To some extent, I think we’re all on a sunshine crusade. I imagine few awaken in the morning and suppose, “Today I want some wo… / …man to shatter my heart and wreck me.” John Mayall, blues-god that he is, falls somewhere in-between the optimists and masochists. His cover of this Willie Dixon you-done-done-me-wrong-honey-but-I-still-love-you composition opens with a howl from Hell, only for Mayall to readily admit that he can’t quit his ladylove. Nevertheless, he’s “gotta put her down for a while.” And while the Zep Heads will argue Plant and Page did this song an equal amount of justice, Mayall’s got more than the devil in him: he has angels on his horns to boot. Worse still, he’s contending with both on one shoulder and his heartache on the other, which, I imagine, is a world of weight to put on any man. He’s hunched over from the burden of the good and the bad and the not knowing how to live without the former despite the latter digging its spurs into his ears, and damned if that opening wail doesn’t impart as much.

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Association with the Cameron Crowe film Elizabethtown and short-lived lyrics aside, the Concretes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love” is the kind of song whose eagerness one can’t help but get sucked into. With its blithe tambourine and kid-pop organ peeking over the neighbor’s rotted, wooden fence, it’s no wonder that, roughly 30 seconds into the song, I’m shaking my hips and clapping away with the lot of them. Victoria Bergsman (of recent Peter Bjorn and John “Young Folks” fame) is ostensibly detached. These aren’t the ramblings of a madwoman, nor are they the regrets of a sad woman or the threats of a woman wrongly crossed. Instead, Bergsman is playful. She doesn’t sing that “love ain’t fair” but rather that “love ain’t far.” As much as she attempts aloof, there’s enough optimism in her vocals for Bergsman to fit in nicely with the rest of the band’s bucket-hat-donning summer sun.

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Ultimately, these songs aren’t of the persuasion that love (or hate, or whatever your strong emotion of choice happens to be) is a matter of joy or sorrow, now or never, but rather a smorgasbord of all the in-betweens in the day-to-day we tend to ignore. Mayall knows he wants to press his nose to his lover’s hair at the cock’s crowing, even if it means dealing with the day later on by way of the evening’s moonshine, and that there’s a favorable balance to be had somewhere, somewhere. And Bergsman knows that we’re always falling in love, even when we’re already in it, be it through a kite on a beach or a few darling tunes on the crowded bus to work. Apparently, we can’t hurry it.

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