DEATH OF THE LOVESONG

It’s 1990. Monday night at the Waterside in Hull. As you walk onto the dance floor, in midnight blue Valentino velvet trousers, Diamond White in hand, the DJ stops the music. By request, the next song is dedicated to you, Rachel Haynes. “Lovecats” by The Cure begins to play. An unconventional choice for a hot love song dedication on a club night, but the lyric “So wonderfully, wonderfully pretty, you know that I’d do anything for you” somehow feels more special, it’s more you. It will become a story and a song that you will repeat again and again, eventually telling your daughter about it when she is old enough to ask about love.

Perhaps it is this story, told to me by Mum, so gorgeously of its time, that has made me so infatuated with and appreciative of the power a love song holds.

Love songs are not just expressions of love that we give or receive, they hold the love stories of our lives in their beat, lyric and beyond. They accompany us on midnight dance floors and Sunday mornings. Blasting through heartbreak and floating out across the wedding night of a first dance. The love song will sometimes be all that is left of the person we love.

There is such bravery in choosing a love song for someone else. Playlists have replaced mixtapes, but the intent remains the same, music selection is the ultimate seduction.

Long after the chocolates are eaten and the roses have wilted, the song remains the ultimate gift of affection, waiting and ready to be played again. A love song, when chosen well, is intimate in a way no object can be. They can be heirlooms, passed down, retold, replayed. They become family folklore, proof that love existed, even if it did not last forever.

“Music is memory with a pulse,” says Dr Ava Coleman, a neuroscientist specialising in emotion and recall. “Love songs lodge themselves in the autobiographical part of the brain. When we hear our song, we don’t just remember a person, we remember who we were when we loved them.” Which is perhaps why love songs have such staying power. Lovers may leave, but the records remain.

I have been thinking about the spectrum of love songs floating out in the world. What, exactly, gives a love song its power? Is it the lyric or the melody? Simplicity or ambiguity? Are the greatest love songs born from falling in love, or from surviving it?

To find out, I spoke to four voices across the musical spectrum: a record executive who has shaped three decades of British music, a guitarist raised in the gravitational pull of Dylan and the Beatles, an indie band who call themselves “door-to-door heartbreak salesmen” and a DJ whose love songs do not need lyrics at all.

Together, they reveal why love, more than any other human experience, continues to dominate music.

For Terry Felgate, former creative director at Parlophone and managing director of EMI Records, the power of a love song begins with belief.

“A mix of things matters,” he says. “But it’s really the authenticity of the vocals. The voice draws you into the lyric, the story, the melody. The way the song is told is key.”

Having worked closely with artists including Blur, Radiohead, Coldplay and Kate Bush, Felgate has witnessed love expressed in countless forms. “Love songs can touch on different aspects of love, not just joy and heartbreak, but passion, infatuation and tenderness.”

While heartbreak may dominate the canon, joy, he argues, is just as potent.

“Heartbreak definitely inspires big songs,” he admits. “But joy can be just as powerful. ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ by Paul McCartney is one of the greatest love songs ever written. Elvis Costello wrote some incredibly joyous love songs when he was with Cait O’Riordan. ‘I’ll Wear It Proudly’ is absolutely euphoric.”

Still, loss has its own gravitational pull. “There’s a whole canon of regret and heartbreak,” Felgate says, citing Smokey Robinson’s “Tracks of My Tears”, Diana Ross’s “I’m Still Waiting” and Hall & Oates’ “She’s Gone”. “They convey something huge and emotional, those moments where love has slipped through your fingers.”

What unites a good love song, he believes, is not complexity but clarity. “Simple can work incredibly well,” he says, pointing to Labi Siffre’s “It Must Be Love”. “The lyrics are simple, but the feeling is enormous. I recently heard 8,000 schoolchildren sing it at the O2 and it was so emotional. That’s the power of simplicity done honestly.”

If Felgate believes the voice carries truth, guitarist and producer James Nisbet believes truth lives in language.

“Lyrics are everything,” he says. “You’re telling a story that’s been told a million times. Everyone has different experiences, but just a specific turn of phrase can connect you to it.”

He recalls Cole Porter’s “Love Is”. “Porter wrote: love is the oldest thing, yet the newest thing. Everyone’s been through it, the first excitement when you meet someone and you’re so glad they found you, right through to the stage where you think... I hate you so much right now.”

Born into the music industry, his father published Bob Dylan and his mother worked at Apple with the Beatles. Nisbet has spent more than two decades touring and recording with artists including Rod Stewart, Lily Allen and Bryan Ferry.

For Nisbet, the greatest love songs say what we wish we had said sooner. “The smart thing. The brave thing. The thing you realise too late,” he explains. “Most people can’t articulate it. Writing it is one thing. Saying it in the first place is the hardest part.”

He points to John Lennon as a master of emotional honesty. “‘Love’ is one of the simplest songs ever written,” he says. “Lennon was a deeply flawed person, but he was honest in singing about love.”

That honesty extends beyond romance. “Love songs don’t have to be boy-meets-girl,” Nisbet adds. “They can be about children, spirituality, devotion. ‘Something’ by George Harrison is one of the greatest love songs ever, it’s not straightforward at all. Even Sinatra said it was one of the best love songs of all time.”

Nisbet notes that songs with a strong religious influence are often among the most powerful love songs. “The euphoric feeling that comes over people in church is similar to the euphoria you get when you’re in love.”

To Nisbet, making music itself is an act of love. “You don’t choose it,” he says. “It chooses you. Just like love.”

For Brighton band Nature TV, heartbreak is not just inspiration, it is necessity. “Heartbreak definitely sharpens songwriting,” they say. “Because that’s when you need music. That’s when you turn to it.”

Describing themselves as “chroniclers of our own heartbreak”, the band see love songs as a way of holding on rather than letting go. “Once someone is in the song,” they explain, “they’re there forever.”

Their music leans into melancholy, nostalgia and longing, what they describe as “frisson”, the physical sensation triggered by harmony. One of their early songs, “Please”, foreshadows a warning with a siren interwoven into the track. “Melody tells your body how to feel,” they say. “Sometimes it creates the emotion before the lyric is written.”

Unconventional love songs matter most to them: Ray Charles’s “Georgia On My Mind”, Daft Punk’s “Something About Us”. Songs where longing blurs into memory, where the object of affection feels interchangeable, place, person, past self.

“I’m grateful for the people who broke my heart,” one member admits. “They gave me the music.”

If Nature TV believe melody leads emotion, DJ and producer Sebastian Konrad removes language almost entirely.

“For me, vocals are sounds,” he says. “Not words. I hear them as another instrument.”

At 25, Konrad represents a generation for whom love songs often arrive via dancefloors rather than diaries. “A saxophone can carry more heartbreak than a lyric,” he says, referencing “Careless Whisper”. “Melody can say everything.”

In electronic music, he explains, love is often assigned retrospectively. “A song becomes a love song because of the memory attached to it. A breakdown, a baseline people connect their own emotions to it.”

Instrumental tracks such as Robert Miles’s “Children” have become emotional heirlooms not because of what they say, but because of when they were heard. “Music becomes a container,” Konrad says. “People fill it with their own stories.”

Across genres and generations, a shared truth emerges. Love songs do not belong to their writers once released. They are adopted, rewritten with memories of dancefloors, bedrooms and break-ups. They become mirrors, sometimes years later, showing us who we were, who we loved and who we thought we might become.

If love disappeared tomorrow, Nisbet believes, music would lose its soul. “Love is hope,” he says. “Without it, there’d just be AI-written slop.”

Nature TV agree. “We’d lose the blues,” they say. “Or everything would just be about sex.”

Love, after all, is the oldest story we have. Yet in music it remains perpetually unfinished, retold in endless variations. Each love song captures a different shade of longing, devotion, regret or hope. A reminder that while love may be universal, it is never singular and never the same twice.

Written by Eve Williams, Cover imagery by Xander Cicalese.