Las eliminadas son:
Con 7 votos:
2.9 YOU'RE MY ONLY HOME
"The discussion between Stephin Merritt and Daniel Handler in the 69 Love Songs booklet casts You're My Only Home as a country song with elements of technopop in its execution.
In his interview with Stephin Merritt in The New York Observer, Philip Weiss records this exchange about the song:
I told Mr. Merritt I sang it to my wife (trying to imitate his deep sad tones). He looked at me like I was crazy.
"The song is tragic and pathetic. 'When you cancel dinner plans, I wish I didn't understand'?" he said. "It's a declaration of love for someone who doesnât return it."
"It's a song about separateness in a relationship," I said. "My wife cancels dinner plansâso what." "
3.6 THE DEATH OF FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE
"Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) was a Swiss linguist whose theory of 'semiotics' was a cornerstone of the structuralist and post-structuralist thought (not just in linguistics, but it anthropology and other analyses of culture and society).
Two core concepts are the 'signifier' â the word or sign that stands for something â (e.g. the words orchid, love) and the 'signified' â the thing that it stands for (e.g. a plant with flowers of unusual shapes and beautiful colours, the experience of infatuation and desire, mutual or otherwise). Some signifieds are more tangible than others, hence 'On love he said "I'm not so sure / I even know what it is... / You can't use a bulldozer / to study orchids," he said, "so... / I don't know anything about love"'
'I'm just a great composer
and not a violent man
but I lost my composure
and I shot Ferdinand
crying, "It's well and kosher
to say you don't understand
but this is for Holland-Dozier-Holland!"'
The rhyme scheme here goes A-B-A-B-A-B-A&B, with the final line delivering the coup de grace. In terms of the metre, the second Holland should come at the start of a new line, but by squeezing it onto the last line a double rhyme is achieved (kosher-Dozier, understand-Holland). And this metrical pile-up also delivers the punch-line in terms of the motive: Ferdinand's murder is the love song's revenge on the critic.
Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and (Brian's brother) Edward Holland, Jr. wrote 25 Top-10 hit singles â many of which evoke the experience of being in love â for various performers on the Motown label during the 1960s.
Aside from the hand-claps after 'I'm just a a great composer' The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure is a 'loop song': all the musicians play exactly the same thing straight through the song; the only thing that changes is the vocal melody. This approach has precedents in The Magnetic Fields' EP The House of Tomorrow, on which all five songs are loop songs."
3.14 QUEEN OF THE SAVAGES
"In the 69 Love Songs booklet, Stephin Merritt cites the 1965 film She, featuring Ursula Andress as 'Ayesha (She who must be obeyed)', as a reference point for the queen of the title. (Since the album was released, there has been a remake of the film.)
The idea of the 'noble savage' is a romantic one in a different sense from that usually applied to love songs."
Con 6 votos:
2.5 VERY FUNNY
"Key to Very Funny is the surprise engendered by the sudden and unexpected end. At the 2000-12-07 performance of the song at the Somerville Theater, Stephin Merritt commented how differently the song works if the audience (there comprising mostly people already familiar with the album) knows when it's going to end."
Con 5 votos:
1.23 THE THINGS WE DID AND DIDN'T DO
"'All the things I knew I didn't know and didn't want to know / that you told me just to tell me later that you'd told me so'
Wordplay for which Stephin Merritt pays tribute to Gertrude Stein for showing how to have lyrics repeat internally without having to rhyme. "Gertrude Stein is an underused resource in music," he says in the 69 Love Songs booklet."
2.21 THE WAY YOU SAY GOODNIGHT
"'The nightbirds start to sing their favorite song: / "The Way You Say Good-Night"'
Stephin Merritt has often said that he writes songs about songs, and this appears to be â at least in part â a literal instance.
LD Beghtol writes:
We recorded this the same afternoon we did Nothing Matters When We're Dancing so my voice was pleasantly transparent and 1930s tenor-y â a voice I don't often get to use. We did three takes for this, one for each verse and once for the coda. It was pretty high already, then when Stephin mixed it he sped it up perhaps a whole step, to really thin out my voice and make it mechanical sounding. It took me a while to get used to that!
There is a song I Love The Way You Say Good Night that appears in the Doris Day film Lullaby of Broadway (coincidentally, Lullaby of Broadway is also the title of a song written for the Busby Berkeley film Gold Diggers Of 1935, where its performance features 100 dancers).
However, the lyrics refer not just to the song "The Way You Say Good-Night", but also to the way the singer's lover says good night: 'The way you say good-night / I dream of all day long', leading to the reflexive twist, 'Oh, I could write a song about the way you say good-night... ' Stephin Merritt points out in the 69 Love Songs booklet that the way the person says good-night is never described in any way. In the terms of Ferdinand de Saussure, "The Way You Say Good-Night" is a signifier, but the signified remains unknown.
'The stars begin their Busby Berkeley dance'"
Con 4 votos
2.22 ABIGAIL, BELLE OF KILRONAN
"This song combines the ballad tradition of lovers-parted-by-war (cf. The Girl I Left Behind Me, The Cruel War, Fare Ye Well, Enniskillen, through to Tie a Yellow Ribbon and Billy Don't be a Hero) with the Irish traditional [The Star of the County Down]. In the 69 Love Songs booklet, Stephin Merritt says that war justifies over-the-top sentimentality, which he likes.
It takes some licence with tradition and with 'keeping it real' (see Stephin Merritt quotes).
The album version has treated guitar panned quickly across the stereo â by contrast, the song sounds more 'authentic' when performed live without these treatments.
It's hard to place and date the war to which the song refers: there have been few wars that have extended throughout Ireland ('blowing through the land') or been protracted enough for a girl to grow into a woman ('When I come home, if I come home / You'll be a grown woman').
Kilronan is the main town on Inishmore in the Aran Islands, part of County Galway ('Abigail / 's gonna be the beauty of County Galway'). Though there's also another Kilronan Parish in County Roscommon. The great Irish traditional harp player and songwriter Turlough O'Carolan (1670-1736) is buried in the church of this other Kilronan, and Kilronan Parish is still home to a Harp festival. In a tradition of non-authentic instrumentation that would surely appeal to Stephin Merritt, much of O'Carolan's harp music, along with other folk tunes and ballads, has been sequenced for MIDI. "
Aquà ha habido un múltiple empate pero se ha ido la que más votos acumulaba en rondas anteriores.
