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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The Temptations
A holiday standard built on a simple, almost sermon-like premise: material gifts are fine, but love is the only present that…
generosity versus materialism universal love seasonal community
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
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
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
A slow, incantatory love song built almost entirely on a single declarative claim, repeated until it becomes its own proof. Sade…
contentment devotion sufficiency
Vampire Weekend
A frantic, pitch-shifted pop song about young mortality dressed up as car-crash Americana. Beneath its manic energy and title…
dying young recklessness fatalism
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
Lana Del Rey
A torch song written for a film about doomed excess, this track poses one anxious question over and over: does love survive once…
impermanence of beauty conditional love nostalgia for lost youth
Bruce Springsteen
A young rock-and-roller pleads with his girlfriend to sneak out past her disapproving parents, turning a neighborhood escape…
young love versus parental authority escape and liberation class resentment and vindication
Robyn
A teenage Robyn's breakout single is a straightforward Eurodance declaration of romantic surrender, built around a repeated plea…
romantic vulnerability independence versus surrender demand for reciprocity
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
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
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
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
Elton John
A ballad of quiet emotional arrival, written for the moment in The Lion King when a wandering young lion falls into…
romantic surrender maturation and settling down wonder at the natural world
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
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
A simple, deliberately unadorned love song built on a single conceit: stripping away every calendar occasion that might justify…
unconditioned love everyday devotion anti-occasion romance
A first-person portrait of a man who joins the military not out of conviction but as a solution to unemployment, lost…
militarism as consumer choice economic desperation masculinity and self-worth
Neil Young
A drifting laborer weighs a move west for work while quietly accepting that the relationship he's leaving behind won't survive…
itinerant labor resignation fading love
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
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
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
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
Cat Stevens
A meditation on mortality and inheritance addressed to a child, using the wearing-out of a pair of jeans as an emblem for how…
mortality impermanence legacy and inheritance
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
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
Minnie Riperton
A love song built around the gap between feeling and expression, in which the narrator worries that her devotion isn't landing…
communication anxiety reassurance devotion
Otis Redding
Otis Redding takes the Impressions' original devotional ballad and turns it into a raw, almost pleading testimony of gratitude…
devotion gratitude doubt from outsiders