On a celebratory ‘69 Love Songs’ tour, Magnetic Fields count the ways
Wallace Stevens gave the world 13 ways of looking at a blackbird; nearly a century later, the Magnetic Fields gave it 69 ways of looking at a love song. Not ways of looking at love, mind you, but ways of looking at the love song, a concept that songwriter Stephin Merritt and his merry band of collaborators stretched to its semiotic limits in assembling the concept album that has become the group’s signature project.
“69 Love Songs” — three discs, three hours — turns 25 this year, and on the second night of the band’s anniversary tour stop at Roadrunner the audience included some people who had obviously bought the three-disc set when it was released in 1999. There was also a sizable contingent of listeners who were visibly younger than the album, and many more in between. Presumably, the uniting factor was love; love for the album, love for the witty lyrics, love for the ways Merritt and Co. sing about love in all its complicated, maddening, beautiful, and hideous glory. “Those who request other songs will endure obscenities,” Merritt warned the audience after the first song. If anyone tried, he didn’t acknowledge them.
The band was spread out across the stage, seated with their instruments. Merritt perched on a high stool at stage left with a microphone and a small table bearing a box of tissues. (Seasonal allergies are hitting hard.) There’s no way to cut the number 69 neatly in half, but Monday’s performance began with “World Love,” 36 out of 69. This presumably meant Night One’s final song was “Promises of Eternity,” which begins with the line “What if the show didn’t go on?” Well played, gang.
But go on the show did, in a combination of victory lap and family reunion for Merritt and the “69 Love Songs” lineup. These included several fixtures of the band — singer-keyboardist Claudia Gonson, guitarist John Woo, singer and ukulele player Shirley Simms, and cellist Sam Davol — as well as the sardonic-voiced singer Dudley Klute (he reaches the notes Merritt can’t, also known as anything out of a bass’s range), multi-instrumentalist Anthony Kaczynski, and a very welcome appearance on keyboards by Chris Ewen, a longtime anchor of Cambridge’s nightlife scene and veteran Merritt collaborator. As with any family reunion, there were keenly felt absences; LD Beghtol, who sang lead on a handful of the album’s songs, died in 2020. Kaczynski picked up the vocals for most of those songs with reverent aplomb.
The album was originally conceived as a theatrical revue, and Merritt has been open about the inspiration he derived from the songs of the late, great master Stephen Sondheim. In practice, the performance had scarce theatrical trappings, save for a bit involving Merritt, singer Gonson, and two stepladders during the morbid Sonny and Cher send-up “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!” However, anything else would have felt unnecessary. Running through “69 Love Songs” in album order is enough of a theatrical stunt.
The album’s most enduring songs have long become staples of Magnetic Fields live shows: “The Book of Love,” “Come Back from San Francisco,” “All My Little Words,” “Papa Was a Rodeo,” “No One Will Ever Love You” — and except for the evergreen, tender “Papa,” all of those were on the Night One setlist. Night Two featured mostly deep cuts, the most novelty of the novelty tracks, and other stuff the band hadn’t played in a couple of decades. Whatever shreds of attention the band paid to track order, it had run out by the middle of disc two; perhaps they knew that anyone who had listened that far would be in it for the long haul. “We’ve only ever gotten this right once,” Merritt joked before “The Sun Goes Down and the World Goes Dancing,” which pushed his voice out of its comfort zone 25 years ago and does so even more now.
However, the wild and unpredictable nature of the sound and subject matter of “69 Love Songs” means that whoever you are, whatever your relationship to love, there’s probably something relatable in there for you on one or more of those deep cuts. If you’ve been listening long enough, there are probably memories in there too. “You’re in every song I know,” I heard on “Busby Berkeley Dreams,” and I thought of a friend who introduced me to the band 15 years ago, and who died shortly after Beghtol did.
The “69 Love Songs” tour is selling out houses not because every song is a gem, but because no matter how farfetched a song’s conceit, or how maudlin or cynical the lyrics may seem on the surface, there’s almost always something true to be found there if you take the time to listen closely. This tour offers a chance to do that and one thing more; to hear Merritt’s raw bass surrounded by a halo of voices singing along one or two octaves up, rising from the audience like prayers.