As I wrote in a blog, “Longing in music takes many forms, whether in the sharp whine of a pedal steel guitar, the weary cry of a muted trumpet, the pulsating digital beat of an 808 kit, the blending of human voices suggesting loss and grief—and most obviously, in lyrics.” Songs with questions, instructions, or desires all count as “longing songs.”
I won’t reveal the context, but in 2013, I realized that at least 20 of my favorite songs are all about longing. The following year, I created a Spotify playlist featuring such songs, which ballooned to over 3,000 songs.
From compiling and trimming this monstrosity, I found that longing is, of course, ubiquitous in music. I also found out that, like activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha argues in their essay, “republics of desire: disabled lineages of longing” (Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire, edited by Alice Wong, 2024, Vintage), longing can be a space of safety for LGBTQ, disabled people like me. Perhaps longing is a condition of human suffering, but in an era of widespread inequity, music can be a powerful force for both personal and social change, and music about longing can aid in the healing process of trauma.
In addition, longing is double-edged: it’s a source of collective and individual joy and release, but also self-pity. Cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib writes in his essay “On Summer Crushing”, “It is hard to create longing without the reminder of what we’re longing for” (They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, fifth anniversary edition, Two Dollar Radio, 2022). That may be true, but it doesn’t stop people from longing for vague, amorphous things that aren’t always tangible: euphoria, security, and community.
However, music does create or reinforce that longing by reminding people of what appears to be lacking. Love songs can exemplify this tendency, but not all songs about longing are about wanting love or sex. Longing to have fun, dance, or be present is also a common theme in music.
This list forgoes canonical renderings of longing in music–also present on the longing playlist, from “Respect” to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and beyond–in favor of lesser-known gems, even if many are performed by well-known artists. Genres present include rock, country, jazz, folk, soul, and spirituals. All are found on the Spotify playlist at the bottom of the page.
10. Sweet Honey in the Rock – “Run, Run, Mourner Run” (live)
The legendary, virtuosic Black women’s a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock’s stirring rendition of the US Civil War song “Run, Run, Mourner Run” quickly takes flight with the impassioned delivery of leader and founder Bernice Johnson Reagon. When Reagon growls and shouts on this 1987 Carnegie Hall performance, it sounds like the forces of history at work. Reagon’s fellow singers in Sweet Honey hold their own throughout this electrifying performance, one that holds its own among their best-known work, such as “Ella’s Song” and “Breaths“. I’ve never seen Reagon, who died in 2024, on any list of the greatest singers of all time, but she should be, even if she would protest such hierarchical judgments.
9. Sarah McLachlan – “Good Enough” (live)
Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan has long been a champion of the marginalized, including female musicians and animals in danger. In line with such work, “Good Enough”, a song about abuse, had long moved listeners on her 1993 album, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. However, in 1999, when she released the hit live album Mirrorball, the louder, heavier, and more muscular version of the song blew me and other listeners away.
McLachlan’s voice sounds less ethereal than typical for most of the music, and the final narrator’s desire to care (“I’ll show you why you’re so much more than good enough”) shines through. “Good Enough” stands out on Mirrorball, and it was one of the very first recordings I considered for my longing playlist.
8. Mavis Staples – “This Little Light of Mine“
From singing gospel with the Staple Singers to collaborating with Prince, Ry Cooder, and Jeff Tweedy, Mavis Staples has been singing for over 70 years and is still going strong. My favorite non-canonical example of her indomitable spirit in music is this exceptional reworking of “This Little Light of Mine”, the spiritual most famously sung by civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer in the 1960s.
This inventive version, taken from her acclaimed 2007 album We’ll Never Turn Back, is driving garage rock ‘n’ soul with antiwar lyrics from Cooder: she sings, “Killin’ folk ain’t in my line / Sure ain’t no way to let my little light shine.” Akin to the legendary “I’ll Take You There“, this is one of my favorite Staples recordings that shows the link between the spiritual and the secular, including in politics.
7. Joan Baez featuring the Indigo Girls – “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” (1995 version)
Joan Baez and the Indigo Girls have recorded this Bob Dylan folk classic together more than once, but this 1995 recording from Baez’s live album Ring Them Bells is my all-time favorite version of this song. It’s simply three women with acoustic guitars singing a classic breakup song, and while the lyrics’ irony might be less apparent, this is easily the most hauntingly gorgeous version of this song I’ve heard.
Baez, who recorded the song in the 1960s, doesn’t have the pristine voice she once had, but her interpretive skills have significantly improved, and with the Indigo Girls’ harmonies, this version slays listeners like me. I used it as the basis for a personal essay about hearing the recording during the pandemic. By the end, the performance garners more applause than anything else on the album—and deservedly so—but the recording deserves a much greater audience.
6. The Velvelettes – “He Was Really Sayin’ Somethin’“
This is the most propulsive, danceable track on this list, and amidst the many Motown Records hits of the 1960s, the Velvelettes’ “He Was Really Sayin’ Somethin’” has gotten lost in the shuffle. That’s a shame because the eternally underrated recording surpasses Motown smash “girl group” classics like the Supremes‘ “Where Did Our Love Go” and the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman” for its gospel piano-led, bass-heavy groove and overall sass and sexuality, including with its carnal-sounding saxophone solo.
More than the Velvelettes’ bigger hit, “Needle in a Haystack“, “He Was Really Sayin’ Somethin’” showed the group’s immense potential and a strong example of the gospel-influenced “Sound of Young America” that Motown succeeded with.
5. Tanya Tucker – “Bring My Flowers Now“
Tanya Tucker has been singing gut-wrenching songs since she recorded as a teenager in the 1970s, but her 2019 comeback album, While I’m Livin’, includes this single that moved me beyond words. Tucker is a master of understated, unsentimental renderings of songs that others would try to wring every drop of emotion out of (“Two Sparrows in a Hurricane“, “Delta Dawn“). Her vocal on “Bring My Flowers Now” makes me believe every last word.
Alluding to the institutional recognition that eluded Tucker for decades, it was followed by accolades like a Grammy award and election to the Country Music Hall of Fame. In other words, even if history remembers Tanya Tucker for her massive hits, this song helped her finally get her well-deserved flowers because, as she so brilliantly sings, “We all think we’ve got the time until we don’t.”
4. Brad Paisley – “He Didn’t Have to Be“
Most purported tearjerkers do not make me cry, let alone sob. This one did. With no disrespect to “Strawberry Wine“, “Don’t Take the Girl“, “You Don’t Even Know Who I Am“, or any number of other contenders, Brad Paisley‘s “He Didn’t Have to Be” is my choice for the best-written 1990s country song, one of the best story songs I’ve ever heard. Paisley’s first #1 country hit isn’t nearly as well-remembered as hits like “Whiskey Lullaby” or “Mud on the Tires”, but this song made me cry so hard when I first heard it that I’ve said it “slaughtered me alive and served me up for breakfast”.
The lyrics about an adoptive father are mirrored in the music, with the call-and-response between the steel guitar and fiddle sounding like a father-son dialogue. Paisley’s understated delivery makes his longing to match his father figure’s care sound more believable. Call me what you want, but this song is a damn masterpiece.
3. Bill Withers – “I Can’t Write Left-Handed“
Soul singer-songwriter Bill Withers‘ Live at Carnegie Hall, which I reviewed for PopMatters, is one of the greatest live albums of all time —a gem that deserves to reach many more listeners. This song, never released on a Withers studio album, is a standout. As Withers explains, “I Can’t Write Left-Handed” is a first-person narrative about the effects of war more than a political protest song.
The insistent, slow piano and backing singers sound like a funeral dirge as Withers sings passionately about a US veteran returning home without his right arm. As much as I love certified Withers classics like “Lean on Me” and “Ain’t No Sunshine“, this song deserves far more attention than it’s received, like the live album on which Withers recorded it.
2. Sarah Vaughan – “I’ll Be Seeing You” (live)
It’s hard for me to pick a favorite jazz singer, but specifically for an unearthly, jaw-dropping sound, Sarah Vaughan is tops. She was not unparalleled in conveying sadness, like Billie Holiday, or joy, like Ella Fitzgerald. Still, when she sang “I’ll Be Seeing You” live for the album Sassy Swings the Tivoli in 1963, you can hear the hushed stillness in the venue as she navigates her astounding range and heavy, slow vibrato on a pop standard.
Vaughan was best with small jazz combos, and the intimacy and quiet intensity of performances like this show why. Her singing here sounds simultaneously less epic in scale, even as she finishes with notes worthy of an opera singer, and it’s more moving than on her pop hits. Wistful longing has rarely sounded so magnificent.
1. Steve Earle –”Someday”
“The space between staying and leaving, I think, is called longing,” writes artist Larissa Pham in her 2021 memoir-in-essays, Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy. Maverick singer-songwriter Steve Earle‘s 1986 song, “Someday”, is one of the best musical examples of such longing not being sentimentalized. It’s one of my favorite country and rock recordings ever, partly because it defies the conventions of both genres: lyrically, the song bucks country’s trademark nostalgia in favor of bitterness about small-town life, while musically, its reverberating steel guitar sounds like classic country and not like classic rock.
The tension between staying and leaving in the lyrics is matched by an urgency in the arrangement and production, particularly in the thundering piano chords that accompany the chorus. While Earle is best known for “Copperhead Road” and “Guitar Town“, “Someday” is one of the simplest, most brilliant, and most unconventional country and rock recordings ever made. When he sings, “I wanna know what’s over that rainbow/I’m gonna get out of here someday,” the longing is palpable, and I’m rooting for the character in the song. That’s what a great song can do.
10 Should-Be-Classic Songs About Longing
