Stephin Merritt Plays Your 69 Favorite Magnetic Fields Songs

The rock band Magnetic Fields released its three-disc magnum opus, 69 Love Songs, back in 1999, and it was recognized immediately as a classic. The Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, the most influential at the time, ranked it the year’s second-best album, while the poll’s creator, VV critic and author Robert Christgau, ranked it first. It’s been heralded since then for its overall artfulness—dazzlingly witty lyrics, compelling melodies, romantic pathos paired with sly humor, and the audacity with which Stephin Merritt, the group’s creative force, accomplishes his daunting goals.

One measure of 69 Love Songs’ enduring status is that Merritt, now 60, and band have been touring the world since 2024, the album’s 25th anniversary, performing all 69 songs over two nights. Magnetic Fields comes to Memorial Hall May 19-20, which apparently will be Merritt’s first show in Cincinnati since playing Sudsy Malone’s in 1997.

The Alternative Rock originality and inventiveness on 69 Love Songs stand out, and yet Merritt doesn’t accept that compliment uncritically during a Zoom interview from his New York City home. First off, he challenges the term “alternative” for his music, or for any music. And he does it in his endlessly quotable, opinionated way.

“Allow me to quibble,” he tells me. “Alternative Rock was a term used for about five years and was applied to a small number of musicians, many of whom probably hate the term. I have resisted it as a label. Basically if you want me to hate something, call it Alternative Rock. It just seems like a rotten title for a genre of music. But it’s not a genre, like Grunge, it’s a marketing term.”

Next, Merritt takes on the flattering notion that the length and conceptualism of 69 Love Songs constituted, at the time, a musical approach without precedent. He begins by citing somewhat similar examples that informed his project, and one thing becomes clear right away: Merritt knows music well enough to teach it.

“For me, other significant examples would be (the cult-beloved band) Half Japanese’s first album, ½ Gentlemen/NotBeasts,” says Merritt. “That came out 20 years before Love Songs.” It contains 39 songs, most short, but two are long suites featuring excerpts of cover versions. “They’re all essentially in the same garage/punk/rock outsider music genre in a way that 69 Love Songs is not. There’s also Charles Ives’ 114 Songs, which is a collection of music and not strictly a record, but there are records of it, and that was a model for me.”

Ives, an American classical composer, worked on 114 Songs from 1919 to 1924 as a coherent work for piano and voice.

“But I think the major model for me was a Boston New Wave band with a name that would not be used now, Space Negros,” he continues. “They had a 7-inch EP called Maximum Contrast from Moment to Moment. The title was a motto they used.” That 1970s band was considered avant-garde rock. The EP Merritt cites came out in 1979 and contains six songs, all less than four minutes, with the shortest checking in at a tight 25 seconds.

A tribute to that band on 69 Love Songs, perhaps, is the 58-second “Punk Love,” one of Merritt’s two shortest pieces. The lyrics are short and to the point, if not immediately obvious as lyrically artful: Love (punk love) / Love, punk love / Punk rock love (punk love).

Magnetic Fields first got together in Boston, where Merritt grew up, in 1989. He dominates on 69 Love Songs, but the band members take some singing leads as well as contributing backing vocals and playing instruments. For the Cincinnati shows, three of the five touring musicians participated in 69 Love Songs: Shirley Simms (vocals and ukulele), Sam Davol (cello), and Merritt. Also in the band are Anthony Kaczynski (vocals and guitar) and Chris Ewen (keyboards). Merritt not only sings but plays a Micro Freak analog synthesizer plus assorted percussion instruments and toys.

Merritt has a keen, often-sardonic humor and knows how to use it. And that’s an important element of 69 Love Songs. “The whole idea of the album is that it’s too much,” he says. “It’s repeating something you would not expect to be repeated.”

In that approach, he sees monumental Pop artist Andy Warhol as a source. “It’s making the heartfelt into wall paper,” he says. “I liked the idea of making an epic that’s also a joke and a joke that’s also an epic.”

He has a wistfully lovely sense of wordplay and, when he wants to use his voice in such a way, a gentle yet deep baritone voice that exhibits melancholy, regret, and loss. Here’s one example, the record’s second song, “I Don’t Believe in the Sun”:

They say there’s a sun in the sky
But me, I can’t imagine why
There might have been one
Before you were gone
But now all I see is the night

So I don’t believe in the sun
How could it shine down on everyone
And never shine on me
How could there be
Such cruelty

Maintaining his writing skills—mixing humor and romanticism, edginess and gentleness—has gotten Merritt compared not just with other “alternative” or modernist rock acts, but with great songwriters of the past, particularly Cole Porter. “I think of him as an important color in the pallet that I like to use, but as a model I’m closer to Irving Berlin,” says Merritt. “I’m happy to be compared to Cole Porter. He’s shorthand for ‘good lyricist.’ But I’m always wary of being compared to him for the wrong reasons. He is also shorthand for gay and twee, and I police the borders of that. (Merritt is gay.) But he is great for the sheer effervescence and joy of rhyming and his celebration of the silliness of the English language, which I do all the time.”

Merritt didn’t get a college degree in music composition or theory, but he credits a high school guitar tutor, who taught at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, with providing the kind of education he’d have received in a music program. Plus he was already creating music for his high school plays. Merritt ended up attending New York University to study film. After leaving, he returned to Boston and studied at Harvard Extension School.

He says his real education in New York came on the dance floor, which makes sense since dancing is an inspirational subject for him on 69 Love Songs. One of the best rhymes in that whole massive work is:

Nothing matters when we’re dancing
In tatter-tatters you’re entrancing
Be we in Paris or in Lansing

“In freshman year I took my classes, but my real education was at Danceteria,” he says about the fashionable New York nightclub of the 1980s that hosted a broad, surprising line-up of live acts from ’60s girl group singers the Shirelles to dance music titan Tino Puente to arty, experimental rockers as Nick Cave and The Fall.

One can probably tell his musical interests are as unpredictable as they are unconventional. So it may be a surprise to learn he regards Bob Dylan as an important early influence, because his mother played Dylan’s records. Growing up, Merritt did not know his father, a rock-oriented singer-songwriter named Scott Fagan, whose recently reissued 1968 album South Atlantic Blues reveals a voice somewhat like early David Bowie.

Merritt says he got his Dylan admiration “from being raised by a hippy who was a big fan of Bob Dylan. So the first 100 songs I knew were probably all from his songbook. I love Bob Dylan’s folk process where he takes (artist and root records collector) Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and grinds it up into a personal meat grinder. Out comes a very different poetry with mostly the same music. He didn’t change the melodies much, but he sure changed the aesthetics while keeping it weird, which is great.”

Naturally, one wonders if Merritt has seen the recent Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, which stars Timothée Chalamet as Dylan. That sets up one more strong rejoinder about our culture from Merritt. “We should be insulted by the whole idea of biopics,” he says. “We can read the Wikipedia page. We don’t need to watch someone pretend to be someone else.”