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Tom G. - 2006-02-15 14:31:32
Most recently, I've really enjoyed Snow Patrol's "Run". It gets close to the "maudlin" border, but the lyrics keep it in check. Since you're a self-professed sap you might like it.
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Tim W. - 2006-02-15 14:32:20
What, no "Wild Is The Wind?"
Will report back on the love song thing.
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Editrix - 2006-02-15 14:58:30
A small sampling of songs that don't rate a "gross" from me:
"She's a Sensation" or "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" by the Ramones
"Anything" by the Continental Drifters
"My Valuable Hunting Knife" or "Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox" by GBV
"The River Song" by The Extra Glenns
"Whipdang" by Slide
"Papa Was a Rodeo" by the Magnetic Fields
"Don't Laugh (I Love You)" by Ween
"He's So Sensitive" by Lovechild
"Closer" by Low
"I'm the Man Who Loves You by Wilco
"In the Aeroplane over the Sea" by Neutral Milk Hotel
OK, I should do some work.
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Inka Kola - 2006-02-15 15:57:59
Most good "love" songs are about thwarted love. Such as "Lovers Rock" or "Lovers Curse". But "L.O.V.E. Love" by the Rev. is still the tits.
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anne - 2006-02-15 16:41:51
Funny that Editrix mentions "Anything" b/c it's a Peter Holsapple song and a couple of his and Stamey's tunes from Mavericks were the first that came to my mind (PH's "I Know You Will"--more sappy and "She Was The One"--more cynical; "Geometry" and "Lovers Rock"(!) from Stamey)
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Chris - 2006-02-15 18:45:56
Te-Ni-Nee-Ni-Nu by Slim Harpo. Uplifting, and the kids dance around and sing it as well.
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Bob - 2006-02-15 23:20:26
"Human Canonball", unfortunately. (It was circumstantial.) [On an unrelated, not to mention played-out note, while I do consider myself a leading expert on the difference between bathos and pathos, I had me some conflation goin' with conflagration.]
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Baby Party - 2006-02-16 09:04:52
Dearest Darling by Bo Diddley
Blue Moon by Big Star
Not the Only Only One, Bonnie Raitt
I Know You Will and Taken, Peter Holsapple & Chris Stamey, from that same great Mavericks album that has so many great love songs on it
You Get Me Lost, Freedy Johnston
In the Dark with You, Greg Brown
I could come up with a million more, but these were on our wedding mix. Our first dance was As by Stevie Wonder, but first runner up was Always and Forever by Heatwave. Yes, corny, but sometimes corny brings the luv.
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Baby Party - 2006-02-16 09:07:44
Oh and how could I forget? Nick Drake's Northern Sky, which I asked Rebecca to sing at our wedding, and which I think is one of the greatest love songs in the English language! And of course there's also I Only Have Eyes for You.
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Alan - 2006-02-16 10:47:32
I could go on for days if I worked at it, but the one song that always, always, always tugs at the heartstrings of the remaining shreds of my humanity is "Unchained Melody" by The Righteous Brothers.
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Paula - 2006-02-16 12:09:33
The Kinks' "Better Days" is not strictly a love song, in fact it's a break-up song, but it's more loving and respectful, I think, than most love songs.
But the challenge for me is to think of good love songs that are 100% straight-up about love and not about its loss. That's harder.
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Matt - 2006-02-16 12:20:07
eh? you prefer roberta flack's version to bert jansch's? heresy!
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Tom G. - 2006-02-16 15:20:35
Paual, do you think it's hard to find a "good" 100% love song because we tend to think that good = complexity, depth, bittersweetness? (I know I do.) And if the song is about the joys of being in love, then it tends to run towards the sappy, cornball end. I like "Walking On Sunshine" by Katrina And The Waves but I know lots of people find that incredibly insipid. It might be all a matter of your perspective of the moment.
Now that I think about it, Elvis Costello's "North" album is almost entirely 100% love songs and I don't think any of them suck. "Still" is perhaps my favorite.
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2fs - 2006-02-16 16:12:25
It seems harder to convince people that joy, or happiness, is worth communicating in song than misery and darkness. I think that's because (a) we're cynical bastards and (b) in rock particularly, there's this (wholly fatuous, and historically dubious, hence annoying) tradition of dark rebellion that automatically grants street cred to negativity. (Hell, even that metaphor of "street" is a stupid example, valorizing...what, exactly? Muggers? The homeless? Cabdrivers?) Anyway, it's pretty easy to be all dark and transgressive - but a lot harder to be non-sappily positive and express genuine (as opposed to rote conformist) joy.
Curiously, the first song I thought of is almost the opposite of a love song: XTC's "Your Dictionary," about divorce. It's intensely bitter, wounded, angry...but I think it redeems itself with its extraordinary coda, wherein the narrator ceremonizes the divorce as a sort of marriage-in-reverse that allows him to move on, having exorcised whatever demons doomed and would have haunted the dead marriage. (Check the interplay of musical/lyrical lines, particularly around the word "ring," in that last part, too!)
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Bob - 2006-02-16 18:28:16
More precisely, I think I had a conflation of conflation and confabulation, which gave my semi-literate self "conflagration". But more pertinently, I think the problem here (and, like bathos and pathos, this goes back to the bottom of your 8/03/04 "Sad Songs" comments section) is that happy and sad aren't as dissimilar as one might think... whereas happy and depressed are. And a case can be made (and is, in those comments) that the difference is love. (After all, "heartbreaking" isn't always a pejorative).
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chris - 2006-02-16 22:51:47
"Hold Me, Thrill me, Kiss me" by Sonny Til and the Orioles. Great title, thats backed up by great singing.
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Chris - 2006-02-17 06:12:16
I guess its not really fair to throw in Jazz, but "Ruby my dear" by Thelonious Monk is probably me and wifes favorite romantic song.
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tris mccall - 2006-02-17 10:54:59
some love songs that have figured big over the past fourteen years:
"misguided angel" by the cowboy junkies
"slide away" by oasis
elvis costello's version of "the very thought of you", from *kojak variety* (huge)
"rain" by the clientele
"ascension (don't ever wonder)" by maxwell
"soft as snow but warm inside" and "cupid come" by mbv
"give in world" by the loud family
"nothing even matters" by lauryn hill
"vincent black lightning", of course,
and
*everything* by pm dawn.
there are so many i'm forgetting.
i like the songs where you're just totally swept away and dizzy with passion.
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Paula - 2006-02-17 11:00:50
Dizzy with passion, as Tris says, describes my feeling whenever I hear "Rush Hour" by Jane Wiedlin which is maddeningly--maddeningly!!--not available on any online music service that I've explored so far. THAT is quality love-tunage!!
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Paula - 2006-02-17 11:02:51
And might I add that Sallitt and his all-star backing band (including Ian and Liza, I think?) played "Give in World" at my wedding. And Donna & Benjoya did "Hungry Wolf," which I'd mentioned in the original post.
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jon - 2006-02-20 00:00:56
To the person who mentioned Freedy Johnston's "You Get Me Lost": I second that emotion.
Paula, you asked about couple's songs and how they came to be. When my wife and I were first sparkin', we played a stack of 45's she had bought from thrift stores. There were a few good ones, like Wanda Jackson's "Funnel of Love", but the knockout was "Trust in Me" by Etta James. "At Last" has become ubiquitous at weddings, but "Trust in Me" is a stunning ballad about having faith in each other, and it became our song when we first heard it together.
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jon - 2006-02-20 00:03:45
I would like to suggest that "Simple" by kd lang should become a wedding standard. "I worship this tenacity, and the beautiful struggle we're in/ Love will not elude us, love is simple."
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jon - 2006-02-20 00:08:06
...and I would like to issue a fatwah against whoever came up with the idea of using "Trust in Me" in a tampon commercial. You bastards!
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Paula - 2006-02-20 13:56:57
One needs to trust in one's tampon, though.
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Paula - 2006-02-20 20:50:10
Jon, you once put a Marti Jones song on a mix tape for me--"If I Could Love Somebody" I believe it was called--and that there is a beautiful not-infatuation-but-deep-love song. I've been looking for it online to no avail.
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jon - 2006-02-24 12:05:34
Oh thank you for reminding me of that song! It was from her album Used Guitars, and you're right, it's nowhere online. I know because I recently tried to find her version of Graham Parker's "You Can't Take Love for Granted" from the same LP. I have it on vinyl and will see if I can digitize it for you. I can't find the band Translator online either. Don't these mp3 providers recognize the pent up demand for these songs?!?
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jon - 2006-02-24 12:09:33
"If I Could Love Somebody" is a John Hiatt composition, by the way; but I'd rather hear Marti sing it.
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