Results for “vulnerability and surrender”

Songs

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

Joan Baez

Baez's rendition of this traditional folk ballad tells the story of a woman ruined by a New Orleans house of ill repute, framing…

ruin and moral downfall warning and cautionary storytelling regret

Bonnie “Prince” Billy

A quiet meditation on walking alone toward some unnamed threshold, framed as a kind of secular hymn. The repeated invocation of…

solitude and pilgrimage devotion without doctrine mortality and departure

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

Patti Smith

A duet between erotic urgency and something closer to faith: the speaker asks a lover to take her as she is, and then defends…

erotic desire as sustenance night as sanctuary from harm doubt and belief

David Bowie

A radio drama in miniature: a space agency counts an astronaut into orbit, celebrates him as a media sensation, then loses him.…

alienation celebrity and spectacle technological failure

Talking Heads

A preacher-like voice addresses an unnamed "you," cataloguing the accidental furniture of a middle-class life and then asking…

mid-life disorientation the unearned life time as drift

Marvin Gaye

A slow-burning soul lament in which the narrator addresses an absent lover across an unspecified distance, moving from tender…

romantic longing separation and absence memory and nostalgia

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