These Precious Words

The Supremes “You Can’t Hurry Love”

The waiting is agony. You see everyone else get the love you want, but it’s somehow so elusive for you. It’s like playing a game rigged against you, and you start to resent it. Maybe you just give up. Maybe you decide love is for everyone but you, and that the best you could hope for is to settle. But you’ve got to listen to the advice of the mother in this song, one of the finest pieces of music ever composed in the United States: You can’t hurry love, you just have to wait. Love don’t come easy.

This is the last thing you want to hear when you feel lost and desperate and lonely, though. And this was a song intended for a young audience – you have no perspective on time when you’re a teenager, or even in your 20s! Diana Ross and the Supremes sing this song with the urgency of a lovesick teen and the unwavering faith of a true believer, anchored by what I consider to be the most exquisitely boppy beat Motown ever produced. “You Can’t Hurry Love” may be secular, but it’s about faith and holding out hope for some divine plan and purpose. The song cycles through melancholy, exasperation, desperation, and hope before landing on a final verse that sounds far more at ease and resolute than the rest of the song. That’s the part – “keep on waiting, anticipating for that soft voice to talk to me at night” – that sounds like a prayer. It’s the part where they truly know this mother’s wisdom is the truth.

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