ANTI LOVE SONG
Betty Davis
Betty Davis
Light In The Attic : 1973
[Buy It]

DON'T RENEGE ON OUR LOVE
Richard & Linda Thompson
Shoot Out The Lights
Hannibal : 1982
[Buy It]

THINGS
Loudon Wainwright III
Here Come the Choppers!
Sovereign Artists : 2005
[Buy It]

BARON OF LOVE, PT. 2
Alex Chilton
Like Flies on Sherbert
Peabody : 1979
[Buy It]

I DIG LOVE
Asha Puthli
Asha Puthli
CBS : 1973
[Buy It]

OUR LOVE
Rhett Miller
The Instigator
Elektra : 2002
[Buy It]

I DON'T WANNA TALK ABOUT LOVE NO MORE
Amy Rigby
Little Fugitive
Signature Sounds : 2005
[Buy It]

Back when I was in college, the newspaper I ran offered free valentines for everyone on campus. If you submitted them, we'd print them, no questions asked. Maybe a friend wanted to confess feelings for a friend. Maybe a student wanted to work through a crush on a teacher. Maybe a guy wanted a girl to know that he liked the way she laughed, or the way she looked in a skirt. Whatever. These valentines were signed or anonymous or, most often, pseudonymous. A few days before the issue closed, my roommate and I were sitting in the dining hall and saw an older kid across the room. He was a stocky, loud, back-slapping type, a wrestler I think, and he had never been particularly nice to us. We thought of him as a bully. As we watched him across the dining hall, we came up with an idea, which was to write him a valentine. It went like this:

Dear Phil,
I miss you. It's been so long since I've seen you.
Love,
Your neck

His name wasn't Phil, though. It was Philip. No, no. It wasn't Philip. It was Jonathan Reed. No, it wasn't Jonathan Reed. I'm not going to say his name, because there's at least a four percent chance that he grew up into a perfectly respectable adult. The valentine we crafted for "Jonathan Reed" was a pretty sophisticated joke, in its own way: we imagined him starting to read it, entertaining a moment of optimism, reaching the end, maybe even tearing up while he felt around for his neck. It was about the love between people and inanimate objects. It was about self-love. It was about the impossibility of knowing the self. And it was sophomoric. Perfect!

It was also, of course, a calculated dodge. We were writing mock valentines because we weren't brave enough to write real ones. The prospect of actually telling a girl, in print, that I liked the way she laughed or the way she looked in a skirt was terrifying. For starters, she might not read it. Worse, what if she did read it? Being scared of girls, or of your feelings for girls, is one of life's universal experiences, and though the fear ebbs as time passes, it never disappears completely. I am reminded of that every Valentine's Day, in part because the holiday seems to demand it. I am married now and have kids, and it is easy for me to tell them how much I love them, but it is also not exactly what Valentine's Day is for, I don't think. There are anniversaries (for the wife) and birthdays (for the wife and the kids) that are far more useful for that. They are specific and personal. To place your partner on the scale on Valentine's Day, or have her place you there, seems wrong: you're either going to feel a twinge of pleasure that people followed the script or a twinge of displeasure that they didn't. So I am calling for Valentine's Day to be taken away from significant others and rededicated to all the other people you love: the people you once had and lost, the people you can't have because the risk is too great, the people you have for fleeting moments in your mind, the people you would try to have if you were sure you wouldn't be rejected. It is very rare that an adult has exactly as much love as belongs properly to his or her partner. Love is unruly and unregulated. The question is what gets done with the surplus. I have a friend who writes Valentine's Day notes to old boyfriends, lovers, or could-have-beens, and though she never actually sends the notes, I understand and approve of the impulse.

Years ago, I was in a relationship, then out of it and in another one. The first woman hung around on the margins. We briefly got re-involved. We decided we couldn't see each other. We feared we couldn't stay apart. At one point, in a fit of optimism, I made a tape for her that included Betty Davis's "Anti-Love Song." I thought I was telling her that even though we loved each other to some degree, the feelings were untenable and possibly even unpleasant and we should let them go:

No I don't want to love you
'Cause I know how you are
That's why I've been staying away from you
That's why I haven't called you
Because I know you could possess my body
I know you could make me scrawl
I know you could have me shaking
I know you could have me climbing the wall
That's why I don't want to love you

The woman didn't respond for a while, and then she responded by drinking too much at a party, disappearing with me onto a balcony for ten key minutes, and then going away again for a year or so. I think it was the song's fault. Upon reflection, it isn't primarily a love song or even an anti-love song. It's a sex song. There's sex in the lyrics and sex in the vocals. There's also a specific intended recipient: there's a line later on where Davis sings, "Sure, you say you're right on and you're righteous, but with me I know you'd be right off." Does anyone know any musician who she might have been involved with, maybe even married to, who recorded a song called "Right Off"? Respond in comments.

Davis's song is bleak but it's also bracing--it strips love down to the process of stripping down. If she was a man, she'd have no trouble telling a woman that she looked good in a skirt, or for that matter out of it. Far bleaker, because it's far broader, is Richard Thompson's "Don't Renege On Our Love." I was going to write "Far bleaker is Richard Thompson's [insert random song here]," because there isn't another songwriter who has spent as many years doing as much damage to romantic clichés. But "Don't Renege On Our Love" is a good place to start. The story behind "Shoot Out the Lights," the album on which this song appears, is well-known: it is about the dissolution of Thompson's marriage to his wife and musical partner Linda. The story is also untrue. Most of the songs on "Shoot Out the Lights" were completed before the Thompsons separated in early 1982, and even before Richard Thompson struck up a relationship with the woman who would become his second wife in late 1981. Even so, "Don't Renege On Our Love" is probably written to Linda, or to the idea of Linda that Richard held in his mind. I never put this song on a mix tape--how could you, really?--but I did listen to it incessantly when I was left by a girlfriend I lived with and thought I might stay with. I was young. After she moved to another city without exactly telling me, clearing her things out of our apartment in the process, I spent evenings sitting sadly rigid a filthy chair playing "Shoot Out the Lights" over and over again. Young. The song did make me feel better, because Thompson seemed more miserable than I was, but then it made me feel worse, because in the course of his punishing monologue he did at least acknowledge his love for her (and hers for him), something I had failed to do until it was too late. Then it made me feel better again, because of the tragic, fleet solo that Thompson plays over the galloping beat at around the two-and-a-half mark.

Should you tell the people you love that you love them? What if they take it the wrong way? I am speaking here mainly of situations mixing men and women, which means they have the potential to erupt into sex or romance. Even friendships in which love is declared are never quite the same again. If you doubt that the very phrase continues to possess magical powers, both bright and dark, just look at how few songs hit the note cleanly. John Lennon had a easy time speaking directly to Yoko, but he was an exception. Paul McCartney's two most famous solo love songs, "My Love," and "Silly Love Songs," are both dodges: "My Love" is written in the first-person evasive, and the famous direct-address bridge in "Silly Love Songs" ("I love you") is held in suspension by the conceit of the title. He wasn't the only one who had trouble. Jim Croce wrote, "Every time I try to tell you, the words just come out wrong / So I have to say I love you in a song," and it's not, I don't think, "I have to say 'I love you' in a song," because the phrase is still a little bit radioactive. Loudon Wainwright III makes a similar claim in "Things"

So when I say I love you it's just a thing I've said
Off my tongue, out of my mouth, made up in my head
But when I sing I love you that's a different thing
Nothing smart, just some guts and heart, since I mean what I sing

Not everyone is as self-aware or as therapized as Wainwright, and some of the best love songs try to do away with words entirely. "Baron of Love, Pt. 2," is little more than the "La Grange" riff (purists may want to refer to it as the "Boogie Chillen" riff or the "Shake Your Hips" riff) played behind an Alex Chilton monologue that touches on a little bit of everything and amounts to a whole lot of nothing. What is produced, though, is enjoyment, which is one of the basic ingredients of love. "I know there's some love in there, baby. It's been hiding all night. Put me in there with you," he says. In its original form, "I Dig Love" was a perfectly serviceable minor song from George Harrison's "All Things Must Pass." There are barely any words, mostly just the title, repeated and reformed, in keeping with Harrison's mantra-like approach to songwriting. In Asha Puthli's hands, though--and in her throat--the song becomes something monumentally sexy, with yips and moans and what sounds like a giant hookah burbling away in the background. Not necessarily stoned, but beautiful. If there ever was a song capable of convincing someone that your love for her (or him) was touched equally by divinity and carnality, this is it.

Eloquence is overrated until it actually appears, of course. "Our Love," the lead-off track on Rhett Miller's first solo album, is a nearly perfect piece of popcraft, wordy and exhilarating, full of historical detail and autobiographical bravery and self-referential cleverness and a big, fat, candy-colored hook:

Richard Wagner's letters to his lover Mathilde were a mess
He should have quit before he had written the address
They made love on the mezzanine her husband was his friend

Amy Rigby, who came to semi-fame with Diary of a Mod Housewife a decade ago, has since written as many good, sharp songs about sex and love as anyone; in "I Don't Wanna Talk About Love No More," she decides that she's done trying to anatomize the human heart:

I'm tired of emotional discussions
I'm tired of repercussions
I'm sick of the o's and the x's
And the sex and the battles and the battle of the sexes

Okay, fair enough. No more talk about love. What, then? Rigby has some suggestions:

Let's discuss the hybrid car
Let's eulogize the Mason Jar
Let's analyze roofing tar
And the bridge too far
Chicago Blues
The right to choose
A swinging door
The Croque Monsieur
The working poor
The war

Does she protest too much? Of course. That's what I love about her. If you see her, be sure to tell her.