Pop School day 5: 20 greatest love songs
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/music/article4004515.ece
God only knows how anyone else stood a chance for the top slot. The Beach Boys
have made it to No 1 in our final, Valentine’s Day list of the very best
love songs.
But are Take That better equipped to provide a soundtrack to romance than the
original Mr Loverman, Elvis Presley, and Sir Smooch himself, Burt Bacharach?
And does 10cc’s denial track - an MOR classic - I’m Not
in Love deserve its position? (No, it’s just a silly phase we’re going
through - Ed.)
Bob Stanley, musician and author of Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop,
picks the 20 best love songs - and reminds you of those classic lines. It’s
not too late. Dim the lights, press play and let those words roll off the
tongue. We wish you happiness. And above all this we wish you love!
1/ God Only Knows The Beach Boys
The yearning of the French horn, backed by a celeste, is followed by the most
unexpected opening line - “I may not always love you.” God
Only Knows then goes on to detail exactly why the singer’s love is
unconditional, unbreakable: “You never need to doubt it.” The lyric was
written by Tony Asher, a humble jingle writer (Mattel toys, Gallo wine)
before he met Brian Wilson and they created the Pet Sounds album. Wilson’s
unorthodox, exquisite arrangement (what the hell is that middle eight?) is
key to the song’s impact - without it, the spell is easily broken, as proven
by David Bowie and Neil Diamond’s aggressive, meaty covers.
Best line “God only knows what I’d be without you”
2/ This Guy’s in Love With You Herb Alpert
Looking for a song to sing to his wife on a 1968 TV special called The Beat
of the Brass, Alpert called Burt Bacharach to ask if he had anything
suitable. Bacharach sent him This Girl’s in Love With You,
which he had most likely written for Dusty Springfield as a follow-up to The
Look of Love. Aside from the slight title change, Alpert added a cracked
confidence. He’s just the right side of smarmy on the opening verse, backed
by a smoky electric piano - you picture him in a tux, a good-looking guy
with a sense of entitlement. The doubts, though, soon creep in, and by the
end of the chorus (“If not, I’ll just die”) he’s broken, all pretence is
gone.
Best line “Don’t let me be the last to know. My hands are shaking,
don’t let my heart keep breaking”
3/ Back for Good Take That
Though he’s proved his skills since (Patience, Shine, Greatest Day),
Gary Barlow hadn’t exactly shown his hand before he wrote Back For
Good in 1995 - Take That hits such as A Million Love Songs
had clunky scanning and lyrics written with thick, butcher’s fingers. While Back
for Good’s “fist of pure emotion” sounds awkward, it is mirrored by the
clever “in the twist of separation” - the boy was maturing. The real power of
Back for Good lies in Barlow’s jump up to the high notes (“What-EH-ver I
said, what-EH-ver I did, I didn’t mean it”). The lyric is a fragile web of
white lies. He knows exactly what he did, but Barlow’s delivery, with Bee
Gees-like support from his colleagues on the chorus (“Want you back, want
you back”) is skilfully designed to melt.
Best line “Whatever I said, whatever I did, I didn’t mean it”
4/ The Folks Who Live on the Hill Peggy Lee
Though it was written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II in 1937, the
definitive version was recorded on Lee’s Frank Sinatra-conducted album, The
Man I Love, 20 years later, which brought out the song’s eerie
isolation. Sinatra’s woozy treatment could see Lee as an entranced and
smitten lover or as a Valium-doped housewife. Either way, the lyric is very
much a dream. The song was used on Terence Davies’s film Of Time
and the City as the soundtrack to footage of the gleaming new postwar
estates of Liverpool; another dream, another illusion.
Best line “Someday we’ll build a home on a hilltop high”
5/ You Make Me Feel Brand New The Stylistics
Arranger Thom Bell was a child prodigy who first gave us what he tagged
“symphonic soul” with the Philadelphia group the Delfonics (La-La
Means I Love You, Ready or Not . . .), much beloved of the Fugees
and Quentin Tarantino. When they parted from Bell in 1971, he hooked up with
the similarly smooth Stylistics, whose lead singer Russell Thompkins Jr had
an unlikely falsetto. Bell and his writing partner Linda Creed gave them the
moody You Make Me Feel Brand New in 1974, a hymnal song that’s more
about thirtysomething gratitude than teenage romance.
Best line “Only you cared when I needed a friend, believed in me
through thick and thin”
6/ Love is a Losing Game Amy Winehouse
Given her publicly played out on-off relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil,
Winehouse’s Back to Black album could have sounded tawdry.
Instead, it was by turns playful, stroppy and very moving. Love is a
Losing Game was its most beautiful moment - “memories mar my mind, love
is a fate resigned” - with producer Mark Ronson giving Winehouse a subdued
string and brass backing. It closed side one of the vinyl edition of Back
to Black, a shrugging sigh after the fire of Rehab, You Know I’m No
Good and the title track. Prince played it at his now-legendary 2007
shows at the O2, and George Michael later chose it as his ultimate Desert
Island Disc.
Best line “Love is a losing game, one I wish I’d never played. Oh, what
a mess we made”
7/ Always on My Mind Elvis Presley
You have to feel sorry for Mark James. He may not be among the better known
songwriters of the late Sixties, but having come up with both this and Suspicious
Minds he certainly deserves a place at the table. This was one of
several Elvis recordings from the early Seventies loaded with regret and
self-analysis, reflecting the unhappy split from his wife Priscilla. Most of
them - Separate Ways, I’ve Lost You - verge on maudlin,
but Always on My Mind is a sincere letter of apology, even though the
singer seems to know the relationship is irretrievable. Willie Nelson’s
stripped-back cover version won him a 1982 Grammy; Pet Shop Boys’ clattering
version still had a warm pulse in spite of their ironic intentions.
Best line “Little things I should have said and done, I just never took
the time”
8/ This is My Prayer Theola Kilgore
It’s hard to think of a more devotional song, a song so absolutely certain of
eternal love, and listening to it you can’t help but fear for Theola. She
looks forward decades, sees the beginning and end (only in death) of the
love affair. “Darling, my life has been completed/ You are the only one that
I have ever needed.” Kilgore’s gospel background is put to good use. She had
a bigger hit with the not-quite-as-intense The Love of My Man, also
in 1963. Both were written by the singer Ed Townsend, who would go on to
co-write Let’s Get It On with Marvin Gaye.
Best line “Never let me bring him one moment of sadness”
9/ Trains and Boats and Planes Burt Bacharach
Bacharach was a star in his own right by the time this song was recorded in
1965. He was especially fêted in Britain with a string of No 1 hits - (There’s)
Always Something There to Remind Me, Anyone Who Had a Heart - which were
far bigger in the UK than the US. He recorded this in London, with help from
uncredited girl group the Breakaways. Hal David wrote the lyrics while
observing that Bacharach’s fledgeling relationship with the actress Angie
Dickinson was struggling.
Best line “They mean a trip to Paris or Rome to someone else, but not
for me”
10/ I’m Not in Love 10cc
The defence mechanism of the sulky teenager. While it has been recorded as an
easy-listening number the lyric is an unconvincing shrug, overflowing into
ugliness on lines such as “I keep your picture upon my wall, it hides a
nasty stain that’s lyin’ there.” The genius of the song lies in Kevin
Godley’s vocal arrangement - made by overdubbing and looping hundreds of
different takes. Godley had dismissed singer Eric Stewart’s bossa nova demo
of the song, but both thought it was worth working on. With the help of
studio receptionist Kathy Warren (“Big boys don’t cry”), they ended up with
a masterpiece.
Best line “It’s just a silly phase I’m going through”
11/ Wichita Lineman Glen Campbell
It’s an unpromising set-up - man working up a telegraph pole misses his
girlfriend. The writer, though, was Jimmy Webb; in 1967-68 he was on a roll
with songs that were geographically specific (MacArthur Park, Galveston,
By the Time I Get to Phoenix) but emotionally as expansive as they came.
The yearning lyric is made all the more effective by alternating between the
day job (“If it snows, that stretch down south won’t ever stand the strain”)
and deep affection (“I want you for all time”). The wide-open spaces of the
arrangement are peerless - the “singing in the wires” is communicated by a
Morse code hook at the end of the chorus, and the restless coda suggests
that the image of the lineman is retreating farther into the distance.
Best line “I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time”
12/ Crazy in Love Beyoncé
Underneath the brass hook and thunking on-the-beat bassline of this party
anthem is a lyric of obsession and loss of self: “Don’t even need to buy a
new dress/ You ain’t there, ain’t nobody else to impress.” It’s hard to
imagine Knowles getting quite so rattled that she wanders around, moping,
wild-eyed in her tennis shoes. Who could have caused her to be lookin’ so
crazy right now? Why, Jay Z of course. Last summer the NME named Crazy
in Love “best pop song of the century”- it was hard to argue.
Best line “It’s the way that you know what I thought I knew. It’s the
beat that my heart skips when I’m with you”
13/ Without You Nilsson
One of the most talented songwriters of his generation, it seems odd that
Harry Nilsson is chiefly remembered for two songs he didn’t write, Fred
Neil’s Everybody’s Talkin’ and this one. It was
written by Pete Ham and Tom Evans and was first recorded by Welsh band
Badfinger. Badfinger made some great records, but their dry, whining
original take of Without You isn’t one of them. It’s a far from noble
song to begin with and could be seen as clear emotional blackmail: Nilsson’s
genius was to ramp up the chorus pay-off - controlled confusion on the first
two lines, before falling into the abyss on the second two.
Best line “No, I can’t forget this evening, or your face as you were
leaving”
14/ How Deep is Your Love Bee Gees
“How deep is your love? I really mean to learn.” Despite its sunny, gauzy
production, reflecting its use in Saturday Night Fever’s sole
romantic scene, this is a troubled love song. “We’re living in a world of
fools/ Breaking us down when they all should let us be” could have been
written by the brothers Gibb about their detractors in the press, who grew
in number exponentially once their disco hits became ubiquitous. As a love
song, its theme of opting out is calmly, if dangerously, appealing.
Best line “You’re the light in my deepest, darkest hour. You’re my
saviour when I fall”
15/ Unchained Melody The Righteous Brothers
In a heavyweight Righteous battle with You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,
this wins on points. It was originally the theme from a now almost forgotten
1955 prison drama called Unchained, though Bobby Hatfield’s
melismatic delivery and the intensity of the lyric make the enigmatic title
quite appropriate: “I’ve hungered for your touch”- not yearn, or crave, but
hunger. Jimmy Young’s starchy version (with a line that sounds like “God
speed you larb to me”) was a UK No 1 in the Fifties and, the Righteous
Brothers aside, it’s since been a chart-topper for Robson & Jerome
and Gareth Gates.
Best line “And time goes by so slowly. And time can do so much. Are you
still mine?”
16/ Bleeding Love Leona Lewis
When the debates have all been had and the dissertations written, Bleeding
Love will probably stand as the one great pop song to have come out of The
X Factor. Its visceral lyric is so strong - the idea of love being an
open wound - that it can almost make you queasy. Though it feels as if it
needs a female voice to carry it off, surprisingly it was co-written by
former US child actor Jesse McCartney and OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder for
McCartney’s third album; when Tedder saw Lewis on The X Factor,
though, he put the song forward for her first album. Lewis’s delivery is all
the more impressive for its restraint over the martial beat of Tedder’s
production.
Best line “But I don’t care what they say, I’m in love with you. They
try to pull me away, but they don’t know the truth”
17/ I Will Always Love You Dolly Parton
Some of the greatest love songs (see also Make it Easy on Yourself) are
the ones in which the singer is stepping aside gracefully; this fragile,
understated country ballad is the exact opposite of Without You.
While the original wasn’t a hit in Britain, it was a regular on Terry
Wogan’s Radio 2 breakfast show. I Will Always Love You’s
tenderness was transformed by Whitney Houston into a roar of enduring love
on The Bodyguard soundtrack in 1992, which brought the song to a much
wider audience while steam-rollering the lovely chord changes on the chorus
of Parton’s original.
Best line “And I wish you happiness, but above all this, I wish you
love”
18/ Love Story Taylor Swift
If you’re going to have the nerve to take the plot of Romeo and Juliet,
then give it a happy ending involving an engagement ring, you had better
write a bloody good song. Love Story really shouldn’t work, but
Swift’s southern fairytale is irresistible, spinning a teen movie yarn and
pulling you along: “Don’t be afraid, we’ll make it out of this mess/ It’s a
love story - baby, just say yes” . The video was set in a castle near
Nashville that was built in the Seventies - which seems appropriate.
Best line “Romeo, take me somewhere we can be alone”
19/ Story of My Life One Direction
Probably the biggest group in the world right now - and what kind of pop
overview would this be without including the biggest group in the world?
It’s impossible to tell at such close quarters, but it feels like One
Direction’s legacy will be closer to that of the Monkees or Take That than
Curiosity Killed the Cat. The words to this fine ballad incorporate nobility
(“Although I am broken, my heart is untamed”) and death (“Seems to me that
when I die these words will be written on my stone” sings Harry Styles;
“Don’t die, Harry!” cry his fans), while the Glen Campbell shuffle of the
guitar provides a gentle counterpunch.
Best line “And I been waiting for this time to come around, but baby
running after you is like chasing the clouds”
20/ Duke of Earl Gene Chandler
Pitched midway between the doo-wop of the Fifties and early soul, Chandler’s
tearful performance was ahead of its time and reached No 1 in the US while
failing to chart here at all. This oversight may have been due to its
confused concept of the British gentry - “You are my Duchess, my Duchess of
Earl/ We’ll walk through my dukedom and a paradise we will share” -
which rendered it slightly silly to English ears. Yet its attractive
excitement (“Nothing can stop me now!”) is undeniable.
Best line “I’m gonna love you, oh oh, nothing can stop me now, ’cause
I’m the Duke of Earl”
God only knows how anyone else stood a chance for the top slot. The Beach Boys
have made it to No 1 in our final, Valentine’s Day list of the very best
love songs.
But are Take That better equipped to provide a soundtrack to romance than the
original Mr Loverman, Elvis Presley, and Sir Smooch himself, Burt Bacharach?
And does 10cc’s denial track - an MOR classic - I’m Not
in Love deserve its position? (No, it’s just a silly phase we’re going
through - Ed.)
Bob Stanley, musician and author of Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop,
picks the 20 best love songs - and reminds you of those classic lines. It’s
not too late. Dim the lights, press play and let those words roll off the
tongue. We wish you happiness. And above all this we wish you love!
1/ God Only Knows The Beach Boys
The yearning of the French horn, backed by a celeste, is followed by the most
unexpected opening line - “I may not always love you.” God
Only Knows then goes on to detail exactly why the singer’s love is
unconditional, unbreakable: “You never need to doubt it.” The lyric was
written by Tony Asher, a humble jingle writer (Mattel toys, Gallo wine)
before he met Brian Wilson and they created the Pet Sounds album. Wilson’s
unorthodox, exquisite arrangement (what the hell is that middle eight?) is
key to the song’s impact - without it, the spell is easily broken, as proven
by David Bowie and Neil Diamond’s aggressive, meaty covers.
Best line “God only knows what I’d be without you”
2/ This Guy’s in Love With You Herb Alpert
Looking for a song to sing to his wife on a 1968 TV special called The Beat
of the Brass, Alpert called Burt Bacharach to ask if he had anything
suitable. Bacharach sent him This Girl’s in Love With You,
which he had most likely written for Dusty Springfield as a follow-up to The
Look of Love. Aside from the slight title change, Alpert added a cracked
confidence. He’s just the right side of smarmy on the opening verse, backed
by a smoky electric piano - you picture him in a tux, a good-looking guy
with a sense of entitlement. The doubts, though, soon creep in, and by the
end of the chorus (“If not, I’ll just die”) he’s broken, all pretence is
gone.
Best line “Don’t let me be the last to know. My hands are shaking,
don’t let my heart keep breaking”
3/ Back for Good Take That
Though he’s proved his skills since (Patience, Shine, Greatest Day),
Gary Barlow hadn’t exactly shown his hand before he wrote Back For
Good in 1995 - Take That hits such as A Million Love Songs
had clunky scanning and lyrics written with thick, butcher’s fingers. While Back
for Good’s “fist of pure emotion” sounds awkward, it is mirrored by the
clever “in the twist of separation” - the boy was maturing. The real power of
Back for Good lies in Barlow’s jump up to the high notes (“What-EH-ver I
said, what-EH-ver I did, I didn’t mean it”). The lyric is a fragile web of
white lies. He knows exactly what he did, but Barlow’s delivery, with Bee
Gees-like support from his colleagues on the chorus (“Want you back, want
you back”) is skilfully designed to melt.
Best line “Whatever I said, whatever I did, I didn’t mean it”
4/ The Folks Who Live on the Hill Peggy Lee
Though it was written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II in 1937, the
definitive version was recorded on Lee’s Frank Sinatra-conducted album, The
Man I Love, 20 years later, which brought out the song’s eerie
isolation. Sinatra’s woozy treatment could see Lee as an entranced and
smitten lover or as a Valium-doped housewife. Either way, the lyric is very
much a dream. The song was used on Terence Davies’s film Of Time
and the City as the soundtrack to footage of the gleaming new postwar
estates of Liverpool; another dream, another illusion.
Best line “Someday we’ll build a home on a hilltop high”
5/ You Make Me Feel Brand New The Stylistics
Arranger Thom Bell was a child prodigy who first gave us what he tagged
“symphonic soul” with the Philadelphia group the Delfonics (La-La
Means I Love You, Ready or Not . . .), much beloved of the Fugees
and Quentin Tarantino. When they parted from Bell in 1971, he hooked up with
the similarly smooth Stylistics, whose lead singer Russell Thompkins Jr had
an unlikely falsetto. Bell and his writing partner Linda Creed gave them the
moody You Make Me Feel Brand New in 1974, a hymnal song that’s more
about thirtysomething gratitude than teenage romance.
Best line “Only you cared when I needed a friend, believed in me
through thick and thin”
6/ Love is a Losing Game Amy Winehouse
Given her publicly played out on-off relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil,
Winehouse’s Back to Black album could have sounded tawdry.
Instead, it was by turns playful, stroppy and very moving. Love is a
Losing Game was its most beautiful moment - “memories mar my mind, love
is a fate resigned” - with producer Mark Ronson giving Winehouse a subdued
string and brass backing. It closed side one of the vinyl edition of Back
to Black, a shrugging sigh after the fire of Rehab, You Know I’m No
Good and the title track. Prince played it at his now-legendary 2007
shows at the O2, and George Michael later chose it as his ultimate Desert
Island Disc.
Best line “Love is a losing game, one I wish I’d never played. Oh, what
a mess we made”
7/ Always on My Mind Elvis Presley
You have to feel sorry for Mark James. He may not be among the better known
songwriters of the late Sixties, but having come up with both this and Suspicious
Minds he certainly deserves a place at the table. This was one of
several Elvis recordings from the early Seventies loaded with regret and
self-analysis, reflecting the unhappy split from his wife Priscilla. Most of
them - Separate Ways, I’ve Lost You - verge on maudlin,
but Always on My Mind is a sincere letter of apology, even though the
singer seems to know the relationship is irretrievable. Willie Nelson’s
stripped-back cover version won him a 1982 Grammy; Pet Shop Boys’ clattering
version still had a warm pulse in spite of their ironic intentions.
Best line “Little things I should have said and done, I just never took
the time”
8/ This is My Prayer Theola Kilgore
It’s hard to think of a more devotional song, a song so absolutely certain of
eternal love, and listening to it you can’t help but fear for Theola. She
looks forward decades, sees the beginning and end (only in death) of the
love affair. “Darling, my life has been completed/ You are the only one that
I have ever needed.” Kilgore’s gospel background is put to good use. She had
a bigger hit with the not-quite-as-intense The Love of My Man, also
in 1963. Both were written by the singer Ed Townsend, who would go on to
co-write Let’s Get It On with Marvin Gaye.
Best line “Never let me bring him one moment of sadness”
9/ Trains and Boats and Planes Burt Bacharach
Bacharach was a star in his own right by the time this song was recorded in
1965. He was especially fêted in Britain with a string of No 1 hits - (There’s)
Always Something There to Remind Me, Anyone Who Had a Heart - which were
far bigger in the UK than the US. He recorded this in London, with help from
uncredited girl group the Breakaways. Hal David wrote the lyrics while
observing that Bacharach’s fledgeling relationship with the actress Angie
Dickinson was struggling.
Best line “They mean a trip to Paris or Rome to someone else, but not
for me”
10/ I’m Not in Love 10cc
The defence mechanism of the sulky teenager. While it has been recorded as an
easy-listening number the lyric is an unconvincing shrug, overflowing into
ugliness on lines such as “I keep your picture upon my wall, it hides a
nasty stain that’s lyin’ there.” The genius of the song lies in Kevin
Godley’s vocal arrangement - made by overdubbing and looping hundreds of
different takes. Godley had dismissed singer Eric Stewart’s bossa nova demo
of the song, but both thought it was worth working on. With the help of
studio receptionist Kathy Warren (“Big boys don’t cry”), they ended up with
a masterpiece.
Best line “It’s just a silly phase I’m going through”
11/ Wichita Lineman Glen Campbell
It’s an unpromising set-up - man working up a telegraph pole misses his
girlfriend. The writer, though, was Jimmy Webb; in 1967-68 he was on a roll
with songs that were geographically specific (MacArthur Park, Galveston,
By the Time I Get to Phoenix) but emotionally as expansive as they came.
The yearning lyric is made all the more effective by alternating between the
day job (“If it snows, that stretch down south won’t ever stand the strain”)
and deep affection (“I want you for all time”). The wide-open spaces of the
arrangement are peerless - the “singing in the wires” is communicated by a
Morse code hook at the end of the chorus, and the restless coda suggests
that the image of the lineman is retreating farther into the distance.
Best line “I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time”
12/ Crazy in Love Beyoncé
Underneath the brass hook and thunking on-the-beat bassline of this party
anthem is a lyric of obsession and loss of self: “Don’t even need to buy a
new dress/ You ain’t there, ain’t nobody else to impress.” It’s hard to
imagine Knowles getting quite so rattled that she wanders around, moping,
wild-eyed in her tennis shoes. Who could have caused her to be lookin’ so
crazy right now? Why, Jay Z of course. Last summer the NME named Crazy
in Love “best pop song of the century”- it was hard to argue.
Best line “It’s the way that you know what I thought I knew. It’s the
beat that my heart skips when I’m with you”
13/ Without You Nilsson
One of the most talented songwriters of his generation, it seems odd that
Harry Nilsson is chiefly remembered for two songs he didn’t write, Fred
Neil’s Everybody’s Talkin’ and this one. It was
written by Pete Ham and Tom Evans and was first recorded by Welsh band
Badfinger. Badfinger made some great records, but their dry, whining
original take of Without You isn’t one of them. It’s a far from noble
song to begin with and could be seen as clear emotional blackmail: Nilsson’s
genius was to ramp up the chorus pay-off - controlled confusion on the first
two lines, before falling into the abyss on the second two.
Best line “No, I can’t forget this evening, or your face as you were
leaving”
14/ How Deep is Your Love Bee Gees
“How deep is your love? I really mean to learn.” Despite its sunny, gauzy
production, reflecting its use in Saturday Night Fever’s sole
romantic scene, this is a troubled love song. “We’re living in a world of
fools/ Breaking us down when they all should let us be” could have been
written by the brothers Gibb about their detractors in the press, who grew
in number exponentially once their disco hits became ubiquitous. As a love
song, its theme of opting out is calmly, if dangerously, appealing.
Best line “You’re the light in my deepest, darkest hour. You’re my
saviour when I fall”
15/ Unchained Melody The Righteous Brothers
In a heavyweight Righteous battle with You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,
this wins on points. It was originally the theme from a now almost forgotten
1955 prison drama called Unchained, though Bobby Hatfield’s
melismatic delivery and the intensity of the lyric make the enigmatic title
quite appropriate: “I’ve hungered for your touch”- not yearn, or crave, but
hunger. Jimmy Young’s starchy version (with a line that sounds like “God
speed you larb to me”) was a UK No 1 in the Fifties and, the Righteous
Brothers aside, it’s since been a chart-topper for Robson & Jerome
and Gareth Gates.
Best line “And time goes by so slowly. And time can do so much. Are you
still mine?”
16/ Bleeding Love Leona Lewis
When the debates have all been had and the dissertations written, Bleeding
Love will probably stand as the one great pop song to have come out of The
X Factor. Its visceral lyric is so strong - the idea of love being an
open wound - that it can almost make you queasy. Though it feels as if it
needs a female voice to carry it off, surprisingly it was co-written by
former US child actor Jesse McCartney and OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder for
McCartney’s third album; when Tedder saw Lewis on The X Factor,
though, he put the song forward for her first album. Lewis’s delivery is all
the more impressive for its restraint over the martial beat of Tedder’s
production.
Best line “But I don’t care what they say, I’m in love with you. They
try to pull me away, but they don’t know the truth”
17/ I Will Always Love You Dolly Parton
Some of the greatest love songs (see also Make it Easy on Yourself) are
the ones in which the singer is stepping aside gracefully; this fragile,
understated country ballad is the exact opposite of Without You.
While the original wasn’t a hit in Britain, it was a regular on Terry
Wogan’s Radio 2 breakfast show. I Will Always Love You’s
tenderness was transformed by Whitney Houston into a roar of enduring love
on The Bodyguard soundtrack in 1992, which brought the song to a much
wider audience while steam-rollering the lovely chord changes on the chorus
of Parton’s original.
Best line “And I wish you happiness, but above all this, I wish you
love”
18/ Love Story Taylor Swift
If you’re going to have the nerve to take the plot of Romeo and Juliet,
then give it a happy ending involving an engagement ring, you had better
write a bloody good song. Love Story really shouldn’t work, but
Swift’s southern fairytale is irresistible, spinning a teen movie yarn and
pulling you along: “Don’t be afraid, we’ll make it out of this mess/ It’s a
love story - baby, just say yes” . The video was set in a castle near
Nashville that was built in the Seventies - which seems appropriate.
Best line “Romeo, take me somewhere we can be alone”
19/ Story of My Life One Direction
Probably the biggest group in the world right now - and what kind of pop
overview would this be without including the biggest group in the world?
It’s impossible to tell at such close quarters, but it feels like One
Direction’s legacy will be closer to that of the Monkees or Take That than
Curiosity Killed the Cat. The words to this fine ballad incorporate nobility
(“Although I am broken, my heart is untamed”) and death (“Seems to me that
when I die these words will be written on my stone” sings Harry Styles;
“Don’t die, Harry!” cry his fans), while the Glen Campbell shuffle of the
guitar provides a gentle counterpunch.
Best line “And I been waiting for this time to come around, but baby
running after you is like chasing the clouds”
20/ Duke of Earl Gene Chandler
Pitched midway between the doo-wop of the Fifties and early soul, Chandler’s
tearful performance was ahead of its time and reached No 1 in the US while
failing to chart here at all. This oversight may have been due to its
confused concept of the British gentry - “You are my Duchess, my Duchess of
Earl/ We’ll walk through my dukedom and a paradise we will share” -
which rendered it slightly silly to English ears. Yet its attractive
excitement (“Nothing can stop me now!”) is undeniable.
Best line “I’m gonna love you, oh oh, nothing can stop me now, ’cause
I’m the Duke of Earl”