Songs of Love 11
Many love songs are about a relationship, a specific connection between people, often a reciprocal one (although possibly one that’s come to an end). But there are some that are about a very different experience of love; that of yearning, daydreaming about the possibility of a relationship. Songs of phantom love that can’t quite be grasped, possibly never will be. These can, as we’ll see here, be songs of hope or of despair, but crucially, they turn on imagination, on fantasy. And fantasy is a crucial aspect of romantic love, whether requited or otherwise.
Performed by The Divine Comedy
Written by Neil Hannon
Released 1997
It’s frequently, if not always, the case that being in love makes one absolutely insufferable, especially in the early stages. It becomes hard to talk about anything other than your loved one, certainly for any length of time. Your thoughts, and so often your conversation, are drawn back inexorably towards them constantly, like a black hole, albeit markedly more pleasant to contemplate (unless you’re an astrophysicist, possibly). This can be even more the case when that love is unfulfilled, so to speak; when you’ve yet to make a move on the object of your affections and join with them in any sense. Without the outlet of an actual relationship, your feelings spill over and infuriate everyone else. Or, in other words:
I told all of my friends
Again and again and again
I drove them round the bend
So now you’re my only friend
As with so much of this song, it’s the gentle humour that makes it. There’s something self-deprecating here, a recognition of the absurdity of the singer’s situation. Oddly, it resembles both ‘Marian’ and ‘Depressed Beyond Tablets’ in that way, except that with both of those songs there was an intensity around the self-consciousness that isn’t at all evident here. There’s nothing of the despair of those two songs (except perhaps, fleetingly, in the closing “I’m going crazy baby” section). Rather, this is a song of hope; not a burning belief that sustains, but something that hovers in the background, casting its light on every interaction. We might even say it’s a song of expectation. There’s a sense here that something is dawning, not quite arrived, but inevitable. Which could come across as very portentous, even pompous, but again, that sense of humour saves it: “I told the passers-by/I made a small boy cry.”
There’s also a movement in the song in terms of its address and tone. The first verse begins “I told the stars above/About the one I love,” followed by telling “the morning sun.” It’s our old friends celestial bodies, then, to whom so many love songs are addressed, giving the love a grandiose quality, as seen perhaps most notably so far in ‘Sunrise.’ But the verse moves on: “I told my mum and dad/They seemed to understand.” Here we’re brought onto the level of the human, where the song remains for the rest of its duration. It’s a nice image, actually, of two parents smiling indulgently as their child unloads all about this wonderful person they’ve encountered, maybe brought back to their own courtship. Neil Hannon is, in much of his work, very good at this kind of small human detail; an encounter or interaction that feels very recognisable.
And this is very much a song that exists at that kind of level in a wider sense. The lines are short, the language simple, the rhymes straightforward. This is a song that wants to speak plainly, all the more so because it can’t quite work up the courage to speak so to the person with whom the singer is in love. Not yet, at least. There’s a curious mix of resignation, particularly in the chorus, and determination (“I’ll get through to you/If it’s the last thing that I do”). There’s just a hint of anxiety there; after all, in actually telling the loved one how they feel, the singer opens themselves up to the potential of heartbreak, especially if they’ve driven away their friends. But still there’s something really charming about the simplicity and forthrightness of the song. “Maybe you love me too,” the singer muses near the end, and as the listener, you can’t help hoping that this might be the case.
Performed by Sammy Davis Jr.
Written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green
Released 1964
After a party (so I’m told by people who like them), there’s a sense of deflation. All of the excitement, the buzz of conversation, has come to an end; the music has been turned down or off; people have departed and you’re left alone to clean up the mess you’ve made. The room that you’re in is left plainer as the decorations fall down or are taken down, and inevitably you’re left with far more food than you could possibly eat. It’s not necessarily a depressing experience, but it is a comedown, a deflation. And as we’ve seen many times already in these entries, being left alone is something that can be faced or explored in all kinds of ways.
Here, the party stands in not so much for a single enjoyable experience, but for future hopes. This, as we’ll come to see, is not so much a relationship that’s come to an end, but the possibility of one – “all dreams must end.” The make-up must be wiped off (which, from a male singer, suggests the possibility of being dressed as a clown, therefore feeling a fool), reality must be faced. There’s a pervading sense that this song is meant to act as a self-inflicted slap to the face, the singer telling themself to snap out of their foolishness. The time for illusion is past, which is a sad and sobering thought at best.
There have been many versions of ‘The Party’s Over’ down the years since its 1956 début, in the musical Bells Are Ringing, by practically everyone you’d expect - Nat King Cole, Bobby Darin, Shirley Bassey – plus a few you mightn’t – Lonnie Donegan, Leslie Odom Jr. But the Sammy Davis Jr. version is unusual in one key respect. The original version, from the musical and its 1960 movie version, comes with a spoken-sung introduction:
He’s in love with Millicent Scott
A girl who doesn’t exist
He’s in love with someone you’re not
And so remember it was never you he kissed
In the musical, the song forms part of the main character’s second-act dejection; she’s constructed a glamorous alter ego for herself, and her love interest has fallen for that alter ego rather than the real her [1]. Very much a classic romantic comedy misunderstanding which will be resolved by the final curtain. But the Davis version has an altered version of this introduction:
I’m in love with a girl
But the man that she loves isn’t me
I’ll never see her again
And that’s how it has to be
Much the same sense is created here, but with critical differences. Without the context of the musical’s plot and the alter ego, we have to assume that the “man that she loves” is another real person. The tone is one of resignation to something already known, not a sharp reminder to oneself. So this is still a song of unrequited love, but here there’s no hope of a reconciliation held out. There’s a definite sense of finality here, of the end of a road being reached.
And thinking of the song as being about an unrequited love affair fundamentally alters it. The “party” was never a real relationship, but an imagined one. Nothing of substance has actually come to an end here, in an objective sense, but the singer feels as though it has. Because, for them, what was at stake here was an entire future of bliss and joy. Their hopes and dreams have come crashing down – whether suddenly or gradually, it’s not entirely clear within the song, but either way the effect is the same. It’s time to call it a day, decisively so, as the introduction makes clear; there’s no hope for a future dawning or catalyst here. It seems drastic, but perhaps it’s for the best. We’ve seen in these entries a lot of songs where singers are melancholically fixated on their lovers or former lovers, with no hope of resolution in sight. It actually makes a nice change to see someone willing to make a decisive break.
[1] Additionally, the song is sung after a literal party, which then acts as a metaphor in the song; it must be said that it doesn’t lose anything taken out of that context.
