Top Hindi Love Song
Kanisha Dezarn
My parents are self-satisfied at Costco in a way that I rarely see except when they return to China. Their coworker sometimes joins us on our trips, picking up a 15-pound sack of flour so he can make mantous and noodles for every meal, less expensive than rice. After we drop him at his house, my mother makes fun of the guy for being cheap.
I call the San Antonio Costco, and a calm Texan accent on the other end reassures me that my wallet has been found. I had dropped it while putting groceries into my car in the parking lot. When I pick it up, I want to hug the man in his silly-looking red vest.
Sometimes I go to Costco in Texas just to see other Asians, where I project my past and future onto the families there. I watch sensible middle-aged Asian parents strolling through the aisles, scanning for Kirkland products for their relatives back home, gifts such as vitamins, salted walnuts, and anti-aging creams. Like my parents, they look for the cheapest thing with a Made in the USA sticker that would simultaneously convey their own success and justify their abandonment of a former home. I make up stories about them in my head. Do they, like my family, pull up with their Asian neighbors in a row of Toyotas each Sunday at the Costco parking lot? Do they buy in bulk the favorite food of their adult children and freeze it until they come home? Do they feel in some way that this is the safest place in America?
My father grows up drinking rice porridge, and, being the younger son of six children, occasionally has a desiccated olive to suck on while my aunts watch with envy. This is what it means to be the favorite. This is what it means to be a son. He nurses that olive for an entire meal because it is the only dish. When guests visit, his parents boil an egg and serve it to the practical stranger or obnoxious neighbor while their own children watch from behind the door frame, imagining the burst of yolk amid the soft white crumble.
Over the years and our continuous fights about my increasing Americanness, food has become the only safe subject between my parents and me. It is also the only language through which they can tell me that they love me. While my white friends receive care packages of cookies and candles from home, my parents offer to overnight me live lobsters that they bulk-order.
And so, yes. When I hear about the decline of the American church, I think about Sunday afternoons. I think about love songs. I think about boys getting nothing to face a hard world with. No understanding of what it is to surrender yourself to whatever you love enough to name a God.
There is no greater love than that which is shared between two people immersed in a common struggle. And this is how the drug dealing anthem comes home to roost. How it takes on a different body entirely when a singer bows in appreciation for the hands that do the hard work, the partnership that flourishes, in spite of those who wish ill upon it.
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The quick answer is of course not, and we can all think of plenty of timeless songs to prove it. But what makes uplifting songs difficult to write is also what makes them interesting from a craft perspective. Where does honesty in song come from, and how can we harness it?
Happy songs may use broad brush strokes when it comes to chorus language, but a lot of their authenticity is hard-earned through a few specific lines in the other sections of the song. Hall and Oates give us a little substance with a few nouns for imagery in the first verse lines:
When regal nonagenarian, Ms. Della, invites her to rent the bottom floor of her Harlem brownstone, Ricki jumps at the chance for a fresh beginning. She leaves behind her family, wealth, and chaotic romantic decisions to realize her dream of opening a flower shop. And just beneath the surface of her new neighborhood, the music, stories and dazzling drama of the Harlem Renaissance still simmers.
One evening in February as the heady, curiously off-season scent of night-blooming jasmine fills the air, Ricki encounters a handsome, deeply mysterious stranger who knocks her world off balance in the most unexpected way.
Set against the backdrop of modern Harlem and Renaissance glamour, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is a swoon-worthy love story of two passionate artists drawn to the magic, romance, and opportunity of New York, and whose lives are uniquely and irreversibly linked.
The novel starts in Atlanta, with a brief sketch of a wealthy, and quite dysfunctional, Black family. The Wildes are very much Southern Black royalty, a dynasty built upon funeral homes serving Black communities for a good nine decades. (see footnote 2)
2 Thinking of Caitlin Doughty and this video on the separation of white and Black cemeteries and funerals, and what that meant (and means) for Black communities in the U.S. This also inevitably brought to mind this other video, ostensibly about the presence of the deceased at a nightclub for his own homegoing, which eventually goes to how white society sees Black people, and how often Black communities police themselves to fend off white criticism (starting about 17 minutes in).
The timeline stuff vaguely reminds me of Wild Women and the Blues by Denny Bryce and I ended up liking the historical timeline way more than the contemporary, which seems to happen when books are structured this way.
Please be aware that some of the books I review, talk about, or plain mention in passing, in this blog, have been given to me by the author, or someone else on behalf of the author, with the express purpose that I review them. (Those reviews are tagged ARC or review copy.)
This stability was changed when Caroline was still in DC. In 2011, Jesse Phillips and I wrote an EP under the band name St Paul and The Broken Bones which would change our lives. Before we got management and an agent, we were playing wherever would have us. But, within a year and a half, we went from releasing an album to opening for the Rolling Stones, playing festivals like Bonnaroo and Coachella, and getting my first passport so I could play shows around the world. The normal life I was headed to, and happy for, was changed (although Caroline and I did find the time to get married amidst it all). For the next few years, our lives were a series of shows and albums, measured in short spurts home and long times away.
This changed in January of 2020 when my wife and I found out she was pregnant. We were always on the fence about children. We were happy together and were worried that a child would make us unhappy or unfocused on our own ambitions. But, after nearly a decade together, we decided we wanted to have a child who we could share our love with. This thing that already made us so scared was made terrifying by a year of global unrest and uncertainty.
This juxtaposition between fear and comfort inspired me to write. Alongside the questions that we all faced, I was coming to terms with parenthood. But, I also welcomed the boredom of a steady home. And finally, I had the time to document this life in song. The songs that came out of that time became an album written with my daughter in mind, with all my hopes entangled with my fears. But, this time, and maybe for the first time, I wrote with love as a foundation, and while this was therapeutic, that was never the goal.
My daughter was born two weeks after we recorded Angels in Science Fiction. And, I will always be grateful that before our new life as a family began, this boring home gave me the chance to finally write a love song. And finally, my wife has a song just for her.
The universal language of music has united generations of lovers since the beginning of time. Falling in and out of love, grasping at unrequited love, mourning love lost and succumbing to deep love are central to the human experience. Love peels back emotions, incorporating complex feelings that come across powerfully in the common language of music. With endless love songs to describe matters of the heart, the top love songs according to music lovers of all ages connect the past with the present.
Frank Sinatra and daughter Nancy deliver this duet with unmatched melodies and the sort of calmness that love can sometimes bring. The almost country-esque wobble of the strumming guitar and drum patterns contrasted with a cinematic string section feel almost embarrassingly romantic, like young love.
This beautiful country ballad is so sad that its relatable to anyone who has lost love and gained a hole in their heart. An under-the-radar song, many discovered this lonely hit via popular 1993 rags-to-riches movie, The Beverly Hillbillies.
Burt Bacharach, one of the most influential songwriters and composers in modern music history delivers the timeless message of love for one another through the political and social realities of the 1960s making What The World Needs Now Is Love" a staple in community building and a reminder of humanity. Bacharach received three Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, six Grammy Awards, an Primetime Emmy Award and over 1,000 artists have recorded his songs.
One of the most versatile soul singers of all time, Sam Cooke, brings deep emotion to music through his ability to oscillate between disparate music genres and styles. "Bring It On Home To Me" is a call-and-response love song with Lou Rawls on backup vocals as Cooke longs for his lover to come back home.
Jill Scott is powerful, candid and curious in her writing and performance. In "He Loves Me (Lyzel in E Flat)," Scott recounts the ways her partner loves her in the most descriptive and intricate details and settings. The song sounds and feels like love.
The 12th entry on the Hot 100 for this female vocal group from Oakland, Calif., it proved to be their biggest hit, with four weeks in the runner-up spot. The song was recorded for the soundtrack to Set It Off, starring Queen Latifah and Jada Pinkett.
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