Belle & Sebastian

The Life Pursuit
Rough Trade, 2006

My favourite love song of recent years is 'Funny Little Frog', the lead single from cult band Belle & Sebastian's most recent album, a gorgeous three-minute pop song with piano and horns and handclaps that makes me want to dance in the kitchen. I adore it not least for reminding me of someone special, but also because it is such a magnificent puzzle – a song so upbeat and ridiculously heartfelt that it approaches parody, with what seems like a shopping list of references to older Belle & Sebastian songs and singer Stuart Murdoch's trademark lyrical obsessions (religion, girls, poetry) and, above all, an object of affection that doesn't seem to exist. "You are my girl and you don't even know it," Murdoch sings in the chorus, and later, almost triumphantly: "And I don't know how you smell!"

This mysterious non-person in the song is claimed to be perhaps the greatest and most inspirational partner that a person could ever have, a mythical romantic superhero that enables the singer to be truly happy ("Honey, loving you is the greatest thing/ I get to be myself and I get to sing") and who never requires an explanation after a late night at the pub. I have always imagined the figure as a religious icon, perhaps an image of the Virgin Mary, an idea floated by Belle & Sebastian's record label at the time, but others have seen it to be a girl viewed from afar and taken as a muse, a model on the cover of a magazine or even the band itself.

When asked by Drowned In Sound, Murdoch would say only that the subject was a real person and that the song was "about someone who thinks they're in love with an actual person but is actually in love with an imaginary person". The film clip played up the same idea, showing the singer dancing around his apartment with a woman in a blue dress before waking up in his bed to discover that he was in fact alone. Perhaps it was written simply to be puzzling, and that's the whole point. I especially love the last line, a sort of knowing wink that leaves everything up in the air. After reeling off a list of things he would like to do with this strange someone, Murdoch announces wistfully: "I'll maybe tell you all about it someday..."