Write About Love—dropped this past October by Belle & Sebastian, is the band’s first release since 2006’s The Life Pursuit, their most popular and acclaimed since 2003’s Dear Catastrophe Waitress, and their most enduring and powerful, I believe, since the amazing If You’re Feeling Sinister, which was named by Spin as one of the 100 best albums between 1985 and 2005.
To write about Belle and Sebastian, for me, is to answer that ever-dreaded dinner party question: “So, tell me about yourself.” You delve forward with as much truth as you want or are capable of—after all, your life is fairly long now—so much could be said, much too much, nothing at all. The crux of the answer is in another question, one asked long ago:
“Then how should I begin…and how shall I presume?”
It was 1998. I had just moved to Austin. College was over. Real life was just beginning, and the song on a friend’s mix tape—“Seymour Stein” from their third full-length, 1998’s The Boy with the Arab Strap— punched me right in the stomach. I was sick with love.
To me, the essence of Belle and Sebastian has always been love, love the way I’ve experienced it—hilarious, cruel, tender, fleeting, confounding, inspiring, despair-ridden, all-encompassing, terrifying,—and enduring, even after it’s over.
My love for this band has always endured—though we both have strayed in recent years—they in their slow output of material, me in my passionate affairs with bands that have come along since. But Write About Love has punched me in the stomach again—hard, and the affair is on again in a big way. This time it’s almost too much to bear.
In many ways, Write About Love isn’t a surprising album for regular listeners: Bacharach-inspired arrangements; strings and horns swelling and receding behind and between clever, obscure, self-referential and always-surprisingly brilliant lyrics; Murdoch’s perfect mid-tenor voice alone and powerful, often accompanied in chorus and duet by brilliant female vocalists.
The rock-n-roll record curator kicks it all off with groovy, up-tempo pop masterpieces punctuated every song or two with unforgettable ballads bound to melt your heart over and over again.
On this album, the brilliant female voices include band member Sarah Martin, for the most part. But we do have two surprising and extremely esteemed guests. For instance, Carey Mulligan, the British actress most famous for her Academy Award-nominated role in 2009’s An Education, offers her sweet voice to the album’s title track, a short, soaring, bouncing and bluesy number reminiscent of “Dear Catastrophe Waitress,” complete with an unfortunate employment placement. Murdoch and Mulligan playfully hit and swing the lead and backup vocals like it’s some jaunty tennis game.
The biggest surprise is Norah Jones, who’s absolutely extraordinary on “Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John.”
But this song is the soul of the album, the song that sums it all up. Where we move from past to present, present to past again, stuck in a single room blue with television light. Norah and Stuart sound as though they’re facing each other in that late-night room, where each wishes sweet daydreams to the other to make up for what was lost and what is now.
The heartbeat of the whole album bleeds out from this song with lost youth, lost loves, and lost selves: “Quiet night you see the TVs glowing/Quiet night you hear the walls are awake/Me and you are getting out of the party crowd/Can I see what’s underneath your bed?/Can I stay until the milkman’s working/Can I stay until the café awakes/Do you hate me in the light/Did you get a fright/When you looked across from where you lay?”
It bleeds out in all the many days and ways we do our best to deny and forget it all: “Yeah you’re great, you’re just part/Of this lifetime of dreaming/That extends to the heart/Of this long summer feeling/All the history of the boys/I invent in my head/Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John.”
It bleeds out with the simple facts we’ve sung so many times ourselves: “What a waste I could have been your lover/What a waste I could have been your friend.”
What’s changed with this album is what changes everything: time and experience. Instead of being twenty-something hipsters, our songwriters are bona-fide grown-ups now, who have lived long enough to rack up a novel’s worth of regrets, sorrows, and soul-sustaining realizations. With Write About Love, we’re given an album’s worth, one not without its cheeky joys, like the first track, “I Didn’t See It Coming.”
Many an old B&S fan I’m certain is already happily singing the first welcoming words of the album right back at our favorite Glasgow band, just like I am: “Take me back I want to surrender/Your familiar arms I remember.”
I can’t think of anything better. Especially since I didn’t even see this one coming; that’s how the best love affairs begin—or begin again, anyway.
Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John” from Write About Love:
“I Want the World to Stop” from Write About Love:
