Magnetic Fields - The pop variety show of the magnetic fields

A is for “Absolutely Cuckoo”

“Absolutely Cuckoo” is a Magnetic Fields song whose title means exactly that: completely crazy. Stephin Merritt is a man as cultured and brilliant as he is complicated and difficult. A songwriter who writes his songs in sordid gay bars with cheap disco music playing in the background, to the point that some songs get binned for being too obviously influenced by whatever track just came on the jukebox — that's not normal. A musician who suffers from hyperacusis so badly he has to cover his ears when the audience applauds, and who, if he could, would never perform live — that's not normal either. The story of the introverted, lonely boy raised by a hippie mother in a commune only partly explains his mania for dressing in monochrome, prefacing any answer with long, awkward silences, and answering journalists' dumb questions in monosyllables. And yet this ugly duckling who's aged badly is probably the most brilliant pop songwriter of the last twenty years. A man who, without ever really talking about himself, has managed — and still manages — to move anyone who gets close to his music.

B is for “Born On A Train”

As a child, Merritt was dragged through thirty-three different houses in 23 years. Far from being autobiographical, a song like “Born On A Train” is nonetheless the unofficial anthem of emotional rootlessness: “And I’ve been making promises I know I’ll never keep/ One of these days I’m gonna leave you in your sleep/ I’ll have to go when the whistle blows, the whistle knows my name/ Baby, I was born on a train”.

The Charm Of The Highway Strip, the album containing this now cult-status single among indie circles (famously covered by Arcade Fire), came out in 1994 and is the record with which the Magnetic Fields, Merritt's main band, stepped out of the shadows into a musical landscape that, while still genuinely “indie” and unknown to the wider public, was about to explode.

The album is completely out of time and totally anomalous compared to every trend of its era. Merritt reclaims white American folk and demolishes its conventions with blasts of synthesizer (the emblematic “Two Characters In Search Of A Country Song”): it's experimental pop, romantic synth-folk, deliberately lo-fi. The record's theme is the loneliness of travel and the drama of abandonment, a leitmotif of folk and country here used metaphorically to describe the painful path of endlessly searching for oneself. There are countless references to traditional American music, and the album is a one-of-a-kind concept record that moves from moments of pure lyricism like “Crowd Of Drifters” to self-mocking line-dance numbers like “Fear Of Trains”. It's one of the few Magnetic Fields albums sung entirely by Merritt, and the bittersweet duality that defines his whole body of work is perfectly embodied by his unmistakable voice, deep and languid (he describes himself as “an octave below Gene Martin”): “Some people don't believe in dying, but some of us don't believe in life”.

C is for “Crazy For You (But Not That Crazy)”

An imaginary sequel to “Absolutely Cuckoo”, this is one of the unforgettable songs from Merritt and the Magnetic Fields' masterpiece: the triple album 69 Love Songs (1999). Famous for its “ring-mod” synth line and its backhanded declaration of love, few know that the Moog bassline is “borrowed” from Sweet (specifically from “Lies In Your Eyes”), the drums are lifted from the Motown sound but slowed down by half, and the chorus is inspired by Kim Carnes' “Bette Davis' Eyes”. Which is to say, you don't need to be all that original to write the pop album of the decade. In Merritt's own words — he is, among other things, a music critic — pop is built on precedent, on creative copying, on the ability to rework influences. The main strength of 69 Love Songs lies precisely in its awareness of this mechanism, and in pushing it to the extreme. The album sounds as familiar as the Beatles, and yet it's absolutely unique, and not one of the 69 songs on it sounds like another.

D is for Death

For Merritt the songwriter, death is nothing more than the necessary consequence of love. 99% of his catalogue consists of love songs, and not one of them is free from this dark side, this tragic side effect. In “The Death Of Ferdinand De Saussure”, another track from 69 Love Songs, the eminent linguist just has time to declare that nothing is known about love before being brutally murdered in the name of Holland-Dozier-Holland, the trio behind much of Motown's romantic repertoire.

When Merritt founded the Gothic Archies in 1995 (see G, below), he claimed the new band differed from the Magnetic Fields in that “every glimmer of hope is relentlessly extinguished”. At the very least, in “Underwear” we're told, in French, playing heavily on the assonance between the two words, that death is just death, but love… is love.

E is for “Either You Don’t Love Me Or I Don’t Love You”

“Every time you feel wonderful, baby, I feel bad/ Either you don’t love me or I don’t love you, oh yeah”. This is, laconically, what Stephin sings on the now-historic EP The House Of Tomorrow (1992). Personally, I adore this EP because it's the blueprint for what Magnetic Fields were before 69 Love Songs: breezy, brief, lo-fi, vaguely nerdy, with a healthy dose of reverb that never hurts. The EP is made up of 5 loop-songs (that is, songs built on the repetition of two crossed chords), a formula Merritt reaches for constantly, each one better than the last, especially when you consider the lyrics: “You look like Herbert von Karajan”; “Don’t you know, love goes home to Paris in the Spring?”; “We’re deprived and depraved” and “The record store is execrable” (where the word “execrable” rhymes with “all”).

F is for Future Bible Heroes

Stephin Merritt and Chris Ewen, a Boston DJ and musician (and reportedly his former boyfriend), formed Future Bible Heroes in 1997, releasing Memories Of Love. Ewen wrote the music and Merritt the lyrics, though it's hard to ignore the latter's touch in the arrangements too. Future Bible Heroes are a synth-pop band at the exact moment synth-pop is the most unfashionable genre around. Pioneers again, in other words: a few years later the 80s sound would explode back into relevance with the electroclash boom, and after releasing another album (Eternal Youth, 2002) and a couple of EPs (I’m Lonely And I Love It and The Lonely Robot), the group mockingly went back into hibernation in 2003. Future Bible Heroes live up to their name: they're destined never to be famous. And yet the records are genuinely worth it: Memories Of Love sounds like Joe Jackson drunk, singing the songs left off some imaginary One Shot ’80 Compilation (the title track and the Kraftwerk-quoting “Blond Adonis” come highly recommended). Eternal Youth almost recalls Roxette, but with thoroughly anomalous arrangements, as if the sampler itself had broken down. See the dissonances of “Dorisdaytheearthstoodstill”, accompanied by the sound of soap bubbles popping at the centre of the earth, and the Sakamoto-esque experiments of “Viennese Lift” and “Bathysphere”. And one can't skip over the decadent dance of “The World Is A Disco Ball” and its depressive cosmogony.

G is for Gothic Archies

The third, but not the last, of Stephin Merritt's alter egos, Gothic Archies emerged in 1995, formally a one-man band of Stephin's, save for the addition of Daniel Handler, accordionist and bestselling author of the children's series “A Series Of Unfortunate Events”, written under the pen name Lemony Snicket. This madcap gothic-bubblegum outfit produced an exceptional EP, The New Despair (Merge, 1996, previously released on They Might Be Giants' own mini-label).

The New Despair is so over-the-top in its tragic gloom that it ends up achieving the opposite effect, helped along by tempos that are anything but slow. Merritt's voice hits new depths on the lopsided “The Tiny Goat” (“The tiny goat wanted a birthday party/ and sent out invitations to its friends/ but when the day came none of them remembered/ so it put out its eyes with fountain pens/ Suicide was not an option for the tiny goat”), but the record's peak is without question “The Dead Only Quickly”, an explosive piano ballad later covered, not coincidentally, by Neil Hannon of Divine Comedy.

2006 brought The Tragic Treasury, inspired by Lemony Snicket's comic-gothic tales and used to accompany the stage show presenting them. The Gothic Archies' black, non-sense humour lightens up further here too, thanks to more theatrical, acoustic arrangements, almost nursery-rhyme-like (“Scream And Run Away”, “Freakshow”).

H is for Holiday

Holiday arrived in 1994, and although it's technically the third Magnetic Fields album, it's effectively the first record by the band as we know it today (only John Woo is missing), and one of their most beloved. Holiday is one of the forerunners of the indie-pop sound as we know it now: a return to acoustic instruments, toy-pop arrangements and lo-fi production. On top of all that, it's packed with fast, lovable songs, starting with the gem “Take Ecstasy With Me”, but also “Deep Sea Diving Suit” and “All You Ever Do Is Walk Away”. The record is a small masterpiece and helped build the band's popularity thanks also to the originality of its lyrics and arrangements, which would go on to deeply influence later generations. One final note for the synth-punk tribute “In My Car”, where John Foxx meets R.E.M.

I is for I (the 2004 album)

Worried that listeners might read his songs as autobiographical if he titled an album I, Stephin Merritt decided to justify the title by having every song name start with the letter I. With hindsight, we also know that I is the first album of the so-called “no-synth trilogy”, in which Merritt deliberately excludes synthesizers and digital effects from Magnetic Fields' production (the other two albums being Distortion and Realism). I is indeed entirely acoustic.

Though it boasts heavyweight tracks like “I Wish You Were My Boyfriend”, which couldn't be left out of any imaginary band “best of”, or “I Wish I Had An Evil Twin”, quite possibly the most beautiful pop song ever written for cello, I pays the price of following 69 Love Songs. By comparison, it comes across as flat in production and less inventive in its songwriting. Of course, it's all relative, though the record does register a shift in the “Magnetic Fields sound” that's historically explainable.

At the time, in fact, Merritt had begun working as a theatrical composer on a couple of neo-kabuki productions: his pop turns hi-fi, turns sophisticated. Far from being bad, it's the furthest thing from Holiday that Magnetic Fields have ever made. For the more patient listeners, I'd recommend “Irma”, an incredible track where harpsichord pairs perfectly with ukulele, and Brian Eno is plagiarized so skillfully that, unless you already know it, you'd never catch it.

L is for Love

The word love appears 96 times on 69 Love Songs. Old or new, sad or blossoming, reciprocated or reviled, love is the great protagonist of Stephin Merritt's music. The most explicit definition is undoubtedly: "Love is like a bottle of gin/ but a bottle of gin is not like love" (from 69 Love Songs).

M for Magnetic Fields

The Magnetic Fields are Stephin Merritt (vocals, arrangements, composition, production, ukulele, guitars, synth and most of the instruments), Claudia Gonson (Stephin's longtime friend, initially manager, then drummer, then pianist, then backing vocalist), Shirley Simms (backing vocalist from 69 Love Songs onward, so good that on the more recent albums she often sings lead on her own), Sam Devol (cello), John Woo (banjo, guitars).

N for New York City

The Magnetic Fields' home base before Stephin moved to Los Angeles (around 2007), it's one of the main sources of inspiration for the band's songs. First, because it's the birthplace of Merritt's longtime musical influences: the Tin Pan Alley movement, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Broadway – in other words, the cream of American songwriting that modern listeners seem to have shamefully forgotten. Second, because it's in this glorious, unsettling city that Stephin wanders around composing. The references are countless: the Bowery, former home of the legendary punk club CBGB's, the ever-decadent and vaguely hippie Lower East Side, the Village (the city's artistic and gay soul), and the Brill Building, the bubblegum factory. Third, because it's in New York, and specifically at Mandolin Brothers, that Merritt buys the vintage little guitars he plays on his records.

O for Original Soundtrack

That is, Merritt's solo works:

1) music for the film "Eban & Charlie" by James Bolton

2) music for the film "Pieces Of April" by Peter Hedges

3) music for the off-Broadway productions "The Orphan Of Zhao," "Peach Blossom Fan" and "My Life As A Fairy Tale" by Chen Shi-Zheng, collected on the album Showtunes;

4) music for the off-Broadway production "Coraline" (in which he used John Cage's "prepared piano")

5) music for the silent film "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" (due to premiere in San Francisco next May – omissis)

P for Pop

According to Stephin Merritt, it makes no sense to talk about authenticity in pop music, nor about originality. In pop, nothing is created and nothing is destroyed, and everything is a pretense. Given all of this man's heteronyms, it may be worth quoting the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa: “Il poeta è un fingitore/ Finge così completamente/ che arriva a fingere che è dolore/ il dolore che davvero sente”.

In the melting pot of this contaminated fruit that is pop, Merritt loves two things: variety, understood as "every genre except heavy rock" (see also letter V), and brevity, understood as "7-inch single format," meaning about 3 minutes.

Q for Queer

Queer = gay. There are two different conceptions of “gay music.” It can mean music made by gay people, or music that gay people like. Neither definition is satisfying, and the literature on the subject rarely goes beyond a mere list of homosexual musicians. That said, in my view gay music absolutely does exist, and Merritt is an illuminating figure in this regard. He never needed to come out, because, as he tells it, no one ever assumed he was straight in the first place. As a result, Merritt is the first “naturally” gay pop songwriter, and his music reflects exactly this idea: none of his love songs ever takes for granted that the love in question is heterosexual, or vice versa — if anything, the roles are often doubly reversed (in “Papa Was A Rodeo,” Mike is a woman), all without resorting to the forced depersonalization that makes a song “politically correct” and sadly neutral. Conversely, while it's true that Merritt's songs are born in gay bars, even a homophobe can identify with them in an instant — proof that love makes no distinctions. When Claudia sings “Acoustic guitar/ I am gonna make you a star/ Just bring me back my girl” or Stephin sings “When my boy comes down the street/ … / And he’s gong to be my wife”, and together they sing “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!”, there's no difference at all, no politics, no sociological investigation required. Stephin Merritt wanders around with a white chihuahua and still manages to be queer without being queer. He's a genius.

R for Reference

Reference means citationism. Musically, Stephin is a professional borrower — so skilled at “being influenced” that, although he can't find anything original in what he writes, I also can't point to any single specific influence among his sources, because everything and its opposite is in there: from ABBA to Leonard Cohen, from Kraftwerk to the Kinks, from Phil Spector to OMD. But citationism also means being well-read — in Merritt's case, downright encyclopedic — and his lyrics are a constant parade of figures from music and showbiz, of places like the Boom Boom Room (the historic gay bar in Laguna Beach), Elaine's in the Lower East Side, learned references. Stephin Merritt's lyrics are packed with sophisticated figures of speech, unexpected rhymes, and vocabulary that sounds more like it belongs in a scientific paper than a pop song. His neologisms are famous too — I'll allow myself to cite “unboyfriendable” (from “All My Little Words”).

S for Sixths

Merritt's last and best heteronym, The 6ths came about in 1992 because he didn't want to sing his own songs. So The 6ths is essentially Stephin Merritt's band in which Stephin Merritt does everything except sing. The first album is Wasp's Nest (1995), featuring, among others, guest vocalists Lou Barlow of Dinosaur Jr, Dean Wareham of Galaxie 500, Robert Scott of The Clean, and Chris Knox of Tall Dwarfs.

In short, a fine crew of 90s indie figures, enlisted to sing songs light years away from their usual output — tracks belonging to the lo-fi bubblegum repertoire of Magnetic Fields. The result is an album of highs and lows, but on the whole as sparkling and engaging as Holiday, and it's worth a listen for “Falling Out Of Love (With You)” and “Here In My Heart” alone.

The second (and so far last) album under the name The 6ths is Hyacinths And Thistles (1999), featuring Momus, the aforementioned Neil Hannon, and a resurgent Gary Numan (who delivers a track that sounds like it could have come straight from his own catalogue, had it been updated for the 90s). This second record in particular seems more careful than its predecessor in tailoring each song to suit its performer, and Katherine Whalen of Squirrel Nut Zippers is masterful as she delivers the sweet “You You You You You.”

T for “The Desperate Things You Make Me Do”

After a turbulent relationship with various record labels, 1995 is the year of stability for Magnetic Fields. John Woo arrives — Merritt's former college classmate and an excellent banjo player — and the band releases Get Lost as their first album for Merge (1995), which would remain their label through i.

Get Lost is almost the older sibling of Holiday, with a bit more synth and less lo-fi (though not by much). Compared to Holiday it's certainly more mature, and, sentimental attachments aside, musically superior. It contains a ukulele piece like “With Whom To Dance” that could easily sit on 69 Love Songs, the moving ballad “Don't Look Away,” and the indie-synth-pop of “All The Umbrellas In London.” Jokes aside, Get Lost is a flawless record and Magnetic Fields' finest work — 69 Love Songs excepted.

U for Ukulele

To dispel a myth: the ukulele is not a guitar. Nor is it a little guitar — it's a four-stringed instrument with a resonating body of Hawaiian origin, with a sharp, bright, slightly out-of-tune sound. The ukulele is part of Hawaiian folk tradition and was imported to the US in the pre-rock era. A cult instrument of the Tin Pan Alley scene, it's a Magnetic Fields staple. Among the best ukulele songs penned by Merritt, I'd point to: “Queen Of The Savages,” “This Little Ukulele,” “You You You You You” (The 6ths), and “Smile, No One Cares How You Feel” (The Gothic Archies).

V for Variety

Merritt is a pop songwriter. Although part of his solo output leans close to operetta and chamber music, his soul and his career belong to pop. Not chart pop, of course, but a mutant pop, sometimes close to folk, sometimes close to synth, often retro. Pop is a genre that makes simplicity its banner, staying catchy and pleasing everyone. But Stephin likes to change things up, likes experimenting with different styles, likes challenges and concept albums. By now he's a producer-arranger with twenty years of experience, and he can be as precise as George Martin. If there's a reason a songwriter who makes bubblegum isn't on the charts, it's because his bubblegum is never banal, never what you'd expect. Variety is art as entertainment, escapism and identification at once — pop for professionals, in short.

W is for Wayward Bus

The Wayward Bus, along with Distant Plastic Trees, belongs to the early days of Magnetic Fields, back in 1992 when Stephin was too shy to sing and Susan Anway took the vocal duties. The two albums are essentially equivalent, and although they already clearly reveal the Magnetic Fields sound, both in the arrangements and in the melodies, they're obviously immature and, all things considered, dispensable within such a rich body of work.

Worthwhile songs, especially for lovers of lo-fi pop, include "Jeremy", "Railroad Boy", "100000 Fireflies" and "Josephine" ("If I were Napoleon/ You would be my Josephine")

X is for "Xavier Says"

Clearly inspired by a conversation overheard in a New York gay bar, "Xavier Says" could have been written by Stephin back in 1995, if it weren't for the extreme shoegaze production that readily links it to Distortion (2008), a semi-tribute to the Jesus And Mary Chain, who in Merritt's view were the last to invent a genuinely new sound in rock.

Distortion is awash in reverb, even on the acoustic instruments, and the overall effect can be somewhat unsettling. On close listening, though, the production proves particularly interesting. A Christmas song like "Mr. Mistletoe" given the shoegaze treatment is genuinely something quite original.

Not everything on the record holds up to scrutiny, but an anthem like "Three-Way", or the mid-tempo ballad "The Nun's Litany", or the horror-pop of "Zombie Boy", rightfully earn their place among the best in the Magnetic Fields catalogue.

Y is for "You Must Be Out Of Your Mind"

Not content with the electric excess of Distortion, Merritt swings to the opposite extreme. "Formally folk" arrangements, nothing electric, influences announced well in advance (Joshua Rifkin, the MOR-psych-folk arranger), just as on the previous record, though here there's a bit more cause for puzzlement in the production, made up of obscure vintage-folk instruments played without any particular ambition, and echo effects on the vocal parts.

The opposite of Distortion, and yet somehow similar, especially on a compositional level, Realism (2010) boasts singles like "Better Things", "I Don't Know What To Say", "You Must Be Out Of Your Mind" and the hilarious "We Are Having a Hootenanny". Merritt shares vocal duties with his longtime sparring partners Gonson and Simms, and the end result is, all in all, satisfying. The truth is that by now Magnetic Fields are a bona fide band, meaning a group that enjoys such a sterling reputation that every new record is almost a guarantee of quality.

Z is for Zebra

"Zebra", the track that "coincidentally" closes 69 Love Songs, was certainly written for the sole purpose of having a song that started with the letter Z. Just as Merritt exploits letters for compositional ends, I'm exploiting the letter Z to close out this overview of such a complex, far-reaching artist, hoping that the next Magnetic Fields album will start with Z.