Featured Essay: The Love Songs Of Our Lives

by Michele Catalano

I asked readers of IHTOV to write blurbs about their favorite love songs, and the response was great. Enjoy these little verses about songs of love.

Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic - The Police

by Liam Cannon

Everyone who’s ever been in love knows that feeling evoked when the chorus launches. You can picture it. You’re doing something semi-mindless, then suddenly, without warning, something specific about your love’s habits, quirks, or personality appears in your mind. The guy in the song calls it a “little thing,” but it could be anything.  Maybe it’s their contagious laugh, the outfit they always wear, or how they play with the dog.

The song begins with a completely opposite focus on the guy’s struggle to express his love. The music is midtempo, and the instruments combine with the lyrics to mimic the swirling anxious feeling you get when wondering if your feelings are being reciprocated.

Then, like the sun bursting through the clouds, the chorus launches. The music is uptempo with a sing-along melody and lyrics. The guy still can’t express those feelings to the person he loves, but he manages to find a way to tell you, the listener. You find yourself overwhelmed with an indescribable emotion—part longing, sentimentality, amusement, joy, and sometimes even bewilderment.  You might smile to yourself, laugh out loud, or even tear up.  In the song he calls it “magic,” but we all know it’s love.

Liam Cannon, a records manager, lives in south Florida, with his lovely wife, Ann, and their neighborhood celebrity dog, Clover. 

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Van Helsing Boombox - Man Man

by Kory Adams

If you look too close at pretty much any love song you risk revealing something off-putting, grotesque. For instance, I’ve loved The Temptations since I was about 10. Sometime in my teens I was listening along to Ain’t Too Proud To Beg with my younger sister and after he crooned “I would sleep on your doorstep all night and day,” my sis said “I wish somebody felt that way about me.” The potential of that scenario so struck me that it completely changed the song. That’s real sicko shit! I mean, if someone my baby sister had rejected had taken to sleeping on our doorstep to try to like, what– force her? guilt her?– into getting back into a relationship? It could be David Ruffin himself and I’d beat his ass until his glasses didn’t fit.

Still though, I get it. Love songs need to have a desperation to them, even if it borders on or surpasses a level of sickness. It’s a bit of a contradiction– when someone reeks of desperation we want to just get the hell away from them. But when an artist shines a light on the desperation we hold within ourselves, we love it.

Now, that’s an anti-love song in my book. But the song I really want to talk about is both love song and anti-love song, full of love-sick yearning, but also a bit of zen.

I first heard Man Man when a girl showed me a little live video of them playing Van Helsing Boombox. It’s one of the more simple songs on the album, but every line is a killer. “Those arms I once knew hold me like ghosts” even now, 15-something years later, gives me that sore, aching feeling, radiating from behind my breastbone. Soon after that listening session I stayed with her while she was house-sitting, and above the bed was Andrew Wyeth’s painting of a sleeping dog. In the months after our relationship ended I was staying up late, hurling empty beer bottles at a brick wall somewhere outside campus while the line “I wanna sleep for weeks like a dog at her feet, even though I know it won’t work out in the long run” was crunching around in my head, pumping out whatever the opposite of serotonin and dopamine is. Yeah, I was hurting bad. I wasn’t “sleep on your doorstep” deranged, but I was feeling pretty ugly. 

So I let the verses cut me open with their obsession-bordering-on-sickness longing, but the chorus led me somewhere different. While it presses on the wound it proffers something deeper:

“When anything that’s anything becomes nothing, that’s everything. 

And nothing is the only thing you ever seem to have.”

There is within us– just beneath the heartache– space and quietude. Examine, accept, and then cast aside the wrenching hurt of loss. Look into the emptiness that remains, and get comfortable. This is you, and when everything else is gone, this is what you have.

Kory Adams is a big goddamn crybaby, and that’s alright.

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When She Talks About Angels - The Go-Betweens

by Anthony Cougar Miccio

Love requires both honesty and kindness. If you have a critical eye, taking pride in being brutally honest, life will eventually teach you - if you’re lucky - the value of being brutally kind as well. A good example is Robert Forster sitting through a Patti Smith concert. On The Go-Betweens’ “When She Sang About Angels,” Forster recalls a show from her then-recent resurrection, full of cornball stage craft (“She raised up her arm/ like she was pushing back the cotton/ on some Midwestern farm”) and name-dropping. “When she sang about a boy/ Kurt Cobain/ I thought what a shame/ it wasn’t about Tom Verlaine.” The tone isn’t angry, however, but almost amused. She had the same habits “when I was a kid,” he admits, the gentle warmth of the music implying history and affection. They’re quibbles, though: he’s glad she’s back, and glad to see her. “When she sang about angels/ she looked at the sky/ anybody else, anybody else/ but I let it go by.”

“When She Talked About Angels” ends The Go-Betweens’ Friends Of Rachel Worth, a reunion album that itself represented a renewed grace between Forster and Grant McLennan, life-long friends who’d ditched their band for solo careers. The irony is that Forster, a published critic himself, isn’t showing Smith grace. He’s roasting her in song. But that’s the collateral damage - and naughty thrill - of conveying its truth. Love doesn’t mean you’re oblivious, or even endeared, to another’s quirks and vanities. It’s letting them go by.

Anthony Cougar Miccio has been babbling online for decades, his latest take depository being https://anthony-is-writing.ghost.io/.

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Head Over Heels - Tears For Fears

by Aarik Danielsen 

Sitting beside your lover and waxing rhapsodic about the approaching weather isn’t merely a pursuit for the older or the retired among us. Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal were both 23 when, in 1985, they offered the most romantic opening line in pop-music history. Forty years later, my partner and I—both in our forties—live like descendants of Tears for Fears. The early rhythms of our love affair follow this song, which reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and endures still: 

Something happened. We were head over heels. We didn’t find out till we were head over heels. 

But more than this, we send each other pictures of the evening heavens, split into grays and reds and pinks; describe for one another the smell of snow; stop and hold each other, silently marveling as the rain blows in; point to the moon, then thank the sky over Nebraska for staying clear and cold.

This bearing witness to the weather is, as Smith and Orzabal wrote, our four-leaf clover. It is a tenet of our love. And it forms a down payment on living and loving the same way when we do become the older and the retired among us. 

There’s really nothing I’d rather do—now or in the future then—than be with her, noticing as the world changes sound and shape and scene, the poetry of the weather sitting on our tongues. Loving like this ensures we’ll never take our hearts and break our hearts and throw them away. 

Aarik Danielsen is a writer and longtime arts journalist who splits his time between Nebraska and Missouri.

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Be My Baby - The Ronettes/Travis

By NancyKay Shapiro

The poignancy of Spector’s big production sound on the Ronettes is well-established. For me, there something incredibly tender in both the simple lyric, the punchy soundscape, and Ronnie’s girlish vocals on this track: she’s impossibly young and sweet, earnest, sincere, passionate.

In 1999 Travis issued their cover of the song. Male vocalist this time, but a similar almost bombastic instrumental accompaniment, deliciously slow, almost ponderous. It instantly exemplified for me Spike’s yearning for Buffy in all its operatic intensity.

A couple of years later, I fell into a fannish obsession with Buffy and Spike from Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I wanted things to work out for those two crazy supernatural kids, so I wrote fanfic after fanfic working out all the ways it could. My sense of their rightness, my yearning for it, was exemplified by both versions of the song.

Together, the original and the cover became the soundtrack to every apotheosis I wrote for them in story after story.

I could hear each version of the song every day for the rest of my life and not get tired of it. “Little symphonies for the kids”, is no exaggeration .

NancyKay Shapiro keeps her record collection in Manhattan.

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Help Me Make it Through the Night - Kris Kristofferson

by Adam Jay

Kris Kristofferson died in late 2024 and received the best afterlife any of us can hope for; universal appreciation. It’s not hard to understand why. He’s arguably one of the best American songwriters of the 20th century, maybe even top 5. He wrote songs that became huge hits (for other artists, mostly) and became a movie star (it’s easy to see why watching him play with The Highwaymen, where he is absurdly handsome compared to the other age and drug-weathered members of the super group). His song “Help Me Make It Through the Night” was a hit for his then-wife Rita Coolidge, and the two of them sang it together on The Old Grey Whistle Test. It’s a beautiful version, sung by two beautiful people, in love with each other and their music. An additional lyric, “I don’t want to sleep alone” (often missing from other versions, presumably to avoid scandalizing Bible-and-flag country audiences) is added at the end. It’s heartbreakingly vulnerable. And they won’t, at least not tonight.

Adam lives and works in Michigan, wrangling cats and nieces and nephews and can’t wait for gardening season to start.

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Alison’s Starting to Happen - The Lemonheads

By Jim Parisi

It’s about that feeling of meeting someone and not being able to think about anyone else, before it works out or goes to hell or works out then goes to hell; that feeling of going about your life, then—bam!—a lightning bolt or Cupid’s arrow or, as the song says, an earthquake forms under your feet; that feeling of not knowing what’s missing until you find “the puzzle piece … that makes the sky complete”;  that feeling of not caring if it works out or goes to hell or works out then goes to hell, because your life is topsy-turvy and nothing that happened before that feeling matters. Insert your choice of name in the title. That feeling is universal.

Jim Parisi last had that feeling in late 1991, at least that’s what he tells Beth, his long-suffering wife. 

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The Idea of Growing Old - The Features

By Mark Arbonies

Songs about being young and in love have sold records for nearly a century. New love is exciting, it’s dramatic. Will they or won’t they? Can it last? Can they defy time and stay young forever? It’s a foundational piece of rock and roll’s history.

A song in favor of getting old is, in a sense, anti-rock and roll. So, aged love is overlooked in the great songbook. The chase is over. It’s the same person, day after day, year after year, now.

The Features, wise lads, know that it still has gifts to share. It is reliable, peaceful. Full of little jokes and quiet joys. Slow mornings and cozy evenings.

A contented refuge may not be the wild nights and young lovers’ dream of rock and roll lore. But, as this algorithmically poisoned world goes increasingly mad, it’s one worth holding on to.

Mark Arbonies is just some guy that plays in a band called Hunting Accidents and occasionally maps small venues for nemusicdb.neocities.org.

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You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go - Bob Dylan

by Philip Moscovitch

I first heard this song when I was falling in love with my girlfriend, Sara. It’s so lively and delightful, and yet loss is embedded in it right from the title. The first verse tantalizes with the notion that this is true love — it’s “never been this close before” — before underlining the certainty that it’s going to end. It’s just a natural fact, with no blame attached: She’s going to go, and he’s going to stay, but he’s going to give himself “a good talkin’ to.”

“More correct, right on target, so direct” perfectly captured how I felt about Sara.  A pure sense of joy, that I wanted to last as long as possible.

The nature imagery is particularly strong, featuring “dragon clouds so high above” and “flowers on the hillside bloomin’ crazy.” And there is a powerful link between the natural beauty of “purple clover, Queen Anne’s lace” and the lover’s “crimson hair across your face.” Joy and beauty are everywhere, but over it all looms the title, repeated six times in seven verses. Your heart is full — so full that you can’t bring yourself to believe in its impermanence. And yet, there it is. Inevitable. That’s love. And loss.

Philip Moscovitch is a writer, and the editor of Write magazine; he is still with Sara nearly 40 years later, and they have seen Bob Dylan together many times

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Good Enough – Evanescence

by Bryan Schultheiss

You could hardly go anywhere in 2003 without hearing Amy Lee’s powerful voice on the radio. Evanescence’s Fallen rose to radio royalty behind Lee’s vocals and a post-grungy alt rock backing that gave “Bring Me to Life” such widespread appeal, as well as the huge success of the softer “My Immortal,” a ballad that showed impressive range for the band and Lee in particular.

Their second album, The Open Door, launched in 2006 with more for alt rock fans to enjoy, kickstarted by lead single “Call Me When You’re Sober.” And while the entire album does have a wonderful ebb and flow between radio-friendly hits and deeper cuts, the true gem is the album’s final song, “Good Enough.”

The track begins with gentle piano and an orchestral accompaniment, settling us in for a relaxing finale, before Lee ups the tempo on her keys and brings her voice to the forefront. The power she possesses is on pure display throughout the song, rising and falling with the instruments and our emotions as she expresses a longing to be worthy of her lover. The way Lee’s voice breaks in the last stanza before asking, “Am I good enough/For you to love me, too,” showcases so much pain and anguish and hope all at once, and the listener is left as breathless as she is.

Bryan Schultheiss is an occasional writer and longtime music lover originally from New York City currently living in England with his family.

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Disappear - Bad Daughter

by Claudia Santos 

Sierra Kusterbeck knows a bad relationship when she sees one. In 2017 the singer nearly chased me out of a bar when my partner at the time tried to make us leave before all the bands had played. Seeing failings in your own day-to-day, however, is much harder. Valentine’s is two days short of being the anniversary of Sierra’s second country attempt. “Disappear” opens like a tragic performance in the scorching heat staring down a dust storm. She does her best to paint her subject as undeniably loveable and yet can come up with nothing but pain in her recounts of them. A breezy listen of the track would lead you to believe it is, in fact, sweet. This, of course, up to the point of the narrator being disappointed every single time.  All the while a tragic waltz continues to dance like swirling sands around you with the one leading it gets increasingly exacerbated the entire time. The solo section plays like an ascension, where the realization is, hopefully, to pull the wool from your eyes and get out while you can.

Claudia Santos has been reviewing music, interviewing artists and essaying on records on the AsterTracks blog since 2020

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One More Minute - Weird Al Yankovic

by Eric Stephen

‘One More Minute’ by Weird Al Yankovic is not exactly a standard love song in that it’s more comedic than anything, but it’s also an original song that was instrumental for cementing my love for Yankovic as an artist. The structure itself is quite traditional, with a 1950s doo-wop style about getting over a breakup, but takes a turn into the absurd with “I’m stranded all alone in the gas station of love, but I have to use the self-service pumps.” 

Mrs. Jackson, my seventh-grade English teacher, picked one student to sing a memorized song at the beginning of class most days that school year, such that I sang two songs. ‘One More Minute’ was one of my choices, and she made me stop mid-song because the lyrics were “too vulgar.” Luckily, she later relented and let me finish the song. Mrs. Jackson must’ve felt the love too.

Eric Stephen writes about Dodgers baseball at True Blue LA, and co-hosts the Three-Inning Save podcast.

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The Fourteenth of February - Billy Bragg

by Hattie Cooke

“Almost twenty years ago my dear friend Rob played this song to me in his living room, after a particularly painful break up with his then long-term girlfriend. I sat on his sofa, half drunk, watching him sing along with Billy’s rounded vowels, flicking his indie boy fringe out of his tear-filled eyes. I was barely 18 and had never seen a man really cry before. In the unexpectedness of the moment, the song itself passed me by, but the next day I went looking for it on limewire. I wanted to listen again.

“If only I could remember that sweet moment when we met,

If I knew then that I would spend the rest of my life with you,

I imagine I would have held your gaze a little longer when first our eyes met.”

There was something achingly beautiful in the juxtaposition of Bragg’s delivery and his lyrical content. How could a man who sounded just like the blokes on my council estate write such moving poetry about longing to recall the details of the day he met the love of his life? Hearing that song, and seeing how it moved Rob, changed how I saw men forever.

Hattie Cooke is a solo artist and writer from Brighton, UK.

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Of Crows And Crowns - Dustin Kensrue

by Dan S.

One of the greatest things about music is how an artist can showcase their versatility. Within my own personal tastes, none have done so better across different sounds than Dustin Kensrue, the long-time frontman and guitarist of the once-thrash-metal-now-turned-progressive-rock band Thrice. Knowing the man responsible for the circle pit banger “Deadbolt” would also be responsible for a solo piano ballad whose lyrics paint a wall of my wife and I’s bedroom is something that swirls in my mind constantly.

The song’s lyrics are an incredible poem of admiration for a partner. They are an admission of vulnerability and thankfulness, and an admission that there aren’t words to adequately express himself. All of this results in a song that no other has ever matched to me. This is the song that played as my wife walked down the aisle. My eyes welled at seeing her, overwhelmed, as I heard the voice of my favorite musician describe exactly how I felt in that moment:

“How all of you enraptures me

til I can’t look away

I pray that I will live to see

you wear a crown of grey

My love, how beautiful you are

My love is ever where you are”

Dan S. is a husband, father, and mediocre online poster

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Stand By Me by Ben E. King 

by S.J. Rayburn

My high school boyfriend sang this song to me on the football field after marching band practice. He got our friend Andy to play sax. Before I go on I want to be clear that it worked. It’s one of the most romantic things anyone has ever done for (at?) me. Unequivocally swept off my feet, an all-time memory to this day. 

But singing to your girlfriend and making your friend help you is a yearning move, and this is not a yearning song.

As a child, when it crackled over the radio on the oldies station (104.3 WOMC), I felt the kind of stuff you sort out later and it’s weird to imagine how you could have felt these things so deeply without really knowing about them but you did. I felt the determination to work through the unknown. I felt the relief of solidarity. It’s about belonging and resolve; knowing that the people you’re with will make the struggle easier to face, people you can count on to help you clean up. The love that humanity has for itself. Ultimately It’s about trust of biblical proportions.

I’ve been thinking about this song a lot, about how the sky is kind of falling and the mountains are literally crumbling into the sea but acts of love and solidarity will save us. There’s a video of a group of musicians in Minneapolis belting it on the street and that’s what I mean, that’s the love that humanity has for itself.

S.J.Rayburn is a musician and artist based in Hamtramck, Michigan. She thinks you should go listen to your favorite song as soon as possible.

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Apartment Story - The National

by Michele Catalano

Is it a love song or an ode to Seasonal Affective Disorder? No matter. It’s a love song to me, one that makes the otherwise dark, confining claustrophobia of winter seem like something to savor in lieu of taking part in life outside your door. Hiding out, maybe getting drunk and listening to records while you wait for some kind of unpleasantness to intrude on you, barring the door against not only the winter but the pretense of life, of going through the motions of facing the world as put-together human beings rather than the fractured people we are. “Sleep in our clothes and wait for winter to leave” has always struck me as romanticized agoraphobia, making “Apartment Story” a perfect love song for the frightened, the fractured, the weary and those we bring down into the abyss of our winters with us.

Michele Catalano is the proprietor of I Have That on Vinyl

Thank you to everyone who shared a love song. Please feel free to use the comments to write about yours. And Happy Valentines Day to those who celebrate.