The Magnetic Fields

69 Love Songs
Merge, 1999

Stephin Merritt came upon the idea for 69 Love Songs, his triple-disc concept album about love songs (and not love itself, as he pointed out to writers), while sitting in a gay piano bar in New York watching a man performing songs by musical theatre icon Stephen Sondheim. "I'm a show tune kind of guy," he thought, and then decided to embark on an ambitious project to write one hundred love songs as a kind of grand melodramatic statement. "Then I realised how long that would be, so I settled on sixty-nine," he said.

The stunt worked and Merritt became the darling of New York and San Francisco journalists who found it impossible to resist such an alluring subject – a plain-looking gay man of an ambiguous age who expressed no emotion whatsoever, collected bizarre musical instruments and brought his pet Chihuahua (named after Broadway songwriter Irving Berlin) along with him to interviews. Between questions, Merritt would pause to compose his thoughts before slinging some deadpan answer back across the table as if the whole event deserved to have been scripted.

The album itself was just as eccentric, and occasionally wonderful – a three-hour collection of not entirely serious love songs in different pop styles, sung by a rotating cast of singers, with often hilarious lyrics. Merritt, himself a music critic in his spare time, tore apart the clichés of romance and love songs like candy wrappers. Opening track 'Absolutely Cuckoo' contained the warning not to "fall in love with me" because "if you make a mistake/ My heart will certainly break/ I'll have to jump in a lake/ And all my friends will blame you/ There's no telling what they will do".

It's funny enough on first listen, but Merritt's incessant cleverness can begin to drag over the course of so many tracks (the titles of which would fill up this column on their own). Perhaps that's why my favourite cut on 69 Love Songs is one of the rarest – 'Sweet-Lovin' Man', a number originally written for a different album and one of the only inclusions that has a straightforward romantic theme without any of the backhanded jokes that dominate the rest of the album. It's sung by Merritt's close friend Claudia Gonson and sounds like the best sugary eighties pop ballad you never grew up with.