Everything I Need to Know About Love I Learned From Pop Songs: Pop Songs, #1

By Laura Roberts

Ever listened to a love song and felt like the song was made just for you? Have you ever helped yourself get through heartbreak by listening to a favorite song? Maybe you and your current flame have one song that feels like it belongs to you as a couple?

If you've ever been in love, had a crush, or simply longed for the relationship spun from a pop song, then this is the book for you.

Pop songs pondered in this book include:
*Barenaked Ladies, "One Week"
*Brick, “Dazz”
*The Buzzcocks, "Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)"
*The Commodores, “Brick House”
*Alice Cooper, “I’m Eighteen”
*Neil Diamond, "Forever in Blue Jeans"
*Bob Dylan, "It Ain't Me, Babe"
*Jay Ferguson, "Thunder Island"
*Fleetwood Mac, "Silver Springs"
*PJ Harvey + Thom Yorke, "This Mess We're In"
*Elton John, “Your Song”
*OutKast, "Hey Ya!"
*Bonnie Raitt, "Shadow of Doubt"
*The Replacements, "Sadly Beautiful"
*Linda Ronstadt, “Blue Bayou”
*Frank Sinatra, “Strangers in the Night”
*Phoebe Snow, “Poetry Man”
*Spice Girls, "Wannabe"
*The Spinners, “Could it Be I’m Falling in Love”
*Wall of Voodoo, “Can’t Make Love”
*The Who, “You Better You Bet”
*Neil Young, "Heart of Gold"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Buttontapper Press
• Release date: Feb 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524202859

Laura Roberts

Laura Roberts can leg-press an average-sized sumo wrestler, has nearly been drowned off the coast of Hawaii, and tells lies for a living. She is the founding editor of Black Heart Magazine, the San Diego Chapter Leader for the Nonfiction Authors Association, and publishes whatever strikes her fancy at Buttontapper Press. She currently lives in an Apocalypse-proof bunker in sunny SoCal with her artist husband and their literary kitties, and can be found on Twitter @originaloflaura. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, Laura has penned the alphabetical travel guides Montreal from A to Z and San Diego from A to Z, offbeat writing guides A Cheater’s Guide to NaNoWriMo and Confessions of a 3-Day Novelist, and the satirical adventure tale, Ninjas of the 512. She is also the editor of the collection Haiku for Lovers, and the forthcoming anthology Everything I Need to Know About Love I Learned from Pop Songs (February 2016).

Book preview

Introduction

Ever listened to a love song and felt like the song was made just for you? Have you ever helped yourself get through heartbreak by listening to a favorite song? Maybe you and your current flame have one song that feels like it belongs to you as a couple?

If you’ve ever been in love, had a crush, or simply longed for the relationship spun from a pop song, then this is the book for you.

So what’s in a pop song?

To some people, the designation pop is a simple way of writing off an entire genre of music. Pop is, of course, short for popular, which instantly explains its appeal. Popular music is music that lots of people naturally gravitate towards, whether it’s because of an infectious hook, a catchy chorus, or an upbeat (and, usually, danceable) sound.

To me, pop music is anything that’s been played on the radio, slipped into our collective unconscious, and become the soundtrack to our lives. Pop music is popular for a reason: we love it. And even if there’s discussion about exactly what qualifies as pop music, the only real requirement is that the song moved you to play it again and again and again.

Pop music can be bubblegum sweet and airy, like a Spice Girls tune. But, as Polo Lonergan points out, even a bubblegum hit like Wannabe manages to slip in some subversion.

Pop music can also be dark, mysterious, bewitching – like a Fleetwood Mac song, sung by Stevie Nicks.

Pop music can even be a commercial hit from an artist better known for their less-than-radio-friendly tunes, as Susanna Donato discusses in her piece on Bob Dylan.

So what brings each of these pieces together?

They’re all about love. Love hard won, love lost, love unrequited, love that lasts, and love that’s just a fading dream.

Love may be a many-splendored thing, it may lift us up where we belong, and you may not be able to buy it in any stores... but it sure is hard to write about without sounding cliché. The writers in this collection have all succeeded in telling their stories without resorting to empty promises, hollow words, or even the obvious choices of love songs. I salute them all for being brave enough to share their thoughts with the world, for explaining what love really means to them, and for aligning themselves with the oft-criticized realm of pop music as a deeper expression of their own world views.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading each of these tales of love, colored by the pop songs that have captured these writers’ hearts, as much as I have.

Now sit back, relax, and let the needle drop as you enter our world of music and yearning.

–Laura Roberts, Editor

February 14, 2016

P.S. A YouTube playlist of all the songs featured in this anthology is available here.

Sex, Love & The Spice Girls

by Polo Lonergan

Considering the fact that I hit puberty in the mid-nineties, it’s not surprising that love was once a confusing topic for me. It was a time of talking about sex, baby, and a time of boy bands crooning about epic love, complete with sugarcoated key changes. There was a clean split down the middle of love; you either wanted sex or you wanted romance. Any overlap in popular music was rare, and certainly never aimed at us young folk.

Yet when the