Sung to Someone
Twelve records, eleven of our rankings and thirty-eight years apart, all doing one thing: turning to a single person and saying it out loud.
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Hank Williams / I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry
It reads as a nature poem — a whippoorwill, a falling star — right up to "did you ever see a robin weep". Every image in it is being handed to somebody. He is not describing loneliness; he is telling one person what it is doing to him.
Lloyd Price / Lawdy Miss Clawdy
Two lines in and he has stopped describing anything: "girl, you sure look good to me." The whole record is aimed at one person standing in front of him, which is why it survives a test that throws out most of what gets called a love song.
Gloria Jones / Tainted Love
An address delivered at a run. "You don't really want any more from me" is not an observation about love, it is an accusation with somebody on the end of it, and the two-minute sprint is a woman getting it said before she loses her nerve.
Frank Wilson / Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)
The title is a question somebody else asked, answered straight back at them. It qualifies on grammar as much as on feeling: the lyric is second person from first line to last, and there is nothing in it that would work said to a room.
The Miracles / The Tracks of My Tears
"Take a good look at my face" is an instruction, given to one person, by a man asking to be examined. Smokey Robinson wrote the most-quoted metaphor in soul music and then pinned it to a request he needs somebody to answer.
Cream / Sunshine of Your Love
The riff is what everyone remembers, and the reason it belongs here is the line underneath it: "I'll be with you, darling, soon." The heaviest record on this list, and its actual subject is an appointment somebody intends to keep.
Bob Marley & The Wailers / No Woman, No Cry
Not a title about women in general, whatever fifty years of misquotation suggest. It is "no, woman, don't cry" — said to one person sitting in the government yard, and everything else in it is what he is telling her to remember.
Prince Nico Mbarga / Sweet Mother
The criterion says one person addressing another. It does not say the other has to be a lover. One of the biggest-selling records ever made in Africa, and it is a grown man thanking his mother, directly, for the nights she did not sleep.
Buzzcocks / Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)
The parenthesis is the entire song, and it is pointed at exactly the person it means. Pete Shelley asked one specific human being that question, then played it fast enough that everybody else could pretend it was about them.
Mariya Takeuchi / Plastic Love
The most misread record here. It sounds like a city at three in the morning, and what it actually is is one woman telling someone not to take her seriously — which she only has to say out loud because he has started to.
Frankie Knuckles & Jamie Principle / Your Love
Jamie Principle wrote it as a bedroom demo: one voice, speaking to one absent person. Frankie Knuckles kept that scale intact when he turned it into a record a warehouse could hold, and it never once stops being addressed to somebody.