The Magnetic Fields singlehandedly defined a unique musical genre that might perhaps be called indie-cabaret.
Their triple album 69 Love Songs is a unique artefact: a collection of bittersweet ballads about the promise and pitfalls of modern romance.
I remember interviewing its maker, Stephin Merritt, who told me he had written most, if not all of the songs while sitting in the same seat of a gay bar in New York’s East Village over a period of months, secretly mining the clientele for inspiration.
He also came out with one of the more shocking – and unprintable – comments I’ve heard in a long interviewing career.
Merritt had grown up in hippie communities all over America with his mother and, unlike the hippies with their pot and the Grateful Dead records, he enjoyed the songs coming out of the radio by bands like Abba and The Bay City Rollers.
That prompted me to mention the then-recent court case against one of them, who had just been convicted of possessing child porn. Merritt’s eyes lit up: “I wish I’d known THAT when I was 14 years old!” he said wistfully.
I decided not to include that in my published article.
69 Love Songs is a masterpiece and this is among the best of a very good three-hour collection of songs, perfectly encapsulating Merritt’s mixture of humour, romance and misanthropic self-deprecation. You might call it indie-cabaret.
Over some off-kilter instrumentation with squelchy synths, ukelele and percussion, he sings characteristic couplets such as this: “The day is beautiful and so are you / My car is ugly but I’m ugly too.”
Despite this, he asserts that he is the luckiest guy on the Lower East Side: “‘Cause I’ve got wheels and you want to go for a ride.”
It was also featured in the underrated crime caper Caught Stealing that came out last year; another reason to see it alongside a former Doctor Who (Matt Smith) as a cat-loving punk.
And the pair of twin Hasidic Jewish hitmen who take their next victim to their grandmother’s house for matzo ball soup before carrying out their assignment.