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Metamorphosis

Writers - Tennant/Lowe
First released - 1996
Original album - Bilingual
Producer - Pet Shop Boys, Andrew Williams, Paul Roberts
Subsequent albums - (none)
Other releases - (none)

Neil had hinted at and obliquely alluded to his gayness throughout his musical career, but now the coyness was over. If 1991's "Was It Worth It?" was his "virtual" coming-out song, stating the case clearly enough for anyone willing to hear it, 1996's "Metamorphosis" was the "official" version, restating it in such a way that nobody, but nobody, could miss or deny it no matter how much they might want to. It's a fast, almost frenetic "gay rap" number, pure and simple, in which Neil describes how his true sexual orientation gradually dawned on him and, despite his resistance against it, he finally "gave in" so that he might achieve personal satisfaction and happiness. He likens this transformation to biological metamorphosis: "Once a caterpillar, now a butterfly."

The instrumental origins of this track lay in a piece that a couple of the Boys' former backup dancers and rappers had been working on with them but abandoned. Neil and Chris thoroughly reworked it with the help of the K-klass production team of Andy Williams and Paul Roberts.

Annotations

Neil told interviewer/author Daniel Rachel (as recorded in his 2014 book The Art of Noise: Conversations with Great Songwriters) that "Metamorphosis" is his least favorite lyric in the entire Pet Shop Boys catalogue. He said that it now "embarrasses" him.
The word "metamorphosis" came into English directly from ancient Greek, where it means "transformation," derived from the roots meta (meaning "after"), morph (meaning "form" or "structure"), and "-osis" (a suffix referring to actions or conditions). Its primary English-language use is in the field of biology, where it refers to the drastic change in appearance that certain species undergo during the natural course of their lives. The song's lyrics themselves refer perhaps the single best-known example of this sort of biological transformation: "Once a caterpillar, now a butterfly." Through the years, however, "metamorphosis" has often been used metaphorically to refer to any type of transformation, even of a non-physical or psychological nature—which is closely akin to how it's used in this song.
"Somebody spoke and I went into a dream" – A direct lyrical quotation from the 1967 Beatles song "A Day in the Life," written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
"… you start to feel increasingly forlorner" – A remarkable clause on several counts, mainly because it contains the rather unusual (and somewhat literary) word "forlorner." It's the comparative form of the adjective "forlorn," meaning sad or dejected on account of having been forgotten or abandoned. But it sounds strange and antiquated to most ears today; modern English-speakers would be far more inclined to say "more forlorn" (when they're inclined to say "forlorn" at all). In fact, the word "forlorn" originated as the past participle of the even more obscure, now almost completely neglected verb forlese, meaning "to lose, forsake, or abandon." But the full brilliance of how the Pet Shop Boys use "forlorner" can only be appreciated when you notice one of the main reasons they chose it in the first place: as a perfect rhyme with the subsequent "love comes right around the corner." To be blunt, there aren't many other lyricists working in pop music today who would have had the wherewithal to come up with anything like that.

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