Beck
A deceptively sunny, surf-pop melody carries lyrics fixated on decay, poison, and predatory obsession. Beck stitches together…
toxic obsession decay and death imagery surface beauty versus rot underneath
Maxwell
Maxwell casts desire as an addiction that the singer both craves and cannot escape, framing love as a compulsion with real costs…
addiction as metaphor for love loss of control guilt and self-awareness
Madonna
A dancefloor anthem built on the friction between infatuation and impatience, where the singer clocks every second spent waiting…
romantic impatience obsession versus self-respect time as torment
R.E.M.
A stalker's boast dressed up as a superhero anthem: the narrator claims omniscience and inevitability in pursuing a woman who…
obsession disguised as devotion toxic masculinity/control surveillance and pursuit
PJ Harvey
A jealous, obsessive lover refuses to let go, oscillating between pleading vulnerability and menacing possessiveness. The song…
obsession codependency possessiveness
Todd Rundgren
A blues-drenched confession addressed to a personified nocturnal terror—likely obsessive desire or a destructive relationship…
obsession fear and desire intertwined loss of control
Waylon Jennings
A short, obsessive breakup lament built almost entirely around one plea repeated over and over: some accusation aimed at a…
heartbreak escape and flight self-destruction
Depeche Mode
A blues-electro stalker's chant built almost entirely around a single fixation: sexual compulsion framed as addiction and…
obsession addiction desire as compulsion
Billy Joel
A young narrator describes a destructive, one-sided infatuation using imagery of physical danger — electrified rails, hidden…
obsessive infatuation self-destruction adolescent isolation
Cassandra Wilson
This is Cassandra Wilson's 2015 reading of the 1938 Coots/Gillespie standard, delivered as part of a tribute to Billie Holiday.…
intoxication as metaphor for desire self-awareness versus helplessness obsession
The Stooges
A slow-burning ballad of surrender, "Ann" strips The Stooges' usual noise down to a hypnotic drone so Iggy Pop can perform total…
erotic surrender loss of control obsession
Mercury Rev
A short, mantra-like song built almost entirely from a single repeated claim of near-arrival, set against an image of racing an…
pursuit of an unreachable goal time pressure and mortality obsession
Prince
A pulsing, funk-driven fantasy in which lustful thought itself becomes a punishable crime, with the narrator gleefully accepting…
desire as transgression punishment and pleasure obsession
A blunt, riff-driven declaration of desire that keeps colliding with the speaker's own disbelief at how simple and overwhelming…
desire versus complexity secrecy and shame repetition as devotion
Roxy Music
A short, hypnotic track built almost entirely around a single repeated phrase, using minimal lyrical content to evoke a mood of…
obsession romantic devotion ambiguity of desire
Death Cab for Cutie
An extended, deliberately monotonous instrumental build frames a lyric spoken by someone who refuses to accept another person's…
obsession denial of rejection unreciprocated desire
The Cure
"Push" is largely an instrumental-driven track with sparse, cryptic lyrics that arrive late and function more as texture than…
self-protection alienation obsession
Sturgill Simpson
A retro-soul come-on built around a single, overworked double entendre, this theme song for HBO's Vinyl trades on 1970s funk…
desire as addiction performance of seduction decay behind glamour
Harry Nilsson
A short, incantatory set of lines about the impossibility of escape gets stretched into a nearly six-minute groove, with the…
inescapability codependency self-destruction
Eurythmics
A minimal, incantatory sketch of a woman rendered almost entirely through color, repeated like a chant until a single image of…
absence obsession dissolution of identity
Bruce Springsteen
A minimal, hushed blues built on obsessive desire, where the narrator's want curdles into something closer to torment than…
obsessive desire sleeplessness and mental anguish transgressive attraction
Built to Spill
A meditation on obsessive thinking and the indifference of the natural world, built around a repeated denial that functions…
obsessive thought indifference of nature anxiety over decision-making
The Rolling Stones
A disco-inflected blues about romantic obsession, where a narrator's loneliness is undercut by the party noise and distraction…
obsessive longing denial and self-deception urban loneliness
Tears for Fears
A song about the collapse of patriarchal control, framed through a female figure who both exposes and dismantles a man's…
patriarchal collapse reckoning and accountability toxic intimacy
A hypnotic, dread-soaked incantation in which the speaker is consumed nightly by obsession, grief, and something like…
obsessive love death and the afterlife possession and loss of will
Neutral Milk Hotel
A distorted, obsessive love song that swings between tenderness and revulsion, built around the fixation of a narrator who both…
obsessive desire idealization vs. disgust possession and control
Deep Purple
This is a straightforward garage-pop cover turned hard-rock workout, built almost entirely from nonsense syllables and a simple…
obsessive infatuation powerlessness in love physical desire
Deerhunter
The title track of Deerhunter's 2013 album is less a song than a controlled breakdown: verses of fractured pleading and…
obsessive fixation psychic disintegration romantic desperation
Florence + the Machine
A song about the void left by someone's silence, and the scale of belief or need required to fill it. Florence Welch turns…
romantic obsession spiritual emptiness unrequited longing
Abbey Lincoln
A standard-turned-jazz-vehicle built entirely on circular imagery, this lyric maps the disorienting churn of memory after a…
memory and obsession the end of love time's circularity
Spoon
A pulsing title track built almost entirely around a single obsessive phrase, tracking a mind hijacked by desire while it's set…
obsession and infatuation loss of control urban nightlife / travel
David Bowie
Written for Bowie's Jareth character in Labyrinth, this is a confrontation disguised as a torch song: a possessive figure…
obsession and control power and powerlessness seduction versus manipulation
A grief-drenched meditation on a lost relationship, told entirely through the act of staring at photographs and the memories…
grief and loss memory versus reality obsessive love
Traffic
A straightforward blues-rock come-on built around infatuation and helplessness in the face of a magnetic, emotionally elusive…
desire and obsession loss of control emotional manipulation
Elvis Costello
A jilted narrator sifts through the physical debris a lover has left behind, treating each object as evidence of who she was and…
romantic obsession grief and loss self-deception
Lauryn Hill
A duet-style love song (with D'Angelo) that uses the phrase 'nothing even matters' as both a declaration of romantic devotion…
romantic obsession loss of perspective devotion vs. dependency
Interpol
A fractured, obsessive address to a woman who dominates the narrator's inner life, built from disjointed images of intimacy,…
obsessive desire emotional damage decay and aging
T. Rex
A glam-rock incantation that fuses science-fiction imagery with erotic obsession, built almost entirely from repeated, dreamlike…
cosmic eroticism obsession and surrender dream logic
Pixies
A fragmented, image-driven portrait of a woman rendered through physical detail and refrain rather than narrative, built around…
obsessive desire fragmented portraiture exoticization/otherness
Curtis Mayfield
A late-70s disco-soul love song built almost entirely around physical and emotional surrender, with Curtis Mayfield trading his…
romantic and sexual devotion surrender of control obsession/infatuation