My 12 Favorite Existential Songs

It's not a real genre—but should be

I have a favorite music genre that doesn’t actually exist. That’s especially odd—because these songs are all about existence.

I call it existential pop. But I’m the only person who uses this label. There are no existential radio stations or playlists.

But the songs are painfully real.

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They deal with possibilities, uncertainties, and difficult choices. Most hit songs tell you about what’s happening, but existential pop is more about the elusive might-have-beens.

Or sometimes they peer into the future and try to see visions of what still might happen—the uncertain glimmerings of our deepest hopes and longings.

There’s always an undercurrent of anxiety in the lyrics, The singer is worried about making a bad decision. Or maybe has already made one—looking back on the past, and asking:

How did I get here?

These are the kinds of issues that existentialist philosophers—Sartre, Kierkegaard, Heidegger—are always asking. But they rarely show up in pop songs. However, when they do, they grab my attention.

Consider the 1965 hit “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?” by the Lovin’ Spoonful. That’s the perfect title for an existential pop song.

You could probably attach that title to every existential pop song, and it would fit. These songs are always obsessed with how you finally decide—and what price you pay if you make a wrong choice.

Or sometimes you pay the price by making the right choice. It’s funny how that works.

Years ago, I did some pop songwriting myself. And I always tried to capture this same existential angst in my songs.

For example:

This is an inexhaustible subject for a songwriter. Once you start focusing on possibilities, everything is fair game for your lyrics.

Let’s look at some more examples. Here are one dozen of my favorite existential songs.

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Stephen Sondheim: “Being Alive” (from Company)

This pushes the existential song concept to an extreme by adding a twist I’ve never encountered elsewhere. The singer is actually interrupted repeatedly by other character who offer unwanted advice.

It’s a strange way of writing a song, but successfully conveys the uncertainty and tensions of making big life decisions.

That made this song a perfect choice for Adam Driver to sing, karaoke-style, in the anguish-provoking film Marriage Story—where he does all the voices himself.

The song is all the more moving because of its rule-breaking. Sondheim lives up the demands of his title—forcing us to feel all the intensity of “being alive.”

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Talking Heads: “Once in a Lifetime”

If I were teaching existential songwriting in a classroom, I’d devote a whole week to this track. It takes a different approach from most of the other songs on my list—because it simultaneously looks forwards and backwards.

The singer describes a future filled with banal bourgeois details…

You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile.
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife…

For some people, this is success. But not here. The sense of claustrophobia and existential panic is palpable even before Byrne asks (or, really, shouts) “HOW DID I GET HERE?”

This song is so perfect in its open-endedness that I’m reluctant to analyze it.

I’ll just point out the powerful evocations of psychic anxiety and uncertainty: for example, the huge automobile (we will encounter cars as existential symbols again below) moving without destination—we just “find ourselves” behind the wheel as in some crazy nightmare. Or the water flowing underground. Or a future that only offers more of the “same”—just as it “ever was.”

It’s reassuring to hear Byrne offer comforting words that “time isn’t after us.” But can we really trust this hollow reassurance? In this song, it feels as if the clock is relentlessly chasing us.

Every time I hear this track, I consider it as a warning to make the right choices—which are not always the conventional ones.

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Brian Wilson: “Caroline, No”

Here’s another angst-ridden “how did I get here” kind of song.

Brian Wilson lived in a persistent state of existential crisis when he composed “Caroline, No.” He was the young Kierkegaard of teen pop, suffering behind the superficial happiness of his surf lyrics.

All the chart-topping successes of his career couldn’t hide the fact that everything else in his life was falling apart.

His marriage was in tatters, and was probably the immediate inspiration for the song. But every other family connection in the Wilson universe was also fraying. He was increasingly cut off from his father, and even his sibling bandmates. His cousin was actually an open adversary and rival.

They now went on the road without him—Brian was too fragile and unpredicable. His panic attacks could occur at the worst possible times. His health was declining, even though he wasn’t even 25 years old.

And that’s when Wilson recorded “Caroline, No”—all on his own, without the help of the other Beach Boys. It was even released as a single under his own name, as a solo artist. You can hear the loneliness in every phrase.