Could you show me the interview where he acknowledges a successful relationship?
You seem intent on fault-finding. If you want to press the point, no, I can't produce a URL to an interview in which he says, "Yes, dear friends, I've recently had a successful relationship". It's a general sense I get from his interviews, interpreting them, as we all must, trying to read between the lines. But when Morrissey sings a line like "I entered no one/And no one entered me/'Til you came/With the key", sings about "explosive kegs", titles a song "At Last I Am Born", and talks about how much Rome has opened him up, I'm guessing he has recently experienced a successful relationship. Perhaps I am using bad terminology. When I say "successful relationship" I mean "successful" relative to his earlier testimonials, in songs and interviews, expressing uneasiness with relationships. You point out he talked about a relationship around 1997 (presumably Jake)-- this is what I am talking about. The relationship ended, yes, but
even to have one was a change from previous years. "Quarry" and "Ringleader" don't chronicle totally new events in his life, but the way he is singing and writing about them is new and different.
Edit: Conveniently, someone has just posted a link to a YouTube interview from 1984. (Thank you, ferrell, for posting the video, and to lilybett for linking!). It contains lots of interesting stuff about his sex life or lack thereof.
"I did lose the very idea that any communion between two people could possibly be enjoyable. I did lose that particular thread. And I did become enormously depressed, to the point that I believed that any kind of relationship was almost impossible". (Morrissey, 1984)
what people seem to be missing is that there was a lot more than unfulfilled desire and misery in the old songs as well.
Well, I am not one of those "people". I would never say that there was nothing to his lyrics beyond "unfulfilled desire and misery". I wrote: "I think we all believe that Morrissey's lyrics have a lot of beauty, texture, diversity of themes, and so on." I then wrote: "Many of the most superficially "negative" songs are extremely joyful and affirmative ... The depth and richness of his writing is unmatched in pop music of the last few decades."
there is, in fact, nothing substantially new in either Morrissey's lyrics or his interviews that wasn't there before;
First of all, you wrote: "All I see is that his attutides towards life and towards himself have changed (although that's probably the most important change there can be for a person)." So you acknowledge a change, and even call it "probably the most important change there can be for a person", but I'm somehow obtuse for speaking of his recent change--
in praise of his last two albums, no less?
But of course, you say that Morrissey has always written about sex, and to support your position you quote a line from "These Things Take Time" referring to either a kiss, a blowjob, or a f***, ripping me with a sarcastic jab that implies you think I know nothing about Morrissey's lyrics. I'm not surprised you don't understand people who "seem incredibly surprised that 'oh, Morrissey is singing about sex!!!'" Who's surprised that he's singing about sex? Not me. The Smiths' first single had a B-side with the line "Let me get my hands on your mammary glands", and Morrissey has found many bracing, original ways to write about sex since then. Sex isn't just another of Morrissey's many themes, it's one of the main themes.
But the fact that he sings about sex is no indication that Morrissey is singing about himself, otherwise we'd be searching hospital records for children he's fathered and girlfriends in comas. When speaking of his writing, it's important to note that, hazards of conflating a writer and his work aside, it seems fair to say that The Smiths contained a great deal of observational songs, whereas Morrissey in his solo career has been much more autobiographical. (To ward off future indignant replies-- "WHAT ABOUT 'GANGLORD', DUDE???-- I probably have to add that I'm talking about percentages here and not absolute categories.) Pointing out that he sang about sex means very little. My apprecation of his recent work comes from what appears to be a dramatic personal change which is now appearing more pointedly in his songs, not some forehead-slapping epiphany that Morrissey is finally singing about sex.
Oh, by the way-- and granted, message boards didn't exist back then, but anyway-- I didn't know
anyone going nuts over the lines in "Suedehead". I knew people who asked, "What is he singing?" But even to hear "It was a good lay" is no more a big deal than hearing lines like "I grabbed you by the gilded beams/Errrrrrggh/That's what tradition means"-- another cryptic line to think about, nothing more. Morrissey has always used voices. I believe that on "Quarry" and "Ringleader" he is singing much more directly about his own experiences, which is exactly what all these "people" are talking about to your apparent bewilderment.
for some reason or other, reviewers have only now decided to take notice. I'm also wondering why.
"I think I try to be very unsexual/asexual about the way I write. I haven't pinned any gender on the table and been very forthright. I think by being completely sexless, it has caused some degree of attention, so people believe I'm totally obsessed with sex. It's a strange paradox - if I wrote about breasts, people would probably ask me about The Clash all the time. Because I've said publicly that I'm not interested in sex,
people are always asking me about it."
Morrissey, Jamming!, May 6, 1984
As for happiness - isn't Cemetry Gates about happiness?
Are you kidding? "Cemetry Gates" is a song about "happiness"? There is a sense of joy in the song, yes, but front and center the song is about plagiarism. Morrissey was responding to critics who had blasted him for "stealing" lines for his songs (as in the case of "What She Said" for example). Any unimitigated "happiness" in that song is supplied by Marr's arrangement. When Morrissey sings "A dreaded sunny day/So let's go where we're happy", the line is utterly ironic-- finding "happiness" in a cemetery is ghoulish and Morrissey plays that up for humor. Even if you cling to the notion that Morrissey is describing a happy day, the song is
still primarily about plagiarism and
still doesn't help your case because the song is a negative riposte to his critics and any "happiness" is oriented toward death, which more or less validates the statement at the top of this thread.
And "Now My Heart Is Full" only illustrates the change in his lyrics. You can argue it's a song about "happiness" or "fulfillment" but even so the song is deeply vague-- the persons in the song are disguised by names from Graham Greene's "Brighton Rock" and Morrissey languidly but pointedly refuses to explain why his heart is full! You don't detect a change in that lyric, say, versus the vague but in comparitively explicit songs on "Ringleader"?
"he mentions [love] a lot of times throughout his career, and it's true that it's mostly in connection with negative emotions, but not always."
Okay, right, so doesn't this back up the "Morrissey is negative" claim?
Love, like sex, is a big subject in Morrissey's work. Perhaps the best way to say it is this: "normal", "happy" love affairs are probably impossible for him, but for most of his career he has sung about all the reasons love doesn't work, even going so far as claiming celibacy and singing about giving up on love ("I've Changed My Plea To Guilty"). Recently he has at least acknowledged in his songs some possibility-- based on his own experiences-- that love or at least a good sexual relationship has happened to him, even if we must quickly add that "love" and "good" must be heavily qualified.
"There Is A Light That Never Goes Out", again, bolsters my argument. The person in that song thinks "In a darkened underpass/I thought, 'Oh God, my chance has come at last'/But then a strange fear gripped me and I just couldn't ask". Now, "reborn" in Rome, I think Morrissey is distancing himself from that song (among others) by admitting things like "explosive kegs" and singing "I once was a mess of guilt because of the flesh/It’s remarkable what you can learn/Once you are born, born, born". Anyway, TIALTNGO's astonishing poetry comes from the mingling of love and death. The "To die by your side" refrain is precisely what Dazzak complained about-- the one song about a possibly fulfilling romantic relationship swirls with imagery of death in a car wreck! And "Ask"? The specter of nuclear annihilation appears in the middle of the song, in fact punctuated by a "desolate" break in the music!
I don't mean to sound chippy about this. I've been on this forum too long to get bent out of shape. I have argued many times on this board that Morrissey's writing (especially backed by The Smiths) contains tremendous amounts of warmth, humor, hope, and an intelligence that give his songs many sophisticated textures. So much so that listening to The Smiths makes me happier-- not macabre, brooding satisfaction, but simple, jubilant, giddy happiness-- than any other band I have ever heard. I just find it exasperating to take some flak while going out of my way to staunchly deny that Morrissey is a monomaniacal gloom queen, in a thread in which I have written "The negativity in Morrissey's art is overwhelming-- except, taken as a whole, it is an expression of positivity". I mean, come on.
Whatever it is you were trying to say, there is no way you could have made that conclusion, and I don't see how it would make any difference to this discussion if I were any of these things? How would it put my comments 'into perspective'? 
