Song of the Week: “Love Love Love” by Of Monsters and Men

Song of the Week is, for now, the only feature on Stetson’s Garden. I absolutely love listening to music, and more than that, I love sharing the music I love with other people. So, I plan on showcasing one song at the end of each week and writing about why I love it, why I felt the need to share it, why I think it is a special song worth sharing.

I just found this band a week ago and they have already become a staple of my music library. I find Of Monsters and Men very interesting. Their vocal harmonies, calls-and-responses and acoustic instruments give off the new-folk vibe that seems to be all the rage these days, but they’re not as toned down and stripped out as their contemporaries. A trumpet blares and a full drum kit is put to good use throughout many of the songs on their first album, My Head is an Animal. And Of Monsters and Men can really blare out some great upbeat, heart-inflating, dance-worthy tunes. Take their lead single “Little Talks” as an example.

But they can also slow it down. That’s what I love about “Love Love Love.” I have a near masochistic preference for songs like this: sad, soft and mournful; the ones that lift you up by gently setting you down on the ground; the ones that slowly trace a scalpel across your heart, making you feel the prickling unpleasantness of a certain kind of life; the ones that hurt, but only in the happiest way. Sure, whining love songs are nothing new, they may actually have a well-deserved place among the “cheesy,” but I can’t get enough of them. I don’t think many people can.

The greatest moments of this song, I think, occur when the music stops. We try to forget, we try not to dwell on it. We not only try, we make grand pronouncements of our efforts to forget, our efforts not to dwell. “I’m done with her,” “I’m done with him,” “I’m done with this” we shout, as much to the empty universe as to ourselves. We give the guitar one last strum and then we drop it, with the intention of never picking it up again. The song is over.

And then it starts again. The memories come flooding back just as though they never stopped. Are they just a distraction from our loneliness, these memories? Are they an indulgence into an impossible kind of happiness, one mixed with equal parts reality and fantasy? Maybe the pain that comes with nostalgia is the easiest way to feel alive, without, you know, actually having to risk living.

And then just as everything you once swore off came back again, it easily is washed away by the flow of time. And then you forget.

“Well maybe I’m a bad, bad, bad, bad person.”