One symbol, several meanings
The rainbow is one of the most loaded images in music, and the list above keeps its different meanings in view rather than picking one. For some writers it is hope, the sign that a storm has passed. For others it is escape, the promise of a brighter somewhere over the horizon. For others still it is pride, the full spectrum standing for a whole community. The same arc of color has carried all of it, sometimes in the same decade, and the songs are richer for the overlap.
The escape tradition starts with the most famous entry of all. “Over the Rainbow” is a girl in gray Kansas wishing herself into color, and nearly every version since, including the ukulele-and-tears rendition by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, taps that same longing for a place where things go right. It is a wish more than a description, which is why it has survived eighty-odd years and countless covers. People do not sing it because they have found the brighter place. They sing it because they are still looking.
The whole spectrum
Plenty of songs here work with color rather than the arc itself, and the list keeps them because the spectrum is the point. “True Colors” uses the full range as a word for someone’s hidden self. “Colors of the Wind” makes a case for seeing the world in every shade at once. “Roy G. Biv” is, cheerfully, a lesson in the order of the colors set to a hook. Even the darker end gets a look: “Paint It Black” is what happens when the color drains out entirely, which only makes the bright entries brighter by contrast.
There is a reason this shelf skews hopeful. A rainbow only appears after rain, and that sequence is built into almost every song here. “Rainbow” by Kacey Musgraves is explicitly a message to someone who has been through a storm and cannot yet see that it has ended. “Mr. Blue Sky” is the sun breaking through, orchestrated to the hilt. The genre carries an optimism that has to be earned, because the symbol itself only shows up on the far side of the downpour.
Related lists
Rainbows sit in the sky-and-weather group on the site. The storm that comes first fills songs about rain. The light that follows runs through songs about the sun. The feeling the rainbow stands for has its own deep catalog at songs about hope, and the pure good mood it produces fills songs about happiness.
If a chorus is stuck in your head, some line about colors or a sky after the storm, the search bar on our home page finds songs from remembered words.
The songs here run from a 1939 film standard to tracks from the last few years, and the symbol has only gained meanings over time. That is unusual. Most images wear out. The rainbow keeps picking up new ones, which is why this shelf stays bright and stays relevant no matter the decade.