Songs About Living Life
Songs about living life are easy to identify with and feel for. After all, we’re all trying our best to do just that. In this post, I’ve compiled a number of songs that focus on different nuances of living life. I hope you’ll enjoy it.
It’s A Beautiful Dab by U2
It’s nice to start this list with an optimistic song that has a fun and pleasant chorus appreciating the beauty of the day. It’s simple yet effective. Of course, later in this song, we’ll get into songs with more nuanced and complex messages about living life.
Landslide by Fleetwood Mac
This is a song about growing up and managing (or salvaging) relationships with your parents. In this case, the relationship the lead singer had with her dad.
Boulevard Of Broken Dreams by Green Day
This is a bit of a sad song about going through life alone. If you are interested in this type of song topic, I maintain a blog post with songs about loneliness that you might want to explore.
Remember When by Alan Jackson
This song looks back at a life that Alan shared with his wife. It literally asks whether his life partner remembered all the memories from raising kids to turning 30 years old to other stepping stones in life. Also, this song has a great and introspective feel to it. It’s positive yet pleasantly melancholy.
Beethoven’s 5th Symphony
In all of music, there is one piece know for being about living life, and that is Beethoven’s 5th Symphony with the famous 4-note motif everyone is familiar with that sounds like DA-DA-DA-DA. The metaphor and idea behind that sound is that it represents your life urgently knocking on your door and asking what you are doing with your life.
Whenever you hear that famous motif, that’s your life knocking on your door. Here is an example of it so you can hear this motif and the urgency at which it comes at you.
Modern Song Using Beethoven’s 5th Symphony That Talks About Living Life
I recently wrote a song called “The One Who Didn’t” about a man who had a vision of what he wanted to do with his life and set out to accomplish those things. But then he wondered about failing. What if he became the one who didn’t and didn’t realize his dreams and didn’t accomplish his goals? That’s quite a bone chilling thing to consider.
On top of that, this new song uses Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and Beethoven himself as something that haunts the protagonist of the song as he chases his goals. Take a listen to how this contemporary song uses Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the story of the song and also in the melody and the sounds.
The lyrics also talk about living life. Here are some of the interesting lyrics of this song:
What if I become the one who didn’t?
The one who didn’t. The one who didn’t.
Didn’t feel my strength, didn’t sing my song, didn’t inspire, dnd didn’t inspire!
Didn’t find my love. Didn’t kiss the girl who is waiting alone – waiting alone – waiting alone waiting alone!
That’s a terrifying thing to imagine about yourself. What if it really does become true?
As the song goes, on there is some redemption with this strong line:
Did I run away or chase some make-belief crown? I got so crazed – even the critics quieted down.
But these are songs about living life and in real life the fixes don’t come so easily which is reflected in the last verse in which even after accomplishing what you had set out to do, fulfillment is missing, which is quite realistic but also unexpected after triumph.
Soul not sold, I became a lion who roared.
But my heart didn’t soar – what was it all for?
Is Beethoven’s fifth to thank or blame
For that lightning strike that kindled my flame?
And at the end of the song:
Journey completed – fulfillment omitted.
But To Ludwig’s 5th – I’m forever committed.
My soul still bursting from every pore,
Laughing madly, I charged gale winds once more.
The combination of these two song is truly about living life because even through struggle, disappointment, success which turns out to be failure, we still have to move forward. We have to keep fighting for ourselves as long as we still can.
Girl And Balloon – Another Song About Living Life
This is a song I translated from the original Russian. It’s a very short song taking around two minutes. But it’s rich in wonder about life. The song spans only four short verses, but in every verse it follows a female character who is a girl in the first verse, a young lady in the second verse, a woman in the third verse, and an old lady by the end of the song.
The song shows us problems that this female character encounters at every stage of life and how she deals with them, often in unsweetened and all-too-predictable ways, which is the magic of this song. It doesn’t sugar coat human nature and shows it objectively.
Bittersweet Mirage – Song About Living Life Through Frustration Of Failed Dreams
This song is inspired by the Myth of Sisyphus, and uses a Friedrich Nietzsche idea that if you find meaning and hope in some goal, you’ll go through incredible suffering to achieve it. Here is the link to the full page and lyrics of this song.
A Song That Spans The Protagonist’s Entire Lifetime: Hitting Air
This is an imaginative song in which the hero of the song is presumably middle-aged. He begins to look back at his life with a vision of a five-year-old version of himself standing next to him, asking whether he did right by him.
As the verses of this song continue, the protagonist makes it further through his life. We see him in his twenties, choosing his life path. Then we see him a bit older. And just when he is looking for the old version of himself, that old version is nowhere to be found. It’s a bone chilling possibility. Here is a page with full lyrics of this song.
