Spiritual Impulses in Rock and Pop Music Lyrics
Ever since I discovered the Highwaymen, I love listening to them every once in a while. Their signature song, the title relating to their bandname, gives me joy particularly in the live version from Nassau Coliseum in 1990, with its hint at immortality:
A clip from Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End evokes a strong spiritual image for an inner turning point.
To me, Shelter from the Storm highlights the contrast between the material world with all its struggles and suffering, and the realm of the immortal soul. The latter invites us constantly to enter.
I count Bob Dylan's Abandoned Love among his love songs that invite to a spiritual perspective. The love to be abandoned may be earthly ties and the ego.
Bob Dylan’s Shelter from the Storm, to me, signifies two fields of life: on the one hand, our well-known world of opposites, struggles, and desperation, and on the other hand the world of the living soul. I see a path described in the song from experiencing the borderline in our physical world up to a new state of being, based on the immortal soul.
This video interpretation of Leonard Cohen's Avalanche sees the song as the Divine Soul within speaking to the human seeker.
It was not long ago that I became aware of the spiritual context of Bob Dylan's Senor - even though I had regarded Love in Vain from the same 1978 Street Legal album as very spiritual for a long time.
A video interpretation of Dylan's Oh Sister: Like many Dylan songs, it can be interpreted on various levels. A relationship of siblings, a love affair, possibly with biographical references? From a spiritual perspective, it may be the spirit aspect addressing the soul aspect in man.
It was only quite recently that I became aware of the spiritual context of Bob Dylan‘s Señor (Tales of Yankee Power) even though it was released on the B side of Changing of the Guards as well as the 1978 album Street Legal, which also contains Love in Vain.
The narrator marrying Isis, their break-up, his adventures, and their reunification may symbolize a spiritual path connecting a seeker to his spirit-soul.