Number Ones: Calvin Harris & Disciples’ ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ (And Why There’s So Many Songs Called ‘How Deep Is Your Love’)
Seeing as Calvin Harris's first album was sardonically titled 'I Created Disco', it's pretty bloody likely he’s heard of the Bee Gees.
Bringing his popular column to Junkee, musicologist Tim Byron takes a deep dive into the song at the top of the ARIA Singles Chart.
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In 1997, upon being nominated to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, the Bee Gees took part in an interview with Rolling Stone in which the interviewer asked the question, “How deep is your love?”
Clearly this was a question the Bee Gees had been asked before. Barry Gibb replied “extremely deep”; Maurice chimed in with, “Oh, it’s fucking deep”; and Robin said his was “a huge, festering pit.” (In the same interview, when asked “What exactly is more than a woman?”, Robin replied: “Three tits. Two vaginas.” Oh, the ‘90s.)
This is a roundabout way of pointing out that Calvin Harris & Disciples’ ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ – which hit the top of the ARIA charts this week — is not the first song that’s been called that. And seeing as Calvin Harris’s first album was sardonically titled I Created Disco, it’s pretty bloody likely he’s heard of the Bee Gees.
In fact, it’s not even the second song called ‘How Deep Is Your Love’: there was a 1998 single of the same title by R&B vocal group Dru Hill, which featured on the soundtrack to Rush Hour and got to #13 in the Australian charts in 1999.
Then there was the 2012 single by Sean Paul and Kelly Rowland that didn’t make the charts here, but which has 33 million views on YouTube. It apparently got to #3 in the charts in Bulgaria, of all places.
So: why are there so many songs called ‘How Deep Is Your Love’? And why is this one at the top of the ARIA charts?
Let’s take a look at the second question first.
Calvin Harris Is The Biggest DJ In The World
Since his 2011 collaboration with Rihanna, ‘We Found Love’, Calvin Harris has been commercially unstoppable. His 2014 album, Motion, features no less than three UK #1 singles, and five singles from that album have gone platinum in Australia. According to Forbes, he’s the highest-paid DJ in the world, earning $66 million in the last year; his closest competitor, David Guetta, only earned $37 million.
Harris and Taylor Swift are famously an item; she apparently mouthed “I love you” to him recently, on stage. One suspects it was thanks to the Swift connection that her pal Gigi Hadid ended up as the star of Harris’s clip.
The success of ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ suggests that Harris is now in the position where hit singles just fall into his lap. The song was co-written last year by English house group Disciples and Norwegian songwriter Ina Wroldsen (who also sings on this recording). Disciples are signed to Calvin Harris’s publishing company Fly-Eye, meaning he has a commercial stake in their writing being featured on hit songs – so when he heard a demo he must have thought, “Yup, I can make that a hit”.
A couple of suggestions about the beat, a few turns of some knobs later, and Harris had a songwriting and production credit; meanwhile, Ina Wroldsen — who sings the bloody song, and probably wrote most of the melody and lyrics — doesn’t get near a byline. This is common in the world of dancefloor hit singles: Avicii’s ‘Wake Me Up’ has Aloe Blacc uncredited on vocals, while Lost Frequencies’ ‘Are You With Me’ doesn’t credit singer Easton Corbin. Calvin Harris is the real star here: he’s the world’s biggest superstar DJ, and his name (well, his brand; his real name is Adam Wiles) is a big part of why this song is at #1.
The Sound Of EDM In 2015
In recent years, Calvin Harris’s brand of EDM has usually consisted of immaculate-sounding trend-hopping that is eminently danceable, but often kind of bland. Diplo wants you to notice his beats, but Calvin Harris wants them to be brutally functional.
In 2011, a track like ‘We Found Love’ had the fat arena synths, the Rihanna vocal, and the big beats that were de rigueur in the post-Guetta world. But in 2015, commercial EDM has moved away from all that. The big thing at the moment, as far as the top of the charts are concerned, is “tropical house”: a sub-genre inclined towards an almost-chill-out feel and sped-up vocals, which takes in tracks like Omi’s ‘Cheerleader (Felix Jaehn Remix)’ and Lost Frequencies ‘Are You With Me’ — and which has also now influenced ‘How Deep Is Your Love’.
Outside of the ‘tropical house’ thing, ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ echoes the likes of ‘Lean On’ by Major Lazer, with its post-chorus based around the manipulation of wordless vocal sounds into melodies. In a funny way, the mix of sounds reminds me of the hit Todd Terry remix of Everything But The Girl’s ‘Missing’ from 1996; the drum machines sound similar, there’s a similar bass rhythm, and the way Wroldsen’s vocals float over the mix works in the same way too.
The most surprising thing about ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ is that Calvin Harris & Disciples kept Ina Wroldsen’s vocal, rather than replacing her with a bigger name. But perhaps that’s in keeping with tropical house: the way songs like ‘Cheerleader’ or ‘Are You With Me’ speed up vocals makes them sound less like singers singing words that are meant to mean things, and more like just another instrument. (Which also could explain why she didn’t get a credit.)
There are some nice touches on ‘How Deep Is Your Love’, which elevate it beyond the run-of-the-mill Calvin Harris tune. The intro and first verse stay on the same chord, giving the first chorus a bit of a lift. And there’s the very Daft Punk-esque vocoder robot vocals – “So tell me how deep is your love / Could it get deeper?” — which enter in the middle 8 as they do in ‘Get Lucky’, providing a deeper-voiced counterpoint to Ina Wroldsen’s repeated questioning of the depth of your affection.
There seems to also be a definite pull to the titular question, as evinced by the four different songs that share the title. Calvin Harris and Disciples certainly know the power of the phrase: they repeat it over twenty times. So let’s explore why that might be.
How Deep Is Your Love? And: Why Does It Matter?
The question is a rhetorical one, of course — that’s why the Bee Gees could joke about it to Rolling Stone. But it’s an old question, and it has persisted: The Bee Gees’ lyrics themselves might have been influenced by the 1932 Irving Berlin song ‘How Deep Is The Ocean?’, where Berlin answers the question “How much do I love you?” with a further series of rhetorical questions: “How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky?” (A question Wroldsen repeats: “How deep is your love? Is it like the ocean?”)
Incidentally, science tells us that the deepest point of the ocean thus far found is about 10km down, and the Kármán line – the point where the atmosphere ends and space begins – is 100km up or so. Unlike the ocean and the sky, though, love resides within us, so there’s nothing we can do to definitively prove how much of it we have. Any gestures of love — the box of chocolates, the commitments, the kind words, even the ring — could have plenty of other motives behind them, and could be aped by anyone regardless of their love.
But while it can’t be measured, love does seem to be on a spectrum; some people do seem more in love than others. Through the course of a relationship, we often feel that we are more or less in love than we were a year ago. And the most common lens through which to understand that spectrum comes via the metaphor of depth — as Elvis knew when he sang about how he ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’; as Stevie Wonder knew when he sang ‘From The Bottom of My Heart’; and as The Triffids knew when they sang ‘Bury Me Deep In Love’.
Perhaps that’s one reason why ‘How Deep Is Your Love?’ has persisted as a question to be tackled in song. Love is something we feel, but have trouble explaining or describing in words; something with uncertain depths. Sometimes we don’t really know if we ourselves are in love — perhaps we don’t quite remember what it used to feel like, or perhaps we aren’t in close touch with our emotions.
Nor can others explain their love to us — and until we know someone pretty damn intimately, it’s hard to know with much certainty why they behave the way they do. Maybe that girl really loves you, but isn’t very good at expressing herself — or maybe you’re just a simple prop to occupy her time. Maybe he’s acting head-over-heels in love because it’s how he gets what he wants — or maybe it’s really how he feels. We don’t know how deep their love is. Maybe they don’t know either.
Let’s Not Shit Ourselves: To Love And Be Loved
We want the other person to not just act nice to us but to be in love, and we want to be sure of it. Love feels damn good, and deeper love feels even better. The flipside is it feels fucking awful when it ends. Half of the songs that have ever been written point this out – and if Taylor Swift and Calvin Harris ever break up, the chances are high that she’ll add another to the pile. (Well, either that or it’ll be a meta song about how everyone expects a break-up song about him.)
We know it’s going to feel pretty shit if we get broken up with, so we do our best to be a better person, to avoid the stupid shit we might do if we didn’t quite care so much. Perhaps love is some form of mutually assured destruction.
And that’s why the question — how deep is your love? — matters. We want to know that the other person is invested in the relationship; that they won’t break up with us over something trivial, or because someone else walked past. But there’s always going to be that element of doubt. If there were harsh words yesterday, or if the honeymoon period of the relationship is over, or if life circumstances have changed — or if we don’t necessarily like ourselves much — we can be left to wonder, do they really love us? Maybe they only love us a bit? How much do they love us?
If you don’t relate to the question of course, all the repetitions in ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ just sound repetitive . But if you’re feeling the song, and if you’re asking the question, the repetitions succeed: they sound like further calls into the void of uncertain emotions we can sense, but can’t confirm.
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