Playlist: Songs for Falling in Love
Is this what it feels like to fall?
Image: Joseph Lorusso's "Lovers and Lautrec"
"I'd like to walk around in your mind someday, I'd like to walk all over the things you say to me / I'd sit there in the sun of the things I like about you, I'd sing my songs and find out just what they mean to you."
If I knew what love is (and I think I do, a version of it), this would be my soundtrack. There is a fluctuation between quiet tenderness, to the bursting at the seams. Love is not an emotion. It's a portal through which humans have traditionally experienced great emotions: empathy, rage, yearning, nostalgia. It's a premise around which we gather to tell our stories and to dream about our future selves. For some, it is steady ground. For others, a welcome earthquake. It exists in the spaces between us: between our shy smiles, our reaching hands, the nervous wavering of our voices in brave confessions.
These songs distill the vast range of everything that love contains.