Will 50 Song Memoir Be Another 69 Love Songs?

Yesterday, The Magnetic Fields announced that 50 Song Memoir - the first new Mags album since 2012's Love at the Bottom of the Sea - will be released on the 10th of March, 2017. They also shared the album's cover art, which looks like this:

It's just an image for now, but in a few months' time, it will be a 5CD set (as well as a 5LP set for you vinyl bores) that people can go out and buy and take home and listen to and cherish forever.

The idea behind 50 Song Memoir is pretty intriguing. Magnetic mainman Stephin Merritt wrote the album just after turning fifty years old, and each of the album's fifty tracks represents one year of his life (hence song titles like '66 Wonder Where I'm From and '86 How I Failed Ethics). Spreading the album over five CDs may seem a little self-indulgent given that the more densely-populated 69 Love Songs was squeezed onto just three, but it makes sense if you think of each disc as a decade: disc one will be the first ten years of Merritt's life, disc two will chronicle his pre-teen and teenage years, disc three his twenties, and so forth.

This is the sort of gimmick I love to see (remember when I named Quiet Marauder's 111-track magnum opus MEN my favourite album of 2013?), and it's all the more exciting for the fact that it's The Magnetic Fields doing it. 69 Love Songs may well be my favourite album of all time, and I was thrilled when I learned that Merritt and Co. would be releasing another jumbo-sized album with a similarly large-scale concept.

But will 50 Song Memoir be another 69 Love Songs? Sure, it's nearly as long and equally brilliantly gimmicky, but is it reasonable to expect that it will deliver the same sort of listening experience? I'm thinking probably not.

Review: Love is Enough by Lia Pamina

Why is love the topic that has dominated popular music for as long as there's been such a thing as popular music? Is it because love, more than any other emotion, makes us feel like singing? Or because love is something almost everyone has felt and can relate to?

Perhaps it's just because love is simply the richest possible seam of musical inspiration. A vast breadth of different emotions and experiences fall under love's general umbrella; Stephin Merritt managed to write 69 love songs, and no two of them cover the same feelings in quite the same way. That first giddy rush; getting devastatingly dumped; growing old together; getting irritated with your significant other and wondering why you got together in the first place; making love; losing your lover to someone else, or to the grave; using love as leverage to get a pair of pet zebras. Perhaps people are still writing love songs because there is a nigh-infinite number of love songs to write.

Lia Pamina is a singer-songwriter from Spain, and her first album Love is Enough delivers us a dozen lovely new love songs that sound like they fell through a wormhole from the 1960s. Pamina plays a variety of different roles over the course of this album, proving - as Stephin Merritt did before her - that love wears many masks and comes in all kinds of different flavours. In Sycamore Tree, she's an innocent young thing, leading her beau by the hand as they make their way to their favourite spot in the park; conversely, in Walking Away, she sounds jaded, singing of darkened halls, narrow streets, and jealous mind.

Opener Better Off Without You and penultimate track Talking to Myself are both break-up songs, broadly speaking. But the former is almost celebratory, with Pamina sounding like her Elefant labelmates The School as she jubilantly pulls the plug on a relationship that's past its peak, while the latter - my personal highlight, along with The Boy I Used to Know - is far more melancholy.

There's a good deal of both joy and sadness on Love is Enough, but whether Pamina is falling in love (Party in the Night), giving up on love entirely (Love), or smugly watching another woman fail to turn her man's head (Keep On Dancing), her sweet songs and the lush, expansive arrangements never cease to delight. More than that, though, this album offers a great answer to the question that asked at the beginning of this review. Why is love the topic that everyone writes songs about? Because love can mean practically anything. Because love covers zillions and zillions of different, unique experiences and feelings.

Because love is enough.

They Are The Gothic Archies

Longtime readers of this blog will not need to be told that 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields is one of my favourite albums ever. I bought the triple CD set in Bristol in 2009; I was there for a university open day, but I managed to squeeze in a trip to Fopp before catching the train home. I spread the album over a whole weekend, listening to Volume 1 on Saturday morning, Volume 2 on Sunday morning, and Volume 3 on Saturday night. I Don't Believe in the Sun, Papa Was a Rodeo and Promises of Eternity were among the instant stand-outs, but I quickly learned to love all 2 hours and 52 minutes of it. It established Stephin Merritt as one of my favourite songwriters, and I've since delved deeper into his work: I now own all the Magnetic Fields albums, plus several other discs released under other names like The 6ths (Hyacinths and Thistles), the Future Bible Heroes (Partygoing and Eternal Youth), and plain old Stephin Merritt (Showtunes).

However, somewhere along the line I realised that 69 Love Songs hadn't been my first taste of Merritt's musical talents after all. In October 2006, a few years before that trip to Fopp in 2009, I bought an issue of Uncut magazine that came, as all issues of Uncut magazine do, with a free CD featuring tracks from some of the latest new releases. One of those tracks was Crows by a band called The Gothic Archies.

I liked the singer's bewitchingly deep voice and his knack for a clever internal rhyme (example: "Every day we hear the same dumb list of those crows' woes"), but for whatever reason I didn't bother to investigate The Gothic Archies any further. Only much later, when I had fallen in love with 69 Love Songs and was digging around to see what else its author had created, did I twig that The Gothic Archies were yet another Stephin Merritt side project, just like The 6ths and the Future Bible Heroes.

February Playlist: What Kind of Monster

Another month, another month-end playlist. Here's what I spent my extra-long February listening to:

1. T.I.W.Y.G. - Savages

(from Adore Life)

Don't mess with love. Or Savages, for that matter. Click here to read my review of their new album, Adore Life.

An Absolutely Cuckoo Valentine's Day

Yesterday was Valentine's Day, and to mark the occasion, a few of us got together at Gwdihw and covered our favourite tracks from 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields.

Me (as Shiny Tiger) performing some Magnetic Fields song, probably

It was a slightly bizarre experience, to be quite honest. Listening to an album - particularly an album like 69 Love Songs - tends to be a very private experience, and so it was strange to hear those gorgeous Love Songs in public. Finding myself surrounded by people who knew all the words to Absolutely Cuckoo and Washington, D.C. was something of a revelation; until last night, a small part of me suspected that I may have just imagined 69 Love Songs, because surely if those songs were real then everyone would be singing them?

Let's Pretend We're Stephin Merritt

What are you doing for Valentine's Day this year? Catching a film? Enjoying a romantic candlelit dinner? Jetting off to Paris for a long weekend in the City of Love?

Well, whatever you had planned, cancel it, because you're coming to this instead:

Click here for Facebook event page.

Remember when, a little while back, I convinced a bunch of talented people to cover their favourite tracks from 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields? Well, many of those talented people will be getting together in Cardiff on the 14th of February to perform their covers live and pay musical tribute to Stephin Merritt and his magnificent three-disc masterwork.

New Year Wishes: Progress Report

Today - the 3rd of July - is the first day of the second half of 2015. The whole of next week will be dedicated to a halftime report, which means that I'll be looking back at some of my favourite songs and albums of the year so far, as well as highlighting a few records that I'm excited to hear in the latter half of 2015.

As for today's blog, well, now seems like a good time for a progress check. Back at the very, very end of 2014, I named five artists who I fervently hoped would release new albums in 2015. Those artists were:

• The Magnetic Fields
• Tindersticks
• Iron Maiden
• Tilly and the Wall
• Guillemots

So, now that half a year has elapsed...how are those new albums coming along, folks?

The Magnetic Fields

There's been no sign of a proper follow-up to 2012's Love at the Bottom of the Sea, although Stephin Merritt did play a couple of never-before-heard "micro-songs" to a small dog named Lola. That may well be it for this year, I fear.

April Playlist: Stick it in Your Arm

We've (almost) reached the end of April, and it's been a month of freshness and newness and sunshine all around. Here are 10 of the tracks that have soundtracked the last 30 days or so for me.

My March playlist can be found here.

1. Rainbow Road - Cloud

(from Zen Summer)

We'll start, perversely enough, with the closing track from Cloud's new album (which I reviewed earlier this week). I don't know for sure that this song's title is a Mario Kart reference, but I fervently hope it is.

3 Albums for Springtime

As you may have noticed, spring is here! The sun is out, the jumpers are off, and there's been a noticeable change in the kind of music I've been listening to lately. Here are three albums that never fail to make it feel like springtime:

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

If I associate an album with a particular time of year then, more often than not, it will be the time of year at which I originally bought that album. I picked up CYHSY's self-titled debut in March 2007, and since then, it's always reminded me of the clocks going forward and the sun coming out. Happily, it still sounds as fresh and as bonkers now as it did eight year (eight years!) ago.

Springiest Track: The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth

"How can I keep me from moving? Now, I need a change of scenery"

New Year Wishes

Here we are, then: the last day of 2014. I've already weighed and measured the best albums of this year, so now it's time to look into the future, to wonder what musical marvels 2015 might have in store for us.

Now, we already have a few dead certs. Modest Mouse, for example, have assured us that they will be releasing a new album next year, as have The Decemberists. But today's blog post isn't concerned with these releases; instead, it's all about speculation, the unconfirmed classics of 2015.

Here, then, are 5 artists that I'd really, really like to hear more from in the next 12 months. As far as I'm aware, none of these bands have given any indication that new work is on the way, but hey, if you're going to indulge in a little wishful thinking, the 31st of December seems like an opportune time for it.

The Magnetic Fields

Wishful-O-Meter: 2/5

It doesn't seem too optimistic to hope for a new MF album in 2015. In fact, you might even say we're due one - Distortion came out in 2008, Realism in 2010, and Love at the Bottom of the Sea in 2012, so if Stephin Merritt keeps up this every-other-year workrate, there should be an extra album in the MF discography by this time next year. Failing that, I'd settle for some Merritt solo action, or another 6ths album.

Tindersticks

Wishful-O-Meter: 3/5

Wikipedia may count 2013's Across Six Leap Years - the latest Tindersticks release - as a studio album, but I don't. It was more of a career retrospective, and while it's cool that Staples et al bothered to re-record all of their old hits, I'm still waiting for a proper follow-up to The Something Rain (which came out all the way back in early 2012). Bonus points if the new one is on a par with The Hungry Saw - it's not my #1 favourite 'Sticks album, but demanding something as good as Tindersticks II at this stage just seems churlish.

Iron Maiden

Wishful-O-Meter: 1/5

If West Ham United's most famous fans fail to release a new album in 2015, this will be the longest Maiden drought the world has endured since the band's eponymous first album was released in 1980. The Final Frontier was almost four and a half years ago now, and so it seems perfectly reasonable to expect a follow-up before Christmas comes 'round again.

Tilly and the Wall

Wishful-O-Meter: 4/5

Things have been disquietingly, uh, quiet in the Tilly camp of late. Their official website still features 'upcoming' tour dates from June 2013, and nobody seems to have heard much of anything from them since Heavy Mood came out. Still, a boy can dream...

Guillemots

Wishful-O-Meter: 1/5...but also 5/5

"More and more gardens are coming into bloom" said Fyfe Dangerfield in a news post on the Guillemots website back in June. On Summer Island, the follow-up to 2012's springtimey Hello Land!, is now two years and three months overdue, and while Fyfe and Co are supposedly still working on it, we're still waiting for some kind of sign that it's nearing completion.

As you can see, I've given this release two completely opposite wishful ratings: a 1 because they can't possibly need another whole year on this, and a 5 because it's beginning to seem like this album will never see the light of day. Time will tell, I suppose, but one thing's for sure: if they continue at this rate then the seasonal quadrilogy that they promised us back in 2012 won't be complete until some time in 2019.

* * *

So that's it for this year! I'll maybe revisit this list in December '15 and see how many (if any) of my wishes came true. In the meantime, have a happy new year and cross your fingers for some great music in the months to come! 

10 Christmas Songs You Might Not Know

December is upon us, which means that it's now officially okay to listen to Christmas music. In fact, you're pretty much obliged to listen to Christmas music, so if you're not a big fan of Wizzard and Nat King Cole and Cliff fucking Richard, you may want to find something else with which to occupy your ears this December.

And that's where today's blog comes in. If you're bored of the same old Slade - because, let's face it, all Christmas CDs have basically the same tracklist - here are 10 lesser-known Yuletide classics that you might not have come across before. I've certainly never spotted any of these on a seasonal compilation, anyway.

1. A Christmas Duel - The Hives and Cyndi Lauper
A rollicking and gleefully hateful cheating song - and then some! Frankly, I'm not sure why Cyndi and The Hives haven't worked together since. I'd gladly listen to a whole album of this stuff.

2. A Christmas Carol - Tom Lehrer

Tom Lehrer ought to be everybody's songwriting hero. This is a characteristically sardonic take on the most wonderful profitable time of the year, recorded in an era when it wasn't yet clichéd to be cynical at Christmas (more on that later).

Papernut & The Primitives

The album on the left is There's No Underground by Papernut Cambridge. The one on the right is Spin-O-Rama by The Primitives. Both albums are released today, and so I thought I'd review them side-by-side, to find out what else they have in common. Words in red refer to the Papernut album, while the blue words are all about The Primitives.

With There's No Underground, Ian Button's outfit have created a pleasantly odd little world in which people manage to get by without any help from the government or, uh, the tube. The album is populated by such oddball characters as 'The King of the Prams and the Dustbins' and the mysterious 'umbrella man'. This is the sort of thing you'd find on a Mansun album, but the songs actually sound more like a cross between The Kinks and Robyn Hitchcock.

Spin-O-Rama, as far as I can tell, aims to evoke the dizzy euphoria that you get on those funfair rides that spin you around until you vomit.

Sequencing 69 Love Songs

Sequencing is an under-appreciated art. Putting everything in the right order is a big part of the game; the ebb and flow of an album is very important, and if you put no thought into the running order, you'll usually end up with a disjointed mess, even if each track is individually very good.

Still, the average album only has about twelve tracks, and just because you're able to arrange a dozen songs into something cohesive doesn't mean that you'll be able to do the same for a three-disc behemoth like 69 Love Songs.

My Sad Songs

Last Monday, my good friend Josh blogged a list of his Top 10 Sad Songs. Today, I'm doing the same - here are my favourite nuggets of lachrymose musical loveliness, roughly arranged from least to most upsetting:

Mistakes by Tindersticks (from The Bloomsbury Theatre 12.3.95)

Stuart Staples' stunning song of regret first appeared on Tindersticks II, but this live performance, recorded at London's Bloomsbury Theatre, is the version to seek out - the lush orchestral arrangement is brought even further to the fore, significantly upping the songs 'curl up in a ball and weep' credentials.

In Different Ways - Progress Report

I bet you're wondering how the 69 Love Songs cover project is going. Well, you'll be pleased to know that it's still trundling on - I uploaded this one only yesterday:



Some stats:

• 17 of the 69 songs have now been recorded and uploaded to The Album Wall's SoundCloud page.
• A further 24 songs have been reserved and crossed off the list. We're just waiting for those artists to finish their covers and send 'em over.
• That leaves 28 songs still up for grabs.

i to Z

When I wrote about The Magnetic Fields' i in my Beyond 69 Love Songs blog last month, I mentioned its main gimmick (all of the song titles begin with the letter 'I') but failed to mention the other one. See if you can spot it:

Things Found in Liner Notes, Volume 2

More treasures that make it worth buying the CD. Volume 1 is here.

• The booklet that accompanies Low's Drums and Guns album is, appropriately enough, filled with pictures of drums and guns:

Beyond 69 Love Songs

If you've already got 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields, you may feel that there's no need to investigate their other albums. And, really, that's fair enough. The jumbo-sized triple set is undeniably career-defining; Stephin Merritt did set out to write an instant, standalone songbook, and the resulting album requires no extra embellishments. Besides, sixty-nine songs is more than many bands accumulate across their entire career.

Still, if sixty-nine songs didn't satiate you - if those three discs merely whet your appetite for magnetic goodness - the MF discography has plenty of other gems for you to unearth. Excluding 69 Love Songs, a total of nine albums have been released under the Magnetic Fields name, and while I'm not sure any of them are actually better than the big one, they're certainly well worth a look.

So, which of the 'other' Magnetic Fields albums should you check out first? Well, here are three suggestions..

Want to see where it all began?

It's hard to pick the better of the first two MF albums - Distant Plastic Trees has the hits (including 100,00 Fireflies) but album #2, The Wayward Bus, feels a bit more cohesive and fully-formed. Fortunately, you don't have to choose one or the other, because as of 1994, both albums are included on one jam-packed CD. These are the records that featured Susan Anway, not Stephin Merritt, as lead vocalist, and her shy-sounding vocals (combined with Merritt's sticky sweet synthesisers) make this the perfect springtime listen. Wait for a sunny day, grab your headphones, and go for a walk.

My favourite tracks from The Wayward Bus/Distant Plastic Trees are When You Were My Baby, Candy, Smoke Signals, and - of course - 100,000 Fireflies.

Want more high-concept brilliance?

The Charm of the Highway Strip is my favourite MF album outside of 69 Love Songs. It's based around themes of travelling and loneliness (not to mention the vampires), and the swathes of synth-country that fill this disc truly are a treat. Think George Jones meets New Order. It sounds great no matter how you listen to it, but I reckon it would sound best if you, like the various protagonists, were hurtling down a lonely road in the middle of the night.

My favourite tracks from The Charm of the Highway Strip are Long Vermont Roads, Born on a Train, and I Have the Moon.

Want more like 69 Love Songs?

When trying to pick the MF album that most resembled 69 Love Songs, I initially thought of Get Lost, which features a nice blend of gentle romance (With Whom to Dance?) and more intricate synth stuff (Smoke and Mirrors). But I eventually decided that i, the LP that came directly after 69 Love Songs, was a better fit. It's the first of Merritt's 'no-synth trilogy', and probably the best of his post-69 albums, with plenty to offer the listener who loved the triple set and aches for more. In an Operetta recalls the frilly genre play of For We Are the King of the Boudoir, while the chamber pop stuff like I Die and Irma could be compared to any number of its predecessors. Elsewhere, I Thought You Were My Boyfriend is an electro-pop raveup that contains no electronics, and Infinitely Late at Night harks back (sort of) to Love is Like Jazz. The album's gimmick, incidentally, is that every song title begins with the letter 'I'.

My favourite tracks from i are I Thought You Were My Boyfriend, I Was Born, and It's Only Time.

So there you have three potential launchpads for your leap into the wider world of The Magnetic Fields. Enjoy!

My Top Ten

Since this is The Album Wall's 100th post (woo milestone!), I thought I'd give you all a treat and finally explain the reasoning behind my Top Ten list on the right-hand side of the blog. These are my ten favourite albums of all time - of all time! - and today, you're going to find out why.

Fables of the Reconstruction by R.E.M.

Why I Bought It: I was just starting to dig into R.E.M.'s rich discography. I'd already bought Out of Time; this was my next purchase, mainly because it was the cheapest one in HMV that day (£3!)

Why I Love It: Its sound is intriguing and mysterious when compared to other R.E.M. releases, and the loose running theme (a lot of tracks focus on unusual characters from the South) makes it a little more cohesive than its cousins. Oh, and it's the album that houses Life and How to Live It, which may possibly be my favourite song of all time.

3 Love Songs

For the last few days, I've been asking various bands and musicians if they'd like to cover a track from 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields. The plan, ultimately, is to cover all sixty-nine songs; quite a few people have already opted in, as evidenced by the big list on this page.

Last night, the first couple of recordings came in. Today, I received a third. Let's listen, shall we?

Want to submit a cover of your own? Go here, choose a song that's not already taken, and then let me know which one it is. You can do this via email (thealbumwall@outlook.com) or on Twitter (@TheAlbumWall); either way, I'll cross your track off the list and you can send over your version whenever it's ready.