OCT 31, 2024 | ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT | By Esabella George
The Boulder Theater isn’t very close. But it’s close enough to only make it through about half of “69 Love Songs,” The Magnetic Field’s 1999 project that earned them a name in the Indie music circles – which I wasn’t a part of to catch wind due to my 2002 birth date. On Saturday evening, October 26, The Magnetic Fields debuted their two night concert celebration, honoring the 25 years of “69 Love Songs.” The set time for those first 34 songs, I don’t quite know, for I was attending night two. Neither of the two classmates I was attending the concert with nor myself knew what would be different about the two concerts until the very end. We finally realized their habit of performing in this two night, linear fashion. They saved the second half of the anthology for Sunday night concert-goers, sequencing the setlist in perfect chronology.
As someone who was not alive 25 years ago, I gave myself a break for not knowing this was the way they toured the album. Splitting the 69 songs into two shows with entirely different sets is a custom to the band and the many fans they have acquired over the years. As a lover of odd numbers, it really pleased my mind that there couldn’t be a perfect split of songs between the two shows, and so someone got a bigger end of the wishbone. The wishbone is which songs you got and what side of the coin they flipped for you. Sunday night was just a convenient night for myself, after hosting a One Direction party with my roommates and dedicating my Saturday evening to an entirely different discography than that of The Magnetic Fields. Getting the second half of the album meant I’d get to witness my favorite song on the three-disc album, and so I was very pleased with how the fates worked out.
The Magnetic Fields were an exceptional band to witness live, they stood still in the same spot, the same formation, their water bottles placed in the same uniform position, even the same glass of alcohol sat at each of their little side tables. There was an undeniable stoic nature to the entire band of five, like they have totally toured this album for 25 years. I don’t know anything about what it feels like to be 25 years old or do something for 25 years straight, but seeing The Magnetic Fields live, their confidence, their friendship without even really looking at each other, was a testament to how time makes something beautiful, it ages so well. So does the voice of lead vocalist, Steven Merritt.
I concurred Merritt has had at least a few dozen more cigarettes since the time he wrote and recorded about 90% of the instruments on the album, 25 years ago, and he even acknowledged the gift of live music trumping any old recorded version; for, after having a coughing fit during “Long Forgotten Fairytale,” he joked that paying money to see a band in concert means you get to experience a live coughing fit: “so much better!” He had a sense of humor which was quite theatrical, even from sitting in the same spot the entire duration of the two acts. It was a bunch of playful face acting, voice acting and he used props (a fake bottle of beer, a disco ball which was illuminated at a dramatic moment during a song). He even exited the stage a few songs in when Shirley Simms, singer, songwriter and ukulele player had a solo song. When he returned to the stage, he made everyone laugh after saying “Thank you,” after the roar of applause. Even though he wasn’t responsible for that applause, the band puts up with his humor, taking credit for someone else’s song. But as I found out after the concert, he is most definitely worthy of the applause as the creator of this entire masterpiece.
The rest of the band didn’t really speak, and it totally worked. They seem to be performing a ritual of allowing Merritt the figurative and literal “floor,” to do and say whatever he pleases, for their art is synonymous to what he has spearheaded, taken risks to produce and trusted in them their own creative decision.
Even though I acknowledge Merritt as the one responsible for the band, the highlight of this show for me was the man at the center. Sam Davol has been the cellist for the band since they got their start in 1991; he is the heart of the band, I now know, after watching the importance of the unique sonic experience he adds to many of the songs in the album. Most notably, “I Shatter” stood out to me as a moment for Davol to shine, which he did over and over again. You can just see the way he connects with his instrument, he maintained a poker face throughout the duration of the show, something I found dynamic about the entire set. He is central, yet almost, mistakenly, indifferent toward what he is doing; in actuality, I found that there was this intentional sentiment that the band would not break from their performance, like this act is all you are going to get, and we didn’t see their smiles and gratitude for the audience until the moment they took their bows. I really liked that. It was like listening to an album for the very first time, with no guiding hand, no prior perceptions of it, when I sang along, it was very quietly to myself, and this felt like an act of respect, especially from the third row.
The most special moment of the set for me was in the second half of the show, after an intermission of, as Merritt put it, “19 to 21 minutes” with a nudge to purchase their merch, we returned to our seats, and “Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin” was performed a little while after their return to the stage. This is a beautiful song, with quite isolated vocals, besides the monotonous piano presence, which I adored. It is bumpy, yet very soft, for it’s a sad sad song. Its last line wrecks me: “Love is like a bottle of Gin, but a bottle of Gin is not like love.” After creating this continuous metaphor throughout the song, anticipating what the “It” is he describes: “They keep it on a higher shelf / the older and more pure it grows” and then “You just get what they put in / and they never put in enough.” He concludes the song with this allegory of love as making us all a little crazy, we want more and more, and are we ever satisfied enough with what we’ve got?
My favorite song of theirs since first hearing it a couple of years ago is called “Papa Was a Rodeo,” and while I wasn’t sure of how the setlist would go yet, this one surprised me as their fourth song of the evening. It is a remarkable duet between Merritt and Simms where two lovers have a conversation where they learn they are not so different, and the defense they put up toward oncoming love, affection and intimacy is revoked once Merritt hears Simms’ side of the story where she is playing a character called Mike.
It is a cowboy song, with such unique metaphors representing our avoidance toward love, being vulnerable, and for how our upbringings can form walls protecting us from something oncoming that feels like an intrusion. The narrative leans into extreme cowboy-like language, bending the intensity of time when Merritt sings, “and now 55 years later / we’ve had the romance of the century,” to which Simms shares the identical narrative about Mike’s story, specifying his “Papa was a rodeo” too.
By the end of the show I had discovered via eavesdropping that many of the concert-goers had attended the two consecutive nights of the show, and if I had known the way they tour “69 Love Songs,” I probably would have secured a ticket to the two shows. The dedication of the fans and the age range we observed is a testament to how timeless this anthology of songs is to any newcomers, young or old. Because Merritt composed a project that incorporates the sounds of many genres from the 90s, it is an ode to literally every taste. Country, punk, indie, shoegaze, even a little bit of metal…it’s all in there! And watching them perform the latter half of the project is a testament, once again, to their musical range and scope of instrumentation.