Top Ten Love Songs of All Time From the keyboard of a 23 year old Jan 15 '05 (Updated Dec 31 '10)    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Music The Dirtchamber Sessions, Vol. 1 by The Prodigy From $11 Jersey Boys [Original Broadway Cast Recording] by Original Broadway Cast From $8 The Bottom Line I would probably write more reviews if I wasn't required to include a bottom line. I have been absent from Epinion’s for quite some time now. I look back and try to remember why I left. Sometimes I’m not really sure. I look at the format of reviewing I see here and instantly I remember why. In its infancy, Epinions.com wasn’t just your normal end of the Millennia .com company, although it was surrounded by billions of those. What it was, was a small community of aspiring writers, we’d write long winded introductions and try to tell a story in our reviews. If we actually included valid information on the product at hand, we were that much for the better. Now I feel like Epinions is as Sterile as Yahoo! or any of those other lifeless forums that once were booming online communities. Maybe that’s not the only reason I left though, there were a few others. Our most esteemed member and a good friend of mine died suddenly, if not expectedly, of Cancer, it was too much for my young heart to take at the moment and I took a permanent break. That sounds personal enough, right? Perhaps, though, the true reason I quite writing for Epinions is that I grew far too objective to review the things I wanted to review, such as cars, musical instruments, and movies. It is true that my reviews most likely would have gotten much better, it is more true that I would lost interest if I weren’t over-generalizing and getting the feathers of more accomplished writers fluffed. I still appreciate the time and 151 reviews I wrote for Epinions in my teenage years, I can see improvements from the first through the last, and my list of short stories and poetry would not be as big, nor as strong, had I not had the opportunity to stretch my creativity every day amongst a community of peers. Four years ago I wrote a review. It was quite a good review, and I enjoy reading it to remember my thought processes right out of high school. Today I have returned to supplement that list. I can see my own development, in that only four years have passed and yet my lists have no songs in common. Perhaps I have grown in my musical understandings, or maybe moreso I realize that words are not everything. My choices of eighteen dealt very much with the lyrics, my choices of twenty-three find refuge in the complete packaging of musical theory. I request that prior to undertaking the following list, you review my Epinion of 26 October, 2000. Top Ten Love Songs of All Time From the keyboard of a 18 year old And take a look at my Epinion of 31 December, 2010: Top Ten Love Songs of All Time From the keyboard of a 28 year old To start this list, I considered my songs that I identified with, and songs that ‘tug at the heart’, each and everyone of these songs pass through my mind quite often. With no further introduction, I present you the Top Ten Love Songs of All Time. 10. Paul Simon – Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes I first heard this song outside of the Harkin’s Theatre in Tempe Arizona, I was alone and as I remember it, melancholy. The man playing his acoustic guitar looked even moreso than I, and really put his heart into the performance. On that day, I did not understand the lyrics, and today, I understand them even less. I once looked up the lyrics, and found that I didn’t need to know them. What this song is about is a New York rich girl who is up on all the fashion and a poor boy who is not. The girl gets upset with the fakeness of her life and finds love with the boy, who is worried about his lack of wealth and what she’ll think of him. In the end, they find that none of that really matters because they love each other. 09. Al Stewart – A Small Fruit Song All of the artists in all of the world strive to what Mr. Stewart was able to do with twenty nine words. It says pretty much what I said for #10, in far, far fewer words. The simple issue is that Love Conquers All. 08. Dominique Van Hulst – Heaven You have probably heard the monstrosity of DJ Sammy’s Heaven, and the somewhat mundane aspects of Bryan Adams’ Heaven. Do(as she’s known to the world) took Mr. Adams’ song and turned it into what it needs to be to be a great love song, consequently, DJ Sammy took Do’s Heaven and, well you know what happened next. Anyways, the prevailing message is that love is all that you need, and you can make any of the other bad stuff go away. 07. Will Young – Beyond the Sea Written by Charles Trenet in French, it was titled, “The Sea”, translated by Jack Lawrence, and immortalized by Bobby Darrin. That’s all fine and dandy, but I consider Bobby Darrin’s version to be clumsy and a bit slow for what the song is saying. It was Will Young who saved the song, he bumped it up a few beats a minutes, and completely cut the end, which really had no place in the song. It’s got that real big Sinatra feel to it, while keeping it personal. I’ve stood looking across the Atlantic humming this song. 06. LeeAnne Rimes – The Rose I am a huge fan of A Capella, you see above that Dominique is almost A Capella, and LeeAnne is equally almost sans instruments as well. I like this song because of the filling voice, the slowness, and the melody. The lyrics are kinda cheesy, but once you get into it, you don’t even hear them. 05. Dixie Chicks – Travelin’ Soldier I’ve been to war, I’ve left a girl behind. Now it doesn’t have quite the effect on me, but laying in my cot at night, this song certainly did. Bruce Robinson, the writer, obviously knew that this song had to be sung by a girl, and held out twelve years before the Dixie Chicks finally sang it. We see on TV, in movies, even at work, that the word Love gets thrown around all the time. It’s like Homer Simpson said, “You say that soooooo often, it’s lost all meaning.” The girl in Travelin’ Soldier redeems the definition of love. 04. Frank Sinatra – Fly Me to the Moon I mentioned Sinatra a bit up the way, it got me thinking about him and how wonderful this song is. I didn’t want to have two big band jazz songs on the list, but C’est La Vie, they both deserve to be here. It compares love to the exhilaration of space travel, but subtly reverts to the down to Earth closeness we’re all looking for. 03. Deanna Carter – We Danced Anyway Everything is better with someone you love. This song has a double meaning, you can listen to it soley for the lyrics, which entail remembrances of a vacation, my guess is in Palermo, because I’ve been to Palermo and this song instantly came to mind in the town square after dark. You’d think not, because she says, “The Stars were upside down.” But amazingly enough, the stars are upside down in the UK, despite it still being in the top hemisphere. Anyways, what’s more important in this song is the general opinion that nothing else matters when you’re in love. In using “Nothing Else Matters” I have exempted myself from including that song in this review, as to keep my original posting, original. 02. Jono Manson – Almost Home This is one of the hardest songs on Earth to get a hold of. I finally found it on Amazon. You’ll know it best from Kevin Costner’s “The Postman”, but that was a clipped and broken “Almost Home”. I relate to this song best because I am trapped on the isle of Great Britain, and, for about five months of my indenture, had a girl waiting in the States for me. When it started to fall apart, I wrote a poem that sounds surprisingly like Mr. Manson’s song. I’d forgotten mostly about this song until I met a young lady here on the island. I have a general decree, I don’t date Brit’s and I don’t date Air Force chickies. Pretty much ruled out everyone. This girl is military, but practically a civilian in character and assignment, so I made an exception. That’s when I realized what “Almost Home” was all about no regrets and always looking towards the future. It’s a great song, and if number one wasn’t so great, it’d be number one. In writing this, I got to remember some wonderful memories, and some painful ones as well. I had a list of dozens of love songs that I brainstormed before writing this, and yet I was still hardpressed to choose ones important enough to be included in this piece. There are many great love songs, but I felt in writing this, I had to choose the absolute best, so ensured that I didn’t spend the time on songs that didn’t fit the bill. A few of these cut songs, included: “Check Yes or No” by George Strait, an examination of the simplicity of feelings that love is based in. “The Game of Love” by Carlos Santana, which deals a little more with the desperation of love. “I have to say I love you in a Song” by Jim Croce, a lovely song, but doesn’t quite feel serious enough to find its way into this collection. “Love is All you Need” by The Beatles, the original is horrid, the redeaux by Kristian Leontiou is some sort of Techno failure. The Beatles lyrics are nice, but instrumentation falls short, I know this because, in the film, “Love Actually” the instrumentation blew away my wildest dreams, and if you can find someone to record the whole song JUST like that, it will be included on this list, pretty darn near #1. Elvis Presley of course needs a place on the mentionable list, “Wise Men Say” is a beautiful piece for puppy dog love, but didn’t quite feel like the permanence is there. He also has a song called “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” which is a bit better when sung in the version by Queen or even by John Hiatt, which isn’t really the same song, but similar enough to generalize. In the end, I don’t want to be a Genreist, but it’s a bit too Honky Tonk for my tastes, and therefore not on this list. And now, without further adieu, I present to you the greatest love song of all time. 01. Tracy Chapman – The Promise This song is unique, in that it could stand as an instrumental, A Capella, or what it is, a glorious blend of instrumentation and vocalization. The melody is extremely slow, but the abundance of Tracy’s voice makes you hang on every word. You could be sitting in your car, waiting for the heater to warm up, with no jacket, in the middle of an East Anglia January, alone, the nearest person twenty miles away, and this song will give you that warm feeling you can otherwise only get in a hug from your true love. I love it. I hope you find a place for these in your heart.

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