Love Her Madly

The most immediately accessible song in The Doors' catalog, "Love Her Madly" benefits from a relatively straightforward structure and a Robby Krieger guitar hook that lodges itself in the brain without permission. The track opens the final album Morrison recorded with the full band, and there's something slightly valedictory about its surface pleasantness — as though everyone involved had decided, consciously or not, to make something that didn't require the listener to work. Manzarek's organ fills are particularly lovely here, dancing around Krieger's melody with the ease of musicians who have been playing together long enough to leave space for each other. Morrison's lyric is not among his most ambitious, but it carries a genuine emotional logic: a man who knows he is difficult to love but cannot stop asking for it anyway, who presents his own madness as a kind of warning and a kind of offer. The production is warmer than the early albums, the rawness softened. Best heard at the start of something rather than the end.