‘I Found Love,’ The Free Design
Have you ever experienced a perfect day, where the sun is shining, it’s not too hot, and you’re in a field running and laughing, butterflies and flowers all around you and birds landing on your fingers as you sing to them?
No? I think the Free Design has.
The brother-and-sister quartet blended unbelievable harmonies to some of the most upbeat, innocent songs of the late 1960s, the epitome of the sunshine pop genre — “Daniel Dolphin,” “Bubbles,” “Kites are Fun” (they are!) and the subject of today’s post, “I Found Love.” Someone in the group must have just gone on the best date of their lives, for the song gushes with happiness.
“I Found Love” begins simply, with only an acoustic guitar, recorders and a triangle (a triangle!), and one male voice proclaims “I found love!” followed by the trademark harmonies answering, “Didn’t even know I needed it.” The call-and-answer continues — “But I found love, never even crossed my mind…” — for a few lines until it leads into the sing-song chorus: “I found love in the fall, and it did not hurt at all! I found love in the spring, and I did not lose a thing!” The harmonies are so close but so intricate —, they remind you of the Four Freshmen or the Beach Boys. This isn’t your basic Crosby, Stills & Nash harmonies. It’s as if only blood relatives can do this. Trumpets and trombones join in the fun in the chorus as well.
The song continues in the happy vein, mentioning soft summer showers, sunlight, flowers, fingers tingling and tootsies tapping; one minute into the song, you find that your tootsies are tapping, and you can “feel the feather in [your] head…a lightness, politeness” in your brain.
By the time the song ends way too soon at 2 minutes and 38 seconds, you want to tell the world of your own joy, running and laughing and flying your own kite.
