A Woman of the World

As I said in my introductory essay to Casanova, this is an extraordinarily long-feeling album because of the way it’s organized into mini-suites, and with “A Woman of the World” we come to the third song of the middle suite, the section I characterize as most representative of classic DC (“Songs of Love” –> “The Frog Princess” –> “A Woman of the World”).

The song also showcases one of my favorite vocal performances of Neil’s. He uses every part of his range here, like a Plains Indian resourcefully making use of every part of a buffalo: there’s the straight-ahead narrator, the conversational/spoken-word chattiness, the heavily affected faux-crooner, and, of course, the shredded belt. It’s such a casual tour de force, which is, in some ways, all the more unexpected coming in this often overlooked song in the DC catalog.

Also, the arrangement shows Neil’s genius in this period for undermining his own orchestral impulses. The song is obviously built to resemble a big, brassy, Broadway showstopper, but the sonic balance is always kept in check with some little oddball touch. It starts off with the watery phasing of the electric piano on the introduction (which makes a subtly witty segue out of “The Frog Princess”). Then, when the baritone sax is bopping along, it’s equalized like crazy so that it’s as trebly as possible. When Neil’s vocals are affected and arch in the bridge section, the strings are rich and warm. When the brass is swinging, it’s processed to feel canned and tinny. The overall effect is ingeniously two-dimensional–it’s like aural art deco, like the musical equivalent of the classic Breakfast at Tiffany’s cover or an early New Yorker. There’s a sense of humor to it, but this aesthetic choice also reflects the tawdry glamor of the Holly Golightly character. It’s 100% the right impulse.

There’s also a fascinating mingling of violence (“maybe I’ll kill her, just trying to thrill her / if she don’t kill me first”) with half-entertained notions of performing femininity (“I’m jealous of her–she’s a woman of the world,” “maybe I need her because I want to be her–baby, can I be your girl?”). It’s easiest to categorize these lyrics as a general nod to Truman Capote’s homosexuality (as well as the unspoken gayness of the novella’s unnamed narrator), but I’ve always preferred to take it one step further and hear it as a more undefinable exploration of gender fluidity. (Nothing sexier than an otherwise hetero guy asking, “baby, can I be your girl?”) This is courageous but necessary, as it allows Casanova to continue cataloging as many different iterations of late-20th century sexual expression as possible, which Neil continues to expand in “Through a Long and Sleepless Night.”

And, as a sauce to how wonderful this song is on its own merits, it’s always made more wonderful when I think of listening to it while driving down Route 41 with Casey, on our way to a family friends’ lake house, in late summer 2000 after my return from London. I was so excited to share this new music with my besties, hoping they’d hear all the same intelligence and exuberance that I heard in it.

The Frog Princess

This is one of those great pop songs that does exactly what pop songs do best–it makes very little literal sense, but feels exactly right. I always sort of mentally glossed over this song in my younger days when I wasn’t actively dating all that much, but now that I find myself going out a lot and going through break-ups of varying degrees of seriousness once every three to four months, I swoon at how accurately Neil has captured the awful ambivalence of courtship and casual relationships. In our most vulnerable moments, when we want nothing more than to love and be loved, it becomes a matter of emotional survival to guard our hearts with overly indifferent statements like “you don’t really love me and I don’t really mind / ’cause I don’t love anybody, that stuff is just a waste of time” which, paradoxically, embolden us to ask the question we’ve secretly been leading up to all along anyway: “your place or mine?”

I also love that the song seamlessly manages to have it both ways, sonically, too. It starts off with a dopey, farty/froggy bassline that underscores the ridiculous comedy of these dating/mating rituals when both parties are feigning excessive casualness before swelling and cresting into a lush, pulsating, string-laden heartbreaker, just aching with suppressed longing for genuine affection, for even a momentary cessation of all the socially sanctioned posturing. The nautical trumpet figure unites the two sections of the song, as it goes from a cheeky quotation bringing to mind horny sailors on leave to a lonely, keening howl at the moon, silhouetting all these tragic single figures adrift on the ocean of their own loneliness.

The first time I saw the DC play live, on March 14, 2001, at the University of Southampton, on the Regeneration tour, Neil played this song solo on his acoustic guitar as one of his encores. The crowd went bonkers for this fan-favorite, whistling along to mimic the beloved orchestration that was dancing through all our heads, and even providing the whooshing guillotine sound effect, which you could tell utterly delighted him.

Songs of Love

Ah. Leave it to Neil to break all the tension he’s been building over the course of the last three songs with a sweet little ditty about boners. “Run around / with trousers on fire / and signs of desire / they cannot deny” is such a wonderful, funny, compassionate, and heartbreaking line. It’s always been funny to me, but somehow it’s extra funny now, considering it more deeply in the context of Casanova as a whole. The plinky, pastoral gentleness of the vocal round is masking, like cheap perfume, the musky hormonal desire of these kids the narrator is describing, heightening the ridiculousness of the fool’s errand the songwriter is on: putting a romantic face on the messiness of private emotions so that they’re sanitized enough for public consumption. After all the rancor aimed at the War Between the Sexes in the previous songs, it seems only fitting for Neil to take the piss out of himself a little bit here.

He’s also taking exquisite care to continue building the narrative arc of the album as a whole. After all the down and dirty lust and rutting of the first half of the album, it was only natural to continue the cataloging of human sexual impulse by focusing on pubescent hormones. Similar to the way that the line “everybody knows that no means yes” still always mildly shocks me in “Becoming More Like Alfie,” I love the quiet deviousness of the lines “fate doesn’t hang on a wrong or right choice / fortune depends on the tone of your voice”–a sly bit of advice that is equally appropriate to a singer/songwriter aspiring toward commercial success by writing sappy love songs as well as for young Casanovas probably looking more for some skin-on-skin action rather than eternal love.

But Neil is also keeps subtly weaving in the intimations of mortality that are driving us toward the grave at the end of the album: “so let’s sing while we still can / while the sun hangs high up above / wonderful songs of love.” In other words, in the summer of our lives, let’s take advantage of all the pleasures–both physical and aesthetic–that are abundantly available to us.

Of course, this is also one of his simplest and loveliest songs, which also yielded one of his highest profile covers when Ben Folds included a very faithful version on his Sunny 16 EP. Featuring two of Neil’s most notable sonic signatures, the round-style vocal overdubs and tinny harpsichord, it’s an undeniable stone-classic of the DC catalog.

Speaking of that harpsichord, when I last saw the DC perform live in fall of 2004, his keyboard player threw a couple of tiny improvised flourishes into the solo. “I didn’t write that,” Neil chastised him, deadpan but utterly serious, after the applause died down. His type may hibernate in bedrooms above, but that doesn’t mean they’re not watching shit like a hawk.

Charge

Neil wrote this song about ten years too soon. If it had come out in the late ’00s during the full blossoming of hyper-pop epitomized by of Montreal in the Hissing Fauna/Skeletal Lamping era, it probably would have been heralded as a brilliant mini-suite exploring the war between the sexes via hilariously apt slices of pop music and pop culture. But, as it came out in ’96, buried in the middle of a set of otherwise immaculately wrought traditional pop songs, it just kind of comes off as an oddball way station between the two halves of Casanova. Which is too bad because, for all that I said in the previous entry about this being the skippable part of the album, I want to make it clear that I’ve come around to understanding how brilliant it actually is. Would I put this song on a mix CD? Probably not. Is it something I crave listening to if I’m in the mood for some DC? Erm, no. But really studying how it operates in the context of what Neil’s doing thematically here makes me appreciate it now more than I probably ever have.

After the cynical and occasionally disturbing examinations of female and then male sexual appetites in “Middle-Class Heroes” and “In and Out in Paris and London” respectively, of course the next logical step in the sequence would be to musically literalize the War Between the Sexes. The lyrics in “Charge” are dark, twisted, and brilliant, the ridiculous double entendres spat with something approaching pure contempt. Where “In and Out” is suffused with a kind of pleading douchiness that undercuts its horndog fixation on conquest, “Charge” doesn’t even pretend to dress up its engorged rage with a sentiment like “I fall in love with someone new practically every day”–it’s just “bang, bang, bang all night.”

And yet despite all this, the song also manages to be laugh out loud funny. The Barry White-esque spoken breakdown might be one of the most genuinely hilarious moments in the entire DC catalog. The line “I have in my hand a piece of paper that says ‘let’s make love not this phony war thang‘” is truly inspired. I listened to a lot of goofy doo-wop with my family while I was growing up, and we learned to cherish all the wacky (and sometimes overly simplistic and on-the-nose) metaphors and imagery in their inevitable mid-song monologues, and this little section always recalls the sense of delight we took in affectionately mocking them. I mean, the specificity of the wording of the phrase “I have in my hand a piece of paper” just tickles me to no end. I love that he doesn’t just have a piece of paper; he has it in his hand. Also, every time I hear the song, I’m always kind of waiting for him to have in his hand a bottle of Moet or a long-stemmed rose, but nope–he has in his hand a piece of paper. This is all just too awesome. Add to that the totally tongue-in-cheek loverman baritone rumble with which he delivers this bit of patter and I just couldn’t ask for a funnier few seconds of music.

Not content to stop with one slow jam sonic cliche, though, he pushes it one step further with the instant segue into a Prince falsetto. The lyrics start getting even more florid, bringing back more prominently the sex/war metaphors: roamin’ around No Man’s Land? Ahem? Gonna set your village on fire? I love that it’s almost impossible at this point for him to push these double entendres too far. Each one keeps getting worse, but they work together absolutely beautifully as a sort of seven-car pile-up of disturbing associations. To escalate this section of the song so far only to pull it back to a sudden pianissimo is the ultimate in thwarted expectations, a war tactic in and of itself that totally catches us off guard and destabilizes us: the bottom drops out and the volume drops down and some sort of creepy molester/ Hannibal Lechter-esque character moistly beckons us to make ourselves at home. Ew.

But for a proper ending, of course, we have to transition back into a final chorus. The big sforzando hits, and you hear one of the few places in all the DC catalog where Neil is legitimately straining his voice. That shredded “charge!” is so pained, so indicative of a character committed to his own insane bloodlust, it perfectly evokes both pity and fear, in a kind of Kubrickian illustration of a man breaking down under the slow, suffocating pressure of outside forces colluding with his own inner demons. Being a Divine Comedy song, though, of course these inner demons take the shape of some truly random (and, yes, funny) melodic interpolations: a bit of Tchaikovsky and Sound of Music in between thrusts.

Again, none of this is particularly easy to listen to, but it’s absolutely necessary, both providing a logical conclusion to this sequence of songs as well as foreshadowing the intermingling of sex and death that will continue to tip toward the grave in the back half of the album.

In and Out in Paris and London

And here we enter fully into what I view as the big problem section of Casanova. “In and Out in Paris and London” provides a bridge between “Middle-Class Heroes” and “Charge,” and though, as stated previously, I used to feel a certain affinity for “Middle-Class Heroes” in my early 20s, I’ve always mentally classified the one-two punch of “In and Out”/”Charge” as this album’s skippable section. It pains me to admit that both as a Divine Comedy fan and as someone who respects the sanctity of the front-to-back album experience, but this song’s facile condemnation of an inveterate womanizer doesn’t seem to be saying anything terribly interesting about masculine sexuality, despite how cunning and well-crafted it actually is formally.

With its thrusting quarter-note rhythm and Neil’s extremely heavy, arch vocal performance, the song’s essential shallowness is designed to provide meta-commentary on the first-person narrator, his exhausting pursuit of empty sexual conquest represented by the exhausting, repetitive simplicity of the tune itself. Viewed in this way, it links neatly with “Middle-Class Heroes,” which similarly uses a high-flown sonic tackiness to critique a certain kind of garish hausfrau, while they also complement each other as a kind of yin and yang of what Neil apparently wishes to categorize as equal opportunity examples of opposite poles of icky, unreflective lust. But, maybe these songs succeed a little too well in being insufferable. Contrasted with “Something for the Weekend,” which through its easy playfulness works as a straight-up song even if you surgically remove the “when he woke she was gone with his car and all of his money” punchline, these songs are really missing the multidimensional sweep and charm of the DC’s best material.

And, to what end? To make the point that some guys think only with their dicks and want to fuck everything that moves? Well, OK. Thematically, a song like this certainly has its place in the encyclopedic catalog of late 20th-century sexual mores that Casanova as an album aims to be; I just wish I liked listening to it more as a song, rather than merely respecting it as an objet d’art.

Though, I’m being too harsh again. As ever, there are glimmers of delight here. Trainspotters will of course note the way Neil mangles the George Orwell and Charles Dickens allusions in order to turn them into the most intentionally over-the-top double entendres imaginable, the way this song’s clueless lothario would no doubt say anything he viewed as pseudo-intellectual to get into a girl’s pants. There’s also something dorkily amusing about his use of the old-fashioned phrase “slap and tickle,” and I can never resist chortling at the over-eager delivery of “way-hey, yeah!” And, even though it’s kind of the opposite of what I think Neil intended, I really adore the line “I fall in love with someone new practically every day” because, well, frankly, so do I. It’s just too bad that, in the world of the song, this can only be viewed as a liability (and a male liability at that) and not an impulse to be harnessed, channeled properly, and celebrated.

Middle-Class Heroes

If this song were a movie, it would star Brenda Blethyn.

You’ve seen her play a variation on this character dozens of times before: vulgar and clueless, betraying an undercurrent of pathos and mute despair. And, unless Mike Leigh is at the helm, despite her best efforts, all this usually comes along with a big, steaming pile of condescension.

Looking back at the journal I kept during my summer studying abroad in London between my junior and senior years in college, the first reference to the Divine Comedy that appears there is my mention of buying Casanova and Fin de Siecle at the record shop, followed quickly by a transcription of the spoken section from this song:

I see unspeakable vulgarity,
Institutionalized mediocrity.
Rise up, little souls; join the doomed army.
Fight the good fight; wage the unwinnable war:
Elegance against ignorance,
Difference against indifference,
Wit against shit.

Ugh. I cringe at that now.

This is one of the very few DC songs that has not aged well, mostly because of its lyrical pomposity. (The sonic pomposity is actually kind of charming, the heavy brass and sickly sweet strings undercut as they are by that plinking marimba line.) In his young man’s attempt to stand up for wit and elegance, Neil kind of just ends up sounding like a dick. Which, while I may sigh and shake my head over, I actually can’t begrudge him, all things considered. When I was younger and feeling trapped by middle-class suburban mores, the sentiment in this song definitely resonated with me. I knew I wanted to run far away from anything remotely resembling the scene painted here. But, now that I have some distance from it all, I can really only reiterate the essence of what I said in my review of Revolutionary Road: it’s my fundamental belief that, at the core, everybody’s doing the best they can with what they have, wherever they are. Even the kind of tacky, frowsy housewife being excoriated here. (And, not to get too sensitive about it, but of course this song is about a woman. Can you imagine if it were about a sad-sack David Brent-esque character instead…? Ooh, yeah, classism and misogyny.) So who is it actually serving to get so snotty about the scent of their candles, the design of their tablecloths, or even their mating habits?

It’s also worth noting that Neil manages to misquote Hamlet at the end of the bridge. The lines from Act III, scene III are actually

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

Obviously he needed to fit the words to the time signature of the song, but gilding the lily by specifying his thoughts flying up to heaven is really a bit much (not to mention effecting a redundant non-rhyme between heaven/heaven), and there’s a world of difference between one’s thoughts and one’s feelings.

Anyway, the one thing I can say in the song’s favor, even now, is that it’s certainly vivid and well-drawn. The introductory line about “oriental paper globes hangin’ like decomposing cocoons” is absolutely gorgeous, as both an evocative description of a specific kind of living space and an aurally pleasing collection of sounds and syllables. Neil’s vocal performance, while a bit over the top, highlights the newfound smoothness of his baritone and reconfirms his status as a vocalist strong and charismatic enough not to get lost in the middle of this song. Even with the many, many issues brought up by the lyrics and narrative and “message” and the wide-ranging sonic palette at play, there’s no way to ignore that this is a Neil Hannon performance of a Neil Hannon song.

Becoming More Like Alfie

The fact that this song is just under three minutes long seems impossible. It’s like some high class art thieves have snuck into the middle of it and somehow spirited away an extra minute and a half without anyone noticing. Not because the song feels long, but because it feels too short for the amount of pure stuff going on here.

Neil’s vocal delivery in the first verse starts off cool, measured, almost scientific. He’s charting his/the narrator’s sexual and romantic development: “once, there was a time…” / “and once…” His nonsense syllables are restrained, conversational, analytic: “but now, hmm, w’l, now I find…” Even the language being used is exaggeratedly pragmatic: “it saves time to say what you mean.”

But then the shackles come loose and he shakes off his restraint, the sound and feeling of the song perfectly mirroring the sexual liberation/frustration in the narrative: the coy fluegelhorn figure disappears, his voice scoops into a crescendo and a growl, and the chorus chugs along like a good Britrock chorus should (well, at least Neil’s version of a Britrock chorus circa 1996). There’s a winkiness, an audacity, and a deep cynicism in the line “everybody knows that no means yes” that always sort of shocks me. The effect is somewhat softened by the subsequent dorky lyrics about the NHS and the elaborate intertextual reference to Michael Caine’s famous mid-’60s black frame glasses, but for a generation raised with explicit sex-ed admonitions that “no means no,” there’s still more power in this reversal than there seems there ought to be.

The second verse brings back the fluegelhorn, but he manages to modulate his vocals somewhere halfway between the politesse of the first verse and the raw emotional purge of the chorus. It’s visceral without feeling like lashing out; there’s blood pumping here. Take, for example, all that moisture in the final “F” sound of the word “enough,” or the sexy little melodic embellishment on the word “time.” It goes even further, though, as he fully inhabits the part, imbuing the word “love” with absolute rancor and calls back the spoken “hmm” from the first verse with the bile-filled “ha” that he nearly chokes on. He uses a classic DC trope up next, the spoken delivery of a line instead of singing it, for “but not now,” three little words that convey volumes about repression and denial…and about being a bookish dude in his mid- to late 20s trying to come to grips with his views on love, romance, and sex. Much like “everybody knows that no means yes” from the chorus, the final lines of this verse — “now I’m resigned to the kind of life I’d reserved / for other guys less smart than I / y’know, the kind who will always end up with the girls” — always kind of catch me off guard, no matter how often I hear them. Even if they’re not strictly autobiographical, it seems like such an unexpectedly truthful window into the kind of sexually nihilistic “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” sentiment that must ring uncomfortably true for a lot of similarly smart, conflicted guys around that age.

After another spin through the chorus and a shouted “oh, come on!” that brilliantly manages to be both a rock and roll frontman’s exhortation as well as one more expression of the narrator’s emotional agitation, we get a stinging little go-go dancing guitar solo. It twirls around with a sort of forced joie de vivre–the melodic improvisation is sweet, but the guitar tone is ever so slightly pinched, and the rhythmic pattern, while not tapping out 32nd notes or anything, gives a sense that it’s rushing toward the finish line, as if trying to prove “see, I’m having fun!!” Which just makes his final, exhausted sigh “I’m becoming more like Alfie” feel all the more hollow and sad.

Something for the Weekend

This song just sounds like the beginning of something, doesn’t it?

Any other band probably would have started this album with “Becoming More Like Alfie”–with that great Michael Caine soundbite, with the swinging, sexy bossa nova groove, with the first-person narrator that’s pretty squarely on the side of male desire. But Neil Hannon knew better. He knew that Casanova needed to start here–with the sound of a woman (two women? I can never tell) giggling, with the signature Divine Comedy horse’s gallop rhythm, with the coy little mystery narrative that totally destabilizes the male/female power dynamic. It’s such a deft move, and it shoots the album into orbit.

It seems doubtful that Neil could have gotten away with making his sex album without it. To tackle all the lechy subject matter without completely abandoning or negating the DC’s charms–and, it bears repeating, this album is full of exemplary DC moments–I think it was crucial for him to take the piss out of himself a little bit right at the outset with that cluelessly faux-suave spoken “helehhhhre.” It simultaneously over- and undercuts his own sexuality, blasting open this whole expanse where he can now play between two poles on the rest of the album, safely, without sounding too much like a dick or a whiner.

The other expanse that’s blasted open here is purely sonic. This song just sounds huge. The production is so sharp and clean and when that little trumpet flourish announces itself, it’s so audacious as to almost be funny. It feels very much like Neil is saying, “OK, the apprenticeship is over.” (Or, as Alfie himself says next, “Right, then we can begin.”) It’s the introduction to Casanova, yes, but also to the mid-to-late ’90s DC style: lush, orchestral, slightly bombastic, passionate, ambitious. (And, it’s worth noting, my personal favorite DC era.)

Casanova

Much as I’m intentionally choosing to begin with Casanova as the first official album here on this oeuvreblog (and then continuing to proceed autobiographically–how High Fidelity of me), I remember likewise very intentionally choosing it from the bin at HMV in London as my first Divine Comedy CD. Maybe I was overwhelmed by all the choices–most of the rest of the catalog was readily available there–and wanted to play it safe in purchasing an album that I at least knew at little bit about, but, more likely, I was choosing it symbolically. It was a trophy moment–not only had I triumphed in finally finding this elusive music (ah, remember when music used to be elusive? how quaint), but I had also succeeded in doing so in London.

As I mentioned in my write-up for Jamie Lidell’s “Green Light” on my best of 2008 mix, the idea of giving myself permission to do something, giving myself a green light, has a powerful resonance for me. And realizing at some point after my best friend Mary spent the summer of 1999 studying in Dublin “oh wait, that’s something I could do too” was a hugely powerful and important instance of this principle. Giving myself permission to explore the idea of studying abroad–to do something a little bit glamorous, a little bit out of my perceived comfort zone, something that hadn’t been suggested or recommended to me by someone else–was my late-bloomer’s way of gaining some sense of agency over my own life. Yes, I was finally learning to make choices that weren’t necessarily what I felt were expected of me, following through with dreams that resonated with some ineffable part of myself simply because of the pleasure the choice gave me, not because they were part of a script I felt I was supposed to be following. I was also learning more about my instinctive love for cities, for their constant sense of surprise and possibility and for their unique and invigorating energy (energy both in the sense of vibrancy and bustle as well as a signature style/character that hangs in the air and permeates and animates its people and scenery and goings-on). So to be there on the streets of London, to have made it there, and then to be creating my own musical map on top of it–away from the ’90s radio that I hated so much at the time, away from the jazz and show tunes that I’d inherited from my family–was the culmination of all these different strands of growth in my life, turning it into a much more intense moment than picking out a CD at the record store usually is. Or has been since then, really. I didn’t consciously realize any of this subtext at the time, of course, but there was still a deliberateness, a self-serious momentousness in the action. Never let it be said that I lack the taste for grand theatrical gestures.

Funny thing is–Casanova has ended up being far from my favorite DC album. But, much like any first love affair, it established a template for what I most want out of the DC: literate, self-referential lyrics, lush orchestrations, a narrative through-line, a bridge song leading to the next album, and, of course, Neil Hannon’s witty, intelligent, romantic baritone.

Even though the album is thematically cohesive, it’s almost set up in suites, musically and emotionally. It opens with a very ’60s lounge pop/Burt Bacharach feel, then passes through a bumpy section that strains its own limits of cleverness and pastiche before introducing a string of absolute classic DC gems and fading into something much darker and more melancholy that would eventually pave the way for Fin de Siecle. I think it’s because of all this internal movement that Casanova has always felt like a long album. It does run 51:52, which isn’t short by any means, but also isn’t, say, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below.

Looking at it now, though, one of the more amazing things about the album is how radically different it is from Promenade, how it represents this huge jump from a sweet little Michael Nyman homage to a lusty, even slightly unhinged declaration of Scott Walker-ish passion. I almost can’t imagine what it would have been like to have been a fan of the band upon its release in ’96 and suddenly be confronted with all this growth. In some ways, it’s just a blossoming (or, if one were to be cynical, trading one set of reference points for another). But still–the sound is so much cleaner, the arrangements are so much more ambitious, and Neil’s voice is leagues warmer and stronger and more mature.

It’s also funny that, in the pantheon of albums about sex, this is the shape that Neil’s took. Funny, dorky, charming, pretentious, anguished, uneven, oddly paced, and ultimately about death–for my 21 year old self, with my penchant for grand theatrical gestures and finding myself recently released onto the streets of a foreign city far from home, this was, really, all things considered, the perfect soundtrack at the perfect time.

Too Young to Die

As indicated previously, “Too Young to Die” is a pretty blatant Divine Comedy bridge song: between the 90s and 00s, between indie label and major, between bespoke suits and jeans, and, perhaps most crucially, between a fictionalized first-person I and one that seems to be more closely aligned with Neil Hannon himself. In regard to that last point, that’s one of the things that’s always bugged me about this song. Not that he’s singing from what appears to be his own perspective but that he’s doing so with a song that, in a lot of ways, denigrates the rest of his work to date. An odd choice for this privileged “closing credits” spot on a best-of comp, eh?

Perhaps “denigrates” is too harsh a word, but lyrics like “I’ve lived a lie from the day I arrived” and “I must break free / from that part of me / that values the art over the humanity” are fairly withering ways to categorize a bunch of songs that are ostensibly being celebrated here on A Secret History. It seems unfair to his fans and oddly unperceptive about his own strengths as songwriter. OK, so maybe he’s not Bob Dylan circa 1963, but the power of something like Fin de Siecle‘s “Sunrise” comes from the fact that its lyrics aren’t overly strident, that the sentiment is coming from someone who typically is apolitical. Besides, being apolitical isn’t necessarily the same as being bloodless or apathetic; there’s no way that the warmth of “The Summerhouse” or the frustration and passion of “Through a Long and Sleepless Night” could have been written by someone who values art over humanity. And, sure, the jokiness of “Something for the Weekend” or “A Drinking Song” might be a bit dorky, and I can appreciate his want to grow as a lyricist beyond the arch cleverness he’d begun to get pigeonholed into, but to claim, as he does here, that “the tune is OK but the words are all wrong” does a gross disservice to the sincerely brilliant lyrics of “Tonight We Fly” and even “National Express.”

The Leonard Cohen-esque low range he uses on the verses has always seemed overly affected to me (and not the good kind of affected, like his Noel Coward homage), again misunderstanding what makes his own baritone such a singular instrument. It’s just not terribly well suited for whiskey and regret. But when he opens up and lets it soar on the chorus, it’s easier to be sympathetic to what he’s trying to say, in part because he allows the slightest bit of melodrama to creep back in. C’mon–that flying-V guitar line? Those super-emo falsetto ooh-oohs? He’s clearly gilding the lily a bit, but the extravagance is an infinitely better frame to put around the message I want to be better at what I do. Don’t hold it against me if I try to do something a little different, a little more grown-up, than what you may have come to expect from me. Don’t freeze me in amber.

In that sense, the key line here is really “I thought that I was doin’ fine / but now I changed my mind.” Fair enough, Neil. A person is allowed to change his mind. Before/after. Point A/point B. Why didn’t you just say so in the first place?

I’ve Been to a Marvellous Party

In the early/mid-00s, my friend Casey spent a few summers during his grad school years working at a day camp for kids in Chicago. One of the activities they designed for the older elementary campers was for them to bring in a song that represented their lives. He said it was cute to see the kind of stuff they picked, especially when their choices were clearly influenced by their hip, urban parents, when the songs were evidently the kinds of things they’d probably listened to during car trips around the city and the greater Midwest over the course of their young lives. Casey, though, picked this song, explaining to the kids, and his fellow counselors, that the British humor and sudden tempo shifts felt emblematic of the current pace of his life. Having known him for at least nine or ten years by that point, he wasn’t wrong.

This version of the song originally appeared on Twentieth-Century Blues, a Noel Coward tribute album from 1998 raising money for the Red Hot AIDS Charitable Trust, where it was nestled among contributions from Paul McCartney, the Pet Shop Boys, Robbie Williams, Bryan Ferry, Marianne Faithfull, Sting, and Elton John. It was perhaps inevitable that Neil Hannon, who’d so often been compared to Sir Noel, in the British press at least, for his similar mix of wit, smarts, sentimentality, cynicism, and way with a delicious melody, would be asked to cover one of the master’s tunes. The perfection of the pairing was evidently not lost on Neil himself, either, since he opted to include it on A Secret History, most likely hoping to introduce his interpretation of the song to a wider selection of his fan base.

The thing that I think I love the most about the Divine Comedy’s take on the song is the way it manages to have its cake and eat it too. Oscillating between tinny, music hall piano drollery and bass-heavy thumping electronica that feels like it would have been right at home in the world of Trainspotting, it can simultaneously pay homage to Coward’s 1930s/40s heyday while updating the notion of “party music” with the visceral punch of then-contemporary club culture. In a way, it anticipates Baz Luhrmann’s masterful use of the same musical cross-pollinating technique in Moulin Rouge! It’s a brilliant way of eliding the trap of being too faithful or not being faithful enough when approaching a body of work that was at least a half century old at that point.

Hannon’s delivery in the patter sections is priceless–it totally hits my weak spot for the kind of effortless, effete, quintessentially English sense of humor that a part of me, enviously, believes is just a birthright of having been born in the UK. (Even though Hannon himself is Irish, as Coward partially was as well.) The plummy vowels, the rapid-fire cadences dissolving into perfectly suspended contemplative pauses, the overly affected sense of world-weariness that seems meant to enhance, rather than conceal, the charcter’s twinkle-eyed delight in the proceedings he’s describing all make me long for the kind of “keep calm and carry on” era of life in London that’s surely way more romantic in my mind than it ever was in reality.

But the final 35 seconds or so might actually be the most successful part of the song. The elongated “I couldn’t have liked it mooooore…” serves as something of a gateway here, revving us up for that burst into an expanse of additional warmth, where the electronic programming becomes more fully integrated into the song’s form, rather than just serving as a clever stylistic tic. The filter on Neil’s vocals becomes less harsh and aggressive, and the addition of the piano and canned strings into the midrange of the instrumentation brings a joyful sparkle that finally unites the two “genres” that had previously been kept rigidly separate from verse to chorus to verse. The marvellous party is finally brought to us, rather than our being asked to travel–however willingly we might do it–to the sun-drenched Riviera or the darkness of an Ecstasy-enhanced rave.

Gin Soaked Boy

Without a doubt, one of the funniest songs I’ve ever heard. Well, I guess the song itself isn’t even all that funny, but the punchline of the penultimate lyric is so delightfully clever in the way it plays with that “I’m the [this] in the [that]” trope, I remember nearly driving off the road the first time I heard it. I was in my old white Chevy Lumina (dubbed Wilma, for those of you who care and/or remember), driving north through Dyer on Sheffield by the bowling alley. Headed where, I can’t remember now, but I’m fairly certain my sister Stephanie was in the car with me–she would have been about 13 at the time–and she was somewhat legitimately afraid I was going to drive us into oncoming traffic, so sudden and violent was my laughter.

Unless I’m making a mix CD for someone who’s already familiar with the Divine Comedy, in which case I might decide to include some live recording or obscurity, this is one of the few DC songs that will invariably find its way onto mixes for new friends, crushes, and other willing victims. It’s overflowing with wit and smarts, but not in a way that seems overly showy or would be otherwise offputting for a newcomer. It also benefits from being one of the best stand-alone songs that Neil Hannon has ever written, which makes it so much easier to use as a tool for introducing people to the band. Sure, “National Express” is a great song and a well-deserved hit, but it works just that much better in the context of Fin de Siecle as a full album (as does, say, “Lucy” or “Songs of Love”). So, I’m always hesitant to divorce those songs from their greater context, however much I love them and would want others to love them too. No such internal agony with “Gin Soaked Boy,” though!

However, in a weird way, “Gin Soaked Boy” doesn’t actually sound like anything remotely typical of the DC at all. The lyrics are full of allusions, sure, but the song itself is one of the cleanest pop compositions in Hannon’s whole oeuvre. The repetition of that short, simple melodic figure is, in a lot of ways, diametrically opposed to the lushly romantic sound that’s more immediately identifiable as DC’s sonic trademark. There are relatively few bells and whistles (um, both figuratively and literally) in the arrangement, and Neil’s vocal seems, again, more squarely in the pop idiom than almost anything he’s done before or since (even the more rocked-out belting on Regeneration betrays a flair for the dramatic).

But regardless of who it does or doesn’t sound like, this is an irresistibly exuberant piece of music. The DC has always known how to use, to the best possible effect, a faux-piano sound that’s just this side of crap, and the slightly watery, “Linus and Lucy”-esque keyboard bit here is a classic, tying the whole thing together as it retraces Neil’s melody line like a campfire round. The little synth-pop explosion at 1:48 always makes me want to spontaneously start dancing, and of course the catchiness of the ba-ba, ba-ba, bah-lah-dahs are the true measure of any songwriter worth his or her salt. (Hint: these are absurdly catchy.) The self-contained logic and fade in/fade out symmetry of the piece are extremely satisfying; there’s not an ounce of fat on the thing, despite being a bit on the long side at 5:03.

It may be a riddle, it may be a pop song about pop songs–after nine years, I still haven’t figured it out. All I know is that a song dedicated to booze has rarely felt lighter, sharper, and more joyful.

Your Daddy’s Car (’99)

And here we have one of Neil’s extremely faithful rerecordings of one of his own songs. To be honest, I wasn’t even aware that the version of “Your Daddy’s Car” that appears on A Secret History differed from the one on Liberation until relatively recently. It’s that faithful. Aside from the noticeably cleaner and sharper sound quality (dig those triangle pings), the main difference is just his repetition of “the engine, the engine” over the song’s final moments and that nice fat string pad to close it out. (Though my mind’s ear always instinctively expects to hear that low keyboard squelch that leads into “Europop” right after it on Liberation.)

Though this is a DC classic, it’s never been one of my favorite songs. It seems like it sits in a weird part of Neil’s voice (probably intentionally given that the subject is an awkward and destructive young love affair), and the ascending pattern in the verse melody doesn’t really do much for me. But, I’ve come to love it as something of a template for so many other vintage DC tunes that sound all sweet on the surface while a dark undercurrent of melancholy, or desperation, or even violence, simmers just below in the lyrics (“In Pursuit of Happiness,” “If…,” “Songs of Love,” “Here Comes the Flood,” “Perfect Lovesong,” etc., etc.).

They played this song the third, and most recent, time I saw the DC perform live, in September 2004 at Schubas, and, if I remember correctly, Neil made some crack about how awesome it would be if one day that long-held note on “can you feeeeel?” finally killed him. As ever, the perfect mixture of sweetness and darkness.

The Pop Singer’s Fear of the Pollen Count (’99)

One of Neil Hannon’s underappreciated strengths as a performer is that he’s a gifted reinterpreter of his own material. Of the few times I’ve seen the Divine Comedy perform live, they’ve always played at least a few old favorites in a way that’s made me go “oh wow…I never thought of the song like that before.” Sometimes it’s a radical departure, like the crunching metal version of “Sweden” they were playing circa ’01 on the Regeneration tour (which also appeared as a live B-side for the “Bad Ambassador” single and which I aim to discuss further down the road) and sometimes it’s just a slower, statelier, more confident and mature take on the song (rather than a reinvention, as such), like the version of “Timewatching” that appears on A Short Album About Love. And sometimes, as with “The Pop Singer’s Fear of the Pollen Count,” it splits the difference in all the best ways, a few subtle but not insignificant tweaks helping the tune’s inherent charms shine all the brighter.

I read somewhere online a while ago that Hannon chose to rerecord “Pollen Count” because he felt it never got the proper shake it deserved in ’93 at being a hit. And, six years later, his instincts proved right, as the song became one of his most notable chart successes in the UK along with “National Express” and “Something for the Weekend.” It’s not really hard to see why. By ironing out some of the overly manic energy of the Liberation version (while retaining all the sublime jangle), spit-shining the production quality a bit, and adding an ace horn section, it just starts to feel more like summer–brighter, more languorous, and imperceptibly sexier without losing its laugh-out-loud good humor. I mean, come on: this song actually features a sneeze solo. Pure genius. Neil’s vocals are smoother and more assured, multi-tracked and harmonized for maximum impact across the board. (Plus, way before all the current mania–and backlash–for autotune, it’s always cracked me up that there’s that one little processed hiccup on “to the rhythm and the rhyme.”) Rather than trying to prove to us that he’s having fun, he’s just having fun.

The decision to start with the sung chorus instead of an instrumental intro leading into the verse is spot-on. It may initially appear like it’s giving away the punchline too soon, but it actually helps better contextualize the song from the get-go, so that, freed from the burden of doing the heavy lifting of setting the scene, the “laugh at the tears you’re crying / smile while your head explodes” lyric becomes even more (and more immediately) funny. Plus, we get one additional spin through that insidiously catchy chorus, and that can’t possibly be a bad thing.

(I won’t be doing this often, but the song is embedded for your listening pleasure here.)

A Secret History

An exceptional introduction to the Divine Comedy, their greatest hits album A Secret History was released in 1999, between Fin de Siecle and Regeneration. It also marked their last hurrah for Setanta Records before departing for EMI/Parlophone. Exquisitely paced and offering a satisfying and comprehensive selection of tracks from their five official albums they’d released to date along with a few odds and sods I’ll touch on soon, this collection feels every bit as vital and important to DC’s oeuvre as any of the other full-lengths. (And I say this not just because it was the first of their albums I had access to.)

The Divine Comedy was one of the first bands I ever consciously encountered that was making albums-as-albums, albums-as-statements, albums-as-coherent-works-of-art. As an English major and film studies student with a long-standing fixation on all things elegant and symmetrical, I found this irresistible about them. The joy of listening to an album straight through in one sitting to preserve the flow and overall emotional momentum felt like a radical new pleasure. The idea that a pop/rock album could tell a story or set forth a thesis or revolve around a specific theme, rather than just being a collection of songs, was perhaps the crucial final nail in the coffin of my former habit of predominantly listening to soundtracks to Broadway musicals–probably because it felt so similar. And after I had ample time to live with the works that preceded A Secret History, I also began to realize that Neil Hannon was even making bridges between his albums, leaving little trails of bread crumbs that suggested (even if only in retrospect) the direction the subsequent album would take.

Perhaps the most blatant of all these bridge songs is “Too Young to Die,” one of only two strictly original cuts on A Secret History. The lyrics “now it’s time to say to say goodbye to my suit, my shirt, my tie” is an unequivocal declaration that the then-current image and configuration of DC–with their dapper clothing and erudite air–were soon to be abandoned in favor of the Britrocky jeans, trainers, more straightforward lyrics, and uber-trendy Nigel Godrich production found on 2001′s Regeneration. (Hello, even that album’s name is as blatant as you can get about announcing a major image change-up.)

Though subtlety it may lack, it nonetheless is a very clear line in the sand, marking what I view as their before and after periods. I’m sure this is partially due to the fact that Regeneration was the first new DC album I had to wait for after glutting myself on the entirety of their body of work as soon as I could get my hands on it. But, I also think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who’d argue that new millennium DC wasn’t indeed a very different beast than they were throughout the ’90s, a trend that has certainly continued this decade up to and including Victory for the Comic Muse. (It remains to be seen, obviously, how their recently announced album for 2009 will fare.)

As such, A Secret History is a combination victory lap, career-to-date summation, and gentle transitional move. Like sneaking a bite of vegetables into a forkful of chocolate cake, it’s very cunningly designed to prepare their notoriously possessive fans for the shake-up to come, without jarring their sensibilities too much all at once.

I see and suspect all this now. But, in my first flush of infatuation, it was just this amazing journey from bombastic orchestral arrangements to gentle, pastoral pop to hilarious club piss-takes to mordant, nearly country-western ballads. It confirmed that “In Pursuit of Happiness” was no fluke, that these guys really were a band I could wholeheartedly embrace as uniquely mine. I couldn’t believe that I was lucky enough to have discovered them, that someone had allowed them to make all this glorious, anachronistic music. It also performed for me a tantalizing fan dance, revealing just enough of this rich body of work to keep me hungry for more, salivating to see precisely how it all fit together.