Select Frequency # 21

I love love

February sucks.

The excitement of the new year and the holidays are now firmly in the rearview mirror, so all that is left is the weight of the cold and darkness of winter to crush the spirit. As a Chicagoan, it’s the ambiguity of how much longer the season will last that will get you. To let you in on a little secret, the winters here really haven’t been that bad in quite a while thanks to climate change. Snow doesn’t stick, and 40-50 degrees feels like the norm. But not this year, this fucking year. 2026 has been a throwback to my childhood with consistently frigid temps and snow that refuses to let go. Part of me is certainly happy to see that winter can still, in fact, be winter, but this year has been dark and cold enough with everything that is Going On.

Anyway.

The State of Things has certainly beat me to a bloody pulp. So much so, that I decided to lean into the obvious theming for the first Select Frequency of the month and highlight some love songs. Here are 9 songs to send to that special someone (and 1 that is basically an excuse to sing the gospel of Joseph D’Agostino).

1. Jessie Ware - “Hello Love”

2. Fun. - Light A Roman Candle With Me

3. Kacy Hill & Nourished By Time - “My Day Off”

4. James Blake - “Are You In Love?”

5. D’Angelo and The Vanguard - “Really Love”

6. Mark Ronson & Angel Olsen - “True Blue”

7. Kali Uchis - “Flight 22”

8. Cymbals Eat Guitars - “Hawk Highway” (not available on Spotify)

9. Kitty & Ricky Eat Acid - “If U Wanna Come Over”

10. Trophy Scars - “Never Dead”

Jessie Ware - “Hello Love”

From That! Feels! Good! // 2023 // Pop

One of the biggest cheat codes any television show can employ to gain an audience is the ol’ Will-They-Won’t-They love dynamic. Friends (a bad show) captivated millions by dangling the promise of Ross pairing up with Rachel on a stick.The Office (a fleetingly good show) almost immediately lost steam once Jim and Pam finally got together. The current hotness, Heated Rivalry (a great show) shot up the imdb charts after its characters stopped fucking around and finally gave into their romantic misunderstandings. If you have a beating heart, you very likely cheered when Scott Hunter won the Not-Stanely Cup and invited his boyfriend onto the rink for a big ol’ smooch, outing himself as hockey’s first gay player. We love a good love, and that’s doubly so when it’s hard-fought and battle-tested.

“Hello Love” is an impossibly good song that somehow provides the ecstasy of these turbulent lovers finally becoming one in a bite-sized helping with two anonymous characters. The bassline might be the warmest known to man, accompanied by strings that sound like a million bucks and champagne-popping brass. Whatever your best get-up is, you best put it on immediately. Jessie’s vocals are set to “Kill” as she beckons a nameless partner into the curtain-closing smooch to end all curtain-closing smooches. When she finally drops the coy act and belts out “I thought that I forgot you/I just needed a reminding!”, I want to yell and pump my fist as if my Chicago Bears found a way to win the Super Bowl. I surrender completely.

A warning for those with poor judgement: beware of wielding “Hello Love” around any old flames; it’s a bonafide tank of kerosene.

Fun. - “Light A Roman Candle With Me”

From Aim & Ignite // 2009 // Indie-Pop

It might be impossible to imagine now, but there was a time where Jack Antonoff was a plucky underdog. While I am not going to sit here with my arms crossed and pretend everything he has done since becoming a pop kingmaker queenmaker has sucked, I do unfortunately default to the hipster take of fun. remaining his best venture yet. With how playful and giddy Aim & Ignite was from the jump, you can begin to understand why everyone would choose to go their separate ways after only two albums: what else can you honestly do?

“Light A Roman Candle With Me” is cheesy and schmaltzy as hell, and I am Millennial enough to admit that I am not immune the boyish charm of Nate Ruess declaring that the resulting poetry that him and his crush would make would be a “a sandwich with everything on it.” The composition is dizzying, having its baroque instrumentation and Queen-like vocal stacks playing of each other to a hilariously theatrical degree, allowing the sparks to fly as tall as the rafters.

Kacy Hill & Nourished By Time - “My Day Off”

From Bug // 2024 // Pop

If Kacy Hill has no fans, know that I am dead. While we aren’t exactly in short supply of singer-songwriters doing a throwback pop thing, Kacy just does it better than a lot of her contemporaries. If I were to try and nail down the secret sauce of her brand, it would have to be how delicate and intimate her vocals come across: every line sounds like a playful whisper. “My Day Off” captures the thrill and excitement of puppy love, and how trouble seems to completely evaporate when you finally find someone you really, really dig. Kacy and guest Nourished By Time trade off as if their backs are turned to opposite sides of the door after the best first date of their lives, the only conflict wondering if it’s too early to talk again. “Maybe it’s stupid/maybe it’s reckless/send me a message anyway” would be enough of an earworm by itself, but the song’s glimmering bassline should be canonized with how it allows the song to glide from daydream to daydream. “Nothing but you on my hands/nowhere to be missing/watching the light hit your back/with the sweetest precision” is just so damn nice.

James Blake - “Are You In Love?”

From Assume Form // 2019 // RnB

For all the fancy bleeps and bloops and adornments that James Blake has in his music, it is a little funny that a lot of it comes down to wondering if someone like-likes him. He has a total breakdown on “Are You In Love?” weighing the implications of passing a “circle yes or no” note in class. The stove-starting clicks and repetition of the question really paint the picture of a man agonizing in his apartment, pacing back and forth, pulling his hair, and occasionally sitting down at his keyboard for a stilted, unsure synth-line: does Jameela love him back? It’s all more than a little silly, and the song’s horns and strings in the climax signal a knowing nod of “of course she does, you idiot!” but the performance and production are so slick that it’s hard not to indulge his temporary insanity.

D’Angelo and the Vanguard - Really Love

From Black Messiah // 2014 // Neo-soul

The cinematic strings that open “Really Love” serve as a silver age Hollywood-style transition to D’Angelo’s dreamy, hazy grooves that feel, much like the man himself, eternal. Every pluck and strum feels meticulously placed on a cosmic level, as if performed by the house band of heaven itself. I have no idea what the hell any of the words actually are except for “I’m in really love with you”, but that’s also kind of the point. The expert musicianship and dizzying layers of instrumentation are there to only underline, bold, and exclamation point the undeniable affection at its earthly center. This isn’t just love, it’s really love.

Mark Ronson & Angel Olsen - “True Blue”

From Late Night Feelings // 2019 // Disco

Admittedly, I’m a pretty easy mark for “True Blue.” Angel Olsen is one of my favorite artists and I’m also a sucker for whenever someone takes a melodramatic stab at copying “Heart of Glass.” Mark Ronson is certainly game on production, creating an infectious groove around Olsen’s on-brand devastation. Here, she intends to break the object of her affection into a million pieces with a tantalizing spell as “I run to you and you know why” just barely lands on beat with hypnotic repetition. For as as washed out and impressionistic as the song gets, “love the way you read my eyes” is a line that consistently drops my jaw: what an insane thing to say.

Kali Uchis - “Flight 22”

From Isolation // 2018 // Soul

You can pick basically any song from Kali Uchis’ catalog and it’ll make you feel like a million bucks. “Flight 22” is no different, sounding like a peak out the window of a first-class seat at sunset next to your lover. Of course, the song is about how they both die due to a mid-air collision, but that doesn’t really matter because they die together. The punchline is almost beside the point, as the song’s woozy sway could seemingly sell me anything. If that means two tickets to dying thousands of feet in the air next to the person you love, well, there’s worse ways to go.

Cymbals Eat Guitars - “Hawk Highway”

From Hawk Highway // 2012 // Indie-rock

Cymbals Eat Guitars were criminally underappreciated in their time (as is Empty Country now, listen to that project immediately if you haven’t), but their sophomore record Lenses Alien is a record that even their most hardcore fans recommend with some qualifications. It’s a plucky album that feels in constant competition with itself to prove that its ideas are the most important ever put to wax. The melodies are jagged, like someone mashing puzzle pieces together out of frustration, committing to whatever time signatures and modes a couple of dice provide them in any given instance. The band would thankfully go on to smooth out these edges with some much needed restraint, but I think this overly eager energy largely served them well to always push what they can get away with in any constraint.

“Hawk Highway” is a one-off tune written and recorded mostly in a single day that serves as the bridge between these two distinct writing philosophies that crams a whole lot of the band’s off-kilter writing into a bite-sized package. It moves at a breakneck pace, with its verses and choruses kinda mushing together around a hook that might feel a little wanting the first time around, but it all makes sense in the unrelenting climax of a ripping solo and the excited declaration of “see the ceiling sunlight swim” next to his lover. It’s such a weird, beautiful way to describe how passing time can feel when you’ve got someone to share it with.

Kitty & Ricky Eat Acid - “If U Wanna Come Over”

From Miami Garden Club // 2017 // Bedroom Pop

If you’ve been online since the first Obama administration, there’s a chance you might know Kitty as the girl who once declared herself as the “rap game Taylor Swift” in a song with Riff Raff. The less said about that time, the better. But for anyone who managed to stick with Kitty, she’s really been quite the hidden gem of bedroom pop, electronic music, and even some proto-hyperpop. One of her best songs, “If U Wanna Come Over”, came together from a collaboration with her now-husband (and bandmate of Teen Suicide) Ricky Eat Acid. You can hear their chemistry on the track as Ricky cooks up unnecessarily complicated (complementary) production while Kitty collects the frustration from her situationship crush. It doesn’t need an explanation, at least externally (“you’re black and yellow butterflies, all the things I like/I make fun of like everybody other than you”), but there’s still a rush in nailing down “what are we” in young adulthood no matter how coy and cool you try and play it. Sometimes that’s a label, sometimes that’s admitting to yourself, as Kitty does here, that someone simply has you “fucked up.”

Trophy Scars - “Never Dead”

From Never Born, Never Dead // 2011 // Blues

Fifteen years on, Trophy Scars’ one-two punch of Darkness, Oh Hell and Never Born, Never Dead remains as, gun to my head, my favorite music of all-time. Every song contained within is so vibrant and sprawling, having a little detail to discover with another spin that I find something new to fall in love with every time I return. One of the main attractions of this duology has always been just how curious and unreserved it is in exploring its apocalyptic stakes for love. On Darkness, Jerry Jones is a sad sack of shit. Maybe even the saddest sack of shit to have ever sacked their shit. He waits until the demons of hell reduce the world to smelling salts and split open the path to hell so that he may wander there for eternity for a mere chance to see his ex again. He compares a breakup text to Seraphim denying him deliverance. The man is sad.

What separates Trophy Scars from their Sad Man-ilk that I loathe, is that every ounce of sadness comes back around in equal measure with hope, effort, and clear-eyed, bleeding-on-the-page exaltation. Never Born, Never Dead is a collection of songs that treats its romance as a cosmic constant. Its lovers find each other, die, then find each other again in the next life. Shit is beautiful.

“Never Dead” is the crown jewel of the whole affair that just completely crushes me. An old man sees his long-lost love in the hospital one more time before he dies with a passage that will make even the harshest cynics simply believe:

Ok

So if I told you we live forever

Would you ever believe?

Twelve thousand years and I can remember

You always end up with me

So let us lie here warm together

And turn the light out in peace

Cause then the next life will be such a pleasure

As we build our new dream!

And if I told you that I remember

Would you ever believe?

I love you more than forever!

But now it’s time for sleep