The funny thing about love is how much time is spent looking in instead of experiencing it. As much as love is constructed by shared time and intimacy, just as prevalent is a litany of ghostly silhouettes. Love is also one-way glances, missed opportunities, and scratched out love notes. It’s the things that remind us of someone that often persist more than the person themselves. Yearning is what rises from these gaps, filling the empty space between would-be-lovers with confusing, passionate, blinding, and quiet longing. Where love is told in actions and words, yearning is all the things you can do, but simply haven’t, or perhaps never will. Sometimes yearning is a constructed memory of what might have been, or a simple gift that you wish meant more than it did, or even the briefest of phone calls with a loved one imprisoned by a time difference. Here, yearning is eight brief and bittersweet songs not so much about love, but everything around it.

“One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” is about two people, but only heard by one. Leonard Cohen’s devastating song patiently follows the trail of the lover he can never have. It’s a desperate and anxious search for answers. Despite its best efforts to unlock the deep enigma of love, it’s always stuck back at square one. Each new sage figure of wisdom the song introduces crumbles beneath Cohen’s unrequited love. Cohen yearns like an analyst, his poetry concealing his restless and calculated pursuit of companionship. But “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” holds no solutions. As it fades out, there’s no sound of embrace, merely Cohen’s frustrated wail as the fingerpicked guitar slowly extinguishes a love that never burned.

In “Concorde,” yearning is anything but faceless. Here, it has a smile, pretty eyes, and a twinkly laugh. The abstract melts, now it’s his dimples, her sense of humour, their soft voice. “Concorde” isn’t searching for anyone, it’s searching for the one. It’s a want that’s so profound it carves a space in your soul that functions not as a wound, but as a jigsaw puzzle, searching for the missing piece. The song reaches crushing climactic heights, the weary run to catch a mere glimpse of the person they hold so dear. However, true to its name, “Concorde” must fly. Despite it all, the highest mountain isn’t tall enough. Just like that, the Concorde rockets past. The memory sears itself into the narrator’s brain to remain immortal in his thoughts, but the sky returns to the same blue it always was.

However, yearning isn’t always poetic theatrics. For every tear-stained love poem is an accompanying dirty thought. Sometimes, yearning is bitten lips, clenched fists, and flushed cheeks. In “I’m On Fire,” Bruce Springsteen is not pining for puppy love. The song doesn’t boast orchestral crescendos or passionate screams, it slithers like a lit spark along a never-ending fuse. The heart wants what the heart wants, and it wants it all. Springsteen doesn’t merely yearn for coy confessions of affection; he yearns for skin on skin. His hushed delivery doesn’t make his feelings any less grand, it just means the rest of it is hidden behind closed doors.

Sometimes yearning deteriorates from passive longing to destructive tendencies, and the vacuum of love starts to turn the wrong direction. In “Kettering,” someone has poisoned the well. Yearning mutates into something toxic, something that clouds your vision and infects the soul. “Kettering” is haunting and fragile, it feels bruised before it even starts. It’s small and alone against an imposing and vast landscape, soon to be engulfed by something wicked. Here, yearning is not merely pining, it’s the desire for a sickly embrace. It will ravage you, hurt you, and kick you to the curb, but that’s all for later. For now, you offer an open hand.

Yearning is not always a private act. It’s a rogue feeling that flies untethered around your subconscious like a balloon in the wind. Sometimes it strikes when you least expect it—on the subway, in class, at a party—and it washes the world in a somber melancholy. Jeff Rosenstock’s “All Blissed Out” is the fuzzy psychedelia of a lovelorn disruption. People and words dissolve into a muted soupy muck. Despite the commotion, Rosenstock is a lone and unaccompanied voice, hearing the laughter and ruckus from somewhere else. It’s a hymn of gloom, a static hum that overwhelms the senses as reality fades into an impossible distance. Rosenstock’s song feels like sinking underwater. Garbled snippets of conversation struggle to penetrate the deep blue and you sink lower into the inky black, left with nothing but you and the crushing pressure.

In contrast to Rosenstock’s bleary chaos is the acute detail of “Alpha Incipiens” by the Mountain Goats. “Incipiens” recalls a memory with the accuracy of a photograph. Yearning possesses the unique ability to magnify every moment. The song hangs frozen in time between the narrator and the person he longs for. Seconds stretch into hours and minutiae blossom from background fodder into towering monuments. Despite the fluttery feeling of a crush, it also brings with it a punishing weight. Everything trivial becomes momentous. The world is seen through an exhaustive magnifying glass where each tiny movement has the capacity to shake the earth. Flashes of yearning aren’t etched into memory with a fine point but seared with hot iron.

Sometimes lonely nights turn into lonely weeks, then into lonely months. The hardest part of romance is waiting. You wait for a change, a shapeless promise that something is bound to get better. You can’t see your knight in shining armour, but you can feel their shadow. Yearning is the desperate clutching for a safety net, an SOS for someone to save you from the monotony. In “Maps,” Karen O reaches for her saviour with outstretched hands. Her strained cry of  “wait…” stands on shaky legs. Despite the song’s triumphant thump of drums, her words come across as blind and broken. “Maps” explodes like a flare in the midst of a blizzard. It burns with all its might to be seen, but the cruel winter snuffs it out. It’s a feeble spark that burns wildly against the dark but ultimately, it hardly makes a sound.

In “Palaces of Montezuma,” Grinderman lead singer Nick Cave yearns with fiery eyes and a hungry soul. There is no room for misery here, only pure love. Cave cuts open his chest and rips out his bleeding heart as an offering to the person he loves, and ironically enough it doesn’t seem to hurt. Yearning isn’t a prison of wanting, it’s a liberating experience of desire. Cave celebrates the privilege of yearning, the ability to realize your capacity to give is far greater than you could have ever imagined. It’s an exuberant and amorous paean to unrequited love. Whether or not Cave’s promises of palaces and gardens are reciprocated doesn’t matter, it’s his love to give. While yearning proves a frustrating and draining experience, it’s also grandiose and beautiful. It feels sad and hard and confusing and flustering and wonderful all at once. But truly, how lucky we are to feel at all.

Tracklist:

One of Us Cannot Be Wrong – Leonard Cohen

Concorde – Black Country, New Road

I’m On Fire – Bruce Springsteen

Kettering – The Antlers

All Blissed Out – Jeff Rosenstock

Alpha Incipiens – The Mountain Goats

Maps – Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Palaces of Montezuma – Grinderman