I Bet You Think This Blog is About You: Brian’s Favorite Love Songs

After reading about Lille and Araceli’s favorite love songs, I realized I was in trouble. Despite a healthy amount of loves, most of them fizzle before I have been properly introduced — failing to reach the apex of significant songwriting territory by a longshot. Not to be outdone, there are songs which I most-certainly attribute to romance, or, at least what I would interpret love to be in that particular era.

1992:  Love is A Capella
I distinctly remember junior high gym dances being awkward in every way. Kids both obsessed and terrified of the opposite sex… and also sweaty from playing pick-up basketball in between dances.  All I know is that slow-dances, complete with bad cologne and flat-bottom woven ties, were always made better by Boys II Men.  Aside from that Motown/Philly gold, I was particularly fond of Shai’s “If I Ever Fall In Love “.  I remember being outraged when I saw their video on MTV and it was the instrumental reprise! WTF. Acapella 4 Life, yo.

1997: Love is Swing-Techno-Ska
People do stuff for people they like.  But, when you’re an impressionable teen, you don’t pretend to like stuff that a girl is interested in, you actually will yourself to like it. For real.  This is the only reason I can come up with for me to dive headfirst into bands that included (but are not limited to) The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, Underworld, and Less Than Jake… in the same year.  Not that they were all terrible bands (I actually still like Underworld), but the only reason I can explain jumping from my favorite musicians in Junior High (Peter Gabriel’s US, and whatever was played on party radio B96) into Prodigy’s Fat of the Land would have to be girls.

2002: Love is a concept
Everything is difficult.  The older people get, the more complicated they like to think life is.  It’s like history class.  When you’re 6, love is candygrams and the Civil War freed the slaves.  When you’re 15, love is pure infatuation — ever-forgiving and evergreen — while the Civil War was the result of tension between the Industrial North and Agricultural South.  When you’re older than 22 you have decided that the more you know, the more you’re aware of what you don’t know.

Love is all Conor Oberst talking about a mirror, or a girl (or a dream or something) and we are aware that the Civil War is called “The War of Northern Aggression” in the South, Northerners had no real interest in abolishing slavery, and Abe Lincoln temporarily disbanded congress and may or maynot have been bisexual.  Here’s a song about Jeff Tweedy doing the dishes, or touring Japan, or drug addiction, or an aquarium.