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2. “When My Boy Walks Down the Street”
“Grand pianos crash collectively when my boy walks down the road,” Merritt sings on this coolly catchy, lyrically vivid fuzz-pop quantity, which imagines the item of his affection because the star of a surreal cinematic montage: “There are complete new sorts of climate when he walks to his new beat.”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
3. “No One Will Ever Love You”
The pure-toned vocalist Shirley Simms sings lots of the sweetest of the “69 Love Songs,” however on this memorable, heart-string-tugging observe she cuts her sugar with a heavy dose of arsenic, telling an detached lover, “No one will ever love you, truthfully/No one will ever love you on your honesty.”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
4. “Grand Canyon”
Personally, this one is in my Top 3. A deceptively easy tune elevated into the chic by an sudden, nearly hymnlike ascending chord, “Grand Canyon” contrasts mythic metaphor with the abnormal actuality of romance as Merritt sings, devastatingly, “I’m simply me, I’m solely me/And you used to like me that method.”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
5. “Busby Berkeley Dreams”
Let’s preserve the devastation going with this wrenching piano ballad that levels a misplaced love as an “outrageously lovely” Old Hollywood musical quantity worthy of the director and choreographer himself. “Gold Diggers of ’69,” anybody?
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
6. “Acoustic Guitar”
On the one tune I can consider that name-checks Charo, Gwar and Steve Earle, the vocalist Claudia Gonson strikes the proper stability between tongue-in-cheek meta-wit and honest emotion, making this sparse, plaintive tune certainly one of Disc 3’s most arresting and quotable moments.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
7. “(Crazy for You however) Not That Crazy”
A wry synth-pop quantity that Merritt sings in a droning deadpan, this tune exams the outer limits of lovesickness: “I constructed a ship with my very own palms, to take us to the moon/I took a pen in my very own hand and wrote you 100 tunes.” Bonus factors for the little Flamin’ Groovies-esque jangle that decorates the ultimate refrain.
