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
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
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
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
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
Minnie Riperton
A brief, unguarded love song built almost entirely on plain declaration and one childhood image. Rather than developing a…
renewed love joy and gratitude simplicity of feeling
Erykah Badu
A hypnotic, mantra-like love song built almost entirely on the repeated declaration of its title, with verses that swap…
romantic devotion mutual vulnerability indifference to outside judgment
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
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
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
Kacey Musgraves
Kacey Musgraves' rendition of this 1961 standard, recorded for the 2022 Elvis biopic soundtrack, strips the song down to its…
surrender to love fate versus choice vulnerability
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
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
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
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
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
A slow, incantatory love song built almost entirely on a single declarative claim, repeated until it becomes its own proof. Sade…
contentment devotion sufficiency
Kraftwerk
A deadpan, synth-driven character sketch of a fashion model, delivered with the same flat affect Kraftwerk applies to machines…
commodification of beauty surveillance and consumption media and celebrity
Florence + the Machine
A song about a creative and emotional blockage that arrives without drama, written during a period widely understood to reflect…
creative block isolation disillusionment with catharsis
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
Roberta Flack
Roberta Flack takes the Bee Gees' 1967 pop-soul standard and slows it into a devotional plea, stretching the original's ache…
unrequited devotion emotional isolation the limits of language to convey feeling
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
Seal
This is a straightforward love song built almost entirely around one confession, repeated with rising intensity rather than…
enduring devotion surrender to love reciprocity
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
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
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
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
Bob Dylan
A third-person account of a brief love affair dissolves into first-person confession, tracing a man's drift from chance…
chance and fate loss and longing memory and self-deception
Nirvana
Nirvana's debut single is actually a cover of a Dutch band Shocking Blue's psychedelic pop song, retooled into a droning,…
intoxication of desire miscommunication in love repetition as feeling
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
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
Peter Gabriel
This is a cover of the Magnetic Fields song, and Gabriel's version strips away Stephin Merritt's deadpan irony in favor of a…
romantic convention vs. lived intimacy tedium redeemed by love marriage and commitment
Al Green
Al Green frames a romantic relationship as a sacred event, thanking a higher power for a love that feels chosen rather than…
sacred love gratitude devotion
Smokey Robinson
A late-career Smokey Robinson love song that turns a simple plea into a multilingual serenade, cycling through French, Spanish,…
romantic devotion universality of love gratitude
The Who
A single, almost liturgical plea builds around one pun -- love as both sovereign force and literal downpour -- to dramatize a…
spiritual thirst emotional exhaustion love as redemptive force
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
Patsy Cline
This is a classic Tin Pan Alley standard reworked through Patsy Cline's country-pop phrasing, built almost entirely around a…
reluctant surrender desire versus resistance emotional vulnerability
Van Halen
This is a defiant, almost reckless assertion of self-determination, delivered through a string of extreme hypothetical choices —…
free will vs fate rejection of moral instruction self-destruction as autonomy
Etta James
Etta James's reading of this standard turns a modest pop lyric into a slow-burning testimony about wanting permanence rather…
longing for commitment loneliness sacred vs. secular love
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