do you think about love when you listen to music?

so for some reason the overwhelming majority of all music ever made is uniquely about love

but does hearing it make you think about someone you're in love with? or used to be in love with? or someone you have a crush on? or someone who broke your heart? or a vague & undefined recognition of love?

or do you not really even notice most of the time? or do you only care about it if the song is good enough or has some personal relevance? are you entertained in other ways, for example saying something like "it's aesthetically pleasing" whatever that means?

serious questions, people

I disagree with the initial premise.

hm, i'd rather have none of that in here tbh

not that i think that is an untenable or stupid position but i really don't care or want to argue about that at all

Think you shd restrict it to a sub-set of popular music to make the proposition more reasonable.

To answer the question I'd say that in those circumstances most of the time what I'm thinking veers between maudlin egotism and a feeling inspired by the song itself without much in the way of external reference/reflection. Thinking about thinking about love or something.

But it's true, though, the initial premise is misguided. Not every song out there is an ode to love.

Music makes me think about many things other than love like I dunno: sex, religion, fashion, politics, work, death and oysters.
Most of the time I'll just visualize something boring, like say the band performing as if the song were live and not in the studio. That happens more constantly than I'd like to admit... so yes, maybe I lack the imagination to picture love stories when listening to most of my music.

I think about love sometimes when I listen to music, but I've never been in love, so I guess I use music as a surrogate for love sometimes.

~~naked honesty~~

Well if we're being pathetically honest then I suppose I'm sort of a frustrated megalomaniac so what I love to do really when I listen to rock or pop music is put myself inside the band and pretend to be the guitar player or the singer or whatever and think about the sort of deranged life I'd have in those circumstances. If I'm listening to electronica or classical it's the same thing, I imagine being the best composer/dj in the world and I imagine how would I go arranging my own songs and the sort of charmingly eccentric lifestyle I'd have. No love anywhere but for myself, then.

Sometimes listening to music is for me the equivalent of people who fantasize about winning the lottery then.

Not every song out there is an ode to love.

i didn't say it was

i am aware of and listen to plenty of music that isn't about love, but i think we can all agree this is the predominate theme & spans from john dowland to robert johnson to the smiths to taylor swift to nearly everything else that people have ever listened to. like this thread is obviously not about what you feel when you listen to merzbow & a thread about "hey doesn't music make you think about weird shit sometimes" wouldn't have been as interesting

good posts rev & moka while i was typing up that rant btw!

some of my earliest memories are of listening to music with my parents, in the car of the living room, long before i had ever been in love. and i still felt a weird aura of love about it. i remember sitting around and having these melancholy moments just staring and listening to a song about being heartbroken, without having ever experienced such a thing, and just feeling this stuff. like i knew about love, that it swelled up in your throat and made your blood feel weird

weirdly, it seems the older i get the less potent & frequent these moments are. i get choked up when i hear "corrina, corrina" but most music is just entertainment to me, emotional content often evades me

when i'm not thinking about the music itself, i usually just think about 'life in general'. there are certain songs/albums that make me think about past relationships, but that's a whole different thing.

I think about love sometimes when I listen to music, but I've never been in love, so I guess I use music as a surrogate for love sometimes.

this, and not just a surrogate for love even-- i think i quite often use music as a surrogate for emotions (not necc emotions i've never had: also ones i don't currently have, or variations on what's going on so i can put what i'm feeling in ~perspective~).

I think "vague & undefined recognition" is a good way of putting it-- certain lyrics, certain combinations of sounds, adding up to a feeling that i'd recognise as love. But so much of what i understand about 'love' i learnt from pop music, so the whole thing's pretty self-referential.

good thread - before I had ever been in love I didn't really 'get' love songs. and I guess I mostly listened to punk, pop punk, stuff that didn't need 'love' as much as other genres to make music with. but after having been in love, man, so many songs seem to have this whole new dimension to them. like 'you've lost that loving feeling' is pretty soul crushing and OTM to me nowadays, whereas before it was just like "hah hah old classic song."

I had to listen to the Zombies song "Brief Candles" over and over on a road trip a few weeks ago.
I had just had been through a short and intense um affair, I guess, and the song somehow really nailed the way I was feeling.
I can tell that the song is about the end of a relationship, probably one that was nothing like my situation.
Still seemed to reflect exactly the way I'd been feeling.

I think about a lot of stuff when I'm listening to music. I listen to music a lot. I'm listening to the Who doing Tommy right now.
I probably think about it most when I'm on the air, though.

yep most of the time. i reminisce a lot.

I think the initial premise is totally accurate. I mean seriously, without restricting yourself to a particular genre (eg metal), select a random song (with lyrics) out of the all songs ever written. I'd say you definitely have an over 70% chance of it being about love.

BTW, re original question unless the lyrics really grab me, I just think about the music in sort of an abstract way.

before I had ever been in love I didn't really 'get' love songs. and I guess I mostly listened to punk, pop punk, stuff that didn't need 'love' as much as other genres to make music with. but after having been in love, man, so many songs seem to have this whole new dimension to them. like 'you've lost that loving feeling' is pretty soul crushing and OTM to me nowadays, whereas before it was just like "hah hah old classic song."

― Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile (dayo), Wednesday, September 29, 2010 6:18 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

totally

of course i also say to myself "this song would fit perfect in this love scene"...of my made up movie.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d5/All_is_full_of_love.jpg

xp daavid: that might be approaching true if your random sample was weighted by pre-1990s pop/top-40 radio play. A random vocal track from my collection has about a 4% chance of being about romantic love, about the same as exhortations to dance, but more than say pleadings for access to pants or denial of same.

On the 4 million Mp3 files on Amazon, restricting oneself to vocal tracks with song structure, I'd guess 10-15% max.

Ha ha, I totally relate to Moka's comments upthread. I often imagine myself playing various instruments in the songs I listen to, especially rock songs. I also imagine how I might have improved a song with better production choices. Fun times!

I tend to listen to songs that are sad and involve love. Leonard Cohen and Scott Walker and stuff. Happy little love songs can go fuck right off.

On the topic of love songs, I rarely think about anything concrete when I listen to them or any other type of songs. However, I definitely relate to the emotions expressed by certain songs. Most songs conjure up some sort of emotion. Love is associated with such a wide range of familiar emotions that it makes a good topic for music. To me, a good love song makes you feel the emotion it is trying to express. So I guess you could say that some songs make me feel emotions that I associate with love, but they usually don't make me think of much beyond that.

I listened to a lot of sad sack love songs when I was in high school, especially American Music Club and Big Star. I think I liked them specifically because I couldn't get a girlfriend, so I felt like somewhat of a sad sack too.

She sends out an aroma of undefined love
It drips on down in a mist from above

^^^this always makes me think

There was a point in my life when I listened to nothing but Red House Painters...talk about sad sack. Im lucky i didn't off myself.

I associate music with love absolutely all the time. To this day, I still can't quite listen to certain songs (I Know It's Over, If you See Her Say Hello, The Dance etc) because they deal with emotions that I find too complex to even contemplate from a distance.

I think at one point in life you simply discover that there is no such thing as culture in itself, there is only love and the emotional lives of individuals that fuel the arts directly or indirectly. So stop ask that girl out, call your parents and friends etc etc. Music is just the soundtrack.

only w daniel johnston lol

when i am in love - deeply, catastrophically in love - love songs speak to me with an overwhelming, almost terrifying intensity, pinning me to the storm of my emotions. this isn't true of just any love song, though. depending on circumstances and tone of the particular love i happen enduring, this or that song might ring true. unfortunately, it has almost nothing to do with what i might think of as the quality of the song in question. even the most egregious wad of cheese can destroy me, if it happens to hit me in the right (wrong) moment. remember being torn apart by "careless whisper" once upon a time, in a moment of weakness. and on the other hand thrown across the sky by "rocket queen".

most of the time, i'm not so vulnerable, and love songs stir little in me. they might remind me of someone, sometime, but this usually has more to do with the naggings of memory (we used to do this when we listened to it) than with the fact that the song happens to be romantic. as a result of all this, i've often thought that most pop songs are specifically targeted at people caught up in specific emotional moments. they might speak in some general way to the mass audience, but secretly, they're bullets aimed at the hearts of a select few. "careless whisper" at hearts consumed with longing and regret, "rocket queen" at those about to. cohen/buckley's "hallelujah" takes aim at the skull of loss and annihilation hidden inside every promise of love. like bullets, they hang in the air waiting for you to be there, and then they hit you.

Prince's "Erotic City" makes me think of hot sticky love.

fats waller got me thinkin baout love lavely

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lricwIcOyUU

when i listen to Arthur Lee i think about Love.