Love song blog

Commitment, dedication, promises. The song was originally written by the Cuban composer Gonzalo Roig in 1911, with lyrics written by him and his wife Blanca Becerra. Especially the Spanish version has become a standard, but even then it took about 20 years. I’ve always loved this version by Vera Lynn recorded, like most of her hits, during WW2.

Previously I wrote about the Momus song Rhetoric which has similar statements, trying to say “I will be eternally yours”, but phrasing it in such a way as if there was a condition in which love might end. Additionally there’s the idea that two people might be born to be with each other, a belief in destiny.

It is not important whether such a thing as destiny is real, or even could be. The emotion alone matters, and how love is such a strong impulse that it changes our thoughts, beliefs, our very being. It makes past disappointments insignificant, the present becomes fuzzy, permanent intoxication upon just seeing the beloved, and the future is suddenly certain, as if the universe itself had decided that this love must happen. Sure, one may think about it scientifically as a cocktail of hormones and the body trying to find a suitable mate, but what I’m interested in is the stuff of poems and paintings: the human experience, as unrealistic as it might be, as fanciful and inventive.

It is in the glory of the stars, in the birdsong, in the nights full of music, and when there is no music around, the notes still keep ringing. We hear them breathing together, sitting opposite each other drinking tea, or holding each other until the morning.

I have a fond memory of singing this song on a warm night while walking through some industrial park somewhere in New Zealand. “Here or on far distant shores”. I was not in a relationship at the time, but just thinking of love that transcends time and space is comforting, and how the thoughts may be with the beloved no matter what the distance is. There is time to be present, to focus completely on what is at hand. But can poets ever really do that, just to describe what is in front of us? Well, in a way. An important part of writing is observing things closely, being really present. But then to turn it into actual poetry or stories one has to sit down and remember, twist it through some viewpoint to make it interesting. In that way writing is also about displacement, thinking about things that are not here, things that have never been. Yet what a wonder it is, to be in love and to be relieved of the self-imposed duty to think of metaphors, and instead to reflect on the world with another soul, not just reflect images of beauty I happen to find in nature or in the city.

Floating, dreaming. The music bounces and flows at the same time, creating a sense of relaxed excitement. Contradictions inherent in falling in love. Anticipation, nervousness, eagerness, fear.

A Momus documentary states that this is a tongue-in-cheek attempt to write a love song. It’s fascinating that the song at the same time subverts the clichéd hyperboles of traditional love songs while still embracing them. There’s a sense of genuine feeling while still admitting that these phrases professing eternal love are glib and disingenuous.

The trick is in the contrast of unrealistic and realistic statements. Most declarations here sound meaningless because they’re never going to be tested, hence it’s just rhetoric. It’s easy to claim love will last until the end of time, until astronauts go walking on the sun. The fact that it’s never going to happen sounds reassuring, but listing impossible things would quickly become boring. It’s not difficult to come up with endless similar phrases, and in the end they amount to nothing, when in reality people broke up for petty reasons.

Yet there is cleverness in the hyperboles. In particular I like “till the melting clocks have chimed a melting hour,” probably referring to Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, and the phrase is just as surreal. What does it actually mean? Does it have to have a meaning? I don’t think so. It’s a love song, what do you expect?

And here come the contrasts: while they’re still declarations of lasting love, saying that “I’ll love you till the razorblades are held against my neck” or “you turn into a person I don’t know” are very well conceivable. These statements draw actual limits on love, something much closer than the end of the world. It makes the other statements look ridiculous, which is why this is tongue-in-cheek, showing the artificiality of love confessions while still saying that love is real. It’s just not usual in pop songs to say that there are limits to love, even if everybody knows it.

I don’t know if it’s intentional, but on the album Timelord this song, with its final line “I love you like the bee that dies, dies astride a queen” is followed by a song called Suicide Pact: “We were lovers – we made a suicide pact,” further bringing in some irony. The gentle followed by macabre. Not an uncommon theme in Momus oeuvre.

And still, the music is pleasant, and the repetitive phrases mean that if one is not attentively listening to everything, it’s easy to just go with the flow, embrace the feeling as a genuine declaration that doesn’t expose anything problematic in these songs. And maybe that’s what falling in love always entails, some forgetfulness of the myriad ways that relationships can go wrong, and how they do go awry around us. Just maybe not this time, not for us. May we find happiness that lasts till the world has stopped and time has lost its power.

More ambiguity. Dark music with minor and diminished chords, striking, dramatic strings strings, but a gently lilting, swaying melody in 12/8. Lyrics that are an appeal to a girl, yet with focus on darkness as salvation, whatever it is. It’s mostly the word darkness that makes the song mysterious, since it’s usually presented as a negative thing.

There is a religious aspect with talk of sin and how the girl’s darkness can somehow be redemptive. It’s the theme of the album Songs of Faith and Devotion, which is, as I’ve mentioned before, a reference to Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate, and how he also blends the secular with religious love, although mostly on later albums.

The girl might not be an actual human being, but a symbol of something else, be it illicit substances or death itself. Where do we seek salvation? In the middle of desperation we can cling to anything, ultimately to the notion of death as an end. Or the song can be heard as some kind of vampire story.

It is not clear who is doing the seducing. The narrator is pleading, but it’s almost like he’s the one asking to be seduced, hoping for a solution when the world leaves him unimpressed. The caress of a beloved, the caress of death, it’s all conflated in this religious imagery. Yet the soft singing and the impassioned arrangement is seductive in itself.

I remember listening to this song in the dark when I was a teenager. At the time I often listened to music with the lights out. It was somehow comforting. But darkness with music is different from darkness without. With music you can focus on other people’s emotions, escape from reality. Without it you have to face the emptiness of the night, its vague feeling of threat, or then your own thoughts, emotions, and your own emptiness. A lot of people aren’t comfortable with that, even when they say they love the dark.

It’s the darkness enhanced that’s seductive, a reduction. Mundane daytime phenomena are removed from the equation and it’s easier to see life to be simple. Perhaps that’s the true seductive notion, however we may pursue it. We’d like things to be simple, love and peace of mind to be attainable, and whatever object we attach to it, we call it a solution, salvation. That is what creates a sense of religiousness. Even the mundane becomes otherworldly when we ascribe such life-transforming powers to it. And to place such high hopes on a human being is inadvisable. It’s a burden to that person as much as oneself, even if it may sound somewhat flattering.

We may be saved by others, but they’re not saviors; their existence shouldn’t be defined solely by it. Even if we met some truly enlightened being who has limitless love, defining them as a savior means we’re already giving up on the notion of developing compassion for ourselves. Even better than compassion is the ability to inspire it in others. That kind of saving I’d hardly call darkness. But that’s just a label, as any description of comfort is bound to be symbolic. Darkness, light, green in blue. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

Some people do thrive on it, trying to save one person, only to become darkness themselves. Mutual destruction, a whirl of despair, clinging to each other as the last hope in the world, and the more the two cling to darkness, the more hopeless the rest of the world seems. It might be better to just look outside for a while, find something else worth admiring. Holding only one thing dear sounds like a recipe for depression as well as its symptom. And when one loses the only thing that mattered, what then?

Well, maybe. Leonard Cohen: “Only one thing made him happy and now that it was gone everything made him happy.”

A minor key, some hesitation, melancholy, perhaps expectation. We are different. No matter how smooth the arpeggios, how we fit together like bursts of bluesy scale runs with strummed chords, there is always something we might not understand about each other. It makes us vulnerable.

But difference is also a source of excitement. I don’t always understand you, but that means there is always more to explore, as long as we don’t take each other for granted. We can talk about our fears and desires, but there is something ineffable. The truth is that we’re hardly aware of our own motivations, sometimes realizing years later that what we thought was rational was just feelings which had been rationalized through some strange logic. So we shouldn’t take each other for granted either.

To be kissed to the core, the warm flow of feelings, bodies close, minds closer. Perhaps it’s a dream of something hardly possible: to be known like no-one else has known us, at our most bare essence. Does such an essence even exist? Perhaps if I surrender I could find it with you. Then what? Maybe the consequences don’t matter, because it’s a dream that can never be perfected, an ideal toward which we can strive together, trying to open up to each other. We may skirt around it for an eternity.

The core, the essence, the soul, it may just be a fabrication of the flow of ever-changing thoughts. When I want to open up, what is it that I am revealing? Is it just emptiness trying to take some tangible form for a moment only to fade away when the attention goes away? Whatever it may be, it is a very basic desire, perhaps a need, to strive for: affection for something we may not even know well ourselves. Whatever I am, I desire acceptance, and wish you to be the one I let close like no other orange.

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The lyrics are simple like a nursery rhyme, but that is why apples and oranges can be taken to some pretty far-off interpretations about difference. “Orange” is the woman who was the subject of many of Stewart’s early songs. The relationship didn’t end well, so hearing the minor chords here, and the use of past tense, seems like an anticipation of the stormy end. But that’s just hindsight.

A note on the music: Stewart is not always considered a part of the late 60s folk revival scene, but the influences are clearly there. Here the fingerpicking style is reminiscent of Bert Jansch. Stewart’s songs had a more pop-oriented approach later, but in the early songs the influence of Dylan and Fairport Convention can still be heard.