How Deep Is Your Love

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The Bee Gees were a hugely influential pop group that had nine #1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 chart — more than any other group in history apart from the Beatles (with 20) and the Supremes (12). Of their chart-topping hits, their biggest (spending 33 weeks on the chart) was their 1973 hit (from the movie, Saturday Night Fever), How Deep Is Your Love, my favorite Bee Gees song, and the one I cover here. This song is the very definition of smooth! It just floats in "on a summer breeze" — with impressionistic lyrics, the soft, warm sound of a Fender Rhodes electric piano, and unique, close-knit harmonies from the Brothers Gibb (Barry, Robin, and Maurice) that combine deep and falsetto voices into a sound that is at once magical, sensual, and soulful.

How the song was written. How Deep Is Your Love is Barry Gibb's favorite Bee Gees song. He has said how it came about in a nearly effortless songwriting process of a few hours. I discovered this incredible video, where you actually can hear the Bee Gees writing How Deep Is Your Love. It's primarily Barry, working with their pianist/keyboardist, Blue Weaver, to converge on the melodies and chord sequences for the verse and chorus of the song. You can also hear how, in its beginnings, with just the piano accompaniment, the song sounded more like a 1940's classic, before they crafted a completely new sound for the song that better fit with the disco-themed movie soundtrack the song was to be a part of: Saturday Night Fever.

The lyrics. The music of How Deep Is Your Love is so pleasurable to listen to that I think most listeners enjoy the song's music without paying too much attention to the words. But if, like me, you are singing the song, and really want to understand the song better to perform it well, you run into a puzzle: on first glance, the words don't appear to add up to a coherent story line! The guy is saying these incredible things about his love: "You know the door to my very soul. You're the light in my deepest, darkest hour. You're my saviour when I fall." But then he appears to be questioning her love for him — "How deep is your love?" — over and over again! Virtually all explanations of the song's lyrics interpret the main line, "How deep is your love?" to mean the guy is questioning whether the gal really loves him.

But the music itself doesn't support that explanation. This supposedly stressed out, insecure guy is singing "How deep is your love?" in the sweetest, most relaxed voice! Note also the words he chooses. He doesn't say, "Do you love me?" He says something quite different: "How deep is your love?" which doesn't necessarily mean the same thing.

So I dug deeper. I learned that Barry wrote the lyrics as an expression of his love for his longtime wife, Linda Gray. Barry and Linda met in 1967, and married in 1970. They had been happily married for three years when Barry wrote this song in 1973, and they are still happily married today, after 53 years of marriage! So the song is not questioning her love, like someone at the very beginning of a relationship.

So now I have a very different take on what this song is about! It's a celebration of a longterm relationship (and it was prescient, insofar as they are indeed still happily married 50 years later!). He's telling her how wonderful her love of him has been already: "You know the door to my very soul. You're the light in my deepest, darkest hour. You're my saviour when I fall." And he's anticipating their lifelong relationship as one in which they discover their love keeps growing deeper with the passage of time. "How deep is your love?" is him looking into the future with delightful anticipation at all the ways she is likely to love him even more deeply than she does today, as their love keeps growing. The line that follows "How deep is your love?" in the lyrics is "I really mean to learn". This reflects the delightful exploration of love he is looking forward to. So this is poetry much in line with Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." — "How deep is your love? I really mean to delight in your showing me the ways!"

There are love songs that are expressions of "I love you" in the moment. And then there are love songs tht celebrate a lifelong love. How Deep Is Your Love is one of the latter kind. I've written some myself — like Mary's Song, where the similar line is, "We've been together every day, and each day I've loved you more." Or in songs I've done covers of, like Petula Clark's My Love, where she sings "And every day it seems I love you more." Or Dan Fogelberg's Longer: "Though the binding cracks and the pages start to yellow, I'll be in love with you." Or Gershwin's Our Love Is Here To Stay: "But oh my dear, our love is here to stay. Together we're going a long, long way." I guess I have a special fondness for love songs that celebrate longterm relationships!