So, which are the songs that never go out of your head?
If music be the food of love, play on. Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene I. Nothing (perhaps) sums up music and lyrics better. So, with Valentine’s Day looming up like a dragnet and one having to pull out all kinds of rabbits from hats in order to reinforce ‘Love is eternal’ and ‘Love is all around,’ I find myself going through the downloads on my phone — because that’s where my coterie of chosen music resides.
Over time, the most enduring anthem to love, for me, has been Annie’s Song. John Denver. Who sang mostly country songs, about Rocky Mountain
High and Aspenglow. When I was a teenager, having utterly confused notions about the ‘Love of your life’ (was it Romeo for Juliet or Oliver for Jenny? But how could that be — didn’t they all end in tragedy?), a male friend of mine (also a teenager) had told me when “he falls in love,” the first thing he’ll do is write down the lyrics of
Annie’s Song on a page torn from his homework notebook (handwritten notes were in vogue those days) and send it by post to her (whoever The One would turn out to be). I’d listened to Annie’s Song many times over, but always referred to it as the ‘You fill up my senses’ number by Denver. Post my friend’s romantic pledge, I noted down the lyrics from the song the next time it played on All-India Radio’s Musical Bandbox (it played every Sunday, without fail, such was its popularity). Till this day, I know the lyrics by heart (“You fill up my senses,/ Like a night in a forest,/Like the mountains in springtime,/Like a walk in the rain…” and all the rest of it), and that combined with Denver’s stunning repertoire of pitch and cadence, still rules my heart. You’re never too old to let go of your first love… song.
In that age of innocence, there were others (mostly culled from Musical Bandbox — that used to be my primary channel for musical gratification), lower in the value chain, that live with me in my phone even today. Elvis Presley’s thunderous rendition (like only he, the greatest singer the world has seen or ever will, can do) of The Wonder of You (“When no one else can understand me,/When everything I do is wrong,/You give me hope and consolation,/You give me strength to carry on”), Kenny Rogers’ Lady (“Lady, I’m your knight in shining armour,/And I love you…”), Andy Williams’ Love Story signature from Oliver and Jenny’s story (“Where do I begin,/ To tell the story,/Of how great a love can be…”), Anne Murray’s You Needed Me (“I cried a tear,/ You wiped it dry”), Cliff Richards’ Evergreen Tree (“Oh darling,/Will our love be,/Like an evergreen tree?/ Stay evergreen and young,/As the seasons go…”), Lionel Richie’s Stuck On You (Stuck on you,/I’ve got this feeling down deep in my soul,/That I just can’t lose”), Diana Ross’s Endless Love (“My love,/ There’s only you in my life,/The only thing that’s right…”) and so on. One particular fave was Jim Reeves’ I Love You
More. Mostly because of the lyrics. At a time when I was getting to learn the nuances of visual imagery in language, “I love you more,/Than every wave,/ That breaks upon,/Some far and distant/Lonely island shore” just made me go into an optic funk; I’d actually be counting waves in my mind, and then giving up (if there ever was a visual counter to onomatopoeia, the lyrics of this song would be No 1 on the Retinal Billboard list).
Significantly — and, again, to my mind — all great love songs stopped being churned out mid90s onwards. Everything seems so angsty and frantic and convoluted since then. In that decade, I’d still swear by John Lennon’s caught-in-a-timewarp Jealous Guy and Woman. And I discovered two other standouts; I say standouts because they went against the grain of their singers. The first was Michael Jackson’s I Just Can’t Stop Loving You; you suddenly wanted to slow dance in Cedar Bend, not break into breakdance at the disco. Then, there was the folksy/poetic Simon & Garfunkel’s quirky romance Groovy Kind of Love.
At the turn of the millennium, I unearthed Don McLean’s Crying, Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares To You, and Joan Baez’s Love Song to a Stranger. Patty Smyth and Don Henley’s Sometimes
Love Just Ain’t Enough I cottoned on to when a friend told me her (then) boyfriend played it for her the evening they broke up.
In the 21st century, the greatest love song I’ve heard is No Fear Of Heights, by Katie Melua — so maybe I was a bit off-kilter when I stated all great romantic compositions ceased to be in the mid90s… No Fear Of Heights is summit-topping. It was part of the soundtrack for The Tourist, and as I was watching Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie navigate canal waters in Venice, at Reel Cinemas sometime in 2010, it started playing in the background, and I was suddenly writing down the lyrics on my BlackBerry hub (“You’re sending an email? Now???” roared the friend who had accompanied me to the theatre). I downloaded the song on my phone later — when technology equipped me to do so (I was a late bloomer to such knowhow).
My last love song conquest was a couple of years ago. Here’s how it played out: I was binge-watching the BBC legal series Silk (The Good Wife is perhaps the best American legal drama ever, but Silk is the best legal drama across all continents). In one episode, Martha Costello, the hard-knuckled female lead played by Maxine Peake, comes back home at the end of an emotionally-frazzled day, sips a glass of red, and puts on a song that makes her break down. It went, “Love me/Please love me…” and I realised I’d never heard that voice in my life. It took me a couple of hours to track down the song. Love Me,
Please Love Me is sung by Sandie Shaw, recorded in the late 1960s; she used to be called the ‘barefoot singer’ because she had size 7 feet but could only get size 6 shoes, so had to take them off while she sang so she could be comfortable. My task for Valentine’s Day, then, is cut out. Create an album called ‘Greatest Love Songs — Curated by Me’, and play on loop.