More than words
Songwriter and journalist Harry Harris explains the secrets behind the best lovesongs ever written. Illustration (above) by Maisy Summer.
“Love, love, is a verb, love is a doing word,” goes the opening line to Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’, and in terms of intros that hook you into what a song is trying to do, it’s right up there.
One of those statements that crystallises something you implicitly understand in a way that you’ve never heard before.
Love songs, though, are a different matter. The best love songs aren’t about doing anything. They’re about living in the feeling of loving someone, and trying to understand the chaos your brain has been suddenly plunged into.
In these cases, love is more the abstract noun, unquantifiable and untouchable, but something you know when you feel it, when you’re in it. This paradox is what defines a good love song. The feeling of knowing exactly and surely what’s happening to you, whilst at the same time not having any words to accurately describe it. Elvis Presley’s ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’, written by the songwriting trio of Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore and George David Weiss, is the perfect love song for this reason. Its chorus line is a big, declarative statement that articulates just how deep the narrator of the song has fallen: “I can’t help falling in love with you.”
There is an pained acceptance that this thing is happening to them, and they’re powerless to stop it, and the clarity of the line is replicated in the verses leading up to it too.
Simple statements, no ten dollar words, but in the song’s bridge we have an attempt to describe the more abstract, elemental nature of love: Like a river flows, surely out to sea, darling so it goes, some things, you know, are meant to be… And it’s not just this song that pulls off this trick. Bob Dylan’s ‘I Want You’ contains verses of dense poetry, broken up by the chorus line of “I want you, I want you, I want you so bad,”; Nick Cave’s ‘Into My Arms’ spends its verses interrogating the most spiritual aspects of life itself, before a similarly simple repeated refrain of “into my arms, oh lord, into my arms, oh lord.”
It’s there in ‘God Only Knows’ by The Beach Boys, it’s there in ‘Time After Time’ by Cyndi Lauper, it’s there in ‘Maps’ by Yeah Yeah Yeahs – something intangible giving way to something immediate and vulnerable. Even in the love songs that are more joyous, this pattern repeats.
Think of the heady, summery metaphors sung by The Temptations before the simplicity of ‘My Girl’s chorus or ‘Wonderful World’ by Sam Cooke, that list of all the things the narrator doesn’t know, before the final, declarative hook that brings us right back down to earth. However, despite this pattern being recognisable enough to spot in any number of love songs past and present, and satisfying enough that each of those songs stands apart as brilliant and unique in their own right, when it comes to writing love songs you can’t rely on patterns.
Sometimes you need things to fall in your lap. In the musical Operation Mincemeat, about the true story of the secret mission that helped the allies win World War Two – a mission that involved dressing up a corpse as a fallen British soldier, packing him full of fake strategic documents and dumping him off the coast of Spain so the Nazis would find him – there’s a heartstring-pulling song called ‘Dear Bill’ (it’s on SoundCloud, the company is called SpitLip, I really recommend you looking it up). It centres around the writing of a fake love letter from a woman to her love fighting on the front as part of this man’s belongings, and has in its chorus the line: “Why did we meet in the middle of a war? What a silly thing for anyone to do.”
I remember watching that show for the first time and listening to that song and being a wreck, as the pain and the love and the grief of the song all unfurled at the same time, and felt crystallised in that line. Luckily one of its writers, Natasha Hodgson, is a fifth of my most active Whatsapp groups, and she told me that line was written in the real letter that was placed on the body. Once they had that, the rest of the song became clear.
Every songwriter I know, and I include myself in this, harbours a secret fear that the most recent song they’ve written will be the last song they’ll ever write. That suddenly, somehow, the well is tapped.
So really, despite this piece of writing having started out as an attempt to break down what a love song is, and the similarities among some of the best (and when I say best, I mean: my favourites), there really is no rule about what makes a good love song, and no formula on how to write them.
Some people will tell you that it’s harder to write songs when you’re feeling happy, which you’d imagine precludes the writing of love songs, but I don’t buy that. There’s a myth that creative people work best when they’re wringing out the pain, and that every song is an act of personal catharsis. I don’t think that’s necessarily true either. What I do think is that to write a love song, you to need to be willing to try and figure out why someone, or something, can make you feel a certain kind of way – and then accept that no matter how hard you try, you’ll never find an answer. You just have to go with that.
