69 Love Songs was always going to be a hard act to follow and Merritt reverted to his preference for 30-40 minute genre exercises for the band’s next four LPs. But that approach expired with last year’s 50 Song Memoir, another Magnetic Fields album that delivers on the audacious promise of its title.
Any listeners anticipating a straightforward autobiographical offering from Merritt, however, would’ve been slightly mystified by the contents of 50 Song Memoir. While each song accounts for an individual year of Merritt’s life, the lyrical approach broadly varies. Some songs are indeed descriptive chronicles, while others are more impressionistic and others display a literal interpretation of the theme.
“I was very careful to change the meaning of the correspondence of the year to the song as much as possible in my never-ending quest for maximum variety,” says Merritt.
There are a range of songs that include details about significant people from Merritt’s life, perhaps most notably his mother and an especially disagreeable ex-boyfriend of hers. But some of the most important people from his life don’t appear on the album. For example, a curious exclusion are Merritt’s Magnetic Fields bandmates who he’s worked with for multiple decades.
“That was intentional because I didn’t want to be singing about my band members on stage while they were there,” he says. “There’s a song by the Roches called The Death of Suzzy Roche in which they sing about how Suzzy, their youngest sister, has embarrassing laundry. It says, ‘She’s got stinky, crusty socks. She’s got underwear that shocks.’ So I thought about that as what not to do with true songs about oneself. It would be a really bad idea to embarrass a band member night after night on stage.”
Merritt’s career output is indicative of his extensive knowledge of music history and stylistic movements. This is reflected on 50 Song Memoir in the occasional references to other artists (such as the 1989 Musical Marching Zoo, on the track of the same name) and the record’s varied stylistic palette. Similar to 69 Love Songs, the stylistic breadth makes for a consistently stimulating and unique listening experience. However, Merritt wasn’t particularly focused on attaining originality.
“I don’t think I believe in originality except as a statistical accident,” he says.
“Originality is mostly context. I have maybe done the only one-song-per-year memoir album, but I’m sure there are hundreds if not thousands of memoirs organised to be one chapter per year. Though, I can’t name any because the organisation of books gets much less scrutiny than the organisation of albums for some reason.”
Contrary to what one might expect, during the album’s creation, Merritt refrained from making comparisons between his song-based memoir and literary memoirs.
“I was not trying to make [the songs] particularly literary or autobiographical in a sense that corresponded directly to memoir writing as a literary tradition. I was stuck in the general contours of a pop song understood as a tradition stretching back into the 1800s. And I made myself the rule that I was not going to read anyone’s memoir while working on this project. So I bought Grace Jones’ memoir, but I’m not allowed to read it until the tour is over.”
The 50 Song Memoir tour comes to a close with The Magnetic Fields’ performances at Melbourne Festival where Merritt and co. will perform the new album in its entirety over two nights. The band’s lineup has grown to account for the extent of instrumentation on 50 Song Memoir, and they’ll be situated within a dollhouse-inspired stage setup. Merritt looks forward to the trip Down Under, albeit for what awaits at its conclusion.
“I think actually that I will bring Grace Jones’ memoir to Australia and read it on the plane trip home.”
