 " Love Somebody " is a dance @-@ pop song with a length of three minutes and forty @-@ nine seconds . It is written in the key of D ♭ major and its instrumentation consists of piano and guitar . Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone described the song 's synth hook as the Sly Stone @-@ meets @-@ Eurythmics . According to Chris Payne of Billboard , Tedder and Zancanella 's influence is all over the song and inches through the verses " before bubbling over just before the chorus kicks in . " Adam Markovitz of Entertainment Weekly in a review of the album , wrote that the song together with " Daylight " have " thickly " produced choruses . Lyrically , " Love Somebody " equates love and physical intimacy , with Levine singing : " I really wanna love somebody [ ... ] I really wanna touch somebody " . Nate Chinen of The New York Times described the lyrical theme of the song as " a plea for salvation on the dance floor or some other horizontal surface " . 
