The Secret of Happiness

Writers - Tennant/Lowe
First released - 2024
Original album - Nonetheless
Producer - James Ford
Subsequent albums - none
Other releases - none

A ballad with, as one reviewer has put it, an "opulent" arrangement, this song finds Neil opening his vocal performance (and later repeating it) with a gasp of "Butterflies!" This serves as shorthand for the blended sense of beauty and wonder that his narrator has found in the person he loves. It could also be a description of the somewhat nervous feelings (as in butterflies in the stomach) he has in the throes of new romance. A recurring brief instrumental motif even seems to mimic the rhythm of the word "butterflies," which is a lovely touch. Both thematically and stylistically something of a companion piece to the Bilingual track "It Always Comes as a Surprise" from two-and-a-half decades before, "The Secret of Happiness" finds the Pet Shop Boys in full-on romantic mode.

During the COVID lockdown, Neil had watched the 1938 musical comedy film Carefree starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers with music by Irving Berlin. He was particularly enchanted by the song "Change Partners" and became, in his own words, "completely obsessed" by it. This caused him to delve into the career and work of Irving Berlin, even going so far as to buy a collection of his sheet music. Berlin's influence would find its way into this song, which underwent a sequence of title changes: "The Autumn in Me," "The Summer in Me," "Something Like Happiness," and then finally "The Secret of Happiness."

As with "It Always Comes as a Surprise," the Boys perform "The Secret of Happiness" in a bossa nova style, though it's a touch subtler than in the earlier song. Although it was undoubtedly Astaire's rendition of "Change Partners" that first piqued Neil's interest in that song, it's possible that a later version, Frank Sinatra's 1967 rendition with Antônio Carlos Jobim—the Brazilian "father of bossa nova" as he is popularly known—has a stronger stylistic influence on the PSB recording. As it so happens, one of Neil's "listening picks" in Annually 2021 was the 1977 album Amoroso by João Gilberto, four songs from which were composed by Jobim. And like Jobim, Gilberto is a major figure in the bossa nova genre. So bossa nova was clearly very much in Neil's thoughts around the time he wrote and recorded "The Secret of Happiness."

The song's narrator regards his lover as a respite from the difficulties of the world. Although he was "hungry, angry, hot and tired," he says all of that changed when "I walk[ed] into your life." His lover doesn't merely possess "the secret of happiness"; rather, he is the secret of happiness.

Again reminiscent of an earlier song (in this case "Miracles"), Neil employs the pathetic fallacy to express how nature itself seems to mirror the beauty and wonder that his narrator is experiencing. Although it's completely ordinary at northerly latitudes for summer daylight to continue late into the evening, he nevertheless attributes this fact to the presence of this love in his life. Everything else in nature around him seems in a benign conspiracy to reflect his happiness: "Moon is rising, trees are sighing, poetry again." And it's all because his lover possesses "all that I want… and maybe more as an encore."

You just don't get much more romantic than this.

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