Whether or not you find yourself in a romantic mood, from OutKast to Snail Mail, there is a love song for all Valentine’s celebrations. Listen to The Observer’s playlist of the week here.
The one non-negotiable for any Valentine’s Day playlist, the Rodgers and Hart classic from their 1937 musical Babes in Arms is one of the most recorded entries in the great American songbook. The Ella Fitzgerald version is sung with a gorgeous clarity that cuts through the slightly syrupy orchestra – and she keeps the odd archaic introductory verse, excised by many others, that contains the treat of her landing, with a raised eyebrow, the phrase “slightly dopey gent”. The song itself, a perfect hymn to imperfection, never fails to make you – as Hart puts it – “smile with your heart”.
“So why’d you wanna erase me? Darling Valentine.” The preternaturally gifted American singer-songwriter and guitarist Lindsey Erin Jordan (aka Snail Mail) pours adoration and frustration into this alternately sweet and stomping ode to a hurting heart, with a chorus to die for.
Billed as an OutKast album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (2003) was really two solo records, and this slice of popped-cherry pie comes from Andre 3000’s half. It’s a Prince-channeling inquiry into the mysteries of love and sex: over irresistible hand-clapping funk, Andre introduces himself as “Cupid Valentino, the modern-day Cupid” surveying a populace whose hearts have grown cold. At one point he raps the question, “For the record, have you ever rode a horse?” which is utterly delightful, even if the “Happy Valentine’s Day” of the chorus somehow becomes “Fuck that Valentine’s Day” by the end.
Is there a more unreliable narrator in pop? 10cc’s multi-voiced marvel is an exercise in pure denial, and all the more beguiling because of it. The American singer and cellist Kelsey Lu covered the song in 2019, teasing it out languorously to twice its original length and allowing the listener to get lost yet again in its strange romantic brilliance.
The Sheffield singer-songwriter Richard Hawley has a rather lovely song called “Valentine”, but it is this simple, spare ballad from Truelove’s Gutter that earns its place on our St Valentine’s playlist for its celebration of ordinary, enduring monogamy and recognition of the work required to keep it roadworthy. Hawley almost leaves his partner’s birthday present on the train and repeatedly promises to give up cigarettes – but for all his flaws, there is no doubting that their love, though “grown strange” in midlife, is one that will last.
Illustration by Charlotte Durance
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