Our Valentine to You
The Valentine's Day mixtape — love songs from the folk and country tradition that understand love as a complex thing.
Valentine's Day is a difficult holiday for people who take music seriously. The commercial music industry's output for the occasion tends toward the saccharine: songs that treat love as uniformly pleasurable, relationships as straightforwardly positive, and romance as a condition without complications.
The folk and country tradition has always known better. The best love songs in this tradition understand that love and loss are the same subject approached from different angles, that the feeling of loving someone and the fear of losing them are not separate emotions but versions of the same thing.
This is our Valentine to you: the love songs that hold up.
The selection
Townes Van Zandt — "If I Needed You" The song that defines the category. Written while Van Zandt was asleep, he claimed. Whether or not you believe the origin story, the song is one of the more perfect love songs in the tradition.
Emmylou Harris — "Boulder to Birmingham" Written after the death of Gram Parsons. A grief song and a love song at the same time. The two categories are adjacent.
John Prine — "Far from Me" Prine at his most direct. The relationship is ending. The narrator watches it end with the clarity that comes too late to be useful.
Patsy Cline — "She's Got You" The most efficient statement of post-breakup consciousness: the objects remain, the person is gone, the objects now carry an emotional weight they didn't have before.
Guy Clark — "She Ain't Goin' Nowhere" The song about a love that survives everything by not requiring anything to prove itself.
Gillian Welch — "The Way It Goes" The acknowledgment that everything ends, made with enough grace that the acknowledgment is also a kind of love.
Willie Nelson — "Always on My Mind" The second-chances song. Possibly the most honest love song in the country canon: the person who failed is asking to be forgiven not by claiming they didn't fail but by acknowledging they did.
Iris DeMent — "Our Town" Not strictly a love song, but it belongs here. The affection for a place and the people in it is love by another name.
Gram Parsons — "She" The late recording, the voice already changed by what was happening to him. Love and time and something elegiac.
Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash — "If I Were a Carpenter" The Tim Hardin song in their hands. The two of them singing together is the evidence.
Happy Valentine's Day. More Mixtapes here.