Sly & Robbie
This is a cover of the classic Doris Day standard, reframed by Sly and Robbie's rhythm-section sensibility rather than by any…
fate and acceptance generational transmission of wisdom the unknowability of the future
Yes
A commercial-rock love song built on hesitation rather than certainty, in which the narrator wavers between wanting closeness…
romantic ambivalence reassurance through repetition emotional confusion
Fleetwood Mac
A plea for reconciliation built almost entirely out of repetition, where the speaker asks a former lover for one more chance and…
romantic pleading nostalgia for lost intimacy persuasion through repetition
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
A dancefloor incantation built on a beheading command, this track turns a nightclub into a site of ecstatic dissolution. Karen O…
ecstatic dissolution surveillance/spectacle of the body ritual and repetition
Broken Social Scene
This is Broken Social Scene's rendition of Joy Division's 1980 classic, recorded for the soundtrack of The Time Traveler's Wife,…
romantic disintegration emotional stasis guilt and self-recrimination
Modest Mouse
Modest Mouse builds a shaky optimism out of wreckage imagery, insisting that even a broken-down vehicle still gets you…
near-disaster and survival willed optimism emotional evasiveness
Jason Isbell
A song about watching long marriages calcify and making a private, almost superstitious vow not to let that happen to your own.…
marital decay willed devotion nostalgia
Television
The opening track of Marquee Moon works as a manifesto of pure appetite and willful blindness, its narrator declaring immediate…
desire and impatience willful ignorance denial of consequence
D'Angelo
A slow-groove love song built almost entirely from a single circling phrase, promising that romantic devotion is enough to…
romantic devotion as survival domestic intimacy sensuality
Led Zeppelin
An eight-minute ballad that starts as a gentle folk critique of spiritual materialism and gradually swells into a mystical,…
spiritual materialism doubt and ambiguity nature as mystic guide
The Cure
A hypnotic, dread-soaked incantation in which the speaker is consumed nightly by obsession, grief, and something like…
obsessive love death and the afterlife possession and loss of will
George Jones
A late-career George Jones confession set as a plainspoken moral ledger: a man looking back on a life of drink and lost…
regret addiction free will versus fate
Joan Baez
Baez's early reading of this traditional ballad frames the singer as a woman recounting her own ruin, casting the House of the…
ruin and regret fallen woman narrative fate versus free will
Rush
A meditation on chance and fate dressed up as a gambling metaphor, Rush's title track argues that existence has no grand design…
randomness vs. determinism mortality and suffering free will within constraint
Gregory Porter
A meditation on a love the narrator can't will himself out of, even when guilt, fatigue, and a bruised past argue for release.…
involuntary devotion emotional exhaustion guilt and self-reproach
A catalogue of everyday mishaps—fender benders, cons, firings, verbal blunders—gets deflated by a chorus that refuses to treat…
resilience through indifference everyday misfortune collective endurance
Billy Joel
A weary older voice counsels a driven young person to ease off the throttle, arguing that ambition pursued without patience…
ambition versus patience fear of mortality burnout
Ann Peebles
A woman alone on a rainy night confesses to a desire strong enough to make her willing to wreck another relationship just to…
forbidden desire loneliness emotional compulsion versus morality
Randy Newman
A booming, boosterish anthem that turns out to be a satire of boosterism itself: the narrator's civic pride is so shallow and…
civic pride as delusion class blindness American boosterism
The National
A quiet, waltz-time song that uses childlike, storybook imagery to describe willful escapism, both personal and political. Its…
escapism denial numbness
The Replacements
A quietly tender ballad from a famously loud punk band, this song imagines two gender-nonconforming lovers with a gentleness…
gender nonconformity acceptance and tolerance love as constancy
A breakup song written from a position of eerie calm rather than anguish, in which the departing partner's bid for freedom is…
romantic dissolution detachment as self-protection cyclical nature vs. human choice
A folk-rock kiss-off built on willful avoidance: the narrator insists they won't ask why a relationship is ending, framing that…
denial as self-protection romantic exhaustion emotional withholding