Valentine's Day Song Videos

Every song here was a Valentine's gift from one person to another: a husband turning twenty years of marriage into a chorus, a girlfriend commemorating the coffee shop where everything started, a wife giving her husband the words she never quite says out loud. Valentine's Day has a reputation for interchangeable gifts — the same roses, the same chocolates, the same dinner reservation. A commissioned song is the opposite of interchangeable. It only works because it's true.

The songs tend to fall into two families. The new-love songs are bright and a little giddy, full of firsts: first dates, first road trips, the message that started it all. The long-love songs are something else entirely — inventories of ordinary devotion, the coffee made every morning, the hand held in waiting rooms, the person who stayed. Both kinds get written from details one partner shares about the other, which is why the first listen is usually watched as closely as it's heard: the recipient realizes, somewhere in the first verse, that this song knows things only their person knows.

Listen through the videos below to hear both kinds. Then, if there's someone whose story you could tell — the meet-cute, the inside jokes, the reasons you'd choose them again — you can have this year's Valentine written as a song. Flowers die by Friday. A song about the two of you gets played every February from now on, and usually a lot of days in between.

New couples sometimes worry one year is not enough story for a song; the briefs prove otherwise — one great year holds plenty. Long-distance couples commission them so the relationship has something to play across the miles, and spouses of thirty years use them to say what the anniversary card keeps almost saying. If February always sneaks up on you, the song solves next year too: it gets better with replays, not staler.