Exquisitely beautiful, intimate, full of pathos, it’s an entire relationship in four verses, as per Simon’s gift: their register office wedding on a not especially nice day weather-wise, moving into a musty apartment with plumbing issues, and the lovers catching persistent colds off each other while they cling to each other through that long winter and for a while after. But Paul Simon’s I Do it for Your Love is truly an advertisement for the genre. Or maybe it’s because Realistic Love Songs would be a hard-to-sell Spotify playlist. Maybe it’s because “furniture shopping” doesn’t rhyme with anything that there are so few love songs written about long marriages. The author of Sorrow and Bliss on I Do It for Your Love by Paul Simon And the fact that the song only lasts one minute 49 seconds means that, when it ends, the first thing to do is play it again. When Waits sings “You haven’t looked at me that way in years”, I don’t hear it as a melancholy statement of finality but as proof that a certain look, of love, has reappeared. But I’ve always imagined it as about a relationship that’s lasted, that’s lasting still. Now I listen to it properly, I realise it’s a song about a love that’s only being kept alive by one person, not two. I’ve always thought that I’m Still Here by Tom Waits is incredibly romantic – but mainly because of the slow, tender piano the shyly hesitant strings and Waits’s voice, which can slouch and smirk and spit and roar, but here just sounds old, richened and sweetened by experience, a little frail as it lifts at the end. I can listen to a song for years without really knowing the words, happy in my ignorance, mumbling my own meanings. The author of The New Life on I’m Still Here by Tom Waitsįor a writer, I have a strange lack of interest in song lyrics. His list of complaints turns mid-song into a plea: “Somebody hold me too close, somebody hurt me too deep, somebody sit in my chair and ruin my sleep and make me aware of being alive.” Yes, it can be inconvenient and invasive and exhausting, maybe all the first kisses and playlists and poems boil down to two people farting on each other in their sleep, but it’s more than that, too: it’s someone to experience life with, to help you understand yourself and the world, to teach you things and treat you gently and call you out and make you laugh – to vary your days, as Robert says. At first, Robert lists all the reasons love is annoying, scary, even tedious: “Someone to hold you too close, someone to hurt you too deep, someone to sit in your chair, to ruin your sleep…” His friends admit this is true, but think Robert is giving love short shrift. Being Alive, from the musical Company, is sung by Robert, a 35-year-old bachelor and romance sceptic, whose married friends have ambushed him on his birthday to insist he find a partner (rude). I’m sorry to say it is also a show tune, but at least it is a show tune from the best to ever do them, Stephen Sondheim. My favourite love song is maybe a little untraditional in that it’s not addressed to a specific love object. The author of Really Good, Actually on Being Alive from the musical Company, by Stephen Sondheim
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