This is part two of a Deep Dive into true love songs. Those songs that aren’t just made of the fairy floss euphoria one person can make us feel, but also the absurd sadness that the absence of them, or the absence of something within us, can make us feel. Those two polar states of truly being human are what truly make love (and the love song) such an absurd yet remarkable preposition.
(Here’s part one: Nick Cave on Kylie’s Better the Devil You Know.)
…The love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted… The love song must resonate with the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love, for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil, so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.
– Nick Cave
Spiritualized’s A Perfect Miracle is a 4-minute-and-46-second journey from the beginning of a euphoric deep love, all the way to its indifferent petering out into nothing. From its ecstasy, the God-like worship, the crippling doubt, the ardent and delusion, to the moving on we feel for someone we love.
It is the blueprint for any deep love that we feel, and it casts a mirror on how absurd it is that we may worship that person like a god, and think they may complete us, yet in the end they can mean virtually nil to us.