Songs of Love 20
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 distinct poles of the universal and the specific (which are not always opposites). Here, though, we have two songs that do both, in slightly different ways. They’re songs that seem to take us into an everyday world, but do so to make grand statements about love.
A-Side
Performed by The National
Written by Matt Berninger, Aaron Dessner and Bryce Dessner
Released 2007
No matter how in love you are, you can’t be together with your lover all the time. You will be separated by circumstance at least occasionally, for work or social events or any number of other reasons – even just to sleep. And so separation is at the heart of a lot of love songs, whether the lovers are in separate rooms or on different continents. As we’ve seen many times, though, absence refocuses the love song; often, it changes the image of the lover into an idealised, almost divine one. Pining makes the heart grow fonder, after all.
That’s not quite what’s going on here, though. This is a song of absence, of pining for your lover at a mind-bendingly bad party (or at least having a terrible time at a party, which is very relatable), that still seems to have its head squarely in the real world. If anything, the singer thinks he might be a little too worldly here: “Can I get a minute of not being nervous/And not thinking of my dick.” His head is empty of thought, and he’s utterly discomfited, “way out of sync,” likely by some combination of nerves and alcohol. But through it all, his excitement to return home to his lover shines through, the anxious verses giving way to the relief of the chorus.
There is, admittedly, a sense that not all is right. “Made a mistake in my life today,” he says in the first verse, though whether that mistake had anything to do with the relationship itself is unclear. Perhaps the “slow dumb show” he wants to put on for his lover is an act of repentance. But then again, it seems as if the relationship here is precisely the thing that is going right. The singer finds himself unable to communicate with anyone – anyone, that is, except for his lover, by implication. Even then, he can’t entirely resist a twinge of anxiety that he’ll “overdo it.” So important is this relationship to him, so central, that it’s his sole focus.
There’s certainly a hint of potential toxicity here, of someone so dysfunctional that their romantic relationship becomes distorted. But for the most part, the song is too grounded for that. The singer, in his position hovering by the punch bowl at a party, is recognisable and sympathetic. There are hints of distress, but for the most part the emotional terrain of the song is about returning to his lover and having a nice time with them, receiving the “blue ribbon” of recognition (and, by implication, calm). It’s not exactly the stuff of gothic melodrama.
That said, the final section of the song, a recapitulation of The National’s earlier song ‘29 Years,’ is something quite different from that, moving into the sphere of idealisation: “You know I dreamed about you/For twenty-nine years before I saw you.” There’s a sense of destiny here, of lovers being drawn inexorably together by time, a familiar enough love song trope, albeit one that can appear impossibly melodramatic. What saves it here, though, is that very contrast with the rest of the song. We feel we can trust the singer here, so when he tells us his lover was a constant ethereal presence in his mind before they met, we have no choice but to believe him. And so an impossibly romantic sentiment is brought into the space of mundane reality, and becomes all the more beautiful for that.
B-Side
Performed by Joy Division
Written by Ian Curtis, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and Bernard Sumner
Released 1980
One thing that keeps coming up in this project, not least in the last entry, is the spectre of biography, generally as something that I disavow. Part of the issue is that there’s a clash here between two different paradigms. In the literary criticism that is my academic background, reading a text as being a pure reflection of the author’s life experiences is generally seen as being shallow, even naïve, though material historical circumstances can certainly be taken into account. In popular music discourse, though, the performer’s life is everything. It’s because it’s such a personal art form, both in how it’s performed and how it’s consumed. So the vast majority of books about popular music are broadly biographical – even most books about, say, the Beatles follow the track of their career linearly. Artists like Leonard Cohen or especially Taylor Swift [1] can tease the question of who a song is “about,” knowing that this is a keen source of fan interest. The first-person “I” in a song is regularly, almost without reflection, read by fans and critics alike as denoting the genuine, authentic voice of the writer and/or performer.
And then you get a song like this, which is haunted in an almost literal sense by the events surrounding it. As with much of Joy Division’s latter material (which is to say that written and recorded in the last 12 months or so of their existence as a band), this song is overshadowed by Ian Curtis’s suicide in May 1980. Some of this is just through the nearness of the timeline – the video for the song was recorded about three weeks before his death, and the single itself released a few weeks after [2]. But there are other considerations that link the song directly to his death. “Love will tear us apart” was the phrase chosen by Curtis’s widow Deborah for his gravestone, and the single cover, like that of the album Closer (released about a month later), itself resembles a gravestone, which Deborah suggests was by the design of Curtis himself.
And then there’s the lyrical content. It’s a song about a love affair gone wrong, turned to “routine” and “resentment.” As such, it’s commonly read as being about Curtis’s own marital troubles – having been married to Deborah for some five years, he had begun an affair with Belgian journalist Annik Honoré, and seemed to regard his marriage as practically over. Deborah, however, is dismissive of the idea that their marriage had calcified into a loveless state, and frankly I’m inclined to take her word more than anyone’s. There’s perhaps a element of self-justification that we might read into the lyric in that sense – if the lovers are indeed “taking different roads,” then one of those roads might well be cheating on your wife. But in the end, I think the song is just one of those insoluble puzzles left behind after someone dies young, especially by suicide. You’re left wondering just what they meant by this or that utterance or action in their final weeks. Deborah writes, of Closer: “His intentions and feelings were all there within the lyrics. While he lived they were equivocal, but with hindsight all was disclosed when it was too late for anything to be done” [3]. As a critic, I’m naturally suspicious of the idea that someone’s truest feelings can be found within their lyrics, but that’s certainly how it feels. And I’m not going to argue with the man’s widow.
So what is there to say about the song beyond all of that? Plenty, in fact. If you plot Joy Division’s career on a linear timescale – which is not generally the best way to appreciate work in context, but has its uses – it’s easy to see this as the endpoint, even the climax, as Peter Hook seems to. Seen another way, it’s the point at which the embryonic form of New Order is most clearly visible within Joy Division, in the breezy, synth-heavy melody – if you like, it’s the midpoint between ‘She’s Lost Control’ and ‘World in Motion.’ It lifted the band from a cult favourite beloved of John Peel and some of his listeners to real national success, and paved the way for the surviving members’ stadium-filling success over the following couple of decades. In its own right, I’ve seen people name it as one of the finest singles of all time.
Of course, that aforementioned melody, catchy yet calm, exists in fruitful opposition to Curtis’s typically emotionally taut lyric – indeed, there’s at least an argument that this juxtaposition is where the song derives a lot of its power. In general, Curtis’s lyrics deal with bleak emotional states of despair, jealousy et al, in abstract, sometimes even vaguely religious terms. Even the titles make that fairly obvious: ‘New Dawn Fades,’ ‘Disorder,’ ‘Isolation,’ ‘I Remember Nothing’ and, perhaps most tellingly in some ways, ‘The Eternal.’ These are austere, sometimes forbidding songs, fashioned out of marble, the sonic equivalent of those covers.
But the emotional terrain of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ is something different. Unusually, these are lyrics that refer to real-life situations, even to mundane details, rather than the radical interiority of most of the band’s lyrics. Both the second and third verses begin with a couple asleep next to each other: “Why is the bedroom so cold?/You’ve turned away on your side;” “You cry out in your sleep/All my failings exposed.” Whether or not it’s drawn from life, it feels real. Even the sense of extremity here isn’t quite the primal scream of other songs. There’s actually a sense of balance here; perhaps not quite of hope, but at least a lingering recognition of the love that was and perhaps still is between these people: “this appeal that we’ve kept through our lives.” The lovers may be “taking different roads,” but even that suggests a kind of peace, interior if nothing else.
Of course, that all has to be balanced against the title itself, which suggests that love itself is somehow the enemy. Some critics have seen the title as an ironic response to Captain and Tennile’s ‘Love Will Keep Us Together,’ perhaps the least Joy Division-like song in the history of recorded music [4], though nobody connected with the band has ever confirmed this. There’s certainly a reading of the title which suggests a jaundiced view of love itself, similar to some other B-sides we’ll be encountering soon enough. But I think the simplest way to read it, in line with the tone of the lyrics, is that this is a relationship that is doomed despite a sense of enduring love, that desperate attempts to fix the relationship may actually push the lovers further apart (and may have already done so, though the future tense of the title, as well as being inherently pessimistic, suggests otherwise). There’s even a sense that this could be a repeating cycle – after all, “love will tear us apart again” (emphasis mine), a sentiment that repeats again and again in the chorus. It’s actually a mature recognition of the ways that a love affair can fall apart without entirely losing emotional charge. And, regardless of how much it’s drawn from real life, that’s what really comes across in the song.
[1] There is a gendered element to this, with women’s art being assumed to be confessional far more than that of their male contemporaries – if, say, Sufjan Stevens and Phoebe Bridgers wrote the exact same song somehow, it seems likely that the latter would be assumed to be writing from real life more than the former.
[2] Though Peter Hook, in his pleasingly irreverent book about the band, implies that the lyrics were written some six months or so beforehand.
[3] Deborah Curtis, Touching from a Distance, 139.
[4] Presumably also the song being referenced in the Smiths’ ‘Ask’ (“if it’s not love, then it’s the bomb […] that will bring us together”) – clearly it was taking up a lot of mental space for the angsty post-punk generation.
