In Search of the Perfect Love Song
Is there any phrase in any language as simultaneously complicated and meaningless as “I love you?” Three tiny words, three little syllables to sum up the wildest and most volatile emotion on the spectrum. You write the same three words in birthday cards for both your elderly grammaw and the person you’re fucking, these three words that can mean I am devoted to you or I need you or Save me or Thanks or Get off my porch; a placeholder, an automatic response, an explosion, a nervous tick, a dirty trick, an obligation. “I love you” is like a survey class on American history: the highlights with none of the context.
Love is the hardest emotion to articulate adequately with just language, so you’d think music would be the better conveyance. Music, the one place where language can transcend meaning by bumping up against melody and rhythm and all that, taking advantage of the primal forces of the universe to bend the air, reverberate through the eardrum into the soul and create more textured emotional responses. Alas, I recently came across the Billboard list of the best love songs of all time and guys, it bummed me out. All this junk like Lionel Richie’s “Endless Love,” “Silly Love Songs” by Wings, and Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” rounded out by Celine Dion and Mariah Carey… all these glossy, over-produced numbers that make love sound like something reserved for the very rich, packed with platitudes and saxophone, and maybe I’m alone (so alone) in this but for me, there’s no place for a saxophone in any love affair I’m interested in being a part of.
Got me thinking about what I really want out of a love song, or what a good and meaningful love song might be. I Googled up a couple more lists and found that a bunch of them included “Wonderful Tonight” by Eric Clapton, which is usually only useful as a demarcation of the exact moment that Clapton became a boring wimp, but this time kind of unlocked the door for me, because I remembered that Clapton wrote that song for his wife-at-the-time Patti Boyd in 1977 after wooing her in 1971 with “Layla.” In “Layla,” Clapton is anguished and supercharged and on his fucking knees begging this woman to give him a chance, by the time “Wonderful Tonight” comes around he’s got her locked down and they’ve been together a while and it’s like he’s telling her she looks wonderful because he has to say something and he knows that compliments are a thing ladies like to hear. It’s the musical equivalent of a disinterested shrug, and the fact that Clapton and Boyd stayed hitched for a few years after it came out is a miracle. I’m not crazy about either song, but here’s the thing—almost all of the songs I cited above are bland declarations of love, where “Wonderful Tonight” and especially “Layla” turn out to be about love itself. What love actually feels like at these two extremes.
So I started thinking of more songs that do that. Love songs that feel real, that express the sentiment in an original way or otherwise do a good job of actually capturing the feeling. Right away I thought of “Your Song” by Elton John and Bernie Taupin, where John starts and stops and fumbles around trying to say something that feels real before finally settling on the song itself being the thing, the action of trying and failing to put his feelings into words serving as an expression of something words can’t capture to his satisfaction. Telling someone you love them is probably the worst way to let them know how you feel, since love is supposed to be selfless but whenever we’re trying to express it we end up just talking about ourselves, and Elton John gets that doing something rooted in love is the better idea. Maybe it’s a generational thing but I have a hard time, usually, taking Elton John seriously—he’s just that dude that did all the songs for The Lion King, and maybe it’s projecting backwards from that that makes his entire body of work strike me as showstoppers from Broadway musicals I’ve never seen, but “Your Song” I can get behind.
Taylor Swift writes love songs kind of along the lines of what I’m thinking about, but while there’s a lot of real emotion on display in her best stuff it seems like her emotional life is limited to melodrama where someone else is entirely to blame, and maybe it’s out of respect for the public figures she kvetching about but there’s so little specificity in any of her songs that the results come off like blind item gossip columns with a catchy beat. Her popularity makes total sense but every time she puts out a new song it’s like, c’mon Taylor… I can believe that Jake Gyllenhaal is probably a jerk but at some point is it the entire world that’s at fault or is it you?
Johnny Cash gets it with “Ring Of Fire,” which was actually written by June Carter about the experience of falling in love with Johnny Cash. It’s got the intensity but loses points for the strange assertion by Cash’s first wife, Vivian, who claims Johnny wrote the song and that it’s about the allure of “a certain private female body part,” according to Wikipedia. There’s a good chance that’s just sour grapes on Vivian’s part– after all, Cash wrote “Walk the Line” for her and then went on to strut right into one of the great romances in music history with June. “Ring of Fire” is also held back by a lack of catharsis, I think—the song’s all about burning and the flames going wild but Cash plays the whole thing on an even keel that suggests more of a simmer. Well, except for the horns in that song, which are triumphant and great…but I spend the whole song waiting for Cash to rise to the level of those horns and it never quite happens. Maybe a simmer is a more realistic depiction of real adult love than an explosion, but the song never quite makes it sound like the falling is totally worthwhile or particularly joyous. “I Still Miss Someone” is pretty great and feels authentic (sniff) but kind of a bummer.
If you’re not already a fan of The Magnetic Fields, go listen to any five songs of theirs and come back when you are or just move on because the rest of this motherfucker isn’t for you. Songwriter Stephin Merritt is one of the great pop geniuses of all time, crafting album after album that feel like parties you weren’t sure you wanted to attend only to end up having the best time of your life. I don’t think there’s anyone alive better at writing love songs that are actually about love as in what love feels like, and how many different ways love can feel. Take “I Don’t Really Love You Anymore,” which at first seems like it’s about moving on only to reveal about fifteen seconds in that the subject is a wreck, trying like hell to convince himself of what he’s saying. “I don’t have to love you now if I don’t wish to / I won’t see you anyhow if that’s an issue / because I am a gentleman / think of me as just your fan / who remembers every dress you ever wore.” Sad, but real and totally original. Even better is “Asleep and Dreaming” off the triple-album 69 Love Songs, where the first verse goes “I’ve seen you laugh at nothing at all / I’ve seen you sadly weeping / The sweetest thing I ever saw / Was you asleep and dreaming” and the chorus is “Well you may not be beautiful / but it’s not for me to judge / I don’t know if you’re beautiful / Because I love you too much.” And that’s pretty much the entire thing.
Take that, Eric Clapton, you soulless sucker. That’s real love Merritt is singing about, those three words coming in at the end but set up with an expression completely original and specific. The love being described is based on familiarity and acceptance and results in a derangement of the senses where objectivity is lost. This incredibly complicated idea sung so simply makes “You look wonderful tonight” sound like “Is that really what you’re wearing?”
In the end I’ve decided that the best and most meaningful love song of all time, that expresses love in a way that feels real and at the same time is about how love really feels, is “Whole Wide World” by Wreckless Eric. The song opens with Eric telling us about his mother explaining to him as a boy that “There’s only one girl in the world for you / and she probably lives in Tahiti” and goes on to declare his absolute certainty that she’s out there, that she’s waiting for him to come find her, that he’ll search the whole wide world to find her. The song swerves between naïve fragility and something… well, kind of reckless, the chorus basically a howl that makes “search” sound synonymous with “tear the world apart,” and is probably best known (maybe?) for its appearance in the movie Stranger Than Fiction, where Will Ferrell warbles a version that drives Maggie Gyllenhaal into a kissy-face frenzy. There’s maybe a better known version done by The Monkees that’s totally great and captures everything wonderful about the original—all the way down to the snarl in the chorus, which I didn’t know The Monkees were capable of,–but leaves out the best verse, where Eric sings about hanging out in the rain trying and failing to meet someone, keeping his disappointment at bay with the idea that his soul mate is lounging far away on a tropical beach waiting for him to join her.
Like I said, kind of naïve. But isn’t that the kind of love you want? There are lots of songs that toy with the idea of soul mates but this is the only one I know that kind of… well, my brain tells me the notion of a soul mate is ridiculous, that there are lots of people in the world that would be a fine match, but my gut tells me there’s only one person that really makes sense. Wreckless Eric makes love sound like fury and determination, and he’s not the lyricist Stephen Merritt is but in “Whole Wide World,” he kind of wraps the whole thing up into a simple notion, which is that love is the one thing where the journey absolutely is more important than the destination, which also comes down to meaning hope. I’ve always thought that the best expression of love was probably shared laughter, which is ultimately a hopeful activity, because no matter what you’re laughing at you’re kind of laughing in the face of death and the nightly news. And maybe that’s what “I love you” really means, even when it also means something else. Hope that we’re not alone, hope that the world doesn’t have to be a drag, hope that we can overcome platitudes and saxophones to craft real meaning out of our lives and that the communion of two intellects can result in something that transcends the limitations of language.
The Tusk 
One Response to “In Search of the Perfect Love Song”
So, Something by the Beatles isn’t on this list and that’s shocking! It’s the best. George Harrison wrote the best love songs, hands down. What Is Life? C’mon. But… You by George Harrison is the most simple and most perfectly minimal love song ever.