Songs about domesticity, settling down, middle age, family life

Lyle Lovett, "Pontiac":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il81IjQQ3ag

I park my Pontiac
Down the hill out in back
Late every afternoon
With a Coke and a cigarette
And all of the neighbors there
They see a nice old man

And the girl there across the street
She sits on her front porch swing
She never realized
But I told her with my eyes
How back in the Second War
I killed 20 German boys
With my own bare hands

And the woman inside my house
She won't stop talking
She never says a thing
She just keeps talking
And I might just leave her still
After the sun goes down

And I smoke this cigarette

the Who, "Love Ain't For Keeping"

Always thought “Domestica” would be a great title for a Middle Aged indie rock band whose members are settling down

album title that is

Greg Phillinganes - Lazy Nina

Billy Joel - Famous Last Words

Neil Young "Country Home"

Paul Simon has more than the one mentioned in the original post. Some great bits in the Obvious Child, for example:

We had a lot of fun
We had a lot of money
We had a little son and we thought we'd call him Sonny
Sonny gets married and moves away
Sonny has a baby and bills to pay
Sonny gets sunnier
Day by day by day by day

a bit later in the song, Sonny's going through his own mid-life reflection:

Sonny sits by his window and thinks to himself
How it's strange that some rooms are like cages
Sonny's yearbook from high school
Is down from the shelf
And he idly thumbs through the pages
Some have died
Some have fled from themselves
Or struggled from here to get there
Sonny wanders beyond his interior walls
Runs his hand through his thinning brown hair

Harry Chapin - Cats in the Cradle
Harry Nilsson - Best Friend
Ron Sexsmith - Michael and his Dad (rips my guts out every listen)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7ISUaWxooM

Tracey Thorn's "Hormones" has a nice contrast of her aging chemistry vs her daughter's youth.

feel like Billy Joel and Paul Simon are pretty inherently domestic

ctrl-f "this must be the place" 0/0

Peter Hammill, "Autumn":

Now we're left with an empty home,
from our nest all the birds have flown for foreign skies.
We're discarded, of no further use,
though we gave our kids all our youth and all our lives -
we really tried.

Now there's only my wife and me;
we used to have a family - now that's gone
and only memories linger on...
it all seems very wrong to me.

"The End of the Rainbow" by Richard and Linda Thompson is the most devastatingly sad example I can think of.

and there was i hoping that this thread would be about the good side of domesticity and the contentment of settling down …

wait has no one mentioned "OUR HOUSE"?!!?!?

that's the quintessence of this type of song imo
la la lalala la la

Lambchop. I want to say The Daily Growl particularly but most of Is A Woman, really.

Joni Mitchell - Hissing of Summer Lawns
Pink Floyd - Time

wait has no one mentioned "OUR HOUSE"?!!?!?
― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera),

original post.

oh whoops
sorry!

:)
it was my first thought as well, so was pissed off that OP had already hit that spot.
that said, i am sure that Madness will have done others, just that i am not in that space at the moment.

Squeeze - She Doesn't have to Shave
Squeeze - Can of Worms

Shangri-La, The Kinks
You and Me, Randy Newman
The Folks Who Live on the Hill, Peggy Lee, Nina Simone et al (written by Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein)

Feel like there must be more Kinks songs, Ray always felt like such an adult songwriter even at a young age

xp to self oops that Randy Newman song is actually called Love Story

xp to the list in the original post:
"shop vac" is such an awesome call.

Maybe if you forget to hide the keys
I'll take a ride to Applebee's
I'll come home drunk on daiquiris
and throw up on the neighbor's lawn

Which made me think of another one... Depreston by Courtney Barnett:

You said we should look out further
I guess it wouldn't hurt us
We don’t have to be around all these coffee shops

Now we've got that percolator
Never made a latte greater.
I’m saving 23 dollars a week

Darling Lorraine - Paul Simon
And Settlin' Down - Poco

In a couple of years they have built a home sweet home,
With a couple of kids running in the yard,
Of Desmond and Molly Jones
- Beatles "Obladi-Oblada"

Hiss Golden Messenger - "Mahogany Dread"

"Girl of mine with silver in your hair
I still want you.
It's getting hard to be easy now.
A couple of kids
Mahogany dread
But happy days are still ahead."

Lots of country songs

I wanna get married.
Yes, I need a spouse.
I want a nice Leave-It-To-Beaver-ish
golden retriever
and a little white house.

I wanna get married.
I need to cook meals.
I wanna pack you cute little lunches
for my Brady bunches
then read Danielle Steele.
- Nellie McKay "I Wanna Get Married"

More Randy Newman: "Feels Like Home"

I also have this daydream of proposing marriage by taking my gal for a drive down a road where I've laid out a succession of signs with Leonard Cohen lyrics:

Baby let's get married
We've been alone too long

Let's be alone together
Let's see if we're that strong

Let's do something crazy
Something absolutely wrong

While we're waiting for the miracle to come

and there was i hoping that this thread would be about the good side of domesticity and the contentment of settling down …

another one about the unattainable dream of settling down

gerry rafferty - "baker street"

Me and My Husband - Mitski

not a heartwarming story but Peter Gabriel's Home Sweet Home

sizeable chunks of the faun fables catalog

oh and wots... uh the deal by pink floyd

Skyhooks: "Balwyn Calling" and "All My Friends Are Getting Married"

Chuck Berry "You Never Can Tell", obv.

Also, most of Adem's "Homesongs" album. And John Martyn's "Sunday's Child"

always found the deployment of this line from blanche blanche blanche's uncrazy striking:

"I just want to take care of my wife and play basketball"

even before the pause and addition of "and get hit by a car"

Let's Move to the Country - Smog:

Let's move to the country
Just you and me

My travels are over
My travels are through

How have Pet Shop Boys not come up yet?

"climbing trees" by bauer, can't believe nobody has mentioned this one already

Lots of country songs

― F# A# (∞), Wednesday, October 24, 2018 8:14 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yesterday I was ambushed by unexpected emotion listening to George Jones and Tammy Wynette's "Two Story House" for the first time. What a sad song.

Last Time I Saw Richard: "Richard got married to a figure skater / and he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator."

Vampire Weekend, "Stranger" feels nicely domestic - "Another night indoors, another sign of life, wobbling up through the floor."

Ray Davies - Quiet Life (from the movie Absolute Beginners)

As someone mentions above, it would take a while to list all the Davies songs on this theme, but The Kinks Present a Soap Opera is an entire album about it.