Natalie Merchant
A monologue spoken from inside grief, built almost entirely from the vocabulary of gravestones and vows, as a widower addresses…
grief and widowhood marriage and devotion suicidal ideation
Skip James
A spare, traditional-form blues built almost entirely from floating verses common to the genre, James reworks the stock imagery…
restlessness romantic ambivalence bodily paralysis/inaction
Elvis Costello
This is Costello's recording of a song originally written by Charles Aznavour, best known in English through Herbert Kretzmer's…
the elusiveness of the beloved identity as multiplicity devotion despite uncertainty
Tony Bennett
A wandering singer catalogs the great cities of Europe and the loneliness of New York only to reject them all in favor of one…
homesickness idealized place as beloved urban loneliness
Foreigner
A straightforward arena-rock seduction song built around a femme fatale figure glimpsed across a room. The track trades…
seduction and surrender loss of control mystery/the unknowable other
Santana
This is Santana's 1999 collaboration with Dave Matthews from the Supernatural album, built around a melodic theme borrowed from…
romantic devotion transcendence through love surrender
Percy Sledge
A deep-soul devotional in which the singer names his partner as the object of near-religious adoration, then quietly reveals how…
devotion dependency fear of loss
The Velvet Underground
A hushed, plainly strummed confession about loving someone who is unavailable, oscillating between tenderness and quiet…
forbidden love longing and loss guilt and self-justification
Billie Holiday
A standard from the Kern-Fields songbook, delivered here as a hushed, intimate meditation rather than a big romantic…
romantic devotion memory as consolation vulnerability
Dinosaur Jr.
This is Dinosaur Jr.'s cover of The Cure's 1987 single, rendered here with fuzzed-out guitar squall replacing the original's…
dream logic loss of the beloved romantic devotion
Shirley Horn
This is a slow, hushed apostrophe to a season, treated as a lover whose absence the speaker will endure with quiet fidelity.…
seasonal longing love as devotion beyond presence nature personified as beloved
A soul lament built on a simple 12-bar-blues frame, this song catalogs a man's sleepless devastation after being betrayed by a…
betrayal and infidelity insomnia as emotional symptom obsessive devotion
Mitski
A brief, hymn-like address to the moon in which the speaker asks that their love outlive their body. It works less as narrative…
mortality possession and dispossession love as legacy
Big Thief
A hazy address to an otherworldly presence that may be a lover, a hallucination, or an actual extraterrestrial, the song treats…
disappearance and loss altered perception vs. reality longing for transcendence
Fiona Apple
A young woman insists on her own unknowability, drawing a hard line between herself and a partner who claims to understand her…
emotional isolation incommunicability of inner life distrust of reassurance
The Moody Blues
A soft-focus devotional ballad in which a seafaring metaphor frames romantic arrival and surrender. The song is less interested…
romantic devotion safe harbor after struggle surrender of self
Leonard Cohen
A meditation on the pull between transcendent, near-mystical intimacy and the noisy, transactional churn of ordinary life. The…
sacred vs. profane transience of ecstasy spiritual longing
Massive Attack
An almost-instrumental interlude built from a single repeated proverb about the unknowability of other people. The track…
opacity of others distrust and self-protection the gap between appearance and interior life
Sarah Vaughan
A standard by Hoagy Carmichael and Ned Washington, here rendered by Sarah Vaughan as an intimate meditation on physical presence…
desire and presence the inadequacy of romantic cliché vulnerability
The Hollies
A tightly wound confession of romantic captivity, built around a plea for the beloved to explain the hold they have over the…
obsession loss of control romantic dependency
The xx
A short, spare meditation on the way absence corrodes trust in a relationship, where the beloved's reality becomes…
insecurity in intimacy fear of abandonment the unreliability of perception
Röyksopp
This is a lyric built almost entirely from fragments and repetition, functioning more as an incantation than a narrative song.…
idealization and unattainability transcendence bodily/sensory ecstasy
Perfume Genius
A short, incantatory love song built almost entirely from repetition, where devotion is expressed as a kind of self-erasure. The…
self-sacrifice in love surrender and devotion time and mortality
Nat King Cole
A classic Cuban bolero of romantic frustration, in which a lover demands a straight answer about the future of the relationship…
romantic indecision frustration and waiting time slipping away
SAULT
A devotional love song that slides between adoration and anxiety, built around the idea that the beloved is a kind of divine…
romantic obsession devotion as faith instability of time and feeling
Bill Callahan
A short, incantatory piece built around a single image—a door that both conceals and contains someone or something unknowable.…
mystery of death or absence the limits of knowledge ritual and repetition
Roy Harper
Roy Harper builds a hazy, cosmic love song out of the vocabulary of psychedelic fantasy, pitting an internal struggle against…
spiritual struggle psychedelic imagery love as anchor
The Band
A rough-edged talking blues in which the narrator defends a beloved vice—loosely figured as 'strawberry wine'—against the…
addiction as loyalty outlaw bravado romantic substitution
Waylon Jennings
This is a traditional Civil War-era ballad, recorded by Waylon Jennings for a tribute album, in which a soldier addresses his…
war and loss homesickness romantic devotion
India.Arie
India.Arie lays out a direct, almost supplicant declaration of readiness for romantic love, treating the beloved less as a…
romantic longing vulnerability self-worth
The Cure
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
David Bowie
A courtly, almost hypnotic love song written for the film Labyrinth, in which the speaker offers cosmic gifts to a beloved while…
seduction and enchantment love as surrender impermanence
Roberta Flack
A love song built almost entirely on devotional imagery, casting a romantic partner as a sacred, protective presence against…
devotion as religion romantic certainty protection from outside judgment
The Jam
A brief, almost hymn-like ballad in which a wandering narrator catalogues distant travels only to insist, again and again, on…
homecoming fidelity romantic idealization
Solomon Burke
A courtship plea built around a single extended metaphor: the beloved's heart as a home the singer is desperate to reach.…
romantic longing home and belonging pursuit/courtship
Dirty Projectors
A giddy, cluttered love song that treats romantic infatuation as a problem of reference and image-making, stacking pop-culture…
infatuation and idealization pop culture as vocabulary for love authenticity amid artifice
Carly Simon
This is Carly Simon's rendition of the Rodgers and Hart standard, a love song built entirely on negation: it lists the trappings…
romantic sufficiency anti-cliché love presence versus fantasy
A classic Mexican bolero of total devotion, in which the speaker surrenders his heart, his being, and even his sense of the…
romantic surrender idealized love devotion as faith
Mississippi John Hurt
This is less a full performance than a fragment captured on tape: Mississippi John Hurt sings the familiar gospel chorus of the…
incompleteness oral tradition humility
The Beach Boys
A love song built on an admission rather than a boast: the singer refuses to promise eternal devotion outright, instead…
dependence and self-erasure in love uncertainty as a form of honesty devotion expressed through negation