Ezra Furman
The Chicago indie-rocker salutes The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs (Merge, 1999).
Picture me at 18, away from home, striving to overcome my apathy about attending a prestigious university [Tufts in Boston], wildly anxious, separated from my high school girlfriend. I am thrown together with thousands of other 18-year-olds. One of them asks me if I’ve heard of The Magnetic Fields. I haven’t. She puts headphones on my ears and I hear heavenly harps accompanying the deep voice of Stephin Merritt. Apparently it’s just one-third of a 3-disc LP called 69 Love Songs. I end up with Disc 2, to this day my favourite, but I didn’t love it at first.
At first sight, 69 Love Songs seems cute, likeable, possibly slightly annoying, on the edge of too clever, maybe a joke. But then comes the next song, and the next, ingenious, concise little crystallisations hitting you like a storm of snowflakes. You start to see that it’s not clever but brilliant, not cute but beautiful.
A crucial element is that I was a budding songwriter, trying to figure out what makes a song work. Stephin Merritt provides one of the best educations I could have hoped for. He is as steeped in Tin Pan Alley and Broadway-style songwriting as he is in synth-pop, techno and Depeche Mode.
It’s also crucial that I was in the thick of figuring out that I was queer. It was years before I learned that Stephin is gay; he doesn’t write about that identity as much as he inhabits it. It mattered a lot that the LP throws gender to the wind, and plenty of his addressees’ genders are unspecified. These were lyrical modes I had never encountered before. I was never the same. I had understood myself to be a straight boy who was into punk rock and folk. I’d maybe become a teacher or a lawyer and stay together with my girlfriend. Instead, I fell in love, learned to write music and became myself. 69 Love Songs held my hand the whole way.
Ezra Furman’s All Of Us Flames is released on Bella Union on August 26.