His heart-exploding words.

I've been trying to warm up to Rhett Miller's new comme ci comme ça album The Believer. While I've never been the biggest Old 97's fan, I spent most of September - November 2002 exclusively listening to Miller's solo debut The Instigator. I get the feeling I'll come around to the new album, but listening to it has only made me go back and reacquaint myself with The Instigator. Okay, so that's a lie; I haven't made it past "Our Love," the album's opening track. In the past two days I've listened to the damm thing nine times. (This according to my iPod's handy play-counter.)

There's much to obsess over: the off-the-chart power pop chorus, Jon Brion's galloping electric guitar work that nearly jumps the rail at the 1:48 mark, Jim Keltner's monster drumming. However, it's the opening verse that really kills me. Check it:

Richard Wagner's letters to his lover Mathilde were a mess
He should have quit before he had written the address
They made love on the mezzanine her husband was his friend
Vienna in a fugue-state working on a thing
That when he finished it took almost seven hours to sing
He still found time to write to her his heart-exploding words.

That's right. Dude took Richard Wagner's epistolary activity with his mistress and turned into into a pop song. The second verse, while not as great (what's up with the third to first person jump?), tackles Franzie:

Kafka in his letters to his lover Milena was alive
But he was waiting for a love that never would arrive
Their rendezvous was singular her husband was his friend
She is a living fire she is a reason to live
She is killing me burning only for him
I'll spend my whole life loving her my heart exploding words.

I love the incongruity of a guy writing a three minute song for his girl and expressing his love via biographical sketches of two long-dead artists.

The Miller song made me think of how hilarious it is to hear Natasha Bedingfield namecheck nineteenth century poets in her TRL-sanctioned hit "These Words." ("Read some Byron, Shelly and Keats / Recited it over a Hip-Hop beat / I'm having trouble saying what I mean / With dead poets and drum machines.")

Your turn: in the comment section, your vote for the most unlikely fodder for and/or reference in a pop song. And the Nabokov ref in Sting's "Don't Stand So Close to Me" doesn't count. Go.