Songwriters lie—that’s the point. Sure, the average scribe of, say, love songs, assembles fiction from a jumble of broken-hearted fact—but that’s until he runs out of material, at which point he is expected to shrug his shoulders and start making stuff up.

Then there are the songwriters who make stuff up from the beginning. Take the Decemberists’ Colin Meloy, whose nineteenth-century ghost stories, interspersed with twentieth-century Cold War romance epics and eighteen-minute song cycles based on Celtic myth, get him accused of insincerity. And sometimes, when he’s wailing about pirates or gut-shot gin-runners, his critics have a point; for all Meloy’s lyrical wit and obvious glee in invention, a lot of the time there isn’t much there. Whether we really need something there is another question, but let’s assume we do, and in that spirit we’d better look at the Decemberists’ “Eli, the Barrow Boy,” which in its modest acoustic production and quiet brevity is one of the unnoticed highlights of Meloy’s oeuvre. It’s good because there’s nothing wasted: there are two verses and two modified choruses, and the story isn’t obtuse or longwinded. Eli the barrow boy wants to buy a present for his lover, but can’t because A) he is poor and B) she is dead; later, after Eli himself has “drowned in the river down the way”, it turns out you can still hear him occasionally, and he still feels the same way, except that A) he’s still poor and B) now he’s dead. It’s melodramatic, sure; maudlin, maybe; but the plaintive, straightforward eerieness of Meloy’s lyrics and delivery turn it into a diamond-cut vignette of unforgotten love, of a memory so strong it is retained after not only its object but its bearer is gone. And it’s all made up, of course, but with such skill and economy it’s ten times more graceful than any similarly-themed story Meloy could have pulled from his own life.

But you don’t have to be dead to refuse to forget a lover, and you don’t have to make up ghosts to make up a perfect story. “Begin the Beguine,” one of a half-dozen Cole Porter songs struggling for the title of Greatest Cole Porter Song, has the same kind of self-contained grace; the song’s a perpetual motion machine, its rapturous end feeding into its wistful beginning feeding into its desperate middle feeding back into its end, in a tight, cyclical structure that puts all of Porter’s cleverness to work without falling prey to the glib archness of which he is occasionally accused. This time the protagonist’s a standard-issue broken heart, a nostalgic ex-lover carried back to his affair’s heyday by the sound of an orchestra. “To live it again is past all endeavor”—and so he hopes to leave it buried, cries “Don’t let them begin the beguine”—but by the end there’s nothing he can do, and he’s begging instead for the orchestra to play, for the irretrievable past to be replayed one last time. The song’s gentle irony comes in the fact that the band never actually plays: Porter just predicts what will happen if it does, then tells it not to, then gives up. He’s not tortured by a serendipitous jukebox choice, but by his own indestructible memory, and here he intersects with Meloy’s barrow boy—both are driven by loss to self-absorption, until petty externalities like orchestras or death don’t matter. And both sit at the center of impeccably constructed, beautifully self-contained songs, without a hair of structure or melody out of place, and without a shred of truth in them - except emotional truth, which is all that matters here. Get things this right and you can make up whatever you want.

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