HeyJaredSongbook
Greg Varner has been in love with pop songs for decades. He believes a song is worth at least 500 words. Every Friday.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 12
- Latest publication
- Sep 25, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 10, 2026
Latest issues
In Songbook This Week: "Mother, Mother" by Michael Callen (opens the original)
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Songwriter(s): Cris WilliamsonDo grown children ever stop longing to be rescued from the terrors that used to afflict them only at night? I think most of us (the badly parented excepted) now and then miss the comfort our mothers gave us when we were little. The wish to be safe again in her arms is tempered by the awareness that our unrealistic longing can never be met. I remember the half-joking but plaintive remark my own mother made when she was in her seventh decade and my grandmother long de
In Songbook This Week: "I See the Sign" by Sam Amidon (opens the original)
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Songwriter(s): TraditionalThe old, enchanted world of signs and portents is reflected in contemporary culture. It’s a distorted reflection, as if in a QAnon funhouse mirror, with signs and prophecies of old-time religion morphing into modern conspiracies both imagined and real. People who in the past might have been soaked in faith’s baptismal waters are now pickled in stronger stuff, leading to fantasies of a coming apocalyptic battle between Donald Trump and the forces of evil. When citizens c
In Songbook This Week: "I'll Be Gone" by Sarah Jarosz (opens the original)
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Songwriter(s): Sarah Jarosz and John LeventhalEnvironmentally conscious pop songs date back at least to 1970, when Joni Mitchell released “Big Yellow Taxi,” with Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” coming the following year. Since then, more songs have taken up themes of the environment and climate change. A tuneful recent example is “I’ll Be Gone,” by Sarah Jarosz, from her 2020 album World on the Ground.Jarosz, a musical prodigy who signed her first recording contract while still in h
In Songbook This Week: “Share the End (2025 Remaster)” by Carly Simon (opens the original)
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Songwriter(s): Carly Simon and Jacob BrackmanWhen Carly Simon released her second album, Anticipation, in 1971, the song “Share the End” landed as an intellectual exercise. We couldn’t have known how prescient it was.The kaleidoscopic 1960s were full of shocking incident—assassinations, bombings, riots, murders, the FBI’s COINTEL depredations, and the ongoing obscenity of the Vietnam war. But only on the paranoid right could it have truly seemed as if the world was ending. In retrospect, it was
In Songbook This Week: "Blue Mesas" by Leon Bridges (opens the original)
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Songwriter(s): Todd Bridges, Eric Frederic, Daniel Stanfill, Harold Lilly, and Olivia SalasIt’s not easy to categorize Leon Bridges, who has been called a “retro,” “soul” and “neo R&B” singer, among other things. Growing up in Texas, Bridges would no doubt have been familiar with the figure of the lone cowboy riding into the sunset, a gunslinger played by John Wayne or Clint Eastwood. In “Blue Mesas,” the final track on his third album, Gold-Diggers Sound, <
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