Twenty-five years after the release of 69 Love Songs, the triple album known for its emotional wit, genre-hopping range, and lyrical audacity, The Magnetic Fields are taking their cult classic on the road again. Iowa fans will hear the entire tracklist in order across two nights at the Englert Theatre in Iowa City this Friday and Saturday.
Ahead of the shows, I spoke with songwriter and bandleader Stephin Merritt about the chaos of touring, musical collisions and the unlikely places where these 69 beloved songs came to life.
When we connected, Merritt sounded relieved. “On our last tour, we had a guitar smash in the luggage handling,” he said. “I’m just glad everything is intact right now.”
Getting from city to city is no small feat these days, Merritt added. “We were supposed to fly out of Newark, which — if you’ve read the news — you’ll know is currently a hell portal. They’ve had blackouts in the air traffic control tower. They can’t talk to the planes for two minutes at a time — just as they’re landing.”
Despite that less-than-encouraging travel backdrop, Merritt and company are pressing on with the full presentation of 69 Love Songs, a record he describes as the opposite of mood music. “There’s an album from the ’50s called Music to Break Any Mood — a reaction against all those albums of mood music. I love that record. And 69 Love Songs is essentially that. Wait a few minutes and the mood will totally change.”
It’s not just the emotional terrain that shifts song to song. It’s the sonic one, too. I asked if the live arrangements this time around have as much contrast from song to song as the album. “Some of the instruments we’re using now make sounds that don’t change much, like acoustic guitar or eight-string ukulele,” Merritt explained. “But we also use synthesizers, samplers and drum machines that can change a whole lot. So the show has a mix of stability and variety.” And one song, “Love Is Like Jazz,” changes completely with each performance.
As a composition, 69 Love Songs is anything but repetitive. The album cycles through clever punchlines, unexpected rhymes and non-repeating melodies with a dizzying pace. Merritt recalled writing many of the songs in an East Village bar called St. Dymphna’s. “I’d go there for breakfast, order an Irish breakfast and a pot of tea, and sit there for eight hours writing. Eventually, when my hands were shaking from all the caffeine, I’d move to Dick’s Bar, which had a magnificent ’80s jukebox, and I’d write there until midnight.”
It was a routine: Sixteen-hour days, alternating tea and alcohol, surrounded by the atmosphere of his New York City haunts. “I would never be able to do that now,” he said. “My caffeine and alcohol tolerances have plummeted. After three drinks I wouldn’t even remember what songs I’d written.”
Even during those marathon writing sessions, Merritt never wrote down his melodies. “When I was a kid, I read that ABBA never wrote down their melodies. They figured if they didn’t remember them, no one else would either. I thought that was really smart, so I adopted that policy.”
When asked if he ever resorts to voice memos to capture a melody, he shared that occasionally he’ll use a voice memo app if something comes to him in the car. “But normally, I’m just in a bar with a notebook and a pen.”
That unusual process also has room for experiments. While he doesn’t formally use John Cage’s Chance Operations, Merritt said he relies on structured collisions to jumpstart ideas. “I’d make lists of instruments, genres and types of lyrical material. Then I’d connect items across the lists at random and see what emerged. Sometimes it worked. One combo might be: Calypso, kazoo, boasting rap ... Actually, that sounds too close to real Calypso!”
From those collisions emerges a whole universe of short, sharp, emotionally potent songs. Some are stories. Some are portraits. Some wrench your heart and then bring it home with a twist. “Some songs have literal punchlines,” Merritt said. “‘Love is like a bottle of gin / but a bottle of gin is not like love’ — that’s a punchline.”
When I mentioned how rapid-fire the album is, Merritt pointed out something most digital listeners may never notice: the built-in pacing of the physical medium. “It was designed with pauses, when you get up and change the record,” he said. “That has disappeared ... like all good things.”
Yet 25 years on, the kaleidoscope of melodies and stories on 69 Love Songs has not disappeared, but instead has continued to shift and take on new meaning.
Take the lyrics to "Love Is Like Jazz." As Merritt says, "On the record it kind of comes off as a joke, but if you just read the lyrics, I think it’s actually a perceptive observation. ‘You make it up as you go along / and you act as if you really knew the song / but you don’t, and you never will.' The older I get, the more true that is.”
