Shitty Love Songs

There are love songs for every occasion: from infatuation ("I Only Have Eyes for You") to recrimination ("You Oughta Know"), from coy flirtation ("Tea for Two") to ravenous concupiscence ("Darling Nikki"). Some of the best use rhetorical tricks to make their point: I've always had a soft spot for Dan Fogelberg's syrupy "Longer," with its dippy hyperbole about the length and breadth of his love for his partner ("Longer than there've been fishes in the ocean/Higher than any bird ever flew"), maybe because I heard it a lot at weddings when I was a kid. The far better but more thorny "God Only Knows" also uses hyperbole, but in a singularly arresting way: It pairs jaw-droppingly negative opening lines ("I may not always love you," and "If you should ever leave me/Though life would still go on, believe me") with their abject refutation ("But as long as there are stars above you/You never need to doubt it," and "The world could show nothing to me/So what good would living do me"). It's a lyrical feint as dazzling as Brian Wilson's vertiginous, transcendent music, and it's probably one reason I've never heard it played at a wedding.

One song I have heard played often at weddings, at least as a slow dance at the reception, is Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are," a smooth electric-piano-jazz ballad with a sweet, playfully warm vocal and a sax lick that places it just down the block from "Baker Street." It's a hard song to actively hate but I kind of do, because it's one of a genre of tunes I've come to think as "shitty love songs," i.e., songs in which the narrator is telling on himself even as he ostensibly opens his heart. Exhibit A is "Always on My Mind," the 1970 power ballad in which the narrator regrets "all the little things I should have said and done/I just never took the time," but hey, not to worry, babe: "You were always on my mind." Gee, how...thoughtful.

"Just the Way You Are" isn't quite as single-mindedly blinkered. The first stanza is lovely, particularly its last line, assuring a presumably longtime partner that our singer still sees them, and doesn't take them for granted:

Don't go changing to try and please me

You never let me down before, mmm

Don't imagine you're too familiar

And I don't see you anymore

The second stanza also echoes the richer-or-poorer, sickness-and-health wedding vows ("I took the good times/I'll take the bad times"). So far so good. But then, oh Billy:

Don't go trying some new fashion
Don't change the color of your hair
You always have my unspoken passion
Although I might not seem to care

We've veered with a screech from "don't change to please me" to "don't change at all" (presumably not even to please yourself?). I mean, God forbid anything alter his partner's looks, least of all their own hankering for a change; I'm sure this guy will be totally understanding about age, gray hair, weight gain, etc. And the second two lines are close to "Always on My Mind" territory; "unspoken passion" from a man who "might not seem to care" doesn't sound like a great deal, honestly. It gets worse, in the song's ultimate backhanded endearment:

I don't want clever conversation
I never want to work that hard
I just want someone that I can talk to
I want you just the way you are

So are you saying your lover's not smart—or worse, that they should sit on their smarts because you, ya dumb lug, "never want to work that hard"? It's clear that this dude wants someone to talk to, not with.

Arguably there are a few hints that this clueless negging is an intentional device—that Joel knows his narrator is a problem. In the bridge he plaintively sings, "What will it take till you believe in me/The way that I believe in you?" And his final statement, "I couldn't love you any better," could be seen as more as an admission of limitation than of surfeit. "This is the best I can do," is the message. The song's title line should really be, "I love you just the way I am."

Of course, I don't think that's how the song is intended, and it's certainly not how it's shared or received by most folks. I get it; the title line sounds like a sweet enough sentiment that I don't think most people really absorb the lyrics—or more likely they simply absorb them without thinking much about them. But while I do occasionally find myself quoting the "Don't go changing" line ironically when asked by my wife as we're getting ready to go out, "Should I change?," this is not a song I could ever play for her with a straight face.

I often think of this song in contrast to "Marie," Randy Newman's rapturous waltz from the album Good Old Boys, which is expressly written from the point of view of a character and hence feels both more heartfelt and more intentionally critical. The ardent tribute of a no-good drunk to his long-suffering wife, it has a neatly delineated three-part form: statement of love followed by statement of regret, followed by a beautiful "I love you" chorus whose sincerity we have no reason to doubt, except that by the end our singer has so circumscribed what his "love" could possibly mean that it's a fair question what Marie must feel in response to the overture: pity and some regrets of her own, most likely.

Over a gorgeous, tentative polychord, Newman's character sings:

You looked like a princess the night we met
With your hair piled up high, I will never forget

This is perfect, especially the passionate single note setting of "hair piled up high"—the music doesn't just evoke her towering hair but also his tender subjective memory of it. Then he confesses, over a series of suspended-then-resolved chords:

I'm drunk right now, baby, but I got to be
Or I never could tell you what you mean to me

Not quite as romantic, obviously, but the honest statement of an inarticulate man. This leads directly to the sweet, insistent, simple chorus, which repeats these two lines for emphasis:

I loved you the first time I saw you
And I always will love you, Marie 

Marie has no cause to doubt this, right? Not yet. A self-consciously flowery, over-the-top effusion of greeting-card images follows, again perfectly set to the rise and fall of the tune:

You're the song that the tree sings when the wind blows
You're a flower, you're a river, you're a rainbow

And now for the twist, made more evident by its doubling of the suspended-then-resolved-chord form:

Sometimes I'm crazy, but I guess you know
I'm weak and I'm lazy and I've hurt you so
And I don't listen to a word you say
When you're in trouble, I turn away

Is this an apology? Not really, as he then concludes:

But I love you, and I loved you the first time I saw you 
And I always will love you, Marie

Honestly, looking back over it, everything is mostly fine until those two extra lines about not listening and turning away, followed by the "But..." They make all the difference, though. Even if I didn't know this was part of a concept album about a confused redneck named Johnny Cutler, this devastating self-own would tip me off to its unreliable-narrator strategy, and put "Marie" in a class of its own: gorgeous but cracked by design. Clearly not a song for a wedding, or one I would play for my wife, at least not to be taken at face value to ventriloquize my feelings for her.

And while I am not a reflexive Billy Joel hater, the difference between his "Just the Way You Are" and Randy Newman's "Marie" would be my Exhibit A for why I prefer the latter piano man over the former.