"I Love You" by Fontaines DC // Song Review

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"I Love You" on the surface comes through as a love song, one that is drenched in passion, but also anxieties and fear. As so many great love songs are, Fontaines D.C. carries a sense of underlying hesitation and the sense of loving something, or something, so deeply that you're terrified of losing it. The desperation in the repetition of "I love you" over and over throughout the song allows for all of these feelings to shine through. The passion in the lyrics, paired with Grian Chatten's delivery, is what makes this song so powerful.

"I love you, I love you, I told you I do, it's all I've ever felt, I've never felt so well," he sings in the opening lines. "And if you don't know it, I wrote you this tune, to be here loving you when I'm in the tomb". 

There is a deep melancholia running through this song, as well as undeniable political undertones that become more pertinent after fully dissecting the lyrics and their meaning. It is largely seen as a complicated love letter to the band's home country of Ireland, which also doesn't shy away from simultaneously highlighting the darker sides of the country's political landscape, either. 

Grian described "I Love You" as "...the most overtly political song we've written" in an interview with NME. It was the second single off of the band's third album, Skinty Fia, and the track captures a sense of pride in their home country, especially in the context of Fontaines D.C. finding worldwide success and carrying a piece of Irish cultural identity with them. That pride is complicated, and often conflicting, though. He added that it, "simultaneously metabolises deep disappointment, and swirling anger, at the current political climate as well as the country's grimmest historical atrocities, such as the decades of tragic brutality at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home in Galway".

There is also an important and unfiltered commentary being made through the song about youth culture and the reality that many are facing in Ireland today, as well as the path forward. Much of it is written with a strong specificity through the references, slang and overall cultural signal points that can only be fully felt and understood by those who have lived there themselves. They also confront the corrupt politics and the systems that the country is built on and the ways in which their history continues to shape the present lives of the people there today. 

"And they say they love the land but they don't feel it go to waste, hold a mirror to the youth and they will only see their face," Grian sings in the powerful bridge. "Makes flowers read like broadsheets, every young man wants to die, say it to the man who profits and the bastard walks by...say it to him fifty times and still the bastard won't cry, would I lie?"

In an interview with the Conversations About Music podcast, he added that "The first half of it I see as me kind of talking sadly about how Ireland is recently and how I've kind of left it. I'm sick of it, and then the second half, I kind of picked myself up and decided that something has to be done about it, and I'm not going to, kind of, rest on my laurels."


Check out more from my song of the week series here. ☆ Thanks for reading!




Photo Credit: Fontaines D.C., Filmawi




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