We all have (well, I hope you do, anyway) songs that provoke emotional responses; Some melody or melodic passage or even a set of lyrics that leave us with wet eyes and a small tear or two running down our cheeks (I’m not crying, you’re crying). Sometimes it’s obvious why, sometimes not so much. Such a song is this one, “If You Don’t Love Me”, by Prefab Sprout.
Written by chief Sprout Paddy McAloon as an incentive to buy a place-marking best-of (A Life of Surprises: The Best of Prefab Sprout) after he had released his magnum opus Jordan: The Comeback, it's a surging, disco-tempoed pop song that carries itself as a unconditional pledge of devotion to an unnamed love interest; of course, Paddy being Paddy he doesn't want to carry that torch beyond the point of all reason so he does hedge it a bit by waggishly telling said love interest "If you don't love me- I will go". Perhaps this is aimed at his audience; I don't know how successful the Jordan album was but it's plain that he put his heart and romantic soul into it. It's the arrangement for me- wacka-wacka funk guitar with that surging, insistent beat and the wistful vocal/woobly synths of Wendy Smith... then at roughly the 2:30 mark, an interlude, as the accompaniment surges, the felt more than heard strings suddenly enter the picture, and the whole thing builds to a grandiose, cinematic, whirling crescendo that I think is absolutely thrilling before we go back once more into the main melody… and after a few more restatements, it abruptly comes to an end, leaving me breathless (figuratively speaking, of course). I think it's just a remarkable song, given its ultimate purpose; perhaps Paddy and company didn’t spend much time on it, but you sure could fool me.
Apparently, Wiki tells me, some agreed with me... it says that "If You Don't Love Me" was the Sprout's highest charting single in the good old US, and might explain why I heard it for the first time sometime around 1993 or '94, when on my lunch break from Donnelley's I happened to hear it via the music that was playing in the background in the Glasgow Taco Bell (way way back before modern Country became the only thing they play- I can't tell you how many times I heard "Redneck Woman" or Yoakam's "Ain't That Lonely Yet" (kinda like that one though) whilst dining there).
OK, this has gone on long enough. Here's the song with its official video; it of course a product of its time, when everyone with a camera, some film school classes, and some pretensions wanted to make music videos and too often they turned into self indulgent collections of random bizarre images designed to reflect the video director's whims and fancies more so that what the musicians were trying to get across with the song, all the better to draw attention to their filmmaking abilities and perhaps lead to making major motion pictures.
Again, I really wish I understood why this song provokes such an emotional response in me, but it does. And I'm moved to share because I kinda felt like writing about it. Maybe you might be a hopeless romantic like me, who knows. Please watch, or ignore and carry on with your lives. It's all good. If you don't love me, I will know.
If you’d rather stream, here are links to this song on the streaming services of your choice.