Love Is Only a Feeling

The Darkness may believe in a thing called love, but in this song, it's only a feeling. Lead singer Justin Hawkins sings about how love isn't really real: it's just a feeling we have, nothing more. We as humans have a tendency to make love out to be this big, otherworldly thing that transcends all and will take away our pain, but it's just another emotion.

In a Songfacts interview with Justin Hawkins, he explained that this song was not about a specific person. "It's more a hybrid recollection, drawn up of lots of internal dialogue on the subject of hearts and all that," he said. "When we wrote that one, I was thinking, 'People always say that it's more than a feeling.' It really isn't. It's just that: it's a feeling. So, I wanted to express that, really. Because for me, that's enough. The way you feel is really essential to what frames your perception of a day or of an existence. I struggle with the idea that it can be any more than that... or is there?"

In their native UK, this was the last single from The Darkness' debut album Permission to Land; it charted in April 2004, more than a year after the album's first single, "Get Your Hands Off My Woman," touched down on the chart. By this time, the group was collecting gongs for their 2003 accomplishments: they won BRIT awards for Best British Album and Best British Group, and earned the Ivor Novello Award for Songwriters of the Year. They had a hard time getting it together for their next album, which didn't appear until late in 2005. The following year, Justin Hawkins left the band, shuttering the group until 2011. The single wasn't released in America, where The Darkness didn't break through like they hoped.