Too many songs about love, not enough about friendship?

“Love songs have been a majority of all songs ever written” and “Love in music has been expressed in all cultures and among all gender, race, and age groups” are claims made by social scientists who study this sort of thing. I suspect no-one reading this will be surprised by these statements or find them difficult to believe, but I think it’s a pity that we have elevated romantic love to such a privileged position in popular culture that we neglect other forms of love, particularly friendship.

There are lots of genuinely wonderful love songs and I imagine most people have heard at least one which they believe summed up their feelings at the time. Surely every teenager, at least in the west, goes through a rite of passage where they repeatedly listen to a particular love song which they feel perfectly captures exactly how they feel? Sadly, I don’t think the same can be said of friendship.

In my (admittedly limited) research, I’ve found a number of pop songs about friendship, but have been largely unimpressed with the quality of lyrics (and indeed music) on offer to express what I think is the true wonderfulness of this incredibly enriching and important aspect of our lives. The fact is, you’d be hard-pushed to compile a double-album’s worth of decent tracks about friendship.

I’ve been thinking about this since taking part in a fundraising event for the British Humanist Association’s choir where people gave short talks and the choir sung songs on a range of themes including Birth, Love, Hope, and Death. They chose Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water for the theme I was asked to talk about, Friendship:

When you’re weary
Feeling small
When tears are in your eyes
I will dry them all

I’m on your side
When times get rough
And friends just can’t be found
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down

It’s a beautiful song and deservedly one that is loved by many. However, the song is rather melancholy, being about friendship in times of trouble, and most of its lyrics could pass for those of love song, a lot like that other classic, You’ve Got a Friend by Carole King:

When you’re down and troubled
and you need a helping hand
and nothing, whoa nothing is going right.
Close your eyes and think of me
and soon I will be there
to brighten up even your darkest nights.

You just call out my name,
and you know wherever I am
I’ll come running, oh yeah baby
to see you again.

As part of my talk at the BHA Choir event, I played the audience a song called Yeh Dosti (“This Friendship”), my favourite of the musical numbers from the greatest of all Bollywood movies, Sholay. This is the most joyous song about friendship I know – it’s got a catchy, upbeat tune and wonderful lyrics about living and dying together in an unbreakable friendship that I’d bet half of India could sing to you even today, more than 30 years after the film’s release. Sadly, it’s brilliance is somewhat lost in translation and I can’t help feeling that those of you who can’t understand Hindi are missing out on a real gem of a song. Unlike many of its western counterparts, there’s no mistaking this for a love song – it’s an out and out celebration of what I think is the greatest bromance ever committed to film.

It’s not just songs; most movies, in fact most of the stories we tell in any format (except perhaps computer games), are centred around romantic love, even when purporting to be about other things. It seems to me that popular culture is bereft of decent expressions of the significance and benefits of friendship. Instead, we over-emphasise romantic love in our artistic endeavours, and, in my opinion, our culture is poorer for it.

Films about everything from cars which transform into robots to superheroes from outer space have romantic subplots shoehorned into them to cater for what I imagine the writers think are audiences’ expectations. It’s as if the people who make songs, movies, soap operas, adverts ,and so on, believe these things are incomplete, or irrelevant, without romantic love being a key element. This is an insidious idea, because it can make us feel our own lives are incomplete without romantic love, that our stories are somehow inferior or inadequate without a central romance to provide ultimate meaning.

The idealised depiction of romantic love in most popular culture can give us unrealistic expectations of what it actually entails in the real world – how many of us grow up with the notion of “The One”, only to be bitterly disillusioned by the end of our first romantic relationship? How many people go through life feeling that the one thing that would make everything better is a romantic partner, only to find that this is not true? When I made this argument at the BHA event, quite a number of people clapped – the first time a round of applause has made me sad.

It’s easy to wax lyrical about romantic love – we have a wealth of cultural references to it to draw from; it truly is one of the things that can bring the greatest happiness, meaning and purpose to our lives. But romantic love can be hard to come by and we should be grateful for the fact that, for most of us, friendship is on offer far more widely. I hope no-one reading this longs for friendship in the way that so many of us spend so much time and energy longing for romantic love.

As you’ve probably gathered from reading this, I haven’t had the kind of success in romantic relationships I might have hoped for as a teenager. I’m spelling that out for you so that you don’t feel I’m showing off when I write this next sentence: I’ve had more than my fair share of deep, meaningful, transformative friendships. My best romantic relationships have been with people who have been, and continue to be, my friends. If I believed in God, I would thank her for blessing me with so many friends, for they have saved me in my darkest hours and heightened my joy in my happiest times. My friends are the people who occupy the most special places in my life and in my heart, they are the people with whom my soul resonates at a fundamental level and they are, at their best, indistinguishable from my family.

I’ll end with a thought I’ve often raised in the past year or so as I’ve spoken about why I’m a Humanist: the things religious believers look for in God, the things some of them think they find in God – meaning, purpose, comfort, love – are things we can all find, for real, in each other, in our fellow human beings, in our friends.

8 Comments »

  1. Well, I suppose it depends on how you define “songs about friends.” You put a number of stipulations down (up-tempo, celebratory, etc.) But I will ignore these in my suggestions, partly because you go on to say that friends have been a help in hard times.
    Some stuff progressively less sappy directly dealing with the theme:
    Dionne Warwick – “That’s what friends are for”
    Randy Newman – “You’ve got a friend in me”
    Simon & Garfunkel – “Old Friends”
    Bill Withers – “Lean on Me”
    Beatles & Joe Cocker – “With a Little Help from my friends”
    Eels – “You’re my friend”
    Beatles – “Two of Us”
    Elliott Smith – “All my Rowdy Friends have settled down”
    Corinne Bailey Rae – “Put your records on”
    White Stripes – “We are going to be friends”
    Big Star – “In the street”
    Touching songs about a specific friendship:
    Iron & Wine – “Jesus the Mexican Boy”
    Michelle Shocked – “Anchorage”
    Van Morrison – “And it Stoned Me”
    Brownie McGhee – “Me and Sonny”
    Friends in Crisis:
    The National – “Friend of Mine”
    The National – “Abel”
    The Shins – “It’s Only Life”
    Bonnie Prince Billy – “I see a darkness”
    Kimya Dawson – “Loose Lips”
    Songs with arguably incidental nice things about friends:
    Bob Marley – “No Woman no cry”
    Traditional irish – “Finnegan’s Wake”
    Willie Nelson – “On the road again”
    Beatles – “In my life”
    The Band – “The Weight”
    Josh Ritter – “Me & Jiggs”
    Bruce Springsteen – “Glory Days”
    Bryan Adams – “Summer of ’69”
    Lauryn Hill – “Every Ghetto, Every City”
    Counting Crows – “Mr. Jones”
    Beatles – “Yellow Submarine”
    Iron and Wine – “Friends they are jewels”
    Carlos Varela – “Jalisco Park”
    Professional Friendships:
    Bob Dylan – “Song to Woody”
    Ana Gabriel – “Amigo Mio”
    Odes to dead friends:
    Anais Mitchell – “Orion”
    Sean Combs – “I’ll be missing you”
    Plus, there are songs about being in a band, partying, etc. that are about an aspect of friendship.

  2. More songs about friendships. They are more uplifting as you proceed through the list.
    R.E.M “Everybody hurts”
    Bill Withers “Lean on me”
    Perfect Day “Lou Reed” – sung by various artists
    Frank Sinatra/Cole Porter “I’ve got you under my skin”
    When I resigned from my first employer after 22 years, at my leaving party, after a short speech, I asked a band to play the latter song as a way of explaining how I felt about the those who were assembled.
    With a few more contributions, and a good performing rights lawyer, you could release a 4 CD friendship album in time for Christmas next year. Just joking.

  3. Everything that is in place(rain,sun,snow,cars ,technology etc;) for the good the bad and the Athiest was put there by God for us to enjoy or misuse.God has no competition.He has the last word.So pick your poison as you go through life.Choose life or death you will meet Him at the end of both.That’s how He is.Every knee shall bow and every Athiest tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.Turn or burn.Jesus could be your best friend,if you want real friendship because He loves you and me.That’s what friends are for.

  4. May I add two defining friendship songs?
    National Brotherhood Week
    I got it from Agnes
    They were written by a great composer now, unfortunately, neglected in these less reverential times. Tom Lehrer still has much to teach us.
    To Phil,
    From my preferred pseudonym you will realise that I am probably not the Athiest person on this thread but am Athier than most outside it. Please take this in the spirit of friendly help. A few lessons in spelling, punctuation and grammar will make your, obviously heartfelt, messages easier to understand.

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