I, like most stereotypical girls, am always a sucker for anything romantic. Books, songs, movies, you name it. I overindulge, obsess over it, and then get burnt out on it and occasionally look back on it fondly. However, there is one song that just sticks out to me from all the others. ‘Heathrow’ by Catfish and the Bottlemen is simply unlike any other love song I’ve heard. It’s haunting, it’s swaying, and it always leaves me wanting more.

The song starts with a hum that slowly fades and settles in, followed by some minor chords on the guitar, and finally Van McCann’s almost whiny voice breaks through. McCann wrote the lyrics for the song and they drip romance in the best way; describing comfort, hugs, kisses, and dancing. Despite the eerie sound there’s just something about it that leaves behind the sweetest of tastes. To me, this is why the song reminds me of cotton candy. It’s sweet, it’s brief, and I just have to get more to remember that flavor. Play. Stop. Repeat. Over and over again.

It was while I was playing the song over and over that I realized something else about McCann’s lyrics. While portraying snapshots of romance, they also reflect the mournful tone of the song. The verses are all in future tense, as in things he will do. ‘Hug her, snog her, dance with her’- they haven’t been done. It’s in the chorus that you realize why, as the chorus is in the past tense. These events either already happened and he’s looking back, or they simply never happened at all. I believe they never happened. McCann’s voice encapsulates this with the aforementioned almost whiny sound; he didn’t get what he had hoped for. The way his voice stretches reminds me of the way someone reaches for something that is just a bit too far away. This little detail nudges the song from heartwarming to heartbreaking. Catfish and the Bottlemen did in two minutes and fifty-seven seconds what most romance movies can’t do in over an hour. The song is just so accessible; it’s so easy for us to project ourselves into these snippets of this relationship. It’s just daydreaming, and at the end of the day, that’s what romance will either start out as or always be.

It’s the longing for that daydream that’s the most poignant here. It resonates, word after word, line after line. The song feels like a diary entry it’s so personal, and it’s that personality that never gets old for me. That sweetness, that love, that ‘it couldn’t happen but I wished it would’, and that hope of ‘but maybe it will’. Those are the ideas that we buy into, the cotton candy sensation of a sweet, temporary fix. We sit back with grubby fingers and an empty bag wanting more and more and I personally love it, I suppose as much as McCann does. Maybe we all do, because despite the sorrow we feel when it’s over, we just can’t seem to shake how wonderful it was while it happened.