My Five Favourite Love Songs

 

Tougher Than The Rest by Bruce Springsteen

As I mentioned in an earlier post about One Step Up, Tougher than the Rest is in my opinion The Boss’s best love song, and one of my favourite. It’s hard to choose between this and Secret Garden, a song I absolutely love to bits. I find the lyrics to Tougher Than The Rest to be more resonant – it’s steady, insistent, and gently courageous: ‘Well if you’re looking for love / Honey I’m tougher than the rest.’ The declaration is made more impressive because elsewhere there’s a lot of weariness, of years of failed relationships, considerable mileages having been accumulated on both sides: ‘Well it ain’t no secret / I’ve been around a time or two / Well I don’t know baby maybe you’ve been around too.’ But Springsteen’s typically simple and direct words draw you in very forcefully, with great plangent beauty: ‘The road is dark / And it’s a thin thin line / But I want you to know I’ll walk it for you any time.’ He doesn’t paint a rosy picture of love. It’s a hard thing, and a rare thing. Listening to it, though, you’re filled with a small amount of courage yourself: because it’s hard and rare, one day you will find love that’s travelled a long way to reach you.

 

If I Loved You by Astrid Williamson

   If I Loved You / Astrid Williamson  

Astrid Williamson’s debut album, ‘Boy For You’, is the first and remains the only album I bought for its cover alone. Actually, it was the cover of the 1st single off that album, ‘I Am The Boy For You’, which I saw in an advert in NME. The way Astrid’s head was tilted back, eyes closed, lost in some bittersweet reverie, spoke to something in my heart, and I took a punt on the single as well as the whole album when it came out. This was the pre-iTunes days, so taking a punt meant shelling out 12 quid on an unknown quantity, but what a decision it turned out to be. Besides the (almost) title track, there was the luminous Hozanna, and the hidden track at the end was a superb and pared back piano ballad. But I would have paid twice the price for If I Loved You, one of my all-time favourite love songs. It’s 3 minutes and 25 seconds of pure sonic bliss, a swirling and twisting expression of female desire, with some heavenly backing vocals adorning the chorus. This was something new for me: until then, my musical intake was exclusively masculine, and I hadn’t yet opened up to the world of female singer-songwriters. Needless to say, Astrid is responsible for widening my perspective. Some love songs recall past instances, or describe certain symptoms of love, but If I Loved You is the one song that creates that rare sense of elation in my mind. A wonderful treat and a woefully under-recognised classic.

 

Don’t Get Me Wrong by The Pretenders

The Pretenders are responsible for some bona fide, stone cold classic love songs, and again it was either between this or Brass in Pocket. But Don’t Get Me Wrong has such thrilling, infectious melody and so wins out. It’s a pure musical manifestation of the joys of love in its bloom, with just enough held back to make you want more. It’s also worth it for this bonkers line: ‘Don’t get me wrong / If I split like light refracted / I’m only off to wander / Across a moonlit mile.’

 

Perfect Circle by R.E.M.

R.E.M.’s sweetest love song is probably At My Most Beautiful, a stripped down tune that surprised with its relative conventionality in the experimental ‘Up’. It deserves inclusion on this list, but I just could not overlook Perfect Circle from R.E.M.’s debut album. Written by Bill Berry, the drummer who departed in 1997, it possesses a mysterious and elusive power that is difficult to quantify with words. You have no idea what Michael Stipe is saying (‘Standing too soon, shoulders high in the room’), but the imagery the song conjures, the places that it takes you, a vaguely remembered longing that runs throughout, are utterly unique. I’m not entirely sure this is supposed to be a love song in the first place, and different interpretations have been made with regards to what it’s meant to be. No matter – for me and doubtless many others Perfect Circle has a timeless feel to it, as well as the sense that, impossibly, it almost seems to convey silence, of things unsaid, of feelings unexpressed.

 

Don’t I Hold You by Wheat

This 1999 masterpiece from Wheat is as tender as a love song can be without getting soppy. A slow burning verse loops without ever reaching chorus, and the resigned way singer Scott Levesque lays down his lyrics adds to the overwhelming sense of regret and melancholy. What really makes this song is the lo-fi approach typical of the late-90s: things never get dramatic, there’s no crescendo, and the band makes no attempt to ingratiate themselves to the listener. There’s no irony, no humour, just the pain of a love grown distant, driven by a quietly pulsing rhythm section that never lets up. When the minimalistic guitar solo kicks in and the chord changes become accentuated, the defences we’ve built up against unfamiliar music start to crumble, and as Levesque repeats the dying mantra of ‘Don’t I…’ at the end, we’re left heartbroken. A beautiful piece that sounds just as fresh now as it did 15 years ago.

Bruce Springsteen – One Step Up

If there was a theme song for that sweet, cursed emotion named romantic doubt, this would be it. Tunnel of Love as a whole is a masterfully intimate album full of great tracks, but ‘One Step Up’ is the standout track.

It’s one long lament of a man whose marriage, much like Springsteen’s was at the time, is on the rocks: our protagonist leaves his loveless home after a fight, to take refuge at a motel. Alone in a bar, he broods on the cold house he has just left, and songless birds, and silent church bells. Same mistakes were made, same words exchanged, and now he is wryly, if ultimately dismissively, contemplating a hint of an affair. All the while there is the recognition that he has let himself, and his wife, down; that his semi-voluntary exile into the night is not new, and it’s down to him more than anything. His self-loathing is endearingly direct – ‘when I look at myself I don’t see / the man I wanted to be / Somewhere along the line I slipped off track / Movin’ one step up and two steps back’, yet Springsteen ends with an elusive, hopeful note: ‘Last night I dreamed I held you in my arms / The music was never-ending / we danced as the evening sky faded to black…’ We never find out if our anti-hero goes back to his wife, even though we are pretty sure where his heart lies. Hidden under the steadiest and sweetest of arpeggios is one of the best breakup songs in pop history: a pitiful story of a man who can’t get over himself to stay, and is honest enough to know it. Like the greatest heartaches, the pain and pity in ‘One Step Up’ is directed at the self: Springsteen tellingly makes no explicit mention of the protagonist’s other half. It’s his fault and suffering alone. From a male perspective, the mood created by the bittersweet melody and plaintive lyrics is note-perfect, hitting just the right mixture of foolish longing and resigned angst.

When he wrote the song, Springsteen’s marriage to actress Julianne Phillips was disintegrating. His true love, Patti Scialfa, was the female vocal in his E Street Band and thus right under his nose, a fact that somehow makes ‘One Step Up’ more poignant. Tunnel of Love is an album full of great love songs like ‘Tougher Than The Rest’, ‘All That The Heaven Will Allow’ and ‘Valentine’s Day’, which are all more optimistic takes on his relationship. Incidentally, the linked video for ‘Tougher Than The Rest’ – the best pure love song that Springsteen has written – is notable for the electrifying look that Scialfa gives him – gives me chills every time.