Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, a holiday celebrating love and romance. The holiday of course has its traditions, like showering your special someone with a box of chocolates, a bouquet of flowers and a nice dinner. But love isn’t always so picture perfect. Sometimes love is aching, painful and desperate. Just like how Christmas has its soundtrack, so does Valentine’s Day. Most love songs are sweet ballads, but some love songs show the desperate and painful side of love. None show this better than Eric Clapton’s “Layla,” in my opinion the most powerful love song ever written, a song written out of pure desperation and melancholic longing for someone Clapton was so close to, but also worlds away from.

The story begins in 1966 when Clapton, who was then the lead guitarist for British blues-rock band The Yardbirds, met Pattie Boyd, a model who had a role in The Beatles’ film “A Hard Day’s Night.” Boyd had recently married Clapton’s best friend George Harrison, the lead guitarist for The Beatles, but Clapton became overwhelmingly lovestricken for Boyd and began writing her anonymous love letters. Boyd assumed the letters were simply the work of just another crazy fan until Clapton called her on the phone to confirm that she had gotten his letter.

Over the next few months, as Harrison began multiple affairs and their relationship deteriorated, Boyd became closer with Clapton, who continued writing her more love letters in which he addressed her as “Layla,” which he derived from the subject of a 12th-century Persian poem. Around this time Clapton formed a new band called “Derek and the Dominos” in 1970, and with this band Clapton began writing “Layla.”

One day, Clapton invited Boyd to his home to show her something. In her 2007 biography, Boyd described her memory of that day. “He switched on the tape machine, turned up the volume and played me the most powerful, moving song I had ever heard,” she wrote. “It was ‘Layla,’ about a man who falls hopelessly in love with a woman who loves him but is unavailable.”

Clapton played it two or three times to watch Boyd’s reaction, but she didn’t react positively at first. In her autobiography, Boyd wrote, “I felt uncomfortable that he was pushing me in a direction I wasn’t certain I wanted to go.”

However, with her marriage to Harrison faltering and Clapton showing her the affection she felt that she wasn’t receiving, Boyd stated, “The realisation that I had inspired such passion and creativity, the song got the better of me. I could resist no longer.”

Harrison found out about their affair that same night while at a party, and Boyd left with him that night, according to Boyd’s autobiography. Boyd dropped out of contact with Clapton for years, while Clapton entered a deep depression alongside heavy substance use until 1975 when he began talking to Boyd again. With her marriage to Harrison in shambles, he once again confessed his love to her. This time she accepted, leaving him in 1977 for Clapton. The two married in 1979.

So what makes the song “the most powerful love song ever written?” Well, the song immediately opens strong with Clapton playing the song’s iconic and indelible guitar lick. He is then joined by the booming chorus made up by the rest of the instruments, creating one of the most powerful intros in all of ’70s rock. The intro is immediately followed by his poetic lyrics begging for Boyd’s attention, begging on his knees for her to ease his worried mind, begging for her to find a way for them to be together, while also telling the story of his love to Boyd with subtle references to the poem he drew the name “Layla” from, through lines like “When your old man had let you down / Like a fool, I fell in love with you / You turned my whole world upside down.”

The first half of the song contains the three verses that tell the story of Clapton’s love for Boyd, with each verse being broken up by the iconic chorus, “Layla / You got me on my knees, Layla / Begging, darling please, Layla / Darling, won’t you ease my worried mind?”

The second half of the song is Clapton repeating the chorus. Each time he says Layla his voice becomes more desperate, until eventually he’s begging and screaming for her, unleashing all of his pain and suffering onto this track. When he is done singing, you can feel his exhaustion, like he’s poured everything he had into his vocal performance. His longing pain is then immediately picked up by Duane Allman’s guitar solo, which is just otherworldly. Allman makes his guitar sing out Clapton’s agonizing longing with his incredibly potent slides and vibratos. He then masterfully winds down the guitar, making it feel like the song has collapsed from exhaustion before the transition to the piano exit of the song.

For all four minutes, depending on how you feel, the piano exit can feel like you’ve passed out and are floating through the atmosphere as you feel nothing but pure ethereality with the gentle, twangy guitar, or the piano exit can feel like pure heartbreak itself and can feel like you’ve lost as you walk away defeated as others feel the joy that you couldn’t feel with the deep piano chords and fade-out at the end of the song. I couldn’t name a single other piece that manages to capture such a wide array of emotions like Layla’s second half does.

Overall, the entire song is extremely powerful, and not just from a music perspective. “Layla” was Clapton putting all his pain and desperation into a gamble on who mattered to him the most, a gamble which eventually paid off for him. The piece remains timeless, as very few other songs were made under incredible circumstances like these that capture the deepest longing and the raw emotions that Clapton felt for Boyd. “Layla” remains Clapton’s magnum opus, and in my opinion one of the best songs in all of rock. So while you celebrate your Valentine’s Day, it could be worth listening to “Layla” and just feeling the raw power of love.