Top 3 Worst Valentine Tunes

Having trouble with those three little words? Batter your heart, then, 'cause so does this trio.

1. "Love," Smashing Pumpkins

A many splendored thing, love hurts, stinks, bites, etc. ad inf. But for porcelain-skinned, stucco-voiced William Patrick Corgan, Jr., it's really just some good ol' boy nepotism. In this one-word late-tracker from disc one ("Dawn to Dusk") of 1995's feel-good hit o' the winter, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Corgan sums it all up in the chorus:

"Love, love -- it's who you know."

Via uproxx.com

Not exactly gushing, Chapter 13 epistle for the heathens at Corinth, but it's infinitely more optimistic, romantic even, compared with Billy's sentiment only seven songs later. Here, a much more jaded and despondent Corgan cries:

"Love is suicide!"

2. "I Don't Know How To Love Him," Sinéad O'Connor

The love between a supposed prostitute and her professed Savior is about as star-crossed as anything Romeo and Juliet, Sid and Nancy or Laci and Scott Peterson could have mustered up. True, Yvonne Elliman sang this one first (and roaring Aussie Helen Reddy made it a hit for Broadway’s Webber & Rice), but it’s this recording by the inimitable, never-say-never O’Connor that’s perhaps the most poignant.

Via thestar.ie

Since the ‘90s, poor Sinéad has flip-flopped all around the ideological block -- rabid atheism, arcane Catholicism, ill-advised Rastfarianism, ersatz lesbianism -- so it’s particularly moving to hear her utter in the end:

“Yet, if He said He loved me…I wouldn’t want to know. He scares me so…I love Him so.”

3. “Love The One You’re With," Stephen Stills

On his first solo single sans David, Graham and Neil on the sleeve (C&N still sang backup on the record), S.S. opens with the enigmatic, almost surrealistic phrase:

"There's a rose in a fisted glove, and the eagle flies with the dove."

Via spokeo.com

The fact that the wonderfully promiscuous Rita Coolidge is there harmonizing with her former lovers, plural, only makes it that more awkward, confusing and, well, awesome. What follows next isn’t nearly as complicated or oblique, and it just so happens to be one of the best odes to second-fiddle settling:

“And if you can’t be with the one you love…love the one you’re with.”