Mary Wells
A brief, early Motown love declaration from Mary Wells, built around a spoken introduction and a repeated vow of devotion. It…
devotion romantic need reassurance
Lush
A bright, almost bubblegum-pop confession of a crush stuck in the ambiguous zone between friendship and romance. Lush strip away…
unrequited or ambiguous desire self-doubt versus assertiveness fantasy versus reality
Brandi Carlile
A hushed confession about desire that can only surface in sleep, this song is built around the gap between what the narrator…
repressed desire unrequited longing self-restraint
Romy
A dance-pop confession of unspoken desire that flips into mutual admission by its final third. Romy builds the track around…
unrequited desire queer longing vulnerability and risk
Damien Rice
A duet between a man and woman (recorded here as a solo vocal) confessing an affair in the aftermath, framed as a confession of…
infidelity and guilt moral ambiguity desire versus loyalty
Nat King Cole
A bolero of pure romantic pleading, built almost entirely on two commands: come closer, kiss me. Nat King Cole recorded this in…
romantic longing impatience and desire vulnerability in love
The Cars
A new wave love song built almost entirely around longing and withholding: the narrator admires a partner who keeps emotional…
unrequited longing emotional distance obsession/insomnia
Angel Olsen
A torch song built on the gap between wanting and having, sung to someone who will never be fully possessed. Angel Olsen stages…
unrequited longing jealousy and triangulated desire self-deception and resignation
The Raincoats
The Raincoats' version of the Kinks' 1970 hit keeps the original words intact but changes everything about who is speaking,…
gender ambiguity sexual awakening performance of identity
Blondie
A hazy, glam-inflected reverie built around the phrase "pretty baby," the song watches a young, cinematic figure from a distance…
obsession with youth and beauty unrequited longing the cinematic gaze
Leon Bridges
A funk-steeped come-on built around a slippery little logic game: if desire feels this good, the song argues, it can't really be…
desire vs. restraint moral ambiguity of attraction surrender to pleasure
Sonic Youth
A slippery, almost mantra-like track built from a numeric countdown and a cycling list of demands, where desire and commerce…
desire vs. commodification repetition and ritual unpredictability/chance
D'Angelo
A chance reunion with an old lover becomes the occasion for a quiet, unresolved confession of longing. D'Angelo's narrator…
nostalgia unfulfilled desire emotional restraint
Hop Along
A hallucinatory, almost disoriented love song in which the narrator watches someone they want but can't quite reach, and talks…
unrequited desire self-deception and rationalization impermanence
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
Warren Zevon
This is a straight-ahead cover of the Ernie K-Doe R&B classic, built almost entirely on a call-and-response tease between a…
unrequited longing secrecy as flirtation stuck-in-the-friend-zone frustration
Camera Obscura
A touring musician tries to talk herself into emotional detachment from a partner who's drifted, only to have the song's own…
unrequited longing distance and touring life emotional self-deception
James Blake
A confessional plea dressed up as a road-trip invitation, where the narrator offers to trail after someone romantically…
unrequited longing codependency self-erasure for love
Cheap Trick
A deceptively upbeat power-pop confession of romantic desperation, where the narrator's cheerful arrangement masks lyrics about…
unrequited desire emotional neediness performance of normalcy
Muddy Waters
A blues plea built on a familiar Chicago blues formula: the narrator lavishes praise on a woman who barely acknowledges him, and…
unrequited desire romantic frustration adoration versus neglect
Japanese Breakfast
A bruised, self-aware account of wanting someone who has already made clear they want someone else, or something else entirely.…
unrequited desire self-loathing jealousy
Radiohead
A song of self-loathing built around a single obsessive comparison: the speaker idolizes someone he sees as flawless while…
self-loathing unrequited desire alienation
Lauryn Hill
Performed live and introduced almost as an experiment in vulnerability after the confrontational 'Rebel', this song builds an…
surrender spiritual longing conflated with romantic desire purification
Caroline Polachek
A breakup-adjacent pop song that treats long-distance longing as a comic, almost physical ailment — attraction itself becomes a…
long-distance desire emotional overexposure humiliation as intimacy
PJ Harvey
A murder ballad told in fragments, where a narrator confesses to drowning a girl referred to alternately as lover and daughter,…
guilt and confession incest/taboo desire folk horror and Southern gothic
Amy Winehouse
This is a bossa nova standard sung from the vantage of the unseen admirer rather than the girl herself, and Winehouse leans into…
unrequited longing invisibility to the object of desire idealization from a distance
The Human League
A synth-pop inventory of consumer-era wish fulfillment, this closing track from Dare reads like a shopping list for the good…
consumerism and desire the commodification of romance and adventure postwar/pop-culture Americana as fantasy
The Wedding Present
"Suck" is a breathless account of one night inside an all-consuming relationship, where talk, sex, and need blur into a single…
obsessive desire codependency loss of self
"Door" uses the image of an endless sequence of doorways to describe a pursuit that never arrives — of a lover, a self, or…
identity dissolution unrequited or ambiguous longing self-erasure and humility
George Michael
A dance-pop declaration of self-preservation dressed up as a love song: the narrator is attracted to someone but refuses to hand…
romantic self-protection distrust of surface attraction patience versus desire
Mitski
A short, disco-tinged plea for someone to use and abandon her, framed through the odd domestic metaphor of a washing machine…
self-abasement in desire substitution and being a stand-in longing disguised as invitation
Frank Ocean
A wistful, fragmented account of a fading summer romance that never quite resolved into anything permanent, sung from the…
unrequited or asymmetrical desire nostalgia for a shared past that never fully existed self-restraint and its collapse
Frank Sinatra
A Cole Porter standard in which a jaded sophisticate catalogs every conventional pleasure that fails to move him, only to admit…
ennui and sophistication unrequited or unequal love irony of excess
Little Feat
A boozy, tall-tale narrative about a drifter drawn in by a radio siren's voice and then by a woman (or maybe a car, or a storm,…
seduction and danger the open road as myth radio as folklore/siren call
The Smiths
A stranded young man with a broken bicycle is picked up by an older, wealthier stranger, and the encounter becomes a charged,…
class anxiety closeted desire vanity and self-consciousness
Chaka Khan
A straightforward declaration of romantic devotion and desire, built almost entirely on the call-and-response between the words…
desire devotion reassurance
Humble Pie
A straightforward soul-rock come-on built around devotion and physical desire, where declarations of loyalty quickly give way to…
devotion desire surrender
Marvin Gaye
A late-night dance-floor come-on built almost entirely from repeated affirmations of desire, this track functions less as a…
desire nightlife/escapism romantic pursuit
The Sisters of Mercy
A hallucinatory love-or-death lyric that fuses war imagery, colour synaesthesia and a near-mantric chant into a portrait of…
obsessive desire death and eros intertwined disorientation / altered perception
Eurythmics
This is a club remix of the Eurythmics classic, stripping the original's icy synth-pop menace down to a looped mantra built for…
universal desire ambivalence and detachment perseverance