Notes On Song: “My Love” and “Silly Love Songs” by Paul McCartney & Wings
Take a love song and make it meta
And when I go away, I know my heart can stay with my love. It’s understood. It’s in the hands of my love. And my love does it good.
How loathsome does a song have to be to turn one’s most ardent critical supporters against them? How bad must the din get to encourage them to write another song commenting upon that previous song and its audience? And how hilarious is it that both songs turn out to reach #1 in the USA?
I don’t know what you whippersnappers have heard about the struggle between Art and Commerce in the heyday of music criticism in the 1970s, but it sure had its casualties. It wasn’t the elbow-patched tweed-jacket variety of pre-rock criticism. Nobody was hovering in the back of the room muttering judgments while smoking a (tobacco) pipe. Change happened fast in those days, standards being hastily drawn up to separate the Wheaties from the chaff. And if you happened to be one-quarter of the most influential band of all time, the gatekeepers insisted you better not phone it in.
Paul McCartney will always be my favorite Beatle. As my friend Sean once said to me, “You don’t choose your favorite Beatle — your favorite Beatle chooses you.” When he started his post-Beatles career, Paul’s work kind of sounded like an exhalation or a warm nap. Excepting Ram, his earliest albums sounded like retreats from the intricate and “heavy.” Look at the cover of the first Wings album Wild Life — these blokes are just sitting in nature, taking it easy, thinking longingly about the soybean curds they’ll make supper with later. That ease permeated that album, as it did with McCartney’s solo debut. You can’t blame a guy for this, especially after a nasty public breakup.
But “My Love” sure broke some of the finest minds of my generation.
It’s from one of Paul’s most complained-about albums, Red Rose Speedway. It was an easy target, especially from the critics. The NME’s Tony Tyler said it was “lightweight” and absent of “intellectual posture.” The Dean, Robert Christgau, said it was “quite possibly the worst album ever made by a rock and roller of the first rank — unless David Crosby counts.” (To me, Red Rose Speedway is not so much bad as it’s weird.)
The nexus of bile on Red Rose Speedway was “My Love,” the second song on Side 1. It sucked up opprobrium like no other McCartney track before or since. Christgau again attacked it in a review of Wings Greatest, saying all the compilation needed was “a stylus-width scratch across ‘My Love.’”
Was it so bad? What lyrical crime did it commit?
Whoa, whoa-whoa, whoooooa, whoa, whoa-whoa, whoooooa. My love does it good.
Oh.
Okay, granted: That’s a little bit of an intellectual backing off, considering Paul had written lines about pastors who silently lament “no one was saved” and naval admirals who “had to have a berth or (they) couldn’t get to sea.” We’re talking a series of wordless interjections and the puzzling compliment that said love “does it good.” Does what good? Macramé? Dish-washing? The ole heave-ho between the linens? And everyone knows the proper phrasing is “my love does it well,” but that doesn’t have the phonetic thrust of the word “good.” Nothing drives the point home like a hard “g” sound. That’s why “God” starts with one.
And when the cupboard’s bare, I’ll still find something there with my love. It’s understood. It’s everywhere with my love, and my love does it good.
Your love is so potent that they can make you look into an empty pantry and have hallucinations. That elusive, phantom corn starch.
Oh oh I love, oh oh my love. Only my love holds the other key to me. Oh oh I love, oh oh my love. Only my love does it good to me.
At least we’ve cleared up that whatever it is that your love “does good,” it is doing something good to the song’s indirect object. It is not simply for display purposes or showing off. Some kind of transformation is happening to the singer, and I bet it smells like orchids.
Don’t ever ask me why I never say goodbye to my love. It’s understood. It’s everywhere with my love and my love does it good. Whoa!
Look, I get it. Paul and Linda are one of the greatest love stories in entertainment history. I’m not objecting to his urge to write her paeans. I suppose one could counter that any over-explanation of complex thoughts or exacting details regarding romance would only dilute the power of the emotion. (Although doing it well is something They Might Be Giants pulls off all the time.)
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There have been plenty of songs more lightweight than “My Love.” Maybe folks were just jealous that that mass public liked it. I just finished Peter Ames Carlin’s excellent book about the history of Warner Bros. Records that had an amusing account of a staff revolt after hearing “You Light Up My Life” for the first time. “‘You Light Up My Life’ was bad pop with a politically retrograde heritage,” Carlin writes. “They’d released a lot of mediocre and even bad records before, but for fuck’s sake, this was an embarrassment.” The song spent 11 weeks at #1, a record at the time.
The chasm was wide at the time. Bubblegum music was universally despised by the cogniscenti, and “My Love” seemed like a slower example of that genre. McCartney took notice, turned around and made a great album with Band On the Run (albeit under stressful conditions). Two albums after that, he finally lodged his defense of “My Love” and compositions like it. Turned out he had a point. It helped that his response also had one of the greatest bass lines in music history.
You’d think that people would’ve had enough of silly love songs, but I look around me and I see it isn’t so. Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs, and what’s wrong with that? I’d like to know.
“Silly Love Songs” starts with a clever audio joke: industrial sound effects that bring an assembly line to mind. Paul knew what critics were complaining about. Silly love songs didn’t sound like they were created so much as they were manufactured. You could argue that songwriting companies and sites — the Brill Building, Nashville’s Music Row, Motown’s Factory, Tin Pan Alley and Dick James Music — reinforced that idea of automated fabrication. (But if you talk smack to me aout Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Harlan Howard, or Smokey Robinson, I would perform the non-violent equivalent of smacking the taste out of your mouth.)
It’s also reassuring that McCartney professes self-awareness. Even he can’t believe people were still loading up on AM radio saccharin. But he understands the comfort and familiarity that it brings and can’t find a meaningul argument against it. (Remember this is the guy who did an album of Great American Songbook covers.) He knew what the body politic wanted to feel most, and chances are Sham 69 and the Anti-Nowhere League weren’t going to supply it.
’Cause here I go again: I love you, I love you.
According to my quick research, in “Silly Love Songs” Wings sings the phrase “I love you” 18 times. I couldn’t find a definitive answer on which popular song repeats the phrase the most, but at least one does so more than “Silly Love Songs”: “I Love You” by Swiss techno band Yello.
The “ILY” tally for that song is 19. Funnily enough, lead vocalist Dieter Meier never says the phrase. Instead an uncredited female voice repeats it 19 times. Meier’s only, typically indifferent response: “I know.” Should’ve figured a Swiss man would be neutral.
Personally I don’t say “I love you” that much. Neither does my family. Of course I love them deeply. That’s what a consistent relationship of almost a quarter century will do to you. I think I say it when it’s necessary: when there’s a meaningful transition coming and I sense that a re-orientation of that emotion might be wise.
I have an unsteady relationship with sentiment. I don’t like to be showered with it. But when I drank a lot, I fell prone to showing careless displays of sentiment myself. I said a lot of cringy things in the past when given over to drunken sentiment (both good and bad). I tend to favor equillibrium these days and so do my closest loved ones. At the same time I fear becoming too distant.
Good thing I can always fall back on sarcasm.
I can’t explain, the feeling’s plain to me. Now can’t you see? Ah, she gave me more, she gave it all to me. Now can’t you see?
“Silly Love Songs” isn’t really silly, but it’s simple. Love just is. The silliest thing to do is to try and define it. I mean, I feel silly for just saying that myself. Paul doesn’t have to defend himself in the slightest. The argument against “My Love” was largely aesthetical. The 50-piece orchestra felt like overkill, similar to what Phil Spector did to the Let It Be album. We’ve already discussed the lyrics.
Also important were the perceptions critics and listeners had about McCartney and his erstwhile songwriting partner. John Lennon’s first proper post-Beatles record, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, was an enraged and exhausted explosion of pain. It resolved itself in albums like Imagine and Mind Games, as well as singles like “Instant Karma!”, in efforts to attain a sense of the ethereal that he’d long distrusted. John was instantly venerated during this time — but I think his anger was just as much an element of his work as his utopian conceits. (See: “How Do You Sleep?”)
As for Paul? He was still the cute one. Which is unfairly denigrating in this context. But he was being held up to the seemingnly altruistic standard Lennon was thought to espouse. Lennon searched for meaning. McCartney sought to relax for a bit. That was the critical perception, anyway, in that brief moment when rock criticism appeared to matter.
Yes, it was absolutely unfair to Paul. On one hand, he didn’t try to do to much with “My Love.” However, as one of the best composers and multi-instrumentalists in popular music history, he never really had to try.
Love doesn’t come in a minute. Sometimes it doesn’t come at all. I only know that when I’m in it, it isn’t silly. Love isn’t silly. Love isn’t silly at all. How can I tell you about my loved one?
“I think a lot of people who are cynical about it, haven’t been lucky enough to feel it,” McCartney told poet Paul Muldoon in a podcast. “You often wonder what the critic who damns it looks like, what his or her life looks like.”
Everybody has a different way of receiving a song. And yeah. Sometimes our worldly expectations play too much of a part in filtering certain feelings, or distorting others’. That is the central problem of aesthetics. All Paul wanted to do was express his multitudes of feelings about Linda. He did it differently than, say, John did. Or than I would.
As a commentary on his artistic approach, “Silly Love Songs” makes its point. “My Love” does too. The two perspectives showed that Paul knew his audience and his critics in nearly equal measure. And that nobody really understands how this whole love thing works — that may be the common theme of both songs.
I just prefer the one with the slamming bass line.
