Geekerati's Favorite Lovesongs...Because Old Internet List Memes?

I’m a big fan of the old social media “list” memes. They still show up from time to time when someone shares “Four Books to Know Me,” but their heyday has long since passed. It’s too bad because they were/are a part of what makes social media genuinely social. So much of today’s online communication is the sharing of ragebait stories or attempts to gain virality through controversial statements or cruelty. These kinds of behavior are built into the various algorithms, and toxicity is favored over connection. This is as true of BlueSky as it is for Twitter, and I even see it creep into Substack from time to time as the ragerati wander into these creative social shores.

As you all know, I subscribe to a lot of different writers here on Substack. Some, like Sherman Alexie, I follow because their poetry and humor remind me of lost friends. I lost some of those friends due to time and distance, but others died far too soon and reading essays and poems by these authors helps me remember the best of those lost friends. Others I follow because they are academics like Kyle Saunders or Christopher J Ferguson, Ph.D. who write about areas I study or have interest in. I don’t always agree with their takes/analysis, but that is what academics at their best are about. There are “pop” academics I avoid here, though they tend to be among the ragerati and that hint might give you a clue of whom I mean. Because of my work in non-partisan youth civic engagement and study of polarization, I don’t filter my follows by partisanship. I follow liberal and conservative alike.

While I don’t “like” everyone I follow/read, there are many I do. People like Rebekah King, Luke Y. Thompson, Critical Hit Parader, J.Q. Graziano, Matt Welch, Nancy Rommelmann and many others are people I either know in real life and care deeply about or are people I consider internet friends. If they are ever in town, I would want to go out of my way to hang with them. Sarah Hepola falls into this group, first by association, but as time has progressed through online interaction.

Sarah is a part of the “hip journalist” crowd I’ve always envied a little bit. She’ll probably push back and say, “I’m not a hip journalist! That’s reserved for people like Thomas Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson…maybe Legs McNeil!” She’d be correct, as far as that goes, but it’s also true that she has been able to make a career commenting about society in some way…often by commenting on things she thinks are cool and having others agree. That’s what I mean by being “hip.” The hip journalists I really envy are those who make a career reviewing films or games, in part because I think I often know more about the subject (and sometimes even imagine myself as a better writer) than many of those who make a living at the gig. Let’s just say that my rage at most of Indiewire’s critical team burns with the fire of 1,000 suns, even as Anne Thompson (editor-at-large of said publication) is someone I like and admire. I don’t dislike most hip journalists, but a part of me envies them in the “I am completely fantasizing how carefree their lives are” kind of way. I know most of them work extremely hard, but their profession is SO COOL.

Anyway, Sarah has a new book out called The Only Thing There is to Want: A Memoir of Three Loves. The book, which I will be reading and reviewing at some point that is too late to be topical, engages with the challenges many people (and especially women) face in trying to have it all in career and companion. To promote the book, Sarah has created a new Substack called Love Anyway that unlike so many Substackers today, she is offering for free. Yes, it’s aimed at marketing her book, a book that is distinctly hip journalist because who gets to sell memoirs, but it is free and gives a sense of her humor and charm. In her most recent post, she shares the “Ten Best Love Songs” according to her.

The Ten Best Love Songs, According to Me

It’s a good list, meaning that it’s filled with good songs, and I thought of sharing it as a part of a not-so-Weekly Geekly, but it included a song by Fleetwood Mac (no not that song) and so my mind wouldn’t settle for a mere paragraph or two in response. My mind demanded, demanded I say, that I share a full list of 10 Great Love Songs (you all know how I feel about “best” lists, which is to say that I prefer recommendation lists to top 10s etc.). In other words, I read her combination of community building and marketing as if it was one of those old internet memes. Look at that, I tied it all back together.

So…without further ado, here is a list of 10 songs in no particular order that I think are great love songs.

One Million by Rocket

I’m a sucker for a good Shoegaze band and Rocket is a fantastic shoegaze band. The textures of their musical tone, combined with the haunting voice of Alithea Tuttle, make for a wonderful contrast. You’ve got the fuzzy grind of shoegaze with the lilting high tones of dreampop, and it works beautifully. Their song One Million is about unrequited love and wanting to be noticed and it was one of the reasons I became and insta-fan of this band.

How Long Will I Love You by The Waterboys (as performed by Jon Boden, Sam Sweeney and Ben Coleman in About Time)

About Time is on my list of perfect films. It is a wonderful story of love and time travel. It is a romantic comedy. It is a coming-of-age story. It is a tale of loss and love. It is a tale of familial love. Richard Curtis has directed many wonderful films about love, but this is the one I’ve watched the most. The performance of How Long Will I Love You featured in the film is magnificent and you can see why Curtis chose it over the Ellie Goulding one that is featured on the soundtrack. That’s right, the version of the song in the film is not the one featured on the CD or playlist, which is too bad. The folk version is so much better and heartfelt. The sequence that uses it in the film (not what is in the video) is true Gesamtkunstwerk.

I’ll Follow You Into the Dark by Deathcab for Cutie

It’s hard to believe this song is almost 20 years old. This is a sad and dark song about love and the eternal commitment possible even in the face of uncertainty. It’s a song that says that no matter what comes, the one who loves you will be there if possible.

Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy

While Pachelbel’s Canon is one of my wife’s and my favorite songs, and played at our wedding eons ago, it is a bit overdone now and so I chose Debussy’s Clair de Lune. While Debussy is Edward’s favorite composer, and I’m Team Edward, this song stands strong because it is one of the most beautiful songs ever written. While its subject matter isn’t one of passionate love, it features prominently in the film Frankie and Johnnie and ties together the simple romance at play in the film. The movie is romantic, but only a comedy in the sense that the protagonists become a couple by the end. The dramatic moments overshadow the humorous and this is the song that unites the romance. There is a sadness and mystery in the song that is a fitting musical description of love.

While the songs are very different, I think there is a similar intimacy in Roberta Flack’s performance of First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. Such a beautiful song.

Operator by Jim Croce

Jim Croce’s Operator is one of the saddest love songs out there and a prime example of how fantastic the singer songwriter era of the early 1970s was at giving us songs that were musically complex while telling a story. The song has the requisite pop hook, but there’s depth there that is often lacking in pop of any era.

Always Something There to Remind Me by Naked Eyes

Burt Bacharach wrote banger after banger and Always Something There to Remind Me is just one example. It’s hard to beat a Dionne Warwick version of a song, but this 1980s alt-pop version of the song rises to the top. From its operatic beginning to its much more intimate chorus, this version hits all the right beats. Other versions of the song use backup singers to add depth to the chorus, but this version proves that’s unnecessary.

Farther Down by Matthew Sweet

From the cover albums he did with Susanna Hoffs to his album Girlfriend where he attempted to connect with the MTV crowd, Matthew Sweet has long been one of my favorite artists. He never hit it really big, he did partner with Susanna Hoffs and Mike Myers to create one of the best movie theme songs ever BBC by Ming Tea.

That’s not a romantic song though, for that I’ll go to his song Farther Down from the film Can’t Hardly Wait. When I think about the films released during my daughters’ high school years, it makes me kind of sad. While there is a lot of content aimed at their cohort, there aren’t many films “about” their life experience. Being a teenager in any era is hard, but in the era of polarization and Covid it can be even harder. Generation X had John Hughes films and Millennials had She’s All That, Can’t Hardly Wait, and many more. I think that one of the reasons that the new Spider-Man movie, and Obsession, have done so amazingly well is that they are films about Gen Z (and this is true of It Follows for Millennials). Every generation needs films about their experience. We’ve seen tons of films about the Boomer experience and Gen X had Hughes films (and eventually films like Swingers and more when they began making their own films), but Gen Z has had a hard time of it.

There’s quite of bit of cringe (I know I’m Unc for even using that outdated phrase, but dads are always Unc) in Can’t Hardly Wait, but there’s a lot of truth. It captures all the anxieties that dominate the high school experience but also shows how shallow they really are. Many of the people I thought disliked me in high school, due to high school politics, ended up being great friends later in life. At my reunions, you could tell those who peaked in high school, but it wasn’t many people. Most had moved on and remembered everyone fondly.

Kiss Me by Sixpence None the Richer

Okay, I’m really picking too many songs from romantic comedies. I mentioned She’s All That in the prior post, but it’s a great romantic comedy and it features a lovely song by Sixpence None the Richer. Sure, the film is implausible in that it tries to present Rachel Leigh Cook as anything other than stunningly beautiful. I’m sorry, glasses and overalls don’t take away from her beauty, they just make her a beautiful tomboy. The film’s performances are fun, but simple. The song on the other hand is one that will endure.

Fire and Rain by James Taylor

Not all love songs are about romance. Some are about friendship and James Taylor’s sad Fire and Rain is one of the best in that genre. Like Croce, Taylor is a powerful singer/songwriter. If you had asked me in 1970 (if I had been alive then) which of the two would live to be 78 (and hopefully even older), I would have picked Croce. James Taylor struggled with heroin addiction and his song Carolina in My Mind is a song about his longing for home as he felt isolated and contemplated his struggles with heroin addiction. It’s a song about the love he has for his home and family; Fire and Rain is a song of love about those he lost far too young. It’s the musical equivalent to the Author’s Note Philip K. Dick wrote for A Scanner Darkly:

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed–run over, maimed, destroyed–but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. - Philip K. Dick, Author’s Note from A Scanner Darkly

A Lifetime by Better than Ezra

While the official meaning behind the band name Better than Ezra is still a mystery, there is no mystery to what A Lifetime is about. The song was inspired by the theft and cremation of Gram Parson’s body, but the story this song tells is a little different. Like James Taylor’s song this is a song about a dead best friend, but the cause of death is unknown, and it doesn’t matter. I’ve lost friends to age, disease, and suicide. All of them were gone too soon. Of all of them, the one that hit the hardest was my friend Ron Peck. He was the coolest guy I ever knew. He was self-assured and had truly refined taste. He had a wonderful sense of humor, but he had an eternal melancholy. Years before he died, he told me how he would kill himself. He described it in great detail as a criticism of someone who had attempted and failed. He said they chose the wrong method and described how he would do it right. That’s what he did, and I miss him every day. We are getting close to October 7th, the anniversary of my mom’s death from heroin addiction, and Ron helped me get through some of the initial pain of that when we reconnected after a couple of years of “I’m in college now” distance. That made losing him even harder, but we had a lifetime of fun together.