some songs don’t wait for you to be ready the first few seconds hit and your chest does something before your brain catches up, before you even remember what or who you’re aching for.
that’s what this list is. seven months ago I wrote about the movies that taught me how to yearn, and a few of you in my dm’s wouldn’t let me stop there. this time it’s songs.
if you haven’t read the first piece, you can here.
to recap where that one started on my musings on yearning, here it is:
Yearning isn’t something you can manufacture. Yearning isn’t something you can manufacture.
it isn’t just an aesthetic or a fleeting mood you slip into when it’s convenient. it asks something of you. it asks you to stay open, even when there’s no guarantee of resolution. to sit in desire without rushing to collapse it into something tangible.
and yes, there is something deeply beautiful when longing is met. when desire lands, when connection becomes something real, something lived.
but that’s not where the transformation happens.
the transformation happens in the holding.
in the moments where you don’t know how it will unfold, and you choose to stay open anyway. when yearning stretches you, softens you, brings you into deeper honesty about what you want, what you feel, what you’re no longer willing to deny.
these films understand that.
they don’t just show love, they show the space that shapes you before it ever arrives. the tension, the almost, the quiet becoming that happens when you allow yourself to feel deeply without rushing to the end.
because yearning, when you let it, doesn’t just point you toward something else.
it changes you.
it makes you more honest.
more awake.
more available for the kind of love that doesn’t need to be chased or forced.
and maybe that’s why it lingers.
not because it was fulfilled, but because of who you became in the presence of it. 💋
which I thought summed up what I wanted to say about yearning. but interestingly enough, exploring it through a different art form cracked something open I hadn’t gotten to yet. while music plays a part in cinema, it relies on other mediums to do the work, the set, the costume, the angles. where music has just the sound alchemy, and something intimate about the songwriter, pairing with sound to invoke a whole story captured in a few minutes.
while I was selecting the songs it felt insanely challenging, so I ended up creating a playlist on spotify, and made it collaborative so you can all add your own, the songs that bring you into your yearning.
I also categorized the songs, not just yearning for someone, but yearning for nostalgia: yearning as atmosphere, yearning as narrative / rupture, yearning as the small and particular.
so without further ado, here’s the set list of songs that have taught me how to yearn, sequenced to move through that same arc, atmosphere → rupture → the small and particular:
I. Yearning as Atmosphere Fade Into You — Mazzy Star Sun Bleached Flies — Ethel Cain Crush — Ethel Cain
II. Yearning as Narrative / Rupture Great Expectation — Sienna Spiro Don’t Delete the Kisses — Wolf Alice Miss — Florence Road Lover, You Should’ve Come Over — Jeff Buckley Begged — Olivia Rodrigo
III. Yearning as the Small and Particular I Wanna Be Yours — Arctic Monkeys Ivy — Frank Ocean In the Living Room — Maggie Rogers Wish On An Eyelash — Mallrat
fade into you
the tempo drags just behind the beat. you feel yourself reaching before you even know what for. a person, a version of yourself, a feeling you can’t name yet. that’s the trick of it. the song never catches up to itself, so neither do you. every time I listen, my heart feels like it’s getting pried open to that yearn.
Hope Sandoval’s voice barely rises above a whisper the whole way through. not because she’s holding back, but because that’s what longing actually sounds like. not a scream. a whisper aimed at someone who isn’t in the room to hear it.
and the lyrics carry that same absence. the eyes that see nothing, hollowed out. the shadow life, lived somewhere just out of reach. it’s not darkness as danger here. it’s darkness as distance. as the space between you and the person you’re aching for. living in shadow becomes its own kind of intimacy, closer to the dark than to daylight, because daylight is where they’d actually have to be seen, be present, be real.
that’s the whole song, wanting something enough to let it stay unclear. fading into someone instead of arriving at them.
sun bleached flies
I find myself yearning backward instead of outward not for a person who’s absent in this moment, but for an entire past self, a past version of a life that already ended. the ache isn’t “come back to me.” it’s “let me go back to when things hadn’t broken yet.”
the length does something most pop songs don’t let themselves do it stretches past six minutes and refuses to hurry. that’s the point yearning for an old life doesn’t move at verse-chorus-verse speed. it drifts circling for the same memory from different angles. the song gives itself permission to sit in that circling instead of resolving it.
and Ethel builds an entire world around it. it’s a scene you’re dropped into. specific American landscape doing emotional work the way a film’s setting would. the lyrics don’t just describe a feeling, they place you somewhere: a town, a house, a version of family and faith that’s already gone. it feels less like a confession and more like being handed the opening shot of a movie.
crush
yearning outgrowing the size of a body. you don’t just feel it, you want to run the full length of it, wing to wing, like it’s architecture built for exactly this kind of feeling and nothing smaller. Ethel keeps reaching for religious scale because ordinary romantic language can’t hold what she’s describing. ache this size needs vaulted ceilings. it needs an altar.
and the lyrics match that scale in the most visceral way possible. violence tangled up with tenderness, a willingness to bleed for someone and call it devotion. fear of being beaten to the confession, of loving first and saying it second. submission written as if it’s the only honest posture left, the body giving up control because the feeling already has.
none of it is subtle, and that’s exactly why it works. Crush isn’t asking to be understood, it’s asking to be felt at cathedral volume. Talk about the art of yearning.
great expectation
the quietest kind of yearning on the list so far, and maybe the most private. not aching for someone who’s gone, not begging a body to be let in. this is loving an idea more than the person it’s attached to. choosing the fantasy on purpose, because the fantasy is safer than the real thing could ever be.
self-protection tangled up in it and wanting someone who never fully existed means you never have to survive them leaving, or disappointing you, or turning out smaller than you needed them to be. the yearning stays intact because the object of it was never real enough to fail you and sometimes that type of yearning is the most challenging because you never fully get closure.
don’t delete the kisses
verses read almost like spoken word, thoughts falling out in real time rather than being sung at you. and underneath, a shoegaze wall holding all of it up, soft and hazy, the melody is doing the emotional work the voice is too overwhelmed to do directly. it’s confession set against a wash of sound, private thinking made public by accident.
then the word repeats. love, love, love, love, love, building and building like a mind spinning on the same word until it stops meaning anything and starts meaning everything. and right after that peak, the question drops in and undercuts the whole thing: what if it’s not meant for me. that’s the moment the song stops being about a person and starts being about doubt itself. the fear underneath every yearning, whispered right after the loudest possible declaration of it.
it’s such a specific, human contradiction. saying the word enough times to convince yourself, then immediately wondering if you even get to have it. a thought so many people carry quietly and rarely say out loud, here sung right into the open.
miss
missing someone in the middle of a good night, dressed up, dancing, everyone around you having a great time, and the absence is still the loudest thing in the room. joy doesn’t cancel longing out sometimes it just makes the empty space next to you more obvious.
the song opens hushed, almost conversational, it’s being said quietly to no one in particular. and then it builds, the way the feeling itself builds when you can’t outrun it, until it breaks into something closer to a shout. the structure mirrors the emotional arc exactly: contained, contained, contained, and then it isn’t anymore.
I also found while listening a haunted quality running underneath it, a sense of someone’s absence still occupying physical space. a kitchen that isn’t empty even though no one’s there. a feeling in the air that won’t leave just because the person did. loneliest kind of yearning, that follows you into rooms full of people and refuses to stay behind.
lover, you should’ve come over
yearning with teeth in it. not soft, not hazy. this one unravels in real time, the vocal climbing and cracking as it goes, like restraint is being lost verse by verse instead of held from the start. by the end it isn’t asking anymore, it’s pleading, and the voice sounds like it’s paying a physical cost to get there.
underneath all of it is regret, the specific kind that wants a second chance more than it wants sympathy. not just missing someone, but replaying the exact moment things went wrong and wishing there was still time to fix it. a mistake that hasn’t been forgiven yet.
that’s what gives the song its weight. it isn’t mourning something that simply ended. it’s mourning something that could have been saved, if only the right door had been walked through at the right time. the ache isn’t clean. it’s tangled up with self-blame, which is so much harder to sit with than plain loss.
begged
stripping away any distance between the feeling and the telling. no metaphor standing in front of it, no cathedral, no shoegaze wall to soften the confession. just the plain, raw fact of it: begging someone to choose you, said out loud without any protection around the words.
you stop advocating for what you deserve and start negotiating for whatever you can get, hoping devotion might be enough to tip the scale. it’s a familiar shape for a lot of people, that shift from wanting to be chosen to actively performing the case for why you should be. the begging isn’t weakness exactly. it’s devotion with nowhere left to go but down on its knees for someone who’s likely unworthy and undeserving of your heart on full display.
what makes it land is the lack of performance in the delivery. it doesn’t sound stylized or poetic, it sounds like something admitted in private and never meant to be pretty. that rawness is what makes it recognizable. most people have had this exact moment somewhere, even if they never said it out loud.
i wanna be yours
the language here is almost funny on paper. wanting to be a vacuum cleaner, a coffee percolator, the most mundane objects imaginable offered up as devotion. but nothing about the delivery reads as a joke. that’s the trick of it. devotion doesn’t need grand language to be real, sometimes it’s more convincing in the small and the ordinary. wanting to be useful, wanting to be present in someone’s everyday life in the most unremarkable ways possible, that’s its own kind of vow.
and the tone is what makes it land instead of read as absurd. slow, syrupy, unhurried, like the song refuses to rush toward the punchline the lyrics seem to be setting up. the music tells you how seriously to take the words, and it insists: completely. that’s tone doing the emotional work the lyrics alone wouldn’t be able to carry. without that pacing, this could read as clever. with it, it reads as sincere devotion dressed up in the plainest objects available.
ivy
Ivy doesn’t just describe a memory, it puts you inside one. the production has that pitched, slightly warped quality by the end, like the past distorting the way it actually does when you replay it too many times. not a clean flashback. something closer to memory as it actually behaves, blurred at the edges, softened in some places and sharpened in others depending on what still hurts.
the yearning here isn’t really aimed at getting someone back. it’s aimed at a version of yourself that existed alongside them, a specific time that can’t be re-entered no matter how close the memory feels. nostalgia convinces you the door is still open when really you’re just standing very close to the glass, looking in.
in the living room
not every yearning comes from heartbreak or absence sometimes it’s quieter than that, and smaller. not longing for a person specifically, but for a whole domestic rhythm that hasn’t happened yet. the kettle already on when you wake up. someone else’s presence folded into the ordinary parts of a day, not the big romantic ones.
no rupture, no begging, no cathedral-sized ache. just wanting for the mundane made shared. a life where the small moments already have someone else built into them. it’s easy to overlook this as yearning at all, since it doesn’t hurt the same way heartbreak does. but the want is just as real, maybe even more honest, because it isn’t reaching for intensity. it’s reaching for steadiness within intimacy.
wish on an eyelash
just a wish, small and childlike, the kind made on an eyelash or a candle without needing a whole philosophy behind it. wanting something simply, without the weight of trauma or history attached to the wanting.
innocence in that which feels earned by the end of this list, not naive. after everything before it, the ache of absence, the performance of love, the begging, the domestic longing, landing somewhere this light feels like relief. like yearning doesn’t always have to cost something. sometimes it can just be a small hope.
when people think of nervous system work, they go straight to the practices that read as typically wellness oriented. the breathwork, the somatic checklist, the regulation techniques with a name and a method. and there’s a place for that, I write those pieces too, and I like writing them.
but in my experience, some of the most honest nervous system work happens in much simpler moments. allowing ourselves to actually feel the sensations. getting lost in a song. being fully in the experience of art instead of just consuming it.
I had to remind myself of that while I was making this piece. there’s an internal pressure to keep writing the nervous system 101 kind of content, the stuff that’s easy to categorize and easy to teach. but there’s an art of yearning in particular that teaches us something about the nervous system those pieces can’t quite reach.
so here’s the unconventional nervous system practice I want to leave you with: make your own yearning playlist. sit with it. notice how your body cracks open at the feeling of yearning, where it lands, what it does to your breath, your chest, your throat. or just listen to the one I made, and let yourself actually feel it instead of thinking your way through it.
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