Your ONE all time favorite love song?

Oh, and ONE :-) more, "Ring the Bells" by The Kinks...straight to the heart, from Ray's.

With much deference to Albert's choice, I'll go with Herman Hupfeld's ageless standard from Casablanca "As Time Goes By", and give honorable mention to Al Green's "Let's Stay Together". As with "In My Life" though, neither of these are actually just straightfoward love songs in the mold of say, Bernstein and Sondheim's "Maria" from West Side Story, or Stevie Wonder's "You Are The Sunshine of My Life", to pick a couple of songs out of the air, but are all the more powerful for the difficulties they acknowledge must be overcome. Of course the question's loaded to begin with, but I think the real point is that from the unabashed simplicity of Buddy Holly's "Peggy Sue", to that song's (and artist's) complexly modern (modernly complex? Nah - most modern love songs aren't complex compared to "ATGB") doppelganger "Alison" by Elvis Costello, a great love song always remains a great song, period.

Hey, we're audiophiles...we're all sociopaths! ;^)

Another one that always gets me is Bob Marley's "Waiting in Vain", in the unrequited catagory. Like many such, the lyrics don't necessarily look like poetry on the page - it's the overall effect with the music and singing which tugs at you.

Hey Dekay (and others), aren't sex songs a different thing than love songs?

P.S. - Hate to be the first jerk to publicly state the obvious (and TEHO & IMO and all that), but more than a few of the nominations above can't help but drive home for me the fact that being into sound doesn't automatically make audiophiles connoisseurs of great music. ;^)

While we're ignoring nominations limits, I also remembered Gene Clark's "I Knew I'd Want You" by The Byrds. (Well, I've got to help counter all those Peter Gabriel votes, an estimable artist who's about as romantic as Stanley Kubrick :-)