A fair proportion of what I know about love, I learnt from pop songs.
Perhaps that’s why – at an age when really I ought to know better, and despite having experienced real, hard, unforgiving suffering as a result of loving – I still seem to have an unashamedly romantic view of love. Every experience of the state that I’ve had has been predominantly built on the foundations of what can be said in a three or four minute pop song. And I think you can say a lot. Love songs have been an ever-present backdrop in my life, to my infatuations, to those wonderful times when infatuated wishing transformed itself into an actual coming together of bodies and minds, through the ups and downs of giving up a part of myself to someone other, of letting them right in, of revelling in that state, to love finally overbalancing one way or the other and all of a sudden the moment (or moments) of parting coming upon me – all of this has been underpinned by songwriters’ eyes and the troubles of their own hearts.
Yet being unashamedly romantic doesn’t mean I see love as having the arc of a Mills & Boon novel, because even before I first loved someone with all of my heart it was clear that the state was messy, unpredictable, often excruciatingly painful, and that most if not all relationships were ultimately doomed, unless underpinned with a kind of compromising practicality curiously at odds with the original lightning strike or gradual sunrise. For every happy love song, there are probably five or ten or perhaps even a hundred unhappy ones. As inevitable as death, love becomes loss and grief, either in the blink of an eye, or over the course of many tides and moons and months and years. Couples who defy the odds and make it all the way to death’s door with their love intact are surely the exceptions. I think we can celebrate that, aspire to it, but also recognise that our own coupling may not last the course.
For every kind of ecstatic or sorrowful experience (and love songs rarely deal with much in between those two poles, of necessity) there is a lyric, and a singer and an object of affection to whom the song is sung. As listeners, we tend to embody one of the characters, while our lover is the other. Sure, odd details or aspects may not quite fit our personal circumstances, and sometimes we find ourselves flitting between subject and object, but nevertheless the songs which stop us in our tracks do so because we know with a certainty we may never feel about anything else that the writer has cut to the heart of it. In singing about their own, he or she is singing our love.
I’m writing these words with a lasting love in my heart. The precise circumstances – well, it’s complicated. But my love and I, from the very beginning we exchanged songs. The flow has been rather heavier from me to her, but that was only to be expected, because as she says, I am a muso. As in, I know my musical onions, and can’t help flaunting that a little when talk turns to music. Plus I’ve always had a keen ear for a love song, and the wooing use to which it could be put. It is one of the great pleasures of the early days of a relationship, to signal who you are and how you love through music. Before the internet we used to do it with mixtapes, and subsequently mix CDs. But the daily or weekly delivery by email (or indeed by blog) of one or two special songs handpicked for a lover from whom you are parted is perhaps an even higher art form; the dose more concentrated. And when I send her way a song she loves as much as I do, well, my heart could burst for the joy of it.
Even at the start, our favourite tunes and themes tended mostly to be sad – songs which dwelt on the troubles of love, songs which mercilessly and graphically yet often gracefully told of the end of love, of love gone wrong. They dwelt in the state of being parted, as we were. I guess we both knew the journey we were taking would have in it as much sorrow as joy.
So this is an attempt to document a love affair in – to pluck a randomly meaningful figure out the air – 69 love songs, from first sight to last rites and beyond; the resurrection of love, a feat that remains possible when the love simply refuses to die. And perhaps also from before first sight – that prescient sense before you love that the woman or man of your dreams will somehow soon materialise in bodily form before your eyes. As if by magic…
Inevitably, this is my take on love; these are the songs which have mattered to me (and to the woman I love, and therefore to me). Your take, your 69 love songs would of necessity be different. But I hope there is enough commonality that you can see why these songs are so freighted with meaning. Because while everyone’s view and vision of love will vary, individually informed by circumstance and the highs and lows they have experienced, and not only the highs and lows, but the how-highs and the how-lows, there are common experiences – the first kiss, the first night spent together, the realisation that you cannot take your eyes or your hands off this wonderful being who has invaded your mind and is palpitating your heart, and so on. Not to mention the anguish beyond the ecstasy, the filled heart broken and spilling. What I want to try to do here is to write from somewhere between the specific and the general, between individual experience and the collective understanding, in an effort to further or enhance that understanding, to explore the nature of love through what songwriters have had to say about it. Loving and being loved are often far from easy states, and songs help us make sense of that. They echo our doubts and fears and loss and sorrow, and that allows us moments of fellow-feeling, a step or two among many towards acceptance. Or, in their yearning desperation, they can provide us with catharsis.
Here at the outset, I’m not completely sure how this is going to work or grow or develop. But whether we’re talking about writing or love, that has always been part of the beauty of it for me.