No. 051 - 311’s “Love Song” changed my life

The couple danced, the baby slept, the parents split, and Devon Balfour found new meaning in a cover of a love song

Aug 09, 2024

This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created by Grace Lilly, supported by readers.

• 5 min read •

However far away, I will always love you
However long I stay, I will always love you
Whatever words I say, I will always love you
I will always love you

You might think I’m about to tell you that the song that changed my life is The Cure’s “Lovesong.”

You’d be wrong.

I’m here to tell you that for something like seven years, I listened to 311’s cover of this song for approximately 13,000 minutes per year. That’s about nine full days every spin around the Sun. I know that streaming services don’t pay much, but I might have funded a lavish vacation for Nick Hexon.

I have a kid who, for the first many years of his life, believed sleep was optional.

When he was a baby, I tried everything: calming salves, special sleep outfits, white noise, a little plastic aquarium that stuck to his crib and made ocean noises…

Nothing worked.

I don’t know why, but eventually I started playing music — the same song on repeat — while I rocked Giles to sleep. And, boom: music didn’t make it easy, but it made it easIER, and that was a positive step. I tried a few different songs. I can’t tell you why I picked all of them, because that period of my life is very fuzzy with sleep deprivation and postpartum depression, but I can tell you at some point I played 311’s cover of “Lovesong” (their version stylized as “Love Song” with a space), and it stuck. Every night and every nap it played on repeat while he fell asleep with me next to him.

“Love Song” was the first dance song at my wedding to Giles’s dad. And wouldn’t that be a nice story when he was older, that he fell asleep to our wedding song? Spoiler: we got divorced when Giles was two-and-a-half, and I spent every night of my freshly-divorced life lying in a terrible basement apartment listening to the song associated with the first dance of my failed marriage.

Lying in a dark bedroom waiting for your kid to fall asleep is a great time to examine your life (and agonize).

Circa 2018, this song was the backdrop to many nights wondering if my on-again off-again, emotionally abusive new partner was going to text me, or if he’d decided now was a good time to punish me with silence for asking for some bare minimum need to be met, only to come crashing back later saying things like, “You’re my person, I’ll always love you.”

After a divorce, a lifetime of being a fat woman in a world that very vocally hates fat women, and experiencing the crushing weight of adapting to single parenthood, my self worth was in the toilet.

He pushed down the handle and flushed.

I stayed, thinking this was what I deserved.

I assume, though my only research about the topic is limited to Wikipedia, that when Robert Smith wrote and sang “Lovesong,” he was thinking about romantic love. This sort of love — neverending, unconditional — is portrayed to us in movies and music as desirable. But over many sad, anxious nights listening to Nick Hexon sing the lyrics, I started to think: why does this person have to put up with their partner leaving? Why do they have to deal with their partner saying things they later have to apologize for? Is this really a good example of healthy love?

It took a long time — longer than it should have, with many steps forward and back — to actively decide the answer was “no.”

I broke up with this boyfriend, for good.

I blocked his number. I found a therapist to help me untangle my self-hatred and an intuitive eating dietician to help me recover from years of an eating disorder. I started hiking, something I hated as a kid, but which now gave me a feeling of empowerment and satisfaction in what my body could achieve, and the solitude I needed to recuperate emotionally. My legs, which I’d always derided as one of my least favorite parts of my body, became the vehicles that carried me for hundreds of outdoor miles. In something of an act of reclamation, I went to a tattoo artist and asked for a fat lady hiking on my thigh. When my acupuncturist saw it, she said, “Oh! You put yourself on your leg!” Yes, I did — because I decided I was worthy.

Most importantly, though, I stopped vocalizing my negative thoughts about myself. I still think them, I don’t think there’s a way to stop that. But now, on my best days, I notice them as passing thoughts. On my worst days I get tangled in them, but rarely do I say them out loud as truth.

Giles outside the State Theater in Portland, Maine, on his way to see 311 with his mom Devon, his dad, and his stepmom

About a year ago, Giles started falling asleep on his own, without me in the room and without “Love Song” playing in the background.

I do not go out of my way to listen to this song anymore because 63 full days of my life spent listening is probably enough. But when I hear it in the future I think I’ll choose to hear the lyrics differently than they were likely meant: not as a plea to someone else to look past poor behavior and to focus instead on the singer’s supposed love, but as a reminder that no matter what terrible words I’ve aimed my own way in the past, I should always love myself. ◆

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About Devon

Once upon a time Devon Balfour thought she might grow up to be a historian, but then she graduated from college and needed health insurance so she's (mostly) worked in college admissions and enrollment ever since. She lives in the suburbs of Boston with her incredibly cool son, her very kind husband, and a collection of books and board games that threaten to take over the entire apartment. When she's not hiking, parenting, reading, or working, she's thinking about New Hampshire state politics or soliloquizing on Woodstock '99.

Instagram @popsiclesforbreakfast

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