It makes you blind. It does you in

Some thoughts and a playlist to mark the 25th anniversary tour of 69 Love Songs, and to spite The New York Times.

Tour illustration lifted from the Magnetic Fields’ Facebook page.

I had a bit of a kick reflex this week when my friend and colleague Lindsay Zoladz at The New York Times published her picks for the best tracks from the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs. For a certain kind of person, nothing could make us feel older than the band’s current tour in celebration of that album’s 25th fucking anniversary. Nor more bitter than said tour not coming to our town.

Soon after the triple album came out in September of 1999, 69LS became a continuous soundtrack to many of our lives. Three years later, “Book of Love” was played at my wedding; maybe it also was at yours. And the songs accompanied our anti-romantic lives, too, when such times struck.

But to hear MagFields impresario Stephin Merritt talk back then, it shouldn’t have meant any of those things. It was strictly a formalist exercise, an attempt to write a love song (as the default mode of pop song) in every style and attitude Merritt could conceive of. I admired the anti-sentimentality of that stance then, and still value foregrounding craft that way. But now it has a bit of the ring of a shield to me.

Merritt’s best songs, which are as good as anybody’s best songs, dig in emotionally alongside the quizzically distanced technique. That tension is what makes them rich. When he leans too long into the conceptual and jokey, the songs begin to flatten into novelty. Which has always been part of Merritt’s mix, alongside Tin Pan Alley, Sheffield synths, bubblegum, and musique concrète, but it becomes wearing and unreplenishing when it dominates, as it does on several later albums. Those records might have caused some listeners to walk away. If you did, you missed the late masterpiece that is 69LS’s real sequel, 2017’s 50-Song Memoir, wherein Merritt comes out from behind the glass as much as he likely ever will.

On 69LS, the implied conceit is that gathering every possible kind of love song might be a way to express every kind of love, from the grandest to the meanest. That is, if love exists at all. For awhile the music even convinces the listener that we’re attaining that panoptic view. But then, by design, it fails: Love’s variations are so vast, the album would have to go on forever to capture them all. And by the way, you probably won’t like a lot of them. That variety, that difference and disputation and thwartedness, is very much the point, coming from a gay songwriter in the aftermath of AIDS in America.

As it’s often noted, the songs mix gendered points of view, voices, and pronouns. They queer the received pop-music boy-girl scenarios. Sometimes, as on “Papa Was a Rodeo,” there’s direct man-to-man (or man-to-“Mike”) address, which was vanishingly rare in 1999 even in the supposedly progressive environs of indie music. But like many of his peers in those scenes—and predecessors such as Porter, Hart, or Sondheim—Merritt was equally driven to subvert the popular song by smuggling in as many incongruous subjects, references, thesaurus-busting words, acrobatic rhymes (or lack thereof), and high-low juxtapositions as he could.

Although “It’s Only Time,” from 2004’s I, is the prettiest gay-marriage song I know (a decade before nation-wide legalization), Merritt was always far more artist than activist. His radicalism coexists with his classicism. And his egotism, too. The point of 69 Love Songs was to prove that he could do it. He stopped at 69 because that was funny, but it also served to suggest he could have kept on going if he hadn’t reached the punchline. In fact, originally he’d planned on doing 100 love songs in alphabetical order, and by some accounts that task did defeat him. Traces of the scheme remain, with the first and last tracks being called “Absolutely Cuckoo” (a terrific start) and “Zebra” (not as elegant an ending).

By the time this album came out, I’d been a devotee for a while. I came upon them in 1994 with the releases of their plasticized-country album, The Charm of the Highway Strip (still perhaps my favourite), and then the leisure-themed Holiday. I hadn’t read much about them yet, and hadn’t heard anyone talk about them in Toronto or Montreal. So I was swept up in the thrill of discovery, and got to go on feeling personally territorial for awhile, silly as that was, both in itself and because Boston and New York (the band’s origin and then base) were obviously well ahead anyway. Merritt conceived 69 Love Songs quite consciously as a springboard out of obscurity, but even he must have been taken aback by how well it worked. There were tales that keeping up with the 69LS demand almost overwhelmed Merge Records’ resources in 1999 (as would happen again five years later with Arcade Fire’s Funeral). I fell for the ungainly behemoth immediately. But my fingers clawed a bit before giving up my proprietary hold to all these bandwagon jumpers who didn’t even know “100,000 Fireflies.” (Of course, they soon learned.)

Absurdly, those old feelings were stirred up a bit reading Lindsay’s piece and her playlist. It’s not often these days I feel I have a corner on any objective truth about music, or anything else. But some atavistic part of me believes I know for a fact what the most important songs on 69 Love Songs are, and how could Lindsay have gotten them so wrong? This is ridiculous of course, because 69LS is like the Beatles’ White Album twice over: Its extreme eclecticism is custom-made to divide opinions and prompt every listener to stake out and defend their own picks and discards. But c’mon, “Fido, Your Leash is Too Long,” and not “Papa Was a Rodeo”? Simply bonkers.

I tweeted to that effect, and Lindsay challenged me back:

So tonight I thought I’d grab a few minutes to compile my Top 10 of 69LS, no sweat. I immediately found out how difficult it was.

If you just choose the 10 most exquisite standalone songs on the album, it doesn’t seem like 69LS anymore. You need a couple of the weirdo shorties, the “Fido”-like ones, if not “Fido.” (Back when 69LS came out, I disliked most of the animal-referencing songs, without realizing my own bias as not much of a creature fancier.)

You don’t want too many synth tracks, nor too many ukulele tracks. There should be both laughers and weepers. And then there are the mixed cases: one of my favourite moments the whole album is the vocal-trio arrangement of the text of an electrical appliance warning sticker as a romantic metaphor at the head of “Epitaph for My Heart.” But the rest of “Epitaph” is not quite as persuasive in its category. Then there are the songs in the middles of the second and third discs, where attention might wander, that perhaps I’ve never quite given a fair chance.

Just to hit all the major suits of 69LS, you’d need at least 20 tracks, not 10. Lindsay herself couldn’t narrow past 11. Since I don’t have an editor here, I’ll raise her to an even dozen. That still means leaving out 57, after all. We end up with three choices in common: “All My Little Words,” “Book of Love” (the ringer), and “(Crazy for You But) Not that Crazy,” which I kept swapping with other contenders but ultimately had to keep for the verse that rhymes “broke my virgin flesh” with “as if you were Ganesh.”

I surprised myself with some I chose to include or sacrifice: Is “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!” here fully on the album version’s merits, or because I’m so attached to the comedy sketch Merritt and chief MagFields co-conspirator Claudia Gonson make out of the duet on stage?

Claudia Gonson and Stephin Merritt, high on life. Borrowed from MUTHA magazine, photo by Kimberly Butler.

So here’s my list. Express your own proprietary outrage in the comments. Also: What’s your nom for worst song on 69LS? Or maybe you dislike the whole thing.

ONE DOZEN LOVE SONGS
All My Little Words
(“Not if I could write for you the sweetest song you ever heard…”)
Reno Dakota
(“It’s making me blue: Pantone 292”)
I Don’t Want to Get Over You
(“Or I could make a career of being blue. I could dress in black and read Camus...”)
Come Back from San Francisco
(“And kiss me—I’ve quit smoking”)
The Book of Love
(“… And things we’re all too young to know”)
How Fucking Romantic
(“What a tacky sunset, what a vulgar moon”)
(Crazy for You But) Not That Crazy
(“I pretended you were Jesus—you were just dying to save me”)
Papa Was a Rodeo
(“I’ve never stuck around long enough for a one-night stand”)
Underwear
(“If there’s anything better in this world, who cares?”)
Nothing Matters When We’re Dancing
(“Be we in Paris or in Lansing …”)
Yeah! Oh, Yeah!
(“What a dark and dreary life—are you reaching for a knife?”)
Love is Like a Bottle of Gin
(“It's very small and made of glass, and grossly over-advertised”)

Listen: On Spotify, on Apple Music, on Tidal, or on YouTube