The tail of a blackbird mending itself and re-learning how to take off again is the kind of story parents read to little kids. Then, when they fall off the swing and scrape up their knee, they can just say “remember what the blackbird did?” to inspire the kids to get up and stop crying already, yeesh.
Paul McCartney wrote “Blackbird” about the black civil rights movement of the 1960s, having been specifically inspired by the Little Rock Nine, a group of girls who were among the first black students to enroll in an all-white school after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. the Board of Education.
Nothing speaks to the wistful endings like “Closing Time,” the 1998 alt-rock jam ostensibly sung from the perspective of a bartender who is ready to get all these drunks out of his bar and head on home.