Every few months I go in search of a song that I only know one line of. It’s a love song. A bitter (not sweet) song about the main character’s love interest loving someone else and them seeing this absence. You really know when something is not for you.
The procedure I follow to find the song is ever-consistent: I do not search for the lyrics of the song (that would be cheating). I try to be my own encyclopedia of music knowledge, something more extravagant than just a library. It is not efficient- but not everything runs in linear time.
I always look into the same two classic albums: “At Folsom Prison” and “Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs”. The former is mostly a decoy, an excuse to peruse through a fantastic concert, an artifact of greatness in search of my song of desperation.
The latter is a far better candidate to host the song. Marty Robbins has a way of writing catchy ballads about love or the loss of it among cowboy tunes for the cutting-edge music listener of the 50s. Maybe before dying outside Rosa’s cantina, our protagonist (s/o Denzel’s son) looked into the loving eyes of their lover, but the love is for someone else.
After my escapades among the greats of country, I realize it is “The One You Really Love” by the Magnetic Fields. Which might not make sense to the reader because I was fully thinking the song in my head was a country song, not the product of indie legends.
“69 Love Songs”-the album that hosts this song- makes my mistake in judgement very forgivable. Stephin Merritt and co pushed themselves to the brink of human creativity under the fishbowl that is the constraint of making an album entirely out of love songs. Not the standard 8 to 14 track affair, either. Three albums-full of love songs with Ween or TMBG-esque versatility. This versatility was not for the best as they did produce their fair share of “brown” songs (Punk Love…). However, even their lesser successes like the acoustic “The One You Really Love” can make me mistake it for one of the greats that it is inspired by.
It truly is more than a concept album- a constraint album. A constraint that doesn’t paint the artist into a corner (Bublé…), but pushes their established sounds by limiting their lyrical topics.
My favorite constraint album is “Have You in My Wilderness” by Julia Holter. A perfect album by all accounts: ethereal, balanced, able to show all angles of love from the beauty of infatuation to the senseless loss of a lover pulling away. An album that I loved from the start, but has grown on me as I have grown and loved. I would not shy away from calling it a favorite of mine.
Julia was already acclaimed prior to the release of HYiMW, known to make some of the most experimental and beautiful pop music that could simultaneously be haunting, daunting and have you fawning. This project saw Julia move in a more catchy direction, but never letting go of the eccentricities that made her one of the best.
The opener and “Sea Calls Me Home” are prime examples of the expansive pop goodness that transport you to a sea town in early summer. Not a summer of romance, rather one where you are beginning to recover- blossom even to someone who you may thought you wouldn’t be.
In an album of “love songs”, “Lucette Stranded on the Island” is the incredibly bitter song of the titular character waking up after getting raped, poisoned and stranded by a Russian prince. The loss of sense is incredibly powerful to start the song and is only amplified with the dizzying crows of Julia that mimics the birds mentioned. Lucette is poisoned, secluded to die. Truly harrowing.
Considering Julia has mentioned that the album was a culmination of her love songs, we have yet to have our “Book of Love” and we won’t.
Loving for Julia is allowing someone in your jungle. You are not Tarzan and they are not Jane. It is more akin to a tug of war. A magnetic field intersecting between two people. In the title track we see how that the magnet in everyone might start to change poles over time. Slowly, but noticeably.
The feeling of having to conquer the love within your partner is evident, makes you question whether it is healthy (probably not). A central theme in the characters throughout the album is a want to know why the things that happened found her: “What did I do to make you make me feel so bad?” When you face similar challenges to your corpus of love, you also try to understand. Maybe not with a lack of quilt, but you try to piece together a puzzle that was never yours to begin with. You gave your all to share your puzzle with them while they withheld, misled or never shared theirs to begin with.
Now you are hungover amnesiac detective trying to piece together the grief, looking for any remnants of love that was. The kicker: you don’t have a Kim.