Results for “tolerance through everyday contact”

Songs

Contact

Daft Punk

Contact strips away song-form entirely, opening with a found-audio transmission of a wide-eyed astronaut describing an…

scientific awe the unknown distance and perspective

The Christians and the Pagans

Dar Williams

A folk narrative song about a pagan niece and her Christian family navigating a holiday dinner together, using domestic comedy…

religious pluralism family reconciliation tolerance through everyday contact

Float On

Modest Mouse

A catalogue of everyday mishaps—fender benders, cons, firings, verbal blunders—gets deflated by a chorus that refuses to treat…

resilience through indifference everyday misfortune collective endurance

Tom's Diner (A Cappella)

Suzanne Vega

A woman sits alone in a diner, cataloguing the small, disconnected human traffic around her — a stingy coffee pour, a couple's…

urban anonymity observation versus connection everyday ritual

Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down

Waylon Jennings

A drinking song that inverts the usual barroom brag: the narrator's nightly ritual of numbing himself fails for once, leaving…

failed escapism heartbreak alcohol as false friend

Adventures In Paradise

Minnie Riperton

A gentle affirmation of self-created reality, this title track treats optimism and imagination as tools for daily transcendence…

manifestation and belief inner freedom everyday transcendence

Acuff-Rose

Uncle Tupelo

A short, plainspoken tribute to country music's staying power, built around the songwriting publishing house Acuff-Rose as…

musical heritage comfort and companionship everyday transcendence

Ordinary Miracle

Sarah McLachlan

A gentle, almost hymn-like children's-film song that treats the mundane workings of nature -- rain, sunrise, the seasons -- as…

wonder in the everyday cycles of nature gratitude

I Just Called To Say I Love You

Stevie Wonder

A simple, deliberately unadorned love song built on a single conceit: stripping away every calendar occasion that might justify…

unconditioned love everyday devotion anti-occasion romance

Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

The Beatles

A bouncy, deliberately artificial ska-pop tale of a market-stall trader and a band singer who fall in love, marry, and settle…

everyday romance domesticity gender roles

Androgynous

The Replacements

A quietly tender ballad from a famously loud punk band, this song imagines two gender-nonconforming lovers with a gentleness…

gender nonconformity acceptance and tolerance love as constancy

Suzanne

Leonard Cohen

A meditation on grace and surrender disguised as a portrait of a woman by a river, Cohen's song moves from intimate seduction…

spiritual longing disguised as romance the sacred in the everyday trust and surrender

My Wave

Soundgarden

A song about radical live-and-let-live individualism that curdles into territorial aggression by its final third. The narrator…

personal autonomy boundary-setting irony of tolerance

Dear Abby

John Prine

John Prine builds a comic song out of the format of a newspaper advice column, staging a series of absurd reader complaints that…

absurdity of everyday complaint futility of advice-seeking identity and self-acceptance

Monday

The Jam

A simple, almost devotional love song in which the usually dreaded start of the working week becomes an object of longing…

romantic anticipation humility and vulnerability weather as emotional metaphor

Ways To Be Wicked

Margo Price

A hard-bitten country-rock kiss-off aimed at a partner who inflicts pain and seems to enjoy it. Margo Price frames cruelty and…

toxic relationships masochism and pain tolerance cruelty versus love

Pacifics (From The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack “N.Y. Is Red Hot")

Digable Planets

Digable Planets turn a Sunday in New York into an extended meditation on rest, community, and creative replenishment, moving…

urban leisure and rest Black cultural inheritance (jazz, literature, hip-hop lineage) community and belonging

Morning, Noon and Night

Big Joe Turner

A bawdy, up-tempo blues-shouter number in which the singer catalogs domestic scenes and comic complaints about a woman he…

desire and frustration domestic life as comic material fidelity and suspicion

What About Us

The Fall

A talking-animal narrator, a rabbit émigré from East Germany living in Britain, stumbles across a newspaper story about a killer…

displacement and immigration institutional trust and betrayal tabloid horror as everyday backdrop

Valentine's Day

Steve Earle

A plain-spoken confession of forgetfulness dressed up as a love song, in which the narrator arrives on the holiday with nothing…

romantic devotion failure and forgiveness commercialized ritual vs. genuine feeling

Vampire Empire

Big Thief

A tense, sensual account of a relationship that runs on contradiction — intimacy that drains as much as it nourishes. The song…

toxic intimacy dependency and addiction desire vs. self-erasure

Start!

The Jam

A brief, almost accidental human connection is offered as a small act of resistance against isolation and cynicism. The song…

fleeting connection alienation reciprocity

Space Oddity

David Bowie

A dramatized radio transmission between mission control and an astronaut becomes an extended metaphor for detachment and…

isolation fame and alienation dissociation

I Believe In Loving You

Carole King

A late-career Carole King love song built as a simple statement of faith, using the language of belief to describe an…

steadfast devotion faith and belief as metaphor for love emotional generosity

Nobody

Mitski

A disco groove wraps around one of Mitski's bleakest lyrics, turning isolation into something you can dance to. The song tracks…

loneliness self-erasure longing for touch over love

Crazy for You

Madonna

A slow-dance ballad built around a single moment: crossing a crowded room toward someone and closing the distance between…

infatuation vulnerability physical desire

After Hours

The Velvet Underground

A childlike, faintly wobbly waltz closes out The Velvet Underground's third album with its most vulnerable song: a wish to seal…

loneliness fear of intimacy escapism

My Baby's Gone

The Louvin Brothers

A classic country lament built on a single conceit: the singer wants nature itself to stop because his personal catastrophe…

grief and heartbreak isolation denial of ordinary time

In Your Eyes

Peter Gabriel

A love song that treats romantic devotion as a form of spiritual salvation, where another person's gaze becomes the only stable…

romantic devotion as salvation spiritual longing expressed through eros restlessness and escape

Take a Love Song

Donny Hathaway

A gentle, imperative-driven love song that reads almost like a set of instructions for living generously. Donny Hathaway turns…

love as practice optimism generosity

Spud Infinity

Big Thief

A playful, riddling meditation on scale and self-acceptance, using cosmic imagery and homespun humor to ask what it would take…

cosmic perspective self-acceptance interconnectedness

F.U.B.U.

Solange

F.U.B.U. is a direct address to Black listeners, reclaiming the phrase 'for us, by us' as a statement of cultural ownership. The…

Black solidarity cultural ownership racial profiling

Nights

Frank Ocean

A two-part song that splits itself at its own midpoint, moving from a hazy, drug-fogged meditation on isolation and hustling…

isolation within closeness hustle and survival memory and nostalgia

Me and Bobby McGee

Gordon Lightfoot

This song has almost nothing to do with the famous Kristofferson/Joplin standard that shares its title; the lyric supplied is a…

moral instruction compassion toward strangers the burdens of fame