Results for “unrequited or unspoken love”

Songs

Isn't She Lovely

Stevie Wonder

A new father's unfiltered, almost breathless reaction to the birth of his daughter, rendered as a series of rhetorical questions…

fatherhood and new birth gratitude love as creative/generative force

Love of My Life

Queen

A piano ballad structured as a direct plea to a departing lover, built almost entirely on repetition rather than narrative…

romantic loss supplication and pleading possessiveness in love

Love, Reign O'er Me

The Who

This is the climactic closing statement of Quadrophenia, a plea for emotional deliverance disguised as a weather report. The…

spiritual longing emotional exhaustion love as elemental force

Baby, This Love I Have

Minnie Riperton

A love song built around the anxiety of being misunderstood -- the singer insists that her feelings are genuine even if her…

communication and its failure reassurance devotion

Freeway of Love

Aretha Franklin

This is a driving-metaphor party song: sex and romance recast as a joyride down an open highway in a pink Cadillac. It's…

romantic/sexual liberation escape and momentum playfulness and flirtation

Bizarre Love Triangle

New Order

A euphoric synth-pop track built on lyrics of paralysis and unspoken feeling: the narrator is caught between infatuation and…

romantic paralysis emotional confusion fear of vulnerability

Can't Take My Eyes Off of You (I Love You Baby)

Lauryn Hill

This is Lauryn Hill's faithful cover of the 1967 Frankie Valli pop standard, tucked into The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill as a…

romantic infatuation gratitude vulnerability

La La Love You

Pixies

A deliberately dumb, deadpan pastiche of teen pop-song sincerity, sung by drummer David Lovering rather than the band's usual…

parody of pop romance adolescent sexuality irony through simplicity

There Is a Light That Never Goes Out

The Smiths

A speaker without a home begs to be driven anywhere, anywhere at all, and finds in the prospect of a fatal car crash not tragedy…

homelessness and displacement unrequited or unspoken love romanticized death

In My Life

The Beatles

A meditation on memory that moves from cataloguing remembered places and people to a declaration of present love, arguing that…

memory and nostalgia mortality the persistence of the past

Tomorrow Is a Long Time

Sandy Denny

A cover of Dylan's early ballad, rendered here as a hushed meditation on longing and self-erasure in absence. Sandy Denny's…

longing and absence loss of self idealized love

Creep

Radiohead

"Creep" is a confession of self-loathing disguised as a love song, built around the gap between an idealized other and the…

self-loathing unrequited desire alienation

Sweet Thing

Van Morrison

An ecstatic, almost breathless love lyric built from a chain of future-tense vows rather than a plot. The singer imagines a walk…

romantic rapture renewal/rebirth innocence regained

Christmas In the Room

Sufjan Stevens

A quiet domestic love song that strips Christmas of all its commercial and social trappings and relocates the holiday's meaning…

intimacy vs. commercialism presence over spectacle domestic love as sanctuary

Flagship

Jason Isbell

Isbell uses a fading hotel as an extended metaphor for a long marriage at risk of going stale, watching an older couple's silent…

marital complacency the labor of sustaining love aging and decline

Androgynous

The Replacements

A plainspoken piano ballad from a band better known for noise, this song sketches two gender-nonconforming characters and treats…

gender nonconformity tolerance vs. prejudice time and generational change

Pink + White

Frank Ocean

A hazy, sun-warmed meditation on being shaped and protected by someone else's love, set against a backdrop of natural disaster…

maternal or protective love survival and disaster memory and childhood

Gimme Shelter

The Rolling Stones

An apocalyptic weather report that turns into a plea for cover. Over a coiling, tremolo'd guitar figure and a hammering rhythm,…

apocalyptic dread violence as imminent, not distant the need for refuge

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

Roberta Flack

A slow, hymn-like ballad that traces one relationship's progress through three ascending intimacies: first sight, first kiss,…

awakening love cosmic/natural imagery as emotional scale vulnerability and surrender

Can't Get Enough

Bad Company

This is a lean, riff-driven blues-rock strut built almost entirely around a single confession of desire repeated until it…

desire and appetite masculine bravado transactional love

Can We Pretend

Bill Withers

A wounded plea for a fresh start with a partner whose affection is unreliable, built almost entirely around one conditional…

conditional love emotional ambivalence denial as coping

Hush

Deep Purple

This is a cover of Joe South's garage-pop original, reworked by Deep Purple into a driving rock jam built around a simple…

obsessive infatuation powerlessness in love desire vs. self-control

You're the One for Me (feat. Joss Stone)

Smokey Robinson

A straightforward duet declaration of romantic certainty and fidelity, built around a duet pairing Smokey Robinson's classic…

romantic devotion fidelity certainty in love

Tear-Stained Letter

Richard Thompson

A wry, uptempo account of a breakup told from the battered-but-wisecracking side, where physical comedy stands in for emotional…

romantic aftermath toxic love masculine bravado as deflection

Keep Me in Your Heart

Warren Zevon

A dying man's direct, unsentimental request to be remembered, framed as a farewell letter set to a gentle, almost lullaby-like…

mortality memory and legacy love as continuity

Superwoman

Gladys Knight

A domestic monologue in which a woman catalogs the daily labor she performs for a partner who has grown cold and inattentive,…

emotional labor and domestic care the myth of female self-sufficiency withdrawal and neglect in a relationship

Damaged Goods

Gang of Four

Gang of Four fuse a breakup song with the language of consumer transaction, treating a relationship as a defective purchase to…

commodification of relationships desire versus love alienation under capitalism

Boogie Street

Leonard Cohen

A meditation on the pull between transcendence and the grinding routine of ordinary commerce and appetite, imagined as a street…

sacred vs. profane mortality and impermanence spiritual longing amid worldly routine

The Kiss

Judee Sill

Judee Sill's 'The Kiss' fuses erotic and devotional language until they become indistinguishable, imagining spiritual union as a…

sacred and profane love transcendence death as release

Stay Up Late

Talking Heads

A family gathers around a newborn and, with a mix of adoration and casual selfishness, decides to keep waking him up because…

infantilization and possession domestic joy selfishness disguised as love

What's Going On

Marvin Gaye

A returning-soldier's-eye plea addressed to family members in turn — mother, brother, father — asking why grief and violence…

war and its cost at home generational misunderstanding police brutality and protest

Running Up That Hill

Kate Bush

A song about two lovers who keep wounding each other without meaning to, and the narrator's fantasy of a supernatural fix: a…

empathy as an impossible exchange the violence hidden inside love gendered misunderstanding

Veronica

Elvis Costello

A deceptively bouncy pop song about an elderly woman lost inside dementia, watched by relatives and caregivers who can no longer…

aging and memory loss identity erasure institutional care/neglect

Suzanne

Leonard Cohen

A three-part meditation in waltz time that moves from a woman by a river, to Christ walking on water, and back to the woman…

erotic love as spiritual apprehension faith and doubt surrender to a guide

Break On Through (To The Other Side)

The Doors

A driving, insistent rock song built almost entirely around one imperative: push past the limits of ordinary perception and…

transcendence and liminality desire and intoxication confinement versus freedom

Pictures of You

The Cure

A meditation on grief and memory in which a narrator clings to photographs of a lost lover, unsure whether the images preserve…

grief and loss memory versus reality idealization of the dead or departed

You Keep Me Hanging On

The Supremes

A woman demands her own release from a dead relationship, addressing an ex who refuses to fully let go even though he no longer…

emotional limbo asymmetry of feeling demand for autonomy

Long Way Home

Tom Waits

A wandering man confesses to a lover that he's constitutionally unable to take the straight path home, in love or in life. Waits…

restlessness and wanderlust romantic unreliability the tension between domesticity and freedom

Until You Came Into My Life

Ann Peebles

A gratitude song built on a rescue narrative: the singer describes emerging from despair into a redemptive love, framing the…

romantic salvation gratitude rebirth/renewal

Yesterday

Donny Hathaway

This is a live soul reinterpretation of the Beatles standard, in which Donny Hathaway strips the song of its chamber-pop…

loss and regret nostalgia as refuge romantic bewilderment