Magnetic Fields

Multicolored lights line the sidewalks of a famous stretch near Times Square, in Midtown Manhattan. This is Broadway, the epicenter of the theatrical musical world.

Actors, producers, agents and assorted frivolities drift through the area, drawn in by Warholian posters proclaiming: "100 Stephin Merritt Love Songs", advertising a musical with no linear plot whatsoever, by an author about to make his debut in a world he's never set foot in before.

Those same posters are then swept away by a sudden gust of wind out of a clear sky, and the man who dreamed it all up wakes up at a table in a Manhattan gay bar he regularly frequents. He realizes that staging the show he imagined is next to impossible, and so decides to pursue a similar idea in pop music instead — only to then run into another impossibility, that of recording 100 songs, since even at two minutes apiece that would add up to nearly three and a half hours: a bit much. He settles on 40, which strikes him, reasonably enough, as an anonymous number. "40 is meaningless. 69 is perfect!" he exclaims.

And 69 it was: the erotic number par excellence, as well as a brilliant graphic pun to put on the cover.

The picture that greets the listener is a paradoxical one. One instinctively wonders what kind of eccentric megalomaniac could be behind such a project. And yet, reading the biography of Stephin Merritt, you'd never guess it: classically trained, openly gay and an ABBA fan, he stands out for a reserved character that turns positively prickly whenever he has to deal with journalists.

His musical journey begins in the early '90s, with home equipment and a four-track recorder. And it's precisely his shyness that pushes him to hide behind the name Magnetic Fields, helped mostly by old friends, who sometimes do little more than lend their voices to a few songs or handle certain instruments.

Our man had already released five other gems as Magnetic Fields between '91 and '98 (the sublime "The Charm of the Highway Strip" stands for them all), along with other work under various guises: Future Bible Heroes, Gothic Archies, the 6ths.

And yet "69 Love Songs" itself came dangerously close to becoming the emblem of the invisible album: released in the US in 1999 across three separate volumes, later bundled into a single box set after a lean spell.

A European edition would then be released in 2000, though the record wouldn't truly explode until a year later.

Merritt immediately reveals a remarkable knack for building sonic architectures that bring to life songs that seem simple and innocent on the surface, but actually conceal a complex discourse on the very act of making music.

"69 Love Songs" runs on two parallel tracks: musical and lyrical. Conceptually, we're looking at a work that invites lofty comparisons — Shakespeare's love sonnets. Sixty-nine ways of telling the story of love, capable of containing the whole of human knowledge, modulating tones and situations along the way. Merritt becomes the bard of both grand and small stories, of episodes ranging from the most irreverent irony to irrecoverable tragedy.

Despite repeated attempts to distinguish and classify the tone of each individual volume, no real guiding thread emerges. And it's disorienting how the record leaps from one point to another with no logical connection between them, other than that of the love relationship, explored in all its possible forms (straight stories, but also gay or bisexual ones).

Merritt's musical baggage is incredibly vast: a meticulous arranger, with "69 Love Songs" he set out to line up years of listening and study (from the extravagance of Hollywood musicals to primordial folk, from synth-pop to classical-style variations), spreading them across highly personal arrangements built with a genuine arsenal of instruments (the list in the booklet is impressive in this respect), gracefully conducted with the range of someone equally at home between retro and modern, embracing every phase of what we still simply call "pop music". And it's this way that the fusion explodes, uniting the chamber ensemble with a deeply personal take on symphonic staging.

But the references go beyond Spector and Brian Wilson's obsessiveness: the arpeggios of "Time Enough For Rocking When We're Old" are as austere as those of Leonard Cohen's "Avalanche", and a vocal line in "How To Say Goodbye" explicitly pays homage to Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue".

"World Love" is a Caribbean-flavored tribute to Paul Simon, in the mood for prescriptions that are nothing short of invincible: "I know the solution/ love, music, wine and revolution". If the vocal lines of "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure" clearly ape Morrissey, "Love In The Shadows" sketches out avant-garde ideas in the vein of Scott Walker, and the closing "Zebra" is an affectionate parody of Cole Porter.

If only for a layer of old keyboards that shatter the harmony of its choruses, "Let's Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits" could easily pass as a tribute to the Beach Boys. A loving, attentive version of Suicide peeks through on "Fido, Your Leash Is Too Long", a grey-and-pink vignette with a frenzied, synth-driven jazz-session coda that's cut off just as it starts.

The inevitable declarations of love for French chansonniers, those who "knew what love is", are all here: "My Sentimental Melody" name-checks Serge Gainsbourg, and "Underwear" references Alain Resnais's film "L'Amour A Mort", whispering over guitar lines that evoke unforgettable Parisian noir.

The album moves between all sorts of jokes (the a-cappella "How Fucking Romantic", the experimentalism of "Experimental Music Love") and serenades ("Nothing Matters We're Dancing", "The Sun Goes Down And The World Goes Dancing"), between nonsense sketches ("Absolutely Cuckoo", "Meaningless") and dark moments (the strings of "The Way You Say Good-Night", the skeletal "I Shatter", the dream-pop-flavored murder ballad "Yeah! Oh Yeah!"), between heart-melting ballads ("I Don't Believe In The Sun", "Very Funny", "Busby Berkeley Dreams") and timeless folk ("All My Little Words", "Grand Canyon", "Papa Was A Rodeo").

"It's a Crime" uses biting synth swells to dress up what its own author calls a "Swedish reggae", and the following "I'm Sorry I Love You" almost seems to pick up the jingle-like hook of "Kiss Me Like You Mean It", but where that song relied on just voice and guitar, this time it sounds like a small-town brass-band march, warped by a bacchanal that gently tags along.

There's no shortage of exquisite, pure melodies: the summery "I Think I Need A New Heart", the poetic, feminine "Sweet-Lovin' Man", "When My Boy Walks Down The Street", urban rock laid over a carpet of distortion straight out of Jesus and Mary Chain, and "A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off", opened by a light drum pattern that walks hand in hand with an irresistible guitar riff and a delightfully deranged lyric: "Well my heart's running round/ like a chicken with its head cut off".

"The Luckiest Guy On The Lower East Side" is a screwball comedy set to music, forging cheeky piano notes over the album's bounciest synth line, occasionally cut through by violins that try to lend a shred of improbable seriousness to a hilarious little tune, spiced up by a Dudley Klute who sings breezy and amused.

Also worth mentioning is "Washington, D.C.", which attempts to put forward a new American anthem as imagined by cheerleaders, "Long-Forgotten Fairytale", which pretends to align itself with dark-wave territory before surrounding itself with big Eighties keyboards that turn it into a delicious slab of dance-music, and then "Wi' Nae Wee Bairn Ye'll Me Beget", a purely British folk song (an affectionate tribute to his Franco-Irish mother), and "Love Is Like Jazz", a twisted, boozy little jazz number.

Reaching the end of a listen that never feels exhausting, you realize why Stephin Merritt is a genius. Only a genius could, at the tail end of the century, sum up and serve on a silver platter fifty years of pop music, filtered through the genre's most overused theme. A definitive album, then, one that anyone hoping to make pop music even in the 21st century will be unable to avoid reckoning with.

"69 Love Songs" is a book to leaf through, telling stories that strike us as absurd, dramatic, amusing, moving. But then something happens: somewhere between a bottle of gin and a chicken with its head cut off, you'll find episodes, minutes, or even just a single instant that belongs to you deeply, and you'll laugh about it, or maybe cry: Merritt wrote all of it, but it's really about all of us.

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01/11/2006