Colin McEnroe Show: Silly Little Love Songs
Love songs define who we are and what we feel.
"Your love is fading. // I can feel your love fading. // Girl, it's fading away from me."
If you were a teenager in the early 70s, the Temptations (and or Rod Stewart) provided you with the perfect vocabulary for incipient loss and heartbreak.
"It's there when you speak my name. // It's just not the same. // Ooh baby, I'm losing you."
Of course, so did the Righteous Brothers with "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling." It's probably a good thing that these ideas exists as singable melodic lines, especially for young people, living through their first few waves of emotional upheaval.
And not just for the sake of the bad stuff. When Joni Mitchell sang "Help me, I think I'm falling in love with you," the words, combined with that initial falling two-note sigh, really framed that not entirely pleasant breathless plunge into infatuation. Oh really? Other people have felt like this? That's not such a lonely thing to do.
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Yes! Thanks!
Your comments make my point. Silly love songs are not silly at all, in fact they are the anthems of the human condition. We are creatures evolved to love achingly, hopefully enduringly. In the long evolution of our species, we evolved to care for each other and the young: to cherish them, to nurture them, to protect them, to educate and support them. And on our small planet, to create and leave behind us an environment in which they can thrive.
Silly Little Love Songs
You are spot on with Joni Mitchell's "Help Me"...in fact, now that I am in a promising relationship (35 years later), it's this same song that runs through my head. I just may have to go out and buy the CD now.
E-mail from Sugi
No could reflect my teenage angst quite like Laura Nyro.
E-mail from Sioux
High Fidelity is THE movie about today's topic! Well, THE book, and then THE movie. And Nick does the whole book soundtrack thing as well. For some reason I associate John Cusak with this idea too -- Say Anything or Better off Dead, where the music is another character in the story...
E-mail from Mike
First off, Chion gets better every show. Better watch out lest this become the Chion and Colin hour... SHE'S THE BEST! and so are you, Colin.
Anyhow. Silly love songs of my life:
Fisherman's Blues - The Waterboys (The opening song for the movie "Waking Ned Devine", also the song my wife and I danced to at our wedding)
Kiss me, I'm shitfaced - Dropkick Murphys (a song about all the awful lines guys use to get a date)
Lorelei - Pogue Mahone (A siren on the Rhine river)
E-mail from Derek
Derek from Bristol here. I grew up thinking song lyrics had no meaning and were simply words strewn together to make rhymes. It's only since I've been in a loving relationship for the past 8 years that I have an emotional connection to love songs, e.g. "Your Eyes" by Peter Gabriel or "Through The Years" by Kenny Rogers. Sometimes I even indulge in breakup songs (pretty much anything by Phil Collins post-Genesis) and imagine such situations in my own life. For the past couple weeks I've been involved on a seemingly endless dichotomy of "It Might Be You" and " Separate Lives," both by Stephen Bishop.
Silly Little Love Songs
Let my love open the door- Pete Townsend
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