2008
Tossing and Burning
A song of yearning so intense it borders on torment. What makes it memorable is not just the desire itself, but the loneliness of wanting to be seen by someone who may not even know you are there.
Found On These Albums
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Songs Tagged: somber
25 songs
2015
Easy
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...
Rough Working Demo
Video
March 2, 2024
Now It's Gone
A folk song about the erosion of rights, norms, and freedoms, addressed in turn to brother, father, mother, sister, comrade, and children. Each verse names a different category of loss. The refrain is the...
Rough Working Demo
Video
September 22, 2018
Time
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.
2016
Song for David
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.
Rough Working Demo
January 11, 2024
Predator
A song about a specific type of political figure — hand grenade, dark-side clown, machine that consumes. The chord sequence borrows from Blaze Foley's "Oval Room," and the acknowledgment is in the notes. The...
Rough Working Demo
Video
December 9, 2024
I Know One Thing
About working through variations on not knowing — what she wants, where she goes at night, what she's thinking — until the refrain arrives at the one thing the narrator can state plainly. Plain-spoken and...
December 23, 2024
Edge of Night
A haunted breakup song that drifts from private hurt into a larger question about whether real feeling ever held. Its images of empty halls, cobwebs, and lingering debris give it the feel of grief after the...
June 8, 2024
Desolate Blue
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...
January 6, 2021
Be With Me
A folk love song, moving through the hours of a day — morning grass, afternoon sun, evening stars, dark of night — with the same simple request at each turn. Four verses, one feeling, no complications.
Rough Working Demo
2016
It's Over
A bleak, matter-of-fact song about waking up to the feeling that something fundamental has already been lost. It is less melodrama than recognition, with humor used only to make the truth bearable.
Rough Working Demo
2014
Palestine
A political song of grief and witness, refusing the idea that any faith can own a piece of earth by right. Its refrain is simple and direct because the sorrow it names already says enough.
Found On This Album
2011
Uptime Blues
A song about modern fatigue and sensory overload — too much noise, too much input, and never enough peace. It turns the language of work and technology into a plea for quiet, intimacy, and a little room to...
Found On This Album
May 19, 2019
This is How it Goes
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...
1980
Too Late
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.
March 27, 2026
Love Ain't Lovin' Me Back
A folk song, about giving love and not having it returned. The verse structure is plain — three lines building a situation, resolved in the refrain. The final verse turns the question: could this time be...
Rough Working Demo
May 18, 2025
A Thin Veneer
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....
Rough Working Demo
Video
May 3, 2025
Ain't No Slave
A song with a dark, resonant pulse, written as a direct response to the traditional spiritual "Ain't No Grave." The theological swap is explicit: no maker, no afterlife, no submission. The lyric is as plain...
May 3, 2025
Winter of Hate
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 9, 2025
Liberty
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.
