The Magnetic Fields are an American indie rock band built around lead songwriter Stephin Merritt. They are known for their simple, stripped-back production, Merritt’s low register voice, and witty (even at times silly) lyrics.
(Underlined song titles are hyperlinks.)
What many know them for, though, is their ambitious 1999 album 69 Love Songs. Exactly what it sounds like, this 2-hour-and-52-minute body of work consists of 69 songs that all tackle the subject of love in some way. This album was inspired by American composer Charles Ives’ 114 Songs, as a sort of songwriting challenge, but achieved wide cultural appeal, and brought the band out of the underground.
Songs on 69 Love Songs range from just 28 seconds long in “Roses” to the over 5 minute song “Papa Was a Rodeo.” While Roses is a sort of 4 line joke set to music, Papa Was a Rodeo tells the story of a lifelong romance between two men in a hyper-southern American landscape. The beauty of this album is in its variety. In fact, there is a song in here for just about any relationship.
The first song “Absolutely Cuckoo” has a simple lyrical structure of rhyming couplets and a circular kind of repetitive rhythm. Some songs like this feel so automatic, like they were written in under an hour in the best way. This kind of childlike simplicity is hard for many artists to tap into, and word choice is so important in a work like this.
One of my favorites in the album comes shortly after this. “All My Little Words” tells the story of a love not meant to be. No matter what one person does, the other just won’t make it work. This devastating realization is set to what sounds like just one acoustic guitar, one banjo, and one electric guitar. An excerpt of the lyrics below:
You said you were in love with me
All My Little Words
Both of us know that that’s impossible
And I could make you rue the day
But I could never make you stay
Not for all the tea in China
Not if I could sing like a bird
Not for all North Carolina
Not for all my little words
Not if I could write for you
The sweetest song you ever heard
It doesn’t matter what I’ll do
Not for all my little words
The limit of this is that I can’t possibly talk about every last song on this album and the small, simple things that make them magical. For example, “The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side” is written from the perspective of a young man with nothing going for him other than the fact that he has a car, and the young woman he loves despite her many pursuers and inevitable marriage to someone else, is content to ride in his car once or twice. To the speaker in the song, this is enough!
The last song I’ll mention is likely the most iconic and notable from the work. “The Book of Love” may seem like a pessimistic reading of love itself at first. In this book, everything about love is written. The book is long, boring, full of charts and songs and full of material things that people like to receive on Valentine’s Day perhaps. But, the speaker always finds a way to interject that even if it is too long to read, “I love it when you read to me.” Even if the songs are transcendental and dumb, “I love it when you sing to me.” And finally, even though all of these gifts associated with love are material and fleeting and expensive, it’s still nice to receive them.
In this way, maybe it isn’t so bad to let love and these complex feelings be simplified into their purest forms.