“When You Love” by Sinéad O’Connor: Simple, Forgotten, Yet Poignant
Finding beauty in the unexpected, the Rugrats in Paris edition
When I began a publication devoted to music, I’ll admit there were about a thousand songs I pictured myself covering before beginning to explore the soundtrack to Rugrats in Paris: The Movie. Between The Beatles, Lupe Fiasco, Coltrane, Green Day, Patrick Watson, Pink Floyd, Tame Impala, The Talking Heads, Bill Withers, Sidney Bechet, and all of the hundreds of artists I discovered in my life, it was difficult to pick where exactly my first few bases would be.
But then, music moves you at unexpected times and in surprising places. So in a way, it feels apt that among the first few songs I explore should be one I’ve randomly disinterred in my dig through the annals of 2000s Nickelodeon. (This was, of course, for scholarly reasons.)
So perhaps more important than starting this dive into the world of music-related writing in an obvious place… is starting it in a decidedly weird one.
In reexploring what makes Rugrats so unique, I found myself touched by the powerful simplicity of the song that plays over the speakers at a mother son dance in Rugrats in Paris: The Movie. Though I’m desensitized enough to pound through the Saw and Human Centipede franchises without so much as a lone retch, I’m also sensitive enough to be brought to my knees occasionally by kids’ movies. Call me sentimental.
The scene with the song is one that takes place within the film’s opening ten minutes, and it’s not one of the movie’s more memorable scenes. “When You Love” is an admittedly simple song, but it’s one for which a good quality recording is shockingly hard to source. (If any of you happen to be Rugrats soundtrack connoiseurs, consider helping out this fellow Sinéad O’connor enthusiast in need?)
The best recording I’ve managed to find is encased within this 240p resolution video. Strangely, it was posted to YouTube less than a year before O’connor would tragically pass away at only 57 years old.
In addition to being presented in a video quality better suited to the bygone days of YouTube banners, it’s clear the audio quality certainly leaves a little something to be desired. But there’s an almost spectral warmth to the imperfection, like the cracks and hisses of an old record.
What I love about the song, though, isn’t that I connect with every note in it. It reminds me of Lana Del Ray’s “Young and Beautiful” in its more soaring moments, and the bridge in its less elegant ones. They’re worth it for the precipitous highs even while they falter in their attempts to fill the lulls in between them.
Part of what makes O’connor’s song special, too, simply hinges on the context in which I heard it. There’s an allure, too, in the haunted rarity of complete, untampered recordings of this song from this now-deceased artist.
Similarly, in an old iPhone of mine lies a very specific recording of “Blue Train” by Coltrane that I can’t find on a single music streaming service today. No matter how hard I’ve hunted, this sonorous rendition of the song seems to exist only in this old, obsolete iPhone I’ve kept lying around for years within a dusty drawer. It’s from an MP3 my dad burned for me in early high school before losing all record of the track himself.
Heard one day on the radio, I can’t say that this Rugrats song would have done much for me. But grieving the third year anniversary of my childhood dog, Rugrats’ willingness to approach one of life’s most complicated subjects was nearly enough to draw tears from me.
There’s a raw and ethereal sort of power to the chorus:
“When you love,
You’re not alone.
The one you love,
Is there beside you.
Never lost,
Or on your own.
A gentle hand,
Is there to guide you.”
And it’s these resonant words that carry the entire song for me and drive home an emotional blow which a 23 year old Nickelodeon movie has no business dealing.
Rugrats is a show that has always held a special place in my heart. It was a show that guided me through the fleeting days when a floaty, abstract world developed into something that could be called consciousness and its music was the ever-present background. Hearing it takes me back to the wide-eyed world of my early childhood and that strange place in time where the borders between reality and imagination blurred.
But one of the achievements that I never fully appreciated about Rugrats until my adulthood was that it’s a show that isn’t afraid to tackle grief. There are multiple occasions in which Chuckie and his father’s loss is addressed within the show. The one that always stuck out the most in my mind, though, was the one in which the red-headed toddler looks wistfully out an airplane window as clouds morph into mothers and Cyndi Lauper’s “I Want a Mom That Will Last Forever” plays delicately.
“When You Love,” on the other hand, sat in a deeper part of my mind. But for some reason — to hear it as Chuckie reckons with the loss of the mother he never knew, meekly standing alone beside a punch bowl, it’s hard not to feel a certain pang.
As Chuckie stands there with folded hands, downtrodden and freckle-faced, his father tries his best to guide his son through the painful moment with a supportive smile and a protective hug. It’s a beautiful and short-lived little sequence that likely goes above the heads of most younger viewers. It’s a simple scene, and not an incredibly long one, but rewatching it as an adult, I was surprised it wasn’t one that I could consciously recall.
Even while it’s hardly the musical masterpiece of the decade in my eyes, it’s powerful all the same. And it will always be colored by that initial context in which I heard it. Sometimes in life, the specific timing and placement of certain melodies can give meaning to notes that would otherwise go unnoticed.