Wait A Minute, Something's Going Wrong

Does anyone really write good love songs any more?  Yeah, yeah..I know.  There are always going to be love songs and there always seems to be some sudsy ballyhoo on the sales chart.  Even hair metal bands used to make a living on the power ballad when that's all the gas they had.  But the original question was; does anyone really write good love songs any more?

I'm talking about writers who can use one honest twist in the lyrics that can make your head turn.  Writers who knew it took more than mid-tempo and a minor chord to set the mood.  Writers who could find a phrase that would jolt a name hard through your mind and clench your gut.

Al Green was love incarnate. Incendiary and phoenix, alpha and omega, dust to dust, have and have not.  He once wrote, "Someone's on the phone/Three o'clock in the morning/Talkin' about how she could make it right".  Is she telling you that she can make it right, or are you telling her that she can make it right?  Which is it?  It doesn't matter.  Al is channeling both F. Scott Fitzgerald and his own night of being haunted by the void.  You're coming along with him because it's your ghost story too and Al is in the exorcist role.

Marvin Gaye's "Here, My Dear" has had renewed attention over the last decade and rightfully so.  Imagine being inside Gaye's mind while he was in studio, knowing the album is being made solely to pay for a divorce.  Knowing the relationship wasn't just damaged, it was totally destroyed.  Knowing he never could filter his inner thoughts and feelings.  It just flowed out like water from a broken pipe, something that started as a simple leak, each attempt to stop the leak made the water flow faster.  He wound up chronicling a swim for life.

Ann Peebles wrote wonderfully of the introspection that can come when alone in bed, with rain beating on the window pane.  The discordant opening tones of sound, sour and alarmingly wrong, it just sets her off.

Soul and R&B performers never had a stranglehold on lost love. George Jones' albums should have come with a parental advisory label.  Not to warn them of what their children would hear, but to warn them specifically, "Caution: These songs could happen to you!"

Lennon wrote, "Red is the color that will make me blue/In spite of you, it's true"

Pete Townshend had Jimmy from Quadrophenia say, "The girl I used to love/Lives in this yellow house/Yesterday she passed me by/She doesn't want to know me now"

The Smithereens sang about the house we used to live.

Love is a rich vein.  It's a sucker's bet and a sure thing.  You lose it, find it, lose it again.  There is always a song to match your place in the short and long cycle.

For all the dreamy or angry, professed or denounced statements of love; it's always the words of Hoagy Carmichael that I hear:

Though I dream in vain
In my heart it will remain
My stardust melody
The memory of Love's refrain