For as long as songwriters, singers, and musicians have written and performed pop songs, there have been ditties that depict loving. Often deemed “sentimental,” such songs spur self love or inspire love of community. They languish over love lost or express a love of life. More still reflect on relationships between love and sex while performers eagerly emote. But what is the excess of the sentimental song and what might it mean to love too much? 

 This presentation listens across the long history of love in Anglo-American sentimental pop song. Whose love is represented and in what ways? How do the McCartneys’ lyrics inform our hearing of older sentimental love songs and vice versa? Have people really “had enough of silly love songs”? In so asking, I aim to untether the longstanding and still prevalent associations between femininity, whiteness, and excess emotional expression.  

Biography

Dr. Emily Gale is a fixed-term Lecturer in Popular Music Studies at University College Cork. Her book in progress, Sentimental Songs for Sentimental People: An Unheard History of US Popular Music, explores intersections between sentimentalism, gender, class, and race with chapters on home, love, death, tears, youth, and feels. She currently hosts a radio show about her research on campus station UCC98.3FM. 

Gale serves on the executive committees for IASPM UK & Ireland and IASPM US. As organizing chair, she coordinated the Society for Musicology in Ireland’s hybrid conference of 2022. She is a regular presenter at the Pop Conference and her voice appears as a pop commentator on NPR’s All Things Consideredand in the Los Angeles Times.