Results for “ambivalence between love and self-preservation”

Songs

My Love Is Your Love

Whitney Houston

A reggae-tinged declaration of love built around apocalyptic and historical extremes, the song insists that a bond between two…

unconditional love survival and endurance spirituality and judgment

Love More

Sharon Van Etten

A quietly devastating account of an abusive relationship told with disorienting flatness, where the speaker's memories of…

domestic abuse and control normalization of harm survival and self-deception

I Love You Like a Ball and Chain

Eurythmics

A blues-rock stomper built on a single blunt paradox: love as bondage that still feels good. The lyric never resolves the…

obsessive love addiction loss of self

All About Our Love

Sade

A spare, almost liturgical love song that trades narrative detail for repetition and affirmation. Sade uses a handful of phrases…

endurance of love forgiveness renewal

If You Love Me

B.B. King

This is a plainspoken love-and-commitment song built almost entirely on conditional statements, trading the verse-chorus…

conditional love mutual understanding commitment

LOVE.

Kendrick Lamar

A relatively unguarded pop-leaning track for DAMN., LOVE. sets a domestic, romantic duet (with Zacari) against the album's…

conditional vs. unconditional love fame and material status as tests of loyalty domestic intimacy amid instability

Is It Love

Gang of Four

A fractured meditation on desire and alienation, this song asks whether what passes for love is really love at all, or just…

alienation under capitalism commodification of intimacy loss of language/memory

Love Bends

Wire

A short, incantatory list of contradictory claims about love, built almost entirely on repeating a single grammatical…

ambivalence of love transformation and distortion paradox

Isn't She Lovely

Stevie Wonder

A new father's unguarded celebration of his infant daughter's birth, structured as a series of rhetorical questions that answer…

fatherhood and new life gratitude love as creative force

When I Loved Her

Kris Kristofferson

A plainspoken elegy for a lost relationship, built on unglamorous, specific praise rather than romantic cliché. The narrator…

loss and regret the ordinary made sacred restlessness vs. belonging

And I Love Him

Shirley Horn

Shirley Horn's rendering of the Lennon-McCartney standard (gender-flipped from the Beatles' original) strips the song down to a…

devotion constancy simplicity of love

Hounds of Love

Kate Bush

A woman being chased through a nocturnal forest realizes the thing pursuing her is love itself, and that her real terror is not…

fear of intimacy vulnerability vs self-protection the hunt as metaphor for love

Love You All My Lifetime

Chaka Khan

A ballad of romantic devotion built on longing rather than resolution: the narrator insists a departed lover was fated to be…

unrequited or lost love fate versus self-doubt longing and yearning

Once I Had a Love (a.k.a.. The Disco Song)

Blondie

This early Blondie track (later reworked into "Heart of Glass") strips romantic disillusionment down to a chant-like refrain:…

disillusionment in love self-deception emotional numbness

Give Me Your Love (Love Song)

Curtis Mayfield

A slow-burning soul ballad built almost entirely around a single plea, this track works less through storytelling than through…

romantic devotion vulnerability refuge from hardship

Love Will Find a Way

Yes

A commercial-rock love song built on hesitation rather than certainty, in which the narrator wavers between wanting closeness…

romantic ambivalence reassurance through repetition emotional confusion

This Is Love

PJ Harvey

A blunt, riff-driven declaration of desire that keeps colliding with the speaker's own disbelief at how simple and overwhelming…

desire versus complexity secrecy and shame repetition as devotion

New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down

LCD Soundsystem

A love-hate valediction to a gentrifying New York, delivered as a slow-building elegy that mixes weary sociological observation…

gentrification and urban decay nostalgia versus reality ambivalent love for place

I'm In Love With a Girl

Big Star

A brief, almost naive love song stripped of metaphor and complication, where a man expresses plain astonishment at feeling love…

first love emotional vulnerability simplicity as sincerity

No Cities to Love

Sleater‐Kinney

Sleater-Kinney open their 2015 comeback album by stripping away the myth of place entirely, insisting that no city itself…

disillusionment with place/identity nuclear anxiety and dread self-erasure and emptiness

To Bring You My Love

PJ Harvey

PJ Harvey builds a self-mythologizing torch song out of biblical and folkloric imagery, casting devotion as a form of damnation.…

obsessive devotion blasphemy and sacrifice mythic self-invention

I Couldn't Love You More

Sade

A slow, incantatory love song built almost entirely on a single declarative claim, repeated until it becomes its own proof. Sade…

contentment devotion sufficiency

Don't Say You Love Me

Free

A blues-rock confession about a relationship built on mutual convenience rather than love, sung by a narrator who admits he let…

loneliness and self-deception transactional intimacy emotional honesty vs. convenient lies

Girl I Love You

Massive Attack

A stark breakup lyric built almost entirely from repetition, in which the singer's declaration of love and his admission that…

loss and lingering love emotional contradiction distance and displacement

Bleed to Love Her

Fleetwood Mac

A quiet, aching meditation on a love that keeps retreating even as it beckons, sung by someone who has decided that pain is…

romantic devotion as endurance elusiveness and withdrawal sacrifice

If I Could Only Win Your Love

The Louvin Brothers

A plain, pleading country ballad built entirely around a single conditional wish: to win the love of someone who remains just…

unrequited love longing devotion

I'm the Man Who Loves You

Wilco

A song about the gap between feeling and articulation, built around a narrator trying to write a love letter he can't finish.…

failure of language romantic devotion self-doubt

Love Galore

SZA

Love Galore is SZA's clipped, cool-voiced meditation on wanting intimacy without wanting the vulnerability that comes with it.…

emotional detachment as self-protection transactional intimacy power and control in casual relationships

Love Man

Otis Redding

A boastful, self-mythologizing party anthem in which the singer repeatedly declares his own nickname and physical credentials as…

braggadocio masculine self-mythology seduction as performance

Message Of Love

The Pretenders

A live rendering of a Pretenders anthem that treats love as a communal, almost civic obligation rather than a private feeling.…

love as mutual obligation solidarity amid hardship romantic devotion

Skinny Love

Bon Iver

A raw, fragmentary breakup address built from accusation and self-recrimination in equal measure, sung to a fading relationship…

dissolution of a relationship emotional exhaustion blame and self-blame

Tunnel of Love

Bruce Springsteen

Springsteen turns a boardwalk carnival ride into an extended metaphor for marriage, using the mechanics of a funhouse tunnel to…

marriage and disillusionment intimacy versus isolation fear beneath romantic ritual

My Only Love

Roxy Music

A stripped-back ballad of loss and devotion, built almost entirely from plain declarative phrases and a repeated title-hook that…

romantic loss memory and permanence the inadequacy of language

I'm the Man Who Murdered Love

XTC

XTC's Andy Partridge stages a mock-confession, casting himself as an assassin who has killed off the very idea of romantic love…

disillusionment with romance performance of confession cynicism as self-defense

Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word

Joan Baez

A meditation on romantic disillusionment framed as a story about overhearing someone else's cynical wisdom and slowly coming to…

disillusionment with romantic love loss of innocence cyclical time and memory

Borderline (An Ode to Self Care)

Solange

A hushed, weary meditation on withdrawal as an act of love, this A Seat at the Table track frames stepping back from public and…

burnout and self-care solidarity under pressure the personal as political

Love Comes Quickly

Pet Shop Boys

A synth-pop meditation on love as an inevitable force that overtakes even those who have arranged their lives to avoid it. The…

inevitability of love isolation vs. connection hedonism as avoidance

My Love Mine All Mine

Mitski

A brief, hymn-like address to the moon in which the speaker asks that their love outlive their body. It works less as narrative…

mortality possession and dispossession love as legacy

Love Like Anthrax

Gang of Four

Gang of Four turn a love song inside out, treating romantic feeling as a disease vector rather than an emotion. The track is…

anti-romanticism alienation self-disgust

Make You Feel My Love

Adele

A plainspoken devotional ballad in which the singer catalogs the hardships she'd endure to prove her love, building through…

unconditional devotion persuasion and reassurance vulnerability