The Question Ellie Goulding Asks That You Can’t Answer

Mike Scott wrote How Long Will I Love You for The Waterboys back in 1988, and it already had that quality of a question asked quietly into the dark. Ellie Goulding’s 2013 cover—recorded for Richard Curtis’s About Time—strips it back further, her voice almost conversational, which somehow makes it worse. You’re not being carried anywhere by production; you’re just being asked, plainly, how long. It stays with you.