💟GROW BIGGER EARS #14:💌"I Love You" Songs
Nothing says "I love you" like singing "I Love You"!🎶It's the gift of tuneage for Valentine's Day- The Playlist for those who forgot the bouquet💐& the chocolates🍫!
Our “I Love You” Playlist is book-ended by the genius of 20th-century generational songwriters: Prodigious Great American Songbook-contributor, Cole Porter, kicks it off, while Lennon & McCartney (Paul, principally) closes our aural love letter with a bit of a musical postscript:
Love in Close Quarters (Our Favorite Place)
First Quarter: The Ubiquitous Uncertainty
Ella Fitzgerald does what she always did best: Interpret the best songs from the best songwriters. No one sang Cole Porter as expressively and convincingly. Porter wrote “Do I Love You?” (Playlist song #1) in 1939, where it found a place in his Du Barry Was a Lady stage musical, first sung by Ethel Merman and Ronald Graham. Ella recorded this song in 1956 for her Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook album.
The Ronettes ask their musical “Do I Love You?” from the close confines of Hollywood’s Gold Star Studio, Phil Spector producing (Playlist #2). He co-wrote with veteran songwriters, Vini Poncia and Pete Andrioli (aka Pete Anders). Friends since kidhood, they released a Richard Perry-produced album on Warner Bros. Records in 1969, The Anders & Poncia Album.
Video: Stills from the Gold Star “Do I Love You” sessions (w/Wrecking Crew) + full audio of Phil directing, with raw takes of the song. Amazing these elements exist!👇
Bruce Springsteen (by way of singer/songwriter, Frank Wilson, who recorded his in 1965 on Soul/Motown Records) is the first to bring even a hint of certainty to his query, with “Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)” (#3). From here, it’s all pure, unadulterated expressions of devotion.
For a recent and thorough dive into Springsteen’s latest album, Only the Strong Survive (from whence this song emerges), check out “Springsteen is a Soul Man” by the former CREEM Editor and longtime rock scribe, Wayne Robins, on his Critical Conditions on Substack. For this writer’s first-hand accounts of “The Breaking of Springsteen” on Houston FM radio in the mid-’70s, please check out this FR&B Legacy article, “Behind the Mic.”
Second Quarter: TB & kd Have a “Confessin’”
“I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You)” was first produced with different lyrics as “Lookin’ For Another Sweetie,” credited to Chris Smith and Sterling Grant as writers, and recorded by “Fats” Waller & His Babies in December 1929.
The following year, it was reborn as “Confessin’,” with new lyrics by Al Neiburg, with the music as credited to Doc Daugherty and Ellis Reynolds. Louis Armstrong made his first, and highly influential, recording of the song in August 1930, and continued to play it throughout his career.
Here (as Playlist song #4), the late Tony Bennett, and kd lang recorded theirs on their Columbia Records A Wonderful World album in 2002 (T Bone Burnett and Tony’s son, Danny, producing). It won the 2003 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album.
Runaway McBride
Martina McBride presents our first unbridled and untethered “I Love You” (#5), which she recorded in 1999. It not only was her first single from her Emotion album, but was featured in the Julia Roberts/Richard Gere film, Runaway Bride, that year.
Martina’s “I Love You” debuted at #43 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart for the week of July 31, 1999, subsequently reaching the top spot in late 1999. It remained there for 5 straight weeks until it was knocked off by “When I Said I Do” by Clint Black and Lisa Hartman Black (only one of whom used to be this writer’s occasional junior high date in the late ‘60s in Houston).
Lecrae feat. Chris Lee
Speaking of Houston, Lecrae Moore was born in the Bayou City in October 1979, which means I could’ve sold records to his mom if she happened to baby-carriage Lecrae into the Cactus Records on Shepherd during the weeks before Christmas!
Longshots aside, Lecrae is a multi-hyphenate in the biz, doing everything in the vinyl world, as well as acting and film producing. Co-founder of Reach Records, he had a 4-year distribution deal with Columbia Records that ended in May 2020.
A devout Christian, Lecrae even graduated from the first college I attended, N. Texas State U. in Denton (subsequently re-named as University of N. Texas). Lecrae received a scholarship to study theater at UNT (I worked a 1974 semester at the theater, mostly with props, and took a theatrical makeup class), and he graduated in 2002 with a Bachelor of Applied Arts and Sciences.
“I Love You,” Playlist song #6 (written by Lecrae, Cobbins and Gaskin), was the final (and bonus) track on Lecrae’s 2010 Rehab album, his fourth.
Third Quarter: The First of Two Playlist Billies
Billie Eilish, who has only experienced life in one century (this one), is a native Los Angeleno, whose mother, Maggie Baird, is a veteran TV character actress who home-schooled Billie.
Billie’s “I Love You” (#7) which she co-wrote with brother, Finneas O’Connell, was issued on a limited-edition record, in 2019, that was recorded live to acetate (lacquer-coated aluminum disc cut one-at-a-time by lathe from a live performance) at the Blue Room at Jack White’s Third Man Records’ Nashville headquarters (Third Man’s Veep of A&R, Mark Chance, has been a Front Row & Backstage subscriber since Day 1 in August 2021).
The Eli Young Band (above) follows with their “I Love You” (#8) from their 2011 Life at Best album, their third. The University of North Texas gets another “I Love You” shout-out, as the four members of the EYB (Mike Eli, James Young, Jon Jones, and Chris Thompson) met there while students at the dawn of the century. It’s likely they matriculated and met there just as Lecrae was picking up his diploma in 2002!
Written by Lee Brice, the late Kyle Jacobs (whose wife is former American Idol fifth-season contestant, country singer, Kellie Pickler), and band members Jones and Thompson, and released on Republic Nashville, the song was produced by Mike Wrucke and Frank Liddell, a fellow native Houstonian, who’s not only a former Decca Records A&R director, but is married to country singer, Lee Ann Womack.
Ruth Price, 84 (and shown above), President & Artistic Director of L.A’s Jazz Bakery (a non-profit performance venue), is a jazz singer from Philadelphia who toured with bassist/composer Charles Mingus, and recorded with drummer Shelly Manne and guitarist Johnny Smith. Here, at #9, Ruth effortlessly honors another Cole Porter chestnut.
From her live recording, Ruth Price with Shelly Manne & His Men at the Manne-Hole, Ruth performs with drummer Shelly Manne’s group, recorded at Shelly’s Hollywood Manne-Hole Club (shown above) in 1961, and released on Contemporary Records.
Scott Yanow of AllMusic reviews that “Singer Ruth Price, on this early set, falls somewhere between swinging jazz, middle-of-the-road pop, and cabaret. She does not improvise much, but her strong and very appealing voice uplifts the diverse material that she interprets.”
Fourth Quarter: Our Second of Two Playlist Billies + “Wait, Before I Sign Off…”
The Climax Blues Band offers a heart-meltingly original “I Love You” at Playlist #10. Originally dubbed The Climax Chicago Blues Band, they’re all from Stafford, England.
Guitarist Derek Holt penned this paean to passion, and it was released (on Warner Bros. Records) on Valentine’s Day 42 years ago (1981). Veteran keyboardist, Nicky Hopkins, was brought in to play electric piano on the song, while David Campbell did the string arrangements. The recording was produced by John Ryan.
The song was the band’s second-biggest hit (after 1976’s “Couldn’t Get It Right”), entering the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in February 1981, peaking at #12 in June, and spending 27 weeks on the chart, while also making it to #20 on the Adult Contemporary chart.
“I Love You” was the 20th biggest hit of 1981. On the CashBox Top 100, “I Love You” peaked for two weeks at #9.
“P.S. I Love You”-Billie Holiday
Lady Day interprets this 1934 Gordon Jenkins/Johnny Mercer Great American Songbook classic (our #11 song) that was released over 2 decades after she recorded it.
Originally recorded by Holiday at Hollywood’s Capitol Records Studios on September 3, 1954, “P.S. I Love You” was included as a bonus track on a CD reissue of her 1956 Clef/Verve Records Lady Sings the Blues album. Norman Granz produced; he also founded Clef Records in 1946, and founded Verve Records in 1956, which absorbed Clef artists thereafter.
Our second postscript comes from The Beatles and their 1962 recording, a song largely attributed to Paul (but, as they all were, credited as “Lennon/McCartney”; actually, so new was this arrangement, it managed to be printed in an early iteration as “McCartney/Lennon”-see label photo below-before they adopted the eventual and apparent alphabetical preference).
Recorded in ten takes at EMI/London September 11, 1962, Parlophone released it as the B-side to “Love Me Do” less than a month later in the UK (October 5).
As The Beatles continued their European conquest through 1963, it wasn’t until April 27, 1964 that the single was released in the states on Vee-Jay subsidiary, Tollie Records as Tollie 9008 (Tollie only existed from February 1964 through May 1965; Capitol Records was lurking nearby, though, and took note of the Tollie collapse):
According to Ian McDonald and his 1994 Revolution in the Head book, “Producer George Martin had booked session drummer Andy White as a replacement for Pete Best [for the “P.S. I Love You” sessions], whom he considered not technically good enough for recording purposes.
“Martin had been unaware that the other Beatles had already replaced Pete Best with Ringo Starr, who attended the session and plays maracas on the song. White was a freelance show band and session drummer, and gave the recording a lightweight cha cha treatment.”
Per Mark Lewisohn and his 1988 The Beatles Recording Sessions, “Martin was not present at the session; in his absence, it was run by Ron Richards (pictured above). Richards told the group that the song could not be the A-side of their single because of an earlier song with the same title [the Jenkins/Mercer one covered by Billie Holiday]: ‘I was originally a music publishing man, a plugger, so I knew someone had done a record with that title. I said to Paul, ‘You can have it as B-side, but not an A-side.’”
Awww. Happy Valentine's Day Brad. Great work.
I'm just now coming up for air and you've since written I think 47 posts. I'm going through them backwards as it feels less daunting. Great list of "I Love You" songs, half of which I never heard before! As there are surely a zillion songs to choose from I'm going to assume you chose these 10 (plus) by metaphorically (or literally) picking them out of a hat.
I will also say that after reading your piece, the last lines of Elvis Costello's "Pidgeon English" from his brilliant Imperial Bedroom album ("P.S. I Love You") are now repeating in my head earworm-style.