And it may be the hardest thing I've ever done
But apart from all that I hope to find
Where's the heart that's been looking for mine?
I hope it finds me in time

Love needs a heart and I need to find
If love needs a heart like mine

Jackson Browne

(coat)

{starts blurry}

I realised some years ago that, having heard only "Werewolves of London", the GLW thought Warren Zevon was some sort of novelty act. As evidence that he was much more than that, I played her various favourite Zevon tracks, including The Heartache...which isn't to be found on YouTube. Ah well, he also did Searchin' for a Heart, which is.

This very secret you're trying to conceal
Is the very same one you're dying to reveal
Go tell her how you feel

I like the Feist version too.

Heart (With Gandalf in the video), This Old Heart Of Mine The Isley Brothers and this:

And another...

Everybody's got a Huh-Uh-Ungery Heart......

Damn this slow broadband connection!

I always had a soft spot for this

(and clearly this was meant to link with the comment above. I'm tired.)

While I'm tempted to nick all the ones from Bob Dylan's 'Heart' episode of Theme Time Radio Hour http://www.notdarkyet.org/tt-heart.html, there are so many more. Today my choice is one of my favourite Charlie Rich recordings, Have A Heart - a song which, lyrically at least, should come across as nothing but self-pity: I'm drowning, I'm hungry, I need you, please love me. But in Rich's hands it is one of the most inspirational songs that I've ever heard. Literally. You can hear him breathe.

(Spotify link also included for those with no stomach for saccharine, literal YouTube visuals:)

http://open.spotify.com/track/4PXu8JOHt9IvEuoZ1PWDNZ

Somewhere in my heart
There is a star that shines for you
Silver splits the blue
Love will see you through

I know you have a heavy heart,
I can feel it when we kiss.
So many men stronger than me
Have thrown their backs out trying to lift it.
But me, I'm not a gamble. You can count on me to split.
The love I sell you in the evening by the morning won't exist.

That's from Lua, which for my money is the redoubtable Mr Oberst's finest song. I went on past the lovely bit about the heart, just because I think it's such a great lyric.

Surely one of the prettiest melodies ever...

...let me roll it to you....

Oh yes...

... in Papworth General ♫

Mary Chapin Carpenter provides a great line in this verse from Outside Looking In from Stones In The Road;

And tonight I drove around, and the street came up before me
I took a turn and then I found this old house coming toward me
I heard the sound a heart must make when a memory's caving in
Oh baby, what a hungry place, outside looking in

Jackson Browne's In The Shape Of A Heart contains these cautionary lines;

You keep it up, You try so hard
To keep a life from coming apart
And never know
What breaches and faults are concealed
In the shape of a heart

Couldn't resist spoiling it with this stinker:

Dear Red Foley could prove to be a part time Christian Barnard as he could :-

"I'm picking up the pieces of a broken heart "

he manages the exercise that any cardiologist would advise by " I'm waltzing with a broken heart "

Maybe as the night wears on and his mood turns morbid he sings " When God Dips his love in my heart "

Couldn't of said it better..

"For the heart with no companion
For the soul without a king
For the prima ballerina
Who cannot dance to anything"

...take a heart.

Bobby Bland

How good is this?

"Only a Fool Breaks his own Heart"

-you can all go home.

Really rather good.

"Stop Draggin' My Heart Around"

Er.. hate to differ here..

No it doesn't.

None of this discusses the heart as an organ, merely as a concept. Any songs mentioning atria, ventricles, valves, coronary arteries, aortae, myocardia?

No. Ask any of the artists above to draw a schematic diagram of the heart; I don't think so.

There are, however, some organs which pop music and pop musicians know ALL about.

Dangly rude male ones. Lots of songs about them. And girly bits as well.

Oh. And Hammond B3s.

then i'll go for this...great Choice by Chris G

I'm having another. There's also a great version by Sinead O'Connor

Can anyone be bothered to turn this thread into a Spotify playlist? It deserves it.

darlin thats all you have to do...
show me a sign, a word or a line
one stitch in time to save this poor
heart from breaking.....jus say my
name, you dont have to say it loud,
ill still be true, ill be waitin jus for you

I couldn't find Dylan's original but this a pleasant version for a Sunday.

“I was made with a heart of stone to be broken with one sharp blow!” yelps Jane’s Addiction frontman, Perry Farrell in Ocean Size, apparently relishing the prospect. Behind him the band works itself into a sonic tsunami.

Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s inability to knowingly sing in key made him a keen articulator of those moments of emotional crisis that are low on composure. “If you’re gonna go, don’t look at me,” he moans in The Gun Club’s Hearts, distraught and overwhelmed by the end of a relationship. Performed live the song lost its measured tempo and was transformed into wayward, off-kilter punk with a snarling Pierce lashing out blindly.

Steven Jesse Bernstein poured a lifetime of pent-up rage, thwarted ambition and humiliation into This Clouded Heart: “You fucking phony genie, give me my wish! Under the auditorium stairs this time, and no bullshit - show up this time or I'll swipe your glasses and never give 'em back!”

It’s darkly comic, like an accidental trip on a paving stone that robs a beaten man of his last shreds of dignity; you know that you shouldn’t laugh but sometimes you do anyway. Bernstein killed himself soon after recording it.

The clinical deadpan electronica of Saint Etienne’s - Heart Failed in the Back of a Taxi chronicles those moments when what is financially astute takes precedence over what is right.

“Sold the ground to a PLC
moved the club out to Newbury
sod the fans and their families...”

Similarly, Midlife Crisis by Faith No More’s picks holes in the narcissism that underpins Madonna’s public image – a woman whose “menstruating heart ain't bleeding enough for two.”

There is nothing metaphysical about the heart in The Pogues’ Tuesday Morning. It’s an organ in the body that keeps you vital and makes your eyes shine, so that you can live in the here and now. When it stops it’s over. “All you had to throw away was a cowardly pile of sheets and a heartbeat that couldn’t carry you,” sings American Music Club’s Mark Eitzel in All Your Jeans Were Too Tight as he morbidly sifts through a dead friend’s possessions and wonders out loud whether anyone really needs to own the soundtrack from Diva.

Died was the last song that Layne Staley recorded with Alice In Chains, penned for his late girlfriend Demri Lara Parrott, whose demise seemed to act as a knock out blow that sent him spiralling towards a fatal drug overdose aged 34.

“My heart is dried up, beating slow, it's been deflating since you died.”

When his body was found in his apartment by police officers he apparently weighed just 86lbs.