The Magnetic Fields: Classic or Dud?

we made the Shaggs sound like Yes

I don't really know Magnetic Field too much, but saw this pre-MF band Buffalo Rome show from 1988 pop up and it sounds pretty great, especially the song around 5:10 ("Yellow Bird"?) Maybe some of these became Magnetic Field songs?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRdqpW-uE64&t=1943s

gah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRdqpW-uE64

!!!!!!!!! Thanks for sharing!! Wow. Yes - that song you mentioned became "Take Ecstasy with Me" recorded by The Magnetic Fields. There are some Zinnias songs in the set: "Leeches", "Kings" (later recorded by MF), "Otters" (part of "Otters" was used in the MF track "Jeremy"). Apparently they sing/play "Plant White Roses" backwards, according to the YT comment?! "Railroad Boy" and "Josephine" were later recorded by MF, too. Also played is "The Tiny Goat" later recorded by the Gothic Archies (who I am seeing tomorrow in NYC). Also, that's Susan Anway on lead vocals, right?!?! On the far left is Johny Blood, who plays tuba in MF. So I think Stephin was 23 and Claudia was 20 in that video (and she was attending Harvard at the time, I think). And then at the end, the announcer says that Jad Fair is coming up next!

yes thanks! I perked up at the proto-"Take Ecstasy" too

Wow.

https://pitchfork.com/news/the-magnetic-fields-announce-new-album-quickies-share-video-for-new-song-watch/

The Magnetic Fields have announced a new collection called Quickies. It features 28 new short songs by Stephin Merritt that are all under three minutes long. Quickies will be released across five vinyl EPs on May 15 via Nonesuch. It’ll also be available digitally and on a single CD. Watch the new video for “The Day the Politicians Died” below.

The band has also announced a series of intimate residency performances at City Winery venues across the country. Find those dates below.

Stephin Merritt is joined on Quickies by his bandmates Sam Davol, Claudia Gonson, Shirley Simms, and John Woo. Chris Ewen, Daniel Handler, and Pinky Weitzman also appear on the collection. Merritt discussed the album’s concept in a statement:

I’ve been reading a lot of very short fiction, and I enjoyed writing 101 Two-Letter Words, the poetry book about the shortest words you can use in Scrabble. And I’ve been listening to a lot of French baroque harpsichord music. Harpsichord doesn’t lend itself to languor. So I’ve been thinking about one instrument at a time, playing for about a minute or so and then stopping, and I’ve been thinking of narratives that are only a few lines long.

Also, I had been using a lot of small notebooks, so when I reach the bottom of the page, I’ve only gone a short way. Now that I’m working on a different album, I’m enforcing a large notebook rule so that I don’t do Quickies twice in a row.

Merritt’s previous Magnetic Fields album was 2017’s 50 Song Memoir. Listen to Pitchfork’s 2017 In Sight Out podcast with Stephin Merritt.

Quickies:

01 Castles of America
02 The Biggest Tits in History
03 The Day the Politicians Died
04 Castle Down a Dirt Road
05 Bathroom Quickie
06 My Stupid Boyfriend
07 Love Gone Wrong
08 Favorite Bar
09 Kill a Man a Week
10 Kraftwerk in a Blackout
11 When She Plays the Toy Piano
12 Death Pact (Let’s Make A)
13 I’ve Got a Date with Jesus
14 Come, Life, Shaker Life!
15 (I Want to Join A) Biker Gang
16 Rock ‘n’ Roll Guy
17 You’ve Got a Friend in Beelzebub
18 Let’s Get Drunk Again (And Get Divorced)
19 The Best Cup of Coffee in Tennessee
20 When the Brat Upstairs Got a Drum Kit
21 The Price You Pay
22 The Boy in the Corner
23 Song of the Ant
24 I Wish I Had Fangs and a Tail
25 Evil Rhythm
26 She Says Hello
27 The Little Robot Girl
28 I Wish I Were a Prostitute Again

How has Stephin Merritt not released an album titled "High Concept" yet?

That list of song titles would be just as believable in a Sparks thread.

Even at 1:49, the new song feels too long.

Some promising titles in there, but "The Day the Politicians Died" definitely doesn't live up to its.

He probably could have just released a track list and skipped the music part.

Fido, your songs are too short.

Some very provocative titles here, though

Fido, your songs are too short.

worked for Bob Pollard

I want to join a biker gang
I want to be in a gang bang
I like my empty life but dang
I want to join a biker gang

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0eYO2cg9jA

LD Beghtol has passed:

Rest In Peace, LD Beghtol. I’m sorry we never finished our collaboration. pic.twitter.com/6zLbkAi6ZK

— 50PoundNote (Jeb) (@50_pound_note) December 8, 2020

Oh no :(

Is there any other info (or context/confirmation) beyond this single tweet? I can't find anything.

I know Jeb and trust him as the source -- LD was apparently found in his apartment but there's no other details. Apparently he did catch COVID in summer, hopefully this wasn't something related to that.

(That further info from Jeb directly.)

Thanks... how sad

I will forever cherish "All My Little Words." Just too sad.

Ah crap. One of my favorite gigs of all-time was the two-day complete "69 Love Songs". It was such an incredibly joyful experience, Claudia was radiating happiness and fun.

Any of LD's other vocal work recommended?

You could check out Flare if you like 'twee chamber pop' of any description
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPLBPOIP1xI

His 33⅓ on 69 is good.

listened to "all my little words" for the first time in forever when i saw this news. i think there's still no one i would trust more to do a perfect 2 and a half minutes.

really sad about this, it's hard to process. his voice & presence on those songs (thinking of "My Sentimental Melody" too) meant so much, more than I ever consciously realized.

"All My Little Words" is so simple but so perfect. RIP

I've at last fully listened to the CD of QUICKIES (2020).

An observation: every one of the 28 songs is a comedy song. We expect irony and drollery from Merritt. But amid the jokes I might also have expected a 30-second flash of plaintive pathos, or 48 seconds of surprisingly raw emotion set to a toy piano. He doesn't deliver that here. It's all black comedy.

I still rather like the way that he uses old-school syntactical precision, in a way unlike anyone else in pop - so that the words in a pop song have the grammar of, say, an article in a 1950s literary journal (if not something much older like Hazlitt or Hawthorne). Indeed I sense that this is something that's developed over Merritt's career - you really don't hear it so much in the 1990s work; it's really only noticeable more recently.

That's kind of how I described this album to a friend a few weeks ago. Every song is a little joke, but none of them are particularly funny. And maaaaybe you get a little of that old Merritt pathos in "She Says Hello," but that's the only thing close to a keeper here for me.

Every song is a little joke, but none of them are particularly funny.

I feel like his stuff always had this quality tbh

I mean I think he's brilliant but there's always been this sense that they think their jokes are a lot funnier than they actually are, that's not a recent development.

I think it's a gradual mutation that's gotten them to this point, where the songs are all joke, no ache. They were most of the way there with Love at the Bottom of the Sea, and then Bob Hurwitz from Nonesuch pitched Merritt the 50 Song Memoir concept, which helped stall the transformation (I always imagine this was Hurwitz's intention), but now here we are with Quickies.

"It's Only Time" came up on my Spotify a recently, and I played it over and over. It feels, like almost every MF song does, like a genre exercise, ironic and detached, but damn if it doesn't succeed magnificently as a straight ahead love song

I totally get that, it's such a beautiful song

I didn't know that 50 SONG MEMOIR was someone else's idea. I don't agree that it 'stalled Merritt's transformation' by being more sincere (if that's what's suggested). I'm afraid I think it's practically his worst LP, especially taken pound for pound, proportionately, or whatever - I mean it's about 20% good.

I think TMF *stage banter* has always been much less funny than they think - and people laugh along with it and think it's delightful that they're saying these actually quite dull things. That's been the case for decades. But I don't think that's true of the songs.

LOVE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, yes, it's true that that had unfunny jokes - 'I'd go anywhere with Hugh', 'I'm going back to the country' - that don't compare with anything on 69LS. (Though the LP is still not all bad.)

Again I think the odd thing is just that Merritt hasn't kept a bit of the 'ache' element along with the comedy - as we all know how well he can do it. I should play 'She Says Hello' again.

Not suggesting 50SM is more sincere, necessarily, just that it's not primarily comedy songs. I thought it was probably his worst LP after the first time I listened to it, but it's really grown on me since then. It's almost hard to think of it as a Magnetic Fields album, though -- I like it as a musical about a weird music geek written by a weird music geek and performed in the style of the Magnetic Fields. Another way you could look at it is that even if it's only 20% good, that's still 10 good songs, which isn't bad for a latter-day Merritt record. :)

And yeah, Love at the Bottom of the Sea wasn't all bad! Also helped that it sounded really good to my ears, especially coming off of the "no synths" trilogy.

Another way you could look at it is that even if it's only 20% good, that's still 10 good songs, which isn't bad for a latter-day Merritt record. :)

That's a good statement.

And it's notable that so many of us (?) seem to have the same feeling of a decline in quality.

Having said this: does it even contain 10 good songs? That would be a list worth making.

Some of the titles are not even summoning tunes for me now. And this after playing it a lot in the past.

These songs, I think are at least OK:

Rock'n'Roll Will Ruin Your Life
Foxx and I
How I Failed Ethics
Ethan Frome
Dreaming in Tetris
Lovers' Lies
Fathers in the Clouds
Ghosts of the Marathon Dancers
Have You Seen It in the Snow?
The Ex and I
Never Again
Quotes
You Can Never Go Back to New York
I Wish I Had Pictures

That's 14! And there might even be one or two more ... but still I don't think I'm setting a very high bar here.

Many of those would make my list of favorites (with Foxx and I at the very top). I'd have to include Hustle 76 (I was in Magnetic Fields cover band when 50SM came out and this is the only song from the album we worked on for possible inclusion in our set, but ultimately we dropped it), Life Ain't All Bad, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea too. I hear that last one as a bit of tribute to Scott Miller, who'd recently passed -- Merritt's said he tried to write a lot of fake Scott Miller songs in his pre-Magnetic Fields days, and it seems like he took the San Francisco setting of this song as a cue to give that another shot.

I always thought Sweet-Lovin' Man was a Donnette-Thayer-sings-Scott-Miller pastiche.

Magnetic Fields cover band!

I'd go and see that!

My iTunes today randomly played 'they're killing children over there'. I thought: this is actually good, in various ways, and the melody stayed with me for hours.

I think I'm going to delve back properly into this LP, maybe playing it all at random for days. I'll try to form a better view on the songs that CAPTCHAS mentions, which I don't now remember at all.

Cool! Yeah, I think driving around listening to it on random like I used to do with 69LS helped me appreciate it more.

I always thought Sweet-Lovin' Man was a Donnette-Thayer-sings-Scott-Miller pastiche.

That hadn't occurred to me but now that you mention it I can definitely hear a connection between it and "Wyoming."

I have always been able to appreciate 69LS consecutively, on CD. I don't even really associate it with random play.

Whereas - 50SM seems basically lower quality or less enjoyable overall, and maybe would benefit from elements of random surprise.

Today I just played the first few songs. I was surprised how good the opener 'wonder where I'm from' is. 'Killing children' as noted, has something, and btw the intro strikes me as a joke on 'Seven Nation Army'. The highlight I think must be 'Judy Garland' - the closest thing to a major song here? With the great line 'Let's try: None of the above'.

Then again ...

"'67 Come Back as a Cockroach", "'68 A Cat Called Dionysus" and worst of all, "'72 Eye Contact" - it's hard to justify even playing these tracks.

Reports that Susan Amway has passed away - heartbreaking.

Shocked and saddened to hear of the passing of Susan Anway, vocalist with the Magnetic Fields, among others. My heart always breaks hearing this song; now for new reasons.https://t.co/YHIWPd2Xh8

— Daniel Handler (@DanielHandler) September 8, 2021

Oh man, the version of “Take Ecstasy with Me” with her on vocals blew me away as a teenager, might still be my favorite track they ever did. That’s so sad.