The second last song from Radio City, the second Big Star album and arguably Alex Chilton’s greatest – or, at least, most coherent – album of his entire career in terms of writing, “I’m In Love With A Girl” is one of those wonderfully universal songs that manages to sound so full of everything – emotion, meaning, the whole shebang – despite being relatively devoid of anything other than a sunny melody, and Chilton playing an acoustic guitar and singing lines that are so vague as to sound universal. “All that a man should do/Is true” he sings at one point, which is almost meaningless in the grand scheme of things but sounds right, dammit. After all, we’re already won over by the opening lines, and want to be on his side, even if he’s not making sense. “I’m in love with a girl/Finest girl in the world/I didn’t know I could feel this way,” he sings, and the romantics that we are swoon a little inside. It’s like pop distilled down into one under two-minute blast.
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