31 love songs for turning 31

Today’s my birthday, which means you should send me $7-$10 so I don’t have to buy my own drinks. I also don’t feel like writing anything so enjoy a playlist of 31 songs I associate with love in some way. Some presented with commentary, some without. Also grouped in no particular order. Enjoy!

1. Wires and Waves, Rilo KileyI associate Rilo Kiley with Zach, and when I hear this line about lonely hearts just getting lonelier, I think about Zach coming home and Cookie excitedly barking at him and us sitting down and sharing how our days went. How something simple can turn lonely hearts away from loneliness.

2. Real Love, Big Thief 

3. Paul, Big Thief

4. Georgia, Phoebe BridgersA weird one, but my grandmother’s name was Georgia and for some reason when I hear the lyric “Georgia, Georgia, I love your son/And when he gets older, he might be the one/He might be the one” I think about her, or someone singing that to her.

5. Does He Love You? Rilo KileyIt must be hard to love someone who will never really love you.

6. Archie, Marry Me, AlvvaysWhat I love about this example is, to me at least, that it shows how a song can mean something specific to you at one point in your life and then mean something completely different almost a decade later. Especially after you’ve seen your friends get married…

7. Shit talk, Sufjan StevensA certain part of love can feel contradictory and I think Sufjan captures that in this song (really in this whole album). There’s a point where you love someone but you can’t live with them, you love them but you can’t look at them. You love them and you know they’ll leave and still, you beg them to hold you before they go.

8. Light On, Maggie RogersSometimes a song can feel like a coded message sent just for you. A silent promise made to someone who never hears it. Sometimes it can be about the promises you make to yourself. A mantra I adopted consciously years ago was as simple as “If you leave the light on, then I'll leave the light on.”

9. In Hell, Japanese BreakfastI think a lot about my grandmother when I hear this song. Both about how hard it must be to see someone die that you love but two how much I wish she could have known the men I’ve loved.

10. Old Friends, Pinegrove

11. How Simple, Hop AlongI think a lot about the lyrics:How simple my heart can beFrightens me and Don't worry we will both find outJust not together a lot. I think I read it as a sort of dirge for the death of a relationship: people falling apart but it’s for the better. We think the best love stories are the ones where people stay together forever, but to me there’s a certain beauty in the fall. How two people can depart painfully from each other but still find their ways to the simple pleasures their hearts desire. How they can still find out, just not together. One love story turns into four, five, or six.

12. Clean Socks, Remember SportsI’ve said this before but I think the worst thing someone can want from you is nothing at all.

13. Me and My Dog, BoygeniusEspecially now that I have Cookie any song with a dog sends me to tears.

14. Pristine, Snail Mail

15. Materialistic, Remember SportsI had this pretty sad experience years ago thinking about the important people in my life and what physical trace of myself I left behind with them. There’s this thing you do when you move on or break up or you ghost out of someone’s life where you take a catalog of all the things you left behind with them and return them. You never really catch all of it, something’s always left behind. Then you stare at it for a while trying to decide if you toss it or keep it. I always wondered what was left behind of me, what physical thing was hard to toss. I think, truthfully it was nothing, or very little.I also think about when someone dies what they leave behind, how a part of dying is the reallocating of objects. I wrote about that when I was in college and then took a course on objects and their cultural importance—museum theory and collection theory—which changed my relationship to the physicality of culture or love or personhood.

16. New Friends, PinegroveLove for the endless path of doing better, being better.

17. Home, Diana RossLiving here, in this brand-new worldMight be a fantasyBut it taught me to loveSo it’s real, real to meLove for how we can find our own homes or build them with someone special.

18. Buttercup, Slaughter Beach, DogButtercup is a tender song. It reads like two old lovers reconnecting while understanding how much they’ve changed; the gap between them so vast but still connected. They don’t need each other anymore but they still resolve to love the past they shared together.The ending of:And we know it's our time to leaveWe wait for your rideWith you standing by my sideAnd you know it ain't me that you needJuxtaposed against the earlier stanza:We go insideAnd you scratch at an old woundYou ask: "How the hell—If I felt like I felt with you—Did I move on so soon?”Highlighting how in the course of a night the asker has changed her stance from still questioning to accepting of the end. Closure, what a nice feeling.

19. When He Sees Me, Kimiko GlennAfter opening that door with Zach, I can’t hear the lyric:What if when he sees meI like him and he knows it?What if he opens up a doorAnd I can't close it?Without crying.

20. Strawberry Blonde, Mitski

21. Lonesome Love, Mitski

22. First Time, Lucy DacusMaybe a weird one lol but:You say the love will come and goWe'll learn to ride the ebb and flowYou always leave before the lightCome back, same time and place, the next nighttransforms me.

23. This House, Japanese BreakfastLove changes everything and what we love evolves with us and our grief.

24. Fire, WaxahatcheeFor some of us, it ain’t enough has really come to define how I write about love, hearing it for the first time felt revolutionary. Also:And I take off drivingPast places been taintedI put on a good show for youAnd when I turn back aroundWill you drain me back outWill you let me believe that I broke through?Maybe the hardest part of loving someone is letting them believe that they did break through. Maybe that’s a key point of love: breaking through, draining back out.

25. Star, Loona Any LOONA song really reminds me of Zach, so you could swap this out with any of their songs.

26. Hurt Me, Charly BlissPart of the nature of love is that we’re probably always going to hurt the people we love the hardest.

27. Acolyte, Slaughter Beach, DogMore and more I think of Zach when I hear this

28. Last Words of A Shooting Star, MitksiI was going to live. I was going to live.

29. Begging for Rain, Maggie Rogers

30. I Wanna Dance with Somebody, Whitney Houston

31. Verlaine shot Rimbaud, Lydia LovelessProbably horrible but God if I don’t feel the lyric “I just wanna be the one you love.” so deeply.