Results for “waiting and suspension”

Songs

Waiting In Vain

Annie Lennox

This is Annie Lennox's reading of the Bob Marley & the Wailers song, retooled from reggae original into a slower,…

unrequited devotion patience versus self-respect power imbalance in courtship

Reasons for Waiting

Jethro Tull

A gentle, hushed love song built on the image of watching a sleeping partner and holding onto quiet, private moments. It moves…

tender devotion distance and longing the fragility of romantic idealism

Waiting Room

Fugazi

Fugazi's signature opener frames stasis as a political and personal condition, staging a narrator stuck in a metaphorical…

patience versus action media disengagement self-discipline

Desperados Waiting for a Train

Guy Clark

A grown narrator remembers the old oilman who raised him, tracing their bond from childhood through the man's decline and death.…

intergenerational friendship aging and mortality masculine mythmaking

Long Way Home

Tom Waits

A wandering, guilt-soaked ballad in which a restless narrator confesses his inability to settle down even as he pleads for…

restlessness and wanderlust guilt and self-forgiveness domestic responsibility vs freedom

Looks Like I'm Up Shit Creek Again

Tom Waits

An early, plainspoken Tom Waits heartbreak song built around a deliberately crude idiom that undercuts its own sincerity. The…

romantic abandonment self-pity working-class vernacular

Picture In a Frame

Tom Waits

A plain, almost hymn-like love song built from a handful of repeated phrases, where devotion is stated flatly and without…

steadfast devotion simplicity as sincerity domestic ritual

Hold On

Tom Waits

A road-worn ballad about a woman who flees a judgmental small town for California and ends up broke and cold in a motel, with a…

small-town judgment and shame escape and disillusionment poverty and survival

Come On Up to the House

Tom Waits

A gospel-inflected invitation song that catalogs the exhaustion and ruin of a life lived apart from grace, repeating a single…

spiritual surrender exhaustion and despair invitation and refuge

It Hurts Like Hell (from Waiting to Exhale - Original Soundtrack)

Aretha Franklin

Aretha Franklin sings a ballad about love curdling into pain without dying outright, where the couple still cares but has lost…

love and suffering intertwined emotional exhaustion fear of vulnerability

Blue Skies

Tom Waits

A domestic wreck of a song dressed in the sunniest possible title: the narrator is broke, abandoned, and effectively parenting…

irony of optimism poverty and abandonment loneliness

Ol' '55

Tom Waits

A young man leaves a lover's house at dawn and drives home in his old car, savoring the drive itself as much as the memory he's…

morning-after tenderness nostalgia for the present moment the road as freedom and solitude

I Want You

Tom Waits

This piece reads less like a finished lyric than a raw studio artifact: a repetitive, formulaic love song built almost entirely…

longing distance repetition as devotion

2/2

Brian Eno

2/2 is the second, more abstract piece on Ambient 1: Music for Airports, built from slow synthesizer drones and processed…

waiting and suspension impermanence technology mediating the human voice

Cirrus

Bonobo

Cirrus is an instrumental centerpiece from The North Borders built around a looping plucked-string riff, filtered arpeggios, and…

altitude and distance organic/electronic hybridity cyclical motion

In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning

Carly Simon

This is a torch-song standard (best known from Sinatra's version) recorded by Carly Simon for a film soundtrack, and it's built…

insomnia and longing unrequited love the contrast between day and night

(Somebody) Ease My Troublin' Mind

Sam Cooke

A stripped-down blues plea in which the singer names his loneliness without ever specifying its cause, relying on repetition and…

loneliness longing for reassurance emotional confession

Fool In the Rain

Led Zeppelin

A love song built around a single, faintly absurd predicament: a man waiting on a street corner for someone who never shows,…

misplaced faith romantic anxiety self-deception

Hung Up

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

Black Coffee

Sarah Vaughan

A torch song built entirely around one confined domestic scene: a woman drinking coffee alone through the small hours, waiting…

romantic waiting and vigilance gendered domestic roles insomnia and time distortion

Lay Lady Lay

Isaac Hayes

Isaac Hayes takes Dylan's spare, folk-country invitation and rebuilds it as a slow-burning soul seduction, stretching the…

seduction and invitation patience and waiting domestic intimacy

Mystery Train

The Band

This is The Band's cover of the old blues/Sun Records standard, reworked here as a mournful, swampy shuffle rather than a…

loss and abandonment travel as metaphor for separation folk/blues tradition

Here Comes a Man

Traffic

A late-period Traffic ballad built around a single, almost mantra-like promise of arrival and rescue. It moves through soft,…

romantic deliverance waiting and patience escape from pain

Quizás, Quizás, Quizás

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

Winter Is Blue

Vashti Bunyan

A short, spare lament that treats a failed love as a seasonal death, letting the bleakness of winter stand in for emotional…

loss of love seasonal metaphor for grief emotional numbness

The Very Thought of You

Billie Holiday

A standard-era love song built entirely around the idea of infatuation rather than the beloved's physical presence: the singer…

idealized love longing and absence daydreaming as escape

Right In Time

Lucinda Williams

A slow-building meditation on desire built from small domestic gestures rather than declarations. Williams narrates a private…

longing memory and its physical trace solitary desire

Blue Money

Van Morrison

A buoyant, playful song built around a photo shoot, where the singer coaxes a model through poses while imagining the payday and…

playful eroticism work as flirtation material pleasure

Don't Know Why

Smokey Robinson

A spare confession of regret builds around a single unanswered question: why didn't the narrator show up for someone waiting.…

regret emotional paralysis longing

Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight

Emmylou Harris

A folk-ballad narrative about a young Louisiana woman named Mary who runs off with a drifter, told through a shifting cast of…

escape and restlessness cautionary romance generational warning

Terra Nova

James Taylor

A restless meditation on procrastinated homecoming, built around the image of a ship (the Terra Nova) as both literal and…

longing for home inertia versus motion family obligation

Odessa

Caribou

A narrator watches a woman in an unhappy marriage build toward the moment she finally leaves, the story told through fragments…

domestic unhappiness female agency anticipation and delay

Where's the Catch?

James Blake

A song about the discomfort of being happy, sung by someone so used to disappointment that contentment itself feels suspicious.…

distrust of happiness anxiety and self-sabotage intimacy versus paranoia

I'll Come Running

Brian Eno

A deceptively cheerful pop song built on an image of devoted, almost servile waiting, where the narrator's declared eagerness to…

devotion and dependency passivity disguised as patience domestic confinement

Thunder Road

Bruce Springsteen

A young man on a porch pleads with a woman named Mary to leave their fading town with him, framing an escape by car as both…

escape and flight romantic persuasion as salvation small-town limitation

Finally Friday

George Jones

A workingman's release-valve anthem: cash burning a hole, a weekend lover waiting, and a chorus that treats Friday night as a…

escapism the work week grind hedonism vs. routine

Call Your Girlfriend

Robyn

Robyn scripts a breakup for a man on behalf of the woman he's about to leave someone for, coaching him line by line on how to…

infidelity and self-justification emotional labor the ethics of kindness

My Ride's Here

Warren Zevon

A dying man's fever-dream inventory of Hollywood Westerns, biblical epics, and Romantic poets, all jumbled together as he waits…

mortality and impending death faith and skepticism entangled art and myth as coping mechanisms

The R

Eric B.

A late-80s Eric B. & Rakim track that doubles as a comeback statement and a victory lap, addressing fans who waited through a…

hip-hop mastery community and borough pride patience and delayed gratification