The Divine Comedy

Lorenz Hart could do it. Stephin Merritt can, too. But rare is the lyricist so skillful he or she can stitch a word last seen on a high school vocabulary quiz into a couplet, making it sound natural as the familiar Moon/June standbys. Neil Hannon — a.k.a. The Divine Comedy — is one of them.

Take “My Imaginary Friend,” a ditty equal parts Harvey and Huck Finn, found on The Divine Comedy’s seventh album, Absent Friends. Egged on by a plucky banjo riff, Hannon rhymes “library” and “peripatetically” with deceptive ease. “Well, that’s the art of songwriting,” says the Irish denizen slyly. “To make it sound like it’s the only word I could have possibly used.”

For Hannon, who’s been winning devotees since his 1993 debut Liberation — not only with his literary finesse, but also with his theatrical baritone, sumptuous orchestrations and impeccable dress — the first pop song to send him scurrying for the dictionary was “Exhuming McCarthy,” from R.E.M.’s Document. “At 17, I didn’t know what ‘exhuming’ meant,” he recalls. “More to the point, I didn’t know who McCarthy was. But I worked it out. And now they’re exhuming him again.”

But while the title track of Absent Friends gives a nod to the trials of Oscar Wilde, Hannon says he hasn’t been following the current media censorship brouhaha. “I’m not a man with his finger on the pulse,” he confesses, preferring the company of his two-year-old daughter to the Internet. “I’m quite happy with a glass of sherry and a good book.”