5 Classic Love Songs That Snagged The No. 1 Spot For Just One Week

Even though they're all-time classics and beautiful, near-perfect expressions of love, some beloved love songs only managed to spend a single week at No. 1 on the pop chart. While their time at the top was ultimately brief, it's still quite an achievement for the groups and singers behind these songs to make it to the apex of the Billboard Hot 100 at all. It's also a remarkable feat to have recorded a love song that, despite any chart technicalities, belongs to the ages. These are canonical love songs, ones that explore and express that most complex and difficult of emotions.

Perhaps these love songs were just so precious and intense that the entire country could only handle hearing them absolutely everywhere for a single week. Or maybe they're just so perfect that they only needed a week in the No. 1 slot to permanently embed themselves in the minds and hearts of millions. Here are five classic love tracks that surprisingly couldn't hold to No. 1 for more than a week.

After Smokey Robinson got his memorable name, the sweetly voiced frontman of the Miracles (and a Motown Records company man) wrote "My Girl" for his superstar label-mates the Temptations. It was devised as a response to Mary Wells' devotional "My Guy" but from the point of view of a man singing to his lady, for whom he's absolutely over the moon — the narrator declares he doesn't need money or fame, so long as he's got his girl, who lights up his life like sunshine even on a cloudy day. The Temptations are positively swooning over the subject of the song, and that delight is infectious through those lyrics and giddy musical flourishes like unison singing, a flowery musical interlude, and a gently repetitive guitar hook.

Wells' "My Guy" was a bigger hit at the time, but "My Girl" is by far the more famous song today. Wells' song spent two weeks at No. 1 in the spring of 1964. "My Girl," the first of the Temptations' four career chart-toppers, took about seven weeks from its entry on the Hot 100 to make it to No. 1. Seven days after it made it there in March 1965, it started to fall.

Equal parts tender, flirtatious, pleading, and thankful, "Let's Stay Together" concerns the entirety of a relationship. The past has been so spectacular, co-writer and soul singing legend Al Green proclaims, that it must be celebrated in the present and allowed to persevere into the distant future. Green really feels what he's singing, or at least he does a great job of selling it. He utilizes every vocal tool at his disposal, alternately cooing, nearly whispering, and just absolutely wailing (in competition with a lively horn section) when he's overtaken by passion, gratitude, and affection for the partner he swears he'll never leave.

"Let's Stay Together" resonated deeply and quickly with audiences. Emanating warmth and coziness, the song first heated up the lives of listeners and record buyers in December 1971, and it wound up at No. 1 in February 1972. The public and "Let's Stay Together" didn't stay together for long, however, as the song was dethroned a week later by Nilsson's desperate break-up ballad "Without You."

Stevie Wonder alone wrote "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" and plays several of the instruments used on the track, but his distinctive, spectacular voice doesn't pop up until 45 seconds into the three-minute song, ceding the first section to duet singers Jim Gilstrap and Gloria Barley, who establish with their simple and innocent performances that this is going to be a song about a love profound and true. "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" builds from some electric piano and professed feelings into a joyful, boisterous, hymn-like celebration of romantic love. Wonder belts out his lyrics as if he's genuinely in awe of the experience and can't believe his own good fortune. He succeeds in putting on wax the moment that a crush or a burgeoning romance transforms into undeniably undying love, and it's almost overwhelming for both Wonder and the audience.

It took a relatively brief nine weeks for music fans to take "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" from its modest Billboard debut up to the No. 1 spot. But then, after the week of May 19, 1973, Wonder's romantic masterpiece lost its slot to the Edgar Winter Group's hard rock instrumental "Frankenstein," a classic rock hit that itself snagged the No. 1 spot for just one week.

"Keep on Loving You" is a love song both for and by folks who were maybe a little bit older and who had been a bit bruised by life experiences. It's the rare love song that acknowledges infidelity and fighting — REO Speedwagon singer and songwriter Kevin Cronin likens a partner to a snake hiding in the grass who has repeatedly cheated on him. But he declares that he doesn't care about all that, because their relationship is so solid and long-lasting that it can weather anything, and so he's just going to continue giving his love as he always has.

The band had been through a lot together since the late 1960s. After a series of flop albums, some minor hits, and Cronin's departure and return, "Keep on Loving You" was the act's first-ever Top 10 single, taken from its ninth studio album, "Hi Infidelity." It took 16 weeks for the power ballad to rise from its entrance in the Hot 100 to the top of the charts. In the issue of Billboard dated March 21, 1981, REO Speedwagon's "Keep on Loving You" knocked Dolly Parton's work song "9 to 5" down to No. 4 and moved up to No. 1. And then, unlike Cronin, listeners quickly moved on to someone new — Blondie's "Rapture" sent "Keep on Loving You" to No. 4 seven days later.

Belinda Carlisle's voice was just too expressive and had too much range for her not to be a pop singer and performer of big, sweeping, epic love songs. Previously a part of the late-1970s Los Angeles punk scene before fronting the popular, radio-friendly rock band the Go-Go's, Carlisle parlayed the success of the latter into a solo career immediately after a 1985 split. After the soft-rocking "Mad About You" hit No. 3 in 1986, Carlisle unleashed an even bigger smash, "Heaven Is a Place on Earth," which moved up to the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100 in December 1987, a little over two months after it first appeared on the chart.

"Heaven Is a Place on Earth" is very much a love song right out of the '80s. The track is loaded with layers of overly processed, crunchy guitars, vocal harmonies, and Carlisle giving it everything she's got as her voice is complemented by sparkling, shimmering synthesizers. While it could be a very dated song, "Heaven Is a Place on Earth" isn't, because it's so catchy and its message is timeless: Heaven may not be real, and life may be complicated, but that's all okay, as this love very much exists. The song about eternity spent a severely limited time at No. 1, however. It fell to No. 2 a week later, behind George Michael's "Faith."