"Love's Got A Lot To Answer For" / Nick Lowe

28 DAYS OF LOVE SONGS

Come on, you really didn't believe I could get through a whole month -- let alone a whole month devoted to love -- without Nick Lowe? Honestly, I could have done the entire month on just Nick Lowe songs, he's got so many with "love" in the title. What else would you expect?

I know this is a minority opinion, but I love the fact that smart-ass rock jester Nick Lowe has turned into this rumpled country-soul balladeer. (Imagine Willie Nelson covering this song, or Waylon Jennings.) It makes me wonder what Ricky Nelson and Buddy Holly and Bobby Fuller might have got up to if they'd been lucky enough to age gracefully. Nick's been chronicling love and loss for so many years, he's got it down to a fine art. He may have started out his career 40 years ago parsing unrequited lust and spectacular bust-ups, but by now he's tightened his focus, devoting each song to a different tiny vector of emotion, smack in the middle of the mess we humans generally make of love.

How gently this song starts out, with a rueful arpeggio of horns, then Nick's restrained vocal, jumping to the high note of the first line, "That little white lie" (hear how he plays down the "leetle" -- aw, hon, it was just a little fib), then dropping an octave to land huskily on "you’ve been caught in." There's nothing like starting off on a diminished chord to signal heartbreak ahead. He may be using a second-person pronoun, but the ache in his voice makes it clear that "you" is "I." Gravely he notes, "Seems to be the last straw / Now there’s going to be an eruption." Everything's tilting off course between them, and apparently it's not just this one incident -- in verse two, he 'fesses up further ("That crack you made / Only half-joking / Has poured salt on a sore.") Raise your hand if you've ever smarted at a "half-joking" remark from someone who's supposed to love you. I love how this drops us right into the middle of their mess. The details don't even matter; fill in the blanks with whatever's on your own conscience.

Rhyme and meter are so muted, they've practically vanished; what he gives us instead is grinding chord shifts, a sidling tempo, and minimalist instrumentation -- an acoustic strum here, a wary bass line, gradually layering on a whisper of drums, punctuated by those heart-melting horns. He slides into that title phrase with a tremble of regret in his voice: "Love's got a lot to answer for," jumping up a fifth for the internal rhyme of "got a lot," then plummeting an octave to growl "to answer for." He's grown-up enough to stand there and face up to it -- he's not lashing back with blame or self-pity or revenge. He knows the score, but that doesn't make this hurt any less.

And then in the bridge, Nick -- god love 'im -- plunges deeper. After all, it's love that he's talking about, and these cracks in the surface matter. "It’s not the same as infatuation/It comes from deeper down / It won’t be played about with /It won’t be pushed around" -- note how he keeps pushing the key changes upward, tapping insistently on a single note for each line, swelling the volume intently. He wants to make it work, goddammit.

But it all breaks down with the downward arpeggio of the last line, "I could have told you what’s in store," before sadly winding it up with (again) "Love’s got a lot to answer for." And it hurts all the more because it IS love. Nick's raising the stakes here, keeping love right where it should be -- at the center of our all-too-human quest for happiness. And who ever said love should come easy?

Love's Got A Lot To Answer For sample

“Love Gets You Twisted” / Graham Parker

28 DAYS OF LOVE SONGS

My blog buddy Betty over at And So Forth got me started recently, thinking again about Graham Parker’s Squeezing Out Sparks. I’m not sure I’d call it a perfect album, but for sure it’s one of the most solid LPs ever, with nearly every track a winner. When this baby came out in 1979, as I recall, punk and New Wave were still duking it out, with power pop waiting in the wings. Graham Parker pulled off a hat trick here, combining all three, mixing anti-romantic sentiments and clever word play with irresistible hooks.

Even though this is one of the slower songs on the album, you could hardly call it a ballad – there’s no crooning, no storytelling, just a moan of frustration. Between the emphatic drum track and those clangy guitar riffs, there’s not a trace of softness or sweetness, and Parker’s gritty vocals attack the lyrics with outright hostility. (Those micro-lags behind the beat, the sarcastic little quavers on key words -- genius.)

The title tells you straight off that his outlook is jaundiced, and Parker works that title phrase relentlessly, repeating it thirteen times and matching it with such rhyming phrases as “the hearts are enlisted” and “I knew that it existed.” We get hardly any details -- no who, what, where, or when – it’s just like he’s visiting the Love Doctor and describing his symptoms, probing every wound. Graham means “twisted” not as in “sick” (“that is just so twisted”), but literally, physically twisted, with your guts in a knot and your spine hunched and your neck kinked up from too many anxious glances over your shoulder. “I try to straighten out, but I’m too wrapped up to see” he complains, and “When she’s in my arms I get tangled up, it’s true.” He's not blaming her -- why should he? It's the inevitable consequence of this thing called love.

So does Graham Parker have any solution? In the bridge, he prescribes his own medicine: “Screw yourself up / Screw yourself up / Screw yourself, screw yourself up.” The way he slides into that “scrrreeew” makes the double meaning painfully clear – screwing up your courage is one thing, but in the process you just get screwed up even further. It’s a losing battle.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately -- about how the music you listen to at certain ages can scuttle your love life. My generation was spoon-fed the true love dreams of Ricky Nelson and Stevie Wonder, and even (god love him) Paul McCartney -- but then some of us in our twenties veered off and developed a taste for the bitterer brew of Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson and Graham Parker. (The Kinks addiction should have been a warning sign, I see in retrospect.) It satisfied some inner craving, I'm sure, but I'm still hung up, oscillating between that and my stubborn longing for happily-ever-after. Which is gonna win out? I still have no idea.

Love Gets You Twisted sample

“Love” / Paul Simon

28 DAYS OF LOVE SONGS

Paul Simon keeps on surprising me. It’s been a long time since, as half of Simon & Garfunkel, he defined an era -- I’ll never forget being riveted by the trailer to The Graduate, with that delicately finger-picked opening of “Sounds of Silence” playing over Dustin Hoffman’s blank face. Simon’s chiseled portraits of alienation and despair (“I Am A Rock,” “The Boxer,” “Homeward Bound,” “A Hazy Shade of Winter”) were just what my disaffected teenage soul needed. I drank up every album thirstily; so did all of my disaffected friends.

Simon stayed in the game even after he went solo, but only just, and after Graceland he fell off my radar. I can’t even remember how this song filtered onto my iTunes -- it’s from his 2000 album You’re the One, which must have come after the spectacular failure of his musical Capeman, but despite the fact that it went gold and won a Grammy nomination, it never reached my ears. Yet this sneaky little track has been burrowing into my brain lately. The jazz-tinged guitar work, the supple Brazilian percussion, draw you in, tease you along – and then those devastating lyrics punch you in the gut.

If Joe Tex was playing a street preacher, Simon is our Professor Emeritus of Love, lecturing wisely on human need. He begins with a first-person example: “Cool my fever high / Hold me when I cry” – yes, love does have its purpose, his empirical research will support that. But then the melody plunges into monotone as he confesses, “I need it so much.” Oh, yes, he knows this feeling, and he doesn’t like it. He drops into a spoken-word rant as he describes love’s general effect: “Makes you want to get down and crawl like a beggar / For its touch / And all the while it's free as air / Like plants, the medicine is everywhere.” Free? Everywhere? Why is that not reassuring?

Then, out of it all, the chorus rises like a phoenix – just the clearly sustained word “love,” repeated three times, over a cresting scale of guitar work that’s suddenly shifted into major key. Yes, yes, love is the answer, you want to call out – until Simon knocks our legs out from under us, going back into minor key as he dourly reminds us, “We crave it so badly / Makes you want to laugh out loud when you receive it / And gobble it like candy.” That’s oddly pictorial; I see him laughing, I see him gobbling – and it’s weirdly arousing.

Simon’s not going to let us off the hook, is he? He switches back into major key and adopts a simpler pop rhythm in the bridge, but only to toy with us again: “We think it's easy / Sometimes it's easy / But it's not easy.” (Now there’s some shrewd, subtle songwriting for you, the less-is-more mark of a master). “You're going to break down and cry,” he wags a warning finger at us, and then throws in another smack upside the head for good measure: “We're not important / We should be grateful.” Talk about putting things in perspective.

In the last verse, he goes global on us, talking about evil walking the planet, about “the master races, the chosen peoples / The burning temples, the weeping cathedrals” – makes you feel like a schmuck for fretting over your own pitiful little love life, doesn’t it? And yet Professor Simon has already wearily signed our pass/fail slip – all right, there’s no grade, just show up for class so you can earn the credit, okay?

We can’t help craving love, that’s the way we’re built -- he knows that, and now we know it too. Yup, Paul Simon is still way ahead of me on the disillusionment spectrum. It's like coming home to find that out.

Love sample

"You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” / Dusty Springfield

DAYS OF LOVE SONGS

A month of love songs and nothing from Dusty Springfield? I don’t think so. If it’s thwarted passion and extravagant emotion you want, Dusty’s your go-to gal. I won’t say that her damaged take on love is the last word on it, but let’s get real here, ladies – we all know what it feels like to be a victim, and Dusty fearlessly plumbs the very depths of that for us.

Released in early 1966, this single was Dusty’s biggest hit ever – her only UK #1, and a smashing #4 success in the US. Throughout the rest of her career, this was her big concert showstopper, though its vocal demands made her dread singing it -- just when you think she can't go any higher, the key shifts upward yet again for that last verse -- ouch! While Dusty started her career with gutsy interpretations of American soul numbers, this song taps another vein, once that's not so familiar to me: diva-like Italian pop. An English translation of an Italian number called "Io che non vivo (senza te)" (or "I, who can't live without you"), it’s so operatic, it should carry a warning label.

Dig that melodramatic scribble of strings that underlines her vocal entrance: “When I said I needed you /You said you would always stay.” We know what’s coming – let’s just wait for that other shoe to drop. “It wasn’t me who changed, but you / And now you’ve gone away.” What we have here is a Grievance, girls. And so it follows, as the night the day, she’s going to have to abase herself for love, traipse right after him and track him down, “and beg you / To come home.” (The way Dusty throws her voice into that “beg” is heart-wrenching.)

Pride? That’s for those who don’t really love. Stripping away every last vestige of dignity, Dusty reins in her voice to supplicate, “You don’t have to say you love me / Just be close at hand.” The chord shifts upward, raising the stakes (and the volume): “You don’t have to stay forever / I will understand.” Another shift, and she clenches down, all her passion bursting through: “Believe me, / Believe me, / I can’t help but love you” (her vocal shiver on “can’t” is simply heart-breaking) “But believe me / I’ll never tie you down.” That “tie you down” sounds so frail and tentative, it simply kills me.

There’s a shivering breakdown after that chorus, returning to the second verse: “Left alone with just a memory,” Dusty describes herself, dropping behind the beat as if she’s crippled. “Life seems dead and so unreal,” and her nauseated curl on “dead” cuts to the bone. “All that’s left is loneliness / There’s nothing left to feel.” But somehow we know that there’s a lot more to feel, and Dusty is just about to lay it on us.

“You don’t have to stay forever,” Dusty assures him in the second half of the chorus. Jesus, what are you doing, girl? How can you say that? You’re laying yourself on the road in front of his car for just a few more nights? This is the absolute limit, the furthest love can go without being masochism. (Or maybe it IS masochism.)

You thought you were in love? Hell, no, Dusty is going to show you what love is, even if her vocal cords rupture. It isn’t pretty, but goddamit it’s extraordinary. I’m humbled by her no-holds-barred passion, every time I listen to this track. All you modern soul singers, the Amy Winehouses and Lily Allens and even the Adeles and Duffys of this world – behold the master at the top of her game, and know how far you still have to go.

You Don't Have To Say You Love Me video

You Don't Have To Say You Love Me sample

“Is This Love” / Bob Marley & the Wailers

28 DAYS OF LOVE SONGS

Time for a palate cleanser, courtesy of that founding father of reggae, Bob Marley. By the time this came out, on the Wailers' 1978 album Kaya, reggae had gone a bit mainstream, and there's no question that this love song is as smooth as toffee. As it lopes along at a rocksteady pace, it makes love seem like the most untroubled, simple thing in the world. But then, maybe it should be -- maybe it is.

"I wanna love you / And treat you right," Marley announces in the very first line -- now there's a novel idea. "I wanna love you / Every day and every night," he reiterates, just in case you were wondering. The melodic pattern is dead simple, a hopeful upward phrase followed by a circling line that practically snuggles up into a cozy resting place. This guy has no ulterior motives, no crippling doubts, and the loose-limbed groove of that relaxed beat beckons you in -- hey! the water's fine!

I love how he puts love right up there with food and shelter as one of the necessities of life: "We'll be together / With a roof right over our heads; / We'll share the shelter / Of my single bed." (There's an inexplicably sexy line, isn't it, girls?). "We'll share the same room / For Jah provides the bread." Now we all know that Jah doesn't always provide the bread, but I'm swept away by his faith in things working out. Even if they're living in one cramped room and spooning together on a narrow cot, they'll be happy, and that's what counts.

That's just about it for lyrics -- except for the next verse's memorable "I-eeh-I-eeh-I-eeh-I-eeh-I /I'm willing and able, / So I throw my cards on your table." Mmmm, I do love a confident man. Not that the relationship's a done deal, not yet; the chorus consists of Marley singing over and over, in pulsing surges of melody, "Is this love - is this love - is this love - / Is this love that I'm feelin'?" and "I wanna know." But I don't get that he's anxious or uncertain about it -- it's more like he's observing his own momentous emotion with wonderment and awe. He's on the threshold of something BIG, the thing that will make his whole life click into place, and who can blame him for marveling at it? You can surf along on that steady rhythm base (or riddim, as they say in Jamaica), but his excitement keep bursting out in those spangly little blurts on the organ, the taps of cowbell, and the wind-soughs from the backing vocals.

It's mysterious, really, how a song like this works. Part of it is just the warm texture of Marley's vocals, plus his incredibly deft phrasing, playing against the beat and then playing against his against-the-beat beat -- it's the soul of reggae, that off-beat shift and thrust. There's just enough production to sound lush, and not too much to overwhelm our sense of these very real lovers (in that delicious single bed). However they pull it off, all I know is that I want to sink into this song, and wrap it around me.

Is this love? You betcha.

Is This Love sample

“The Love You Save (May Be Your Own)” / Joe Tex
28 DAYS OF LOVE SONGS

So many of these love songs I've been writing about are sung by the lovers themselves, who're out to woo or wheedle or settle some score -- they're saturated with Vested Interest. But now here for a change is this neglected treasure from 1966. Warning: This has NOTHING to do with the Jackson Five's thrilled-up joyride of a song with the same title, despite the vaguely similar "Stop!" of the Jacksons' opening. No, this is a slow number, a cautionary tale for those who have loved and lost -- a classic example of The R&B Advice Song. Most advice songs involve the singer counseling a friend (think of “Tell Her You Love Her” or “She Loves You”); vested interests still creep in. Not so Joe Tex. He's acting purely in the public interest, accepting the mantle of street preacher, delivering a sermon on the nature of love to whatever congregation he can find.

Apparently, throughout the 1960s Joe Tex and James Brown were locked in a notorious rivalry, ignited (naturally) over a woman. James Brown prevailed -- as a kid I heard plenty of his stuff and hardly any Joe Tex, except for the late novelty "Ain't Gonna Bump No More With No Fat Woman." (Tex quit show biz after his conversion to Islam and died young, of a heart attack, in 1982.) Thanks however to Elvis Costello, who featured this on his 2005 Starbucks Artist's Choice compilation -- a landmark album in my life, for very personal reasons -- I finally came to the Joe Tex party, and now I'm making up for lost time. This guy was amazing, with a slyness and subtlety and vulnerability you never got from the Godfather of Soul.

I love how he turns the ballad tempo into a world-weary tromp, with heavy-hearted percussion and admonishing trombones. Oh, yes, brothers and sisters, gather round, for I know whereof I speak. He's the Voice of Experience, as he establishes in the first two verses—“People, I've been misled / And I've been afraid / I've been hit in the head / And left for dead” (he also says he’s been “abused,” “accused,” “pushed around,” “brutalized,” “given til sundown to get out of town” -- man oh man). With all that suffering, worn into every tremor and creak of his expressive sweet tenor, he's a certified expert on the pain of love.

It all leads up to the chorus: “But I ain't never / In my life before / Seen so many love affairs / Go wrong as I do today.” Check out his masterful phrasing, how he lags dolefully over the words as if shaking his head. Then he puts his foot down: “I want you to STOP,” an abrupt caesura underlined by a twiddle of horns and vibes; “And find out what's wrong / Get it right / Or just leave love alone.” Those are your choices, folks, and he sounds faintly disgusted by all these screw-ups. With finger-wagging vibrato, he warns, plunging darkly into his lowest voice, “Because the love you save today / May very well-l-l-l be your own.” People, you’ve been schooled.

The Love You Save video

“The One I Love” / R.E.M.

"Modern Love" / David Bowie

"Addicted to Love" / Robert Palmer

28 DAYS OF LOVE SONGS

Oy, sorry I'm posting this late -- got distracted by the Oscars. (Yay, Slumdog!) So it's appropriate that today's post, which was supposed to be yesterday's post, is all about videos -- specifically, a trio of 80s vids from the Golden Age of MTV, representing three songs that were absolutely inescapeable in their day -- and virtually impossible for me to get out of my head once they're in.

If MTV hadn't already existed, they'd have had to invent it so that David Bowie could re-charge his career, with perplexing visuals further mystifying his already mystifying songs (kinda like Bertolt Brecht goes disco). When I first heard Modern Love, on his 1983 album Let's Dance, I couldn't believe that he was actually singing "I catch the paper boy / But things don't really change / I'm standing in the wind / But I never wave bye-bye" -- but there is the Thin White Duke himself on screen, gaily waving bye-bye. This video is teasingly non-literal -- instead of acting out the song (too boring), it's a (staged) stage performance, shot in super-saturated colors. I keep trying to extract his "message" about the travails of modern love, from that plummy spoken word opening ("I know when to go out / I know when to stay in / Get things done") through the slightly anguished yelping of the verses ("There's no sign of life / There's just the power to charm"). Then I give up; whatever modern love is, it's too discombobulated to pin down. The second half of the song collapses into a call-and-response villanelle, Bowie free-associating against his back-up singers, "modern love" morphs into "church on time" into "god and man," going from Dionne Warwick to My Fair Lady to Milton to Sartre and back again. (My favorite line: "Church on time / Makes me par-ty"). The real purpose of this piece? To watch David Bowie jiving around in his beautifully cut suit, darting mascared glances, his cheekbones as divine as ever.

Then in 1985 Robert Palmer out-Bowied Bowie with this iconic video for Addicted To Love. Funny to think that now sex addiction is an acknowledged psychological condition (hello, David Duchovny!); when this came out in 1985 it just seemed like a joke. “Your lights are on, but you’re not home / Your mind is not your own / Your heart sweats, your body shakes / Another kiss is what it takes” – and there’s Robert Palmer in a suit and slick long hair, surrounded by a phalanx of the sexiest possible French models, with glossy scarlet lips and lithe hips, jiggling seductively behind their electric guitars. At first you think he’s singing about his own addiction, but no, he’s singing about how he’ll get this woman hooked on him – “Your heart beats in double time / Another kiss and you’ll be mine.” It’s all about the groove, of course, that prowling syncopation and the harsh, relentless electronic pulse of this song. “Whoa, you like to think that you’re immune to the stuff, oh yeah / It’s closer to the truth to say you cant get enough, / You know you’re gonna have to face it, / You’re addicted to love.” It’s a pitiless piece of magic.

As far as MTV went, it was all downhill from there -- directors started using music videos as career springboard and songwriters paid more attention to their storyboards than on making a tight radio-ready track. R.E.M. may have started out as a Southern jam band, but then Michael Stipe got delusions of being a Serious Artist and Social Critic -- witness the surreal montage of this bloated rock anthem (cue up The One I Love, from 1987's album Document). How Stipe wrings so much passion from such weird, off-kilter material, I don’t know. If you just listen to it, it seems a haunting middle-of-the-night highway driving song, with that opening line – “This one goes out to the one I love”--evoking every disembodied song dedication you’ve ever heard on late-night radio. That minor-key melody is so melancholy, I’m aching already for these separated lovers, as he repeats, “This one goes out to the one I’ve left behind.” But when you get past the apocalyptic grandeur of those guitar riffs, what’s the scenario here? A musician on the road? A trucker? A college student on a road trip? A soldier’s lament (that would explain the chorus, where Stipe bellows “Fire” over and over, though for ages I was convinced he was singing the name “Diane”). One thing for sure; this doesn’t work as a love song – except that it does. If you’ve ever been separated from someone you’re involved with, Stipe's tortured wail captures exactly what it feels like. Who cares what the lyrics say, when you can confound your audience with an arty video?