Morrissey A-Z: "Love Is On Its Way Out"

I love this one. All the sounds are great and very interesting. The sections of the song work very well. I consider the "Love is on it's way out" part which takes about 65 to 70% of the song to be section one. That's all the examples of problems we face in the world. Then there is a little instrumental part and he goes into section two starting with "Bur before it goes," and it just goes to a whole other place.
It's a message of hope and transcendence.
I don't want to go overboard but all of us are seemingly under attack, assaulted on all sides by the horrible things happening all around us, or at least it feels that way sometimes. And this song seems to be saying that even with all that there is a possibility for something else that has real meaning and can get us through.
9/10 or is it a 10/10? The vocal at the end is so good.
 
Gustavo did part of the drum section, synths, backing vocals & nylon string guitar - yet all of that and Manning's Mellotron still can't help the fact that this song needed an actual real harpsichord playing on it IMHO.
Still listen to it though :)
FWD.
 
I love the sound of this one (particularly the synths) and sentiment of the first part of the song - although dear god I struggle with those lines about elephants and lions. But the way he pulls off his old trick of switching the song up in the second part, making it soar and making it all about his own emotional misery as well as animal cruelty: Classic Moz. (Love it at Wembley last year, too.)
 
I can't stand this one. The music sounds like an Ableton demo that you'd overhear someone fooling around with at Guitar Center and the flat lyrics represent everything I find so dull about modern Morrissey. The melody (if you could call it that) never gels with the backing track, nor does the rhythm ever fall into anything resembling a proper groove. Nice title, but for me it ends there.
 
The arrangement is all over the place (as per usual when it comes to Gustavo), and the lyrics are some of the most trite on the album. Still, I like it better than "Bobby" and "Ruth" - the true clunkers of the record.
 
Love, love, love this song, ever since it was premiered in February last year. A true game of two halves: firstly, a groundbreaking (for Moz) electronic arpeggio led section before a haunting bridge, filled with a children’s choir and a spare middle 8 that introduces the acoustic textures playing into the final half...which contains some of his most breathtaking and heartfelt vocals. The move from saying “love is on its way out”, backed up by mentions of hideous crimes, to “do have the time to show me what’s it like?” demonstrates a classic Moz manoeuvre from declaratory to desperate to know “what it[’s] like”.
A modern gem. Loved it at Wembley, too @BookishBoy!
9.5/10
 
great song,second half of the song his voice is strong,just a great pop song.
9 ways/10 outs.
 
Not for me,it seems to me a song that anyone could compose.Morrissey is a master wordsmith he can do better.
 
I can appreciate Gustavo's contribution to this one, but I still think it's the weakest track on the album. It is just too lyrically thin and predictable.

Thankfully there are much better and more substantial songs on I Am Not a Dog on a Chain.

In the poll on the Hoffman board it ranked 86th from 264 solo songs.
 
The most David Brent of all Mozzer's repertoire, musically, lyrically, and vocally. Especially the delivery of this couplet:

love has broken down
it's on its way out

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I’ve always thought that the song was also a bit of a critique of modern pop. There’s no love in modern pop music. It does have in the beginning a narrow synthetic quality with narrow repetitive lyrics and the pace of the song really makes you feel like somethings coldly slipping away. Like the person above mentioned it is very morrissey to bring it back to that yearning for feeling. He wants anything other than to be cold and the music expands and rises etc. it all has a nice effect. Morrissey more and more let’s the song structures convey his feelings rather than just a lot of intricately put together words imo
 
I loved this one when it was unveiled prior to the album, but it turned out to be one of the weaker tracks on Dog. Also can't help but notice that this song structure has been used before with better results (e.g. Home is a ?, Lost), the innovation here is mainly in the electronically driven first half. And the lyrics are perhaps reminiscent of the classic Morrissey approach, but too lazy and repetitive for me to rank this one among his great lyrical contributions. So I have to admit that I revised my opinion downwards on this one, though it is still a decent song.
 
I'm not going to get involved with this nasty piece, unless you offer me a lucrative distribution deal so that my opinion reaches every bathroom and also every bedroom on this f***ing globe.
 
unimaginative and on well-trodden ground, not a fan of this at all.
 
I don’t know, I just love the way that he’s saying with music how an emotion like love is what ads all the nuance wide eyed qualities to our lives. It’s what gives our life depth and without it we’re as two dimensional as cardboard cut outs. Doing that with the dynamic between the songs two parts makes it a better song than home is IMO
 
Cracking song. If you strum a stringed instrument, a good indication of a song's quality is whether you want to learn the chords to it, and whether it sounds good just being strummed along to. This passes both these tests! A great arrangement too - love the way the song builds to its climax.
The words don't break new ground but the sentiment is powerfully expressed. It was such a relief hearing him sing about this stuff after the duff lyrics that ruined much of High School. A strong 8/10!
 
I'll agree that the "children crying/elephants and lions" section isn't the most polished or sophisticated thing he's ever written but I don't think it's meant to be. It's very real and who else is singing about it in the context of a pop song? Maybe it's even purposefully naive. The end of the video does show that same photo that seems to used on the cover of his next record, a young Morrissey.
Maybe it's unintentional but it's possible that it's written from the point of view of a younger person who is discovering the world and losing hope at the senselessness of it all. I don't know a better way to talk about "the sad rich shooting down elephants and lions" than just saying it, and maybe stating it so matter of factly is intentional.
Either way I think it comes across as simple and honest.
I feel sorry for people who can hear the part that begins with "but before it goes" and not feel uplifted.

Maybe it's just lazily written and it wouldn't be the first of his songs you could say that about, but as soon as it begins I'm completely there for all of it. Let's not be so sophisticated that we miss out on something simple and heartfelt.
 
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