By Igor Keller

I’m just stumbling into my tenth year of making albums as the band Longboat. I’m at a very different place from where I was when this started out. In that time, I’ve recorded 23 albums and although my music has evolved in ways I could never have foreseen, one thing remains predominantly true: I don’t write love songs.

Am I a horrible person who has no warmth or human feeling? Probably not. Does that mean I hate love and love hate? Definitely not. Out of the 350-odd tunes that I’ve written and recorded, I can readily think of only four that even enter into the love song domain. And that’s mostly by accident. All the others are about something else.

I made an album last year called The Century Limited I. On it, I covered pop tunes originally recorded in the 1910s, updating them and fostering them into these tense modern times. It was a tough job selecting the dozen tunes for the album, because music back then was pretty bad. Sure, there were lots of songs about WWI, ships sinking/getting torpedoed/blowing up, derailing trains and Ireland’s melancholy emerald shores. And then there were the love songs, generally delivered in the trademark bellow that the era’s microphones required, complete with the rolling of the “r” that really added a lot of class. In them, you would find songs of earnest devotion, rampant idealization and quivering fidelity. I didn’t choose any of those tracks, but funny thing, change just a few details here and there, inject a lot of technology and you’ve got a tune that could conceivably exist in the 21st century. Many sentiments are exactly the same; only the language is different. Even the rhymes are duplicates. That’s how little things have changed in the last century.

So what’s my deal? Am I trying to correct an old wrong? No, love songs aren’t wrong by any means. They will exist, because they’re the songwriter’s first resort and they are the most direct way of relating emotion. It’s just that I find writing about other things more interesting. Well, that and when it comes to love, I can’t add any insight. I can make up a good story. I can describe an odd predicament. I can even lay the foundations for the end of the world. But I have no wisdom to share about why anyone falls in love or why love sustains some and starves others. I don’t have that skill. If you do, I admire you.

I’ve been married for just over two years now. When I got to know my future wife, I was certain that she was right for me. I didn’t know whether I was right for her until I asked. It turns out that, yes, I was right for her.  She told me so. At no point did I need a love song to spur me along. And at no point did I feel like I had to produce love songs en masse to woo her favor. That didn’t happen. We talked to each other like normal people, not deploying love song phrases that make everything sound weird and insincere. We could describe our emotions without song lyrics. Whatever I was feeling for her was quite different from what you hear on the radio. It didn’t need to be a song. It was probably better that it wasn’t. And to this day, we still like each other very much.

When you explore topics unrelated to love and its byproducts, a strange thing happens:  your vocabulary changes and so do your rhyming options. New worlds open to you. If you’re feeling like you’re rhyming the same words over and over, you probably are. If you’re writing primarily love songs, you might need a change of scenery. I highly recommend that. Like I said, love songs are the first resort for many a songwriter. For me, they’re the last. But that could change. Perhaps I’ll awake one morning with an album’s worth of love songs in my head. In the meantime, I’ll keep writing about dystopian technology, political sabotage and Slavic folktales, among many other things.