Adam Payne, the prodigiously talented solo artist, leader of Residual Echoes and proprietor of Pacific Coast Editions, has discovered a shocking fact no one else dared suspect: “St. Elmo’s Fire” by Brian Eno and “Love The One You’re With” by Stephen Stills are two halves of the same song. As the primeval “man-woman of the moon” Aristophanes describes in Plato’s Symposium was once cut in two by Zeus “like a sorb-apple is halved for pickling,” so these two recordings must have been sundered since time immemorial. Now, at long last, Payne has restored them to their original union.

“One Love The Fire, You’re With St. Elmo” may sound merely surprising at first blush, but it’s really going to fuck you up the next time you hear “Love The One You’re With” at the local CVS. The feeling that the song is somehow incomplete will gnaw at you until, on the drive home, you realize what you thought was missing: Robert Fripp’s quicksilver solo from “St. Elmo’s Fire.” And the next time you give your tear-stained copy of Another Green World a spin, you’ll wonder where those big, open, Laurel Canyon, Joni Mitchell acoustic guitar chords went. It goes downhill for you from there, cognitively speaking. Have you seen Videodrome? That’s your life a few months after hearing this.

Of the two artists, Stills is the one I imagine being touchier about intellectual property rights. But in this case, he would be hoist with his own petard! For how could he object to being paired with Eno, when he has so lately enjoined the listener to love whatever damaged, smelly person fate thrusts in his or her lap?

A related point: would Stills’ song also have been a hit with the title “Fuck The Date What Brung You”?