Album: Empty Glass
Year: 1980
I’m not going to lie: it took me awhile to come around on “Let My Love Open The Door.” After all, there were hardly any guitars on it, and it was an unexpectedly massive hit single, meaning it was all over the radio all over the time, while the far more deserving “Rough Boys” kinda got buried.
But at some point over the decades, “Let My Love Open The Door” wore down my resistance, and now I’m a total sucker for one of the most straightforward pop songs that Pete Townshend ever wrote. And I kinda consider it one of the rarest of birds: a non-danceable synth-pop song. (And indeed, because of The Who’s rhythm section, it wasn’t like Townshend wrote a lot of danceable songs, even though dancing was one of his lyrical motifs going back to when he declared he didn’t mind other guys dancing with his girl.)
Starting with a synth squiggling right towards you, “Let My Open The Door” starts off simple enough:
When people keep repeating
That you’ll never fall in love
When everybody keeps retreating
But you can’t seem to get enoughLet my love open the door
Let my love open the door
Let my love open the door
To your heart
It’s with the first chorus where Townshend unleashes a whole bunch of cool production tricks: first, there pre-echo on every single instance of his singing the title, then there’s a really cool round-robin vocal arrangement on the post-chorus.
My love open the door
Tooooooooooooooo
My love open the door
Tooooooooooooooo
My love open the door
Tooooooooooooooo
Those vocals are repeated so much, they almost become another instrument, but they also provide both a constant hook and a counterpoint of complexity to the almost sappy lyrics.
When everything feels all over
Everybody seems unkind
I’ll give you a four-leaf clover
Take all worry out of your mind
That, of course, is on purpose: unlike a lot of the other songs on Empty Glass, where Townshend lets his natural bent towards overthinking and ambiguity muddy up the message a bit, there isn’t any of that in “Let My Love Open The Door.” It is what it says it is, which is why you’re so lucky he’s around.
And I think that’s why it resonated with people: insanely catchy throughout, but also easy to grok lyrically. And in fact, “Let My Love Open The Door” was only the second Townshend-penned song to crack the Billboard Top 10, matching future Certain Song “I Can See For Miles” at #9, which is kinda weird that two incredibly disparate songs are his biggest singles, but why not?
“Let My Love Open The Door”
“Let My Love Open The Door” official music video (terrible sound, but featuring Big Country’s future rhythm section)
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