The Magnetic Fields: Classic or Dud?

I tried directly to raise the "what next?" issue here, I think 21 years ago:

Little Man, What Now?

That's all fair, pinefox. I realise that my reaction was in part a reaction to the total shift away from the sonic bath of the earlier albums that I'd become so intoxicated by. It is clear that his ambitions were very different for 69LS, and that something more literary and self-consciously 'eclectic' was being undertaken. To my ears, it is a very interesting failure interspersed with moments of success, but I think one's response to it probably depends on how much you regard its ambitions as being met by the music.

(and how much you are able to disregard an album as a single unified listening experience rather than a document that can be edited by the listener)

As for Holiday, well, I guess the manic bubblegum synthestra vibe is something of an acquired taste, which I happen to already have in great quantities, lol

The idea that 69LS is a failure - feels to me like saying that pop music is a failure.

HOLIDAY: it's not really about the sound, I just don't think most of the songs are as good.

As for "literary": offhand I'd say that the first LP is the most literary.

One example:

You're in your own little world: an expensive birdcage;
Like a plastic baby in a Faberge egg
I saw you today at the Cafe Blase
And thought of the nights when we had fire fights
Nameless seaside ghost town...
That's where I go when I see the moon
Living in an abandoned firehouse with you
You're in your own little head in a field of sunflowers
And there's blood in your mouth and there's rats all over town
(C): Take me out to the beach and I'll tell you my secret name
Take me under the sea and we'll derail the trains
Let's run away into the caves I still love you I still love you baby
You're in your own little box with ribbons in your hair
And there's dust in your mouth and worms in the air
Hideous city of unknown words...
That's where I live when I go to sleep
In an abandoned firehouse with you.

All day snow covered us
Night-time: it was always night
The people on the street were made of meat
Black girl, trucks ran us down
Blue boy...
The people on the sidewalk were traced in chalk
Whale embryos filled your enormous room
Screech-owl kachinas built your spiritual room
We were kings, kings!
We were kings, kings!

That seems to me vastly more literary than anything on 69 Love Songs.

Pop music is not generally consumed over the course of three hours ;)

Holiday and Wasp's Nest are my two favorite Merritt albums. I like 69LS but I don't really enjoy the non-songs like "Punk Rock Love", even in concept and that makes it drag a bit. Disk 2 stands up with his all time works though, despite it all.

Holiday's sound MAKES the songs good imo; if they were performed on an acoustic guitar with no adornment they'd lose a lot, sure, but the whole point for me is how the mesh of sound evokes something far beyond the basic chords

Oh another Disc 2 supremacist! High five lol

Pop music is not generally consumed over the course of three hours ;)

I don't understand this comment.

Well, I am calling 69LS a (very interesting and frequently successful) failure as an album experience. I don't think it impugns pop music to learn that three hours of it by one artist - even one who is clearly blessed with genius - is a fluctuating and not entirely satisfying experience. I don't think ANYONE could have pulled off 69LS, to be clear. Not even Big Thief!

"not entirely satisfying" doesn't sound like "failure", to me.

Talking to someone else today, coincidentally, who likes 69LS about as much as I do, I typed:

CD1 > CD2 >>>>>>> CD3.

The first 2 discs are both staggeringly great, but I think that CD1 wins through feeling even more like a "greatest hits" or "the new standards of our generation" -- a disc in which you can have, let's say: I don't believe in the sun, all my little words, a chicken with its head cut off, the luckiest guy, come back from SF, etc etc, all blazing at you one after another within the first 10 songs -- remains to my mind an achievement that I have not heard surpassed since.

The effect of that is not so different from (or at least one can make the analogy with), let's say: a little help from my friends, fixing a hole, lucy in the sky with diamonds, she's leaving home, all on one side of vinyl.

CD2 I would see more in terms of being continually surprisingly good ie: you can't believe how one great song follows another but almost of them have been underrated and, by most people, almost forgotten, until they come on. A bit less hit-parade and more LP-track in flavour.

I mean, I think of Scott Miller at his most extravagant and eclectic, and he never got an album beyond 74 minutes. 69LS is more than twice that length! Lolita Nation, Plants & Birds & Rocks & Things and Interbabe Concern shunted together would compare maybe, but it'd also probably detract from the impact (and distinct energy) of each to try and view them all as a single undertaking (although the quality of the music would at least be consistently high - because they were originally conceived of individually)

Much of 69LS Disc 1 feels sonically slight to me, and I think this is once again a matter of personal preference.

I've never heard of any of those things or titles.

I admit that I am deeply out of touch (ie: ignorant), hence for me to say "nothing has been better than 69LS since 1999" would be factually rather meaningless (though if I did now hear another 500 LPs from that period it probably wouldn't change my mind, indeed would actually leave me thinking that statement was true).

Scott Miller is a direct contemporary of Merritt's. He stands as a comparably brilliant highly literary and idiosyncratic (though rooted in classicism) American songwriter. I strongly recommend those albums (by Game Theory and The Loud Family, his vehicles)

I say 'is'; tragically, I mean 'was'.

And I'll add that 69LS was Miller's favourite album by TMF, and he didn't put any of their other albums on his year-end lists, so he's with you rather than me here

(it was indeed his favourite album of 1999)

I'd have to reread poster Imago's posts more closely to be sure of this, but it looks to me that, among other things (eg: 'sonic slightness', which might be a more credible and / or novel complaint to my mind), they are rehearsing a view that was debated long ago, maybe on this thread, maybe elsewhere (even Facebook?), by several of us, which is basically:

"60 love songs is too long - if it were cut down by about 75% then it would have a higher ratio of great songs and I'd like it more".

This seems in one way rational. But I don't agree with it because, as various people (including me, but certainly also including one-time poster Stevie T) tried to say in the past: There is a different effect from creating a larger work in which the smaller parts interrelate -- and thus get "added value" from their participation in the whole.

The concept of a "concept" is relevant here though I don't think the particular concept (Love) is so important.

If we take the view "if it were cut down by about 75% then it would have a higher ratio of great songs and I'd like it more" literally then we might logically cut it down to one song - the one we like best - and it will have a 100% success rate and finally be judged a ... "success".

We could also take another large work of interconnected parts like ULYSSES and say: at 700pp this is too long, it would be better at 350pp, or 70pp, with just the best sentences, or just the essence of the story.

Some people like Roddy Doyle have even virtually said this!

But this would not be a good approach to ULYSSES, and most people who like the book would say that the different parts of the book support each other, provide contrast, build up intricate cross-reference, etc, and you need all of them in order to make all of them work.

Though the medium is different I think my view of this particular 69LS question would be roughly the same.

As I say, this has all been rehearsed in the past, probably rather better than in this post.

>>> "60 love songs is too long"

Unusually bad typo which undermines the meaning of the whole sentence or post

I do wonder what the optimal arbitrary number of love songs is. I suppose it depends upon your ambitions. About 40 would have probably been an easier sell, albeit less of a unique undertaking. Susanne Sundfor only needed ten! (And that should have been eight, really; sorry to everyone who likes Trust Me or Insects but imagine that album ending on Slowly, c'mon)

A sad statement: Anyone who thinks "TMF went downhill with 69LS" ... really needs to hear ... 50 SONG MEMOIR.

It has long been my impression that while 69LS is feted by casual and johnny-come-lately listeners like myself, hardcore fans usually think it pales in comparison with earlier work.

Merritt addresses the “why 69?” question in the liner note interview, which I feel is somewhat essential to the experience of the album (although I’m sure it can be enjoyed without it)

xp again, I’m curious who these hardcore fans are, as the hardcore fans I’ve known are not like this! Is a it maybe a geographical or “timeframe” thing?

I have read that interview more times than I have read most things, and nonetheless I cannot remember what Merritt says about the number.

I share poster Morrisp's feelings here. What I wondered about Alba's post was really whether Alba is 'casual' as he says. I always thought he was more of a 'fan'. This seems relevant to Alba's statement.

If the statement is "people who have listened heavily to TMF since 1989 prefer the first two LPs to 69LS", then I'm not that surprised. But that feels "self-selecting" or a loading of the dice. Like saying "People who were massively into music in the mid-60s often still think mid-60s pop is the best".

If the statement is something like "people who love TMF, know all the records and have listened to and thought about all of them a lot [whether they've been listening since 1989 or 2019] think 69LS pales in comparison with earlier work" -- then I think this would be false.

I think a large proportion of that latter category of people probably like 69LS most, and in any case most of them will think 69LS is better than every TMF LP after it (which is c. 22 years' worth!).

I haven't heard the earlier Magnetic Fields records, but part of the reason 69 Love Songs is able to work is because of the relative thinness/conceptual nature of many of the songs. If every song was dense, it wouldn't be parsable.
I'll never listen to every song again, but it is important that they exist; not just my favourite 29 Love Songs.

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

― Halfway there but for you, Wednesday, August 18, 2021 2:36 PM (six months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Among other connections, the Loud Family opened for Magnetic Fields in 2000. In the Scott Miller biography, Claudia Gonson describes an uncomfortable dinner where he delivered a monologue, a self-lacerating "review" of his work.

v much need to read that

part of the reason 69 Love Songs is able to work is because of the relative thinness/conceptual nature of many of the songs. If every song was dense, it wouldn't be parsable.
I'll never listen to every song again, but it is important that they exist

this seems eminently fair

again, I’m curious who these hardcore fans are, as the hardcore fans I’ve known are not like this! Is a it maybe a geographical or “timeframe” thing?

I think the main thing is just that it's a small sample I'm talking about - the odd person whose "Puh, Get Lost is a much better album than 69 Love Songs" has lodged firmly in my head. It's not like I'm surrounded by Magnetic Fields fans in my life. Maybe some of it was on here. But in my head they became representative of proper fans, ie people who got into them before I did in 1999 or 2000.

Alba -- again, I feel that that is rather "self-selecting" somehow -- ie: someone who has been a fan of a thing for a long time is always quite likely to say "it was better earlier". It would probably be hard, *in general*, to find people who did the opposite.

But do TMF fans that we know actually say that? I suppose some do or did, some don't. Steady Mike, for instance, I don't see saying what you've described.

I think that what was said c. 2000 is a bit of a red herring re: NOW, anyway. 69LS is now much much closer in time to "early Merritt" (c. 3 years to GET LOST!) than it is to us now (23 years!). I think it would be a bit odd for someone NOW to say "I only like the EARLY work of 1993, not the later work when he sold out and jumped the shark, in ... in ... 1999".

This thread revival made me think something earlier, which I will try to summarise briskly as:

Do early Magnetic Fields records (even going up to 69LS) sound good?

It can be readily agreed that the first 2-3 LPs are "cheap and tinny", consciously so, making a virtue of this, a "lo-fi bubblegum aesthetic" or something. (Or can it? Maybe this is all wrong.)

Do those LPs, if you play them on a reasonably good hifi, sound cheap and tinny and therefore *bad* in any way? Or does that sound sound *good*? Or do they not even sound cheap at all?

Also, poster Imago said that 69LS was sonically thin. I find this a bit interesting as I feel: maybe there is something to it. Maybe the production even here was a bit home-made and minimal. Does the production of 69LS hold up now?

I genuinely don't know. I always used to think that these records sounded GOOD, but I was naive, and when I first heard them I was playing on very average (at best) equipment.

By contrast -- I DON'T think that the LPs i, or REALISM sound cheap. My sense is that on those records Merritt recorded as lush-ly as he wished to (perhaps on REALISM more than ever, even if the songs aren't the best?).

Then on eg: LOVE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA we're back with "all synths" but again I would guess that any "cheapness" is deliberate - as the peculiar kinds of distortion on DISTORTION are, or the "cigar-box uke" and "wine-box cello" on QUICKIES.

But again, tbh, QUICKIES doesn't sound thin to me.

So I don't think any of this is an issue AFTER say 2000. Indeed I wonder a bit if HYACINTHS & THISTLES is a hinge work.

As I recall, the piano on 'he didn't' on HYACINTHS & THISTLES is played by someone quite expert, and the whole thing sounds rich and full, and I wonder if that track alone could be identified as a new spirit for Merritt -- 'I'm going to use this money I've just been paid to make things sound richer, rather than just capitalise on their cheapness'.

Indeed isn't the transition from WASPS' NESTS to HYACINTHS & THISTLES the single simplest demonstration of change in "production values" for Merritt?

As I recall there are things like 'heaven in a black leather jacket' on the first that sound cheap, vs things like 'night falls like a grand piano' on the latter.

But maybe I'm getting mixed up and W'sN actually sounds fine and it's just the singers who were cheap (several of them incredibly obscure for a 'guest stars' LP), as against Odetta, Gary Numan, Clare Grogan et al.

a digression:

What Is The Worst Line Stephin Merritt Has Written?

I really don't see this as a question of the records sounding "good", in an audiophile sense.

'Holidays' shows a much greater investment in texture than 69 LS, an interest in developing a unique and immersive soundworld on record whereas 69 LS is presented more as an audio 'songbook'.

Holidays might be a "budget" immersive soundworld. Does it really matter? Hm, maybe. It refers a lot to "real" instruments and the synthesized instrumentation doesn't always transcend the feeling of a kind of shorthand, in that sense. But when it does, oh boy... I wouldn't say either record is fully realized, or that seems to me to be missing the point. Part of what Holidays is, is a demonstration of what a DIY record can be, how it doesn't just sound like everything else.

fwiw, 'The Charm of the Highway Strip' was the soundtrack of my best friend's car in high school, at the time there was a lot of hype around 69 LS and I just assumed that's what it was. Later that same year, i got the CD of Holidays ahead of a family vacation because the store didn't have 69 LS. When I finally borrowed 69 LS from the library in like 2007 I was really surprised that it wasn't 'Highway'. idk which album is my favorite.

the charm of the highway strip might currently be my fave. at one point i was a get loster, and holiday used to be my fave too. of 69 love songs was my favorite at a few points. they have several really great albums.

^yes

as far as timeline goes, 69 love songs was my introduction to them, via a couple songs on a mixtape (luckiest guy on the lower east side and how fucking romantic). i didn't get to their earlier work until a few years later and i think they're consistently good and each one has at least a couple all-timers on it. and they're a bit easier to digest in a single CD instead of 3.

but shoot, i'm just going through 69LS now (continuing my day long magnetic fields fest) and it's so good as well. maybe some day i'll go in the direction, back in the forward direction of time, toward today, and give their later albums a shot. i bought i [2004] when it came out and enjoyed it for a while, but i kind of lost the plot with distortion and realism

I really don't see this as a question of the records sounding "good", in an audiophile sense.

'Holiday' shows a much greater investment in texture than 69 LS, an interest in developing a unique and immersive soundworld on record whereas 69 LS is presented more as an audio 'songbook'.

Holiday might be a "budget" immersive soundworld. Does it really matter? Part of what Holiday is, is a demonstration of what a DIY record can be, how it doesn't just sound like everything else.

― The 25 Best Songs Ever Ranked In Order (Deflatormouse), Monday, 21 February 2022 22:26 (forty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

good post that explains my great liking for Holiday - it isn't 'well recorded' or expensive-sounding (69LS feels MUCH more expensive) but it is a bedroom synth-layering masterpiece

if anything, The Charm... has an even more astonishing sound-world, with a sort of bizarro alt-country thrown in amongst the twinkling, meshing anti-pop

both albums (and the first two) are not 'well recorded' but the sonic detail is RICH and the textures are weird (and, I find, delightful)

As I recall there are things like 'heaven in a black leather jacket' on the first that sound cheap

Fwiw, "Heaven" was released as a single well before the album. Like, two years before? So maybe that accounts for the lower-fi sound, though imo I like that particular sound.

All day snow covered us
Night-time: it was always night
The people on the street were made of meat
Black girl, trucks ran us down
Blue boy...
The people on the sidewalk were traced in chalk
Whale embryos filled your enormous room
Screech-owl kachinas built your spiritual room
We were kings, kings!
We were kings, kings!

That seems to me vastly more literary than anything on 69 Love Songs.

Also one of the greatest things they ever wrote. It probably couldn't have worked for long, they couldn't have made five albums of songs like that, but Distant Plastic Trees is such an incredible portrait of a MOMENT where it made sense for them to do this.

Honestly, I'm a much bigger fan of Magnetic Fields live than the albums, entirely related to the way they're recorded. There are some KCRW sessions that are the ones I return to most.

Even a phone-mic version like this works more for me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkz0UruvXSc

"The Magnetic Fields lose something on record but as a live band they kill" is inner-circle Slatepitch, kudos

"Holiday", singular. Got it. Thanks for correcting.