What You Won’t Do for Love
This past week, I’ve been listening to Bobby Caldwell’s hit single ‘What You Won’t Do for Love’ from his eponymous album, released in 1978. Its wistful rhythm and blues has been sampled many times over by prominent artists such as Tupac Shakur, whose 1998 rendition I remember playing on the radio in the Japanese sports car my 1970s-era parents drove around in at the dawn of a new millennium. Given its melancholic F-sharp minor key and contemplative lyrics that deal with powerful themes of love, sacrifice and nostalgia, this song not only marks a profound moment in Caldwell’s musical career, but also resonates deeply with my own experiences of loss and change. The song’s lingering emotional blueprint compels me to reflect on its meaning and significance as both a timeless artefact and a personal memory that haunts as much as it delights with its poignant honesty.
The signature trumpet chords and the resigned passion with which Caldwell sings the opening lines and refrain of ‘What You Won’t Do for Love’ pulls the listener directly into the emotional remit of a lover’s world gone awry:
I guess you wonder where I've been
I searched to find a love within
I came back to let you know
Got a thing for you and I can't let go
Despite leaving his love in search of self-fulfilment, Caldwell struggles to forget the one to whom his affections are so irrevocably attached — a universal human experience of longing amidst healing from what is longed for. Pursuit of that within is often a greater challenge than the pursuit of that without, especially in the realm of love, as Caldwell’s lyrics evince so plainly. In light of his words, I feel the weight of my own difficulty in leaving behind a past seemingly filled with love to reside in a present of comparable emptiness. Memories that mediate my experiences create a life at once living and dead. The dualism presented in Caldwell’s emotional life parallels this tug of war that some endure with the sands of time and winds of change as identities, circumstances and people shift or fade away. The complexities of Caldwell’s intensely felt love are underscored with the solemn pick of bass strings typical of higher tempo funk music, and the soulful echoes of choiceless compromise in bold lines such as:
My friends wonder what is wrong with me
Well, I'm in a daze from your love, you see
However, nowhere in the song are these nuances more powerfully captured than in the earnest vocals of the chorus:
What you won't do, do for love
You've tried everything but you don't give up
In my world only you make me do
For love what I would not do
As I look back on a life thus far lived in the shadows of golden days gone by and the rocky transitions of young adulthood, what I understand by way of Caldwell’s refrain is that I have compromised beyond the scope of rationality for those I love, and that if like Caldwell, I continue in perpetuity, where might there be an end of it? Must true love be proven through sacrifice even if that sacrifice becomes more significant than the love that necessitated it? What then does that make of such love? There’s an aphorism from Shakespeare’s Hamlet that comes to mind from my rushed readings of the play as an undergraduate which seems to be in direct dialogue with the source of these questions:
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man. 1
Reader: What wouldn’t you do for love? Can there truly be a love without limit?