81 songs
May 6, 2022
A folk song, about being stranded by history — "a casualty of one of history's near rhymes." The walking verses and the plain refrain carry a Woody Guthrie-adjacent feel, and the narrator sounds more resigned...
May 26, 2019
A blues-rock ballad about a path the narrator keeps walking despite knowing where it goes. The imagery is rural — a dog growling, a distant rumble, wood beginning to rot — and the final verse adds the most...
April 20, 2019
A lullaby-like ballad that follows one woman's walks to the shore where the waves do what words cannot. It is gentle, patient, and a little heartbreaking.
2017
A ballad about two people circling a truth they cannot quite say aloud. Its repeated turning around becomes both action and confession.
2016
A ballad about all the things two people do not say to each other, and how a single tear can end up carrying all of it. The restraint is what makes it hit.
2015
A song about disorientation and the slow erosion of self-recognition. It speaks in clouded fragments, admitting only what it can: something is slipping away.
2015
A song built from parallel questions about what comfort might look like when everything falls apart. It asks for company, song, and touch without pretending any of them will fix the collapse.
2014
A plainspoken song about the approach of autumn as a metaphor for everything unfinished. The refrain softens its declaration into something closer to an admission.
2013
An affectionate tribute to the plainspoken songwriting tradition John Prine made his own, where humor and heartbreak sit side by side. The song celebrates the way simple language, well placed, can carry...
2012
A song about the baffling pull of someone who keeps slipping away and coming back. It captures the weary tenderness of a relationship that never quite settles but never quite ends.
2010
A reflective love song that looks back on intimacy through images of mirrors, glass, and fracture. It carries the ache of hindsight, as though understanding has arrived only after the damage was done.
2010
A reflective song about sensing change before anyone can name it. It asks whether history is turning, whether a reckoning is coming, and whether we are capable of recognizing it while still inside it.
2015
A searching song about the unruly act of making something true out of inner noise. It moves through fear, fatigue, and self-scrutiny toward rare moments when expression briefly feels effortless, even while the...
2012
A breakup song written from the stunned quiet after long companionship suddenly ends. Instead of big declarations, it relies on small physical details, rain, cold, empty woods, to show how abandonment settles...
2011
A rueful song about a love affair caught in its own repetition. The title says everything: this is not about forgetting, but about trying to will memory and desire into silence for one more night.
March 24, 2019
A spring song of thaw and return, naming the season through images of water, birds, and first growth. The mythic frame gives its tenderness extra resonance.
2017
A ballad about a relationship that almost became something real and never quite did. It borrows a famous phrase to describe an intimacy that never found solid ground.
2016
A searching ballad about a long road traveled and a mountain that's always there in the mind. The lyric doesn't sentimentalize — "broken people, bodies, hearts and minds" is in there — but it finds a resting...
2011
A plainspoken love song about wanting tenderness without games or pretense. What saves it from sentimentality is the final turn, where simplicity becomes less a slogan than a question asked of another person.
May 4, 2019
A song about how reason yields to attraction despite every better intention. It knows exactly when principle gives way to the body.
September 22, 2018
A dark political song about the collapse of norms and the narrowing of public life. Its urgency is sharpened by how little it needs to say.
September 9, 2018
A plainspoken song that catalogs the moments, sights, and seasons that make being alive feel undeniable. It finds meaning in attention rather than proclamation.
July 15, 2018
A blues song addressed to marijuana as a companion when other comforts have failed. Its humor never quite hides the loneliness underneath.
2018
A philosophical reflective song about impermanence. The verses invite presence and then withdraw the ground: the warmth between us will grow cold, this momentary flash, the sound will fade. The bridge...
2017
A jazz-inflected folk song, built on a familiar, easy-moving shape. Three verses of summer sensory detail — golden, sapphire, ivory; distant, closer, right here — each closing with the recognition that...
2016
A tender song of absence and longing, carried by the feeling that memory can make the whole world echo with one missing person. Its sadness is direct but never heavy-handed, more ache than despair.
2015
A song built from directional opposites — in and out, over and under, up and down — until all that movement circles back to defeat. Its plain language gives the pattern real weight.
2014
A plainspoken outsider's song tracing a sense of not fitting in from childhood through adulthood. Its power comes from how directly it speaks: no grand theory, just a lifetime of knowing the world has always...
2012
A restless instrumental that lives up to its title, moving forward with a sense of momentum and uncertainty. It feels like pushing through rough country without a map and trusting motion itself to reveal the...
2010
An exuberant song about opening up to the world and letting joy rush in. What begins with windows and sunlight widens into something freer and more bodily, as if release itself were the point.
2009
A love song steeped in water imagery, where desire, comfort, and surrender flow into one another. The repeated invitation to return to the water gives the whole piece a steady, immersive pull.
2016
A summer-memory song held at a slight, wistful distance. It lingers over warmth, touch, and the way certain seasons stay suspended in the mind.
2016
A darkly comic song about media saturation, public cruelty, and the warped creature that collective fear can summon. The tone is satirical, but the unease underneath it is real.
2015
A searching ballad that uses dialectic as a way of thinking about conflict, from the intimate to the historical. What keeps it human is the sense that every grand argument still lands in lived experience.
2014
A philosophical piece built on a complex instrumental architecture ), which is unusual enough to shape the whole sonic character. The title references William Blake's personification of cold reason, and the...
October 19, 2019
A reflective song about being too far gone to try. The verses use a three-part structure — love you/want you/touch you but can't reach you — and the bridge acknowledges the other person's good intentions...
2019
A plainspoken song, about a woman who carries physical presence like a natural force. The description builds from specifics — boots, jeans, bedroom eyes — to a plain statement: she could blow your mind. The...
March 10, 2018
A birthday song written with warmth rather than fuss. It offers goodwill in the simplest possible form and trusts that simplicity to carry the feeling.
2016
A weary desert song about promises of deliverance that never quite arrive. Drawing on images of wandering, punishment, and the elusive land of milk and honey, it turns sacred language into a human story of...
2014
A song of cautious hope that refuses easy specifics. It lets uncertainty stay in the room while still insisting on endurance.
2011
A generous, open-hearted invitation to hear the world differently and come along for the ride. More than a seduction, it's a song about wanting to share a state of feeling, rhythm, and attention.
June 8, 2024
A folk song about the specific flatness of depression — not wanting to die, not feeling alive, going through motions without the feeling that should accompany them. Two verses, a plain refrain: "drownin' in...
2017
A folk song, built entirely on adverbs — "soberly, carefully, methodically" — stacked verse by verse into a portrait of submission and quiet desperation. The bridge is instrumental and arrives as relief. The...
2016
A slow, searching song about damage that may already be beyond repair. Its repeated refrain makes the recognition feel heavier each time it returns.
2016
A folk song built on Hamlet's phrase — the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns — and tracking decline through seasons of the soul. Eight verses, each ending on a different tag. Long,...
2016
A folk-blues built on a single repeated wish that changes from verse to verse: lay down this load, walk the golden road, see the emerald valley, hear the silver bell toll. Five verses, one song.
2014
A community song written to invite people in rather than keep them out. Its warmth, clarity, and directness are part of its purpose.
September 30, 2018
A folk song about time running out on a relationship and maybe on other things. The central image — each step dropping a grain into the sands of time — holds the verses together loosely, and the refrain asks...
2017
A philosophical song about history, fate, and the possibility that meaning appears only in passing. It questions everything while still listening for a voice in the noise.
December 28, 2023
A folk-jazz song, following a walk with a companion through the last cold days of a season. The turns — maj7 and m7 shapes throughout — give it a warm suspension. The bridge is wordless until the last time...
2016
A political song addressed to working people and the ways they are taught to misread their own hardship. Its argument is blunt because the stakes are.
2015
A reflective walk through the woods that becomes a quiet hymn to attention, season by season. It finds renewal not in grand revelation but in the steady company of light, leaves, birds, bees, and breath.
2015
A searching song about seeing freedom in the animals — chickens scratching, sheep behind wire, dogs in the sun — and finding the comparison disquieting. The bridge redefines freedom as not just taking what...
1980
One of the earliest songs in the catalog, this is a rain-soaked meditation on longing, sorrow, and the uneasy feeling of being joined to something larger than oneself. Its language moves between intimacy and...
May 19, 2019
A political song built as a rolling catalog of public types, false prophets, and ordinary people trying to get by while things decay around them. The refrain carries a tired fatalism, but the song itself still...
September 29, 2018
A blues song addressed directly to people the singer cannot understand. What gives it force is that the refrain is not only accusation but genuine bafflement.
2016
A song about a friendship too old and deep to explain. It trusts the bond more than the conscious mind that tries to name it.
2012
A warning song about runaway systems, where profit and speed have long since outrun wisdom. The image of the train is simple and effective: once the machinery is in motion, the question is whether anyone can...
1981
One of the oldest pieces in the catalog. The lyrics are a translation of a poem by the ninth-century Sufi mystic Dhu'l-Nun al-Misri, set to original music.
February 10, 2019
A searching, introspective song about the divided self and the feeling of being watched from within. It moves from ordinary awareness into something more mysterious, then turns toward love, where the question...
2016
A plainspoken political song, with a gallery of characters each responding differently to a new authoritarian presence. Jethro Bodine, Jihadi Jack, Martha Sue, the corner guy — each verse inhabits a type...
1980
An early apocalyptic lament that faces loss without softening it. The song piles up its reckonings one after another, but beneath the severity a human voice insists that what has happened must be named.
2011
A blunt protest song aimed at violence done in the name of faith. Its anger is public rather than private, turning outrage into a rough, unvarnished chorus that refuses consolation.
April 29, 2026
A blues-soul song about waiting and confusion in a relationship. The narrator has been patient, the partner absent, and the refrain asks the most direct possible question. Three verses approach the same...
March 22, 2026
A song about a woman who might be a hallucination or might be real, whose hair floats and whose siren song the narrator can't stop hearing. The refrain — "oh, I want to see me in your eyes" — is the most...
March 2, 2026
A plainspoken song, returning to a traditional form: a man who wants to walk a woman home, worried she's still looking for someone else. The outro slows to the same four chords.
February 25, 2026
A folk-blues structured as a community's collective voice speaking directly to immigration enforcement. The verses escalate from neighborhood to schools, from refusal to warning. The final line repeats slowly,...
May 18, 2025
A folk song, about watching someone reveal themselves as something they didn't appear to be. The verses track from initial perception to current behavior to the question of how it will be viewed by history....
May 3, 2025
A folk song, about the Boomer generation's transformation from Aquarian idealism to fearful authoritarianism. The verses describe the movement — tired of the establishment, now become the establishment,...
March 25, 2025
A satirical folk song that turns its attention to public figures and the stories that gather around them. It lets the details speak for themselves, allowing the tone to shift between humor and unease without...
March 9, 2025
A political song spoken in the voice of Liberty herself, protesting the way her image has been turned against the people she was meant to welcome. Its anger is sharpened by grief for the promise being betrayed.
