Lucy Dacus first heard Edith Piaf’s “La vie en rose” when she was in middle school. She was studying French at the time, and to practice her pronunciation, she would sing the song to herself. She loved it—Piaf’s songbird voice, the song’s mysterious melody, the grainy quality of the old record; it felt like “drinking a love potion.” But the song took on a new resonance one day when she was painting a mural in the school’s library. “I was singing it to myself, and the janitor was cleaning up, but I didn't notice,” Dacus recalls. “And then when I noticed I was like, ‘Oh, I'll stop.’ And he was like, ‘No, go on ahead.’ So I sang the whole song. And then he sang the Louis Armstrong English version to me. It was just one of those weird moments with a stranger that reminds you that the world is a little bit magical.”
Dacus later adds that the janitor even winked and tipped his hat. “It was unreal,” she says, and yeah, that’s putting it mildly. But listen to that song—really listen to it—and Dacus’s story makes a strange kind of sense. At their best, love songs have a way of suspending gravity, of enchanting the air they inhabit, of making empty-library duets with strangers seem not just plausible, but natural.
Of course, most love songs don’t have that power. Most love songs are terrible. The genre is rich in the sort of recycled syrupy goo that makes the very notion of love hard to stomach. There are over a dozen different love songs called “Love Song,” at least that many with suspect lyrics (“I know where you hide / Alone in your car”; “If I was invisible / I would just watch you in your room”; “You can run / You can hide / But you can’t escape my love”), and many, many more that sound like they were manufactured by Hallmark. Imagine, for a moment, how different Lucy Dacus’s run-in with that janitor would read if it was not “La vie en rose” she’d been singing, but “Wicked Game.”
In fairness, it’s hard to make a great love song. Love—the Tom Cruise meltdown of feelings—reduces even the best artists to spewing gobbledygook like “I begged for a kiss, she gave me seven / Our lips touched and it feel like heaven” and “The moment that you speak / I wanna go play hide and seek.” And in a lot of ways, making a great love song has never been harder. In case you hadn’t noticed, this isn’t a particularly romantic time to be alive. We find dates while we’re on the toilet. We’re constantly confronted with unattainable notions of love. And we’re in the midst of a long overdue—but nonetheless unsexy—cultural reckoning about sexual assault. Is it any wonder that young people are having less sex than they have in generations?
Add on social media’s immediate and horrific feedback loop, and this can be a precarious time to wear your heart on your sleeve. “People will fry you,” says the 21-year-old soul singer Omar Apollo, of writing corny lyrics. “They'll start making memes. It's scary, putting out art. You gotta be very vulnerable. You're bringing back raw feelings, like shit that made you cry before. So it's hard to bring it [up] and then put it out, and then have whoever you wrote it about hear it.”
Dacus, who recently covered “La vie en rose” with a dual-language, rock take on the song, has heretofore been wary of making songs about love for fear of being pigeonholed. “I think that it's pretty common, especially for female performers, for their work to kind of be forced back into a narrative about their love life,” she says. “So I've been afraid to fall victim to that trope, and don't really write about love that often.”
But despite all the challenges that come with making a modern love song, artists are still finding ways to invigorate the genre. Even though social media snark can keep artists on their toes, Internet interconnectedness has also foregrounded nontraditional forms of love. LGBTQ artists—Frank Ocean, Troye Sivan, St. Vincent, Rostam, and Kim Petras chief among them—are making some of pop’s most evocative and creative modern love songs, in the process proving that listeners are open to all kinds of love. “There used to be a feeling that you're alienating people who listen to your music if you're a girl and you're talking about a woman, or if you're a guy and you're talking about a guy, and I'm really happy that that's disappearing,” Petras says.
Moreover, the ways modern technology has affected romance has inspired new, universal themes in love songs. “Love songs are all about people connecting on a heavy and intimate way, and I think a lot of what connects people these days is feeling disconnected, feeling like outcasts, or dealing with depression—most of your interactions existing through a screen,” says Ricky Reed, a producer who has made love songs with stars like Leon Bridges and Christina Aguilera. “I think a theme in a lot of great current love songs is people somehow finding a way to feel connected in a time of rampant disconnection.”
For Reed, there’s no better example than Lovelytheband’s "Broken," in which vocalist Mitchy Collins sings, "I love that you're broken / Broken like me / Maybe that makes me a fool / I like that you're lonely / Lonely like me / I could be lonely with you." In recent years, these sorts of sentiments have sprouted up in all genres of music. Julien Baker’s Boygenius rock ballad “Stay Down” and H.E.R.’s twinkly R&B track “Focus” each reference feeling neglected by a partner who is distracted by their device. And Bjork has cheekily referred to her critically adored 2017 album Utopia as her “Tinder album”—it features songs about swiping and about falling in love by “sending each other MP3s.”
My personal favorite modern love song might be Japanese Breakfast’s “Till Death,” off the band’s 2017 album, Soft Sounds from Another Planet. The song, which Michelle Zauner wrote on piano, is lush and sweeping in the style of melodramatic oldies. It incorporates tubular bells and lots of string synths and has a big, cheesy orchestral key change. Against that sumptuous backdrop, Zauner essentially recites a list of painful things she’s experienced throughout her relationship—”PTSD, anxiety / Genetic disease / Thanatophobia.” The song’s somber lyrics keep its swooning production from veering too sappy. But more than that, the juxtaposition of the direly tragic and the unabashedly romantic hits you in a way few other love songs achieve. The depth of the love Zauner describes comes through; if most love songs are a kiss, “Till Death” is two hands clasped tightly together.
“In my mind, ‘Till Death’ is the only true love song that I've written,” Zauner says. “I don't think I knew what love really was until I was in that relationship. I saw that love is so much about being there for someone and enduring something hard with them. I think that you can't really know if a person loves you or you love a person unless you endure some real, true hardship together.”
Zauner pulled from the brother-sister soft-rock duo The Carpenters in making “Till Death.” (She and her husband danced to 1971’s “Rainy Days and Mondays” at their wedding.) And while you can hear traces of the band’s swaying melodies in the song, its synths and airy production make it sound thoroughly modern, though it’s not connected to other contemporary love songs sonically so much as it is thematically. Instead, Zauner manages to finds connection in a disconnected time.
Today every artist has access to virtually every sound imaginable, so there’s no longer one sonic framework that unites our love songs. For Reed, that freedom gives way to what’s important. “In the '50s and '60s it was like, ‘love song, big string section.’ In the '80s, ‘love song, Yamaha DX7.’ And it's kind of dope that now there's no one-stop-shop. You just have to sing from the heart. And that's what defines a modern love song.”