14 Pitchfork Staffers on Their Favorite Love Songs
Valentine’s Day isn’t just about overpriced sweets, uncomfortably packed restaurants, and cringey greeting cards—it’s about love, too! And what better way to express affection than through music? From bygone odes to telephone calls to paeans honoring lifelong commitment to cautionary tales about the pitfalls of romance, here are the love songs we’ll have on repeat this weekend.
Labi Siffre: “Bless the Telephone” (1971)
Nothing gives me more anxiety than answering a phone call. At this point, picking up means receiving bad news or listening to someone blather on and on. But with one tender song, Labi Siffre makes me want to spend hours with a phone cradled to my ear.
Taken from his 1971 album The Singer and the Song, “Bless the Telephone” finds the British artist lilting over finger-picked acoustic guitar, telling us how hearing a simple greeting from his lover is enough to make him feel less lonely. Siffre met the real love of his life, Peter John Carver Lloyd, in 1964, and the pair stayed together for nearly 50 years until Lloyd’s death in 2013. It’s lovely to think of how phone calls must have nourished their connection through the decades, collapsing the space between them. –Eric Torres
The Knife: “Heartbeats” (2002)
Is “Heartbeats” actually a love song? Like pretty much everything the Swedish brother/sister duo the Knife ever did, its core meaning remains obscured behind masks both sonic and literal. But it sure feels like one to me, somehow capturing how the rush of infatuation can bloom into something divine, despite inscrutable lines like “mind is a razor blade” and “you kept us awake with wolves’ teeth.” The José González cover from that bouncy-ball commercial is the more famous version, but the original is the masterpiece: Karin Dreijer’s vocals are giddy, and the bass synth bounds ahead like someone who just found out their crush feels the same way. –Amy Phillips
Alvvays: “Archie, Marry Me” (2014)
Contemporary dating so often boils down to who we can absorb into our highly-optimized lives, as if we’re all sizing up romantic prospects the way we would mini-vacuum cleaners on Amazon. So many love songs are subject to similarly rigid marketing calculations, but not “Archie, Marry Me.”
The indie-pop gem from Canadian band Alvvays is a serenade for and about the modern skeptic. It’s foregrounded by pragmatic concerns: What’s the point of marriage when there are student loans to pay? And yet it’s a quiet defense of the type of windswept romanticism evoked by old photos. The ringing clarity with which singer Molly Rankin introduces the concept of lifelong commitment reminds us that it can be brave to seize such an ideal and live it earnestly. Everything else—the flowers, the bombast, the social expectations—can be discarded. –Cat Zhang
Future: “Throw Away” (2014)
On the first half of this track from Future’s 2014 tape Monster, the rapper pretends to be happy, but his unjustifiable, womanizing ways have left him empty inside. “I can’t lose my concentration, girl, I ain’t go on dates,” he says, unable to realize that he’s hurting himself just as much. Then, on the dreary second half, he reckons with his past and tries to win back the woman he mistreated. “I was fucking on a slut and I was thinking about you,” he wails, issuing what is likely the world’s worst-ever apology. “Throw Away” is a cautionary tale that offers two valuable lessons: 1) Being a player is not cool, and you should open up your heart for once, but also 2) Get out fast and avoid the lure of Valentine’s Day before you, too, are pathetically groveling at your ex’s feet. –Alphonse Pierre
Leonard Cohen: “If I Didn’t Have Your Love” (2016)
Early in his career, Leonard Cohen might have built up a love song one lived detail at a time: a cup of tea, a birthmark, an unmade bed, and other small parts that eventually accumulate into a relationship. By his final album, though, he didn’t have that kind of time.
“If I Didn’t Have Your Love,” a magisterial ballad released less than a month before Cohen’s death, captures love’s immensity. Each verse begins with a vision of apocalypse and ends with a simple refrain: “That’s how it would be/How my life would seem to me/If I didn’t have your love/To make it real.” The impossible gravity of Cohen’s late-career voice serves him particularly well here: When he sings of a bitter wind that swallows the world whole, he sounds like he’s really felt it blowing through his coat. No matter how often Cohen returns from these nightmares to the comfort of his partner, you can’t shake the feeling that the end has already arrived. –Andy Cush
Spiritualized: “I Think I’m in Love” (1997)
Like a lot of Spiritualized’s perfect album Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, the first part of this eight-minute track is explicitly about taking drugs. Then a shaggy groove saunters in, and frontman Jason Pierce spins a series of clever romantic couplets that operate like coin flips: “I think that you’re my dream girl/Probably just dreaming.” With these lines, “I Think I’m in Love” takes on the riddle of romantic illusion—the dizzy high of infatuation and the fear of fooling ourselves again. Delivered alongside spiraling synthesizers and shuddering harmonica, the effect is as heady as any other type of mind-altering experience. –Anna Gaca
Se So Neon: “A Long Dream (긴 꿈)” (2017)
Getting back into dating after the end of a long relationship can be a harrowing experience filled with angst, worry, and questions about how you ever let anyone get so close to you in the first place. On “A Long Dream,” South Korean indie rockers Se So Neon look beyond that terror to the moment you bounce back, when the wary crush that you’ve been holding starts to turn into something more. “I changed a bit, at some point,” frontwoman So-yoon sings in morose Korean, before perking up: “Then this hidden heart started to wonder about you, little by little.” Maybe it won’t last, but then again, maybe it doesn’t matter. –Noah Yoo
Teddy Pendergrass: “When Somebody Loves You Back” (1978)
Only Teddy Pendergrass could make math this sexy. Admittedly, it’s not the most complex calculus: In this track from his 1978 album Life Is a Song Worth Singing, the Philly soul legend croons about the joys of “50-50 love,” the kind of enduring affair where both partners bring their best efforts, and selves, to each other. (In the outro, he breaks things down even further, proclaiming he’s not interested in any “70-30” love, no “60-40” partnership.) Over strings that sound like libidinous bee swarms, Pendergrass sings of love that is broken in, grown up, and all the more joyful in its equality. –Stacey Anderson
The Microphones: “I Felt Your Shape” (2001)
“I Felt Your Shape” feels like a love song, sounds like a love song, and might even be one. What first seems like a short, sweet distillation of the awkward thrill of a new crush could also be read as a dark requiem for a crush’s false optimism. The spare acoustic song is about maturing into an empathetic partner, instead of desperately clawing at love with the blind lust of youth. Phil Elverum conjures a vignette that’s so ghostly, it’s like reaching for a shape before realizing there’s nothing there. –Drew Litowitz
Bruce Hornsby and the Range: “Every Little Kiss” (1986)
“Every Little Kiss” is a song about talking on the phone with someone you love after you get off from work. That’s all there is to it. There’s no kissing or conspiring; we don’t even get to hear about the phone call itself—just the promise that it’s going to happen. So why does it feel so ecstatic?
Maybe it’s the way Bruce Hornsby can’t keep still: the hums and hiccups and jittery hey yeah’s between each line. Maybe it’s the fact that, musically, every part sounds like it could be the chorus. Even at the very end—after the piano solo and the guitar solo and the rousing final chorus—he throws in one more little micro-hook, wailing along with a harmonica and repeating the title as everything fades out. You feel the desperation, see the sun setting in the distance. He doesn’t want to say goodbye. –Sam Sodomsky
Van Morrison: “Summertime in England” (1980)
“Summertime in England” finds Van Morrison operating in full-tilt mystic mode as he and his band stretch out for nearly 16 jazz-inflected minutes. As he begs for company on a whirlwind rural getaway, he leaps across the names of poets and places like river stones. But within this hazy framework lies sharp images of a tattered coat, a dangling red robe, and the voice of gospel great Mahalia Jackson cutting through the ether. Between brassy instrumental interludes, the band snaps back together around a rhythm that’s anxious with anticipation and eager with desire. Morrison’s blunt koan of “It ain’t why, it just is” is about as good of an explainer as you can get on falling in love. –Allison Hussey
Joeboy: “Baby” (2019)
“Baby” is part plea and part pledge of allegiance. As a prodigy of the Nigerian singer Mr. Eazi, 22-year-old Joeboy has the world at his fingertips—but on this hit from last year, the woman he wants seems just out of his reach. His love doesn’t sound unrequited, just a little uneven. “Girl, I don’ give you all I got, but it’s not enough for you,” he proclaims, sounding more challenged than resentful. With its sweet whistles and warbling percussion, “Baby” makes you feel like you, too, are worth a pursuit. –Mankaprr Conteh
Galaxie 500: “Tugboat” (1988)
Galaxie 500’s debut single is a reverb-drenched downer about a loner who finds bliss away from the noise of the world. But despite its melancholic nature, “Tugboat” has a romantic undercurrent perhaps perceptible to only the most wistful of dreamers. It’s possible that the reclusive narrator isn’t running away from society to be alone so much as he is seeking the quiet contentment that can be found with a loved one. A tugboat, after all, is most effective when it’s alongside another vessel. –Quinn Moreland
John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman: “Dedicated to You” (1963)
On this spotlit jazz ballad, crooner Johnny Hartman’s supple baritone shares a slow dance with John Coltrane’s wispy tenor sax. There are devotions within devotions throughout the standard: It details all the things—books, paintings, stars—a heart-eyed romantic would dedicate to their love if given the chance. On paper, it could easily curdle into sappy mush. But Hartman’s delivery has a spectral quality, as if he’s a tuxedoed ghost serenading his earthbound partner, who is in turn given breath through Coltrane’s horn. “With you I know a lifetime could be just one heavenly place,” Hartman sings, his voice luxuriating in limbo. –Ryan Dombal
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
