11 of 69: Cause I always say I love you / When I mean turn out the light

"I think I Need a New Heart"

Human beings rarely say what they mean. That in itself is sort of a meaningless statement--through the 'duh' factor of how obvious it is. Of course we don't say what we mean. Language is too sloppy and evasive and full of multiple meanings. Even the most careful and taciturn among us slip up sometimes. What I find interesting though is when people purposefully say the wrong thing for the right reasons or vice versa.

If a person is psychologically exhausted from a long day of work, has possibly fought a bit with their significant other during the day (but things are good now) and is just tired of further conversation and they say "I love you" they may very well mean "Please turn out the light (I want to go to sleep)." But that "I love you" still functions the way the person intends it--most of the time. If the other person is kind, or intuitive enough, they'll respond with a "I love you too," and *click* off goes the lights. Simply asking the person to "Turn off the light" would be the honest route, but also the one most fraught with peril. If the significant other is still fuming, that's the last thing they want to hear. If they are in the middle of a story or anecdote about their day that they feel is very important, and you blurt out "Turn out the light," you sure as hell better believe that the light is staying on.

And that's just the domestic reading of that couplet. I think the actual lyric refers more plainly to 'If I tell you that I love you then we'll end up having sex.' But is this more or less duplicitous? It's certainly selfish and unfair, but does the other person really not know what they are getting?

I think its wonderful that the narrator can only speak the truth in song. It's pretty much the thesis statement of 69LS. Forget everything the singer is actually telling their lover, their real message is in the song "I Think I Need a New Heart" which just so happens to be this song. If 69LS is an album of love songs about love songs, then this is its heart. Odd (or maybe perfectly apropos?) that this heart needs replacing.

Grade: "Adoration" (5 of 6)

10 of 69: The Cactus Where Your heart Should be / Has Lovely Little Flowers

"The Cactus Where Your Heart Should Be"

Alright, time to man up and get back on this project. My competitor is gearing up to lap me. Although to be fair, my discussions of the 69LS have like, paragraphs and stuff, whereas hers are twitter-esque in their succintity. Anyhow, on to my tenth entry in what increasingly appears to be a Summer long quest to pick apart the Mag Fields magnum opus.

"Cactus" coming right on the heals of "Bunnies" packs a helluva a one-two punch. The playful randiness of the previous song (where our protagonists are content to roll around in the hay all day--let's disregard the 'furries' undertone) is supplanted by a downright cranky guy who is refreshingly equal parts wistful. This is just another example of how strategic the 69 songs are arranged. And disparate pairings like this have the effect of augmenting each partner's salient features. you know, like a collage. or a really nice BLT.

At first blush, a cactus doesn't seem like a particularly attractive vehicle in a metaphor for love. Rather simplistic, no? It's spiky and forbidding. If your heart was a cactus, well, you wouldn't be attracting to many mates. But this short song is overflowing with unexpected connotations. Leave it to Merritt to remind us that just like any other forbidding plants, cacti produce incredibly beautiful flowers. And thus the singer can be both 'stuck' on their love object's spines and completely enamored of her "lovely little flowers."

And when the cactus becomes less a person and more a person's heart all kinds of nice lines of thought can be drawn. A cactus is one tough customer, built to thrive in a harsh environment. It can go long periods of time without nourishment. It defends itself with princkly spines but can also be quite grand and statuesque. "Cactus" the song doesn't cite these possible meanings, but they are there, and suddenly a heart as a cactus isn't all that far-fetched. It's actually pretty damn wonderful.

A surprisingly powerful little song. Grade: "Adoration" (4 out of 6)

9 of 69: Let Abbots, Babbitts and Cabots / Say Mother Nature is Wrong

"Let's Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits"


Not to put too fine a point on things but this song is about fucking.

After a few days of combing through the lyrics of 69LS I decided to cut short what may be a fool's errand to document any all usage of or allusions to sex. If my basic knowledge of Freud proves in any way accurate, if you look hard enough, you'll find sex everywhere. So hopefully the list that follows chronicles only the most overt references. Anyhow, and away we go:

"Putting folks on the moon"
"Have an affair"
"Stars exploding in the night"
"Bang"
"Making you feel like a woman"
"A tryst"
"I've had him before"
"Two fireflies Fluoresce"
"The same song a million times in different ways"
"Do it"
"The things we did and didn't do"
"The way you say goodnight"
"See(ing) God"
"One night stand"
"Things we're all too young to know"
Any time "Dancing" is mentioned.
"Make love"
"Spinning like a gyroscope"
"Feeding your bear"
"Sex"
"The night you can't remember, the night I can't forget"
"Make things dark"
"I miss doing the wild thing with you"
"Cried out"
"Electric eels under the covers"
"You flew"
"Until you've had sweet lovin' there's no lovin' worth the name"
"I made you mine"
"You'll be the Pope"
"A twirl"
and....


drumroll please...


"Let's pretend we're bunny rabbits/
Let's do it all day long"

8 of 69: I Only keep this Heap for You

"Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side"

Saving Graces.

You've just spend an entire weekend enjoying the gorgeous late Spring weather and then Monday rolls around and demands you return to work. Inside. In a basement. The saving grace? The second you step in the old stone structure the sky opens up and it's raining dogs and cats. So what happens if the girl you like just so happens to be a big hit with the menfolk, could theoretically be with anyone up to and including professor Blumen (who alledgedly makes her feel like a woman) and you aren't exactly doing so well in the looks department? Relax. Everything is okay. After all you're the luckiest guy on the lower east side. You've got wheels and she wants to go for a ride.

"Luckiest Guy", for me, is the first game changer on 69LS. If the album were boiled down to a dozen or so essential songs, this would be on the ballot for sure. It's beautifully simple if not offering the deeper registers of meaning like some of the others that came before it. It's merely the tale of a dude with a busted mug, the girl he loves and the rusted heap he hangs on to just for her.

It strikes me these kids are young and poor. Maybe its just in his head, but I doubt that any of the many guys buzzing around the object of the singer's affections are actually astronomers or buying her expensive gowns. Andy, bicycling across town in the rain just to bring her candy seems much more likely. And even if that guy pedaling through puddles is a regular Don Juan, you're the only one (for the moment) who can make the wind blow through her hair and laugh like a little girl. Yeah, maybe there's no chance for anything more, but sometimes the laughter of the pretty girl in the bucket seat next to yours is enough.

grade: "Infatuation" (5 out of 6)

7 of 69: Damn you/ I've never stayed up as late as this

"Come Back From San Francisco"

Ah, the long distance relationship. Or rather, the long distance non-relationship, since much of what I can tease from these lyrics suggests a one-way street of rueful longing. It just so happens that street runs the breadth of our entire country, from New York to San Francisco. Not a small piece of real estate, that. In either case it doesn't seem like anyone is coming back to anybody else anytime soon.

Shirley Simms sings the lyrics on the album and this generates some interesting gender confusion ("Should pretty boys in discos/ distract you from your novel" implies that either a) the singer's far away man is bisexual or b) if the person in San Francisco is a girl then the singer herself is gay or at least bisexual) since the words are carefully arranged not to give away any gender pronouns for the love object. It's always just you, you, you. I've heard that Merritt will perform the vocals in concert if Simms is not around. This smoothes out some wrinkles, if anything makes the story 'simpler' so to speak seeing as Merritt, a gay man would most likely be pining over another man.

The second most notable theme of the song is an unattractive and overwhelming inferiority complex. The singer is constantly showing how insecure and just not good enough she is. There's some wordplay here. She's not just "in love with them" she is "awful in love them." Key difference. She talks of worrying, quitting all her bad habits, being inevitably betrayed, to sum up, "Will you stay/ I don't think so." And that only if her lover comes back to her in the first place. Even the (mightily) strained metaphors imply a submissive relationship. Her object is powerfully vast like the Moon (which will carry on being a heavenly body with or without her assuming the role of its dutiful poetry) or a force of nature like the Wind (which will go on blowing through anything and everything regardless if the singer is its trees). The object of affection needs her only in so much that she enhances its already very obvious attractive qualities.

Even the soft strumming of the guitars give away the singer's true feelings. "You need me," she says, but I'm not sure even she believes that. Perhaps something with more percussion, or a more confident electronic rythym would be more convincing, more likely to change my mind. But does that mean 69LS doesn't need "Come Back from San Francisco"? Nothing of the sort. This sort of love, while perhaps unattractive, has its place. I for one, am just happy its way the hell over in New York.

grade: a "fondness" (1 out of 6)

6 of 69: I guess I should take Prozac, right/ and just smile all night/ at somebody new?

"I Don't Want to Get Over You"

Read just about any critical assessment of 69LS and you'll be bombarded with praise. This was a very favorably reviewed project, and almost every article I've read boils down to the same key topics. Granted, music journalism has become even more 'catching' with the advent of blogging and the rise of the internet as the key source of information about new music. By now it feels like most writers on the web are spewing the exact same regurgitated catchphrases (as opposed to, say, physical "zines" whose material, while more original, can and often does feel dated in the mere time it takes to get the damn thing to the printer and back). However it is surprising how much reviewers aped from each other even in 1999. Either that, or everyone just noticed the same things:

1. The scope. The album's massive length has been discussed as both a positive (a sweeping magnum opus) and a negative (can one actually sit down and listen to the whole damn shebang in one go?) And as some have joked, like, totally 69, dude!

2. Fascination with Merritt's voice. This comes largely from folks who, like me, were first introduced to the Magnetic Fields through 69LS. At the end of this project I will have to gather all of my Merritt Voice descriptions and have a simile "battle to the death". Everybody, it's a Metaphor-off! (Listen to your friend Billy Zane...)

3. And the eclecticism. Perhaps the most signature aspect of the album is just how many different styles of music are embraced, parodied, messed with, sincerely reinterpreted, savaged, honored, and buried. Which makes it all the more frustrating when casual listeners say the darndest reductive things.

A few weeks ago I was listening to V1 in a back room at work and a passerby heard a snippet of "I Don't Believe in the Sun" and groaned. He then cracked his typical litany of jokes that the situation appeared to cry out for:

"Awww, cheer up, emo kid!"
"Put on some sad bastard music, see if I care!"
"Rob, that's the worst fucking sweater I've ever seen, that's a Cosby Sweater, a Caaaawwwwwzzzzby sweatuh!"

This wouldn't have been so irritating if not a week earlier, just days before this project sprang forth from my forehead fully grown, the prime antagonist dismissed this music in an equally casual manner as being 'emo.'

This is frustrating for a variety of reasons, least of all the aforementioned remarkable variety found on 69LS. But even still, if you take the Magnetic Fields body of work into account, whatever it is that 'emo' describes would hardly be accurate in the first place. Merritt's fallback style appears to be variations on 80's electro-pop. Snappy synths and playful guitars. Generally upbeat and fun. So is 69LS so different? Or do people just love dismissing stuff as 'emo'?

"I Don't Want to Get Over You," is certainly not the best place to begin my rebuttal. It is mopey and despondent, but gets interesting as it describes how easy it is for a person to slip into this mindset, the "happy being dumped" philosophy. This comes after the real pain of separation, the not being able to eat or sleep part, the raw depression where something you had is missing and the mind and body have yet to build up psychic and physical defenses. There is a romantic, poetic aspect to being so broke up over love, a misguided egocentric place where you are so sure that most people just don't have the ability to love like I do man, but good friends will only tolerate you acting like an idiot for so long. But some people don't respond to their friends hints, and this drudgery becomes a lifestyle choice. There's a slippery slope down to maudlinville, full of "clove cigarettes and vermouth" where people "dress in black and read Camus." Merritt, to his credit, appears to be making fun of this kind of behavior, dismissing it as only fit for 17 year-olds.

But its slightly more complicated than all that. Because there is no quick fix. You can't go from being in love to miserable to all better in 24 hours. There is a time where sleeping pills to get through the night might actually be a wise choice, and where a night out with friends sounds just nightmarish, and Prozac might be the only way to be able to "smile all night" and not bring everyobody else down. Which is the genius of even a mediocre song on this album. That it can take itself seriously and not so seriously all at once.

Or, you know, it's just a bunch of emo whining.

Grade: "Puppy Love"

5 of 69: Have I annoyed you or is there a boy who well he's just a whore

"Reno Dakota"

I suppose this short, playful (I wouldn't exactly call it disposable) song is a chance to explain how I came upon the 69LS in general.

As the last entry suggests, I'm a sucker for lists. And I simply LOVE year's end 'best of' lists. Back in 1999 I was a junior at Syracuse University. There is (I hope this shouldn't be modified to 'was') a great record store downtown called, perhaps somewhat unfortunately, Soundgarden. It was the record store that sold me my first Les Savy Fav EP, my first White Stripes album, my first Le Tigre, Fugazi and inevitably, Magnetic Fields CD. The kind of record store that has a scruffy mongrel dog that kicks around your feet as your fingers clickety clack through the bins of used CD jewel cases. The kind of record store that gives birth to hipsters such as myself en masse.

As 1999 dovetailed into 2000, I flipped through SPIN magazine's year end best albums article. This was right around the time SPIN was very tough on music, had become the slightly pale and freckled Rolling Stone of its time (while Rolling Stone no longer had any sort of critical acumen toward music, e.g. putting the backstreet Boys on the cover and celebrated Kid Rock as a musical savant). A few years later someone must have realized that this wasn't a very good business model, and SPIN caught up with Rolling Stone once more, only the crappy contemporary era version of RS, (you know, sans the meaty political journalism) that it has never been able to shake. Of course I'm being way too hard on SPIN (why oh why did you play fast and loose with my heart?), but only because I've since fallen for magazines like Magnet and (RIP) Punk Planet.

SPIN's 1999 best album list had some serious chops, with names like the Flaming Lips (at their peak IMO, with Soft Bulletin), Beck (with his insanely catchy party album Midnight Vultures), Mary J Blige, Rage Against the Machine, Wilco, Built to Spill, Ol' Dirty Bastard and at number 4, the Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs. The latter entry struck me as just the sort of over-ambitious magnum opus I might like (I really like excessive trainwrecks, especially films, like A.I. and the Fountain), and when I had a chance the following June, while restoring the empty coffers of my paltry bank account with shitty Summer jobs, I picked up the first volume.

And the thing is, I really didn't get into it. I liked it, but certainly didn't appreciate it. I listened to it a bunch of times before it slept and gathered dust on my CD tower for several years. It wasn't until I picked up a used copy of Volume 2 (just filling out my collection really) that I fell in love with the Magnetic Fields. That is the CD that captured my heart and urged me to buy V3 a mere week later, but wouldn't even allow me the sonic space to listen to that later purchase, or go back to V1 for that matter. To this day I've probably listened to the series in this kind of ratio 5 : 9 : 2. And the first 23 songs only so much because I've owned it nearly twice as long as the rest.

Alright, I suppose this narcissistic music history lesson must end. Short story made shorter, 69LS is a grower of the best sort. As I descend into the depths of adulthood (to say nothing of middle-age) I find that I can finally appreciate work of this caliber. Because I'm wiser? Probably not. Mostly, I would guess, because it is fucking awesome.

grade: "puppy love" (2 out of 6)