For the songs that stayed after the world moved on.
Songs for the End Times is a space for deep dives into the songs, albums, and artist catalogues that feel like they belong on the soundtrack to memory, survival, heartbreak, nostalgia, and quiet personal collapse. These are the tracks that stay with us long after their original moment has passed — songs first heard on cassette, CD, radio, MTV, late-night mixtapes, or streaming queues, returning years later with a different kind of weight.
This section looks beyond popularity or critical acclaim to ask why certain songs endure. Through personal reflections and close readings of lyrics, melody, production, performance, and cultural context, Songs for the End Times revisits the music that shaped who we were, who we became, and what still plays in the background when the world feels louder, stranger, and harder to explain.
Start here
The music archive has grown large enough that chronology is no longer the most useful way in. A better starting quartet is Frou Frou and Details, Alana Davis and “32 Flavors”, Fiction Factory’s “(Feels Like) Heaven”, and the Spin Doctors’ “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues”. Between them, they cover most of what this section keeps circling back to: memory, production, lyrics, disappearing acts and songs that somehow outlive the moment that made them.
The 1980s shelf
For the decade of cassettes, synths and immaculate melancholy, continue with Propaganda, Tears for Fears, Depeche Mode, and INXS.
The 1990s shelf
The 1990s trail runs from “32 Flavors” to Shawn Mullins’ “Lullaby”, Candlebox’s “Far Behind”, and The Sundays.
