Results for “youthful trouble”

Songs

Trouble

Ray LaMontagne

A slow-burning confessional in which the narrator personifies his own chronic anxiety as a female antagonist, then pivots to…

chronic anxiety/depression redemption through love self-destructive cycles

Teen Age Riot

Sonic Youth

A near-instrumental, chant-based intro gives way to one of Sonic Youth's most anthemic songs, a shambling ode to youth…

youth rebellion underground music culture hero worship and its limits

Borrow Trouble

Feist

A meditation on the anxious mind's habit of manufacturing worry before it's even needed, built around the old idiom about…

anticipatory anxiety self-fulfilling negative thought borrowed time and mortality

Trouble I've Had All My Day

Mississippi John Hurt

A spoken introduction that sounds almost improvised gives way to a slow, circling blues built around a single refrain: trouble…

fatalism romantic betrayal poverty and legal precarity

Trouble, Heartaches and Sadness

Ann Peebles

Ann Peebles addresses trouble, heartache, and sadness as if they were unwelcome visitors, ordering them off her doorstep now…

deliverance through love personification of emotional states resilience

Dirty Boots

Sonic Youth

A hazy, half-narrated scene of teenage nightlife and adolescent desire, rendered in fragments rather than a coherent story.…

adolescent restlessness sexual awakening ritual and superstition

Bridge Over Troubled Water

Roberta Flack

Roberta Flack's rendition of the Simon & Garfunkel standard slows the song into a gospel-inflected vow, turning a folk-pop…

devotion and self-sacrifice comfort in hardship friendship as refuge

Trouble On Double Time

Free

A brash blues-rock boast about womanizing that curdles into confession, as the narrator's swagger about juggling multiple…

infidelity and desire self-awareness vs self-destruction masculine bravado

Schizophrenia

Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia" builds a fractured character sketch around a woman whose mental illness is treated with unsettling…

mental illness and stigma unreliable perception family cruelty

100%

Sonic Youth

A tribute song built from fragments of grief, aggression, and dark humor, written in memory of a scene figure lost to violence.…

violent death and its aftermath rock scene mythology and idolization gender and predation within a music subculture

Incinerate

Sonic Youth

A love-as-arson song that turns romantic devastation into a fire-and-rescue scenario, with the narrator both perpetrator and…

romantic destruction self-annihilation violence as intimacy

Superstar

Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth's cover of the Carpenters' "Superstar" strips the original's lush orchestration down to a slow, droning haze,…

one-sided obsession loneliness the falseness of mediated intimacy

Sugar Kane

Sonic Youth

A hazy, repetition-driven love song built on a nickname (borrowed from Marilyn Monroe's character in 'Some Like It Hot') that…

idealized desire surface glamour vs. hidden unease repetition as devotion

Kool Thing

Sonic Youth

A satirical dialogue between a rock star's ego and a skeptical female voice, "Kool Thing" stages a flirtation that curdles into…

gender and power celebrity worship racial politics

Bull In the Heather

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

Shadow of a Doubt

Sonic Youth

A chance meeting on a train dissolves into a hazy, possibly murderous conspiracy between the narrator and a stranger, with the…

complicity and denial desire as danger dream logic

Caught By the Fuzz

Supergrass

A teenager's drug bust unfolds in real time, told entirely from inside the panic of arrest and interrogation. Supergrass turn a…

youthful trouble authority and interrogation shame and family disappointment

Art School

The Jam

A blast of punk-era sloganeering that treats the art school as a metaphor for total creative and social permission. The Jam…

youthful self-assertion anti-authoritarianism media distrust

Quick Step

The Adverts

A fast, self-aware punk anthem about the band's own formation and the grind of making it, delivered with equal parts bravado and…

youth and its expiration date the mechanics of punk as a career ambivalence about performance

The One I Loved Back Then (The Corvette Song)

George Jones

A novelty-tinged story song built on a bait-and-switch: an old man's admiring description of a car turns out to be a description…

nostalgia lost youth double meaning/wordplay

Girls On the Beach

The Beach Boys

A slight, sweetly harmonized ode to the California beach-town fantasy: sun, girls, and the assumption that romantic opportunity…

idealized youth California mythology male gaze

Stoned at the Nail Salon

Lorde

A meditation on aging out of youthful restlessness, sung from inside a comfortable domestic life that still itches with doubt.…

aging and impermanence domestic contentment vs. restlessness nostalgia for youth

Jersey Shore

The Promise Ring

A brief, offhand travelogue of restlessness set against a fading summer, where the speaker's physical drift along the Jersey…

transience aging out of youth seasonal decline

Young and Beautiful

Lana Del Rey

A torch song written for a film about doomed excess, this track poses one anxious question over and over: does love survive once…

impermanence of beauty conditional love nostalgia for lost youth

We've Been Had

Uncle Tupelo

A disillusioned rock musician surveys the wreckage of the alternative-rock gold rush of the early '90s, comparing the…

disillusionment with the music industry commodification of youth culture loss of authenticity

Drive

R.E.M.

Drive opens Automatic for the People as a stark, semi-acoustic address to an unnamed younger generation, built almost entirely…

generational drift autonomy and its risks rock and roll as inheritance and myth

No Surrender

Bruce Springsteen

A road-tested anthem about clinging to youthful vows of loyalty and defiance even as adulthood erodes the certainty behind them.…

youthful idealism versus adult disillusionment friendship and loyalty as survival strategy nostalgia for adolescent certainty

Night In the City

Joni Mitchell

A brisk, buoyant invitation to leave the house and lose oneself in urban nightlife, built almost entirely from imperative verbs…

urban romanticism impulsiveness and escape sensory delight

Back in the Day

Erykah Badu

A short, groove-driven interlude from Worldwide Underground that turns nostalgia into pure texture. Badu strips the idea of "the…

nostalgia communal joy simplicity vs. complexity

Show Me Love

Robyn

A teenage Robyn's breakout single is a straightforward Eurodance declaration of romantic surrender, built around a repeated plea…

romantic vulnerability independence versus surrender demand for reciprocity

Courting Blues

Bert Jansch

A hushed, traditional-sounding love lyric built around a single reassurance repeated to a young woman: come lie beside me, no…

clandestine love youthful courtship reassurance and persuasion

Angel From Montgomery

John Prine

A young man's ventriloquized portrait of an aging woman worn down by a marriage and a life that never became what she imagined.…

aging and disillusionment domestic entrapment lost youth

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

Down to the Waterline

Dire Straits

A hazy, nocturnal recollection of teenage romance staged in a dockland landscape of quays, stairways, and coasters. The song…

nostalgia working-class romance memory and place

Rudie Can't Fail

The Clash

A ska-inflected celebration of a London rude boy who refuses to reform, structured as a call-and-response between disapproving…

youth rebellion respectability politics working-class identity

Hold My Life

The Replacements

A twentysomething asks someone else to hang onto his life for safekeeping because he doesn't trust himself with it yet. The song…

fear of self-destruction delayed adulthood dependency and trust

Gin and Juice

Snoop Dogg

A laid-back, first-person account of a house party thrown while a parent is away, stretched across a single night of drinking,…

hedonism and leisure casual misogyny and detachment youthful rebellion

Back Where It All Begins

The Allman Brothers Band

A mid-90s Allman Brothers road song that treats restlessness as both a curse and a calling, framing the highway as a route back…

wanderlust cyclical return freedom vs. attachment

Pacifying Joint

The Fall

A Mark E. Smith sound-poem built almost entirely around one phrase, worked through its multiple possible meanings — a drug, a…

ambiguity of language youthful drift surveillance/paranoia

Crocodile Rock

Elton John

A pastiche of early rock and roll nostalgia, built around an invented dance craze and a lost teenage romance. The song uses…

nostalgia lost youth first love