Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs (1999) contains two of Stephin Merritt’s most beloved numbers, “The Book of Love” and “Papa Was a Rodeo.” Both have become standards a quarter century after their release, though they represent but a tiny fraction of equally brilliant earworms that appear in that industrial-sized collection of music.
When Merritt started working on 69 Love Songs in the second half of the ’90s, his music was known only to a small subsection of the alternative music-buying public. For an artist with such a modest commercial footprint, most record companies would have balked at releasing an album containing nearly three hours of genre-jumping music.
Fortunately, Merritt’s label was the artist-run Merge Records, which knew he was a genius who could maintain his high standards of quality control across three CDs. Given all this, Merge was fully on board with that ambitious project, which originated in a Midtown Manhattan piano bar.
“They were playing various Broadway show tunes,” Merritt told me, “and I was thinking about what I wanted to do next. I thought it’d be a good time to do something large, and I’d been listening to Charles Ives’ 114 Songs.”
114 Songs was not a single cohesive work — it’s more of an anthology — but Merritt has a habit of pretending that some compilations close to his heart are actually one unified project. He points to Pavement’s Westing (By Musket and Sextant), which is actually an anthology of singles and EP tracks, but Merritt didn’t know that when he fell for the album.
“It was kind of a formative experience for me,” he said, “because the songs are all differently recorded and don’t sound like they’re on the same album at all. And, in fact, they weren’t. One of the records that formed my childhood aesthetics was Desolation Boulevard by Sweet. In the U.S., it was released as a studio album, but in fact, it’s a compilation taken from a little more than two different albums and some singles that they put out in Britain to make one really great U.S. album.”
While Merritt sat at the piano bar, he hatched the idea to do something that combined romance with Warholian detachment and mechanical repetition. Eventually, 100 Love Songs popped into his mind. The openly gay songwriter then began brainstorming a show that involved four drag queens and an audience Clap-O-Meter that would determine the night’s most popular performer.
Merritt was imagining a show poster, because he finds it easier to have musical ideas if they originate in another medium, which is why he often ends up designing a T-shirt, poster or record cover before the songs arrive.
“I kept thinking about the poster for 100 Love Songs,” he said, “and I realized that 100 might just be too many. That would be 300 minutes long. I started looking for a number lower than 100 that still had a large industrial quality, and I noticed 86 has a nice gothic feel. But when I got down to 69, I thought that was perfect for love songs and I realized that this is what I should be doing with my life. So, within the space of a few minutes, I went from thinking, ‘Woe is me,’ to thinking, ‘Oh my God, I have a project!’”
Merritt wrote in his notebook, “I hereby swear to do this,” and he gave himself one year to record the entire album, with a three month-runway to start writing (the project only went over by about two weeks). The deadline made 69 Love Songs possible, he said. “I’m a big believer in the frame. If you go beyond the frame, you’ve really damaged the artwork.”
Over the course of writing and recording, he discarded many tracks that were either not up to par or didn’t quite work for the project. Merritt points to the lyrics for “(Crazy For You But) Not That Crazy,” which contain the couplets: “I built a ship with my own hands / To take us to the moon / I took a pen in my own hand / And wrote you a hundred tunes.”
“I had already written 100 when I wrote that line,” he said. “Some of them were terrible, some of them were very tossed off, and some of them just didn’t fit on 69 Love Songs, like ‘The Sun and the Sea and the Sky.’ It is not a love song to a person. It’s an appreciation of the natural world, and that was originally slated to be on the record until I realized that it didn’t fit.”
The way that Merritt brainstormed ideas in that Midtown piano bar was typical of his work routine, because he likes to write in public. Much of 69 Love Songs was developed in Dick’s Bar, a divey watering hole on 12th Street and 2nd Avenue in Lower Manhattan, along with an Irish bar on St Mark’s Place, St. Dymphna’s.
“I write everything in public spaces,” he explained. “At home, there’s too much to do, and I have dogs slobbering all over me. Writing is something that I do in public with a cocktail in my hand. So, I have a daily routine of spending a few hours in a restaurant or bar with music that isn’t too loud, where I can eavesdrop on other people.”
Some of those spots subliminally influenced the music on 69 Love Songs, like the arrangement of “Busby Berkeley Dreams,” which contains what Merritt later realized was a melodic quote from a song on the jukebox at Dick’s Bar. It was a subtle influence, because the borrowed arrangement appears only in the cello line, not the top line vocal melody.
“The other place that I was writing was St. Dymphna’s,” Merritt continued. “There definitely is a song on 69 Love Songs that I can’t imagine that I would have written had I not been hanging out at St. Dymphna’s, and that is ‘Abigail, Belle of Kilronan.’ It’s a song set in Ireland around 1911, where the protagonist has to go off to war to save Ireland. I actually wrote it in Costa Rica on the beach while reading a biography of Stephen Foster, but it’s directly influenced by St. Dymphna’s.”
69 Love Songs made a big noise upon its release. It topped music critic polls and sold quite well for a triple CD set on an independent label, and its music quietly seeped into the mainstream during the first decade of the new century.
“Papa Was a Rodeo” became an immediate favorite, with its gorgeous melancholy melody and sardonic lyrics (“I see that kiss-me pucker forming / But maybe you should plug it with a beer”). However, it was “The Book of Love” that carried Merritt’s music to a wider audience after Peter Gabriel’s cover of the song was included in Shall We Dance?, starring Jennifer Lopez and Richard Gere.
“Suddenly, ‘The Book of Love’ took off in a weird way,” Merritt told me. “It became a wedding standard. It was on Dancing With the Stars, which had nothing to do with me doing anything, you know. Dancing With the Stars never called me. I didn’t get to meet Cloris Leachman or something. But yeah, I wrote ‘The Book of Love’ at St. Dymphna’s one afternoon, and 10 years later it’s on Dancing With the Stars through absolutely no more work of my own.”
Money can’t buy love, but the licensing income generated by “The Book of Love” did buy Stephin Merritt a home. It is not your ordinary love song because it contains his characteristically ambivalent lyrics, like the lines, “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.” I mentioned to him that it strikes me as an odd nuptial song and Merritt replied, “I strongly agree with you. I would never play it at my own wedding.”
69 Love Songs features many different voices, including Claudia Gonson, Merritt’s longtime manager and musical collaborator, and Shirley Simms, who duetted with Merritt on “Papa Was a Rodeo” and who sings on several more tracks. Gonson is not touring with the group while she focuses on her managerial duties, but Simms will be on the road with the Magnetic Fields.
“I met Shirley when she was 10,” Merritt said. “I have known all of the current members of the Magnetic Fields since 1990 or before, but I met Shirley in the ’70s. I like working with people again and again. We’re not like a rock group or something, so we don’t fit the standard model of how to be a band. It’s more like a film director and cast, like John Waters or Orson Welles working with the same actors again and again.”
Kembrew McLeod stumbled across the Magnetic Fields’ fourth album, Holiday, in 1994 and has been a fan ever since. This article was originally published in Little Village’s May 2025 issue.
