The Love Songs

A couple years back, I got on a Lisa Loeb kick, and rediscovered “Sandalwood,” a song I’d liked when I first heard it in the 1990s, but was overshadowed in both pop culture and my personal recollection by songs like “Do You Sleep?” and “I Do,” not to mention her career-defining hit, “Stay (I Missed You).”

As soon as I heard the song again, though, after I don’t know how many years, maybe decades, I remembered.

She can’t tell me that all the love songs have been written
‘cause she’s never been in love with you before.

These opening lines, repeated throughout the song, communicate a lot, ranging from a sense of intense feeling to a nascent, vaguely immature sense of love, or at least infatuation that took me back to a time when this song most spoke to me.

The underlying sentiment that the song rebels against--that there’s no point in writing something new because every take has already been recorded--reads as an assault on not only a songwriter, but an artist of any form. Because if every song, and by extension every story has been recorded already, what’s the point of any new creation? Loeb’s objection, that her own love is so special or unique sounds a bit puerile--a romanticized notion that older folks have lost the capacity to understand young love.

It’s easy enough to dismiss a sentiment like that.

But what if she’s right?

Many of us grow older and more jaded about romantic love, privileging mutual support and shared values and decision-making with a partner over unbridled passion. Might it nonetheless remain fair to say that every love is unique? Despite gender roles and archetypes, common frames of reference and the en vogue things couples do in our times, it’s nothing shy of depressing to think of every relationship already having been done. of every love song, with this frame of reference, having been written.

But then, even if we are to reject the premise of this song as juvenile, or untrue to our experience, might we yet find value in it? Is there so much harm in being young and believing a love to be genuinely special? Isn’t that how we achieve some of our sweetest moments over those formative years? We learn how to love and learn to be loved and learn to cope with heartbreak as not only victim, nor perpetrator, but usually a bit of both.

And even for those relationships that go the distance, be they the high school sweethearts who marry, or much older, less wide-eyed pairs that come together later in life, isn’t that glimmer still important? That early-on magic--the first time holding hands at a concert, the first time kissing outside someone’s apartment, the first time someone cries or shares something intimate or slips an arm from a sleeve or, yes, says I love you--remains foundational in its electric sensation and implicit suggestion that this might last.

So it is that I suggest Lisa Loeb is right after all these years. She can’t tell you that all the love songs have been written.

She's never been in love with you before.