Magnetic Fields
LOVE STORY
Magnetic Fields Mastermind Stephin Merritt Tackles the World's Oldest Subject on '69 Love Songs'
Magnetic Fields have summed up a century of pop with 69 LOVE SONGS, a mammoth three-CD set that embraces nearly every style of popular music and every kind of romantic emotion with unstoppable tunefulness and sly, ferocious wit. Masterminded by hyperarticulate songwriter/singer/multi-instrumentalist Stephin Merritt, the set (also available as three separate volumes) offers three hours' worth of sharply wrought, wildly varied songs with five different singers. Here, Merritt speaks to bn.com's Douglas Wolk about what he's learned from his survey of history, songs, and the ways of the heart.
barnesandnoble.com: Do you feel like you understand more about love now than when you started 69 LOVE SONGS?
Stephin Merritt: [Long pause] No. [Another long pause] Well, yes. But do you mean because I've done the project? No. I did a lot of research. I read books about love -- mostly short books. I read a self-help book whose title escapes me right now. I read two books of love letters: One was on how to write love letters, and the other was famous love letters.
bn.com: Did you use any of your reading directly?
SM: The research was really not so much directly for the making of the record as for the making of the lists that allowed me to make sure I covered more aspects than I usually would. I made lists of various genres of 20th-century music and made sure that I hadn't left any major holes, and I made lists of the various types of love songs, and I made lists of actual love songs, and I made lists of the types of love songs prevalent in various decades, and other types of songs: college songs in the '30s, the dancing craze in the '20s.
bn.com: Were there any styles on the lists that you didn't want to try?
SM: Are you familiar with Weekend? Their album was LA VARIETÉ [1982], French for variety program, and on the back it explained that LA VARIETÉ was everything except heavy rock. In homage to that, I thought I would deliberately exclude heavy rock. I'm perfectly capable of doing heavy rock, of course. Every small child is perfectly capable of doing heavy rock. But I capriciously left that one out as a tribute to Weekend -- a really oblique, completely unnoticeable tribute.
bn.com: Do you have a sense that pop music is going in a specific direction?
SM: I would say "plop" would be the specific direction. I think in a few months, when the year 2000 comes around, it's going to be okay to like new things again. People are going to demand new things, especially in music, which has been so incredibly stagnant for at least 15 years. What I'd like to see in the year 2000 is the abandonment of music being categorized by the race of the artist, or the perceived race of the audience. It's disgusting, and I would like to be amazed that it's still happening. [Eliminating] racism and sexism would be major improvements, and it would make an enormous difference in the music industry. It would be really nifty if black people were allowed to make records that didn't have to constantly refer to very recent traditions of black radio. It's absurd, and at this point, it's as though the only thing the American public were allowed to hear were "coon songs" and ragtime. It's worse, I think, than it was in 1899.
bn.com: The liner notes to 69 LOVE SONGS imply that you have a ukulele endorsement now.
SM: Well, I endorse the ukulele. Definitely. At some point, I may begin looking for paid endorsements, but I feel strongly and happily about my Kamaka Pineapple uke.
bn.com: Why that particular uke?
SM: It's in the shape of a pineapple.
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