Song for Sunday: Regina Spector – Loveology

Love is taught in Regina Spector’s new song. The musician’s eighth album, Home Before and After, will be released at the end of June.

to Christopher Sipin

You can make a flag out of anything. Or you can at least try. It can be over-analyzed and interpreted, talking about things differently, and using new terms. Then something as elusive as love, the loudest, fastest, wildest emotional roller coaster, suddenly becomes the science of love. Regina Spektor calls her new single “Loveology,” just as aspiring drink makers made “Mixology” by mixing their ingredients in the past. In the case of the Spektor, this is served with a wink.

It comes down to whether you want to look at things objectively or prefer to feel them. Objectivity versus subjective self, sort of. You have so many experiences in life, so many hearts broken, and so often that you heal yourself before you find yourself in the loop of love again, that it is really easy to be able to look at love and the whole relationship without emotion. It doesn’t work, even if I wrote a song about it.

In her movie “Loveology” Regina Spector is the teacher in front of the classroom: “Sit down, class, open your textbooks to page 42,” she says at one point in the song in a calm voice. Forty-two, the answer to life, the universe and everything. How lovely it is for Douglas Adams to make a cameo in this song.

Then the theology begins: “Porcupine science, antler science,” what an absurdity. “Car-ology, bus-ology, train-ology, jet-ology”. And even more: “Love, I’m sorry, forgive me.” How to forgive, how to love, how to apologize, how to be truly sorry. Oh, how cool it would be if we learned how to do this in school. I am sorry about that.

Lots of analysis, but the opposite too: “Let’s go to the movies, I’ll sing you a song about absolutely nothing,” Regina Specter sings and talks about the opposite of what you’re already doing, singing a song, which is almost a lot. Let’s close and close together. Watch a movie, don’t think, don’t argue, don’t exaggerate, just let yourself get carried away.

“Oh, you are an incurable human being.” Music for incurable human beings. Regina Spector sings in the direction of someone who might be the same. Anyway, about a very important person. So about all of us. And her piano plays melancholy that means a lot and then nothing really: “absolutely nothing,” as in movies in movie theaters and pretty pop songs.