What do we sing about when we sing about love? Over the 65 years of the pop charts, songwriters have described love through similes: like oxygen, like a butterfly, like a heatwave. Love has also echoed loudly as a metaphor: as a tender trap, a battlefield, the devil, the drug. It flies over mountains and laughs at oceans. It makes me feel like I’m on another world with you. Nothing compares to love; without it, you’re like a bird without a song.
But love isn’t simply a small part of our individual stories. Love is about all of us in our most extreme states of being and it’s a concept that has changed as society has changed. Love songs tell us who we are and who we could be within the structures and systems that surround us: when we’re postwar survivors captivated by the possibilities of romance, film and fantasy; when sexual liberation surges; when love becomes something that can crush social barriers and boundaries or when it refuses to fit into any conventional categories. The progress of technology, diversity and equality has changed our definitions of love in tumultuous ways; no longer, for example, do gay men have to hide their love away, as John Lennon sang back in 1965. Songs about love are society’s soundtrack.
They have also long been the motors of the modern record industry and the bestselling songs that tackle love are fittingly broad in their approach. The Beatles’ She Loves You is Britain’s third biggest-selling song about the mushy stuff: a song about the delight of someone adoring you, fed through the energy of four brilliant boys on the cusp of a new world for young people. Above it are John Travolta and Olivia Newton John’s You’re the One That I Want, a 70s pop sparkler featuring its female and male leads equally matched displaying their desires to be together, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax, a tough, thumping statement of intent that displays its emotions pretty proudly, as gay culture fought to make its mark in the mainstream.
These huge hits stretch the idea of the love song far beyond simple schmaltz and sentiment, sure, but since when has love been just about comfort and joy? It’s about lust. Sex. Sexuality. Palpitations. Pain. “Hit me with your laser beams,” Holly Johnson sang; we all long for that hit. Therefore this list doesn’t feature Robson and Jerome or Renée and Renato – it’s not a pure list of poignant tearjerkers. These 10 songs, in their own progressive way, powerfully show the way love has transformed us and, by extension, how we have transformed love.
1 | Wild Is the Wind by Johnny Mathis (1957)
Pop’s earliest love songs were widescreen in emotion and scope, as the postwar film industry demanded, slowly stretching expectations of the conventional love story. Take this, from the soundtrack of an epic 1957 romance about an Italian woman who marries her brother-in-law after her sister (his wife) dies; she then falls in love with his ranch hand, with explosive results. Written by Russian-American composer Dimitri Tiomkin and American lyricist Ned Washington (who also composed the far less romantic “rollin’, rollin’, rollin’” theme tune to TV series Rawhide), Wild Is the Wind’s theme fittingly goes all out with its passion: “Give me more than one caress, satisfy this hungriness… for we’re creatures of the wind, and wild is the wind.”
Its singer, Johnny Mathis, vividly remembers first hearing the song at 22; at 81, he still sings it live. “It was so sensual and it was the longest thing I’d ever heard. I remember [pianist] Joey Masters kept turning the pages.” Masters had to truncate it to three minutes to fit the film (“Dimitri said, ‘Oh my dear man, don’t worry about me, I’m just a composer!’,” Mathis says with a laugh), but later versions by Nina Simone and David Bowie made it longer again, which suits its high drama. “Bowie’s was a complete revelation to me,” Mathis says. “Both [Simone and Bowie] were inventors. The song in their hands had no parameters.”
Bowie had always loved Simone’s 1966 version too. He bonded intensely with her after a brief meeting in a New York club in 1974, calling her that night at 3am to tell her “don’t let anybody tell you you’re crazy”. They spoke every night after that for a month. Bowie’s Wild Is the Wind transported the song into a new, icy European world and became the shivering finale to 1976’s Station to Station.
2 | Will You Love Me Tomorrow by The Shirelles (1960)
An 18-year-old Carole King wrote the melody for this song on a piano one afternoon, while her baby played next to her in a playpen. The husband she had quickly married after becoming pregnant wrote its lyrics that evening – Gerry Goffin was an assistant chemist at the time, to pay the bills. Continuing a narrative that began in the Shirelles’ first hit, Tonight’s the Night (which saw the band’s lead singer, Shirley Owens, worrying about a man who’s going to beg her to “turn the lights down low”), Goffin’s words saw the song being banned by several US radio stations. They were seen to explicitly address the idea of the one-night stand: “Is this a lasting treasure/ Or just a moment’s pleasure?/ Can I believe the magic of your sighs?” It also led to Goffin packing in the day job: he and King had their first No 1 hit.
The possibility of a woman having sex because of love, outside marriage, had arrived and, more shockingly, here it was coming from a woman’s mouth. It was also the first No 1 for a female black group, one who had been advised not to put their image on record covers in case they’d put off white audiences. But they became known, as did their song, and things started to change.
3 | Je t’aime… moi non plus by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg (1969)
The 60s’ sexiest song about love pretends not to be a love song at all. Here’s Serge sighing “me neither” in response to his lover’s effusive declarations of affection; a surrealist homage on his part, he said, which put the idea of each gender’s relationship to love in stark, blackly comic shades. But Je t’aime also speaks volumes about the changing expression of love after summers that were purportedly full of it: love became something to be vocalised loudly, shown off about, not hidden away.
Not that everyone was ready for it. Its original 1967 version, featuring Gainsbourg and a heavy-breathing Brigitte Bardot, got shelved, largely because Bardot’s then-husband, Gunter Sachs, got wind of it. Two years later, Gainsbourg’s version with Jane Birkin became the first UK No 1 to be banned and although its message about love was mixed, it formed an essential part of the couple’s 13-year relationship. “We hadn’t been together very long,” explains Birkin today; they’d just made the movie Slogan together, in which they played a couple having an affair. Then Gainsbourg played her Je t’aime, featuring Bardot. “Would I record it with him, he said? And I was, ‘Of course, of course!’ It was so torrid and wonderful and all these other starlets were lining up wanting to do it. I didn’t want anyone else to put their hands on him!”
It was recorded, rather unerotically, in separate booths in a Marble Arch studio in only two takes and became an international sensation. It was even known in Spain and Portugal, Birkin beams, which were then dictatorships. “It’s seen more as a protest song than a love song there and that makes me rather proud.”
4 | Brother Louie by Hot Chocolate (1973)
Songs about race and love weren’t a new thing in the 1970s, but they were sidelined. Take Alberta Hunter’s You Can’t Tell the Difference After Dark, written by the blues singer in 1935 (“I may be as brown as a berry, but that’s only secondary/ And you can’t tell the difference after dark”). The track was omitted from her early albums. The first big US hit on this subject came over two decades later: Janis Ian’s Society’s Child, about a white girl whose family won’t accept her black boyfriend (“My mother went to answer… she wouldn’t let you inside”). It took a year to get to No 14; many radio stations refused to play it.
Six years later, Brother Louie was a US No 1 for blues-rock band Stories, telling a similar tale (“He took her home to meet his mama and papa/ Man, they had a terrible fight”). The song was written by Errol Brown and Tony Wilson of Hot Chocolate, who’d had a huge UK hit with it earlier in 1973, and its message was clear: “There he stood in the night/ Knowing what’s wrong from what’s right”. This is the moment that message went mainstream.
5 | You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) by Sylvester (1978)
Disco’s fuel was glittering, sparkling, pulsating love. Some of the people behind it had also understood love’s importance as a driver for pop songs for many years, such as producer Harvey Fuqua. He’d had a No 1 love song, Sincerely, with his doo-wop group the Moonglows, in 1955, and in 1961, took Tammi Terrell along to his brother-in-law Berry Gordy’s new record label, Motown (her love duets with Marvin Gaye would become a mainstay of the label). Fifteen years later, he met a singer, Sylvester James, who’d been in a touring drag act called the Cockettes a few years earlier. Signing him to Fantasy Records, which had made its money from Creedence Clearwater Revival, Fuqua told Sylvester to drop his surname and a legend was born. This floor-filler about the authenticity of feeling isn’t a gay love song as such, but its adoption as an anthem in gay club culture, and Sylvester’s playfulness with gendered dressing in its video, was an unapologetic acknowledgment of all the marginalised, brilliant places that true love could come from – and how it could really feel, individually and collectively.
6 | Computer Love by Kraftwerk (1981)
“When the album was finished we didn’t even have computers… so it was a vision.” So said Ralf Hütter to journalist Simon Witter in 2005, nearly 25 years after Kraftwerk wrote their song predicting how love could be found in the 21st century. Computer Love sees a person at home, the machine in the corner their only companion, wanting something more solid: “Another lonely night/ Stare at the TV screen/ I don’t know what to do/ I need a rendezvous”. Admittedly, Kraftwerk didn’t predict broadband or Tinder – instead they call a number “for a data date” – but the track’s glistening minor-key melody held both promise and melancholy in its delivery. It got to No 1 in February 1982, seven months after its release, although it was its B-side’s popularity on the radio that propelled it to the top: a reissue of another of their alienated songs about love and desire, The Model, from 1978. “I’d like to take her out, that’s understood… now she’s a big success, I want to meet her again,” sang Hütter. Magazine culture and computer culture now told him to love and, by extension, how we should love.
7 | I’m Your Man by Leonard Cohen (1988)
Songs about love and getting older have always been part of jazz and popular song. Take Frank Sinatra’s glorious 1965 collection The September of My Years, featuring Hello Young Lovers from The King and I (“I’ve been in love like you”), Last Night When We Were Young (“let’s reminisce, and recollect the sighs and the kisses”), to the title track (“As a man, who as always had the wandering ways/ Now I’m reaching for yesterdays”). Trust Leonard Cohen to bring modern ideas of sex, and some synthesisers, into the game. His I’m Your Man album talked of the older lover with more raunch, confiding how he ached “in the places where I used to play” on Tower of Song, while the album’s title track showcased the unquenched longings of the ageing lothario. Cohen’s raddled voice made it clear that this wasn’t a young person’s narrative, and invitations to comfortable grownup scenarios (“if you want a father for your child/ or only want to walk with me a while”) squeeze themselves in between the sex: “If you want another kind of love/ I’ll wear a mask for you/ If you want a partner, take my hand… I’m your man.”
8 | The Book of Love by The Magnetic Fields (1999)
The 90s bristled with self-aware, outwardly cynical, but ultimately deeply heartfelt indie love songs. Take Pulp’s best-known love song, 1995’s Something Changed (“I wrote this song two hours before we met/ I didn’t know your name, or what you looked like yet… where would I be now if we’d never met?”). Then there’s Blur’s Tender, from 1999 (“Tender is the touch/ Of someone that you love too much… love’s the greatest thing/ I’m waiting for that feeling to come”).
The Magnetic Fields’ 1999 album, 69 Love Songs, was this moment’s definitive statement. The Book of Love became its signature song, a regular at weddings of those of an indie persuasion, talking of how the book is “full of charts and facts and figures”, but that also it’s “where music comes from… I love it when you sing to me”. “When I wrote it, it never occurred to me that it’d become a wedding song,” says songwriter Stephin Merritt now. “I mean, I know it ends with the line about wedding rings, but it begins with the line ‘The book of love is long and boring’. I can’t think of anything less romantic.” He wrote it in a cafe in New York’s St Mark’s Place after hearing the Miracles’ Best of My Love, and thinking about the Eagles’ song of the same name; he’d also been thinking of the Monotones’ Book of Love, so decided to create a successor for it. “That title – there was so much to write and so much to say. It’s a bit like I’m saying ‘Our love has boring periods, but that’s marriage, dear.’ I guess maybe that makes it romantic after all.” He’s played it at three weddings himself, although never on his suggestion, he’s quick to add.
9 | Fistful of Love by Antony and the Johnsons (2005)
Songs about the places where love and transgender issues transect aren’t easy to define. Some forums proclaim Lola by the Kinks as an early example, but others understandably reject its broad brushstrokes (Ray Davies told Jon Savage in 1984 that it was about the band’s manager meeting someone he thought was a woman, but wasn’t). By the 2000s, more transgender artists were emerging into the mainstream and Anohni was recording as Antony and the Johnsons, releasing their second album, I Am a Bird Now. Full of stark, expressive songs that uncovered desires to transition from male to female, many tracks revealed how love often gets mixed up in that process. Fistful of Love features one of Anohni’s New York champions, Lou Reed, who sings its beautifully romantic opening lines: “I was lying in my bed last night/ Staring at a ceiling full of stars/ When it suddenly hit me/ I just have to let you know how I feel.” Reed had tackled transgender subjects decades earlier with Candy Says and Walk on the Wild Side; here, he speaks as an older, learned figure, before giving Anohni a moment to shine. She sings of a love so deep that she welcomes its physical pain: “I feel the whip/ And I know it’s out of love.” Its rawness and directness hit the heart hard.
10 | Little Things by One Direction (2012)
Since their commercial high-water mark in the 80s and 90s, boybands have excelled in teaching young girls about the vague, sparkling feelings of love. I’ll Be Loving You (Forever), trilled New Kids on the Block. No Matter What, harmonised Boyzone. The cash registers sang sweetly alongside them.
But this song, co-written by Ed Sheeran and singer-songwriter Fiona Bevan, did something different: it tackled the physical inadequacies many young women feel in the age of social media and told them they were OK to have. “I know you’ve never loved the crinkles by your eyes when you smile,” the boys sang. “You’ve never loved your stomach or your thighs… but I’ll love them endlessly.”
“It felt very important to write it like a feminist love song,” says Fiona Bevan. Sheeran had left it off his first album, but knew it had a future somewhere; in summer 2012, he met One Direction backstage at the Olympic opening ceremony and realised it would work well for them. “There was something very powerful in putting these words in their mouths, too,” Bevan adds. “Girls at that age – 12, 13, when their self-esteem is often rock bottom – need to hear those things said, so to hear them from their heroes is life-changing.”
The song was deliberately sensitive, vulnerable and gentle, and after its global success (it was a platinum hit in the UK and the US), Bevan had hundreds of messages from girls on social media, which she found special, as it reminded her what she was like at that age. “It also made me realise the absolute power of a song,” she says. “When you’ll listen to nobody else, you’ll let a love song speak to you.”
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