Theme
Songs about devotion
Interpretations from our editorial team that explore this theme.
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OneRepublic
Come Home (feat. Sara Bareilles)
A plea sent out from someone tired of conflict to a person, or a wider audience, asking them to choose connection over the noise of war and ego
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Daniel Caesar
Hold Me Down
A bruised love song about wanting devotion from a partner whose ambitions are pulling her out of the relationship
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Rihanna
Umbrella (feat. JAŸ-Z)
A promise of shelter to someone you love when their weather turns bad, dressed up in stadium-sized pop hooks
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Muse
Undisclosed Desires
A pledge to love someone whose damage and self-protective performance have kept everyone else out
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Post Malone & Swae Lee
Sunflower (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse)
A push-pull love song about a guy who keeps leaving a woman who keeps drawing him back, framed through a flower that turns toward the sun whether he stays or not
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Milky & Mall Grab
Just The Way You Are
A house-music love note that turns devotion into a chant, asking a partner to stay exactly as they are while the beat keeps rolling
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Drake, Future & Molly Santana
Little Birdie
A torch-style ballad about being blindsided by love after giving up on the signs that were supposed to announce it
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Noah Kahan
Orbiter
A rising songwriter at an awards show he's about to lose feels alien in his own success and orbits the partner who keeps him tethered
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Car, the garden
My whole world
A quiet love song about the moment you realise someone has become the entire shape of your inner life, and you ask them to hold that weight even if you're wrong about it
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AKMU
How can I love the heartbreak, you're the one I love
A refusal to romanticize a breakup, sung by someone who realizes mid-walk that loving you cannot include loving the loss of you
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NMIXX
Heavy Serenade
A K-pop love song that turns the act of falling for someone into a flower opening, with the lyric itself becoming the petal
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Myles Smith
Stargazing
A breathless declaration of certainty to someone who turned out to be the right person all along, asking only that they not break what's finally been recognised
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The Black Skirts
1:05
A love song that fixes itself to a single stopped moment, 1:05, as a way of refusing the clockwork rhythms of grown-up romance
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Ella Bright
Baby Now That I Found You
A confession of one-sided devotion, sung by someone who refuses to release a partner who has already announced they're leaving
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Josh Fawaz
Like a Prayer
A short, devotional pop cover that treats a lover's voice as something close to religious experience, collapsing romance and prayer into the same gesture
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Beyoncé
Dance For You
A striptease reframed as a thank-you note, where seduction is the language a long-term partner uses to say everything love already covers
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Ed Sheeran
How Would You Feel (Paean)
A nervous declaration of love phrased as a question, written for the quiet moment before someone says the words out loud for the first time
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Taylor Swift
The Fate of Ophelia
A love song that uses Hamlet's drowned Ophelia as the cautionary alternative: rescue from despair by a partner who arrived just before the spiral closed
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Alex Warren
Ordinary
A love song that borrows the language of religion to describe a devotion so total it feels like both worship and surrender