The Magnetic Fields - "Realism"

In describing a great pop song, I've often heard people say that a song can be "deceptively simple" - so simple and sublime that it feels like it's existed forever, or just came tumbling from the fingers of the songwriter, when in fact a great deal of thought was put into the process. Stephin Merritt, to me, is a great songwriter of popular songs. And yet, as time goes by, I find myself more and more picturing him laboring at his desk, trying to sweat out the perfect stanza - one that will make the rhyming of "down on your knees, yeah" and "anesthesia" seem perfectly natural. The man is works hard and you can tell.

It still feels like most of his songs have existed forever, but the question lately is whether or not he can keep the experience of listening to a song pleasurable. In the earlier days of Magnetic Fields, the mixing of a steady beat with the beauty of a song like "All the Umbrellas in London" felt like heaven on earth. And with 69 Love Songs, he pretty much laid out his case for being a genius: so many songs, so many of them terrific. So much talent on display, it overflowed. Merritt's next two non-Fields albums, the Sixths' Hyacinths and Thistles and Future Bible Heroes' Eternal Youth (featuring collaborative songs with music by Chris Ewen and vocals by frequent Magnetic Fields' vocalist Claudia Gonson) continued what seemed to be an endless supply of picture-perfect songs.

And then something seemed to go wrong, at least to me. In I, we were given a new series of seemingly flawless verse, but the rapture started to fade. You can't flaw someone for having a gift, but it started to feel like Merritt wasn't so much writing songs to be placed into the public consciousness, but to be catalogued and collected, like a poet trying to make sure his verses were properly presented for display and bound in the correct volume. (The whole conceit of I was that the song titles began with "I." I've worried that at some point he'll do a volume for every letter.) And this is where we are now, with the fourth Magnetic Fields album following a similar jacket design (that black bar down the side of the jewel box with the band's name) - The Collected Works of Stephin Merritt.

And yet, Realism is so much better than the last outing (Distortion) that tried to shake things up by adding reverb and feedback to... well... a bunch of songs that were then sung acoustically with strings in concert. That sounded like the songs in 69 Love Songs and I. This time Stephin brags "no synths" in the liner notes, and we're given toy piano, sitar, banjo, strings, horns. And a lot of perfect pop songs performed like chamber music which is exactly the way these canticles should be sung.

But is it fun? It wants to be. I really want to like the bouncy "Dada Polka" and I kind of do even though it feels like it's trying too hard to sound like it isn't the product of trying too hard. There are lot of odd numbers here - a song about a hootenanny and a song about Christmas and you want to love them but the little eccentricities (the German choruses, the lines about a personality quiz with the zzzz in quiz enunciated) push away. (Although I'll defend to the death "The Doll's Tea Party" which is about a doll's tea party and therefore sounds like the most precious, awful thing ever recorded. But somehow having Gonson sing the song helps highlight lines that genuinely bring on a chuckle: "... we're all in our glittering best / There will be a test / On who's best / And worst dress/ But we won't have it said that we're fashion obsessed / We're just prettier ladies than most of the rest.")

My other question: is it poetry? In the words of Franny Glass: "If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything" as opposed to creating "terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings.” I enjoy Merritt's syntaxy dropping and his clever references. As someone who works in 4-color publishing I love the line in 69 Love Songs' "Reno Dakota": "You're making me blue. Pantone 292." A few years down the road "I could say I want you/ That would be a bore/ Maybe in a font you / Haven't seen before" just makes me a little tired.

But (and this is important) there's a lot of poetry; a lot of places where something beautiful is left on the page. "Walk a Lonely Road" has a lovely melody, but as a verse on a page it would be equally lovely: "When I found this lonely road / Off I walked for good / When I was a little boy / Way off in the wood." Or the closing "From a Sinking Boat" where a drowning man writes a final "I love you" to his love. And... sounds like Stephin Merritt. But wouldn't Stephin Merritt make sure his last words were just perfect? And then there's the hilariously sardonic "Seduced and Abandoned" where a male voice (there are two other males listed, he doesn't make this easy) sings a woman's song about being left with a baby after a lover leaves, ending with "I think I might drink a few / And maybe the baby will too."

But I'm giving away all the punch lines. I think the final score in all of this is that Merritt is a real poet about 75% of the time, which goes toward calculating my rating. And that's a good average. It isn't a bad experience sitting and doing my work to these songs. If I'm getting a little fatigued by Stephin Merritt, it may be because I shouldn't be picking up each new album but should rather wait forty years until there's a huge boxed set of the collected works and we all get to sit around and parse every phrase and decide it's all wonderful. In the meanwhile, I wish he'd emulate some of the people he will hopefully be compared with a century from now - Johnny Mercer, Harold Arlen, Cole Porter - and be a bit more of a showman. I think someone needs to do a Merritt tribute album and hire Kristen Chenowith and Justin Bond to sing on it.