Elizabeth Barrett Browning once wrote, “How do I love thee, let me count the ways…” since then, and before then, people have been expressing their love through many ways, especially music.
Maybe, it’s a ballad meant to woo the girl of their dreams, or a rock song trying to win her back. It could even be a simple pop song about how someone loves spending their days with someone else. Maybe it’s a new emo song that doesn't make sense to your grandma, but makes you cry every time you hear it. There are a lot of songs that talk about love.
Let’s start at the beginning, and go chronologically through a relationship. The first thing you really have to do is tell someone that you love them.
No song does that better than “Space Age Love Song” by A Flock of Seagulls. Say what you want about the bands’ hair or their psychedelic rock style, but break the song down for its lyrical content and you have the best way ever to tell a girl or guy that you are falling in love with them.
Maybe it’s a simple song but it opens with, “I saw your eyes, and it made me smile and for a little while, I was falling in love”.
Any teenager who has been in a relationship, heck anybody that’s ever been a relationship knows what it’s like to literally see sparkles in someone’s eyes, to remember the fragrance of their date’s perfume, and walk through the mall 2 days later and smell it again and just feel that warmth of the previous night.
Everyone knows what love feels like. It’s that feeling that A Flock Of Seagulls invokes. This song speaks to your gut, you feel it, and you know what it’s like.
Now let’s sidestep for a moment, shall we?
Same timeline, it’s a guy telling a girl that he loves her; however it is clear that she is not interested.
The song in question is Taking Back Sunday’s “You’re So Last Summer”.
Adam Lazzara sings about falling in love an odd way, and he realizes that he is never going to get that far, but he almost begs the girl for something, anything.
At one point he promises her, (and this is one of my favorite love invoking lyrics) “The truth is, you could slit my throat and with my one last gasping breath, I’d apologize for bleeding on your shirt.” Stop reading for a moment and think about how deep that is……
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Yeah, that’s a lot to take in.
So, we are hearing from a guy that is so in love, he doesn't care if the girl kills him. Lyrics like that are usually reserved for breakup songs, but these pseudo-emo rockers make it work.
Again, we have all been there before. Clutching reaching for anything, trying to breathe some sort of breath into this thing that you know is right. You might see it as desperation, maybe even suicidal, but it’s so much more. It is that night that you go home crying because you just saw the boy that you have a crush on kissing some other girl. Or maybe you can even compare it to the feeling you get when you find out you didn't make the baseball team; and you feel like all of that practice and training you did was a waste. The song speaks for itself.
I think anyone would agree that Billy Joel writes great songs.
Hands down “Just the Way You Are” is, in my opinion the greatest love song ever written, (from the point of view of someone in a relationship).
Billy talks about how much he loves this girl for just being herself. He doesn't care about any of her downfalls or bad habits.
Truthfully, isn't that the kind of relationship that we are all looking for? No one is perfect, and Billy Joel realizes that. We all want someone that will love us for all of our idiosyncrasies, and we will do the same for them. Maybe it is a husband who after 30 years still laughs every time his wife farts in bed. It’s the little old couple who still holds hands at the movies. Or it is simply knowing that there are parts of your significant other that no one else will ever understand, and knowing that makes you love them more.
Bottom line it is perfect love.
We are finally at the post break up song, and there a lot of them, and really they cover different emotions and feelings, but I will try to keep it brief.
So, there is the simple sad, I can’t go on feeling. That break up where you just want to lay on the couch for days. Maybe you can’t eat; maybe you just eat tubs of Ben and Jerry’s.
But either way, you are hurt and life really is not all that good. Your friends want to cheer you up, but let’s be honest they don’t get it. This is simple me time.
The songs that you find there are plentiful. The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry”, Harry Nilsson’s “Without You”, Air Supply’s “All Out of Love” The list could go on and on.
Then there are songs that attempt to regain the love of a previous relationship. Sometimes it doesn't work, sometimes it does, and sometimes it’s just a matter of getting that feeling back.
Getting that emotion comes to mind when you hear a song like “I’d Really Love To See You Tonight” by England Dan and John Ford Coley.
It is a simple song by a band that had two hits. But the song is from the point of view of a guy that just wants one last night with an ex flame. He tells her he doesn't want to move in. He doesn't want to mess up her life, but for him, he needs that touch, that smell, just that part of the relationship that made him feel better. It’s not that he wants to get back together with her.
He just wants to feel her next to him.
He wants that closeness.
He wants her.
The final scenario is a love song about a guy that wants to get back together with a girl that he once loved, but once again she rejects him.
So it’s like a double hurt, probably the most pain you can ever experience. "Pretty Pathetic" by The Smoking Popes.
I have always pictured it as a guy at a bar telling someone about the horrible night he had. He had a perfect evening planned with his ex. But it just didn't work out.
At one point, he says “she had to feel something for me a love as strong as ours doesn't just go away you can’t just turn it off unless she was lying all those times but I don’t think so”
But it doesn't happen, and we have all been there you say all of those awkward things. You cry you take off your glasses you beg. It’s the moment where you know you sound pathetic, but you know it is this or the couch with the ice cream, so you give it your all; it is the Lloyd Dobbler boom box in the air moment.
People will continue to write love songs.
Maybe your favorite is not in this essay, but I am sure you can identify to the feelings that are presented here. And as time continues there will be new songs but the themes will remain the same.
Love is the Answer.
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