Review Summary: I'm not a smart man, but I know what love is.
69 Love Songs is a culmination of tracks written and composed about love. This review is not necessarily a documented approach to dissecting what love is or what it means though. Rather, the product examined here in The Magnetic Fields' sixth studio release is a simple review, a look at what specific portions of the album mean to your average listener. After all, love is a simple word to recite and throw around, yet the many interpretations of what it means to love and to be loved stretch for miles.
Briefly stated, 69 Love Songs is a concept album about exactly what meets the eye, sixty-nine individual love songs. This is indie-pop at its finest, enhanced with contributions from the usual band members in Merritt on vocals and a myriad of other wind and string instruments, Claudia Gonson on piano and percussion, Sam Davol on cello and flute, and John Woo on guitar, banjo, mandolin, and bass. Merritt takes lead vocals on most tracks, and is credited with all song writing and composition on the album, but guest vocals are also present, with Gonson singing on a few tracks, as well as other musical contributors who add their own musical skill sets and vocals to the equation.
The musicianship and diversity plays to great strengths in terms of overall substance and replay value on the record. It's a breath of fresh air hearing so many different voices and talents bring forth the overall flow and vibe presented over the course of sixty-nine tracks. Each possesses separate orchestral arrangements, often times with new combinations of singers. What one can find from all of this is the essence that makes the genre so great in the first place. These are very catchy songs with substance; the carefully crafted instrumentation and lyricism provides familiarity stricken within the listener’s soul simultaneously. As with any album about relationships, one can't help but emanate similar feelings of sacrifice and longing taking in Stephen Merritt's poetic diction. It brings forth so many emotions, all seeming to come and go at the snap of a finger. Contrary to the belief that three hours worth of material can be droning to get through, the songs really come and go so quickly, bursting forth each in its own different way. There too possesses all the thoughts of Merritt's interpretation of love along the way, for example, the craziness of being in love at all, the joy, fear, aching, pain, frustration, peace, uncertainty, and bliss that is love. What sentimentality for just a four-letter word.
Pondering all of the different things that can be said about 69 Love Songs could stretch from page to page of rambling research and thought. However, the bottom line is that the album is a work of art, something to be heralded for years to come. It's hard to go wrong with such a relatable concept in almost every human life, if not all. Writing this review in itself is all about individual perspective. There lies all of the things stated about what I the writer think about it, but that's merely one piece of a whole puzzle. Anyone else who listens to 69 Love Songs provokes a whole new world of thoughts and feelings entirely. From Stephen Merritt's perspective, perhaps maybe these are more just the many facts and aspects of love, not even dialing in to individual diary entries of what he has experienced in his own life. Nonetheless, the power is yours. How do you respond to 69 Love Songs?
