"I Love You Always Forever" by Donna Lewis

Let’s do a quick experiment. Pretend you are going shopping. There are only one or two items you need and you’re either in a bit of a hurry or just not in the mood to be out of the house for long. You opt for the small store close by with a pharmacy in the back, where everything is overpriced, but not overpriced enough to justify traveling farther to the bigger grocery store. The floors are usually glossy and a lot of the items are labeled as “on sale,” but when you look closer, it’s only if you have the store’s rewards card. You know, the one the cashier always asks you about and the one you always decline.

Imagine you’re there right now. What song is playing over the speakers? “All For You” by Sister Hazel? “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Deep Blue Something? “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz? For me, the quintessential “song playing at the expensive corner store” is “I Love You Always Forever” by Donna Lewis.

For anyone who doesn’t share this opinion, I’ll try to find some common ground. Maybe this isn’t the ultimate “store song,” but it sure is a mind-numbing earworm. I don’t mean that as an insult (spoiler: I really like this song), I just mean that the song is really, really catchy. I’ve played it for a few of my friends and family members and if they didn’t recognize it right away, as soon as that bass line started, they all realized what it was and what was happening: An invasion of their mind’s real estate for the next few days.

Something about that bass line and the chorus that mirrors it seems to have an almost universal earworm effect. I don’t really have an in-depth answer to the question of “why?,” but I feel comfortable ascribing a lot of it to the hook’s simplicity and repetition. That entire hook has 32 notes total. Out of those notes, 24 of them are C. That’s 75% of the chorus dedicated to one note, with the other 25% being two other notes (E and F) sprinkled in. It feels like a delicate balancing act, an experiment to find the minimum amount of variation required to create something catchy. This minimalism makes the melody easy to remember and that’s the first step to a song getting stuck in someone’s head. The notes which stray from the seemingly ubiquitous C breathe the necessary life into the riff, keeping it from becoming too monotonous. They also match up well with the light percussion present in the song, adding to the rhythm.

That’s really all the analysis I can come up with, so I won’t try to add any more. I'll just take a second to mention the lyrics. Lines like “I love you always forever” and “near and far and always and everywhere and everything” can seem like the kinds of things a teenager might say because they don’t know how else to express their emotions. However, the first two verses are very poetic, in my opinion:

“Feels like I'm standing in a timeless dream

Of light mists, of pale amber rose

Feels like I'm lost in a deep cloud of heavenly scent

Touching, discovering you

Those days of warm rains come rushing back to me

Miles of windless summer nights

Secret moments shared within the heat of the afternoon

Out of the stillness, soft-spoken words”

These two verses, along with the keyboards and the sound effects which accompany them, create an atmosphere that I think is best described using words from the song itself: a “light mist.” It’s an ethereal, dreamy prelude to that captivating hook, which drives most of the rest of the song.

Overall, I really enjoy “I Love You Always Forever.” I find the song as a whole to be intriguing and I wanted to write a bit about it, even if it all but guarantees that the chorus will be stuck in my head for the next couple of days.