SOUNDTRACK: PETER GABRIEL-“The Book of Love” (2010).
This is a cover of the Magnetic Fields’ song (not the fifties song). I have this strange relationship with the Magnetic Fields. I love the songs that Stephin Merritt writes. His melodies are simple but timeless. And his lyrics are usually wonderful. Like from this song:
The book of love has music in it
In fact that’s where music comes from
Some of it is just transcendental
Some of it is just really dumb
And then there’s Merritt’s voice. It is deep. Almost comically deep, especially when he sings slowly, it brings on a strange profundity to these words. And it works pretty well. Although sometimes I want the songs to be…more. And that’s where the covers seem to come in.
Gabriel’s cover doesn’t change the song really at all. But it has Gabriel’s voice, which soars and it has Gabriel’s sense of instrumentation, which also soars. Perhaps it’s that Merritt’s songs deserve bigger and lusher treatments–they practically scream for Broadway. And while Gabriel’s version is nowhere near Broadway over-the-topness, it fleshes things out nicely.
Of course, it may very well be that Merritt’s understatement (and oftentimes, just one instrument) provide a successful counterpoint to the spectacle that the song could be. And maybe that’s why they are so successful.
But Gabriel’s version is really great, too.
[READ: April 20, 2013] X
One more book of poetry for April, this one by Dan Chelotti. It is Chelotti’s debut, and Chelotti’s poetry is wild and weird and often quite funny. It is also unapologetically modern. As you can see from the first poem “Ball Lightning”
I am looking out over
one of the first real gray
days of autumn listening
to a podcast in which
these two men are talking about
the phenomenon of ball lightning.
Or, more sadly in “ Grieving in the Modern World” in which he compares the way people’s grief in the old days was so public, but now it seems so small and insignificant, oh and besides:
…the microwave is
almost finished heating
my dinner , and the newshour
is about to begin. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 