Some ideas seem inherently good. There are a select few masterpieces of art where it seems that nothing could have gone wrong. The time was right, the place was right, and no critic could conceive of a project’s downfall.
Others are harder to conceive. More specifically, sometimes there’s something about a piece of work that just begs you to tear it down and dance on the rubble. If it fights back; if it survives that scrutiny, then we know it’s really good. That’s a higher standard.
The Magnetic Fields were always a kind of wonderkid among the ’90s rock movement. Stephen Merrit, reportedly the brains behind the outfit, quickly got himself a reputation among musicians. A lot of people actually started calling him a genius.
Merritt just shrugged off the compliments and kept making great CD’s, dividing his songwriting talents among four separate projects.
Merritt’s first two attempts, The Wayward Bus and Distant Plastic Trees, were quietly released in 1991 and 1992 on his own label (PoPuP) to pleasant reviews. Distant Plastic Trees spawned the college radio pseudo-hit “100,000 Fireflies” and got the band in the door at bigger labels.
Between ’93 and ’95, five albums were released under the Magnetic Fields name, and critics began to really drool. Each album was specifically thematic, dealing with a concise subject in depth, yet still remaining accessible and, in many cases, danceable as well.
It was at this point that Merritt announced plans for 69 Love Songs. The project would be a three-disc, three-hour dissection of every imaginable type of love.
Originally, Merritt planned on 100 Love Songs, meant for a Broadway style review, but after realizing that the resulting project could require upward of six hours to execute, he settled on the more textually suggestive and graphically stimulating number 69.
Critics began their apprehensive shift, seeing that Merritt was flirting with disaster. A wrong step, and the album would be a mere oddity that no human being would admit to owning, but if he could pull it off …
Not only did Merritt complete the project with the requisite number of songs, he did so without including songs that could be singled out as filler material. 69 Love Songs came out of the studio at once both supremely ironic and intimately sincere — not to mention a Broadway-ready three hours long.
From bitter odes to exes like “Nobody Will Ever Love You” to the completely inverse denial of “I Don’t Want to Get Over You,” Merritt maintains an honest delivery.
At once charming, pathetic and sad, Merritt gets to let loose and make three hours of songs on the most tired subject in the world, but maintains an aloofness and wry delivery that keeps things interesting.
Merritt dips into the wells of almost every genre imaginable, giving new meaning to the phrase “an eclectic album.” There are war songs (“Abigail Belle of Kilronan”), jazz ballads (“Love is Like Jazz”), country tunes (“The Cactus Where Your Heart Should Be”), disco opuses (“Long Forgotten Fairytale”), punk parodies (“Punk Love”), and even quasi-Gaelic amore (“Wi’ Nae Wee Bairn Ye’ll Me Beget”).
The genius isn’t that Merritt has catalogued so many different types of love, but that he’s pulled so many of them off so flawlessly. Make no mistake; while some songs may seem like nothing but a gimmicky joke, every one bears the mark of a true craftsman.
On “Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin,” Merritt fleshes out a charming metaphor, but really drives it home with the last line when he sings, “Love is like / a bottle of gin / but a bottle of gin / is not like love.”
In “All My Little Words,” the protagonist is told he’s “unboyfriendable,” but still goes on to pen a beautiful chorus saying, “not for all the tea in China / not if I could sing like a bird / not for all North Carolina / not if I could write for you / the sweetest song you ever heard / not for all my little words.” It’s a beautifully simple song, sparsely instrumented with only an acoustic guitar and a pair of voices.
This is without mentioning the other four vocalists who pull regular duty on 69 Love Songs, without mentioning the fact that every song sounds significantly different from the rest, and without cataloguing a good 40 other types of love that Merritt came up with.
Perhaps the most powerful statement of all is aimed at bands that keep producing tired songs about one subject. Merritt hasn’t just heard it all, he’s done it all; he hit every stereotype and reduced it to a formula, so let’s see something new.
69 Love Songs shows up in used bins with alarming frequency but is also available online, as are albums by the Magnetic Fields and Merritt’s other projects Future Bible Heroes, the Gothic Archies, and the 6ths.
