We begin with The Beatles and “Yer Blues.”

John Lennon said the song was written in India, while he was meditating for hours a day in the Maharishi’s camp. The place was beautiful. The purpose was spiritual. Everyone had gone there, in one way or another, to reach something higher.

And yet Lennon said he was writing some of the most miserable songs on earth. When he wrote that he was so lonely he wanted to die, he said he wasn’t kidding. That was how he felt.

That gives us the first shape of loneliness: the kind that doesn’t care where you are.

You can change the scenery. You can sit in the most peaceful surroundings imaginable. You can try to reach God. But if the loneliness is inside you… it comes too.

This is The Beatles and “Yer Blues”.

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“Yer Blues” gives us loneliness at its most exposed. Not decorative sadness. Not melancholy for effect. Something more frightening: the feeling that even beauty, meditation and distance can’t save you from yourself.

John Prine’s “Donald & Lydia” takes us somewhere quieter, but no less lonely.

Prine explained that the characters Donald and Lydia were based on real people he’d seen but who he’d brought together in his mind, using Bob Dylan’s “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol” as a guide for the song.

The two were very shy. Too shy to introduce themselves. Nobody introduced them, so they fell for each other only in their dreams. Donald was someone he’d seen in his army boot camp, Lydia in an army town. They formed together in his mind, producing a different kind of loneliness.

Lennon’s loneliness is internal and overwhelming. Prine’s is social, almost painfully ordinary. Two people might have been able to love each other, or at least know each other, but the bridge is never built.

There’s something especially sad about that. Loneliness isn’t always the absence of other people. Sometimes the other person is there, or could have been there, but no one makes the introduction. No one says the first sentence. No one finds the courage to disturb the silence.

So we move from loneliness as despair to loneliness as missed connection.

This is John Prine and “Donald & Lydia”.

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Donald and Lydia are two shy people who never quite meet in the real world. Their connection only happens through their dreams.

ELO’s “Telephone Line” moves that loneliness into the act of trying.

Jeff Lynne told Rolling Stone magazine that he sounds desperate and lonely on the song, and that maybe he was. The song is quite literally about trying to find a girl every night and not being able to get through to her. He thought of it as a scenario, but also said it may have been prompted by his own unhappiness at the time. He connected it to the plaintive songs he loved as a child — Del Shannon, Roy Orbison — the sad songs that somehow felt best.

That’s the next shape of loneliness: the failed signal.

With “Donald & Lydia,” no call is ever made. With “Telephone Line,” the call is made again and again, but it doesn’t arrive. The desire is no longer hidden; it’s become an action. The person reaches out. The person tries. And still there’s no answer.

There’s a particular ache in that, because trying can make loneliness worse. Silence is one thing when you’ve said nothing. It’s another when you’ve tried to speak and heard nothing back.

And yet Lynne also said people told him the song gave them a boost, even though he never dreamed he was doing that for anybody.

In a way, that matters. A song about not getting through somehow gets through. The singer can’t reach the person inside the song, but the song itself reaches listeners outside it.

So loneliness begins to turn. It’s still painful, still unresolved, but now it’s become shareable. The private line becomes a public sound.

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“Telephone Line” is loneliness as unanswered contact: a voice sent out into the dark, hoping someone picks up.

Joan Armatrading’s “Me, Myself, I” complicates the whole idea.

Joan was seperated from her parents at an early age. Her parents left her with her Grandmother in Antigua when they moved to the UK and she wasn’t reunited with them in the UK until the age of 7. She said she missed her parents terribly when she wasn’t with them, and thinks this shaped how she is now, “a loner person”. She has always been used to spending time on her own, and that’s where “Me, Myself, I” came from.

But the crucial part is what she says next: she is comfortable being on her own. She has no problem with it. She thinks it can be healthy to enjoy being by yourself. Sometimes, she says, being on your own is empowering.

That’s the pivot.

Not all aloneness is loneliness.

The difference is agency. Loneliness is often the feeling of being cut off against your will. Solitude can be the freedom to stop chasing, stop explaining, stop needing the room to recognise you.

After “Telephone Line,” this feels like a necessary correction. The unanswered call says, “I need you to respond so I can feel less alone.” Here, Armatrading says, “I may be alone, but I’m still here. I’m not incomplete just because I’m by myself.”

That doesn’t erase the sadness underneath it. Her memory of missing her parents gives the song emotional weight. But she doesn’t leave us only with absence. She gives us a grown-up version of it: the child who missed people becomes the adult who can sit with herself.

Loneliness isn’t solved… it’s transformed.

This is Joan Armatrading and “Me, Myself, I”.

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Joan Armatrading gives us solitude as strength: not pretending that loneliness never hurt, but refusing to treat being alone as failure.

Lindsey Buckingham’s “Street of Dreams” moves into a more fragile kind of inwardness.

In a 1992 interview on “In Concert”, he described it as a very personal song about his own loneliness, at a time when he felt he was drifting creatively and wasn’t quite sure why he was doing what he was doing. His father had died many years earlier, but he would still sit and talk to him, imagining what his father might say back. The middle section of the song is about that imagined voice telling him that whatever happens, whatever illusions get broken, he has to keep going and follow his instincts.

That’s loneliness as disorientation.

It’s not simply that someone is absent. It’s that the self has lost its bearings. The work is still there, the talent is still there, the life is still moving — but the reason for it feels blurred. What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Who am I doing it for? And who would understand if I said I no longer know?

After “Me, Myself, I,” this becomes the other side of solitude. Being alone can be empowering when you’re at home inside yourself. But when the self starts to drift, aloneness becomes more dangerous. You begin looking for a voice that can steady you.

For Buckingham, that voice is his father’s — not physically present, but still active in memory. His father can’t answer in the ordinary sense, but the imagined conversation still matters. Sometimes loneliness reaches backwards for guidance. Sometimes the person we need is no longer available, so the mind builds a room where we can still speak to them.

And that’s not nothing – it may be one of the ways people survive.

This is Lindsey Buckingham and “Street of Dreams”.

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“Street of Dreams” shows loneliness as drift: a creative, personal uncertainty that reaches toward memory for guidance.

Soundgarden’s “The Day I Tried To Live” takes us into the hardest kind of effort: trying to come back out.

Chris Cornell told Rolling Stone magazine that the song is about trying to step out of being patterned, closed off and reclusive. He described attempting to be normal — to go out, be around people, hang out. He said he had a tendency to be closed off for long periods, not seeing people, not calling anyone.

But he also said the song is hopeful. It’s about trying to understand, belong and get along with other people — failing, perhaps, but probably trying again tomorrow. He said people misinterpreted the title as a suicide-note idea, but for him it meant something else: the day he actually tried to open himself up and experience what was going on around him, instead of hiding in a cave.

That’s such a powerful distinction.

The song isn’t about the end of trying. It’s about the difficulty of trying at all.

Loneliness often looks passive from the outside. Someone doesn’t call. Someone stays in. Someone withdraws. But from the inside, the smallest act of return can feel enormous. Opening the door. Answering a message. Going outside. Being around people without knowing how to be around people.

That’s why this song belongs near the end of the episode. It takes the earlier forms of loneliness — despair, missed connection, failed communication, solitude, drift — and turns them into a daily struggle – not a grand transformation.

Just one more attempt.

Sometimes “trying to live” means exactly that.

Not winning.

Not flourishing.

Not suddenly becoming easy company.

Just trying again.

Thanks for turning that into song, Chris. This is Soundgarden and “The Day I Tried To Live”.

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Soundgarden gives us loneliness as a pattern someone is trying to break: the cave, the silence, the closed-off self, and the effort to step out into the day again.

Lou Reed’s “Turn To Me” gives us one of the reasons that effort can be worth making.

Reed told Creem magazine that he was very aware of what it feels like to listen to something when you’re feeling down. A good book, film or record can describe what you’re feeling and make you think: no, you’re not alone. He loved the fact that it physically exists outside you, written by another person. Something outside your own head has named what’s happening inside it.

That’s the final shape of loneliness in this episode: recognition.

Not rescue, exactly… certainly not cure… but contact.

Because sometimes what helps is not advice. It’s not being told to cheer up, get out more, move on, be grateful, think positive. Sometimes what helps is hearing someone else describe the room you thought you were the only one sitting in.

That’s what songs can do.

“Yer Blues” says the beautiful place may not save you. “Donald & Lydia” says feeling can fail to cross the gap. “Telephone Line” says the call may not get through. “Me, Myself, I” says being alone can also become strength. “Street of Dreams” says memory can answer when no one else can. “The Day I Tried To Live” says trying again is itself an act of courage.

And “Turn To Me” says… here’s a voice outside you… here’s proof that someone else has felt something like this… here’s a record, a book, a film, a song — something you can turn to when your own thoughts become too small a room.

Reed wanted the song to have humour too, a kind of “Hey, hello. I’m still here. How are you doing?”

That’s a beautiful place to end.

Not with loneliness vanishing… but with someone answering.

This is Lou Reed putting a dance beat on loneliness with “Turn To Me”.

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