John's Track of the Week: "Funny Little Frog"

Song: Funny Little Frog

Artist: Belle and Sebastian

Album: The Life Pursuit

Year: 2006

For years, I was not a huge fan of this song. To be honest, I kind of had something against it. It wasn't the overly-happy or poppy nature "Funny Little Frog" seemed to exude, however, it may have had something to do with the band's altered sound. I'm of the camp where I thoroughly enjoyed the older, more melancholic Belle and Sebastian of the late 1990s, so perhaps this was just the song that set me off more than any other recent piece of work. Still, I would occasionally listen to this track, along with several others from The Life Pursuit, just to try to prove to myself that maybe it wasn't so bad. Surprisingly enough, I ended up being convinced by God Help the Girl, Stuart Murdoch's side film/recording project. Among the fantastic collection amassed on that record, a very toned-down version of this song somehow rose to be one of my favorites. With time, I began to gravitate towards the original, and now we're here, with it being my Track of the Week.

The song chronicles a literal laundry list of feelings which our narrator has for his partner. However, as we find out at its conclusion, it ends up that none of this is actual said out loud, and instead, promised to be shared at a later date. It's almost timeless, the message and the different images evoked, that it nearly makes the song somewhat of a classic love ballad. Especially in our modern times, it seems to me that it has become harder and harder for people to really share their true feelings in spoken word. Perhaps this provides the chronicle of that struggle? A goofy, slightly awkward, but overall, pop-driven and metaphor-filled recap of how much one person means to another. Somehow, in 2009, I'm tempted to believe that this is one of the most accurate observations of modern life I've seen. Or I could just be overanalyzing. Either way, it's below, for your listening pleasure.