From the listener’s point of view, the answer to the question what makes a perfect love song is easy. It’s a song that melts your heart, unlocking feelings that surprise you because they’ve been dormant for so long. One feels alive again to romantic possibility.
The question, how do you make such a song is much harder to answer. At the basic level, you just go for the emotional jugular, with a cliché. How beautiful you look tonight. My heart beats faster. I saw you across a crowded room. By fashioning a melody around such conventional phrases, a songwriter can spin gold.
That’s the tricky bit, and not every writer of love songs succeeds. Ed Sheeran certainly knows a thing or two about clichés, and judging by some new research, which tells us his song Perfection is the most streamed love song on Spotify, he must know how to turn them into gold too. I beg to differ. However, if you go down to the Arctic Monkeys’ I Wanna Be Yours at fourth place you’ll hear this line: “I wanna be your vacuum cleaner, breathe in your dust.” OK it’s not Ira Gershwin, but at least they realise that to make a love song something more than sincerity is needed.
The great masters of turning cliché into gold were the writers and composers of the Great American songbook. Take Isn’t it Romantic, by the great song-writing team of composer Richard Rogers and lyricist Lorenz Hart. The title is a knowing cliché itself, and the lines “Sweet symbols in the moonlight. Do you mean that I will fall in love perchance? Isn’t it romance?” are also a clever tease.
One aspect of love Rodgers’ and Harts’s song ventures nowhere near is sex. But there are plenty of songs that mimic the breathless rise of erotic passion. John Dowland’s lute song of 1597 “Come Away” has the lines, “To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die, With thee again in sweetest sympathy.” Here the harmonies rise and the rhythm speeds up in a way that leaves no doubt as to what “die” actually means. Sex at that era and for romantic composers had to be chastely covered in metaphor, but for soul singers like Marvin Gaye it needed no covering. In his Feel All My Love Inside you can actually hear the sounds of a female org*sm in the background.
At the opposite pole are the songs of love’s anguish, which find a thousand different ways to howl “don’t leave me”. Tina Turner’s What’s love got to do with it? despairs not about this or that lover, but about the whole idea of love.
Ecstatic despair and ecstatic fulfilment are actually not so far apart, a truth which music can express better than words. In both cases the feelings are just too strong. You feel the ungovernable quality of love in Taylor Swift’s Love Story, which takes the story of a teenage encounter at a party and swells it to startlingly huge, cosmic dimensions.
But enough of sadness and madness. St Valentine’s Day is here after all. So best to return to romance and that nice cosy feeling of doting on someone. Composers of the Great American Songbook caught that feeling so well, and none better than Duke Ellington in his “I didn’t know about you”. In Ella Fitzgerald’s wonderful recording, Johnny Hodges’ outrageously horny saxophone introduction is mirrored in Ella’s slinky melodic turns and suggestive vocal slides. “Had a good time every time I went out, Romance was a thing I kidded about,” she purrs. “How could I know about love? I didn’t know about you”.
10) Ben Peters– You’re So Good When You’re Bad
Performed by: Charley Pride
Released on: The Very Best of Charley Pride
Label: RCA
This song by the man who became famous in the 1960s as the first black country singer doesn’t have any obvious quirks that make it stand out from innumerable other country love songs. But Pride’s way of singing it is so affecting, and the image he paints of a woman who saves him because she’s such an angel but also because she’s so bad, touches on depths of human complexity and rings true in a way many love songs do not.
9) Pauline Viardot– Hai Lui
Performed by: Louise Alder
Released on: Chère Nuit: French Songs
Label: Chandos
The great singer and composer Pauline Viardot was the lover of the Russian writer Turgenev, who was often absent in Russia, and you can feel a personal pain in this song, based on a French poem inspired by Cuban folk-poetry. It described a woman waiting for her lover, and not knowing if he will ever return. The refrain, which begins with the word Hai Luli surprisingly turns to the major key – another example of major being sadder than minor.
8) Carole King & Gerry Goffin – Will You Love Me Tomorrow?
Performed by: The Shirelles
Released on: Will You Love Me Tomorrow?
Label: Not Now Music
So many love-songs tell of love from a man’s point of view. In this one the words by Carole King tell of a woman’s fear that her man, who seems so affectionate today with the light of love in his eyes, will be gone tomorrow. The sound of the voices is freighted with longing and sorrow, and the arrangement for string orchestra subtly reinforces the message. The swooning violins speak of love, the repeated notes in the cello seem anxious.
7) Bob Dylan – Lay Lady Lay
Released on: Nashville Skyline
Label: Columbia
A sexy song about a bedroom encounter, of a kind that simply couldn’t be made in our puritanical age. The chord sequence expresses a louche eroticism by circling round and round four unrelated chords. It creates a feeling of weightless ease given extra heat by the sliding bottle-neck guitar sound. The emotional range broadens from appetite to longing, and in the final verse a feeling of carpe diem. “Stay, lady, stay Stay with your man awhile. Why wait any longer for the world to begin?
6) Erik Satie– Je te veux
Performed by: Donella del Monaco
Released on: Chansons Satie
Label: Opus115
Erik Satie, composer of the gentle Gymnopédies, loved to hang around cafes and cabarets, and as this song shows he had the sentimental love-song of Bel Époque Paris off to a t. Once heard, its gently yearning waltz theme, which seems more nostalgic than excited by future possibilities, can never be forgotten. The words say “I have only one desire: to be yours… Burning in a dream of love, we will exchange our two souls”.
5) The Beatles– If I Fell
Released on: A Hard Day’s Night
Label: Parlophone
This ballad seems over-earnest at first, and the introductory verse a little stiff in its joints. However when the song starts properly with the first verse, “If I give my heart to you,” it starts to warm up. Then comes what we imagine will be an identical second verse, until the harmony takes a surprising turn on the word “pain”, and suddenly the song becomes truly affecting.
4) Robert Schumann– Mein Schöner Stern
Performed by: Peter Schreier
Released on: Schumann: Lieder
Label: Teldec
This song is a secret cousin to Charley Pride’s You’re so good when you’re bad (listed above), in the sense that it worships a saviour woman, in this case pictured as a beautiful star. The difference is that, this being the 19th century, the woman has to be seen as angelic through-and-through. The wheeling harmonies, constantly side-stepping the expected resolution, are a beautiful musical metaphor for the stars wheeling unstoppably in the heavens.
3) Joni Mitchell– My Old Man
Released on: Blue
Label: Reprise Records
Joni Mitchell’s classic song lists all the loveable attributes of her man, who seems like a dreamer, and is probably a hippie. The whole thing breathes an air of 1960s counter-culturalism, an impression reinforced by the wayward melody of the refrain. The harmony darkens interestingly when she describes how the blues come to haunt her when her ’Old Man’ is not around.
2) Rodgers & Hart– Where or When
Performed by: Frank Sinatra
Released on: Only the Lonely
Label: Capitol Records
This song rises far above the mere feelings of two lovers, in an echo of the Platonic idea that love expands the soul and leads to thoughts of God or eternity or—in this case—predestination. The singer imagines that the shock of love is really a shock of recognition. “Some things that happen for the first time seem to be happening again, but who knows where or when.” In this recording the first verses are sung with piano alone, but the final verse arranger Nelson Riddle suddenly wafts us up to the stars with a sumptuous orchestral sound.
1. Puccini – Che gelida manina
Performed by: Luciano Pavarotti
Released on: The World’s Best Loved Tenor Arias
Label: Decca
This is that lovely moment early on in Puccini’s La Bohème, when the penniless Rodolfo meets the equally penniless Mimi, a lodger in the same cold house. He takes her hand, and blurts out “It’s frozen, let me warm it.” His song tiptoes into being so tenderly, and swells to a climax in a way only Puccini knew how. Has anyone ever not been melted by this?
