Seven of the Best Songs from ‘69 Love Songs’
With Love at the Bottom of the Sea, released just last week, the Magnetic Fields have returned to that simplistic synth rock aesthetic that first popularized Stephen Merritt and his troupe of musical madmen back in the nineties. After the ‘no-synth trilogy’ which consisted of i (2004), Distortion (2008) and Realism (2010), this is a return to the Golden Age of the Fields, i.e., to When Stephen Merritt Became a Hipster God, i.e., to that magical time during which 69 Love Songs (1999) came out.
To celebrate, let’s look briefly back at a few of the songs from 69 Love Songs.
This song, the album’s opener, tells us exactly what we are getting into. Clocking in at barely a minute and a half, it does not intimidate; it is damn funny; and, with a simple melody repeatedly repeated, it utterly lacks pretension. Plus, anybody who has been in love can empathize with the narrator’s disclaimed obsessive craziness.
Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits
Merritt has said: “69 Love Songs is not remotely an album about love. It’s an album about love songs.” And knowing this, we might think of “Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits” as a clever commentary on the music scene, its commentary being that love songs are veiled aphrodisiacs. Or, we can listen to it as a funny song about having lots and lots of sex.
69 Love Songs isn’t all fun and games. In this song, Stephen Merritt shows off his versatility: He oscillates here (from the caustic silliness of “How Fucking Romantic”) to heartbreaking heartbreak, to a desperate painful feeling surely commonplace among people in love: You love somebody more than you love me.
A little known fact about this song: Lemony Snicket, the acclaimed and mega-popular novelist who wrote the acclaimed and mega-popular A Series of Unfortunate Events books, both arranged this song and played accordion on this song’s final, recorded version. A more commonly known fact about this song: This song is stupendously gorgeous.
This song is silly and it is about underwear.
This song (the first Magnetic Fields song I ever listened to) fully displays Stephen Merritt’s gleeful contempt for love song clichés (and is a really good Magnetic Fields induction song). Here is the setup: A husband and his wife are singing to each other about the state of their marriage and when she asks him shocked unhappy questions—e.g., “Do you want to break my heart?”—he happily replies, “Yeah! Oh, yeah!”
“Zebra” is the perfect finale for 69 Love Songs because its story, in which a woman asks her lover to buy increasingly preposterous gifts, utterly captures the process of contemporary romance. We are always looking for satisfaction. We look continuously for true love and happiness, and then for truer love and happier happiness, and the grass never quite becomes green enough. Finally, this album about love songs reminds us why we listen to love songs. Through music, we yearn for more.