Love Conversations

Note to tired readers: This will definitely be my LAST reference to 69 Love Songs for at least a year. O.k, at least a month.

Every so often it happens. I fall completely in love with a song. I wanna make out with this song, get coffee with this song, and do other things with this song.

But it's a song and we can't do these things. So instead I listen. And listen. And listen.

The song I have most recently fallen in love with is "The Book of Love" by The Magnetic Fields. Yeah, I've mentioned them here before and yeah I'm eight years slow to recently acquire the three CD album, so bear with me as my love for this album plays itself out.

I like this song more for what it doesn't say than for what it does say. It starts out, "The book of of love is long and boring/No one can lift the damn thing." I imagine a big, brown, sturdy book with all sorts of dryly inaccessible information, "....charts and facts and figures/and instructions for dancing." But then comes the twist, which is often the case with Stephin Merritt. Interspersed between the description of the book is, "...but I/I love it when you read to me/and you/you can read me anything," this the first place that makes me want to drink red wine and read Creeley with this song. It's slow and sweet the way the words are drawn out to emphasize the beauty of this simple doing.

Then there's the place that makes me want to go out dancing with this song and afterward take it ocean swimming.

And finally the place that makes me want to have a conversation with this song, one that lasts a long, long, long time, maybe forever.

Without getting into a discussion of marriage here because, well, because marriage is hard in theory and in practice, this song makes me think about how some conversations between some people keep going because some conversations can't and won't be finished. Marriage can be this kind of conversation.

I love this song for its ability to make me keep wanting to have ongoing conversations with the people I love. I love this song for its ability to make me remember to fall in love, with a song, again and again and again.

Now please go have a listen. And I promise not to talk about 69 Love Songs ever again.