Writers and musicians often circle the same themes — love and loss, faith and doubt, power and decay — only from different sides of the stage. Shared Obsessions explores those overlaps, pairing authors and artists who chase the same questions through words and sound.
In this series, you’ll find Kafka mirrored in Radiohead, Leonard Cohen and Anna Akhmatova wrestling with the same ache of devotion, or Kurt Vonnegut and Godspeed You! Black Emperor confronting the end of the world in their own languages. Each post traces a dialogue across art forms — how literature and music echo, argue, and illuminate one another.
Whether you come for the philosophy or the playlists, Shared Obsessions is where creative worlds meet and where ideas reverberate between the page and the record groove.
Some artists make the first move. They give you a melody to hold onto, a character who tells you what she wants, or an emotion that arrives with its meaning neatly attached. Fleur Jaeggy and Nico don’t do that. Jaeggy writes in short, precise sentences that can feel almost unnervingly calm. Nico’s music after the…
Some men can turn waiting into a full identity. They are beings-in-suspension. They are waiting for the transfer, the call, the woman, the apology, the promotion, the revelation, the clean beginning, the better self that is supposedly on its way and will, any day now, assume control of the situation. Until then, they endure. They…
The scariest pleasures are not the ones that get old quickly. Those are easy. They disappoint you or make you feel bad fast enough that your self-respect has time to stage a small recovery. The dangerous pleasures are the ones that work beautifully. They work so well that the rest of life starts to look…
There is a kind of modern weirdness that can look like a supermarket aisle so overstocked it starts to feel theological under the fluorescent lights. Or maybe like a man in a too-large suit singing about air, cities, paper, buildings, and other things that absolutely should not feel this suspicious. And yet somehow they do….
There’s a particular kind of dread that doesn’t announce itself. It’s the feeling of waking up and realizing the world is operating by rules you were never given. Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed. No explanation. No prologue. A Radiohead song opens mid-glitch, mid-thought, suspended over circuitry that never resolves. Franz Kafka and Radiohead are separated…
Why One Artist Rewrote Her Narrative—and the Other Never Got the Chance At first, Sylvia Plath and Fiona Apple seemed to be placed in the same cultural box. Both emerged young. Both produced work that was emotionally exacting and unwilling to soften its edges. And both were quickly framed as unstable rather than precise. Their…
Late capitalism rarely feels like a crisis while you are living inside it. It feels like emails. Metrics. Wellness language that quietly replaces care. It feels like knowing something is wrong but not knowing where to put that knowledge without sounding naïve or dramatic. George Saunders and Father John Misty are obsessed with this feeling….
Some artists turn pain into performance. Others let it spill, unfiltered, across the page or the microphone. Charles Bukowski and Amy Winehouse belonged to that second kind. They didn’t romanticize addiction. They reported from inside it, giving their work the rawness of survival and the strange beauty of collapse. Their art lives where honesty meets…
Some obsessions never fade, they just find new mediums. For Aldous Huxley, it was the search for enlightenment through words, philosophy, and psychedelics. For Kevin Parker of Tame Impala, it’s through the sound of shimmering synths, circular rhythms, and lyrics that blur the self into echo. Across nearly a century, both artists chased the same…
Some artists spend their lives chasing joy. Leonard Cohen and Anna Akhmatova were not those artists. Both wrote about love with startling directness, but for them, love always carried a shadow. Desire came with betrayal, memory blurred into mourning, and intimacy was haunted by history. It might sound odd to pair a 20th-century Canadian songwriter…