TATAR #4: Our Mutual Friend

by Neil Hannon (2004)

So this is Neil Hannon better known as The Divine Comedy.

The song tells the story (in the first person) of a guy who meets a girl, drunkenly goes back to a mutual friend's house, drinks some more, then they kiss and pass out. The kicker (spoiler alert) is when he wakes up in the morning and finds the girl has slept with the other bloke:

"No longer then

Is he our mutual friend"

Quite.

Now the album version has layers of lovely instrumentals to keep the ear entertained but this piano version lets us hear the song in the raw, duff notes and all. I like that.

Musically the most striking thing is the rhythm: a fast, synchopated semi-quaver pattern. It's unsettled, angry, obsessive even:

"No matter how I try

I just can't get her out of my mind

And when I sleep I visualize her"

There's something about that word 'visualize'. He's not just thinking about her or dreaming about her; 'visualize' is more intense.

So the rhythm speaks to this intense fixation. The melody, on the other hand - a slow, falling tune - is more melancholic, resigned.

And the harmony gets even more interesting. It's basically Bb major but not quite. That is, the simple 4-chord sequence of Cm-F9-Bb-Eb, starts and ends, not on Bb as you might expect, but on Cm. And when we do hear the Bb chord, it's in the first inversion, meaning that the bottom of the chord is a D rather than the root of the chord Bb. So we never quite feel rooted. We're drifting along, a bit lost in a dreamy drunken kind of a way. Just like the fella in the story.

The lyrics drift too. There are a few true rhymes (settee/me, 45s/lives, floor/anymore) but there are just as many half rhymes (pub/nightclub, noise/voice, danced/balance) which adds to that inexact, drifty feel.

All of this makes for, not only a great story song, but a great character song too. Some people think of musical theatre songs as songs that literally tell a story. So a theatre song will inform us that X happened, then Y happened, then Z complicated the situation in a meaningful-but-dramatically-satisfying fashion. But more often than not, theatre songs aren't songs that literally tell us a story, they are songs that are part of a story. That's why the character they are conveying is more important than the narrative they are telling.

This one does both.

Divine.