To create 69 love songs seems like the work of a lifetime. Stephin Merritt, the mastermind behind The Magnetic Fields, accomplished the feat in a single year.
“I was sitting in a gay piano bar in Midtown Manhattan,” Merritt tells PureHoney in an interview coinciding with a bout of respiratory distress that has made his famously deep voice perhaps a bit lower. “They were playing Sondheim songs and Jesus Christ Superstar and I thought I should do a theatrical revue. I wanted to break out of being identified with rock music. I imagined having six drag queens singing a whole lot of songs while competing for applause. The one who got the most applause would be the only one who got paid.”
At first Merritt planned to write 100 songs for the revue. “But then I realized 100 three-minute songs would be 300 minutes and that would be too long,” he says. “Then I thought what other meaningful numbers are there? Eighty-six songs about death? Still too long. I’ll save that for another time. Seventy-six patriotic love songs? Then I got down to 69 and I thought the interplay of that number being a dirty joke and love songs was right up my alley.”
While the songs never formed a theatrical revue — though Merritt still threatens that as a possibility — the resulting album, 69 Love Songs came out in 1999 as an instant indie-pop classic: melancholy, funny, biting, tuneful and stylistically all over the map. It was released on three CDs and as a vinyl set lasting a smidgen under three hours. The Magnetic Fields will take two nights, November 1-2, at Miami’s Arsht Center to play the album in its entirety.
“It’s important to know the concert is one show spread out over two nights,” Merritt says. “If you want to hear both ‘The Book of Love‘ and ‘Papa Was a Rodeo‘ you’ll have to come both nights.”
The Saturday performance ends at song No. 35, “Promises of Eternity,” and Sunday picks up with the next track, “World Love.” Merritt adds that fans of the album should not expect replicas: ”We don’t like to be faithful to the record. We do things differently. I might decide not to play guitar on a song and instead play ukulele. We keep it loose.”
Though The Magnetic Fields have put out a dozen releases, including 2017’s 50 Song Memoir, 69 Love Songs is arguably their most celebrated work. And to be clear, Merritt says he really did write and record all of it in under 365 days.
”It was fun. I enlisted friends,” he recalls. “I told them I wasn’t socializing that year, but if they wanted to help make the record I’d be happy to see them. I had charts written all over the walls and schedules of what song needed to be written by what time.”
In a sense Merritt had prepared for that record his entire life. “My mother played guitar and I started taking lessons at seven,” he says. “I took piano and percussion lessons around the same time. Then in high school I took organ lessons and then harp lessons.”
By the time he started The Magnetic Fields in 1991 he had a vision of what they would sound like. “I’d feel limited by being in a rock group or bluegrass,” Merritt says. “I want all the palette. The main instrument in our first album [1991’s Distant Plastic Trees] was a sampler. I felt like I had the whole world at my fingertips.”
When asked if it’s difficult to play the songs from memory almost three decades later, Merritt is honest: “I don’t have a good memory. Every time I go on tour I have to relearn the songs. I’m not capable of singing them all by memory. I have a lyric sheet in gigantic type.”
Does performing these songs transport him back to early days? “I’m in the middle of playing a concert; I don’t have the time to be nostalgic,” he says. Merritt also plans to release a new album sometime in 2026. No hint yet how many songs.
The Magnetic Fields perform 69 Love Songs on Saturday and Sunday, November 1 and 2, at the Arsht Center in Miami. houseoftomorrow.com ~ David Rolland
