Big Romantic Stuff

Songs from the Book of Love

As you know I’ve been around to the museums, but I had not attended a concert of any kind since the COVID-19 lockdown before last weekend. And I was shocked to recollect it. Surely, I thought, I must have seen some band or singer-songwriter or something since March 2020. But I hadn’t; I’d been to protests, as participant and as observer, and sometimes the protests had music (like the loony Fetus Asks Momma Why She’s Murdering Him song played at one of the religious run-ups to January 6). And I followed the Go-Go truck blasting funk on Juneteenth. But I hadn’t been anywhere to gather in front of a stage specifically to hear what a musician had to say.

But a friend contacted me Thursday and said the Magnetic Fields tour for which he’d long ago ordered tickets and which had been cancelled was suddenly, to his surprise, finally on, and did I want to go.

We’d seen the band before, on the 50 Song Memoir tour in 2017, in a slightly awkward incarnation with animations projected on a screen. Memoir is pretty good, and I don’t begrudge songwriter Stephin Merritt his right to go to the volume gimmick well again. But 69 Love Songs is sort of a landmark, and the reference to it was for me an invitation to disappointment. It might be different if I were a true Merritt fan, as my friends are, but I’m one of those people who swooned for that little white box in 1999 and then moved on to other things.

Maybe I moved on because I could hardly keep track, in those pre-streaming days, of Merritt’s multiple projects — the 6ths, The Gothic Archies, et alia. More likely it’s because he was a real anomaly in the rock and folk music to which I mostly stuck: a post-modern Tin Pan Alley performer whose lyrics were more like a cross between Robert Herrick and Frank Loesser than Bob Dylan or John Lennon, and who sang from a seated position, in a mournful and rather inflexible low baritone, rather in the strenuous style of the electric troubadour. The stunt of 69 Love Songs sort of pointed up his weirdness. So I treated it like a one-off, a beautiful and brilliant thing that I didn’t really want more of.

And nothing in the 2017 Memoir concert (except the wonderful song about the mystery of love called “’68: A Cat Called Dionysus”) excited me enough to revisit. It wasn’t as if Merritt’s sedentary, phlegmatic style did anything to woo me, either — the Fields are great players but they don’t sell a song so much as place it carefully in the shop window and then go back to doing the crossword.

But here I was, years later, after considerable forced isolation, sitting at a table at a nice, vaccination-checking, mid-sized venue, drinking drinks and eating snacks, and feeling for the first time in forever the atmospheric drop when the lights dim and the hose music fades. The opener, Christian Lee Hutson, had good songs and very good finger-picking, but mainly what I remember about him, besides clever quasi-absurdist patter and a few killer lines like “And I don't care who sees me/ Behaving so ugly/ I just hate that you loved me/ And that this is how it ends,” was that he had stepped out with a guitar and did the singer-songwriter thing, live, in front of us, like in the old days, with the warm tones of his voice and his acoustic engineered to soothe us, and it worked.

But the headliner really got to me. As usual, Merritt just sat there, impassive, strummed a variety of stringed instruments, made an occasionally pithy remark, and groaned his musical groans while his cellist added bass lines and occasional accents and his two female accomplices sang backup and occasionally lead (another thing unusual among modern singer-songwriter ensembles) and added keyboards, shakers, and the various as needed.

They played a lot of 69 Love Songs. And those songs about lost love, damned love, good love, and better love that I had admired and more or less set aside now reached me more than they had when I first heard them. As they had in 2017, the Fields played straightforwardly, stripping away much of the gimmicky synthetics and effects used on the original album (in part, I suspect, to better distinguish the songs, which do not cover a lot of ground structurally, from one another lest the whole thing begin to sound too repetitive). Taking those gimmicks away, just letting the songs be, had the effect bringing out the romance in them that over-attention have covered up. “I'm Sorry I Love You" was still ironically peppy, but the sorrow behind words like “The rose will fade when summer's gone/ The song will fade and I'll be gone” was unhidden and intense. And songs that were always pure, unadulterated — as Elyot says to Amanda in Private Lives when music completely overtakes them — “big romantic stuff” just called to the heart.

Who’d have thought that the fey little fat man, perched on his seat off to one side, not even at the center, looking like he doesn’t quite give a shit, could make, for example, a trick like “The Book of Love” work so well? The verses are almost conversational explanations of how the Book we’ve all heard about is not so great, really — or at least it’s too difficult and heavy and old for we who are “all too young to know” to perceive its greatness. (The “all” in that line is extremely carefully and well chosen, as all his words are.) But the choruses tell us why that doesn’t matter. On Saturday Merritt closed his eyes, lolled his head, and crooned: “But I-I-I-I-I/ I love it when you read to me/ And you-ou-ou-ou-ou/ You can read me anything.” And I recognized it as the call of love.

Maybe it’s wasn’t just the song and the playing; maybe also, it was that we were there in front of him, being sung to. And that all the magic of which we’d been holding memories, that had happened in playhouses and movie theaters and bars and halls and stadia, had for the moment come back.