Songs of Love 27: Love as Sincerity
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 validates the emotional truth we find in it. That accounts for a lot of how we talk about them, from the “paternity testing” of many Taylor Swift songs to the stories that surround many famous songs about their origins – did David Bowie really see Tony Visconti and Antonia Maass kissing by the Berlin Wall? Did ‘Yesterday’ really come to Paul McCartney in a dream?
And that obsession can end up obscuring the deeper truths that we find in those songs. So here are two songs that, whatever their relationship to biography (and the A-side at least was apparently written for a real person), present themselves as extremely sincere, even straightforward. Which could be sweet, and is in the case of the A-side, but sincerity can also appear as a form of unvarnished honesty, which is on show in both songs. That can be less appealing, but it can also be a way of showing love, for some people at least.
A-Side
Performed by Billy Joel
Written by Billy Joel
Released 1977
There’s a fine line between sincere and cheesy at times. There have certainly been songs I’ve included here (mostly A-sides, one imagines) that another critic would find unbearably clichéd or tacky, and there are well-known songs that some people find moving that leave me entirely cold. And this is one of those songs that gets a lot of radio play, particularly on stations that pride themselves on playing “chill” music, that I can imagine many critics finding saccharine and irritating. Whereas I find it not only moving in its straightforwardness, but more emotionally complex than it might initially seem.
This is a song about prizing an authentic connection, disavowing the superficial and seeing into the depths of someone. It’s about an understanding so solid that it cannot and should not be breached, and a love that isn’t subject to the winds of change. Where a lot of love songs turn on the idea of a change or alteration, this is a song rooted in solidity and permanence.
Part of the reason for that is that this is a mid-relationship song, rather than one focused on a beginning or end. As we’ve mentioned before, that’s quite unusual in the sphere of popular music. The idea of staying and growing with someone over a long period of time is harder to package into a three-minute song than a meeting or parting. But this is one of the ones that succeeds in that. It’s about pledging, or re-pledging, support; you could even read it as a sort of renewal of vows (“I said ‘I love you,’ that’s forever”). The singer explicitly disavows the idea that the lover is “too familiar” and claims they wouldn’t leave in “times of trouble” – the evidence for which being that they haven’t already, implying that the couple have been through tribulations already. The sense is of a relationship that’s been tested, and has held firm.
There is, though, one verse that perhaps tests this comforting, supportive reading.
I don’t want clever conversation
Never want to work that hard
I just want someone that I can talk to
I want you just the way you are
I’ve struggled with this verse (which is repeated at the end of the song for emphasis) in the past. At times, I find the implication that the lover isn’t capable of “clever conversation” more than a little patronising – “I’m so glad you’re a dumb-dumb.” But maybe that says more about me than about the song, really. Because clearly the point here is the connection that already exists between the lovers, and the idea that they can understand each other on a very genuine level without having to show off. It’s about the comfort found in their conversations – “never want to work that hard” – and there’s even a hint of the idea of love as refuge that we’ve seen before. The lover, and by extrapolation the home, represent a place to relax rather than have to perform intellectually and socially.
At its heart, then, the song is a promise of, or alternatively a plea for, unchanging permanence – “need to know that you will always be/The same old someone that I knew.” On a realistic level, this is, of course, impossible. Part of the reason why love songs are so invested in change is that change is an inevitable part of life, and of relationships, one which healthy relationships embrace. So how do we read this kind of plea – is it deluded? Does it suggest a stubborn blindness? There are hints, if you’re looking for them, that there might be something wrong with this relationship – the singer is aware that at times they “might not seem to care,” and pleads with the lover “what will it take ’til you believe in me/The way that I believe in you?” Perhaps there is a gulf growing here, at least of communication.
That wouldn’t be my reading, though. For me, the idea of longing for permanence may be unrealistic, but that doesn’t make it any less romantic – all the more so, in fact. What this song feels like, to my mind, is the stumbling confession of a middle-aged man[1] who’s been with his partner for a long time, and is unused to speaking from the heart. At times, he makes mistakes and says the wrong thing – he accidentally implies that she’s an idiot, for instance. But his basic honesty, and the depth of his feeling, shine through. I think that’s ultimately why I find this song so moving. As polished as the melody and production are, there’s a kind of emotional rawness to it. The whole song comes across as a “promise from the heart.”
[1] Joel was actually only 28 when the song was released, but he comes across as one of those people who’s always been middle-aged at heart. Even his first big hit, ‘Piano Man,’ recorded when he was 24, has a world-weary edge to it.
B-Side
Performed by Leonard Cohen
Written by Leonard Cohen
Released 1974
More often than not, the love song champions a beautiful, unique connection between two people, something that others (if they’re acknowledged at all) can only dream of. Even if that connection has been lost, or has gone wrong, it still stands out as something to be treasured. That fantasy of uniqueness is familiar from many love stories, and also the feeling of being in love itself, which tends to confer a kind of advertent elitism.
Sometimes, though, you get a song that’s doing essentially the opposite, one that is precisely about the absence of love. And here we have a song that’s very keen to discourage even the suggestion that there may be real love and affection here. On the contrary, this is what’s left when love departs, a bleak vista from which all life has been sapped.
The prevailing mood of this song isn’t romance, but desire even to the point of sexualised greed. This is two people feeding off each other, with the desire strangely depersonalised – “I love to see you naked over there/Especially from the back.” The relationship, such as it is, is an entirely sexual one, concerned only with bodily hunger – as Cohen sings: “Everything depends upon/How near you sleep to me.” It’s a striking line, inverted in sentiment by noted romantic and far-right agitator Morrissey for the Smiths song ‘Hand in Glove:’ “Everything depends upon/How near you stand to me.” What’s curious is that, hearing the two songs in isolation, it would seem as if it’s Cohen taking a sweet sentiment and inverting it, and indeed I assumed for a long time that it was a pre-existing cliché that Morrissey was playing straight, but in fact the line originates with Cohen.
For much of the song, the lover (a term I’m using advisedly here) is compared to a monument, something to be admired and surveyed from a distance, but whose best days are likely behind it (the possible misogyny of which is undermined by the fact that the singer too is “in ruins”). “Your beauty lost to you yourself,” though whether or not it could ever be recovered is something the song doesn’t answer and, perhaps, isn’t interested in. Images of faded glory proliferate, from the laurel crown of her former lover to the bells “fastened to the rein” by the lover, which “many men have loved.”
And as this last makes clear, there’s no sense of uniqueness to this connection. These are two people who have had other lovers, and make no apology for that. While this is a particularly strong example, there are quite a few Cohen songs where he explores this idea of love as a repeating cycle rather than a specific connection between two people. In ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,’ for instance, he sings “Many loved before us, I know that we are not new/In city and in forest they’ve smiled like me and you.” [1] Even the title of the album from which ‘Take This Longing’ comes, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, suggests this idea of eternal recurrence, vaguely in line with the Buddhist ideas that Cohen would study in later life.
But ‘Take This Longing’ is far from a song of Zen-like acceptance. It’s quite reminiscent of the first B-side covered here, ‘It’s All Right with Me,’ in that this is a relationship of surrogates, two people trying to find the illusion of someone else, someone lost, in each other. The last verse makes this extremely plain, with typical Cohen self-deprecating humour:
You’re faithful to the better man
I’m afraid that he left
So let me judge your love affair
In this very room where I have sentenced mine to death
And as with that song, the very attempt to find a surrogate only reinforces the sense of need for the original lover. Adopting the ex’s laurel crown is a tacit admission by the singer that he’s stepping into that role, and there’s an element of pretence involved here. So this is not a song about the absence of love really. Rather it’s a song of deep yearning and need, disguised with a casual attitude to sex. Only a true romantic can be this cynical.
And that, in essence, is why I’m covering what seems like an anti-love song here. Like many B-sides, this is very much a song about love and beauty, which are affirmed all the more by the fact that Cohen is focused on the negative space where they used to be, calling attention to their absence. There’s no love to be found here. But there used to be, and everyone involved in this encounter is acutely, painfully aware of that fact.
[1] Another sentiment with which ‘Hand in Glove’ takes issue: “No it’s not like any other love/This one is different because it’s us.” Clearly Morrissey had been scrawling some furious notes on his Cohen album sleeves.
