Condition of the Heart: The Modern Pea Pod's Valentine's Day 2006 Mixtape

Love, lust and loneliness - Valentine's Day must be like Christmas for songwriters. After all, the love song (and its reverse, the break-up song) stands as pop's ultimate cheap thrill: easy to write and easier to listen to, its appeal comes to us immediately because we fill in the blanks with our own experiences. Everyone has fallen in love, and almost everyone has fallen out of it, too; these feelings have mass appeal because they truly are universal. So when we hear a great love song, it's less like hearing somebody tell us about their lives and more like reliving our own. So what if many of the great love songs weren't inspired by great romances? So what if, like John Lennon said, 90% of the Beatles' early tunes didn't stem from personal experience?

We experience these songs with the intensity of a real-life love affair, and that's what's important; the "She" in "She Loves You" might not have been a real person, but the love was real. So in celebration of this most romantic (and loneliest) of holidays - as well as those great twin songwriting traditions, those songs of love and heartbreak - we present this lovingly compiled mixtape, with two songs each by fourteen artists: Side A love, Side B loss. Maybe it won't keep you warm at night (or make you loathe some heartless bitch with every fibre of your existence), the way real love can. But it's our hope that for at least 90 minutes, it will remind you of just what a powerful and unexplainable force human connection can be.

Side A: Love Songs

0:05 - Billie Holiday: "Them There Eyes" (2:50)
It's a mathematically-provable fact that there's never been any music more romantic than the jazz pop of the 1930s and '40s. And while that era was filled with its share of classic crooners, from Frank Sinatra to Ella Fitzgerald, none of them did it better than Billie. Megan explains: Those big brassy horns, Holiday's heart-pounding jazz whisper, those sexy old movie cymbals...all of them combine to accurately manufacture the champagne glow of instant attraction. I bet Woody Allen falls in love every time he hears this song, too. (Available on The Ultimate Collection)

2:55 - Gloria Gaynor: "Reach Out, I'll Be There" (3:21)
Aaron: In her cover of the 1966 Four Tops classic, Gloria Gaynor took the beat for 'Reach Out, I'll be There' and made it rougher, harder, and faster. In short, she discofied it. But though it became an anthem for the dance floor, it was still an anthem of the heart, and the message remained the same: if you're feeling down, baby, you can count on me. That's what love means, when you get right down to it - and when I hear this song, I can't help but get down. (Available on 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection)

Article Author: Modern Pea Pod

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