Love is a song | CPT PPP Coverage

Love songs are one of the first ways we learn about the ups and downs of romance. They are poetry. People release albums now instead of love narrative poems or collections of sonnets. When plague shut down theaters, Shakespeare wrote “Venus and Adonis.” When the pandemic shut down…everything … Taylor Swift dropped the albums “evermore” and “folklore.” We turn to the words of others to articulate how we feel; it’s how we share in the human experience. When we are madly in love, we share it with the world by telling people a song: “This is our song,” we proclaim.

Do you remember the chokehold Aerosmith’s “Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” had on us all in the late 90s? I’m certain I went to a wedding in which that was the bride’s aisle march. And you know what? Good for her. I went for “Dawn,” a piano arrangement from the 2005 film adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice.” I was more frivolous for the exit song: “Eight Days a Week” by the Beatles. For a whole generation of young people, John, Paul, George, and Ringo taught them how to articulate love. It could be the exuberant joy of “Eight Days A Week” or the wondrous adoration of “Something.”

Fiona Apple dropped her first studio album in 1996, and it was in my hot little hands by 1997, right when I was entering high school and beginning to learn all the repercussions of love and heartbreak. I’d slow dance to “Slow Like Honey” in driveways with my date. As if clairvoyant, she drops an album right when I need it. In 1999 when my heart was broken, there she was with the song “Paper Bag.”

“Hunger hurts, and I want him so bad, oh, it kills / ‘Cause I know I’m a mess he don’t wanna clean up.”

For a new generation, it’s Taylor Swift. It’s easy to dismiss Swift as only writing heartbreak songs. She is well aware of this, and admits to enjoying writing heartbreak songs in a 2019 NPR Tiny Desk concert. By the time she was recording that concert and promoting the album “Lover,” she had been in a happy long-term relationship (one she is STILL in). She opined, “Can I still do what I love if I’m totally happy?” Why would Swift, a grown woman in her 30s madly in love, proudly re-release a song like “All Too Well” as a ten-minute, heart-wrenching ballad, and why would grown women like me (nearly 40) who are happily married gobble it up? Because we remember (all too well) what those feelings are like. “All Too Well” is not just a heartbreak song, it’s also about remembering when love was good:

”And maybe we got lost in translation. Maybe I asked for too much. But maybe this thing was a masterpiece ‘til you tore it all up. Running scared, I was there. I remember it all too well.”

And Swift validates those feelings every time she releases a heartbreak song as a happily-in-love woman. You’re allowed to recognize how sad you used to be. Love songs and heart break songs are not for the “get over it” crowd. They are for the “we got over it but we won’t forget it” crowd. We pass these songs along, like letters, so others can learn and share about love and heartbreak. One of my students told me she looked up Fiona Apple after I had shared with the class that she was my favorite singer when I was their age. My student liked what she heard.

I made her a whole playlist. May it serve her well–however she needs it.