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The personnel shifts altered the group's songwriting and sound as well. On Belle and Sebastian's next album, 2003's Dear Catastrophe Waitress, the bass got thick. The guitars got dirty. Pop wizard Trevor Horn's production is crisp, and the arrangements emphasize the percussive, thrusting rock 'n' roll elements of the songwriting. Smutty single "Step Into My Office Baby" got the group a radio and MTV hit. And the live shows carried the muscle of this new sound.
It is on this wavelength that the band has continued since 2003. Early fans may find less mysterious beauty in the group's current sound — Murdoch has quipped, not altogether kiddingly, that the music he'll be best known for is behind him — but the band as a whole seems far more comfortable these days.
After 2006's strong The Life Pursuit, and an accompanying world tour, Belle and Sebastian took a four-year break that ended this year, when it reassembled to begin work on seventh album Write About Love. The project wasn't conceived as a meditation on love — guitarist Stevie Jackson suggested the title when the band members were picking tracks for the album. And Murdoch says the "love" they're writing about isn't romantic, but rather a kind of spiritual currency or force — "a way of looking at the world."
Write About Love contains some of the band's catchiest songs, and some that rank among its quietest and most trying. Perhaps the most risky cut is "Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John" — a typically daydreamy number about a girl who can't find a boy as alluring as Lou Reed, Jack Kerouac, and John Lennon, her musical and literary heroes. It features the unmistakable, creamy vocals of one Norah Jones, jazz pianist, daughter of Ravi Shankar, and adult contemporary megastar. During the song's recording, the band played live in the studio, while Murdoch and Jones sang face-to-face in the vocal booth. "She sort of took over, to be honest," Murdoch chuckles. That may be why, apart from the lyrics, it sounds more like a Norah Jones song than a Belle and Sebastian one.
On most of Write About Love, Belle and Sebastian sound more familiar. The strong title track, which includes vocals from British actress Carey Mulligan (An Education, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps) rides the breezy rock-pop style of the band's last two albums as it tells the story of a girl bored with her job and her life. Her respite comes, like those many Belle and Sebastian protagonists, during her daydreams. Every day, while eating lunch on the roof of her office, surveying a view of the city, she writes about a man: "He's intellectual, and he's hot, but he understands."
Elsewhere, Murdoch describes his faith directly. The essence of "The Ghost of Rockschool" is its refrains about seeing God in puddles and streets and other small things. "I don't want to disappoint people, but there isn't an hour in the day in which I don't think about an otherness — seeing God and even being thankful for the present moment," he explains.
Murdoch and the band decided from the start that they wanted Write About Love to be absorbed slowly by their fans the way their early releases were, with no advance interviews or reviews and only a few live dates to support the record. "Nobody really cared back then," he says. "People would discover the record, and they would listen to it without the prejudice of having heard reviews or having any hype. And I liked that."
But a few weeks before its release, as is common these days, the album was leaked onto the Internet. Murdoch was furious — so much so that in his online diary, he suggested that the band might forego selling albums the traditional way in favor of self-releasing them digitally. But his American wife, Marisa, whom he married in 2007, was as angry as he was, and soothing her put the leak in perspective for Murdoch. "I thought, 'Well, what are you going to do?'" he says. "That's just reality."
It was Murdoch's history in the Bay Area that largely changed his and the band's mind about touring the U.S. and performing at Treasure Island. In 2001, Belle and Sebastian came to San Francisco to play two nights at the Warfield, finally making good on Murdoch's promise to himself to return with a band. He felt comfortable enough performing then to ride out onstage on a motorcycle. "I was so fucking psyched, to use your term, I just couldn't wait," he gushes. "It had taken 10 years to get back to the West Coast, but I had my band and we were in good form."
The way Murdoch tells it, every visit here is a way to relive the pleasures he discovered on that first trip. "I love taking the Geary bus right to the ocean and then just walking back," he says. "I just love that cliff walk, and seeing the Golden Gate Bridge emerge, and then walking through the Presidio and then right down into the Marina and then back into North Beach for some coffee or pizza."
Here, Murdoch pauses, as if recounting the thoughts and daydreams he's had on so many of those walks through the city. His voice returns a bit more softly. "I'm telling you, it's angelic, that San Francisco."
E-mail Ian.Port@SFWeekly.com.
"I swore to myself that I wasn't going to come back to San Francisco without a band. And that happened." — Stuart Murdoch, Belle and Sebastian
"It was a boost to us that people in the States, especially people in San Francisco, accepted you at face value, accepted you for what you were and weren't prejudiced against you. We felt like second-class citizens at home because we were sick." — Stuart Murdoch
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