Top 20 Songs About Love: The Top 5!

It may be a day later than usual, but this week's Top 5 will conclude my forgettable list of the top 20 songs about love (on my computer). You can find the other 15 songs on this list here. I now present to you the Top 5 Songs About Love!

#5: The Cardigans - "Lovefool" - It's really no secret that The Cardigans are one of my more guilty pleasures. Hell, a few months back I even crowned Nina Persson as my favorite female frontwoman! She beat out Jenny Lewis and Neko Case! But as good as Nina is, she's never been better than on the band's breakout 1990's pop song, "Lovefool." Nina's sugary vocals croon over the band's perfect arrangement, pleading, "Love me, love me! Say that you'll love me." Your heart would break if the song weren't so catchy and poppy, because at it's core, "Lovefool" is really a song about being madly in love with someone who doesn't love you anymore. Not really the type of song you typically sing along to wildly, but that's part of what makes it such a timeless song.

#4: Death Cab for Cutie - "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" - I'm still pissed that this lost the Grammy to "My Humps" by The Black-Eyed Peas, for Best Pop Songwriting no less!! But that is the type of world we live in, ladies and gentlemen; a world where Bin Gibbard, and already accomplished writer, writes his most poignant of love songs and it gets beat out by an ex-crack whore singing about her "lady lumps." The fact of the matter is that there are very few love songs, on or off my computer, that can compare to this gem. It's about loving a person so much, that when they die you'll have nothing left to do but die as well. Gibbard sings, "Love of mine, someday you will die but I'll be close behind. I'll follow you into the dark." He expresses his lack of confidence that heaven or hell will greet them, but knows that as long as they have each other in the afterlife, they'll be happy. It is one of the most selfless portraits of love ever created, and one that you'll remember for your entire life.

#3: The Wrens - "She Sends Kisses" - Honestly, I'm a little upset that more people don't know this song. Hopefully it's placement at #3 will encourage all of you to go download it or something. The song is uber-depressing. It tells the story of a guy who's just lost the love of his life, describing it as "ten tons against me." He spends his days looking at old photographs, listening to their favorite records, trying to replace her with other women ("I put your face on her all year"), but ultimately never forgetting the one that got away. That's probably her fault too though, she keeps writing him. And every time she writes he gets his hopes up, he starts remembering, but it never amounts to much. It's not a beautiful song by any means, but it's touching, brutally honest, and it rocks! This isn't so much a love song as it is a song that portrays love as is sometimes is; painful and depressing. But it is brilliant, and everyone needs to hear this one.

#2: The Dears - "22: The Death of All the Romance" - Of all the songs on this list, this is the only one that I can't analyze and tell you what it's about. I just don't know. I know it's a duet, and I know it deals with love and romance, but that's all I can decipher. Really though, is that such a bad thing? I mean, sometimes love is so complicated, so unexplainable that you just accept it for what it is and deal with it. The bottom line is, I may not know what this song is about specifically, but I know that is one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard and one of the best duets of the last 20 years. If that's not enough of a reason to listen to it, I don't know what is.

#1: The Postal Service - "Such Great Heights" - As I was compiling this list, this song kept moving up and down the list until I finally just decided to place it at number one. It's the third Ben Gibbard song on this list, and though not as well written as "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," it is a much better love song. Unlike so many love songs on this list, "Such Great Heights" is not drowning in melancholy or about a subject that is less than preferable. Like Buddy Holly's "Everyday," this is a song that's about the blissfulness that we all hope that love could be like. It's about being a perfect match for someone ("I am thinking it's a sign that the freckles in our eyes are mirror images and when we kiss they are perfectly aligned"), missing them when they're gone, and loving every minute of when they're around. It is not the most realistic of love songs, to be sure, but it is everything that we all hope to one day attain. For that, "Such Great Heights" is not only perfect, but entirely worthy of the top spot on this list.