Is Writing a Love Song Like Tatooing a Girl's Name on Your Arm?

When it comes to the human condition, I think singer/songwriter Peter Himmelman is particularly perceptive. Once, at a concert, after finishing a love song, Peter half joked, “You know, when I wrote that song I really cared about that person.” I thought about that when listening to I’ll Be Your Lover Too, by Van Morrison, an achingly beautiful love song, so I looked it up. Morrison wrote that when he was married to his first wife.

Paul McCartney wrote And I Love Her, for his longtime girlfriend, Jane Asher. They eventually were engaged in late 1967, but separated the following year, probably because Paul met Linda Eastman, whom he later married.

The muse for McCartney’s bandmate, George Harrison, when he wrote Something was Harrison’s then wife, Patty Boyd. Frank Sinatra called it one of the best love songs to be written in the past 50 or 100 years.

Boyd famously left Harrison for his good friend Eric Clapton, who wrote his best-known song, Layla, about her. She was also the muse for You Look Wonderful Tonight, which Clapton actually wrote as the couple was headed for their divorce.

Frank Loesser wrote Baby, It’s Cold Outside which became a hit after appearing in the 1949 MGM movie, Neptune’s Daughter (with Ricardo Montalbán long before he started pitching Chrysler Cordobas or battling Captain Kirk). Loesser and his wife Lynn Garland would perform the duet at parties. When Loesser sold the rights to the song to the film studio, Garland was upset because she considered it to be “their” song. Loesser and Garland divorced in 1957.

Are you noticing a pattern yet?

I was once driving with the woman who is now my ex-wife somewhere in rural Washtenaw County, Michigan and, seized by a fit of passion, I recited to her lyrics from Bob Dylan’s Never Say Goodbye (not to be confused with Jon Bon Jovi’s song of the same title).

You're beautiful beyond words
More beautiful to me
You could make me cry
Never say goodbye.

“That’s not how it goes,” she replied. So much for romance. She was, in fact, correct, I got a couple of the words wrong.

You're beautiful beyond words
You're beautiful to me
You can make me cry
Never say goodbye.

Dylan released Never Say Goodbye on the Planet Waves album (subtitled Cast Iron Songs & Torch Ballads) that he recorded with the Band, prior to their landmark reunion tour in 1974. Presumably, Bob wrote it for his wife Sara. His next album, 1975’s Blood On the Tracks, generally considered some of Dylan’s strongest works, was recorded in the throes of his breakup with her.

It’s said that the only women’s name a man should get tattooed on his body is that of either his mother or his daughter. “Coverups” is an important part of the tattoo business. The primary reason for coverups has to do with former lovers or spouses. Perhaps one should think of those tattoos when starting to write a love song for one’s current lover.