Throughout history, love songs have played a decisive role in romance. Yet in the last several decades alone, they have gone through major transformations. So what’s the status of the romantic song?
JAZZ
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Musical fads come and go, but the classic American love song seems nearly as revered today as it was decades ago, when the Gershwin brothers, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and others were lifting the genre to new heights.
Step into a cabaret or jazz club anywhere from Chicago to Paris, and it probably won’t be long before you’ll hear someone playing or singing the Gershwins’ “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” Porter’s “I’ve Got Your Under My Skin,” Berlin’s “What’ll I Do,” Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s “Come Rain or Come Shine” or the most famous one of all, Hoagy Carmichael and Mitchell Parish’s “Star Dust.”
Yet the enduring popularity of valentines from “the great American songbook,” as Tony Bennett calls it, has been a mixed blessing. Yes, it’s comforting to know that the glorious tunes mentioned above, as well as hundreds more like them, have attained a measure of immortality.
Unfortunately, more recently written songs in the same, non-rock idiom have had trouble getting heard, let alone remembered. Overshadowed by the old standards and virtually ignored by mass media in the ’90s, newer songs that extend the musical traditions of Gershwin (George is pictured) and friends struggle to reach their audience.
Because few radio stations these days cater to adult listeners who savor a sophisticated lyric, and because Fred and Ginger no longer are introducing such tunes to millions via the silver screen, even the most brilliant young songwriters never will enjoy the exposure that they might have attained in the heyday of the film musical.
That doesn’t mean that great love songs are not being penned anymore. Quite the contrary – they’re being written every day by gifted songwriters such as Craig Carnelia (“Old Movies,” “The Last 40 Years”), Amanda McBroom (“Ship In a Bottle,” “The Rose”) and Tom Andersen (“Every Night I Sleep With an Angel”).
For those willing to dig deeply through the record bins and linger at cabarets such as Toulouse Cognac Bar in Chicago and the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room in New York, there’s no shortage of heart-rending new love songs to be heard.
You just have to work a little harder to find them.
— Howard Reich
LATIN
The state of Latin love songs can be described in two words: Luis Miguel. Translated into English that means big, tragic, gooey stuff.
In the last decade, Luis Miguel (pictured), an international pop star of Mexican and Italian heritage, has transformed the Latin bolero, as Hispanics call these love ballads, into a commercial juggernaut.
He’s made a mint with “Romance” (’91), “Segundo Romance” (’94), “Romances” (’97), and then collected it all into “Todo los Romances” just last year. He’s also spawned countless copycats; in fact, in recent Billboard Latin charts, at least seven of the Top 10 albums were bolero-heavy entries.
Suddenly, there is a slew of Latino singers discovering love and packaging it into big, slick, romantic concept records. Among these are Alejandro Fernandez, son of the mariachi superstar Vicente Fernandez, and Jose Feliciano, who released his own bunch o’ boleros last year. Even salsa singers like Marc Anthony feel compelled to stick at least one gut-wrenching bolero into their otherwise supersonic dance records.
The truth is that boleros, for all their current popularity, are nothing new. Luis Miguel dips back regularly to the ’50s, ’40s and even the ’30s for songs. Indeed, his producer is Armando Manzanero, a Mexican composer and modern-day legend who has had more than 400 of his boleros recorded since the ’60s and claims to have at least 50 waiting in the wings. (His big American hit: “It’s Impossible.”)
In fact, most of what Luis Miguel has been singing is recycled, which raises these inevitable questions: He may be helping rediscover these classic gems, but are his takes on them up to snuff? And when will he stop?
Sometimes, as in his electric version of “Besame Mucho,” Luis Miguel does something so radically different that it transforms the song. But, other times, he turns a tune like “Nosotros,” a poignant farewell from a dying man to his lover, into a bouncy, feel-good ditty.
“Nosotros” is typical: Boleros, and Latin love songs in general, are pretty melodramatic.
— Achy Obejas
POP
What’s love got to do with it?” The question, as Tina Turner posed it more than a decade ago, is rhetorical. On the pop charts in the rock era, love has been a many splintered thing, a lustier and nastier emotion than that portrayed in the days of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.”
Lustier and nastier, but also more complex. Songwriters of the rock era such as Bob Dylan, Smokey Robinson, John Lennon, Marvin Gaye, Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Liz Phair, Lyle Lovett and the team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, to cite just a few prominent examples, have extended and in some cases expanded the rich tradition of Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, Irving Berlin and Brecht-Weill.
That’s because love, and its myriad facets, has never gone out of style as a topic for songwriters. Scan the list of Grammy nominees for Song of the Year, and it is consistently dominated by divas and crooners chronicling the travails of the heart. In the last year, the one song that cut across generational boundaries was a big, brassy tearjerker ballad that might not have sounded out of place in a 1940s Broadway musical: James Horner’s and Will Jennings’ “My Heart Will Go On,” a major hit for Celine Dion (pictured).
The relative innocence of “My Heart Will Go On,” however, is countered by a wave of songs that equate love with lust in an effort to cash in on today’s teen-dominated pop market. Young heartthrobs from the Backstreet Boys and Usher to Britney Spears and Monica sing about longing with an explicitness that leaves little to a 14-year-old’s imagination.
But alongside that, a host of songwriters are exploring the consequences of intimacy, whether it be the fallout from the AIDS crisis (as heard in R.E.M.’s album “Automatic for the People”) or the difficult responsibilities of parenthood (Everclear’s recent hit “Father of Mine”).
And, for the first time, relationships that fall outside the traditional, heterosexual model are finding their way into pop and rock songs, as openly gay artists such as Melissa Etheridge, Boy George and the rising rock band Sleater-Kinney enter the mainstream.
What’s love got to do with it? Just about everything, it turns out.
— Greg Kot
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COUNTRY
Valentines from America’s heartland have changed a lot over the past decade or so, but not in the direction of the irreverent, insulting humor so fashionable on today’s greeting card racks.
“People want to hear the good things now,” says Keith Stegall, artistic chief of Mercury Records’ Nashville office and a writer and producer of hit love songs.
“There has been a shift to the positive love song. Artists want to sing songs that have more to do with what’s right about love rather than what’s wrong about it.”
Not that male singers are necessarily turning away from negative tunes by choice. Nashville music, after all, was long recognized as the source of songs of amorous complaint ranging from classics such as “Sweet Dreams” by Patsy Cline (pictured) and Ray Charles’ “I Can’t Stop Loving You” to less soul-wrenching offerings a la Buck Owens’ “Act Naturally” and Travis Tritt’s “Here’s a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares).”
Then came the switch to happier songs, which coincided with the empowerment of women as major Nashville record sellers. The mindset changed dramatically between Reba McEntire’s 1986 “Whoever’s In New England,” the lament of an urban but traditional-minded wife trying to wait out her husband’s affair, and Shania Twain’s commanding mid-’90s “Any Man of Mine,” which countenanced no such abuse.
“Any man of mine,” Twain decreed, “better walk the line.”
Male singers now try to do that, partly out of fear of political correctness standards governing what is appropriate to say to and about women. If anything, the old Nashville sexual double standard has been reversed. Now it’s “more kosher for a woman to sing a negative song about a guy than for a guy to sing a negative song about a woman,” Stegall says.
Such once-hip sentiments as Merle Haggard’s “It’s Not Love (But It’s Not Bad)” are hopelessly passe. Women of the ’90s accept nothing implying they’re less than No. 1 on your dance card or in your heart.
Having recently written a No. 1 country hit titled “Love of My Life” for Sammy Kershaw and another called “I Do (Cherish You)” for Mark Wills, Stegall offers an obvious Valentine message. Guys, keep it worshipful. Girls, suit yourself.
— Jack Hurst