There’s a fine pop songwriting tradition of using the phrase ‘love song’ ironically. The Damned’s rumbustious punk-era hit Love Song was about as far removed from a traditional love song as it was possible to get in 1979.
Bon Jovi’s 1995 single This Ain’t A Love Song was – guess what? – actually very much a love song. And Sara Bareilles’ 2007 breakthrough hit? Well, reputedly, love was very far from the subject Bareilles had on her mind when she wrote it.
The singer-songwriter from Eureka, Northern California, had signed to Epic in 2005, and the story goes that during the year-long gestation period before the release of her major label debut Little Voice, Bareilles was being pressured by her new record company to come up with a hit.
Latest Videos FromMusicRadar
Love Song, with its insistence of ‘I’m not going to write you a love song cause you asked for it, cause you need one,’ was her rebellious response. In 2007, Bareilles explained that “I got mad at myself for letting those doubts creep into my brain and swore I would write something totally honest, whatever it may be, good or bad. And I did. Love Song was my response to all that, my little stick it to ‘em”.
So a simple tale of a dastardly record company forcing an artist into a box they don’t want to go in, then? Well, the story is a little bit more complicated than that, though it took a few more years to emerge.
In a 2021 interview, Bareilles said that “The song wasn’t a specific response to my record company. Nobody sat me down and said, ‘I need this kind of song from you.’ There was more of a subtle, nuanced… withholding. I was getting ready to release the first record, and I had a whole boatload of songs, so I was like, ‘What’s the deal? Let’s get in the studio. Let’s make the record.’ There was a withholding of the green light.”
It seems that Epic were unconvinced that Bareilles had the requisite songwriting chops and needed outside help. They set up some co-writing sessions, which the singer described as “a total disaster… devastating on every level. I felt invisible and unimportant and manipulated.”
“I was so stubborn, especially at that age. I was so protective of myself – I wasn’t going to do what they asked me to do. I wasn’t going to wear the sparkly dress, I wasn’t going to wear the high heels. I was so concerned with losing myself, somehow, in the process.”
In a 2015 Huffington Post interview, she was in a more reflective mood. Speaking of the co-writing sessions: “I think for me, they came at a time where I was still so unsure of my own edges. In a way, I was still sort of discovering who I was as an artist at that time. And while I don’t think that any of those collaborators had any bad intentions, I just don’t think I was ready to collaborate.”
Love Song was, then, a frustrated response to those sessions, composed in her rehearsal room, on her own. By this point, Epic had recruited producer Eric Rosse to the project – he and Bareilles started working together midway through 2005.
In her record company biography for that album, Bareilles wrote that: “Eric Rosse and I spent countless hours deliberating, fighting, and seeking compromise on what would make this music the best it could be. I’m not proud to say it, but I feel like in many ways I walked in with my dukes up.” Speaking to Sound On Sound in 2008, Rosse admits that it was difficult at first: “Yes, she did need a bit of convincing.”
For five months Rosse and Bareilles worked through stories of songs, arrangement ideas and song structures. “She came up with a lot of material,” he recalled, “And we would demo stuff, just piano and vocal, and send it off to Pete Giberga (the A&R on the album), who was getting excited about the project.”
Both artist and A&R knew that they needed a single to launch the album and, luckily, halfway through these sessions, Love Song landed.
“Sara came in one day with the initial musical idea which included the phrase ‘I’m not going to write you a love song,’ and the rest was sort of la-la-la,” remembered Rosse.
“Structurally it was a bit different from the final version: there might not have been a bridge and I can’t quite remember how she did the pre-chorus. But there definitely was a basic structure to the song, with most of the music, the main hook line, and several verse ideas.”
“We discussed where the song could go, thematically and structurally, and she went away and came back with more or less the finished song. I think that for Sara the idea of a love song was synonymous with a commercial hit, so she was taking poetic licence with the term.”
Now they had a potential hit single, both Rosse and Bareilles put all their energies into making the track count. The pair recorded three different versions of the song, though each had the same lead vocal.
“The first step of recording the backing tracks for the album was that Sara and I drove around LA for a day, trying out pianos for her in four or five different studios,” Rosse explained in 2008.
“We felt that a Yamaha seven-foot grand at NRG studios suited her music the best, so we did the basic tracks – piano, drums and bass – at NRG. The remainder, Yamaha CP80 electric piano, Mellotron, guitars, backing vocals, were overdubbed at my own studio, Squawkbox.”
However, the initial overdubs for the song didn’t seem to fit with the main vocal, so artist and producer had to have a re-think. “The issue was mainly one of feel,” Rosse reasoned. “A four-to-the-floor feel can easily sound heavy and laboured, so I wanted to make sure that the rhythm had enough movement. It had to drive the song forward, and not feel plodding, but also not feel so happy or poppy that it would make the song sound silly.
“We used two drummers on the song, and the final drum take took place at Sunset Sound. The piano was tracked twice, because it had to match the new feel of that last drum overdub. We also did a number of different approaches with the guitars, and there’s a very subtle drum loop, programmed by Jake Davies, that you sort of hear rather than feel, but that helped drive the song forward.”
Once these issues were ironed out, the mixing was relatively straightforward. “I wanted to make the song as driving and aggressive as I could, and feature Sara’s voice as much as possible, squeezing every ounce of energy out of it,” Rosse said. “By the time it came to mixing, the issues we had during tracking were entirely resolved, and I was only looking at minor things, like how many backing vocals to use, and how much of a vocal double there should be.”
“Sara associates lead vocal doubling with slick-sounding pop music, so we had to come to various levels of compromises on that. But in general the heavy lifting had been done on this song, and it was just a matter of making it sound and feel really good.”
The finished single was helped massively by its video, the sort of sumptuous creation that you rarely see in 2026. Installed in a Wes Anderson-esque fantasy world in which she is a performer in a jukebox-like machine that dispenses love songs, Bareilles (wearing a dress and heels, natch) sings to order whenever a punter places a coin in the machine. She rebels, wedging a coin in the wheels of the contraption to give herself a break. It’s a brilliant metaphor for the ‘official’ story of the song, and one that Epic seemed only too keen to greenlight.
It did the trick. Love Song made Number Four in both the US and – more surprisingly – the UK charts. Following this, the album Little Voice was a Top Ten hit in both territories and went double platinum in the States.
It set Bareilles on a trajectory that has seen Broadway success in the form of her Waitress show soundtrack, which led to a second career in film and musical theatre. And all but one of her four albums have reached the Billboard Top Ten.
Sneaking in just before the close of music’s physical era, you couldn’t imagine Love Song being a hit in 2026. Even at the time, with its attention to detail, melodic richness and refusal to descend to cynicism, there was something very old skool about it, which Bareilles picked up on in that 2015 Huffington Post interview, in which she revealed that actually it was a love song, after all.
“It was a love song to my craft,” she argued. “It was a love song to my intention, to my heart and soul. I was fighting for the essence of some truth inside of me, which to me is a beautiful love song. It just wasn’t a duet between Peter Cetera and Amy Grant.”
