Jack Ruby Tuesday

Love Songs

In answer to kittenstropicalia:

My favorite love songs.  I couldn’t limit myself to three.

1. Scritti Politti - “Confidence”  [My favorite song.  I like how Green Gartside plays off the double meaning of the title.]

2. Gal Costa - “Baby”  [Really simple and quirky lyrically, with references that mainly Brazilians would get. Her version is way more beautiful than the Os Mutantes take that came out at the same time.  Completely celestial.]

3. Breathless - “Goodnight”  [Simple, refined, with more than a touch of despondency.]

4. Steely Dan - “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)”  [Clearly, I don’t seem to like my love songs to be all that straightforward.]

5. Françoise Hardy - “Tous les garçons et les filles”  [Well, it’s more about the misery of being alone and wishing to be in love like the rest of the world.  It’s timeless, though.]

6. Jimmy Radcliffe - “Long After Tonight is All Over”  [This just hits the spot.]

7. Bettye Swann - “I’m Lonely for You”  [So does this.]

8. Arthur Russell - “You and Me Both”  [I find this one particularly touching.  Arthur’s oeuvre is full of winners like this.  “A Little Lost” might be even better.]

9. Bim Sherman - “Love Forever”  [One of my favorite reggae songs.  It was a toss-up between this and “If I Don’t Have You” by Gregory Issacs, but I like the words to this a bit more even if the music in the Issacs song is more sumptuous.]

10. The Fatima Mansions - “You’re a Rose”  [A fairly perverse choice with my favorite lyrics of all these songs.  “I miss your smile, your laugh, your snore, your fond contempt, your faithful rage! (…) You don’t mind the queues, the burning trains, the squalid, mute despair. You don’t mind deceiving lovers; you ignore the stinking air. (…) Your face hangs down before me like a rootless flame, in awe I stare, you’re a rose, you’re a rose in a crown of thorns!”  Offhand, I can only think of one other love song Cathal Coughlan wrote, the similarly spiteful “You Turned Me.”]

That’s what I can come up with at the moment, but this list is definitely subject to change since there’s tens of thousands of songs lodged in my head that I haven’t thought of yet.