Literary Love Songs to Woo Your Valentine
Your friends at Underground Books have you covered this Valentine's Day with seven literary love songs with which to serenade your lucky valentine and four songs with which to console yourself should things not have gone so well with your last valentine... From bookish lyrics to lyrics straight from the book, we hope you enjoy these as much as we do! Or just listen to the whole playlist!
For Wooing:
The Book of Love by The Magnetic Fields
"The book of love is long and boring
No one can lift the damn thing
It's full of charts and facts and figures
and instructions for dancing
but I, I love it when you read to me
and you, you can read me anything"
"Wrapped Up In Books" by Belle and Sebastian
"We’ve got a fantasy affair
We didn’t get wet, we didn’t dare
Our aspirations, are wrapped up in books
Our inclinations are hidden in looks"
My Ántonia by Emmylou Harris and Dave Matthews
“Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.” ― Willa Cather, My Ántonia
"She's writing a novel.
She's writing, she's weaving,
Conceiving a plot.
It quickens, it thickens.
You can't put it down now."
The Sensual World by Kate Bush
“I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” ― James Joyce, Ulysses
"How I know your face, all the ways you move, you come in, I can read you
You're my favourite book"
Me Gustas Cuando Callas by Brazilian Girls
Just as all living things are filled with my soul.
you emerge from all living things filled with the soul of me.
It's as if, a butterfly in dreams, you were my soul,
and as if you were the soul's word, melancholy.-Pablo Neruda, "Poema XV" translated by Robert Hass from City Lights' The Essential Neruda
For Crying & Eating Ice Cream:
Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, Performed by Rufus Wainwright
"Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah"
Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush
"Out on the wiley, windy moors
We'd roll and fall in green.
You had a temper like my jealousy:
Too hot, too greedy.
How could you leave me,
When I needed to possess you?
I hated you. I loved you, too."
"My name is Calypso
And I have lived alone
I live on an island
And I waken to the dawn
A long time ago
I watched him struggle with the sea
I knew that he was drowning
And I brought him into me
Now today
Come morning light
He sails away
After one last night
I let him go."
"And history books forgot about us and the bible didn't mention us
And the bible didn't mention us, not even onceYou are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first, I loved you first"
Listen to the whole playlist here.