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.
J and I fought all the time. It wasn’t that I didn’t love him, I did, but I knew I wasn’t in love with him. He was a rebound, a boy I met after my first true love knocked the wind out of me. When J and I met I was doing crazy things like dancing in typhoon rains and writing love songs in G-D-Em-Am chord progressions, for the boy who broke my 20-year-old heart.
J saved me, in a way: he taught me what a real relationship was. How the mundane, the annoying, and the sweet were all rolled up together, indivisible, as if you’d rolled up oatmeal and raisins in cookie dough. J would pick me up from work in a heavily guarded building in the middle of a busy business district. I was almost always late, but he’d drive around the block for 30 minutes until I appeared, breathless and running, by his door. I bought him a pug. I met his parents, we vacationed in Cebu with his family. Sometimes he would have lunch with my mom without me, they liked each other that much.
But the fights were always terrible — I always felt that he was holding me back, from someone, something, somehow. I remember a particularly bad one: we were eating at a pretty high-end restaurant, the kind with oysters on half-shells served with mignonettes and Lalique wine glasses. I told him I couldn’t eat while looking at his face in front of me, and could he please leave. He got up, stood outside the restaurant and waited for me to finish dinner, then brought me home.
Our relationship may have evolved out of my need for a lot less emotional intensity, but it taught me a lot about the push and pull of coupledom. I learned how to give of myself, I held my anger. However, the feeling of being trapped never left me– it contradicted the fact that I grew to love him exponentially the longer we were together. I didn’t understand it, and in the end we broke up after being together almost three years. I still consider him one of my dearest friends.
This was my song for J:
At one of those breaking up and getting back together moments, J told me this was his song for me.
2005
D played bass in a band that my (then) band gigged with fairly often; we’d bump into each other at random shows and eventually became each other’s band contacts. Setting up shows together evolved to watching shows of other bands together; he was always down to go to a concert and I always had a (+1). We were both music nerds; he knew everything there was to know about Brit-pop and LA bands, and he was constantly making me mix CDs. I was going through a crazy period in my life, though, and my feelings for him were constantly vacillating between fondness and love and friendship and nothing. He introduced me to Myspace, the Magic Numbers, and girls who stalked me and left me mean messages on the Internetz because they liked him.
“I never thought you wanted me to stay, so I left you with the girls that came your way”: I heard this Magic Numbers song and immediately related it to D.
One day, this song came on the radio. He said he felt this way about me: “Everybody wants to go forever/I just wanna burn up hard and bright/I just wanna be your firecracker/And maybe be your baby tonight.”
2009
I always thought this was the most beautiful love song written, and was so jealous of everything about it — Conor Oberst is such a poet, and he was lucky to have loved somebody else so much, he wrote this song, which inspired this video. I’d always tear up watching it, it was better than Oprah.
I always wanted to be one of the people in this video, and feel every uber-intense gooey seratonin-induced emotion that love gives you. And now I am.
And I realize that I need you, and I wondered if I could come home.
Brian, Lille, and I are feeling a bit on the emo side as of late, perhaps because, sadly, as much as this season has sparkled with euphoric, for-the-record-book moments, the summer of death has billowed above the entire time. So rather than wait to feel even more depressed on Valentine’s Day, we’re going retrograde with these next series of posts with a list of our favorite love songs.
Four nostalgic love tunes, three from the past and one current track. I suppose in doing this top love songs post, we’ll find some comfort in the ongoing search for treasure at the end of the rainbow. It is there. Bear with the mush, it’s comfy.
Let’s get started.
Instead of mulling over quasi-horrific “love” tunes like “I Wanna Sex You Up,” “Is This Love,” or “Glory of Love,” that seriously engulfed my childhood-tween years, I’d rather fast-forward to the moment in which love really entered my consciousness.
Although the Cure’s “Pictures of You” wasn’t timely during the ‘97 school year at San Francisco State, it made a significant impact on my freshman, undefiled heart with a particular comic book artist who loved the Cure. Our relationship which was construed as obsessed and drama-laced, was actually the most raw, I think, I have ever been, you know, a solid “Dawson’s Creek” sort of thing. And I was in it. He played this song for me one morning. Instantly I knew the song summed up our entire time together, and foreshadowed his departure at the end of the year.
During the next phase of my adult life (er, like a year or two later), my heart melted at any sound that was brought forth by a Latino musician from Los Angeles, who willingly opened my musical realm to bands from South America, specifically Argentina. Los Enanitos Verdes and Soda Stereo have some of the most lyrically passionate songs. One in particular track, “Luz De Dia,” is completely enchanting and sensual. It’s mainly about giving in to a lover and forgetting about everyone else. I wish I could translate it all now, but the leg-work will do you good. I honestly thought this tune would be our wedding song. Funny now, but still an amazing song.
There’s no possible way I could do a love song post without mentioning Pearl Jam. They consoled every crush that I endured through my junior and high school years, whether it was with “Black,” “Yellow Ledbetter,” “Release,” or “Breathe.” Regardless if these earlier tracks from their catalog were about love or not, they comforted me and that’s all I really needed.
“Come Back” off their self-titled album released in 2006 was especially poignant. It was the year that I said goodbye (sort of) to a writer who encompassed every particular trait I could ever imagine in a man. We had so many things in common (we even shared a love for Pearl Jam) and at times I saw him as a mentor, which in many ways twisted my vision of who he really was. Nevertheless it was probably the only time I had ever really loved selflessly. I remember listening to that song as I drove away from our job site (yes, we worked together), sobbing endlessly probably because I was leaving my old self, and him, never to return.
As for the current track that makes me feel all gooey about a particularly hard man that I fancy is from Ray LaMontagne’s debut album, Trouble. “Shelter” makes me want to soften him up. Goodnight.
Bembang! is a music blog written by a trio of music nerds who live in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City.
