By Zoe Robinson
When you survey a group of high school students about their favorite love songs, you’d stereotypically expect to see a majority of them being happy and upbeat, focusing on the joys of love. However, our Valentine’s Day survey revealed that here it is not the case.
Putting the responses into the calculator, we found that the majority of students’ favorite songs were about yearning and longing, and 57% of students’ favorite lyrics were about people you can’t have. So then, the question is, what’s up with all the sadness? While we can chalk part of the answer up to the typical turbulence of high school love, we can also dive a little deeper into how we relate to music as a community.
An article from last year, Deconstructing The Love Song: How And Why Love Songs Work, from Udiscovermusic.com, explains that while love songs are fun to listen to and daydream about, the real reason why they work is because they help us process our own emotions. “Most people can’t express their feelings, so a good love song has to make them say, ‘Oh my God, that’s just the way I feel,’ ” songwriter Cynthia Weil explained, which goes hand in hand with how hard it is to express all we feel as teenagers. From a scientific perspective, the article also includes research stating that tragic love songs in particular don’t necessarily depress us, but trigger beneficial empathetic hormones that allow us to relate to what they’re singing about.
All of these insights really reflect the results from the survey, in which only one artist dominated in the results of all 3 questions we asked (favorite love songs, favorite lyrics in love songs, and ‘our songs’ that you might share with someone): Taylor Swift.
As one of the current queens of pop, so much of what Taylor Swift writes focuses on the intensity of her relationships. Mentioned 9 times across these questions, all of the songs cited, including Betty, Fortnight, and Cardigan, have some kind of focus on longing or heartbreak in love. Not only are they about feeling disconnected and lost in relationships, but also fearing losing the connection you have, with one of the favorite lyrics being “please don’t ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere,” from New Years Day.
However, just like the real high school experience, we can see a wide range of emotions in the songs that people here at Lovett enjoy. One of the other most popular Taylor Swift songs mentioned as a favorite was Daylight, a song that focuses on the brightness and clarity that love brings, referenced in lyrics like, “I don’t wanna look at anything else now that I saw you, I don’t wanna think of anything else now that I thought of you.”
Beyond Taylor Swift, many other songs reflected the emotional range we can see. Jeff Buckley’s, Lover You Should’ve Come Over, one of the quintessential love songs for yearners, was mentioned multiple times. Specifically, the lyric, “My body turns and yearns for a sleep that won’t ever come,” shows Buckley yearning as much as one possibly can, and wanting to sleep in the same bed as the girl he loves. The happy songs also talk about the joys of love being expressed to their fullest potential, with songs like Bruno Mars’ Just The Way You are, and Sabrina Carpenter’s Your Love’s Like cited as students’ favorite lyrics.
One key idea in many of the songs is vulnerability, especially in one of the most popular songs mentioned, Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls, with the lyric, “I just want you to know who I am.”
This sense of longing and vulnerability is key to the art of the love song, whether it be sad or happy, and this has been true for a long time. So long in fact that we can even see it in the Nible. While many songs and stories from this ancient era can feel distant and confusing, it’s also important to recognize the key similarities between their narratives and messages today. When I spoke to Reverend Brown about this, he pointed out the book “Song of Solomon,” which he described as “graphic in a poetic way,” as Solomon describes a passionate lust between himself and another woman, almost seeming to objectify her. “Remember,” he reminded me, “times were very different back then, so there’s a lot about owning women that was cultural, but many of the main themes here are similar to today.”
According to Reverend Brown, not only are there romantic love songs and poems in the Bible, but the entire text is a sort of love song from us to God. David’s book of Psalms, one of the most popular books of the Bible, is a call to God for divine love and comfort, and a plea for God to give that love back to him. “The Psalms sort of have every bit of human emotion, right?” Reverend Brown said. “There’s anger and grief and joy… and love… there’s lots of psalms that talk about the love between God and the people. In my opinion, it’s the whole arc of the Christian Bible, right?” We can definitely see the themes he talks about mirrored in contemporary love songs; whether we want to be with another person or God, we want to love them and be loved back.
While on the surface it may seem surprising that so many favorite love songs are sad, it actually makes sense. This time in our lives is so turbulent, and all we want is to enjoy and figure out how we feel. This is why love songs aren’t just about romance: in truth, they’re about connection, growth, and learning how to feel. What could be more high school than that?
