Nothing touches us so deeply, reminds us of a person or meaningful moments quite like music. Even many years later, we still remember the song we played on repeat during our first heartbreak, on our first road trip together, or the one we danced to when we fell in love.
We asked musicians what they consider to be the most beautiful love songs. What makes a good love song? What touches them about it and why is this one song special to them? LAURENZ NIKOLAUS, the CHAOS STRING QUARTET, INGRID SCHMOLINER and SOPHIA LABROUPOULOU gave us their answers. Below are personal statements from the artists.
Laurenz Nikolaus
715 – CRΣΣKS by Bon Iver is a special song for me. It’s about love and loneliness, repression and memory. It’s actually difficult to interpret exactly what the lyrics mean. The minimalist elements, namely just vocals and vocoder, perfectly reflect the fragility of the themes. Sweet melancholy, nostalgia mixed with great longing, makes me feel all the emotions of love. Personally, I associate this song with a long car ride, alone, during which you want to scream loudly into the night, without echo, without waiting for an answer. It’s like a little emotional reset to return to everyday life feeling liberated.
In my opinion, that’s exactly what makes a successful “love song”: depth, honesty, and the use of words that sound exactly like what they want to convey.
Chaos String Quartet
Love is a powerful emotion with many facets and faces. It can be passionate and quiet, demanding and comforting, loud in happiness and soft in pain. Love is never static, but changes over time and with the experiences we have. Interpersonal love changes its face, perhaps losing some of its unconditional nature, but gaining depth, trust, and stability.
It is precisely this dimension of love that is reflected in Franz Schubert’s song “Du bist die Ruh” (You Are the Peace). Like a silent prayer, it describes the beloved as a source of peace and inner home. Love is not understood here as a fleeting passion, but as a deep, almost spiritual connection in which the human desire for security and fusion is fulfilled.
When we play this song in our quartet version in concert, a palpable calm and peacefulness spreads throughout the hall. It is almost magical to experience how such an “old” love song still touches the hearts of the audience today and has a profound emotional effect.
Ingrid Schmoliner
“Beim Schlafengehen” (At Bedtime) from “Four Last Songs” by Richard Strauss
I heard the “Four Last Songs” for the first time 28 years ago and then listened to them on repeat… Even now, “Beim Schlafengehen” still manages to touch me deeply. I simply fell in love with the musical setting of these lines by Herman Hesse.
At Bedtime
Now that the day has made me weary,
May my longing desire
Be kindly received by the starry night
Like a tired child.
Hands, let go of all doing,
Forehead, forget all thinking,
All my senses now
Want to sink into slumber.
And the soul, unguarded,
Wants to soar in free flight,
To live deeply and a thousand times over
In the magic circle of the night.
Translation of Hermann Hesse’s, “Beim Schlafengehen”, 1911
Sofia Labroupoulu
Barro tal vez by Alberto Spinetta is, for me, one of the most radical love songs I know, precisely because it refuses a conventional love story. Written in Argentina in 1973, at a time of growing violence and inner fracture, the song feels like a quiet act of resistance. Luis Alberto Spinetta refused slogans, propaganda, and simplification. His gesture is not loud or militant, but deeply existential.
The beloved here is not a person. It is the act of awakening, a transformative force. Love appears not as possession or fulfillment, but as vulnerability – barro, clay – something unfinished, still being shaped. When he sings that he would die inside if he did not express what he feels, this love becomes a matter of survival.
The axe strikes the bark where transformation begins. The river dries so silence can speak. This is the suspended moment before rebirth, before another beginning, sustained by a deep trust that love and faith, carefully nurtured and held, cannot be corrupted or stolen, only carried forward.
Barro tal vez is not about love. It is love: the courage to remain unfinished, always in transition; love as becoming song instead of remaining silent, a mystical, cyclical sense of renewal that feels urgently present today.
Lots of love! xx mica – music austria & Austrian Music Export
Translated from the German original by Arianna Alfreds.