De La Soul
"Eye Know" is De La Soul's sunniest love song, built on a Steely Dan sample and playful Daisy Age slang. Both Posdnuos and…
courtship and seduction wordplay as intimacy group identity and self-naming
Mercury Rev
A driving, hypnotic song built almost entirely on repetition, tracking a headlong romance the narrator already knows is doomed.…
doomed romance velocity and recklessness impermanence
Aretha Franklin
A joyous, motorized courtship song built around a single sustained conceit: romance as a drive on an open highway. Aretha…
romance as motion/escape freedom and self-determination playful flirtation
Ramones
A three-minute cover of a 1958 rock and roll standard, stripped down and sped up until the invitation to dance becomes an…
teenage romance dance as ritual nostalgia for 1950s rock and roll
Eurythmics
This is a cover of the 1934 standard, recorded for a mid-1980s charity Christmas compilation, and it plays the song fairly…
young romance seasonal escapism imaginative play
Lana Del Rey
A woman narrates one glowing, precarious night with a lover she suspects she's about to lose, fusing sensory euphoria with an…
doomed romance hedonism as coping beauty and self-fashioning
The Supremes
A pastoral love song built on borrowed classical melody (adapted from a Baroque minuet traditionally attributed to Bach,…
idealized romance nature as backdrop for love devotion and permanence
Richard Thompson
A jaunty, almost comic account of a wrecked relationship, where the narrator recounts being physically and emotionally battered…
toxic romance emotional exhaustion comic violence
Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Fitzgerald's reading of this holiday standard is pure surface pleasure: an invitation to a winter courtship ride rendered…
winter romance togetherness seasonal nostalgia
Little Feat
A wry breakup narrative that keeps undercutting its own heartbreak with comic self-interest. The narrator confronts a cheating…
infidelity and betrayal performed heartbreak vs. real indifference serial romance
Van Halen
A breezy, party-anthem celebration of seasonal freedom, cruising, and casual flirtation, delivered with the loose-limbed swagger…
youthful escapism seasonal freedom casual romance/objectification
Animal Collective
A barrage of interrogative fragments and postcard-sized images collages the world into a single imaginary destination, half…
placelessness and utopian longing collage as method identity without borders
Patti Smith
An anthem built from a dream-vision, in which the speaker imagines armies disbanding and deserts turning to gardens, then hands…
collective political power utopian vision vs. reality dream as prophecy
Leonard Cohen
A meditation on grace and surrender disguised as a portrait of a woman by a river, Cohen's song moves from intimate seduction…
spiritual longing disguised as romance the sacred in the everyday trust and surrender
Blondie
Blondie's debut single reframes a streetwalker's infatuation with a police officer as a giddy crime narrative, blurring the…
desire as transgression policing and power irony of legal language repurposed as romance
Sade
Sade builds an entire song out of a single sustained image: a lover as bedrock stability amid emotional chaos. The lyric barely…
emotional refuge isolation vs connection stability in love
Elliott Smith
A hushed, seductive address that turns out to be spoken in the voice of addiction itself, offering comfort, oblivion, and…
addiction as intimate voice self-destruction disguised as tenderness loss of potential
Kate Bush
Kate Bush voices Cathy Earnshaw's ghost from Emily Brontë's novel, pleading at a window for reunion with Heathcliff. The song…
possessive love death and haunting nature as emotional mirror
Weezer
A deliberately simple escapist fantasy, built almost entirely from stock vacation imagery and a chant-like hook, that trades…
escapism forgetting the past idealized love
Elton John
A shy, broke narrator confesses he has nothing to offer a loved one but a plainly written love song, and the song's own modesty…
romantic devotion inadequacy and humility the inability to articulate feeling
Jason Isbell
A song about watching long marriages calcify and making a private, almost superstitious vow not to let that happen to your own.…
marital decay willed devotion nostalgia
Feist
A deceptively bouncy pop song about the wreckage left by adolescent romance, where a childlike counting hook masks lyrics about…
lost innocence romantic disillusionment nostalgia
Mos Def
A narrative rap unfolding like a short film in three scenes, tracking a pursuit-and-fallout romance with a woman the narrator…
desire versus discernment the performance of masculinity and vulnerability cynicism eroded by intimacy
XTC
A giddy, image-drunk love song that describes a single overwhelming encounter through a barrage of unrelated historical and…
sudden infatuation the inadequacy of language before wonder celestial imagery displaced onto a person
Eric B.
A New York subway pickup evolves into a slow-building courtship narrative, told from the perspective of a smooth-talking…
courtship and seduction urban geography as narrative backdrop mind versus body