For love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave.Song of Solomon 8:6, King James Bible
The love heavy metal songs worth keeping never ask the band to turn down. A Leyden jar holds its charge because a wall of glass stands between two skins of tin foil, one lining the inside and one wrapped round the outside, and it can sit on a laboratory shelf holding enough to jolt a grown man's arm to the shoulder, until somebody bridges the two foils with a wire and the whole store goes in one blue crack that pits the metal where it jumps. Tenderness is one foil. Weight is the other.
Most metal love songs short the jar. The power ballads of the Sunset Strip laid the wire straight across and spent the whole charge in one flash of syrup, and plenty of heavier bands never charged it at all, dropping a word like heart into a song about war where it lit nothing. The songs that last keep the glass in place. It was written in 1972 about the end of drummer Bill Ward's marriage, and recorded without a single guitar. The Aston quartet behind that piano ballad, a band nobody had ever accused of sentiment, was Black Sabbath.
Love heavy metal songs before the ballad had a formula
Written in a rented mansion in Bel Air, where Tony Iommi found a grand piano in the ballroom and taught himself enough to play it, and released by Vertigo on Vol. 4 in September 1972 with Geezer Butler on mellotron, "Changes" leaves Ozzy Osbourne alone with a love that has already ended, singing in the plainest words he ever put to tape. It is the heaviest thing on the record. Nothing on it is loud.
Six years later the Birmingham five who had just traded satin for studded cowhide tucked a love song of their own into the middle of Killing Machine, released by CBS in October 1978, and the band that did it was Judas Priest. "Before the Dawn" runs three minutes and twenty three seconds on a clean, chiming guitar, with Rob Halford singing at half his power about a lover about to leave, and the hard songs on either side make it land harder. Quiet needs loud neighbours.
Between those two records came a love song that needed no piano to keep it heavy, because it was sung by a man who could carry a whole band's weight in his chest. The singer who gave Ritchie Blackmore's new group, Rainbow, its slow, dreaming centre on the 1975 debut Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow was Ronnie James Dio, and "Catch the Rainbow" drifts for six minutes and thirty eight seconds on Blackmore's clean guitar while Dio sings about a night that cannot be kept. Nobody in the song gets what they want. That is why it holds.
Motörhead and the love song at full throttle
The trio that recorded its love songs as if somebody had told it they were illegal went out under the name Motörhead. Released by Bronze on 8 November 1980 with Vic Maile producing, Ace of Spades carries "Love Me Like a Reptile", a courtship taken at the speed of a getaway car. It works the way concentrated sulphuric acid works on a glass of white sugar in the classroom demonstration, charring the sweetness black and driving it up out of the glass in a smoking, crumbling column far bigger than anything that went in. The sugar is still there. It is carbon now.
Lemmy saved the slow one for later. "Love Me Forever", from 1916 in 1991, is a ballad in the old sense, sung low over a guitar that keeps threatening to break into something faster and never quite does, and the album it sits on was nominated for the Grammy for Best Metal Performance in 1992, losing to Metallica's self-titled record. Even the slow ones sounded like a warning, and the man singing them never once pretended to be a nicer person than the fast songs said he was.
It works the way concentrated sulphuric acid works on a glass of white sugar, charring the sweetness black.
The letter home
Released by Epic in September 1991, No More Tears carried a love song that Ozzy Osbourne wrote with his guitarist Zakk Wylde for his wife and manager, Sharon, and the man he asked for the words, who by his own later account made more from the four lyrics he gave that album than from fifteen years of his own band, was Lemmy Kilmister. The same hand that wrote "Love Me Like a Reptile" wrote this one. Nobody could tell.
"Mama, I'm Coming Home" reached number 28 on the Hot 100, and it lasted because there is a compass inside it. A needle carried round the world on a tour bus swings at every bend in the road and every steel stanchion in every hall, shivers, overshoots and settles back on the same bearing each time the bus stops, and the song is built exactly like that, all the wandering in the verses and one fixed point in the chorus. It is a road song with an address on it. The chorus lands like a benediction.
The decade had heavier letters too. The Hanover five whose "Still Loving You" closed Love at First Sting in 1984, as its ninth and final track, were Scorpions, and in the same year Judas Priest put "Love Bites" on Defenders of the Faith, a love song whose lover happens to be a vampire, which is one way to keep the subject heavy. Neither band thought love was beneath its creed. The faithful nearest the stage sang both.
The band that held out longest
The East London five that had filled eight studio albums with pharaohs, mariners and fighter pilots without a single love song among them were Iron Maiden, and when one finally came, on Fear of the Dark in May 1992, it was about love's absence. That was the only way they could have done it.
"Wasting Love", written by Bruce Dickinson with Janick Gers, the guitarist who had joined in 1990, sets a clean arpeggio and a slow build under a lyric about bodies without affection, and its video was directed by Samuel Bayer. Dickinson sings it at full height, with the whole band arriving behind him in the second half. On any honest reading it is the least Maiden-like song on the album, and reviewers have kept ranking it among the record's best in the decades since.
| Song | Band | Album, year | How it keeps its weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Changes | Black Sabbath | Vol. 4, 1972 | Piano and mellotron, no distortion |
| Catch the Rainbow | Rainbow | Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow, 1975 | A voice that carries the whole band |
| Before the Dawn | Judas Priest | Killing Machine, 1978 | Quiet among loud songs |
| Love Me Like a Reptile | Motörhead | Ace of Spades, 1980 | Played at full speed |
| Still Loving You | Scorpions | Love at First Sting, 1984 | A slow build to the full band |
| Love Bites | Judas Priest | Defenders of the Faith, 1984 | The lover is a vampire |
| Love Me Forever | Motörhead | 1916, 1991 | Low, slow and threatening |
| Mama, I'm Coming Home | Ozzy Osbourne | No More Tears, 1991 | A road song with an address |
| Wasting Love | Iron Maiden | Fear of the Dark, 1992 | About the absence of love |
None of these songs carried a record into the essential heavy metal albums on its own, and none of them needed to. Each sits on an album that was heavy first and tender for four minutes, and the tenderness is believable precisely because the other forty minutes were not.
At the far end of the shelf from these four minute confessions stand the longest heavy metal songs, where a band takes fifteen minutes to say what Sabbath said with a piano in four. Love in this music was never the softer subject. It was the one the loud records were hardest on, and the few songs that came through it were built to carry the weight.
