The Magnetic Fields - 50 Song Memoir

Drowned In Sound 90

And thinking about it, that’s true. His best-known work to date - feted 1999 album 69 Love Songs – was as much an exercise in explication of the art of the ‘love song’ as anything more intimate. And, in a sense, the series of concepts that Merritt uses to theme and group his releases (song-titles-beginning-with-the-letter-i, (i), noise music (Distortion), synth trilogies, non-synth trilogies etc) have always served as a means of distancing the musician from the music, an intellectual exercise rather than the kind of tortured confessional that other singer-songwriters might favour.

But now we come to the matter in hand: 50 Song Memoir. On one hand, it’s quite a typical Stephin Merritt concept: an album with one track representing each year of his life to date, to mark his fiftieth birthday. On the other hand, though, it’s a clear departure. A chance to get inside the head and history of the purveyor of some of the smartest, drollest, most poignant-slash-cynical lyrics of the last 20 years, to get a sense of his background, his formative moments, his influences and more – an irresistible prospect.

Of course, what you get, in fact, is nothing quite so straightforward as a narrative history of the artist. While some tracks are reasonably directly autobiographical – ‘68 A Cat Called Dionysis’, a cute tale about an unfriendly family pet, ’03 The Ex and I’ in which he revives an old romance – others are much more oblique, sometimes tantalisingly so.

He approaches the story of his mother from several angles, which combine to give a clearer picture than perhaps just one obvious song might do. In ’67 Come Back As A Cockroach’ we get a list of the kind of parental admonishments that were levelled at the one-year-old; by 1974, on ’74 No’ we get a funny/sarky catalogue of all her kooky beliefs (each one explained then followed with a dry “no”. “She says she ain’t no hippy / I guess beatnik’s the word”, he explains elsewhere (’75 My Mama Ain’t’). By his teens we get hints of the absent father, with a scene from 1979 that sees Ma Merritt taking her son backstage at a show in an attempt to show him that “Rock and roll will ruin your life / Like your old no-good-nik dad”.

In the particularly bile-filled ’77 Life Ain’t All Bad’ it sounds like Merritt is singing directly to this absent father (or possibly an unloved step-father?) as he deadpans “I hope I never run into / Another piece of shit like you”, going on to gleefully (or with relief?) sing “Na na-na na, you dead now”. Dark stuff.

From around 1985, of course, both love and sex begin to move up the agenda. In ’85 Why I Am Not A Teenager’ he bemoans the usual teen woes – “When you never get paid and you never get laid / And you’re full of these stupid hormones” but suddenly, abruptly, reminds us of the new peril that gay men began to face at this point: “And just then they come out with AIDS”. Oof. We get snapshots from what sounds like a ‘first love’, described in the odd, disjointed ’87 At The Pyramid’ as dancing “into my dream world / Bleach blond with caterpillar eyes” and a fun, chaotic-sounding menàge-à-quatre in ’93 Me and Fred and Dave and Ted’ – “All in two rooms with one bed”. “Ah, we were young and vaguely in love” he continues, sweetly, perfectly capturing the insouciance and anything-goes days of life and love in your twenties.

It’s tempting to try and forensically track the course of Merritt’s romantic life, in fact, as we get closer to the present day and a preponderance of break-up / get-back-together / heartbreak / fresh love songs come to the fore. Is this one major on-off love, or several different relationship being documented on tracks like ’04 Cold-Blooded Man’, ’05 Never Again’, ’09 Till You Come Back To Me’, ’11 Stupid Tears’ and ’13 Big Enough For Both Of Us’? Ultimately, does it matter? The sentiments come through clearly and relatably and, as Merritt himself rather disingenuously tells us towards the album’s end (on the elegiac ’14 I Wish I Had Pictures’) “I’m just a singer / It’s only a song / The things I remember / Are probably wrong”.

A key moment (from the year that Magnetic Fields started) comes when Merritt describes, on ’89 The 1989 Musical Marching Zoo’ what sounds like his idealised version of a perfect band: “Anonymous figures with animal heads … This is the band that I wanted to be / No names and faces and no history”. He is also very dryly amusing on his earlier, very first forays into music, when he describes his first band on the terrific ’78 Blizzard of ‘78’: “We made The Cramps sound orchestral / That’s an achievement, I guess / As for rehearsal / We made The Shaggs sound like Yes”. The laconic narration goes on to claim that this period of his life, living in a commune and making music with fellow teenage friends “was hell”, but the affectionate nostalgia is audible in the lyrics.

Of course, there is so much else in this densely-packed release to unpick. Merritt opines on different styles of music, with disco, noise rock, the New Romantics, synthesizers and more all getting name-checks. Religion and philosophy also feature (see in particular the quite wonderful ’86 How I Failed Ethics’, chock-full of Merritt’s genius story-telling, all set impeccably in rhyme).

Styles veer from synth bangers to lo-fi noise at will, so despite the length of the album it never even begins to feel ‘samey’ or over-long. Throughout, of course, those masterly rhyming couplets pop up time and time again to floor you with their wit, appropriateness and elegance. Another whole review again could be written simply quoting line after line, but their joys are probably best discovered in context with the music (hint: rhyme fans should, in particular, check out the tracks from 67, 68, 78, 86, 93, 00, 05 and 15).

So do you finish listening to 50 Song Memoir with a better sense of Stephin Merritt: the man? Yes, I think on one level you probably do. You will have learned that he used to hang out at Danceteria in the Eighties, that he has suffered throughout his life from a range of strange ailments, that his mother was an unconventional yet well-educated woman and that, like us all, he seems to have had his fair share of romantic ups and downs in his 50 years of life so far.

But this is an artist that reserves the right to still obfuscate and obscure. Along the way you will also have heard an emotional love song… to a bar (one of the album’s highest points, remarkably) and got confused by precisely who is who, and who might fit in where in the narration. But that’s good, right? Merritt has lifted the curtain JUST enough to draw us that bit more into his world, while still maintaining both his brilliantly singular world-view and style AND enough distance for us to look on in abject admiration.

The Guardian 80

(Nonesuch)

Eighteen years after the epic 69 Love Songs, Stephin Merritt has crafted an autobiography in 50 songs, one for each year of his life. The singer-songwriter rifles through twice that number of instruments as his lugubrious baritone drolly documents pivotal experiences. There is the childhood pain of rejection by a pet (“We had a cat called Dionysus … every day another crisis”), his mother’s ghastly taste in men and his suspicions, in ’92 Weird Diseases, that he may have Asperger’s.

Some songs are drily or blackly funny, others are wickedly vengeful (“When I write my memoirs, you will read them with pain … searching in vain for your name”), dark or deeply moving. As his life unfolds from romantic disaster to pop crisis (“Rock’n’roll will ruin your life and make you sad,” he deadpans) to some sort of equilibrium, the music evolves from a solitary ukulele to richly observed baroque new wave and operatic synthpop, all with terrific tunes. It’s an album worthy of Merritt’s grand half-century.

The Guardian 80

(Nonesuch)

In his years as The Magnetic Fields, US songwriter Stephin Merritt has not shied away from concept. Following sprawling works such as 69 Love Songs, and an album of songs beginning with the letter i, the 52-year-old left-field troubadour has written a life in 50 musical vignettes, whose fun tropes include incorporating seven instruments in seven different combinations. All the possible Merritts are on board, from stentorian intellectual chansonnier to giddy teenage New Waver – one whose amused air rarely falters, even when listing painful physical ailments (Weird Diseases), or being misunderstood (Quotes). Musical quirks do pile up, but the joys here are many, from Merritt’s deadpan views on ethics, discos, Levi’s 501s, tears and his local (Be True To Your Bar), to his magnificent way with a tune, in which complexity lurks within simplicity.

Pitchfork 74

Following his late-1990s triumph 69 Love Songs, Stephin Merritt began cannily organizing his Magnetic Fields songs. There was 2004’s alphabetic i, followed by the genre filters of 2008’s Distortion and 2009’s Realism. In 2012, Merritt took on a slightly defeatist project—“the concept is there is no concept!”—with Love at the Bottom of the Sea, an album whose lack of thematic unity resulted in a disappointingly uneven listen. Now, the Magnetic Fields return with a record that, like 69 Love Songs, forces Merritt to get focused and inspired. 50 Song Memoir is easily the best gimmick Merritt’s stumbled upon since the turn of the century.

Arranged chronologically with a song for each of the first 50 years of Merritt’s life, 50 Song Memoir is a conceptually satisfying work, spanning five discs and two-and-a-half hours without feeling repetitive or samey. If there’s one thing Merritt has learned over his three decades as a songwriter—besides how to seamlessly insert limericks into songs—it’s how to pace himself on record, keeping his quasi-showtunes from becoming cloying, his jokier ones from turning precious, and his ballads from sounding melodramatic.

Of course, for anyone turned off by the idea of Merritt—an escapist pop descendent of Bacharach and Sondheim—getting all Benji on us, you will be relieved to know that the story of his life sounds a lot like a Magnetic Fields album, and a very good one at that. There are some deeply revealing moments here. The opening songs, in particular, pinpoint the origins of Merritt’s career-spanning themes of placelessness and unrequited love—how they began with his parents’ wanderlust and a childhood cat, respectively. But 50 Song Memoir often takes a less literal route through Merritt’s life. “’76 Hustle 76” illustrates its time period by mimicking the then-inescapable sound of disco. Judy Garland’s death gets its own song, as does the rise of synthesizer music in the early ’80s. For a songwriter who once formulated an entire record around the first-person pronoun, 50 Song Memoir is more selfless than its title indicates. Here, Merritt seems more interested in exploring the moments that mark time—where we’ve lived, who we’ve loved and lost—than tracing his own particular narrative.

As a result, 50 Song Memoir is an immersive, incisive listen, despite its avoidance of traditionally memoiristic details (we never, for example, learn the names of Merritt’s parents, whether he has siblings, what it was like trying to follow-up a breakthrough album, etc). The themes that Merritt addresses over multiple songs become the album’s guiding lights. “All the young dudes of 25/Caught diseases, few survived,” he sings in “’90 Dreaming in Tetris,” before explaining, “We expected nuclear war/What should we take precautions for?” The AIDS crisis influences many of these songs, adding an ominous shadow to the darker tracks and a mournful tone to the love songs.

There’s something jarring about Merritt singing so directly about his fears—even his bleakest work used to come bundled with the naivety of a hopeless romantic. It helps that most of the album sits squarely in Merritt’s musical comfort zones. Like Love at the Bottom of the Sea, 50 Song Memoir draws inspiration from the sounds of each of his records, from the psychedelic synth pop of Holiday to the indie-film-trailer twee of i, even making room for genre exercises in dance music (his Future Bible Heroes records) and surf-rock (Distortion).

By the album’s end, though, the songs begin to lack the cultural context that distinguished the earlier ones, and 50 Song Memoir borders on morphing into just Several More Love Songs. But among these sit some of his finest tracks. “I guess there’d be other fish in the sea/But I don’t want fishes and you don’t want me,” he sings in the exquisite “’05 Never Again.” It’s the exact kind of song that would turn to putty in the hands of a lesser writer, but Merritt knows how to wring it for emotional resonance. In fact, its place near the end of the album almost signals—more than the impact of the breakup—his growing mastery as a songwriter. It suggests that our deepest wisdom can be located in our most personal thoughts. “I wish I had something better to do,” he sings, “But even my own clothes remind me of you.”

Just one song later, Merritt gets a little too specific, showing what the album might have been if he took its title more seriously. In “’06 ‘Quotes,’” Merritt dredges up an old controversy that involved several music critics accusing him of racism. The subject matter has him sounding slightly bitter and self-righteous, but even worse, it simply doesn’t make for a good Magnetic Fields song. Merritt’s work has always been less confessional and more “Things Fitting Perfectly Into Other Things”: you listen to his songs and marvel at how effortlessly he packs his thoughts into verse, one rhyme parlaying into the next. The best of 50 Song Memoir plays to his gifts (“From the time I began, I was mostly vegan,” he boasts in an early song), but with an extra layer of urgency, tied to the task of representing an entire year in a tightly structured pop song. “I am the least autobiographical person you are likely to meet,” Merritt admitted with typically humdrum candor in an interview about the album, “I will probably not write any more true songs after this than I did before.” He’s likely already dreaming up his next project—putting the past behind him and moving on, his catalog 50 songs richer as a result.