Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone – we love you.
We also love music, as you know. And whatever genre or style of music you love, you can almost guarantee it will be littered with love songs.
On this most romantic day of the year (if you’re 12), we thought we should tell you all about the love songs we love. But, as we’re a Picky bunch of Bastards, we couldn’t do that without also telling you about the love songs we hate as well.
Tom Burrows
LOVE
Father John Misty – ‘I Went To The Store One Day’
‘I Went To The Store One Day’ is the sound of someone arriving at love. The protagonist of I Love You, Honeybear is a drug-abusing, narcissistic fuck-up who flails between disastrous encounters, and at one point literally lists the reasons why he wouldn’t be the ‘ideal husband’ of the song’s title. But it all leads to the resolution of this song.
To gently picked acoustic guitar backed by the swell of strings, Josh Tillman starts from the modest setting of the moment he met his wife, and expands outwards to their future lifetime together. House buying, seven daughters, inevitable death. It rather perfectly ends with the immortal words his wife Emma first uttered to him in that parking lot. A perfect song.
HATE
Plain White T’s – ‘Hey There Delilah’ (2006)
The narrator of ‘Hey There Delilah’ is the enemy of love. He’s the performative, ponytailed acoustic guitar-wielding campfire dweller, cooing into Delilah’s eyes about how she looks so pretty. His grating, twee voice is a giveaway. He doesn’t believe what he’s saying – he thinks it’s what she wants to hear. We know – Delilah knows – he doesn’t mean it. He’s here for a good time, not a long time.
This song came out in the UK when I was 15, and it was a pre-viral sensation, inexplicably reaching no. 2 on the Singles Chart. But even as a teenager, I couldn’t stand its insincerity. To my ears, this berk was masquerading. A fraud of love. And just like his supposed love for Delilah, Plain White T’s were gone, overnight. Thank god.
Fliss Clarke
Love song I LOVE: Close Encounters by Bat for Lashes
This haunting, otherworldly track from Bat for Lashes 2016 concept album The Bride cuts through me every time. The atmospheric warped chords and verse lyrical images of pale green light, bright moon, windswept lands break into a chorus that is just so pure. The simplicity of Natasha Khan’s delicately soaring voice declaring “you know that I’ll love til the stars don’t shine, you know that you’ll always fill this heart of mine” is so tender, beautiful, sad and joyous at the same time. It feels spiritual, transcendent, and seems to speak of Love with a capital L. The kind that isn’t merely romantic, friendly, familial or desiring but is higher and deeper and beyond words and worlds.
Love song I HATE: (Everything I do) I do it for you – Bryan Adams
Oh god it’s the definition of dirge: slow, miserable, boring. It feels like being dragged plodding through a gravelly tunnel of grey sludge… for SIX AND A HALF minutes. It seeeeeems to end at 4:10 but launches into a needless reprise for Adams to warble without feeling until fade. I find everything about this song irritating: the lyrics are inane (“There’s nowhere, unless you’re there”); the parentheses in the title being the first clause; the build without the payoff of even ending where it naturally ought (4:10). And this song sold 15 million copies worldwide. It’s one of the biggest selling singles ever and still holds the record of longest unbroken run at number 1 in the UK with 16 consecutive weeks. Baffling and beyond all reason. I simply do not understand.
Fran Slater
Love: The National – Slow Show
It’s more than obvious of me to pick The National for this one, but when I thought about a love song that gets me in the gut it had to be this one.
Not only is it very typical of everything I love about The National – the way it builds, the insistent beat of the rhythm section, the tone of Matt’s vocals as he battles his emotions – but it is also, at times, some of the most interesting writing about love I’ve ever heard.
The repeated lines of ‘you know I dreamed about you/for 29 years/before I saw you’ might be the best way I have heard a lyricist tell someone that they love them.
But I also love the way that the song shows how anxiety mixes with new love – that feeling of excitement always tempered by the fact that you could fuck it up at any second:
‘I wanna hurry home to you/Put on a slow, dumb show for you/And crack you up/So you can put a blue ribbon on my brain/God, I’m very, very frightened/I’ll overdo it.’
Genius.
Hate: One Direction – That’s What Makes You Beautiful
Maybe this is an easy target, but fuck me I hate this song.
Knowing that my niece, and millions of other young girls around the world, were listening to this song while their small brains were forming was definitely a challenge for me.
This is a song where four lads who looked like they’d cut their own hair with shears sang about how a young woman is only beautiful because she doesn’t know she’s beautiful and clearly has had all the confidence knocked out of her by other creepy boys who cut their hair with shears. Absolutely maddening.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being shy, or struggling with confidence. But there’s definitely something wrong with four lads hanging around and waiting for the girl who looks like she thinks badly of herself.
Creepiest song of all time? Possibly. Either this one or anything written by Jarvis Cocker.
Katie Burke
A LOVE SONG I LOVE: Lovesong, The Cure
It’s simple, impactful. It’s the perfect dedication: “whenever I’m alone with you, you make me feel like I am home again…” not to mention whole again, young again, fun again. Being with that person who renews you in all of the best ways. Wherever you are in the world, however long we are together, I will always love you.
It doesn’t need to try too hard musically or lyrically; it’s just right. My first ever proper boyfriend sent me a voicemail, playing guitar and singing this song, forever etched into my mind decades later. I’m pretty sure there’s a part of me that will always love him, too. Not in a romantic way, but because I’m inherently nostalgic and it becomes about the memories more than the person. It reminds me of silly nights out in my 20s, and the platonic adoration of my friends, because they make me feel that way, too. Love endures, as does this absolute belter.
If I was allowed an honourable mention, it would be Radiohead’s cover of Nobody Does it Better, originally by Carly Simon. Introduced by Thom Yorke as “the sexiest song ever written,” I would absolutely concur.
A LOVE SONG THAT DOES MY HEAD IN: You and Me Song, The Wannadies
It felt a bit like shooting fish in a barrel to pick a song by Ed Sheeran or Adele for this one, although I’m not sure whether this one is entirely left field either. Aside from attending a wedding where this was a (super awkward) first dance, and witnessing a friend bawl her eyes out in Glasgow’s Garage Nightclub after a breakup while those around her snogged to this tune, I can ALMOST see past the relentless cheer and “bop bop bops” and the consistent overplaying. However the fact that the dude keeps doing things he actively KNOWS his other half hates during arguments absolutely does my head in. Best of luck for always and forever, mate, when they finally see past your pish. It’s the chosen twee love anthem for people who never got past chart music to find absolutely anything better.
When checking the lyrics of this song, making sure it was as meh as I recalled, I was reliably informed via the internet that it was used in an episode of Coronation Street in 2003, back when it was a staple watch for me. Richard Hillman is listening to it as he drives the collective Platt family into the canal as part of a murder-suicide bid. The family thankfully survive, however Richard cops it – as he was a right baddy his demise was worth a cheer. Remembering this storyline has been the only positive outcome of revisiting this song.
Rick Larson
Best: The Goon Sax – ‘Make Time 4 Love’
An impossible task, this, to choose one. I considered Ray Charles’s ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ (my wedding first dance song), ‘History Lesson—Part II’, the Minutemen’s love letter to punk rock and best friends, Van Morrison’s epic ‘When the Healing Has Begun’, and the unabashed ‘I Believe In a Thing Called Love’ live (you need the whole crowd falsetto-ing “Just listen to the rhythm of my heart”) by The Darkness.
But, I settled on two minutes and nine seconds of pure pop perfection by this sadly now defunct Brisbane, Australia trio. These youngsters seemed wise beyond their years, capturing the work love can require and deserves to combat time’s erosion. The song is flat beautiful. It features one of the most deft and judicious uses of cowbell ever. The strings swell, the horns hit. Then suddenly it’s over too soon.
Worst: Ed Sheeran ‘The Shape of You’
One of the pernicious effects of songs like this is that AI songs will be harder to identify. Presumably an actual human being wrote this, but it comes across as the mistranslated output of a mainframe unfamiliar with basic concepts of life and love. “We talk for hours and hours about the sweet and sour and how your family is doing okay.” Yeah, I don’t believe you. The third verse starts, “One week in we let the story begin/We’re going out on our first date.” I thought the story began at the, you know, beginning when you met at a bar because—Ed’sLifeTips ™—the club is not the best place to find a lover. “Ed, shall we hit the club tonight?” “No, let’s grab some pints at the bar, mate, I’m looking to find a lover.”
Later Ed marvels that “Your love was handmade for somebody like me.” I don’t think you know what either “love” or “handmade” means, not in any deep way but just as a matter of basic vocabulary. This doesn’t work literally or metaphorically. Throughout, Ed repeats, “I’m in love with your body” interspersed with poetic tidbits like “We push and pull like a magnet do.” This is what you would get if you prompted ChatGPT to write a song from the POV of Ted Bundy by Insane Clown Posse. Don’t get me started on the music; let’s just say it’s dominated by synthetic marimba and leave it at that. Fuck this guy.
Matt Paul
Love: ‘Toothpaste Kisses’ by The Maccabees is one of my favourite songs, regardless of category. It has so much sentimental value for me across many formative relationships. It’s simple, and cute but in its sincerity it captures the intimate moments of falling for someone. Whether you’ve been with them 10 days, 10 months or 10 years.
Hate: It has to be Wet Wet Wet with ‘Love Is All Around’. It’s a saccharine mess with double helpings of pop gloss. Add to it that my mum was obsessed with it when it came out. I normally love her music taste but this exception got way too many plays. Hearing it now just puts me on edge. Plus if we’re talking romantic, no one wants to be thinking of their mother.
Picky Bastards 