We want to believe that love songs are sincere, that they express something real. That’s true of a lot of art, but the love song perhaps more than any other form. We want it to be based in reality, on the assumption that that direct relationship to material fact
Around the age of 6 or 7, my relationship to gaming changed significantly, taking on more of a sense of ownership – literal ownership of consoles and hence games themselves, but also of franchises. Like with books or films, I was finding games that were mine, to which I had a
There’s an immediacy to many of the songs we’ve looked at in this project so far, and to many love songs in general. Very often, they’re about decisive moments, whether they’re “set” in the present, where that moment is happening right now in the course of
Though not the artistic medium to which I’ve devoted most of my writing or analytic time – that being either literature or music – I think video games might be the defining medium of my life. They’ve been there since I was very small, a constant background noise, and even
Many love stories are a mixture of passivity and activity. The chance meet-cute at the café or university library is counter-balanced by the airport rush at the end, a testament to the love bursting forth uncontrollably. In reality, some of us go out seeking love – on dating apps,
As we’ve seen already many times, the love song is often profoundly interested in individual moments. Moments of change, or moments that seem to contain an entire relationship in miniature; some even find themselves trapped in a particular moment. Last time, we looked at a couple of the many
Love is, of course, life. In the philosophical sense that we can’t truly live without love, as well as the more literal sense that most of us are (hopefully) conceived and raised through love. And yet love is so often paired with death. The idea of dying for love,
Love changes people – or, if you prefer, it reveals them. Some people, when they fall in love, become more open and generous, while others turn inwards and become selfish and narcissistic. It can reveal the world to you, or it can narrow your world to just your lover. Which it
The idea of songs written about real events has lurked in the background of this project from the off, as a key part of how people think about and relate to love songs, perhaps most notably in the Fleetwood Mac entry. As listeners and critics, we very often want to
[The following contains spoilers for Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight Rises, Inception, Oppenheimer and, especially, The Odyssey.] In the last week or so, there has been an awful lot of discourse out there about The Odyssey – proof of its cultural impact, if nothing else[1]. Some of this discourse
Some love songs live in the everyday world, full of mundane details to help make the song and the sentiment more easily relatable. Others are more abstracted and idealised, with vistas of grand operatic emotion. This is true of all lyrics and lyric poetry, broadly speaking, which revolves around the
Can we separate art from the artist? Roland Barthes aside, any number of extremely dull and predictable thinkpieces have wrung their hands over this age-old question, particularly in the last decade or so, where a seemingly endless parade of predominantly male artists have fallen over themselves in revealing their