Elvis Costello, “Georgie and Her Rival” (Mighty Like a Rose, 1991)
The Magnetic Fields, “100,000 Fireflies” (Distant Plastic Trees, 1991)
The early 90s were a dark, strange time for Elvis Costello (if you need proof, check out the video for Mighty Like a Rose’s lead single, “The Other Side of Summer,” and witness him in his scraggly-bearded, shoulder-length-haired, biker-jacketed glory). “Georgie and Her Rival” displays a particular lack of faith in the human institutions of romantic love and common decency, profiling a couple who lack interest in both and yet remain together out of spite. Predicated upon phone tag and booty calls, theirs is a relationship in name only; as the song’s title suggests it’s much more of a game, nay, a war, with each party’s pride at stake.
“100,000 Fireflies” hails from the days when Stephin Merritt was too shy to sing on any of his songs, and so had Susan Anway handle lead vocals for the first two Magnetic Fields albums, Distant Plastic Trees and The Wayward Bus. In retrospect it’s a damn good thing; even though Merritt found his voice later on (a sardonic drawl that turned his lilting love songs into something far more cynical and fascinating), songs like this one are best left to someone who’ll put their whole heart into it. Anway spends much of the song intoning bizarre epigrams on the things that make her sad (“I have a mandolin / I play it all night long / It makes me want to kill myself”), but her heavenly voice and Merritt’s music-box orchestration make it all go down easy. The heart-exploding kicker, though, comes at the end, when the cryptic metaphors suddenly give way to raw honesty (“You won’t be happy with me / But give me one more chance / You won’t be happy anyway”). What sounds at first like a brief coda ends up extending for a full minute, laying out the bleak future of two people brought together by loneliness rather than love.
UPDATE — Costas Lignos wrote a kickass comment on this post that distills its overall point in an incredibly clear and concise way, so I’ve decided to repost part of it here:
“I think there’s an interesting contrast in the way that Stephen Merritt and Elvis Costello handle the dysfunctional relationships that account for the bulk of their songwriting. In Costello’s world a song’s narrator is almost always a detached, astute observer, watching oblivious lovers continue to harm each other because that’s the only way they know how to love. In most of Merritt’s songs, the narrator is in the relationship and as the song develops expresses their awareness of how sub-optimal they, their partner, and/or the relationship is, but is ultimately willing to submit to destruction at their lover’s hands because they prefer it to nothing at all. Costello’s lovers confuse love with destruction, while Merritt’s know the difference but resign themselves to accept destruction with love.”
