Happy 25th Anniversary to The Magnetic Fields’ sixth studio album 69 Love Songs, originally released September 7, 1999.
In the late ‘90s, Stephin Merritt was sitting in a gay piano bar in midtown Manhattan called the Townhouse, a tony, serious kind of place that had paintings of racehorses on the walls. He was listening to the pianist’s interpretations of Steven Sondheim songs, when he suddenly had the thought, “I really should get into theater music because I’d be good at it.” He then decided, on a whim, that he’d write 100 love songs by way of introducing himself to the world.
“Then I realized how long that would be. So I settled on sixty-nine,” he recalled to the San Francisco Bay Guardian back in 1999. “[I decided] I'd have a theatrical revue with four drag queens. And whoever the audience liked best at the end of the night would get paid.”
As wild and entertaining as this drag queen revue would have been, Merritt realized that it simply wasn’t practical. In order to teach the four drag queens all of the music, he would basically have to make an album. “And if I was going to make the album,” he said, “I may as well make the album for public consumption and skip the step with the four drag queens.”
Still, it was a weird time to be writing about love, even that late into the ’90s. “I lived in the East Village, so half the people I knew were in the middle of dying of AIDS,” Merritt recalled to New York Public Radio this year. “And people’s attitudes toward love and sex were extremely different from what they are now.”
Nevertheless, Merritt set out on his quest. Each morning, he’d head to St. Dymphna’s Café in the East Village to pen songs and drink tea. And then in the evening, he’d haunt Dick’s Bar and sip cocktails for yet another songwriting session. Months later, he’d indeed ended up writing 100 songs, some of which took shape during the recording process, but chose 69 for the project.
Rather than relying on the show-tune genre that had initially inspired him, Merritt decided that he wanted each song to come from an entirely different universe. He made long lists of musical genres, and then chose the categories he could imagine himself being able to work within.
69 Love Songs includes everything from the avant-garde (“Experimental Love Music”) to earnest singer-songwriter (“Acoustic Guitar”) to cliché country (“A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off”) to the heartfelt ballad (“Come Back From San Francisco”) to Irving Berlin-adjacent (“The Luckiest Guy On The Lower East Side”) to rumba (“I Think I Need A New Heart”) to raucous punk (“Punk Love”) to sophisticated French pop (“Underwear”) to electropop (“The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure”). And that’s really only scratching the surface.
The most impressive facet of the three-hour, three-disc 69 Love Songs, however, is not how many genres it covers, but how it manages to be both ironic and heartfelt at the same time. The album’s overarching sentiment is encapsulated in Merritt’s voice itself (though he doesn’t sing every song on the record). As his friend Peter Straub observes in the 33⅓ series oral history of the album: “Stephin’s voice […] is a wonderful, expressive instrument, though tonally it may not offer much variation. But it is emotionally expressive. It conveys a kind of all-stops-out romanticism that is framed almost ironically, but is not felt ironically.”
In fact, if there’s one song on the album that captures the ambitious breadth of 69 Love Songs, its gloriously fun but ultimately futile attempt at deconstructing the love song, and its heady alchemy of self-aware cynicism and poignant sincerity, it’s “The Book of Love”:
The book of love is long and boring
No one can lift the damn thing
It's full of charts and facts and figures
And instructions for dancing
But I, I love it when you read to me
And you, you can read me anything
When he was ready to begin recording, Merritt rounded up the rest of the Magnetic Fields (with whom he had recorded previous albums): Claudia Gonson, his high-school friend and manager, on piano and percussion; John Woo on guitar, banjo, and mandolin; and Sam Davol on flute and cello, while Daniel Handler played accordion. Merritt plays more than 100 instruments on the album, although he relied heavily on his most beloved, the ukelele (“Everyone looks cute playing the uke,” he’s been known to say).
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He even fashioned some instruments of his own making, Harry Partch style, including something he calls the “Slinky Guitar.” “It's an appropriation of two guitars,” he explained. “You connect them with a slinky and block, or let [the slinky] oscillate between them. You plug in both guitars and pan them left and right, and you get a sound from the spring. I usually use it for percussion.”
Merritt sings most of the songs on 69 Love Songs, but he also shares vocal duties with two male singers, LD Beghtol and Dudley Klute, and two female singers, Shirley Simms and the aforementioned Claudia Gonson. Each singer contributes two songs per CD.
There’s a very distinct magic these multiple voices sprinkle throughout the album, namely the notion that love is universal, and the unabashed hope that it can happen to anyone—even the most foolish of characters (and there are plenty of those throughout the songs). But perhaps an even more compelling element to the multiple-voice magic is the gender bending prevalent throughout 69 Love Songs. Men sing about other men but also about women, names are chosen for their ambiguity (“Andy,” for example, could be a man or a woman), and even names like “Mike,” which seem clear-cut, end up being references to the only female Mike in pop culture (Nancy Sinatra’s character in the 1966 biker film The Wild Angels).
“He [Stephin] does this all over the record, sort of plays with gender and gender stereotyping,” Gonson observed during a recent interview with WNYC. “A lot of people have told me that what they like about 69 Love Songs is the gender-bender angle that in 1999 was a little new.”
Merritt chimes in proudly, “A reporter told me recently that they thought that it was the queerest record ever made.”
As trans writer Samantha Allen observes in Them, it was rare at the time for queerness to be presented outside of a derogatory context, or really even to be presented in the (somewhat) mainstream at all. “The Magnetic Fields made me gay,” she writes cheekily. “Or at least that was my Mormon father’s fear when he heard me obsessively replaying tracks from 69 Love Songs, in which gender, sexuality, and genre morph from song to song as casually as one might try on a new pair of shoes.”
The first time I heard songs from 69 Love Songs, I was in college and they were on a mixed tape made by a friend of a friend. At first it made me fall in love with him, until I soon realized that I was probably just in love with his taste in music. Meanwhile, my college roommate Christine dreamed of fairy-tale weddings and drove around town listening to sappy power ballads on Delilah After Dark, which once compelled me to make up alternate lyrics to Foreigner’s “I Want To Know What Love Is" (I wanna know what love is / I want you to blow me).
She accused me of being a cynic who was secretly a romantic, and it wasn’t until I bought all three CDs of 69 Love Songs, and listened to them furtively on my headphones, that I could admit that this was probably true. I liked the album’s arm’s length approach to love – it made fun of the whole embarrassing, syrupy, saccharin thing—but then it would pull you in for a passionate embrace at the moment you least expected it.
In his 33⅓ field guide and oral history of the album, LD Beghtol (who also sings on the album), divides 69 Love Songs into “the Pop Album” (disc one), “the Ballads Album” (disc two), and “the Comedy Album” (disc three). The Pop Album is my hands-down favorite, followed by the Ballads Album (ahem, I’m aware of the irony), and then they’re both trailed (surprisingly) by the Comedy Album. But, really—who is anyone kidding—each disc has elements of all three.
The album opens with the ukulele-heavy “Absolutely Cuckoo,” sung perfectly droll with a nod to just how crazy this undertaking called love really is—and just how batshit the narrator possibly is himself. He sings, “Know now that I’m on the make / And if you make a mistake / My heart will certainly break / I’ll have to jump in a lake / And all my friends will blame you.”
Meanwhile, the waltzing “I Don’t Believe In The Sun” tells a sob story of love lost. “I’ve struggled with depression most of my life, and because of this I collect lyrics that ring true to someone like me,” admits the band’s friend Lynn Rudell in the oral history. Her personal favorite? “How can it shine down on everyone / And never shine on me? / How could there be such cruelty?”
Conversely, the synthy, zigzagging “I Don’t Want To Get Over You”—which Beghtol describes as “art therapy rock”—takes the depressive’s plight and makes a lighthearted, sympathetic joke of it by describing a stereotypical goth: “I could dress in black and read Camus / Smoke clove cigarettes and drink Vermouth / Like I was 17, that would be a scream / But I don’t want to get over you.”
A take on Scott McKenzie’s hippie-dippy “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair),” the ‘60s-esque “Come Back From San Francisco” is equal parts breezy and gloomy and beautiful. It’s sung with expert introspective breathiness by Shirley Simms, and contains a very unforgettable line: “Come back from San Francisco, and kiss me I’ve quit smoking / I miss doing the wild thing with you.”
Next up, and studded with the infamous Slinky Guitar, “The Luckiest Guy On The Lower East Side” evokes a scene from a Broadway musical, with the clueless but loveable main character sashaying down a busy New York City street, loudly declaring his love for someone who only uses him for his car.
On the second disc, the “Ballad Album,” this mental image from “Luckiest Guy” is recreated, and reversed, with the sunshine-y, exuberant “When My Boy Walks Down The Street.” Merritt sings of a total dreamboat who inspires awe in everyone who crosses his path, to the point that “The world does the hula-hula when my boy walks down the street.”
The mood changes to grey and tired, but still full of love, with “Time Enough For Rocking When We’re Old,” where we’re invited to imagine the couple of the previous song decades later, with significantly less energy and exuberance, sitting in their rocking chairs and holding wrinkled hands.
Similar to “Come Back From San Francisco,” the track “Washington, D.C.” makes love locale-specific by focusing on the nation’s capital—with cherry blossoms in full bloom. The city is declared the greatest place to be simply because it’s where the narrator’s paramour lives—“It’s my baby’s kiss that keeps me coming back.” In reality, Washington D.C. carried very little personal meaning for Merritt. “I had to do fact-checking with Sam [Davol], who’d lived in Washington for a while,” Merritt confessed. “He gave me the cherries.”
On disc three, the Comedy Album, the mood starts out arty and French with “Underwear.” I recently heard this song in the British crime-drama series The Responder, which used only the beginning of the song—“A pretty girl in her underwear / If there’s anything better in this world/ Who cares”—over an image of a young woman in her skivvies. It struck me, for some reason, as slightly sexist but I couldn’t place the song or why it bothered me until I googled the lyrics and realized it was a beloved Magnetic Fields classic. The second part of the song flips genders—“A pretty boy in his underwear / If there’s a better reason to jump for joy / Who cares,” leaving the young woman in the first verse much less objectified.
Meanwhile, in sticking with the comedy vein of the third disc, “Acoustic Guitar” pokes fun at the earnest singer-songwriter ballad, while also managing to be quite beautiful. The narrator admonishes her guitar, abusively telling it that it’s lucky to have her—“Acoustic guitar, if you think I play hard / Well, you could have belonged to Steve Earle / Or Charo or GWAR, I could sell you tomorrow / You’d better bring me back my girl.” It’s merely one small component of an epic album full of push-pull, ugliness and extreme poignance, and comparisons of the heart to a cactus, a boa constrictor, and, of course, a chicken with its head cut off.
69 Love Songs ended up turning the Magnetic Fields, a small indie band, into if not exactly a household name, then at least a fairly seismic phenomenon. “Before 69 Love Songs, the Magnetic Fields was me in my tiny, squalid studio in Alphabet City,” Merritt told Magnet magazine. “After 69 Love Songs, the Magnetic Fields was a ‘band’ with credit cards and a record contract.”
It’s definitely been a wild ride, something that’s not lost on Claudia Gonson, Merritt’s musical accomplice since they were both 14. “Before 69 Love Songs, the Magnetic Fields were a 10,000-selling band; after, we were a 100,000-selling band,” she added. “Before, we were college-radio favorites; after, we were NPR favorites. Before, our audiences were largely teenaged or 20-something indie kids; after, our 20-something fans knew of us from their parents. Before, people wrote to me saying that Stephin’s albums saved their lives when they were suicidal; after, people wrote to me saying that they fell in love with their spouse because of this album.”
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