The Magnetic Fields made me gay. Or at least that was my Mormon father’s fear when he heard me obsessively replaying tracks from the Stephin Merritt-fronted group’s 1999 masterpiece 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. On the synthpop-inspired track “Long-Forgotten Fairytale,” Dudley Klute sings about being a “princess” in an “old enchanted castle,” fantasizing about escaping a cycle of abuse. In the twangy “Papa Was a Rodeo,” an unnamed narrator (voiced by Merritt) croons to “Mike” about a storied 55-year romance, only for Shirley Simms to chime in during the final chorus, revealing that the lover was a woman all along. To me, the three-volume record — now deservedly recognized as one of the greatest of all time — was what queerness itself sounded like: fluid and shifting, horny and desperate, performing pirouettes on the often indiscernible line between sincerity and camp.
At the time, I wasn’t familiar with the term “queer” outside of a derogatory context, nor had I myself morphed into a full-on transsexual. I was 13 years old, and I hand-waved away my obsession with the openly gay singer-songwriter’s output as mere fascination with his cleverness. Which was partly true. Lyrically, 69 Love Songs is boundlessly inventive, like a never-ending handkerchief produced from the sleeve of the smartest clown in the circus. On “The Book of Love,” the most widely heard track outside of the band’s fandom, Merritt drolly intones, “The book of love is long and boring / No one can lift the damn thing.” In “Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin,” he pushes the titular metaphor past its limits until it loops around and becomes gutting again: “You just get out what they put in / And they never put in enough.” The tracks are arch and metatextual, more about love songs than love itself, but that hasn’t stopped them from accruing personal meanings for listeners who put them on wedding playlists, much to Merritt’s reported bemusement.
Not that he is opposed to people resonating with the emotional texture of his music. While speaking with the famously wry indie icon in advance of the 25-year anniversary tour for 69 Love Songs, which begins March 22, I recall a quote Merritt once gave to the Independent (“songwriting is not about expressing something”), but he sets me straight, so to speak. “I have said that about the lyrics,” he specifies, adding that “people form their identities largely through the arts, correctly, and music is an important part of that.” In fact, he clarifies that 69 Love Songs is his “most self-expressive record,” even though many might assume 50 Song Memoir, his equally vast 2017 release, might be “nominally filling that function.”
The challenge of speaking with Merritt is that my own identity has indeed been formed through his music, and meeting one’s maker on Zoom can feel eerily like dying. Twenty-five years later, my own gender seems like a surprise in the chorus of a sad song, my Mormon dad has come around, and I will be one of thousands celebrating an audacious record that is both deeply silly and one of the most sublime creative achievements ever pressed to vinyl. Below, Merritt speaks with Them about Lil Nas X, dealing with long COVID, and the legacy of 69 Love Songs.
What’s your favorite song from 69 Love Songs that you don’t often play live?
I don’t have a favorite. I have very few favorites of anything, but I especially don’t have favorites among my own songs. I am particularly interested in “Experimental Music Love,” which our guitarist, John Woo, has actually figured out how to replicate live. The technology has changed, and it is now possible to do “Experimental Music Love” live simply by speaking into a microphone. It’s fantastic. [We use] an Electro-Harmonix stompbox, and I’m deliriously excited about making the audience soil themselves in delight.
I won’t ask in terms of “favorites,” but is there a song from 69 Love Songs that you’re kind of tired of playing live?
Well, “The Book of Love,” of course, we play differently. We keep changing how “The Book of Love” comes out, so that it doesn’t get very stale. The “Book of Love” has a problem, which is that it can either be boring or it can be upsetting. I’ve performed it at people’s weddings and I’ve performed it at one funeral for a friend of mine, my former downstairs neighbor during 69 Love Songs, Maggie Estep. I am never performing at a funeral again of anyone I know.
That was a really bad idea, and it kind of ruined “The Book of Love” for me, in a way, because for a few years, every time I sang “The Book of Love,” I was back there, like in a nightmare, having to sing “The Book of Love” at a funeral for someone I knew and was friends with. She died suddenly, quite young, and the whole experience was horrifying. That is not the kind of thing you should be thinking about when you’re trying to perform “The Book of Love.”
I have been reluctant to tell you that I have been to a wedding where “The Book of Love” was the couple’s song. They have since divorced.
Oh, that’s how that works. Yep.
You originally conceived of the album as a musical revue. Would you ever want to see it in that form, like a Magnetic Fields jukebox musical?
We have talked to a number of theater directors who were proposing to do that, but my insistence that it, in fact, be 69 songs long put the kibosh on that. I have a 69 Love Songs brand to uphold, and I’m not letting some theatrical upstart ruin the purity of my ideas just so they can use my title.
I respect the principled stance. It is a masterful achievement in songwriting, as I’m sure you’ve heard countless times in your career-
Thank you.
-and that only makes it stand out more as time goes on. The percentage of Billboard-charting songs that have been written by a solo songwriter has been plummeting since the 1970s.
I don’t understand. With a group of six people writing a song, what are the other five of them doing?
I wonder that myself.
My theory is that it’s actually one person writing a song, and five other people getting some of the royalties.
Are you concerned about songwriting as an art form going forward?
I was always concerned about songwriting as an art form, and it’s certainly not getting better, but there are bright spots. One of the bright spots is Lil Nas X. Lil Nas X dominating the country charts is the most exciting thing that has happened in music in decades.
I agree with that.
And then, a few months ago, there was a drag performer who dominated the Christian rock charts for a week before the establishment realized what they were doing. [They were] singing about love and togetherness and there are a lot of people who don’t like that kind of behavior. Love and togetherness, not everyone is into that.
Yes, I believe they were excluded from Grammys consideration for the Christian music category. On that note, I remember in 2012, the year “Andrew in Drag” came out, there was a lot forward momentum for same sex marriage and trans rights, and I felt almost optimistic. I wanted to know what you make of the current anti-drag backlash.
I have bookmarked an article in, I think, The Atlantic, which is a feature-length interview with RuPaul on his opinion on that exact question, so I’d feel like an idiot commenting on it before I read this article. I’m, unfortunately, a news junkie and I’m ashamed to say I can’t say anything, because I haven’t read enough about it yet. I am in favor of self-expression and people being able to take responsibility for their own gender identity and other kinds of identity as well. I will probably get canceled if I continue that sentence, but I am more in favor of individual rights than anyone else you will meet. I often think that the anarchists don’t go far enough, and I don’t think that people should be canceled about it. I think everyone should be brought into the fold. “The more the merrier” is my motto on the question of gender in general.
Another thing you’ve likely heard frequently is that 69 Love Songs is a formative album for many people. Reading your interviews, you’ve said “songwriting is not about expressing something” and that very little of the album is autobiographical, and yet people have imprinted some deeply personal meanings onto it-
I have not said that.
OK.
I have said that about the lyrics. The whole point of music is to tell people... it’s the same point as DJing: to tell people what records you like, basically. As it turns out, what records you like is one of the most important things about you. If you grow up in a basement on an Amish farm and you have no access to radio, you are going to have a very constricted idea of music and the musical spectrum, and not coincidentally, a very restricted idea of what that would mean for [your] identity. I think that people form their identities largely through the arts, correctly, and music is an important part of that.
Do I think that the lyrics of “The Book of Love” express an opinion that I would expand into a thesis? Absolutely not. Do I think that you can tell a lot about my taste in music from listening to 69 Love Songs? Yes, you can. That is the point, and that’s why 69 Love Songs is my most self-expressive record, even though 50 Song Memoir is nominally filling that function, being a memoir.
69 Love Songs is a memoir of itself, in a way that 50 Song Memoir isn’t quite, because I’m not deliberately exploring every nook and cranny of the musical possibilities on 50 Song Memoir. It’s about the lyrics in a way that 69 Love Songs is not. Because 69 Love Songs is all love songs and I don’t have to work to establish that. It’s right there in the title; I’m free to use that as a springboard without having to worry about whether the song expresses anything on its own.
That makes sense to me, that maybe it’s not about direct personal expression, but it’s still expression and resonates with people in that way.
Yeah, and many of the figures in the songs are characters, other than myself. But most of the songs are too vague for the figures to be fleshed-out enough to be considered characters, as in most songs, and certainly most love songs.
I think most love songs are about unusually genetic, [I mean] generic characters. Unusually “genetic” would be fun. There are a few love songs that specify something like “with a turned-up nose.” There’s “Lydia, The Tattooed Lady.” There’s a fun song. Some songs specify eye color, but there’s not all that many eye colors, and hardly any of them specify green, which is the only rare one.
There’s “the old guy with the gold eye” in your song “Love in the Shadows.”
Yeah.
When I mention the album in a room of, say, five people, I’ll often get three blank looks but then the two smartest, most interesting people will know it. I wonder how you feel about The Magnetic Fields, and this album in particular, having a “secret society” quality where it’s not a household name and yet some of the most artistic people cite it as an influence.
I am happy not to be more famous. I want to be rich, but I don’t want to be famous, so it’s fine with me if it’s a slow forest fire. I don’t want to have everyone suddenly learn about 69 Love Songs all at the same time, and get tired of it. And I definitely don’t want to be recognized when I leave the house. I used to be recognized when I lived in the East Village, and that was awkward. I would never know when someone was about to shout, “You! You’re… 69!"
I never thought of that. That is a strange thing to be accosted with in public. On the topic of the Village, apart from friends and family, you were one of the first people I thought about during the COVID-19 lockdowns because I remembered how much you like to write in bars. How has your writing process changed with the pandemic?
Well, I was the first person I knew to get COVID and I haven’t actually recovered completely. I have yet to finish a song four years later. In fact, is today March 11th?
It is.
Happy fourth anniversary of me getting COVID. I’ve been to a neurologist, I’ve had all sorts of tests. Apparently, my temporal lobe is out of sync with the rest of my brain, but that’s a very common and not-all-that-useful marker of something being wrong with your brain. But anyway, there’s something wrong with my brain where I am no longer able, currently, to finish a song.
So I have hundreds, maybe thousands at this point, of fragments that I didn’t have before, but now I have no new recent songs. Fortunately — don’t panic — I have many notebooks full of previously finished songs and no one would know if I never actually finished a song again, because I could just use the other finished songs that I haven’t had a place for. So it’s only worrying for me.
Well, I sympathize. I’ve had COVID twice, the second time harder than the first, and I still feel weirdly foggy around writing.
I have had some writing assignments that I couldn’t finish. I can only fill a 3x5 card. When I try to fill two 3x5 cards, I can’t do it.
I do have a few questions about specific songs. Lyrically, in a genre with a lot of really overwrought metaphors, I think “Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin” is stunning. Do you recall anything about the circumstances of writing it?
I know I wrote it at Dick’s Bar, which was at 12th Street and 2nd Avenue, and is no longer there. They had a wonderful jukebox of early ’80s and late ’70s disco and new wave. I’m not sure that I realized that it was in 21/8 when I wrote it. I may have only discovered that when I got home and tried to play it. It’s fun to play live, because it’s in an extremely strange time signature and it’s so minimal that the audience is definitely focused on the words.
It’s set up so that it doesn't mean anything until the last line, and the last line explains everything that you have heard up to that point. So, in that way, it's like a Gene Wolfe novel where, once you’ve finished, you realize you were reading a different book than you thought you were. I love that stuff.
“Papa Was a Rodeo” is regarded as one of the most beautiful songs on the record. I won’t use the “favorite” word, but do you hold it in similarly high esteem?
The first review I ever read of 69 Love Songs specified that not all 69 songs were worth listening to, for example, “there’s horrible country claptrap, like ‘Papa Was a Rodeo.’” In this reviewer’s mindset, all country music is terrible, and so the fact that I had dared to put something from such a terrible genre on the record showed my contempt for the audience.
There are daggers shooting out of my eyes at the thought of that.
That’s why country’s popular.
Especially now that Beyoncé is doing country.
And Lil Nas X.
The last track I wanted to ask you about was “100,000 Fireflies,” which is not on 69 Love Songs. I read in an interview published after her passing that vocalist Susan Anway said you told her, “Don’t sing like you know how,” which I thought was evocative. Did you use that approach for your side project The 6ths, in which you write for other vocalists? What appeals to you about letting the lyrics shine more than the emoting?
Well, I think when people are in a situation like The 6ths, they can be overly concerned with making the producer happy. Maybe they want to show off what they can do. I wanted to make sure that they were not showing off what they could do, but that they were singing as though this lyric were their daily lives. The songs on The 6ths records are describing characters. They’re mostly not describing cataclysmic events in the characters lives; they’re just describing their everyday life.
In the song “Dream Hat,” the character lives in a trailer park, but has discovered a magical hat. We don’t know if this is a metaphor or not. Generally, things are not metaphorical until you are told that they are, but you can always assume that they will mean something as though they were metaphorical by the end. I tried to keep “Dream Hat” literal, but I don’t know.
Mac McCaughan, who sang “Dream Hat,” can belt like nobody’s business, and I wanted him to just sing it straight. So I famously asked him to sing it as though he were bored, and I got good results with that. “Sing it like you’re bored” is really synonymous with “let the lyrics take care of the emoting.”
It works for me, certainly. I’m so excited about the 25th-anniversary tour. What’s your hope for the 50-year anniversary of 69 Love Songs?
I will be president at that point. I will be in my 80s, old enough to be president, and I will not have time to go on tour, but the technology will have changed and I can send my avatar on tour because that technology has already changed. ABBA have sent their avatars on tour. So we will be able to send our avatars on tour across the galaxy to all the various terraformed worlds that we will have instituted around Alpha Centauri.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The Magnetic Fields are touring the U.S., the U.K., and Europe with a special two-night performance of 69 Love Songs from late March to November.
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