5 Timeless Rock Songs About Love

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Singers, writers, poets, and other artists of all stripes have dedicated untold time and energy to creating work about that all-too-human experience called love. Whether it's the giddy, euphoric feelings of a brand new relationship or the turmoil that often comes from a breakup, there's a lot of artistic output related to this universal experience. Although rock music is more often associated with loud guitars, a pounding beat, cool detachment, and lots of drama, themes associated with love have often found their way into this genre.

You can find love at the heart of the 1970s proto-punk growl of Patti Smith, the 1960s psychedelic guitar wail of Jimi Hendrix, and the '90s dream pop of Mazzy Star. It's there in the 1980s pub rock/new wave of INXS and the alternative art rock of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs from the early 2000s. Love is a seemingly limitless font for creative output, and that includes rock in all its myriad incarnations.

"Because the Night" from the godmother of punk, Patti Smith, starts off with a quiet piano intro before she bursts out with her plaintive vocals about the physical side of love. The first words of the song are "Take me now, baby, here as I am," and the track builds and builds like the anticipation of reconnecting with a returning lover. The song's origins are also rather unique. Bruce Springsteen, who was working on his album "Darkness on the Edge of Town," had written the music for the song but only had the chorus: "Because the night belongs to lovers / Because the night belongs to lust / Because the night belongs to lovers / Because the night belongs to us." The super producer Jimmy Iovine convinced Springsteen to give the song to Smith to work on.

At the time, Smith was in a long-distance relationship with Fred "Sonic" Smith, the guitarist for the MC5 at the time. He was in Detroit, while Patti was in New York. The lyrics came to her as she was waiting on a phone call from Fred. The song appeared on her seminal 1978 album "Easter" and became her biggest hit. She married Fred in 1980, had two children with him, and was with him until his death from heart failure in 1994.

In 1967, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, one of the most important bands of the '60s, played at the Monterey International Pop Festival. The pivotal performance introduced Americans to the virtuoso rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix and lit the fuse for Hendrix and his band, drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding, to become a huge success. It also may have provided the impetus for Hendrix's song "Little Wing" from the 1967 album "Axis: Bold as Love." 

Hendrix later recalled that this song about a female figure who provides boundless love — "With a thousand smiles, she gives to me free" — first coalesced in his mind while he was at the festival. He recalled that the mood had been peaceful and energetic. "So I figured that I take everything I see around and put it maybe in the form of a girl maybe, something like that, you know, and call it 'Little Wing,' in other words, just fly away," Hendrix said in a January 1968 interview (via "Jimi Hendrix: 'Talking'"). 

There are other potential sources as well. According to Charles R. Cross' biography, "Room Full of Mirrors," Hendrix once told his brother that Little Bird represented their mother, who died when the guitarist was a teen. Another potential source for Little Bird includes a 21-year-old Swedish hotel worker named Catherina, who Hendrix had begun seeing around the time he wrote the song. Whatever the source, he created a haunting work imbued with a deep love of the feminine nature.

Mazzy Star formed in Santa Monica, California, in the late 1980s from the ashes of Opal. The band's twin engines were singer and lyricist Hope Sandoval and guitarist and songwriter David Roback, who helped create the band's signature dreamy, psychedelic-infused sound. The pair's biggest hit came in 1993 with the group's song "Fade Into You" from the album "So That Tonight I Might See." The track begins with a strummed acoustic guitar before Roback's slide guitar laconically enters. Sandoval's melancholic and haunting voice then breaks through and instantly pulls you in.

Although Sandoval's lyrics can be rather veiled, at its heart, the song seems to be about someone deeply in love with a person who is too self-centered or just unwilling to return the feeling in kind: "Fade into you / Strange you never knew / Fade into you / I think it's strange you never knew." The vagueness of the lyrics works perfectly with the music, which leans into an ethereal country sound — reminiscent of a desert ghost town (a feeling that the video's visuals echo). But every listen reveals another possible interpretation in a song as multilayered as love can be. With only four studio albums and some EPs and singles strung out over several decades (and with Roback's death in 2020, that's likely it), Mazzy Star is a band that remains as mysterious as its music.

INXS (pronounced "in excess") began in Sydney, Australia in 1977. Over the next 20 years, the band steadily grew into one of the biggest rock acts in the world before singer and songwriter Michael Hutchence's tragic death in 1997. The 1987 album "Kick" was the one that helped transform the group into a global sensation, with four singles from the album becoming top 10 hits. One of these was the ballad "Never Tear Us Apart," a love song for the ages with music by keyboardist/guitarist Andrew Farriss and lyrics by Hutchence.

With its dreamy strings, a shimmering lead guitar, saxophone, and Hutchence's plaintive vocals, "Never Tear Us Apart" is drenched in romance and matches the lyrics about an instant connection that turns into a lasting love: "I ... I was standing / You were there / Two worlds collided / And they could never tear us apart." Hutchence wrote the song for his longtime girlfriend Michele Bennett, whom he'd begun dating before becoming a famous rock star. The couple broke up in 1987, but they remained lifelong friends. "Never Tear Us Apart" remains a beloved love song, especially in Australia, where in 2025 it was crowned the best Australian song of all time in Triple J's Hottest 100 of Australian Songs.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs shot into the limelight with the debut full-length album "Fever to Tell" in 2003, which included the hit "Maps." The song comes toward the end of an album full of raucous alternative rock, which immediately sets it apart. "Maps" starts with a jangly low-fi guitar riff from Nick Zinner before Brian Chase's booming drums come in. When Karen O's plaintive voice, stripped of artifice, begs, "Wait, they don't love you like I love you," it's nearly impossible not to be moved. It's a lover's plea that most everyone can relate to at one point in their lives.

Karen O (Orzolek) wrote the song about her relationship with then-boyfriend Angus Andrew, the lead singer of the Liars. He was on tour at the time, and the two rarely saw each other. That longing turned into a hit record and video. "To write a love song that stands the test of time ... that's all I ever wanted to do," she told The Guardian in 2019. "Especially as I'm a hopeless romantic." "Maps," like other timeless rock songs about love, has managed to reach beyond time and place to become a number that belongs to all the romantics of the world.