The Tension of the Love Song
Love’s Logical Disjunction
Happy Valentines folks… or rather a bit late to it. It’s left me thinking, what makes a good love song, and can a love song really say ‘I love you’ without some sort of struggle attached? I’d wager a good 80% of music is probably in some way about love, in some form or another.
I have debated with many of my friends, over the years, about what makes a good love song - primarily, the various types that exist, why they are good, and perhaps whether ‘I love you’ is its own paradox. That is to say, it’s a statement that is simultaneously the most and least powerful thing that can be said, dependent on what surrounds it. Can you even mean what you profess if it’s recorded for everyone, in a three minute runtime? Who knows.
My basis - somewhat darkly, for an appraisal of the ‘love song’ comes from the tradition of ‘Aporia’ found in Greek Tragedy. A translation breaks down into ‘non-porous’, and refers to some form of irresolvable internal contradiction or a logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory (thanks Oxford dictionary). Typically, in tragedy this comes about at the end - typically with resolution but at some form of irreversible consequence or change. Heavy right? I suppose that’s why we respond so well to bad endings in films - we’re a little traumatised. A lack of resolution sticks with us for a lot longer than a tying things up in a happy bow.
So with that in mind, my thinking is that you can’t have a good love song without some aspect of this ‘aporia’, or transformation. I think there inherently needs to be strife, or struggle, or some form of metamorphosis in a love song to really promote the meaning of that song. Going back to the Greeks, I suppose I mean that the love song can function as a form of ritual sacrifice for emotion. So where then, is my goat and mountainside? I jest.
Either way, here is some analysis and grouping of select songs that tackle love in different ways, and along the way I’ll try to draw some vague line of ‘aporia’, if I can.
The (More) Purist Love Song
When I use the word ‘Pure’ here I’m referring to songs that address love directly, optimistically, and without much complication (at least omitting it!). I suppose the genuinely nice, life-affirming ones.
My first thought was of Labi Siffre, he’s a songwriter who somehow captures the light and dark shades of life, as well as his own worrisome thoughts, in such an elegant and concise way. My choice here is ‘Another Year’, I love ‘Cannock Chase’ too and ‘Bless the Telephone’, but maybe those were a little more obvious? I don’t know.
The opening of this song is so simple and sincere, without being saccharine:
‘We started well - I looked at you you looked at me
We fell into that dream it wasn't hard for me to do, you were lovely
And I hardly even knew I was laughing all over my face
'Cause you were laughing and you brightened the place
Now here we are, we've come this far’
The real sleight of hand in this song is the unexpected chord around ‘laughing all over my face’, which allows for the introduction of that slight unsure tension to the song. Perhaps the tension of loving someone and being slightly in awe of them, or the delicacy of it all: ‘I think I shared the life that lonely people do’ - oh Labi.
I’m amused too by the comedy of the first line, ‘we started well’. It’s quite a funny way to describe the start of a relationship really. Notice the mirroring of the lines too, ‘looked’ and ‘laughing’. There’s a sort of internal ‘match-making’ within the lines, if you will. I wonder if that keys into the line about ‘I can’t imagine how I lived without you’. Siffre’s adored subject makes him feel whole, or complete, but it exposes an underlying vulnerability too, found in the chorus:
‘Another year has gone
And here’s another one
What are we going to do
Will it be something new?
Will it be good?
Will it be good for me and you?’
I think it’s that necessary leap of faith of love that is found in the chorus. I love the swelling strings and strident vocals that Siffre delivers as he questions the good times that are to come in his relationship. It feels very earnest, and I think that is what makes Siffre’s writing so attractive - he captures a universal set of feelings and anxieties, and makes them accessible with his poetic style and feel.
Then the final lines:
‘Only time will tell
If we will use it well
Looking at me, what do you see, do you agree?
Looking at you I see everything I could need’
Two sets of (almost perfect) rhyming couplets - it’s an elegant way to wrap the song up. There’s not necessarily a need to declare love, it’s already there, instead it’s left like a conversation - it’s for the other person to answer. I imagine it a little like sitting over a dinner table, or outside a cafe, and just acknowledging the awe of care you have for the person in front of you.
So in this case, I don’t need any tragic complications. It’s a simple romanticism that works.
On the topic of awe, how about Paul McCartney’s ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, a song that Paul manages to fit every colour of his voice into - from his pop delivery, through to his screeching rock and roll voice.
Lyrically, the song is fixed to the same place - the verse is much the same as the chorus - but McCartney’s confession is singular: Linda stops him dead in his tracks, and the song is an acknowledge of both his awe and terror over that fact:
‘Baby, I'm a man, maybe I'm a lonely man
Who's in the middle of something
That he doesn't really understand
Baby, I'm a man, maybe you're the only woman
Who could ever help me
Baby, won't you help me understand?’
Like Siffre, perhaps with a little more flair than nuance, McCartney leans into the trope of a lonely man made complete by his lover. I suppose the ‘lonely’ here refers to realising the hidden capacity of love that avails itself when you find yourself besotted - who knows.
My next choice is REM’s ‘At My Most Beautiful’, it’s more of a personal choice as I don’t know how well known the track is - though it was a single, I think it’s best we don’t talk about how trite the video is:
‘I've found a way to make you
I've found a way
A way to make you smile
I read bad poetry
Into your machine
I save your messages
Just to hear your voice
You always listen carefully
To awkward rhymes
You always say your name
Like I wouldn't know it's you
At your most beautiful’
Much like other songs on Up, there are themes of remote connection, tied to the rise of the internet and technology that surrounded the late 1990s. In this instance, it’s the answerphone that marks the romantic centrepiece of the song. ‘At your most beautiful’ really comes to be Stipe’s appreciation for the vulnerability he is allowed to have with his partner. I think there’s a wonderful revelation of intimacy that is found through the medium of a voicemail, notably the comedic tolerance of ‘awkward rhymes’. On a larger scale, you can abstract the idea of the voicemail being a way to freeze the ‘states’ of a person, and loving them for all those states, even if - much like the bad poetry, we are all works in progress. Surrounding that too, is Stipe’s comedic reflection on the awkward manner of voicemails - the strange habit of announcing ourselves on a recorded call despite the information being parsed. In doing so, it adds a human aspect to the more benign nature of ‘your machine’. Again then, Stipe’s decision to save these awkward moments in return to replay his lover’s voice, is for him what makes his lover their ‘most beautiful’.
I find a similar - if not slightly more crude, amusement in Nick Cave’s ‘Babe You Turn Me On’, mainly because of its juxtaposition of low brow and high brow topics:
The butcher bird makes it’s noise
And asks you to agree
With it’s brutal nesting habits
And it’s pointless savagery
Now, the nightingale sings to you
And raises up the ante
I put one hand on your round ripe heart
And the other down your pantiesEverything is falling, dear
Everything is wrong
It’s just history repeating itself
And babe, you turn me on
I wonder here if the butcher bird, native to Australia, is Cave playing with an idea of himself as some brutal creature in comparison to his lover. At the same time, he also invokes the nightingale for its more traditional connotations of love and melancholy. It comes as less of a surprise then when Cave ends the verse with the juxtaposition between ‘heart’ and ‘panties’. I think it’s the honesty of romance, mixed with sleaze, that never fails to get a laugh out of me. It introduces just that bit more danger to the romance, just as is established already by the butcher bird and nightingale.
That then is followed by sincerity - even if everything around the two people is collapsing, Cave still is enamoured with his lover - regardless.
‘And, babe, you turn me on / Like an idea, babe / Like an atom bomb’
There is that sense of renewal to be found in his love, a continuous fount of inspiration and adoration to be found in Cave’s lover - both creative and destructive.
My final offering is Bjork’s ‘Hidden Place’, a song which muses on the hidden emotional territory that is shared by two lovers when together. Amidst skittering beats, and a choral section, Bjork’s hesitant vocals flutter between nervous anxiety and confidence:
‘Through the warmest cord of care
Your love was sent to me
I’m not sure what to do with it
Or where to put itI’m so close to tears
And so close to
Simply calling you up
And simply suggesting
We go to that hidden place’
Contrasting the cold soundscape of electronic beats, Bjork’s warm introductory image of love as something umbilical imparts the flurry of delicate feelings that accompany a new love. I think that then really manifests in the second verse - the palpable anxiety of wanting to hear back from the person, and in that same image - escaping the dangers of the outside world that could pollute (or freeze) that love. Of course, it is also worth noting the less innocent sexual undertones that can be read into the lyrics, woven carefully underneath. It’s a delicate address then of the feelings of anxious desire associated with a new love.
Perhaps then, in these examples - the important complication to addressing love purely, is the vulnerability that comes with it. That then features as the sticking point.
Self Destruction from Unrequited Love - Radiohead and St Vincent
So I guess this is where I get to my point about that ‘aporia’ I mentioned earlier - I think the unrequited love is probably the source for many musical successes, and obviously stems for as long as time! My opinion on these, is that the response of unrequited love is perhaps the most productive for a good love song. Essentially, your subject matter doesn’t have to exist, the song’s voice can be singular, and your song is going to be relatable at some point to someone. Horribly cynical of me? I agree! But what I mean really is, the unrequited love song offers the biggest canvas for painting emotional depth into a song - it offers a sounding board for negation:
Take Radiohead’s ‘All I Need’, the song’s ‘aporia’ plays out in the presentation of a stage:
‘I’m the next act waiting in the wings
I’m an animal trapped in your hot car
I am all the days that you choose to ignore
You are all I need
You’re all I need
I’m in the middle of your picture
Lying in the reeds
I am a moth who just wants to share your light
I’m just an insect trying to get out of the night
I only stick with you because there are no others
From the first line it becomes clear that the song is built around a drama of being ‘second best’, with subsequent lines being used as a form of self-destruction through negatory structures. It’s a very intense depiction of longing and desperation for another’s love. By the time we reach the chorus, the voice adopts the position of Ophelia - one of Shakespeare’s tragic characters, driven to madness and suicide by her love for Hamlet, and his subsequent madness.
This sense of being in the backdrop continues into the moth line, one which I find beautifully sincere even if self-deprecating.
Underpinned by Minimoog bass, swelling guitar lines, and a tripping drum pattern, the final outburst of the song comes with some surprise, with the voice driven to their own madness: ‘it’s all wrong’ - ‘it’s alright’. It’s a back and forth that doesn’t resolve itself - not quite an aporia, but getting there. Depends on the consequence really.
St Vincent’s ‘All My Stars Aligned’ offers a different approach - Clark’s lyrics, in their dark comedic way, describe a voice that has set herself up for failure:
‘I read the signs
I got all my stars aligned
My amulets, my charms
I set all my false alarms
So I’ll be someone who won’t be forgotten
I’ve got a question and you’ve got the answer’
Something I love, amidst the clever wordplay of these opening lines, is the positioning of the song’s voice as a supplicant to their lover/failed relationship. They place their legacy in the outcome of the other person’s answer. Which, we know is doomed to fail by the use of superstitions as a guide. Really, the superstition is its own poison - it’s the act of engaging with our own imaginative rituals to salve the pain of reality. In doing so, we becomes assured and start to tell others as a means of willing it into existence - even if the doom lurks at the back of the mind. See also, 10cc’s ‘I’m Not in Love’, ha!
What about the tragedy of fashioning yourself into the ‘perfect’ person to bridge the imperfect match of the unrequited love?
Believe it or not, ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ is more about consumerism than it is about love, but it works for both. I recall footage of the song being dedicated to Canary Wharf at a gig in the late 90s.
Even if about consumerism, the climax of the song is the tragic admission: ‘If I could be, who you wanted (all the time)’. For a song that condemns artifice, and the relationship between two worn down lovers, Yorke makes an unexpected step into the song’s voice right at the end. It’s this hypothetical that gives rise to the song’s portrayal of ‘fake’ scenes. It’s an attempt to reject the plastic world only to finally give in, acknowledging that it would be better to morph into a fake version of himself to satisfy his love.
The mirror to this is found in St Vincent’s ‘Just the Same But Brand New’, a track which takes power from artifice to hide hurt. Composed minimally, like ‘All I Need’, the song is built primarily from Annie’s vocals and drifting, pitch-shifted guitars. Throughout, Clark describes the experience of transforming herself into a fake version of herself that aligns with her lover, underpinned of course by the knowledge that it has changed nothing:
‘And anything you wrote, I checked for codes and clues
The letters stopped unceremoniously in June
So I changed my I’s and A’s to yours
I’m just the same but brand new
And I do my best impression of weightlessness now, too’
I think these lyrics are really masterful. The song title’s irony extends into the lyrics, as they recall accounts of this (failed?) metamorphosis: immediately you have the paranoid thinking of a lover trying to read into problems that aren’t there, followed by the spellbound act of reformatting one’s signature, and finally the ‘impression’ of weightlessness. In reality, all these acts of transformation are performative and flawed, but cleverly they elucidate the song’s title. Ultimately, as the song explodes into heavily compressed drums, it becomes clear that the oxymoron of ‘just the same but brand new’ is in fact the necessary perspective gained from the experience - of coming out the other side. In the eyes of the lover, Clark positions herself as appearing the same as ever, but only from the outside. In this case, there is indeed resolution with some (potentially tragic) irreversible change.
Aporia here then, manifests in the sacrifice of the self to achieve resolution - often with the knowledge that doom looms on the horizon.
The Broken Love
If unrequited love has the ability to be theoretically tragic, then maybe the flip side is a love that has failed. My first thoughts when devising this list was Nina Simone - few artists can convey such emotion through their voice as her. My choice is ‘Don’t Explain’, written by Billie Holiday after the real account of her husband cheating. If Siffre’s songs are pure for their simple romanticism, then maybe this is pure for the intensity of its pain. I can’t really listen without it taking my full focus and mood:
‘Hush now, don’t explain
There ain’t nothin’ to gain
I’m glad that you’re back,
Don’t explain
Quiet, baby, don’t explain
There is nothing to gain
Skip that, the lipstick.
Don’t explain
You know that I love you
And what love endures
All my thoughts are of you,
For I’m so completely yours
Don’t wanna hear folks chatter (originally ‘cry when’)
’Cause I know you cheat
Right and wrong don’t matter,
When you’re with me, my sweet’
Really these lyrics explain themselves, and when you listen you’ll get what I mean. The tense atmosphere is there from the opening: unresolved chords mark the return of Holiday’s husband as she sits on her pain, simply glad for her return. It’s an incredibly tragic elucidation of the lost respect any lover must experience in the face of known infidelity. As the scene unfurls, Simone reaffirms Holiday’s love for her husband, choosing to rise above the emotional impasse. The trouble then is the delivery and the music, which suggests otherwise. It’s such a beautifully brooding piece that flaws me entirely - you’re never quite left knowing if the reaffirmation of love is placatory in its pain, or in a state of denial, or both. It’s an impossible emotional block that the song pushes against.
‘So be it, I’m your crowbar’ opens Fiona Apple’s ‘I Know’, sketching the pain and complication of learning that you are the object of a man’s affair. Positioning herself as a ‘crowbar’ introduces a doubt (‘so be it’) that she herself will become a transitory love rather than anything sincere, but she tries to navigate that anyway:
‘And you can use my skin
To bury secrets in
And I will settle you down
And at my own suggestion
I will ask no questions
While I do my thing in the background
But all the time, all the time
I’ll know, I'll know’
Apple extends the crowbar metaphor from an escape route through to a container for her lover’s infidelity, but at the same time chooses to spare herself from the details of his affair. It’s an uncomfortable position to describe, complicated further by her own doubt that she too is only ‘in the background’. Her only saving thought is the knowledge that she is his intended love. As a contrasting position to ‘Don’t Explain’, it’s an uncomfortable perspective to hear.
‘While you try to find
The lines to speak your mind
And pry it open, hoping for an encore
And if its gets too late, for me to wait
For you to find you love me, and tell me so,
It’s okay, don’t need to say it’
Ultimately, Apple develops her own doubts in this man. With the song’s aspects of theatre, the final ‘encore’ still relies upon her role as ‘crowbar’. In an ultimatum, Apple implies that she too has come to the realisation that this man will doom his relationship with her, just as he has doomed his current relationship, by not turning to her for support. I wonder then, if the choice of an instrumental outro confirms this - withholding the expectation of ‘I know’. Messy.
On the topic of unhealthy relationships - Elvis Costello’s ‘I Want You’ was covered by Apple in exchange for Costello to cover ‘I Know’. ‘I Want You’ is alluring as much as it is terrifying, if sincere in its subject matter. It’s one of the most obsessive songs I’ve ever heard - the kind of song that you associate with the same guilt as sympathising with a villain.
‘Oh, my baby, baby
I love you more than I can tell
I don’t think I can live without you
And I know that I never will
Oh, my baby, baby
I want you so it scares me to death
I can’t say anymore than “I love you”
Everything else is a waste of breath’
Intense right? Somehow, more intense that ‘Every Breath You Take’. For an opening, the song thinly veils itself as a sweet crooner ballad, but lyrically implies otherwise - harking to a twisted re-imagining of The Beatles’ ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’. Can you profess love through the obsessive mind of a sociopathic character?
Costello is quoted as saying: ‘There are about five things to write songs about: I’m leaving you, you’re leaving me, I want you, you don’t want me, I believe in something. Five subjects and twelve notes.’
I wonder then if this song achieves all of those?
If you haven’t listened already, it fast becomes clear - upon the signal of a wavering guitar line - that the plodding drumbeat over Costello’s repeated ‘I want you’ makes for quite the tense atmosphere. It’s like an unrelenting held stare. In this song, he’s not the guy you want at your door with a bouquet of flowers.
Across these examples I’ve drawn a trajectory from being the victim of love, to complicit in an affair, to finally being crazed by love.
The Love Separated by Distance
So far I’ve explored love songs that address established love, unrequited love, and broken (and or outright unhinged) love. What about the love that can’t be?
Scott Walker’s ‘It’s Raining Today’ is my song of choice, functioning as a vignette with which to ruminate on a love that slips away:
‘It's raining today
And I'm just about to forget
The train window girl
That wonderful day we met
She smiles through the smoke
From my cigaretteIt's raining today
But once there was summer and you
And dark little rooms
And sleep in late afternoons
Those moments descend
On my window pane’
Introduced by dissonant strings, and a delicate pulsing guitar line, Walker’s crooning vocals impart the dramatic scene of the song. The lyrics too, between verse one and two, are united by the present rain but reflect on pleasant memories of a love that has passed. Notably, the ‘train window girl’ seems to imply an abstraction from a love that was personal, perhaps instead as a love that never had the chance to begin. In memory, there is both the sense of present sorrow (rain) and the sense of forgetting (cigarette smoke), as though this girl’s features - now defined by a smile, are dwindling too.
I’ll admit, I am less charmed by the sudden gear shift transition into a vast orchestral section, but it helps transition the song away from its introspective position, even if that’s where the drama lies…
My other choice is Bjork’s ‘Unravel’ - a song which entertains longing with such economy of lyrical content:
‘While you are away
My heart comes undone
Slowly unravels
In a ball of yarn
The devil collects it
With a grin
Our love
In a ball of yarn’
The song itself sounds volcanic, there is a deep heartbeat like kick drum that pounds into the song’s atmosphere, all while cellos and reversed samples swirl around Bjork’s words. Tenderly, Bjork describes her heart unfurling, like yarn, as it is pulled away by external forces (manifested as the devil). It captures the slow, oozing pain of losing someone to distance and time, just as everything that made that love thread together, falls apart to mark its own traced lines on the emotional map. The chorus however, returns with optimism - an unexpected chance for renewal:
‘He’ll never return it
So, when you come back
We’ll have to make new love’
As much as the unravelling of love’s threads causes pain, it opens up the chance for that love to be rediscovered, rekindled, and made new again. The pain of the distance, and longing, is counteracted by the knowledge that it opens up the opportunity for renewal.
I suppose then, in this instance I have finally struck upon a fix for this ‘aporia’ I mention. A way of moving beyond consequence. Optimistic!? Maybe.