Stephen Mejias

Dear Frida,
It is official: I have a crush on you, and it feels good. I woke up this morning with your words circling through my foggy mind. Don't you worry, love. Let me help you love. There you go, love. Oh that's brilliant love.

I knew nothing about you when your album, Silence is Wild, wound up on my cluttered desk. Now I would like to know everything. Perhaps it was a mistake, perhaps you can't help it, but, yes, you have been extra charming. It's not only me, I'm sure. I'm sure others feel the same. If it is true, as you say, that your beauty is fleeting, then it's a good thing that I found you now; no way would I have been able to stand anything more lovely. You are so clever in "Dirty Dancing," the way you refer to the Ronette's "Be My Baby." I love it. (You and I are the same age. Did you know?) We were 10 years old when the movie was released, and I can still remember how it made me feel: At once repulsed and attracted, like, "Is that what love is supposed to be? When I grow up, will I meet a girl at some fancy resort and will we dance and fight and act so strange?" And I remember sitting on my parents' bed, looking out the window onto dreary Richards Street, listening to Kylie on the radio, thinking how old and new the music sounded. I could have been your Jimmy, your Johnny, your Stephen.

My sister, as it turns out, is married to a fellow from Sweden. Let us make it two. We can go on vacations together&#151winters in San Juan, summers in Stockholm. Poetry aside, when it comes to loving, all goes wild. I like that. I like the passion in "Highway 2 U," you giving the finger to police if they try to stop your love from speeding. And your voice rises and falls and does playful, little loops like a child's paper airplane tossed into a blue, blue sky, and I like that, too.

You seem to know so many great pop songs. It's not only evident in the way you twirl these perfect and grand choruses around your pretty piano fingers, but also how you seem to nod so gently to the others. Do you like the Fiery Furnaces? I get the idea that you do. I can hear it in your progressions and in the way you deliver certain lines and most clearly in your devotion to story-telling. But that last item can go back further, can be traced to any sort of folk music. You tell stories&#151sometimes the most horrible sorts of stories&#151with such an eerie, weird detachment, as if it's just life and that's just the way it goes, content to place such great emphasis on what appear to be insignificant details: In "December," for instance, a story about a trip to the abortion clinic to "rid us of our little trouble," you sing:

Oh you have played records all night long
You come straight from the club
When you pick me up at 6 in the morning
You smell of champagne and cigarettes!
I put on stockings and a dark green dress
And we're off to the clinic.

More than haunting, some of these songs sound haunted, but in the very best sense. Are you haunted, Frida? I am haunted, too.

And in "London," I hear hints of Morrissey in the way you sing:

I want to be like them!
I don't care if they are men
I want to be rich
I want to be fine and dandy

And "Birds," with its warbling, rising synth lines and happy, dancing cello, reminds me so much of the Magnetic Fields. This could have been one of the 69 love songs, this would have fit nicely in the old, chipped paint of the many pieces of april. The massive, twisting pitch shifts in "Science" take me back to 1998 and Mercury Rev's beautiful Deserter's Songs. And I am sure that's an abbreviated section of Air Supply's "Making Love Out of Nothing At All" in your "Old Shanghai." I am positive of it! Tell me, am I right? When I was a freshman in high school, I found a copy of their greatest hits in my mom's CD rack and, whenever I was feeling heartbroken or romantic, I would play it over and over again. My mom would ask me what was wrong, and I'd lie and say that everything was fine. "I know why people listen to this music," my mom would tell me, but I'd always deny it.

You close Silence by asking, "Why do you love me so much?" I can understand the feelings behind the question, but it comes as no surprise to me that you should be so loved. Only a beautiful person could be so shocked by another's love, could be so immune to one's own beauty. Is your idea of love really so out-of-date, or is it, in fact, timeless? I don't know.

Purple and green, the light,
under bridges and in the parks
It's not like in my Russian days when my brains shot
with wit and style
But the bars are ours
and my heart is yours
and our love is a flower and a running horse

Your words are poetry, no matter what, and I would like you to love me back, yes, but it is OK either way.