The Dylan tune that starts out "My love she speaks like silence" is entitled "Love Minus Zero / No Limit." It's my wife's single absolute favorite song.

I'd also like to mention another lovely-if-unconventional love song from the same album, "She Belongs to Me," whose lyrics start "She's got everything she needs, she's an artist, she don't look back."

My favorite romantic *recording* of all time would have to be the doo-wop version of "I Only Have Eyes for You," as performed by the Flamingos, produced by Harvey Fuqua in Chicago in the late 1950s. I still get goosebumps whenever I hear it, and wonder at the fact that no other record before or since has ever created a remotely similar sonic atmosphere.

The song itself is a pop "standard" from the 1930s and has been recorded many, many times (normally in a more "straight-ahead" style, or as the "fake-book" basis for jazz improvisation). I would have guessed it was written by Cole Porter, but I just looked it up and the music is by Harry Warren and lyrics by Al Dubin -- hardly household names.

Little-known fact: R&B legend Ernie K-Doe was a member of the Flamingos as a teenager. His mother had brought him to Chicago in an effort to break him into show business, but he returned home to New Orleans within a year or two and spent the rest of his life here. About a year before he died in 2001, he began claiming credit for the lead vocal on "Eyes," which is probably not true. However, he may well have been one of the background voices on the record. There is no doubt he was a member of the group at one point, since his face appears in the group photo on the front of the "Best of the Flamingos" LP and CD.