Music Monday: Silly Love Songs

For Christmas this year, my wife and family blessed me with the Deluxe Edition of Wings’ “At the Speed of Sound” album from 1976. This is part of the “Archive Collection” Paul McCartney started releasing of his work about five years ago. The Standard Release of each album consists of at least two CDs: one of the original album in question remastered, the other(s) with additional tracks (B-sides, demos, outtakes, etc.). The Deluxe Editions are coffee-table book size, and come with about 100 high-quality pages of pictures, new interviews about the album, notes about the recording, and even reproductions of notepad pages, concert tickets, etc, along with the CDs and a DVD with music videos, concert footage, and so forth. For example:

As a McCartney fan, I was intrigued about these releases when I first heard about them, but a bit skeptical given the relatively steep pricing (anywhere from $70 – $100 each). However, having been gifted with one such set, I’m impressed, and would even suggest that, for the enthusiast (such as me), they’re worth the money. Not least because the Deluxe Editions also come with an access code you can use to download high resolution audio files of all the songs (24 bit, 96 kHz, for the audiophiles). That’s better-than-CD quality, and possibly as close to the master tape as you’re going to get with digital.

To celebrate this gift, today we’re looking at the most well-known song on the album, “Silly Love Songs.” Paul wrote it in response to the criticism that all his songs seem to be love songs of one flavor or another. Instead of denying the charge, his response was, “Yes–and what’s wrong with that?” After all, there are worse things in the world to sing about than love. That was his take, anyway, and the thousands of people who put this song in the top ten of singles charts around the world (number one in the U.S.) seemed to agree.

The song is deceptively simple. The chords are C, Em7, Fmaj7 for much of the song, and the only real “change-up” comes with the bridge (“Love doesn’t come in a minute…”–the chords here are Em, Am, Dm, C; Em, Am, Dm, F/G…). But I say it’s deceptively simple because what makes the song interesting is the blending of all the elements. First, you have that bass line–what I consider to be the real hook of the song:

On top of this you have a main theme (“You’d think that people would have had enough of silly love songs…”), which starts and ends the piece, and in between you have melodies that blend together in counterpoint, and you have brass riffs that are as hummable as just about everything else in the song. And that’s what makes it so infectious–you’ll come away with some element of it rattling around inside your head for hours, days, weeks after.

Here’s the music video:

Questions? Thoughts? Insights? Or do you have a song you would like me to feature on a future Music Monday?