“I wanna love you, but you’re so cold” is one of the lyrics from “Original” by Malcom Todd. This lyric captures the longing of an individual, it captures the epitome of yearning. Like many things, music captures things that are so real and one of these things is yearning.
Yearning is defined as a tender or urgent longing. It is a word that has been sprinkled all over social media, especially amongst teenagers with situationships and love that will never be. In this teenage age, love is a very real thing; it is growth and it can be destruction. In a way, yearning is to love in a way not always forgiving to one’s soul but is to another’s. Yearning is to love with passion, maybe even with obsession, whether that passion or obsession is rewarded or not lies the real concern with this action of love,
Music and yearning go together like heartbreak and pain. So many artists have conveyed such an action of love in their music. It really goes to show how music is really an important form of art. An art that has so much impact in the lives of teens
One of the various artists that explores yearning very well is Faye Webster. In a song of hers “A Dream with a Baseball Player,” she repeats the phrase “How did I fall in love with someone I don’t know?” She questions the strangeness of loving someone that isn’t aware of the love one has given them. Yearning at times can also manifest as a strangeness. This same strangeness ties into things like crushes, unrequited love etc. It is loving with no guarantee.
Take when Faye Webster sings about love, she’s also singing about the yearning that comes with it. It makes her songs so meaningful. In Jonny(reprise) she questions “Jonny, why couldn’t you be ready too?” In her questioning comes the selflessness that comes with love at times, wanting answers to a question that will only cause hurt when you have tried way too hard in loving, in yearning. All this love for a person that has gone too far.
Even Fiona Apple’s song “Paper Bag,” her lyric, “Hunger hurts, and I want him so bad,oh,it kills” brings forth this same idea of yearning, longing in an intense manner. To want and love someone in such an absorbing manner brings pain towards your soul. It begs the question, why do people long in such an intense manner when affection isn’t guaranteed? They are too absorbed in yearning.
Additionally, in Chappell Roan’s “Casual,” she explores the idea of loving and longing for someone so much but they do not reciprocate that much dedication. “Is it casual now?” she repeats in the song. She’s yearning towards a person that depletes her love of being “casual.” Loving with such intensity can never be casual. Love is deep. Or in Big Thief’s “Vampire Empire,” the lyrics, “I wanted to be your woman, I wanted to be your man. I wanted to be the one that you could understand,” show the grief behind such love. Once again, yearning is an action of dedication that does not always result in good.
In all these songs and more that exist in our age, it shows that some love so intensely with no guarantee. To the other end, others barely do so. Love and yearning, siblings under the same idea bear an importance towards each other and some music very much displays such. We may love and we may yearn but love they work very cohesively together. I think that to love is to yearn even though the person is by your side and it may not seem like “longing.” It is to long for their comfort and always be okay if it isn’t always with you. It isn’t always right to long for someone because it can turn into something of an obsession.
