Those scare quotes are important. Most straight up, earnest love songs bore me–unless they feature a lot of use of the word “baby” in which case they positively repell me. These songs are all songs about love, of one kind or another, but they are not what you would call “love songs”.
(If you’re wondering why that image for this mix: it’s Reading Gaol. Draw your own conclusions.)
- Danny Michel • Another Love Song (from Clear)
- Let's establish the mood right off. The chorus here is the theme of this mix.
- Tom Wilson • I'm In Love With The System (from Dog Years)
- A song about the neurotic love of the abused dog for the cruel master. Except, you know, in the music industry. It’s a pathological love song.
- Aengus Finnan • Fly Away (from Fool's Gold)
- A boy's love song for his Dad. This will also completely break your heart if you let it. Especially the bit about the razor-blade & ash tattoo. Heard live this can reduce strong men to tears. The true story that inspired this song is one of the reasons why Aengus isn’t a teacher any more.
- The Waifs • When I Die (from Sink or Swim)
- A girl's love song for her home town. This is pretty much straight up love, but love of a place. The Waifs are a pretty great Aussie group that have done quite a bit of touring in Canada, considering the distance.
- Thea Gilmore • Ever Fall In Love (from Loft Music)
- Gilmore is a great songwriter herself, but this is, of course, a cover of the Buzzcocks tune. It's a painfully catchy cover, though, and you will find yourself humming it afterwards. Anyway, it's hard to complain about a happy version of a song about being in love with exactly the wrong person. The original.
- Thin Lizzy • Angel From The Coast (from Jailbreak)
- Miracles, jet set hit women, poker-playing wild card women, fallen drunks, and criminal love. How can you go wrong? U2 can go fuck themselves, this is the best rock band from Dublin.
- The Pogues • The Broad Majestic Shannon (from If I Should Fall From Grace With God)
- Speaking of Irish things… here you go, the closest you’ll get to a straight up love song. Of course in this one there is parting, one of the people is always crying, etc. It slides in because it’s also about being in love with a place and the memories it holds, where ever you roam. Live in 1988
- Sons of Maxwell • The Lighthouse (from The Neighbourhood)
- A love song for a hooker, or a paen to the notion of emotional suicide? U-Decide! Me, I’m thinking that the idea that a lighthouse could be a beacon to suicidal ships, as well as a warning to healthy ones, maps VERY, VERY nicely onto certain kinds of human relationships. I especially love that this song sounds like it should be a simpler romantic tune, when listening to the words shows it to be so much darker, and so much more interesting.
- Judy Henske • Wish I Had My Old Guitar (from Loose In The World)
- A love song for the bad old days. When we're old and comfortable, sometimes we look unreasonably fondly on the times when we weren't either. Also, references the Happiest Place on Earth.
- Richard Thompson • God Loves A Drunk (from Rumor and Sigh)
- God's unconditional love. Doesn't mean much to an atheist, but it makes for a really nice, really dark song. And when I say “doesn’t mean much”, that doesn’t mean I don’t get wistful at the idea of “no shakes and no horrors”. Live
- Keb' Mo' • You Can Love Yourself (from Just Like You)
- A blues song with sexual double entendres? Shocking, shocking I say. It amuses me that some people hear this song as a straight up paen to self-esteem and completely miss the saucier meanings.
- The Tim Malloys • One Night In Boston (from Drunkards, Bastards, and Blackguards)
- A love song, of sorts, for a long lost love. (My buddy Adam wrote the song, and sings it—this is important to know, for the “knew me from Adam” bit). I love the structure of this song, especially how it ends. Also, the whole lyric around the “who wouldn’t give absolution?” part blows me away.
- Junkhouse • No Way Out Of Love (The Rounder)
How is it that I can’t dind lyrics for this online? Shocking. (from Strays) - Hamilton's one-time bad boys of rock and roll do a song about love and gambling. Love as an inescapable trap, and the slow spiral of the female gambler.
- Jim Croce • King's Song (from Words and Music)
- I could have used half a dozen Croce songs here, but this is the one that's newest-to-me, so it's in my head. And it's a whole different kind of “love gone wrong” story.
- The Cult • Edie (Ciao Baby) (from Sonic Temple)
- This song is about Edie Sedgwick. The same woman who inspired Dylan's "Just Like a Woman" and "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat", as well as “Femme Fatale” by the Velvet Underground, “Little Miss S.” by Edie Brickell, and a whole lot of other songs. It's technically a love song, albeit a love song to a tragic figure from decades ago… This song always makes me think of Erica Ehm.Video.
- Jim White • The Wound That Never Heals (from No Such Place)
- A nice little serial killer love song. There aren't enough Black Widow tunes, you know. And ones where love is both the root of the pathology, and the way it expresses itself–well, that just had to make the cut.
- Spirit of the West • Swingin' Single (from Save This House)
- “We were splitting up, and you split up instead: You lost your head last night, and your body came to bed.” Yeah, that's pretty genius.
- Daniel Lanois • Rocky World (from For The Beauty Of Wynona)
- This is the most beautiful song from a CD featuring a naked woman with a knife on the cover.
- Flogging Molly • Far Away Boys (from Swagger)
- A working man's song for a far away love. This is the Irish version of that Heritage Canada commercial about their being one dead Chinese for every mile of the TransCanada railway.
- Headstones • Cemetary (from Picture Of Health)
- Sometimes finding love is all about being in the right place at the right time.Video — directed by Bruce McDonald, director of such acclaimed classics as RoadKill, Highway 61, and Hard Core Logo.
