10 Love Songs for 10 Stages of Life (So Far)
a little valentine's reminiscing
“i will” by the beatles
Will I wait a lonely lifetime? / If you want me to I will
This is the first song I ever heard — Or at least that’s how the story goes, and I see no cause to doubt it. Every time I hear the track, it gets me right in the gut. My mom sang it to me nightly when I was a baby. It cuts through to something fundamental.
Not all love songs are romantic. I suppose this one was intended to be when Paul McCartney wrote it. And I’ve meant it that way too, singing it to my partner. But I’ve also sung this song through tears among friends, or surrounded by my family’s pet cats in my childhood home. I sing it to myself when I get anxious or scared. I don’t even think much about the lyrics, in these moments — I like how it sounds, how it dances in my chest when the words come out. I like how the notes climb so high at the end that it’s almost silly; I wonder each time if I’m going to run out of breath. I remember my mom’s rendition: skipping the second verse that sounds a little cavalier, never neglecting the final pass but always reaching, tinny, for the summit.
“annie’s song” by john denver
You fill up my senses like a night in a forest
Somewhere in my hometown, there’s an old VHS tape labeled something like “Clare 2”. And on that dusty relic, there’s a clip of me as a toddler, dancing around the room in red and ruffled Christmas PJ’s with my dad. The moment is soundtracked by John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy”, which for whatever reason was a mandatory Christmas listen in our house back then, boxed up with the decorations that went back into storage each January.
My dad loved to play John Denver around the house when I was little, so his songs have burrowed their way deep into my bones. They hurt to hear, now. But art can be a conduit in this way, giving us safe ways to engage with those who aren’t safe to contact or to love. “Annie’s Song” is a pure and wholesome expression of what it feels like to bask in someone’s kindness, to feel truly safe and honored in their presence.
“sparks fly” by taylor swift
Drop everything now / Meet me in the pouring rain
I loved this one in middle school, and it’s aged like fine wine. A rich, effusive burst of joy and desire, it acts as a tribute to the universal feeling of having a crush. But it’s also a song unafraid of being demanding, of expressing desire unabashedly.
I think what’s so exciting to me about this song now, as a 20-something, is largely the same thing that was so exciting to me when I was 12. This song is…sexy. It’s confident and strong and completely rooted in the wants and needs of its singer. This kind of self-assuredness when it comes to love and sex is something it takes many of us decades to cultivate. And while here it lives in the realm of fantasy for Taylor, I can’t help but feel like the messaging is bold and progressive. She’s the pursuer, not the pursued. She’s completely active in her fantasy, and open about what she wants.
To my timid, pre-teen ears, this song felt like a scandalous secret — an invitation into a new body, a new way to exist.
“swing life away” by rise against
If love is a labor, I’ll slave till the end.
Here comes the emo phase: Rise Against was everything to me when I was younger, the first real taste of hardcore punk I ever had. “Swing Life Away” isn’t punk by a longshot — A slightly saccharine acoustic rock track, it offers some reprieve towards the end of an album that’s otherwise relentless with energy. Siren Song of the Counter Culture taught me to love noise, and to crave infectious hooks in music regardless of the genre. Life’s too short to be scared of fun.
That’s kind of the message of this song, honestly. Or at least it’s my read of it now, looking back on it fondly with an older gaze. I didn’t know anything about working a minimum wage job or feeling like life was slipping through my fingers when I was 13. I’ve had more relevant experiences since, but somehow feel even less prepared to take on the earnestness this track has to offer. I debated cutting it from this list for a while. I need to seem cool, after all…
I don’t care. Life is full of burning, bristling, tumultuous crap. The simple, sweet tunes that make us happy, the people we don’t have to perform to be loved by, the dreams we chase with friends…This is the stuff of love songs. The good kind, that still sound as sweet a decade later. Damn the rest to hell.
“the fragile” by nine inch nails
I won’t let you fall apart
Sometimes love feels like being saved — It’s what allows CCM tracks to be crossover hits on country radio, and love songs to sometimes sound like hymns. It isn’t good to be codependent. We shouldn’t make idols out of lovers. But in those early teenage years, that’s often just how things pan out…
When I was 14, there was little on God’s earth I wanted more than a time machine that would allow me to date late 90’s Trent Reznor. He was the archetypal “bad boy”, I guess, but Nine Inch Nails’s music has also always struck me as alarmingly sensitive. Both discs of the aptly titled The Fragile are brimming with sentiment, raw and unpretentious. And on that album’s title track, he offers himself up as some sort of savior to a hurt lover, swoon-worthy candy for my angst-ridden ears.
Sentiments like “she doesn’t see her beauty” are all over pop radio — It’s easy to roll our eyes when we hear them. In the years following high school, I’d meet my fair share of men who took advantage of my insecurity and susceptibility to flattery, enjoying the fact that I didn’t see myself the way they saw me. But there’s something so genuine about this track, nonetheless; It still feels more like earnest fantasy than those real-world schemes. It’s a song that could be about a friend, a sibling, a child; anyone that’s felt worth saving when you couldn’t stay in the game for yourself. And honestly? Trent still feels like a badass you can trust.
“asleep and dreaming” by the magnetic fields
I don’t know if you’re beautiful / because I love you too much
I plodded through my teen years feeling awfully alienated by most love songs. I didn’t feel beautiful or much like a girl, and it was difficult for me to identify with songs that heralded the prettiness of some ideal lover. I couldn’t imagine that anyone would ever save words like those for me. I was drawn, instead, to cynicism in my music, which lured me away from love songs and towards angrier, lonelier fare.
Stephin Merritt’s infamous collection of 69 Love Songs was the exception. He’s gone on to say that his aren’t love songs, but “songs about love”, a description I clung to at the time but have grown a tad skeptical of. These songs are not conventionally romantic songs, sure, but most are still quite passionate. And their queer, sarcastic, generally jaded content does not absolve them of that label, “uncool”as it may be.
When Merritt sings “You may not be beautiful…” in the middle of “Asleep and Dreaming”, it comes as a bit of a shock. It feels like an insult, yet another plot twist on an album full of unlikely encounters. “But that’s not for me to judge,” he qualifies. “I don’t know if you’re beautiful, because I love you too much.”
There’s definitely a world in which this was still intended as a punchline, a silly way to articulate affection that’s backhanded if not outright mean. But at 16, I took comfort in those words — Maybe I wouldn’t ever feel beautiful, but maybe that could be okay. Maybe there was something else I had to offer, too big for the gaze of a shallow high school boy to frame.
“du og meg” by of montreal
She taught him what was real / She taught him he was ok / That his thoughts were not just rubbish / That he had something good to give
If you asked me what my favorite band was, at any point between 2015-2019, I probably would have said of Montreal. The Athens, Georgia band — a rotating cast orbiting buoyant songwriter Kevin Barnes — fit life like a glove when I was at my lowest. They offer up brilliant, undeniable dance pop with lyrics that would make your therapist shudder.
“Du Og Meg” is one of their happiest tracks, detailing the beginning of one of Barnes’s deepest and most infamous relationships — that with his ex Nina, who inspired 5 or 6 of his band’s albums. His songs for Nina run the gamut from sex-fueled romps to vicious revenge tracks. Some of them have aged poorly, too hateful in hindsight to feel worth the sympathy. This one is wholesome, though, and is a favorite that has stood the test of time.
There’s something fundamentally comforting about this song, and the childlike language it uses to set the scene — America is “the evil empire”, and the couple’s fateful first meeting is the awakening of a “sleeping heart”. Barnes weaves a fairy tale that practically shivers with joy. But the catch is, loyal listeners already know it’s a lie. This was tacked on as a bonus track on the very same album where he chronicled the divorce that awaited these two lovers, a opera with an unhappy end.
“love minus zero / no limit” by bob dylan
My love, she speaks like silence / without ideals or violence
It’s one of those lyrics that has aged poorly between my own ears. You don’t have to tell me twice that it’s a bit chauvinistic to praise a woman for being quiet and void of ideals…And yet, I’m still compelled to defend this one. I loved it more naively when I was in my late teens, but I still think something about it is lovely.
“Love Minus Zero” was allegedly written about Sara Lownds. As always, it’s tough to take Dylan at his own word, and this song in particular feels far too abstract to be bound to the name of any real person. I think that’s the key to seeing past its faults — Dylan starts off singing about a voice like silence, that “knows too much to argue”, but his manic pixie dream completely disintegrates by the song’s end. A raven with a broken wing is the sad specter he finds by his window, a contagious spirit that had to be crushed to meet his dire expectations.
We want things with other people to be easy. We want love to be easy, sure, but we also want work to be easy, family to be easy, patched up and tattered old friendships to be easy. And things would be easy if the people we cared for agreed with us, tiptoed over our indiscretions and dimmed the lights for our hangovers. But when we sand the edges off other people, we idealize them. And when we idealize them, they lose a lot of what makes them feel like agents we can touch or hurt.
“Love Minus Zero / No Limit” offers up an impossible equation: Can someone be both perfect in our eyes and fully appreciated as real? Can we find perfection in other people without stripping them of their humanity? Dylan leaves this open-ended, but I think that’s where the romance lives. Love is what encourages us to ask these kinds of questions, not what reveals their answers.
“run away with me” by carly rae jepsen
Baby, take me to the feeling
In my high school’s theater club (I know, I know…) we had a tradition of gift-giving during each tech week. We’d randomly select “tributes” that we’d sneak gifts to backstage, and would reveal our identities at the cast party, to many tears and hugs. As seniors, we got the opportunity to choose who we acted as Secret-Santa-With-Extra-Steps for, and one of my dearest and oldest friends picked me for our final fall show. It was a sappy, full circle moment, but it’s one I remember fondly and without a hint of bitterness.
Her final gift to me that night was a DVD. And on that DVD was a video of all my best friends, downtown, dancing in the streets and lip syncing to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Run Away With Me”. This was probably super disruptive to general city life in my hometown, but I don’t care. It’s one of the most heartwarming gifts I’ve ever received. And it’s the perfect memory to attach to that song, so vibrant with shameless, dancing-in-the-streets joy.
The gift was perfect in part because I was obsessed with that song that year, and made no secret of this fact on car rides with my friends. Night drive? “Run Away With Me”. Tagging along for errands? “Run Away With Me”. You overheard something humming softly in my worn-down Apple earbuds during study hall? Probably also “Run Away With Me”.
But embracing that song, and deciding to be really really annoying about it in the way only an attention-starved teenager can, was a significant move for me. It was a shift away from being cynical, and blocking out art I deemed too warm to touch. I wasn’t afraid to love pop music anymore, to show affection to my friends, to listen to songs about love with a wide smile on my face. I wasn’t afraid of bold declarations, like the ones that glued Carly’s lyrics to their rich, bombastic melodies.
“bless the telephone” by labi siffre
It's strange, the way you make me feel / With just a word or two / I'd like to do the same for you
Long distance relationships suck, plain and simple. You can do everything right — plan the meet-ups, stream the movies... But they’re still a mighty challenge, and one that many partnerships aren’t up for. God knows my first one was terrible, full of coldness and cheating and endless postponement. My second attempt was a little different.
My current relationship started in sophomore year of college, right before summer break. Neither of us had cars, so we had to try the distance thing out pretty early, before we’d really grown close or endured any hard times. This was scary, particularly because my previous relationship had gone so poorly, bored through by distance until it hemorrhaged and collapsed. But it turns out, when someone cares about you, you find small ways to make things work.
We called almost nightly, but this time it wasn’t a chore. That was a hard summer for me — rough job, challenges at home, drama with the high school friends — but it almost didn’t matter. I had something new, comforting, and supportive to look forward to every evening, that helped to anchor me within the chaos. This routine that we built around distance actually strengthened our relationship this time, rather than destroying it. And that’s the exact magic this song captures beautifully.
Thank you all for reading! I love love songs, but my favorites aren’t always the best ones to discuss, and the ones that make me feel the most aren’t always my favorites. Next week, I think I’ll give my actual top ten.
Until then: Embrace the things and people that bring you joy!
Clare
Brilliant list!!!