Love, Love, Love
The romantic songs that shape our hearts: A special Valentine’s Day report
But no straight-on ode to happy love ever makes you want to get jiggy: Sex is sharper and desire more vivid when you can’t be sure your lover won’t cheat. The air feels cleaner, the jasmine smells stronger, even stars sparkle brighter when your heart hurts. And I, personally, may not want to feel that particular sting ever again in my life, but there’s something that thrills me about the way this song reminds me how it felt when I did. (Judith Lewis)
Bob Dylan: “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”
Except for one tingly moment in Don’t Look Back, Bob Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” never registered with the popular imagination, much less the national playlist. This was a ballad that told no story, it had rhymes that weren’t really rhymes, and its lyrics were not reliable truths but a jumble of paradoxes and non sequiturs. In the song Dylan describes all the things his girlfriend is and isn’t. “My love she speaks like silence . . . /She knows there’s no success like failure . . . /She’s like some raven at my window with a broken wing.” On the other hand, Valentines can’t buy her, and she doesn’t judge. The list exudes eccentric charm, but Dylan goes beyond this rather traditional romantic litany to create a snapshot of America at a time of tectonic change. The most basic ways in which people looked at one another — or didn’t — were shifting, and this frightened many. Dylan pays homage to his inspiration, prairie poet Carl Sandberg, introducing a montage of people in dime stores and bus stations who talk of situations and draw conclusions on the wall. At the very moment he confesses his adoration for a woman, the singer offers a furtive Valentine of his own to an uneasy nation. I have listened to this song, quite infrequently, for 35 years but it has never grown old for me. We know early Dylan better as the troubadour of peace and civil rights, but here, with this almost forgotten ballad, he composed an anthem to love. (Steven Mikulan)
Rex Griffin: “The Last Letter”
The vast majority of pop love songs radiate such an annoyingly fatuous quality that they’re similar to horror movies — requiring willing suspension of disbelief. While this song was introduced in 1937, the shuddering, love-gone-bad agony it oozes couldn’t possibly be updated. Written and recorded by Rex Griffin, the Alabama singer-songwriter who virtually codified modern honky-tonk pathology, “The Last Letter” is a stark, suicidal kiss-off of Olympian proportions. It’s just Griffin and an acoustic guitar, delivering the lyric at funereal midtempo, and creating a bleak atmosphere of gloom with an extraordinary use of language. He laments the “promises that you are breaking so free”; admits he can’t offer “the clothes that your young body craves”; and sings of “the heartaches the tears and the sorrow.” There is no damn doubt that Griffin personally “suffered anguish untold.” The record has a low-key, smoldering immediacy that is uncomfortably persuasive, revealing the true depth of romantic ardor in all its distinctive presence. It’s hard as hell to find — and almost as difficult to listen to — but the song’s been frequently covered (by Jack Greene, Connie Smith, George Jones, Tommy Collins — the recently reissued Waylon Live has a fine version), and it lives on as the standard by which torment is measured. (Jonny Whiteside)
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