“Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.”
- Joan Crawford
What would we have if we took all the elements of love out of music? We'd have about five songs. It's hard to think of songs that don't have something to do with love, be it a new love, an old love, a lost love, unrequited love, a love gone wrong, a broken heart, a physical attraction. Without the presence of love in a song, we get Who Let the Dogs Out.
Songs about love, good, bad or otherwise, are personal and the significance that some of them hold is impossible for us to convey to others. To even talk about them with someone else is to degrade them in a way. Trying to explain a song's place in your heart and psyche is much like what Mark Twain said about another ineffable subject, “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process.”
And so here I go, dissecting a song. No, not really. A few days ago I talked about Chuck Berry's song Johnny B. Goode being shot into space as a representative for all popular music. Playing along with that idea, if I were asked to select one song having to do with love to send into orbit, here's the one i would choose.
I have no attachment to it myself, but I consider it almost perfect in its structure, melody and the emotion it captures. If you're a person born in this century, much of its power may not translate. If you don't know what a matchbook is, or if you've never stood alone at a payphone, maybe late at night, trying to reach some love in jeopardy, it may not land. But still, I think the story it tells is timeless and universal, and all in under four minutes. See below. What would be your song choice? - RP
Speaking of Chuck Berry, today's his birthday (1926-2017)
Name That Movie: “What'd you think of my speech in there?”