“The point of the song is we are very well damaged by the legacy of the romantic poet, that we think of love as a thing that is with strings and is this force for good and then if something bad happens that’s not love…I don’t know so much about that. I don’t know that the Greeks weren’t right, I think that they were, that love can beat a path through everything, that it will destroy a lot of things on the way to its objective which is just its expression of itself. You know my stepfather mistreated us terribly quite often, but he loved us and well, that to me is something worth commenting on in the hopes of undoing a lot of what I perceive is terrible damage, yet we talk about love as this benign comfortable force: it is wild.
John “Will You Be My Valentine?” Darnielle (on the song Love Love Love)