My friend Jeremy and I talk pretty much every day. Odds are high that if I'm online, I'm talking with Jeremy. We are pretty competitive: we can compete at just about anything, including which of us is the least competitive (I totally won that one).
Tonight's game was a competition of love songs. We each picked five and explained why we thought they captured something fundamental to being in love, losing love, wanting love, etc. Because we overshare, we explained when they were of personal significance too, but I won't get into that part.
Here were my five (forgive the awful videos, just listen to the songs):
1. Mazzy Star - Rhymes of an Hour
For what it's worth, this video features stills from the movie Stealing Beauty, and the scene which this song accompanies is really beautiful and sexy.
I might have also picked Mazzy Star's more famous song Fade Into You, for that similar hazy sense of drifting into another person.
2. Wilco - Radio Cure
I've gone on about this song before, and it's been in pretty heavy rotation for a while now. The line "Distance has no way of making love understandable" just kills me. I still feel like this song a lot, and I love it so much it's a little worrisome.
3. Foo Fighters - Walking After You
Dave Grohl achieves this soft sensitivity in his vocals that made me a fan for life. Also the gentle cymbal is lovely and scintillating. I want to dance very closely with someone to this song or just like, hold each other. It's dreamy.
4. Jets to Brazil - Sweet Avenue
(Ignore the photo of Damien Rice). This song wins for mellow contentment and gorgeous lyrics. Notably:
now all these tastes improve
through the view that comes with you
like they handed me my life
for the first time it felt right
and one of my favorite lyrics ever written:
budding at my fingertips
touching you I start to bloom
I love this kind of love.
5. Ryan Adams & the Cardinals - Go Easy
No surprises I guess, seeing as I've posted almost all of these songs here before. This one is not really a perfect love song by any stretch of the imagination, but the exact time in my life when I got into it, the promise of sunny warmth and love that was more fun than agony and the possibility of being with someone who just got me... it was pretty exhilarating.
This game was flawed because we were specifically trying to come up with songs that the other didn't know well. For example, we both might have used "Set the Ray to Jerry" by the Smashing Pumpkins, were we not both huge Pumpkins fans. Ditto on Radiohead and several other of my very favorite bands.
Jeremy's picks were interesting, and it was great talking about the meaning and feelings he got from the lyrics and music. I realize, though, that he was at a disadvantage in this game because he likes harder stuff and the music I like is generally mellower and more accessible. I dug his choices still.
1. Vast - Touched
2. Tool - Pushit
(I don't know why he was surprised that I already knew and liked this song.)
3. Stabbing Westward - Waking Up Beside You
4. Queens of the Stone Age - Make It Wit Chu
I said that musically this seemed derivative of the Rolling Stones song "Monkey Man," then we got side-tracked when Jer admitted that he never listens to any of Let it Bleed beyond "Gimme Shelter." I was totally appalled and we needed to spend a while discussing this. The line that Jeremy said did it in this song was "I ain't here to break it, just see how far it will bend."
(It is, I'm aware, a huge character flaw of mine that I can't appreciate that line without hearing Neil Goldman on Family Guy saying "Ow you're bending it" when Lois is dressed as Mystique from X-Men.)
5. Failure - Stuck on You
We stopped keeping score somewhere around the fight over Let It Bleed, so we declared this round a tie and agreed there will have to be a rematch... or a Round 2. I made a list of probably 15 other songs I might have used, so I feel pretty prepared to kick his ass in this regard.
Now it's your turn! What are your love songs??
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