GutterPutter

Sara Bareilles isn’t someone who is able to leave a definite mark in pop music. She doesn’t push the boundaries of the genre the same way that Lady Gaga has been doing up to the time of writing. She isn’t recognised as a silver-tongued poet the same way that Fiona Apple is. And she doesn’t have the knack for big hits the same way as Avril Lavigne had once shown. A contemporary, the legend, and an upcomer had either defined or is defining the first decade of the second millennium by 2007. 

And Bareilles is at best a footnote by then. She only started entering mainstream attention with her signing of Epic Records in 2005 following a quiet rise in recognition with cameos in indie films like Girl Play in 2004 and being a backing act for headliners. While she already made an album before in Careful Confessions back in 2004, it was after her signing when she hit big stumbling blocks by 2007. In her MTV interview, she admitted that despite enjoying a professional relationship with her producer Eric Rosse, she shared her frustrations that she didn’t have any good ideas on what her singles should sound like. All her pain gets funnelled into the lead single of her second album Little Voices – ‘Love Song’.

Contrary to popular rumours, Bareilles’s record label didn’t specifically ask her to write a love song when she’s struggling from writer’s block. However, the very commercial appeal of the type, given its theme that should appeal to just about anyone, gives credence for it to be parodied or toyed around with. Its popularity is so vast that it is rife with clichés and tropes that are laid bare the moment it is played. Picture the melodramatic pleas for forgiveness, the solemn vows through the pianos, or a thousand metaphors about roses or hearts or whatever else. 

What makes ‘Love Song’ work is that it looks to be as generic as its title suggests on the surface. You have the piano chords in common time although its tone is on the deeper end which conveys frustration – familiar in a way to Michael Bublé’s ‘Just Haven’t Met You Yet’ that was later released 2 years later. The first verse alludes to the love interest being aloof or inattentive to the imbalance in the relationship. “Head underwater and they tell me / To breathe easy for a while,” goes Bareilles as if she’s on the ignored end of the dynamic. “The breathing gets harder / Even I know that,” and so begins the build-up as the piano ballad gets more layers of rock instrumentation with the guitars and the drums. Both of which are on lower mixing as to add more tension to the already terse piano playing.

Then comes the pre-chorus which is when the inspiration behind the song becomes more apparent although it remains well within the subtext. “Blank stares at blank pages / No easy way to say this / You mean well, but you / make this hard on me,” the section goes before the declaration belts out: “I’m not gonna write you a love song”. The way the relationship on the surface layer of the song is presented is a toxic kind where the narrative voice in Bareilles is sidelined in favour of her needy partner’s feelings. It correlates to the uptempo bricolage of pianos and guitars that harmonises well with the defiant singing. The sharpness from the delivery blurs the line between the romantic frustrations and Bareilles’s issues with the neediness of her record label.

With the bridge included as well, there’s an emotional dependence between the couple where they owe their newfound meaning in life to one another. “Promise me / That you’ll leave the light on / To help me see / With daylight, my guide, gone”. There’s a certain metatextuality in how the subtext of the writer’s block also highlights the cathartic bond a creative artist like Bareilles will have with their work. There’s a kind of trope, which also takes in a form of advice, regarding how you should choose a job you love as to never work a day in your life (paraphrased by the way). The implication with that being that you should target your passions as the vehicle for your main career so that you won’t feel grinded out by the monotony of living. And for many artists, this will likely involve getting employed in a full-time capacity continuing with whatever they’re doing with job security and other benefits included in.

Given the context between Bareilles and her record label, this marks an overt willingness to depart from what would’ve been the biggest milestone in her life to go back towards doing indie records instead. This marks the climatic breaking point of the song’s nominally “romantic” atmosphere because rather than offering a possibility of making amends over an issue, the narrative voice instead proposes breaking up if that allows her to enjoy living her life again. In a song that constantly subverts the convention of love songs, the bridge outright exposes the strength of self-preservation over staying together. The slower tempo with the plodding kick and snare drums and a sluggish bassline erases all intimacy in favour of the confessional. Bareilles is willing to keep her creative integrity and preserve the hopes of making songs if she lands on a great idea over sticking with her partner or record label as a music artist herself and drains herself out of her passion.

It is with funny irony that ‘Love Song’ soon rocket-shoots upward into being the definitive song for Bareilles after its release. It climbs its way up from being a free single on iTunes to peaking within the top 5 on numerous charts as a sleeper hit alongside being certified platinum from selling tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of singles in Britain alongside Canada and America. Many swarm in to compare Bareilles to Regina Spektor or Toni Amos for the wittiness in her writing and how it weaves with her expressive piano playing. As electric as the reception is, it is not the kind of fame that is meant to last. ‘Love Song’ remains as her most commercially successful single ironically enough as the rest of her other ones have failed to top the charts in the same electric way as it did. 

Today, Bareilles’s most sustained success rests not so much in outright making albums, but more so through theatricity. She made musical scores for musicals like the 2013 adaptation of the 2007 comedy-drama film Waitress, played the Bible’s gold-hearted prostitute Mary Magdalene in the stripped-down 2018 TV rendition of Jesus Christ Superstar, and worked with a wide variety of musicians in composing the Broadway musical for Spongebob Squarepants in 2016. Perhaps given the nature of ‘Love Song’, it might be the wish she would have wanted. 

Almost every big music artist would get pressured into writing a love song and while some are able to make their own that’s organic and peculiar as is the case with Talking Head’s ‘Naive Melody (This Must Be the Place)’, a lot more errs toward One Direction to say the least. Even if they might not be asked to directly make it, the general accessibility of the theme makes it a key priority for many to enjoy a bout of commercial success. Bareilles’s ‘Love Song’ defies it by presenting an uncharacteristically dodgy depiction of a romantic relationship gone wrong as an allegory of her desire to not blemish her creativity from the pressures of making a hit song. It might not rank as being among the greatest ever songs of all time, but it is certainly among the more surprisingly witty pop tunes throughout the decade. And it is this aspect that allows it to stand better than most other ones at its time.