Falling “So In Love” With Curtis Mayfield and Orchestral Manouevres In the Dark

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Apple Music is celebrating its 10th anniversary, my streaming app tells me. For the occasion, they’ve made a playlist of the 100 songs I’ve listened to the most in my decade-plus as a subscriber. Near the top are the usual suspects—two tracks from REO Speedwagon, “Stumblin’ In” (which I listened to 838 times in 2022 alone), and a smattering of music I heard first in a television show and have loved ever since, like Dion’s “Only You Know” (Ozark), the Vogues’ “You’re the One” (The Queen’s Gambit), Fleet Foxes’ “Montezuma” (Girls), and the Avett Brothers’ “No Hard Feelings” (Love). But just 10 spots apart are “So In Love” and “So In Love,” great but not top-billed tracks from Curtis Mayfield and Orchestral Manouevres In the Dark, respectively—one song I discovered cosmically, in the infancy of my Apple Music days, and one song I discovered accidentally, in the throes of an ever-evolving synth-pop obsession.

My biggest compulsion is repetition. I watch things over and over. I listen to things over and over. I eat the same food almost every day. But in that repetition is a gesture of comfortability, and I have a compendium of “sleep songs”—songs that I play to fall asleep and wake up hearing, including (but not limited to) Peter, Paul & Mary’s “Early Mornin’ Rain,” Cassandra Jenkins’ “Hard Drive,” and the Capris’ “There’s a Moon Out Tonight.” What I am trying to say is: I listen to a lot of music, and I listen to a lot of music a lot. And, if Apple Music is a reputable agent of accuracy, then it should be noted that, in the catalogued history of my musical habits from 2015 until now, I have only listened to 11 songs more than Curtis Mayfield’s “So In Love” and I have only listened to 20 songs more than OMD’s “So In Love.”

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I found Mayfield’s “So In Love” in the same fashion as many other millennials and older zoomers: through Grand Theft Auto V, thanks to Frank Ocean’s in-game radio station, Blonded Radio. I grew up in the rural Midwest, far enough away from city civilization that no light pollution so much as crept into my skies. As a teenager, all I had were virtual nights under the banner of Los Santos, roving violently down freeways while the same hundred songs shuffled across a dozen channels. But there was a moment, during nightfall, where “So In Love” came on and shared its perfection with me. I used to play videogames because I had no one. GTA V, despite its faults, teleported me into necessary fantasy: I could drive and it didn’t matter how far; I could spend money and it didn’t matter how much.

And when I heard “So In Love” for the first time, Harold Dessent’s woodwinds, which color the atmosphere of There’s No Place Like America Today entirely, came rushing in under the cover of Lucky Scott’s vibrating bass and Rich Tufo’s keyboards. The title isn’t a misnomer; “So In Love” is for the romantics. I began waiting for the song, tuning into every in-game night and postponing missions for the sake of catching just a second of Mayfield’s high-heaven voice and sobbing organs. I could have just played the song on my cellphone, but there was no magic in that. I could never figure out the algorithm or predict its arrival, though; the song always found me, not the other way around. I learned soon enough that you can’t play Grand Theft Auto forever, but I certainly did try to and still do, as its successor gets hit with repeated delays. But eventually, my PlayStation 3 gave up, so I went to the Record Connection in nearby Niles, Ohio to buy a copy of There’s No Place Like America Today on vinyl. They didn’t have it, so I spent my college years lying in bed with an iPhone by my ear, sitting with the cooing warmth of “So In Love” until I could draw it from memory.

There’s No Place Like America Today was a bleak yet comforting dissection of post-Nixon America—a collection of songs expounding on love, sensuality, and survival’s existence under the thumb of systematic oppression. The tranquility of “So In Love” momentarily banishes the album’s fits of God and funk. “Life is strange,” Mayfield sings, his falsetto struggling. “Believe me, it is true: We don’t always mean the things we sometimes do. Look at me, look at you.” Dessent’s saxophone swells but never colossally, invoking a divide between splendor and sensibility. Quinton Joseph’s drumming putters on like a low-riding Oldsmobile crawling through traffic; he bats a cymbal and the air around him is touched into velvet. If “So In Love” is to suggest anything to its listeners, it is that to be alive is to be political—to be in love is to be political, and to love and to hope means you must be ready to sacrifice in the name of peace. “You do so many things with a smiling face,” Mayfield sings, pushing a psalm into the language of the living.

I would have never found out about Curtis Mayfield had it not been for Blonded Radio in a game I begged my parents to let me play. He wasn’t signed to Motown, and he wasn’t the leader of a hard-rock band, and he wasn’t a chart-topper during the Reagan years. Curtis and Super Fly weren’t on rotation in my household, except for when the latter’s title track showed up in episode five of Freaks and Geeks. By the time millions fell victim to the Stranger Things boom of ‘80s nostalgia in July 2016, I’d already been there for a decade—placed into the clutches of commodified retrospect lovingly by my mom, who graduated high school in 1988 and kept her car radio dial tuned to MIX 98.9, Youngstown’s “80s to Now” station.

DURING THE WEEK, hits of the aughts and 2010s would rummage into 98.9’s focus. But the station’s weekends were reserved for big hairdos and ostentatious materialism, for clashes of Prince and Madonna and one-hit wonders barely hanging on to FM relevancy. It bled into what reality waited for me outside of the car: Mom took me to a Def Leppard and Poison concert on the day Michael Jackson died; she taught me that George Michael and Rick Springfield were timeless heartthrobs; she loaded my blue iPod Shuffle with songs by Bon Jovi and Duran Duran, bands I learned about on hour-long VH1 specials and remembered the names and motions of. And, though every year came with gifts in tribute to my evolving childhood taste, perhaps none were as definitive as the Pure 80s CD she bought for me in 2004 or 2005. I wore the disc out until it was too scratched to spin.

Bless her heart, but my mom’s taste has always been relatively mainstream—a parallel, most likely, to what the pop charts looked like when she was coming of age. Maybe that’s why I eventually abandoned my own out-of-time worship of AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and Green Day for the Top 40 around the time Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream came out. I can remember it perfectly, coming home from basketball camp and hearing “California Gurls” for the first time while riding shotgun through Amish country. I imagine Mom had felt that way about “Jessie’s Girl” or “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” once—that sense of discovery, held without a care for whether or not anyone else in the world was having it, too. I’ve tried to maintain that fascination in the needling 15 years that have come since, speaking of songs by Drake, Bob Dylan, and Tame Impala with equal sincerity as their phases come and go.

And there have been many phases: the Mac DeMarco-ification of my junior year; computer classes spent filling out Sporcle quizzes about Dylan album titles; writing Kurt Cobain quotes on Hanes blanks; sweating through Warped Tour and watching pop-punk YouTube creators; getting so into Frank Sinatra that I stayed up until 3 AM on a school night to watch High Society on the Turner Classic Movies channel; holstering my Cleveland pride into a listening buffet of Machine Gun Kelly, Kid Cudi, Chip Tha Ripper, and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony once the MySpace years bled completely into Facebook.

But my favorite phase came briefly in the summer of 2023, when I was working on my greatest synth-pop albums list for Paste and spent a great amount of time with Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark’s 1981 LP Architecture & Morality. I had known of OMD before then, thanks to an interest in their perfect hit song (from Pretty In Pink) “If You Leave” and knowing that “Electricity” was a big reason why the band Nation of Language formed. I eventually made it to Crush, their sixth record, and heard the excitements of “Enola Gay” and “Radio Waves” become more polished and saccharine—thanks to Stephen Hague’s sparkling production. OMD made Crush on a time-crunch, and co-founder Paul Humphreys even briefly quit the band during the sessions. None of that mattered, though: Crush became a Top-40 album and wielded songs like “Secret,” “La Femme Accident,” and OMD’s first-ever US hit, the dense but rapturous “So In Love”—a song that, with every listen, comes unglued by its impossible beauty.

The synth-pop happening in Europe at the time juggled melodrama, romance, and alienation transcribed through electronics. Some called it stiff, others lamented a lack of “real instruments” on New Wave recordings. But OMD made gorgeous pop music that also happened to feature synthesizers on the marquee. How the voices of Humphreys and Andy McCluskey wrap around each other while Martin Cooper’s saxophone yowls in delicious spurts on “So In Love,” it makes sense that John Hughes tasked the band with writing and performing the definitive song from Pretty In Pink. Maybe OMD wasn’t as disaffected as Cabaret Voltaire or as android-y as solo Gary Numan, but Humphreys and McCluskey weren’t all that irregular: They cut their teeth in the same club as the Beatles and were as keen on hocking the sights and sounds of Ultravox as they were the The The.

But Crush was seen as OMD’s sell-out moment. If the definition of “sell-out” means grasping at chart pertinence then, sure, maybe Humphreys and McCluskey gave away their integrity for a measly brush with popularity. Look closer at Crush, however, and you’ll find critical takes on love (“Hold You,” “Women III”) juxtaposed with big-budget, MTV-ready hooks (“Bloc, Bloc, Bloc”) and a trumpet solo from Neil Weir that can’t forgive the addition of odd, pitch-shifted Japanese voices (“Crush”). The album is eclectic—part adventure, part mainstream, part haunted by the precedent of Architecture & Morality’s singularity. Some critics may argue that OMD’s charm fell apart after Dazzle Ships in 1983. I say that “So In Love” was their final bewitching missive, as McCluskey relinquishes the chorus to Humphreys, who sings: “Heaven is cold without any soul.” I think then about Mayfield’s words in his own “So In Love”—how “This love affair is bigger than we two, lose the faith and it will swallow you” sounds like a perfect response.

OMD were one of the only groups of its era to break away from post-punk, flourish in electronica, and earnestly ascend into the pop mainstream. They inspired the Pet Shop Boys to start making music together, and some of their peers, like Alphaville, Duran Duran, and Tears for Fears, cited them as influences along the way. You get Talk Talk, ABC, and Yazoo because of OMD. Their music is immediately charming, absorbed by the likes of Kraftwerk, the Human League, and Nine Inch Nails. ZZ Top started using synthesizers because of OMD. Gary Numan once admitted that OMD was responsible for “some of the best pop songs ever written.” I’d wager “So In Love” meets that criteria. If what Interview said about “If You Leave” is true, that it’s “one of the most influential, zeitgeist-capturing songs ever to be written,” then let’s agree that “So In Love” is its understated, transformative synth-pop sibling—perhaps OMD’s last true tug of the underground before embracing Top-40 modicum.

And decades before any of this, Cole Porter wrote a song called “So In Love” in 1948, for his musical called Kiss Me, Kate. Patti Page popularized it a year later, and names like Sinatra, k.d. lang, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, and Peggy Lee would cover it eventually. It’s a vocal standard that was once a timeless show tune, but you might be shocked to know how few original compositions have ever been titled “So In Love” in the 77 years since Porter first put his pen to paper. A Smash Records group named the Festivals would do it in the early ‘70s, but those guys never got the break they deserved. Who’d have thought that three words memorializing humanity’s greatest reward would be so pathless?

Luckily, we got a couple within a ten-year span. Curtis Mayfield’s version of “So In Love” bears no resemblance to Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark’s beyond both songs employing flawless saxophone solos. They exist in separate genres and separate idioms. But to hold these two efforts together so closely, and to have them linked by name, feels like a gift I’ve not yet encountered otherwise. Maybe, in due time, Miley Cyrus’ “End of the World” and Herman Hermits’ “The End of the World” will usurp them. For now, my heart pledges allegiance to dear Curtis and those Merseyside boys. There is a strange cord connecting “So In Love” and “So In Love.” In other universes, they likely don’t intersect at all. But in mine, they are inseparable.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

Falling “So In Love” With Curtis Mayfield and Orchestral Manouevres In the Dark

10 years apart, Mayfield and OMD wrote two of the prettiest songs I’ve ever heard and titled them both the same.