Stephin Merritt did not mean any of what he wrote on 69 Love Songs. He has been very clear about this over the years. 69 Love Songs — the massive triple-disc, three-hour opus that celebrated its 20th anniversary this past Saturday — is a writing exercise, a parlor trick, a flex. It is not a work of personal expression. “Expression is not the point,” Merritt once told The Independent. “If I need to express something, I express it in ordinary prose. Songwriting is not about expressing something.”
In that same interview, Merritt puts it another way: “69 Love Songs is not remotely an album about love. It’s an album about love songs, which are very far away from anything to do with love.” If there’s any authenticity to be found on 69 Love Songs, it’s what Merritt calls “fraudulent authenticity” — which is to say that it’s not authenticity at all. But if 69 Love Songs ever mattered to you — and there’s a very good chance that it did — then that fraudulent authenticity does the trick anyway.
Take, for example, “The Book Of Love,” still the best-remembered of those 69 love songs. Over a barely-there guitar strum, Merritt, his baritone croak of a voice in soft-swoon mode, gets into the concept of love itself, and into that of music itself: “The book of love has music in it. In fact, that’s where music comes from. Some of it is just transcendental. Some of it is just really dumb.” Talking to the AV Club years later, Merritt said that he used “The Book Of Love” to explore “the way the different clichés interact.”
But two of my best friends chose “The Book Of Love” as the first dance at their wedding. My friends didn’t pick that song because they wanted to explore the way different clichés interact. They picked it because it’s a beautiful song. They picked it because it moved them. (One of those friends — his name is Marc Hogan, and he works for Pitchfork — tried to ask Merritt about the sentiment that so many people attach to “The Book Of Love” as part of an onstage interview a couple of years ago. Merritt, characteristically, https://www.stereogum.com/2057552/magnetic-fields-69-love-songs-turns-20/reviews/the-anniversary/was a dick about it.)
Posted from: https://www.stereogum.com/2057552/magnetic-fields-69-love-songs-turns-20/reviews/the-anniversary/
[the_ad id=’12166′]