By Michelle Goldberg

LATELY IT SEEMS as if talk-show nation has infiltrated songwriting. Performers have always torn their romantic wounds open for art and profit, crooning laments to an eternal "you." But more and more often today – in indieland (Quasi) and in pop (Everything but the Girl) – one hears the subject answering back. On Yo La Tengo's new And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, husband and wife Ira Kaplan's and Georgia Hubley's voices curl around each other in achy relationship odes ("The Crying of Lot G") and tender reminiscences ("Our Way to Fall"). Like Quasi, Sleater-Kinney have had to make a transition from rocky romance to rock and roll, and much of the combustion and poignancy of their breakthrough Call the Doctor came from the id-ego interplay of Carrie Brownstein's even tones and Corin Tucker's fierce vibrato. On "Stay Where You Are," Tucker wailed, "You can't find me, you're in the dark," while Brownstein sang the desperate, clinging lyrics "I just need you to save me one last time," a dialogue that sounded a lot like the last grasping gasps of a dying affair.

Few singers, though, have displayed the dynamics of their relationships quite as nakedly as Sarah Records alumnus Bob Wratten. In fact, Wratten's output over the past eight or so years has overwhelmingly been about one woman, his frequent collaborator Annemarie Davies. She joined his band the Field Mice after they'd already released several singles and EPs, at first singing words that Wratten had written about another girl. Then the two fell in love, and their alliance caused fractures in the band that led, in part, to its eventual breakup. The pair formed their own outfit, Northern Picture Library, which – reflecting their brief domestic bliss – created plush, atmospheric watercolor soundscapes with little of the anguish that had animated Wratten's previous work.

Soon enough, though, suffering returned. The relationship fell apart, and Wratten, alone again, recorded an EP about love's dissolution, naming his solo project Trembling Blue Stars after a line from Pauline Réage's classic of sexual masochism, Story of O. The EP, Her Handwriting, was all about Davies, and recording it was so painful that he quit twice before finishing it. "Basically I sort of canceled the studio time," Wratten (interviewed via phone at his home in London) says when asked about the time period. "I was really unsure. Eventually the producer asked me to just come into the studio for a day, and that's the basis on which we did the record."

Wratten says that Davies didn't hear Her Handwriting until it was finished. "I know she found that hard," he says. "That's the record she listens to the least; it's so close to us breaking up. Certain things made her angry, because the way I see something might be totally different than how she remembers it." Still, he says, Davies has never been angry at him for exposing so much of their life together. "That's just the creative process. She's never said, 'I don't want that going out.' "

Nevertheless, Wratten says he's tried to respect Davies's privacy. "There have been times when I've had interview questions and I've checked with her before I answered them," he says. "She's the one person whose opinion I listen to. If she said that something I write goes too far, that she doesn't want me to talk about something, I'd respect it. But she's really OK with it. She understands the way I write songs, and she's a fan of other songwriters who write quite intimate lyrics."

In fact, Davies was so OK with Her Handwriting that she appeared on Trembling Blue Stars' next record, Lips That Taste of Tears. By then the two had achieved a kind of friendship, and Davies provided breathy, caresslike backing vocals to songs on which Wratten agonized over losing her. Her face, pale and wistful, graced the album's cover.

Now she's joined Wratten once again to echo his obsessions on the shimmering, morose Broken by Whispers. The album is more spare and acoustic than Lips, which at times recalled Hooverphonic with its raindrops-on-rooftops beats and airy synths. The song "Birthday Girl," off the new record, is just Wratten's soft, crystalline voice and a lightly strummed guitar, accented with the faintest wisp of strings. Still, with its sweet melodies jangling in contrast to tales of romantic agony, Broken by Whispers fits easily within Wratten's oeuvre. "Doubled up with longing, 3 a.m. / Anything is better than this," he sings on "Ripples." Davies's voice is barely present, hovering like a ghost behind "Snow Showers" and "Dark Eyes." But knowing that she was likely in the room when Wratten sang "Though we've been apart / Longer than we were together / I'm still all adrift / Something still has not mended" makes it all the more affecting.

Like Sarah Records generally, Wratten has elicited an almost hysterical hostility from the more macho corners of the British music press. In a review of Northern Picture Library's "Norfolk Windmills/Paris" single for New Musical Express, writer Stephen Wells came across like a closet case clinging madly to his masculinity after getting a hard-on in a gay bar. "[O]ne might suspect that this record is YET ANOTHER streak of flailingly ineffectual tish/tishing wispy-wispy billycooing maggot piss aimed at adolescent male failed-suicides who couldn't get a shag in a nearly bankrupt brothel with a credit card stapled to their pimply foreskins," he ranted, calling Wratten a "woman-loathing inadequate."

Ironically, though, such brutal outbursts make Wratten's earnestness, his refusal to hide behind ironic or oblique allusions, appear all the braver. "Like anyone, I don't like it when we get a bad review," he says. "But I would never think, 'This is too vulnerable,' or, 'You're revealing too much, and the enemy will give you a good kicking.' That wouldn't occur to me when I'm writing songs." There may be masochism in leaving oneself so vulnerable, but there's also strength.

Such openness is certainly why Broken by Whispers is the second most romantic album so far this year – second, of course, to And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. Both records succeed because of an almost painful intimacy grounded in real-life details. Without them, "love" is often just a word like "baby" or "oh, oh, oh," a lazy songwriting trope or a scrap of default filler. Abstract from overuse, perhaps it needs to be tied to specifics. And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out is given undeniable resonance by the band's biography. Since so many feel betrayed by myths of marriage and commitment, it means a lot to know that Kaplan and Hubley are singing of a real union, that real unions actually exist. "I quite like it when I know who someone is singing about, when I know they're singing about a real person," Wratten says. "I think a lot of people pick up on it." After all, pop stars today have to make us believe in love before they make us believe in love songs.

PHOTO: ALISON WONDERLAND

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