Greatest Love Songs Ever: #2 “What the World Needs Now is Love”
By Tom Quiner, Board President, Pulse Life Advocates
“What the World Needs Now is Love” is the most unique song in this countdown of the 52 Greatest Love Songs Ever. What a magnificent work of art … a love song about love. Every other song on the list is a love song about a person or a relationship or even a relationship gone bad.
This song is about love itself. And a single word takes it over the top: ‘sweet.’ It’s not just love, it is sweet love. Indeed, love is the sweetest, the most delicious thing we’ll ever taste in this life. Lyricist Hal David somehow managed to top himself with this timeless set of lyrics.
Recall that this is his 4th entry (along with composer Burt Bacharach) on my list, preceded by these classic songs:
What’s missing in our life?
This song is sort of secular acknowledgement that something insistently tugs at our heart throughout our lives, suggesting that we’re missing something.
St. Augustine said it this way:
“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
What’s the source of this restlessness? What’s missing in our lives? Or rather, what is it that we need more of?
Mountains? Not necessarily.
Hillsides, oceans, rivers, meadows? They’re nice, but is that what’s really eating at us?
How about sex, drugs, and rock n roll? Do we need more of that? No.
How about wealth, fame, and adulation? Nope. Some of the people who’ve achieved them to the max are the unhappiest people in the world.
There is only one thing we need more of, and it’s not a thing, it’s a person: God, who is Love.
What the world needs now is more God.
Not sure if that makes sense, because God is infinite. He made us. He’s everywhere. But we put up barriers to this single relationship that offers total fulfillment when we sin and get too full of ourselves and stop going to church.
Hal David grappled with this idea as a secular writer of pop songs. In fact, Burt Bacharach said it was the most difficult set of lyrics David ever had to write.
They wrote the iconic refrain in 1962, but then David got stuck on the verses. Didn’t know where to take it.
He kicked it around for two years before he came up with these two lines:
“Lord, we don’t need another mountain,
There are mountains and hillsides enough to climb.”
This gave him the direction he needed, and the song wrote itself from there.
A nun sings “What the World Needs Now is Love”
For faithful readers of this series, you may recall that I referred to this very song in my introduction to this series a year ago:
“I recently heard a Sister of Life speak. Sister Bethany Madonna asked,
“What does this culture need? What does the world need? What the world needs now … is love sweet love.”
And with that simple phrase, ‘love sweet love,’ she and an audience of 50,000 people were instantly connected. Everyone knew what was coming next as she sang,
“It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.”
The power of a love song! The Jewish born songwriters, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, had no idea that their love song, “What the World Needs Now is Love,” would be invoked at a Catholic Eucharistic Congress 59 years after they penned this gem.”
Too preachy?
Bacharach and David first offered this song to Dionne Warwick, who turned it down because it came across as too ‘preachy’. Worse, from her perspective, she thought it was more of a Country Western song, and not her style.
Jackie DeShannon jumped on it and had the honor of introducing this glorious song to the world (top of page) in her distinctive, husky voice. DeShannon brings a vulnerability to her presentation, which somehow amplifies its effect.
Sensing that she missed out on something big, Warwick recorded her own version a year later (above). She revisited the song in 2019 in a gospel-tinged arrangement (below).
Bacharach inserted a key change before the final refrain to great effect. Some key changes in popular music are unnecessary and come off as kind of cheesy, a feeble attempt to add a little drama to an otherwise lackluster song.
Not this one. The key change ratchets up the drama and dares you to not sing along!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this series as much as I have enjoyed writing it and listening to these great songs again. The countdown ends next week with our last entry, the #1 greatest love song ever, which we’ll release on Valentine’s Day.
The culture is just as important as the legislature. That’s why Pulse Life Advocates does more than just lobby at the Statehouse on behalf of the unborn. Pulse lobbies, so to speak, on their behalf in the culture, in the arts, in our entertainment. We engage in the theatrical arts. We promote films and music that support the values that made Western Civilization great. The theme of this greatest love song series?
That love is the antidote to abortion. And love songs are an antidote to the culture of death.
We ask you to partner with us in this mission by supporting Pulse financially with your gift. We can’t go it alone. Our unborn brothers and sisters can’t go it alone. We need you. Give generously today.
