2. No Doubt: “Artificial Sweetener”
“The return of Saturn,” Gwen Stefani sings on this angsty new-wave-y rocker, which perfectly encapsulates a cosmic identity crisis. “Assessing my life, second-guessing.”
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3. R.E.M.: “Saturn Return”
A year after No Doubt’s “Return of Saturn,” R.E.M. released its 12th studio album, “Reveal,” which features this bleary-eyed piano ballad that name-checks the same astrological phenomenon. Rather than a personal exploration, though, this song is a character study of a late-shift convenience store employee, who climbs to the building’s roof and has an awakening while staring at the night sky.
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4. Stevie Wonder: “Saturn”
This song — in which Wonder imagines fleeing Earth for a utopian existence on the sixth rock from the sun — is more about a playful interpretation of life on the planet than its placement in the sky: “Going back to Saturn where the people smile/Don’t need cars ’cause we’ve learned to fly.” But given that Wonder has long been attuned to all forms of spiritualism, and that he released “Songs in the Key of Life” when he was 26, he might have been thinking about what was just around the bend.
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5. Vashti Bunyan: “Here Before”
The English folk singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan released her first album, the great cult classic “Just Another Diamond Day,” in 1970. It took her 35 years to release her second, the lovely “Lookaftering” — when she was 60 years old. A few years prior, when Bunyan was in her late 50s, a younger generation of musicians had rediscovered her music and given her the confidence to start writing and recording again. Sounds like a second Saturn Return to me. (And so does this déjà vu-inducing track from “Lookaftering.”)
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6. Hayley Williams: “Watch Me While I Bloom”
The Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams has repeatedly discussed the concept of the Saturn Return in interviews, calling the band’s 2017 album “After Laughter” a marker of “a significant turning point in my life.” The album on which she really seemed to be processing the lessons of her Saturn Return, though, was her 2020 solo release “Petals for Armor.” This bright, twisty track celebrates the hard-won growth on the other side of that transformation.
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7. No Doubt: “New”
I had to go out with one more track from “Return of Saturn,” and this is probably my favorite song on the album. Produced by Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads (!), this tune heralds the luminescent beginning of something else — a sentiment Musgraves echoes on “Deeper Well” when she sings, “It’s natural when things lose their shine so other things can glow.”
