We begin in the sixties with a song that starts from a tiny image and expands into a whole social diagnosis. Paul McCartney described “Eleanor Rigby” as beginning with a stray line and the idea of someone picking up rice in a church after a wedding — and from that small, poignant detail it moved into what he called the “lonely people” direction.

That’s a very sixties starting point: not a manifesto, not an argument — a scene. Ordinary life. And then the quiet horror behind it: how many people are invisible in plain sight?

This song really needs no introduction.

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“Eleanor Rigby” begins with isolation — the unnoticed person in the background of other people’s celebrations.

The seventies take that loneliness and add history to it: a life changed by systems you didn’t choose.

John Prine’s “Sam Stone” comes straight out of the post-Vietnam reality. Prine talks about his own drafting to Germany in 1966, rather than where everyone thought they would go – Vietnam. Sam Stone wasn’t so lucky, he was built from that world: the man coming home from Vietnam, but something comes home “with” him. The damage wasn’t only physical — it reshaped a whole family’s life.

So the lens widens: from the loneliness of one life, to the loneliness created by war and its aftermath — where being “back” isn’t the same as being restored.

John is no longer with us but his songs are eternal. From his eponymous 1971 debut album and with the gut wrenching line, “Jesus Christ died for nothin’ I suppose”, this is Sam Stone.

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Prine’s decade is aftermath: the big event is supposedly over, but the real story has only begun — in homes, in relationships, in the long tail of what people carry.

In the eighties, the anger sharpens again — especially in Britain. Paul Weller said “A Town Called Malice” was his attempt to capture the anger and frustration he felt about Thatcherism and what he saw as the dismantling of working-class communities: attacks on trade unions, small businesses disappearing, English life being “closed down” to people. He even describes the “phoney pretence that we could suddenly all be middle class because we were allowed to buy our own houses, get a mortgage and be in debt for the rest of our lives.”

So the focus shifts from private damage to public policy — but it’s still about lived life. Not theory. The politics becomes the weather people live under, day after day.

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That was The Jam and A Town Called Malice.

Weller’s eighties voice is direct: the pressure on communities, the closing down of possibilities, the frustration and despair.

Then the nineties arrive with a different tone: not only anger, but scepticism — the feeling that the big political story being sold to you might be too simple.

Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy” is written around that historical moment when the Berlin Wall came down and people said democracy was coming to the East. Cohen calls himself the gloomy person who turns up to “ruin the orgy” — because he didn’t think it would happen that way. He pushes back on the triumphalism around democracy ‘coming to the East,’ and instead frames the U.S. as the real ‘laboratory of democracy’ — where races, classes, genders and orientations confront one another.

So we move from “this is what’s happening to communities” to “be careful what story you think you’re living in.” The dream of progress is itself questioned — not because hope is bad, but because slogans can be another kind of disguise.

Here’s Leonard Cohen and Democracy.

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Cohen gives us disillusion with the big story: democracy as promise, and the suspicion that the reality is messier.

In the noughties, one event forces a different kind of language: collective trauma.

Bruce Springsteen described “The Rising” as beginning in a “nether world” — a place that is still your world, but transformed into something unknown and unknowable. And in that space, all you have is connection: “you who are in front of me and you who are behind me.” He calls it an image of sacrifice — and says religious imagery becomes almost unavoidable because of the nature of what people were living through.

So the decade shifts from cynicism about public narratives to something rawer: grief, sacrifice, and the need to make meaning when words feel inadequate.

Here’s The Boss with The Rising.

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Springsteen’s noughties voice is communal — a transformed world, held together by connection and sacrifice.

The Twenty Tens often turn inward again — not because the world is fine, but because the private cost becomes the story.

John Mayer described “Never On The Day You Leave” as coming after running into an ex — amicably — and finally being able to admit: “A lot of it’s me. A lot of it’s in my head, like something happened to me, and it’s just the way I work, it’s the way my mind is and I took it really hard.” He talks about a sadness so deep you hope it only happens once in your life. A sadness so deep he can’t sing the following line without crying: “She’ll fight for you like hell then force herself to like some other man.”

This is the decade of psychological honesty: the admission that sometimes the hardest thing isn’t what happened — it’s how your mind holds it. The dream here isn’t political or collective. It’s more basic: to understand yourself without self-deception.

This is John Mayer and Never On The Day You Leave.

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Mayer gives us private reckoning — the mind’s role, the slow work of admitting what was yours.

Then the twenties land with loss that isn’t just personal — it’s “macro,” as Gillian Welch put it.

Talking about “What We Had,” she said it touched everything that was happening after the damage to their Woodland Studios from a tornado in 2020. “It certainly wasn’t just a breakup,” she said. “So much was gone… so much that we had, had disappeared.” And she describes starting with the chorus — the phrase “what we had” — because it felt like the sound of those words already existed, as if the song was waiting for that moment.

That feels like the twenties in a nutshell: grief that isn’t only about one relationship or one event, but about the disappearance of stability itself. The dream isn’t “what can I become?” It’s “what can we hold onto — and what has already gone?”

This is Gillian Welch and David Rawlings with What We Had.

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