I love, love mainstream dance pop. I’m talking about “Teenage Dream” and “I Found Love.” It’s weird because I’ve never danced at a club, and it’s the type of music that’s meant to be disposable, the type of music that serious music lovers like myself are supposed to despise.

Yet I can’t help but smile,  and nod my head, to feel happy inside when I hear these songs. There is something real, something significant going on in these processed beats and vocals. These songs are a pure expression of love.

As Katy Perry or Rihanna vocals soar over synth and bass lines, the darkness and pain of love disappears.  All you can feel is the joy of it; the joy of the first kiss, of the electricity when skin touches. Inside these songs, that joy of first infatuation, of first falling for someone, is the only thing that exists. The seriousness of relationships doesn’t cloud the purity of that beautiful feeling. These sounds collect into something that never makes you sad, just happiness at the possibilities of love.

When Tegan and Sara released “Closer,” I hadn’t thought about love, or at least love as something I could have, in a long time. Just things in my personal life had made the idea of love feel far away. I had trouble listening to the numerous songs about love without feeling sad.

Tegan and Sara are one of my favorite bands, so naturally I am eager to hear their first new music in years.

I was overjoyed by what was coming out of my speakers. They were singing the type of dancey pure love songs that get played on the radio, but they were doing it with their talent and sensitivity toward music. I must have listened to the song 15 times the first day it was released.

Inside of Teagan Quinn’s bouncy vocals, inside her lyrics about love before, as she herself put it, “sex, complicated relationships, drama and heartbreak,” I could feel the anger inside me slip away. I had a smile on my face that no one could erase. Whatever darkness was in me was gone.

Now, ever since I’ve been listening to the song. The idea of love doesn’t seem so far away. It now feels like something I can touch and can hold. The world seems a little brighter. A world filled with possibilities.

My whole world was changed by one song; it proves what music can do for people, how it’s so much more than just background noise. Neither does the music have to be sophisticated and intellectual, whether it’s a Miley Cyrus song or a Beatles song as long as it means something to you it has value.

I’m not saying that an album by Katy Perry or Lady Gaga has the same depth or  sense of musical history that   an album like Bob Dylan’s “Freewheelin’” has. You can listen to “Freewheelin” for decades  in a way not possible with these silly love songs.

But as Paul McCartney knows, sometimes you need a  silly love song to remind you what’s beautiful in life.