Blood And Intimacy

Belle & Sebastian “Will I Tell You A Secret”

Most of the songs on Belle & Sebastian’s Late Developers are sunny and sleek up-tempo numbers but “Will I Tell You A Secret” is an outlier, a short and relatively unadorned folk pop song that’s much closer to the band’s early style. The arrangement is very direct and simple, mostly acoustic guitar, harpsichord, and Stuart Murdoch’s voice focused sharply on articulating a melody so beautifully shaped that it sounds immediately familiar, as though it’s been with us for hundreds of years. (Maybe it has?) The lyrics return to a frequent Murdoch theme – addressing someone you’ve once had a romantic relationship with but over the years the relationship became more of a close friendship. As ever Murdoch approaches this with kindness and grace rather than bitterness or disappointment, but there is a melancholy to this song however much he tries to obscure it with gratitude and a generosity of spirit. He’s lamenting something that’s been lost – a child that was never born, and a void in his life where their casual intimacy used to be.

Buy it from Bandcamp.