Make You Feel My Love: 5 Songs With Unique Expressions of Love

This week's songs are from Captain Beefheart, Lucinda Williams, Daniel Johnston, My Morning Jacket, and Brian Eno & John Cale

Talking Heads “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” may be my favorite song. That designation can change by the day, or even moment-to-moment. But when I’m forced to offer an answer, I have trouble thinking of an alternative. It wins by default. The song has been described as a series of non-sequiturs, but the various metaphors are all tiles in a mosaic about a concrete description of love. Being literal by design (one critic called it “Autistic Erotic”), it is devoid of cliche, and very specific. David Byrne was being intentional—all based on his observation at how loaded with cliches love songs often are.

“It’s a real honest kind of love song. I tried to write one that wasn’t corny, that didn’t sound stupid or lame, the way many do.”

Part of the whole idea of romantic love is that one loses their faculties, composure, and even sense of reality. So it’s easy to understand why writers stumble into the same handful of adjectives and symbolism. Love makes people do crazy things—like write songs. Sometimes people are already crazy and write songs, and then they fall in love. Maybe the order’s got nothing to do with it. But there are some great songs about love—or its effect on people—that avoid the typical cliches and articulate something far more real than heart beats, butterflies, and dreams.

Here are 5 songs with unique expressions of love.

“Art is not necessary. It’s like love—it fills your heart and soul.” - Captain Beefheart

Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band - “My Head is My Only House Unless it Rains”

Beefheart on a Valentine’s Day entry? Yep! This is an incredibly soulful jam. It’s got two winding guitars and a steady drum underneath it to keep the beat of Don Van Vliet’s heart. If this was done by Steely Dan or Joni Mitchell instead of the gruff oddball avant-garde rocker, it would be lauded as one of the great modern love songs. It does have a lot in common with Mitchell’s Court & Spark and Hejira fusion-lite era. There is such a clean, melodic tone to the lead guitar, even as it cuts a corner into some angular lines in the chorus. 1972’s Clear Spot is a wonderful entry point into Beefheart’s catalogue (see also: “Too Much Time”). “My Head is My Only House Unless it Rains” finds Beefheart in pursuit of his one true love—they’re out there somewhere, he just hasn’t found them yet. He’s got a series of wild images to describe just how focused he is in his pursuit. He eventually gets around to a cliched desire, but it’s expressed within such a unique metaphor that it’s easy to forgive:

“My heart won't beat until I wrap my arms around you
My arms are just two things in the way
Until I can wrap them around you”

“I love that Bob Dylan song ‘Ramona.’ I love that song. ‘Ramona, come closer, shut softly your watery eyes.’ Watery eyes. That's writing. And that's what's missing in a lot of writing today. People would just say ‘eyes’.” - Lucinda Williams

Lucinda Williams - “Something About What Happens When We Talk”

An early-career gem from the great Lucinda Williams. If the meaning of this song eludes you, you must have never had great…conversation. That’s all it’s about: the intoxicating effect of a great conversation.

Conversation with you was like a drug
It wasn't your face so much as it was your words

As we’ve established, it’s pretty easy to write a song about love, loaded with cliches and double entendre. But Williams’ ability to find that sweeping feeling in more natural settings—human connection, of all places!—is damn good writing. The melody (particularly in the refrain) and the pacing makes for a song that feels too romantic to be about just talking. In addition to Williams’ writing and performance, there’s some really nice lead guitar here by Williams’ longtime guitarist & producer Gurf Morlix, a Top-5 contender for the Greatest Name in Rock & Roll.

Daniel Johnston - “Some Things Last a Long Time”

Like “This Must Be the Place,” Johnston is in just-the-facts mode here. He’s got a picture on the wall. The colors are strong. He thinks about the person in it often. But oh my what a song! A lot of what I struggle with on many of Johnston’s songs is that they are grasping at the idea of love. They have the emotional vocabulary of a middle schooler’s attempts at writing early Beatles songs. Many of his admirers appreciate him for that childlike quality. But then there’s something like this—it’s all about what he’s not saying. He still sings with an innocence and fragility that is nearly overwhelming. Two pensive chords make the bulk of the instrumentation—he’s thinking of telling her about all of this, but he’s undecided. Back and forth. Maybe instead, he wrote this beautiful song.

“I see the person singing and it’s definitely not me now and it definitely is what I was then…A cool thing about recording—you can freeze these moments of yourself in time, it’s like a little time machine, that there’s this version of you that’s forever frozen in time and will always stay that version of you. But then the you that’s still living keeps going on and changing and growing, hopefully becoming better and better.” - Jim James

My Morning Jacket - “Phone Went West”

Love can make people do crazy things. Sure, that’s a cliche. But listening to Jim James sing about someone in need of medical attention who is also trying to break into someone’s house—trying both the front and back door—somehow sounds like the climax of a Nicholas Sparks book. I mean, you try and tell him whether he’s right or wrong. Because even he doesn’t seem to know.

Off 2001’s At Dawn, My Morning Jacket have let this song evolve in their live sets over the years. It’s become a fan favorite given its shape-shifting nature and their ability to stretch out the drama. Last time I saw them, the light reggae » post-rock epic version clocked in just over 13 minutes. You can check that version out right here. One of my favorite things about early My Morning Jacket is the echo of Jim James’ voice, and they captured that effect naturally by recording his vocals in an empty grain silo on his family’s farm. No wonder it sounds like a grand piano in a concert hall.

“Once while dining with Eno, Cale set fire to the check. ‘Eno was helpless with laughter, screaming, “Oh horseplay!” while the bill was in flames in the ashtray.” - From Pitchfork’s review of Wrong Way Up

Brian Eno & John Cale - “Lay My Love”

Leave it to Brian Eno to find an indirect way to say “I Love You” in a song—with an heap of extra words and obfuscation in between. This is from 1990’s Wrong Way Up, the only full-album release from two long-time, if intermittent, collaborators. They apparently didn’t work well together, despite what the results have to offer. “Lay My Love” sounds like an Eno solo effort—he’s singing and it’s got his usual programmatic drum machine/synth sound. Cale doesn’t even play the strings part. Bassist Darryl Johnson—a frequent Eno and Daniel Lanois session player—also has a credit on the track. The lyrics are barely comprehensible and came out of Eno’s process of laying down a melody with nonsensical gibberish and forming words out of them later. Whatever the words, he’s rolling out the red carpet as a way of expressing his love in a way that at least sounds like he means it:

I scramble all the names and the combinations
I penetrate the walls of explanation
I am the will
I am the burning
And I will lay my love around you.

And maybe just sounding like you mean it is all one really needs to hear.

Thanks for reading. Enjoy the listening.