0.6.2 - What is love? Baby don't hurt me
For two people who spend a lot of time listening to and discussing and sharing music, we somehow don't have 'a song'. No first dance, no specifically special tune that we attach to our relationship in any way. Obviously, if for any reason we were no longer together, fully fifty percent of the albums I've listened to over the last fifteen years, on holidays, on road trips, or just hanging out together would have to be permanently retired. Maybe we don't have a song because we have three hundred different songs, all representing one part of the long journey we have been on together. For Valentine's day this year, I bought her a box of fancy chocolates from the ethical chocolate company she likes (not an official sponsor, just a happy customer); she sent me a Whatsapp message at 1.20pm and then went out in the evening to play Tennis, leaving me to type this.
While I regularly say that the pattern and schedule of my music consumption isn't controlled in any meaningful way, and it's just where my whims and fate take me, there are some albums that I always knew I was going to do for certain beats on the calendar. Listening to 69 Love Songs for Valentine's Day has been on that list since I started this in January, though as it came closer, I started to get more nervous. It's been a while since I'd listened to the whole thing, nearly 3 hours of music on three discs (back when I owned it on CD, at least). But Valentine's fell on a Friday, work has been omega-hectic and one of my key team members just left to have a baby the day before. Could I really afford to spend 3 hours listening to one album? And what on earth was I going to write about it?
Well, I did, but part of the reason you are reading this on a Saturday night* and not on a Friday is because I did - it essentially took me the entire day to listen to it, threading bursts of songs in between phone calls and meetings, and a blissful thirty-five minute uninterrupted segment in the afternoon where I walked to the pharmacy and back. It's certainly not the optimal way to consume that album, but consume it I did, and in those brief moments where I could, I thought carefully about the whole album and how it made me feel.
There's something fundamental about a concept album; of which 69 Love Songs exists as a grandiose example of the form. This is top-down album design; there's no gradual accretion of studio tracks, tied only loosely together by the authors mental state at the time of writing. Instead, we start with a statement of intent - we will write a 3 album statement about love in all its forms, charting relationships from the giddiness of new romance, to the insecurity and ill communication of relationships trying to find their way through tough times, to the bitter sting of loss and emptiness, and the steadfast resolve to pick yourself up and try again the next time. I was going to say that not all these tracks are songs, but what is a song? A twenty-nine second ?concept?/?musical sketch? like Experimental Music Love isn't going to make it onto the radio, but if The Magnetic Fields say its a song, who am I to deny them? But scattered throughout the tracks are some genuine gems of lo-fi indie music which absolutely nail the brief; The Luckiest Guy On The Lower East Side, The Book Of Love, Acoustic Guitar, Bitter Tears, Epitaph For My Heart, I could just spend the rest of this article listing well constructed and beautiful celebrations and lamentations of the power of relationships.
I think someone, somewhere, could make the argument that if you distilled this album down, focused on only the truly best tracks, this could have been 13 Really Great Love Song That Wins The Mercury Music Prize. But the concept, and its necessary imperfections and oddities, is the point. It's not a casual listen, both in terms of run time and the required buy in from the listener to take in the whole thing before passing judgement, but in a world more and more moving away from the album as a concept, let alone the concept album as a concept (I hope that sentence scans correctly), it exists as a piece of Capital A Art and should be treated as such.
So how do you follow that? What else could I possibly have to write about? Am I really going to devote an entire blog post to one album two weeks in a row and try and cover another thirty albums on Sunday like a madman? Well, I have learned from my mistakes. Initially I thought about pairing this with The Tortured Poets Department from earlier in the week - there's definitely some parallels to be drawn between two 120 minute plus albums, 25 years apart, one charting the ups and downs of relationships writ large, the other a microscopic examination of a doomed relationship from start to finish to epilogue - and I still think it's not a bad concept, but I didn't want to separate Taylor from the albums I listened to alongside her, so instead I will pick her up tomorrow, and I considered which other albums I had in my album memory banks which I felt captured specific elements of love encompassed as a whole by The Magnetic Fields, and settled for three.
I think there's a belief, and one which I think has some truth to it, that a lot of Carly Rae Jepsen's (white/male/straight) fanbase exists as some kind of mass ironic joke which they are all in on. It's cool in a winking, ironic way for the guy in the Slayer T-shirt who's the bouncer for the punk/metal nightclub to be also deeply into CRJ. I am not one of those people. I have a long history of loving pop music, and wrote an article about how I love Girls Aloud. I am deeply, unironically into Carly Rae Jepsen because I honestly believe that making good Pop music is incredibly difficult yet because it is 'Pop' music, it is treated as less legitimate, less important. I am out here on the internet to tell you that it is not, and that I knew CRJ was special not after Call Me Maybe was everywhere, but when I Really Like You and the E•mo•tion album followed it (Alt+0149 for those dots you best believe I had to google to figure out how to replicate, by the way) and I loved it because it sounded like something different and interesting by comparison to Call Me Maybe, which could so easily have been the meme one-hit-wonder of her career; obviously, a lot of people were kind of disappointed that it didn't just sound like Call Me Maybe and her popularity in the public perception dipped, but not in mine.
As part of our attempt to create an aggregate point of comparison to 69 Love Songs, E•mo•tion (copied and pasted it from above this time, I'm not doing that dumb shortcut again this article) represents the love that's new and exciting and unknown. Everything on here speaks to the emotional incoherence and irrational fervour that comes with knowing you are into someone, and trying to navigate that into something...transient? meaningful? short and devastating? The path is not yet decided on E•mo•tion, and that's how it should be. I saw CRJ with Catherine a couple of years ago in Nottingham while she was touring The Loneliest Time, and with the exception of a few drunk (straight/white/men) at the gig - who'd come to ironically see her sing Call Me Maybe and that's it, spending the rest of the gig getting increasingly drunk and loud as they realised they knew no other songs of hers - the entire experience was like a house party with 1000 of your closest friends. I think this is the definitive starting point for people who want to, without prejudice, listen to her music and see if it vibes with them, even though I love The Loneliest Time more now.
OK, that's the good vibes out of the way. Covering the 'love is complicated and messes you up even as you are living through it' section of our experience, Lorde and her Melodrama album perfectly follow on from Carly Rae's expansive excitement. What happens the morning after? A month after? Is there anything here between us apart from pure chemistry and fatal attraction? Or more devastatingly, do we both think differently about how this was going to turn out - a brief fling, or a lifelong companion?
Lorde has many incredible accomplishments, of which I rank her stone cold Hot Ones appearance as the most impressive.
And if you think the difficult second album would trip her up, instead she's going to exchange the stripped down bedroom production for a lavish studio arrangement, and write what might be the quintessential album about messy teen romance. It's such a shame that I really don't get on with her third album Solar Power, (ironic, considering what I do for a living) nearly as much as the other two, but this is an absolute musical masterpiece and if you've for some reason disregarded Lorde, I implore you to give this album a listen, it's one of my absolute favourites.
Finally, Our Love To Admire handily covers the dissolution and bitter breakup section of our road trip through all aspects of love. I've been holding off on listening to any Interpol as long as I could because they are one of the bands where, if I am not listening to anything right now, I will just put one of their albums on. Out of my top 100 songs from last year, about 30 of them were Interpol songs dispersed across various records, and there is something about how their music sounds which resonates so completely with what I guess is my default resting brain state that I find it incredibly compelling every time I listen to it. When I listen to Interpol, I want to listen to all Interpol, so I made a conscious effort to listen to this and then hard pivot to something else to break any temptation I might have**.
It's strange then that the band themselves are not wild about this album; Fresh from a trifecta of critically acclaimed independent label records, this was Interpol's one and only major label release, by all accounts a highly troubled affair both because all their original engineers and studio tech staff ended up getting fired during production because of label nonsense. and Paul Banks was relatively newly sober and had just reached the tumultuous end of a long term relationship. If you hear bitter exhaustion dripping across every track on this album, while they sing about moving across the country after a breakup on The Heinrich Maneuver or confronting the stagnation of their relationship in No I In Threesome, you're not wrong. This album I still think is a highly solid contribution to the band's body of work; Pioneer To The Falls and Rest My Chemistry are amongst my favourite songs by the band, but their immediate return to their indie label for their fourth self-titled album shows that breakups and bad relationships are not just reserved for people.
So there you have it, 69 love songs, plus a bonus 37, a positive Valentine's day treat which means no-one will mind or notice that this is going up two days after the event. And please know that, if you are reading this, you are all my Valentine.
** I did listen to 'Lights' and 'All The Rage Back Home' and 'If You Really Love Nothing' immediately after but I promise I can stop any time I want.
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