Young Love...According to Music

It's been around for decades hasn't it? Centuries even. It's a classical story that is written is so many ways, spoken in a labyrinth of different words, told with varying degrees of passion, bitterness and nostalgia. It's transcended many historic American novels, and helped some of them rise to the top of scholar's library's. No matter how many times the story is told, no matter how young or old the person is that is telling the story one thing remains the same...young love has become a vital vein in America's literature, poems and as my blog post title suggests, also in music. Perhaps mainly in music.

What is the palpable allure of young love anyway? What is young love? Well, let me throw out a few song lyrics that speak for themselves. There's a new country group called Gloriana that has a new song out called Wild At Heart. In the song there's a lyric that says..."the night is telling us we're way to young. That's all right, I've got forever on the tip of my tongue." Regardless of the song's meaningless, light and fluffy lyrics, the song is based on "a couple of kids running loose and wild." Is there something almost iconic about young love? Is there something poetic, or mystical?

There's also another country song, and it's one of my favorites. Strawberry Wine by Deana Carter. In the song there's a lyric that goes: "I was caught somewhere between a woman and a child, when one restless summer we found love growin' wild."This opens up a whole other blog post about love and it's inevitable link to summertime. Just listen to the new song Summer Nights by Rascal Flatts and you'll get what I mean.

Anyway, back to Deana Carter. With that lyric it brings up the question of young love defining the separation between childhood and adulthood. Is it a way to forever close that door on our youth? A way to cross the threshold into our first tastes of something different? Is it a way to grab hold of the unknown, to have someone to plummet into the unseen depths with?

Before I get too abstract, let me throw another song at you. I could probably quote every Taylor Swift there ever was for this blog post because they all basically deal with young love. Whether it be lovelorn or angst, it always seems to be the bottom line with her. Take her song Love Story for example. There's a lyric that goes "we were both young when I first saw you." And then the song goes on to explain how they worked around obstacles to keep their love alive and later on looked back on it all. Taylor's songs bring me back to my point in the beginning of love being poetic and a fantastical story filled with many blind corners and wild sultry nights. But what makes the allure of young love so palpable for songwriters? Why are so many songs out there focused on it? It's no secret that most songs out there are about relationships, but a good chunk of them are about young love specifically.

Whatever the reason, I'm sure the whole idea will continue to mystify thousands of writers out there in the world. Whether they be authors, songwriters, playwrights, poets....or anyone else. The only question is, does the kind of young love mentioned in the songs above exist in the real world, our world? Or is just that, a lyrical and poetic story to spin around thousands of voices crooning over our radios?