Is it a Love Song?

One of the greatest songs ever created I have no doubt and I do love this song but is it a love song? I got into a bit of a debate yesterday as this classic from 1975 was played on Steve Wright's Radio 2 programme 'Sunday Love Songs'. Well I've never spent a lot of time thinking about what the song really meant, until now.

You see I thought it was just some bitter dumping song. A bloke a bit  fed up about being chucked by his woman and just hating love and everything that went with it. When I looked into it further though it is in fact the opposite. This is a explanation which I've taken from Wikipedia but I have read other sources and the explanation is the same and it goes like this......

Eric Stewart came up with the idea for the song after his wife, to whom he had been married for eight years at that point, asked him why he didn't say "I love you" more often to her. Stewart said, "I had this crazy idea in my mind that repeating those words would somehow degrade the meaning, so I told her, 'Well, if I say every day "I love you, darling, I love you, blah, blah, blah", it's not gonna mean anything eventually'. That statement led me to try to figure out another way of saying it, and the result was that I chose to say 'I'm not in love with you', while subtly giving all the reasons throughout the song why I could never let go of this relationship."

​When I read other comments from people and their interpretations they seemed to think is was a man in denial, that he was really in love but didn't want to admit to it or know really how to express it properly. 

So you see which ever way you look at it and when you delve deeper and look for the real meaning it is actually a love song and I hold my hands up. I was wrong to think it didn't deserve a place on Sunday Love Songs because it is in fact one of the biggest love songs of all time.

It was nearly binned and never to be heard but with a bit of re editing it  was released as a single topping the charts and also winning three Ivor Novello awards in 1976. There was also some controversy over the timing as the original single was over six minutes long, too long for air play on the BBC (that would become a regular thing eh?) but after public pressure it was played and has been played in it's entirety ever since.

A great song and I'm glad I have now taken the time to understand it more. I do love the way we all see something different in a song. That happens a lot in other arts such as poetry and paintings, we can interpret it in a different way and not always how the artist intended it to be in the beginning.

The moral of this post? I guess as well as never judge a book by it's cover, never a judge a song by it's lyric. 

Thank you for reading today, I will be back tomorrow for Teapot Tuesday but for now.....

Take care.