DATE | WEEKS |
October 23, 2004 | 1 |
This column should not exist.
That's not to say I don't like this song, or that there's anything illicit that happened with this song. No, the reason this column shouldn't exist is actually quite banal, at least in retrospect.
The week "She Will Be Loved" reached #1 is the same week the Boston Red Sox won the American League pennant. Let me rephrase that: the Boston Red Sox won the pennant over the New York Yankees after losing the first three games of the series and trailing game 4 in the ninth inning. A week later, they won their first World Series in 86 years. Most of the country celebrated the perennial hard-luck losers finally breaking through and overcoming "The Curse of the Bambino", and especially because they did so in a most improbable fashion.
Not me. I'm a Yankees fan, and I was devastated. I couldn't fathom how such a thing could happen, at least to the Yankees. Perhaps the sting would've been taken off if the series went back and forth, or if the Yankees weren't the ones on the wrong end of history. But to go from the high of potentially sweeping a blood rival to the embarrassment of being the first team in baseball history to surrender a 3-0 series lead, well, it was a lot for my brain to handle. I defiantly wore my Yankees hat out of the house the day after the Red Sox won the World Series, and even though I was living in Washington State, I predictably got shit from some people.
How does all this tie in with "She Will Be Loved"? For whatever reason, that season's Red Sox team acquired the nickname "The Idiots". And the song that was at number one the week before was Green Day's "American Idiot". In a fit of childish petulance, I remember busting the song all the way down to #6 after the Yankees were eliminated, and since "She Will Be Loved" sat at #2 the previous week, it swooped in to fill that vacuum until it got knocked out the following week.
So yeah, I can thank the Boston Red Sox for the fact that I have to write about Maroon 5 again.
"She Will Be Loved" was the third single from Maroon 5's smash debut Songs About Jane. It was written by Adam Levine and James Valentine and while it retains the same jazz-adjacent qualities of the majority of the album, it also feels more geared toward pop radio than either of the first two singles, "Harder to Breathe" and "This Love".
Levine's narrator sounds infatuated with a girl, a beauty queen of only eighteen. (Levine was 23 when Songs About Jane was released, so I guess the age gap isn't that icky?) Weirdly, Levine starts the song in the third person, singing "He was always there to help her. She always belonged to someone else." But he quickly changes to the first person; "I drove for miles and miles and wound up at your door. I've had you so many times but somehow I want more."
I've always viewed the song as Levine's narrator being in love with someone he can't have because she's in love with another man. Perhaps that's because I felt like I was in that situation a time or two when I was growing up. But reading the lyrics back today, it sounds like Levine is the "someone else" in the relationship. That is, the woman in the lyrics is cheating on her boyfriend with Levine.
It's hard to know if that's what Levine intended. Levine claimed in an interview with Entertainment Tonight that the song was not about a relationship he was in, but one he was observing from the outside. By inserting himself into the song, maybe he feels like he's the only one that can save her from herself. That her boyfriend, however good a person he is, isn't capable of being a good partner for her because, well, he's not Adam Levine.
That's sounds like an egocentric perspective, but I think it's a relatable one, at least for a young man who may not have the courage to pursue a relationship on his own. Speaking from personal experience, having crushes always allowed me to play the hero, to be an idealized version of myself. I was scared shitless to act on them, probably because it would have meant exposing my flaws and being vulnerable to another person. When you're a teenager, that can be an incredibly daunting thing to overcome.
I think that's ultimately what Levine is going for here. He wants to play the hero to this girl, even though she may not actually need saving. I wonder if Levine should be considered an unreliable narrator. Is the whole song a fantasy Levine is having? Where the girl in the song is secretly unhappy and if only she could turn to Levine and realize he's the person she's been waiting for.
I can see that playing to some women as misogynistic, as if the woman in the song is a "damsel in distress". That may be true, but I think that the point of a crush, regardless of who has it or who the object of it is, is that it's the most ideal form of a relationship. In your head, your crush is never going to break up with you. The fact that there's a third party in the picture complicates the song immensely, since Levine doesn't make this guy come off as an asshole.
The video for the song doesn't really clarify things. It was originally going to be a performance piece similar to the clip for "Harder to Breathe". That was scrapped in favor of a conceptual version directed by Sophie Muller. The video pays homage to the 1967 film The Graduate. Levine is in a relationship with a young woman, while observing that his girlfriend's mother, played by Kelly Preston, has an abusive relationship with her husband. Eventually he hooks up with the mother, only to be discovered by his girlfriend. It's pretty weird!
That video got constant airplay on VH1, and the song was all over pop and adult contemporary radio. "She Will Be Loved" matched the #5 peak of "This Love" on the Hot 100. The final single from Songs About Jane was "Sunday Morning", a languid number that stayed in theme with the rest of the album. That reached #21 on my chart, and #31 on the Hot 100.
Maroon 5 established themselves as a pop chart mainstay with their debut. They were prominent enough to be invited to play the Live 8 concert in 2005 in Philadelphia. It set a high bar for their next album, but they easily managed to clear it. And I was still open to what they had in store. We will see Maroon 5 again in this column.
EXTRAS
Here's Maroon 5 performing "She Will Be Loved" with country star Sara Evans on a 2008 episode of CMT Crossroads.
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