Three songs you need to hear: Sean Michaels’s playlist of the week

In 1958, The Monotones released a song about the Book of Love. Inspired by a toothpaste jingle, it’s a doo-wop number that moves so fast it seems to be sprinting – especially at the chorus. If the group’s six singers have indeed read the Book, I suspect they skimmed it. Chapter one is allegedly about confessing love; chapter two concerns commitment; chapter three, enigmatically, teaches you “the true meaning of romance.” The Monotones’ description of the final chapter leaves me skeptical about the whole publication: “In chapter four,” they sing, “you break up / but you give her just one more chance.” Most perplexingly, the Monotones’ central lyric concerns the authorship of the Book of Love. “Who wrote [it]?” they ask and ask, as if they’re trying to compile a bibliography; as if the author’s CV could tell them, once and for all, whether love’s a mug’s game.

In 1999, Magnetic Fields released a song about the Book of Love. It’s the cleverest, prettiest song that has been written on the topic, a song whose lyrics fit together like lovers’ locking eyes. I get the impression that Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt must have picked up a different edition of the Book than did the Monotones’ six-part harmonizers. As Merritt describes it, the tome offers little value as a relationship manual. Instead it’s full of flowers, “facts and figures,” instructions for dancing, and “things we’re all too young to know.” “The book of love has music in it,” he explains. “In fact that’s where music comes from / Some of it is just transcendental / Some of it is just really dumb.”

Droll and sentimental at the same time, keenly felt, the Fields’ Book of Love has understandably become a wedding-day standard. It is arguably one of indie rock’s most important contributions to the American songbook. But be careful who you play it for. It’s not easy to take back.