The Magnetic Fields: Classic or Dud?

i saw this @ outfest in los angeles a few months. really good, the q&a was hilariously awkward and semi-hostile.

awkward and semi-hostile.

like SM himself?

details! SM, CG, Sam and John did Q&A last week here, but I didn't go.

well SM brought some musical instrument he'd just purchased onstage with him and the moderator asked, "are you going to play a little something for us? what do you say, would you guys like to hear stephin play a song??" and everyone applauded and those who didn't kinda slowly slunk down in their chairs as SM gave the mod a death stare and then the questioning moved on.

another one i remember was some guy tried to give stephin merrit gay bar recommendations (because he'd been having trouble finding a good one in l.a.) and another somehow turned a question into a verbal link to a website. neither really went over very well.

btw while the Good Morning Atlanta clip was funny, I didn't find it as mortifying as everyone has always claimed.

http://www.engrish.com//wp-content/uploads/2010/11/do-as-bunnies-do.jpg

anyone seen these videos from '96? Stephen is on top form. "I can't hear your heckling while I'm talking, so if you wish to heckle please wait until I have finished... talking"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63SttwOM-XU

haven't. but I went to a lot of their shows then.

I saw them probably within a week of this performance, and this was my favorite song from the show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkz0UruvXSc

I sure hope at some point he does something like Randy Newman did recently with simple piano-and-voice recordings. He sounds amazing live doing "A Thousand Lovers in a Day," and the Future Bible Heroes version doesn't come too near it.

http://www.metro.co.uk/showbiz/interviews/1019-molly-ringwald

15th anniversary of 69 love songs coming up in a little over a month. posting about it now because i am going to forget.

i've found that the magnetic fields are a tough sell for people around my age. their sensibility is too gen x maybe? or maybe they just aren't cool? whatever it is, i can't get people to the point where they grasp the point of the band, which is to rescue the old cliches about love from their own lameness by refusing to hide from it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W97YAYPFGw

do you think that is still a reasonable description of their project?

No. Idk. Their post-love songs output has never excited me outside of a few songs here and there.

man, "i" is one of my favorite albums ever. ilm seems to hate all the music i love

weird if the kids don't get 69 anymore. back when i was young everyone was at least impressed by the bigness of it.

"I" is great.

ppl who are Definitely Younger Than Me (early to mid 20s) seem to get it. but younger than that, i don't know. slick over twee, competency over complicated sentiment.

i think the stuff after 69ls (well, after 'i') is a deliberate and definite and listener-hostile refutation of their earlier project, but not a well-executed or a consistent or a coherent one, so i can see why, as an ongoing project, they're a hard sell

maybe it was wrong to think so at the time, but the air of deliberate shittiness maybe kind of made up for an ivy-league-grads-play-with-ukeleles feel whose capture by a more central part of the white edumacated music consumer taste-market has kind of made the sound more dubious in the meantime

weird to listen to 'come back from san francisco' now and assume it is addressed to some kind of startup douche

... i don't think it's 'that' san fran.

no, it's not, but shit changes right out from under your nice little song sometimes

Still don't really dig much post Get Lost/Wasps Nest. Like his synth pop formalism better than his broader formalism.

Wasps Nest is one of my favorite albums but I've never really bothered with much else. I have the Wayward/Distant compilation that I bought after the 6ths but it didn't fall for it like Wasps Nest. Never heard 69 Love Songs. Maybe I should try. Would by a 30 7" box set ;)

we just need pomplamoose to cover a mag fields song and the circle will be complete

hahaha nm of course that exists already

lol

On the subject of 'I', whilst I probably prefer '69', 'I' contains my two favourite MF tracks (I Don't Really Love You Anymore, I Thought You Were My Boyfriend).

Weird to think of "69LS" vs "post-69LS" as the division line here where to me it's clearly "pre-69LS" vs "69LS and after."

Yeah, that's what I said. Or synth-pop vs. Claudia singing a bunch and playing piano.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/fashion/a-night-out-with-stephin-merritt-the-singer-for-magnetic-fields.html?ref=music

Unlike so many performers these days, he doesn’t use Twitter or Instagram. His mom beat him to Facebook. “I can’t deal with the amount of work that would involve,” Mr. Merritt, 49, said. “I’m amazed that everyone else is willing to put in a part-time job worth of work in order to manage their social media accounts. I’m too busy playing Scrabble and Words With Friends.”

That habit has inspired a new book, “101 Two-Letter Words,” a collaboration with Roz Chast on a series of short poems and illustrations celebrating some of the shortest and strangest entries in the Scrabble dictionary.

Sample poem: “Ne is born, if you’re a man;/if you’re a woman, nee./It’s just like what a horse says,/but it’s spelt a different way.”

i've found that the magnetic fields are a tough sell for people around my age. their sensibility is too gen x maybe? or maybe they just aren't cool? whatever it is, i can't get people to the point where they grasp the point of the band, which is to rescue the old cliches about love from their own lameness by refusing to hide from it.

Weird. The Magnetic Fields were very popular on my small liberal arts college campus (2008-2012). Mostly 69 Love Songs.

yeah a lot of people (myself included) loved that album but had little or no time for anything else he did before or since. it's like it's so sprawling and total, why would you need anything else by him.

because one of his other songs is this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvSY4NYkySM

slick over twee, competency over complicated sentiment.

wait, thomp, is this describing the magnetic fields or the tastes of young listeners? because the magnetic fields is totally a twee band exploring complicated sentiments.

Poems I would most like to read from Merritt's book (I assume they're in there): "Qi," "Za," "Xu," "Ut" (any word that allows me to dump a "u" deserves its own poem), "Ba," "Bo," and "Bi." Cs and Vs, get your own book.

from that NY Times piece--

Okay:
He also wears nothing but shades of brown because he thinks that black makes him look like a SoHo tourist and that it’s good when his clothes match his brown eyes.

too bad:

hyperacusis in his left ear, which makes him especially sensitive to loud noise.

hyperacusis has been a thing w/ him for years. Didn't know he'd relocated to Hudson, NY tho.

(from LA/NYC)

he used to live a few blocks away from where i'm at (in those weird old apts from 'mulholland drive' iirc.)

sounds ideal

I always wanted to meet him and then impress him by how cool/knowledgeable i am... so unlike those other fans who he unfairly seems to despise

i wd talk w/him about German films back in the day (silents to Fassbinder), but then Dick's Bar closed.

little or no time for anything else he did before or since. it's like it's so sprawling and total, why would you need anything else by him.

weird logic imho

When I saw them live I was uncomfortable with the way he talked to Claudia, who seemed like a kind person

oh that's (mostly) an act, they've polished it over the years

she is a tot sweetheart, truly

my wife is close friends with one of HIS close friends and all four of us had lunch together once. he's a good dude imo, he just likes to be a bit zingy.

that docufilm actually captured the Claud-Stephin dynamic pretty incisively i thought.

yeah it did.... i thought it was kind of sad. don't want to project too much but it seemed like she was in love with him.

imposing that fiction of star-crossed lovers, separated by sexual orientation, onto the story of the magnetic fields seemed fitting though. i read it as a possibly intentional thing