About three years ago I bought my second guitar, it was an acoustic one and went looking for songs I could learn. Harvest was one of the first I found.

It's about a man walking through his own death. He moves through a garden, sees wilted things, feels shadows behind him. The whole thing has the atmosphere of a grey afternoon that won't end.

The line that gets you is "mourner's lament, but it's me who's the martyr." He's been watching a funeral this whole time and then realizes it's his. He's not a witness. He's the subject.

What Åkerfeldt never tells you is how the guy feels about that. Could be acceptance. Could be detachment as someone already so removed from the living that he's watching himself from a distance. Could be something darker, like this was always where he was heading. The song doesn't resolve it. The orchard just goes quiet. And it stays heavy.

This one came on randomly. I wasn't looking for it. And I'm not sure I would have found it if I was.

To Bid You Farewell is technically about a man losing someone. The few lyrics it has are about waiting for a sunrise that doesn't fix anything, and asking "am I to bid you farewell?" like he already knows the answer. But the lyrics almost don't matter. The song is 11 minutes long and most of it has no words at all. Just guitars, slowly getting darker.

That progression is the whole point. You can hear something being lost in real time, the way things actually end. By the time the song is over you feel like you've been through something.

It makes me feel like I miss someone I never knew. I don't know how else to put it. The music gets there without needing to explain itself, which is more than most songs with actual words manage to do.

In 2021 a friend taught me this as one of the first songs I learned on electric guitar. So before I knew anything about what it meant, I'd already played it and felt it through my hands before I understood it with my head.

It's a love song. That's the thing most people miss because the word "reaper" is right there in the title. But Buck Dharma wrote it thinking about dying young and wanting to find his way back to his wife on the other side. The whole song is him telling her "don't be afraid, we'll get there, love doesn't stop just because we do".

The Romeo and Juliet reference threw people off. A lot of listeners heard suicide pact where Dharma meant eternal devotion. He was apparently shocked by that reading. But Blue Öyster Cult never corrected it too loudly either, and the song ended up soundtracking Halloween.

That gap between what it is and what it became makes it more interesting, not less. A love song that sounds like horror because love and death have always lived next to each other anyway.

This song is about the oldest trick life plays on you. You're young, time feels infinite, and you drift waiting for something to show you the way. Then a line lands: "And then one day you find ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run."

That's it. That's the whole song. The rest is just the weight of that realization. Every year getting shorter, plans that come to nothing, breath getting shorter. Roger Waters wrote it in his twenties and somehow already knew what it felt like to be old.

I'm 23. By every measure I have time. But this song already makes sense to me in a way I wish it didn't, that constant weight of not living life to the fullest, of days passing in the background while i'm busy meaning to start.

I found this one through a guitar riff on an Instagram reel. Someone was playing those opening notes and I had to know what it was.

The song is exactly what it sounds like. A man getting his heart literally kickstarted. On December 23, 1987, Nikki Sixx overdosed on heroin, turned blue on a bathroom floor, and was clinically dead for two minutes. Paramedics injected adrenaline directly into his heart. He woke up in the hospital, ripped out his tubes, walked out in leather pants, caught a ride home from two teenage girls who were already mourning his death, and then went home and did more heroin.

Then he wrote a song about it. Thought it was a throwaway. It became their biggest anthem.

Most songs called things like "Kickstart My Heart" are using that as a metaphor. This one isn't. That's what makes it better than it has any right to be.