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In the Mood for Love
By Tom Netherland
Media General News Service
Love and passion can ignite with a blink of an eye. One look – the look – and you bet Cupid aims his arrows and fires mightily. Musicians have famously captured such moments in songs. Love of all kinds – enduring to fleeting, unrequited to unconditional, among young and old alike live in songs.
No amount of ink and space employed herein could list them all. But read on for some blood pressure-rising, heart-pounding and just plain old hand-holding songs of love.
Take Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.” Co-written by Merle Kilgore and Cash’s eventual wife June Carter, the song was number one for seven weeks during 1963 and has long since become one of Cash’s landmark moments on record.
But “Ring of Fire” is a love song. A fiery love song in which Cash sings that “… it burns, burns, burns” – “it” being love. Carter had Cash in mind as he was the ring of fire. Cash in turn used her words for him to underline how he felt for her.
Then, in 1967, Cash and Carter hit the top of the charts with “Jackson,” their first major and biggest duet hit together. Fast as lovers’ beating hearts, the song’s whiplash tempo mimicked the intense love between Cash and Carter. They were married the next year.
Friends and neighbors, listen and love.
Few singers brought the love more than Frank Sinatra. Old Blue Eyes had a way with words meant for the heart. Whether finger-poppin’ his way through Cole Porter’s “In the Still of the Night,” bounding with love overflowing in “I’ve got the World on a String” or carefully romancing via George and Ira Gershwin’s “Embraceable You,” Sinatra’s songs stick to the heart like arrows to the heart.
From the try and try again category, in 1947 Sinatra offered George and Ira Gershwin’s smoky hot “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” Melt when he lets linger such lines as “The world will pardon my mush, ‘cause I have got, my baby, a crush on you.”
Fellas, take note and rocket to a record store to buy Sinatra’s “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Then, bear in mind the following. Every day could be Valentine’s Day.
Plenty of songs refer to the recognized day of love. From Jim Brickman and Martina McBride’s soaked-in-sap “Valentine” to Willie Nelson’s ode to his children, “Valentine,” scores of songs invokes the “V” word.
Let’s look at Nelson’s “Valentine.” Simple and spare yet subtly powerful when heard, particularly Merle Haggard’s rendition from 1994, the song’s opening lines “Valentine, won’t you be my valentine, and introduce your heart to mine … can’t you see I love you, valentine” could easily crash into a heap of mush if not for power of performance.
From the category of unrequited love comes the masterful Hank Williams. Desire and want magnified to the power of millions emerges when Williams sang such lines as “If you only love me half as much as I love you” on “Half as Much.”
Williams probably just as easily have sung the Rolling Stones’ uncharacteristically tender “Wild Horses.” Lead singer Mick Jagger eases the rock while emphasizing the strength of love when he emotes that “wild horses couldn’t drag me away …” to whoever was the object of his love at the time.
Listen to Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight.” Clapton’s guitar slides and wails quietly, bringing to mind candlelight for two as he looks deep into the eyes of his girl and says “Darling, you look so wonderful tonight.”
Simple, yet electrically powerful.
Dig deeper for Chris Isaak’s “Except the New Girl.” Not exactly a song of unrequited love, the shadowy song emphasizes the oftentimes incredible urge to and intense search for love that steams within many of us.
Hard rockers, don’t miss Guns ‘N Roses. The band best known for the decidedly non-love song “Welcome to the Jungle,” waxed romantic with the epic “November Rain.” “When I look into your eyes I can see your love refrain but darling when I hold you don’t you know I feel the same.”
Very much a gray area song of love, in which lead singer Axl Rose essentially doesn’t know which way his love will turn, the song embodies the unknown while also embracing the moment.
Sometimes, love just needs patience. As sung so memorably on “Patience,” Guns ‘N Roses’ Axl Rose whispers “girl, I think about you every day now … there is no doubt you’re in my heart now.”
So it goes with love songs. Most people have their favorites, and for many of them, they are the soundtracks of the love of their lives. Songs of the heart are in the heart. Just look and they will come.
TOM NETHERLAND is a freelance writer. He can be reached at .
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