69 Love Songs - Magnetic Fields

69 Love songs is a three disc "concept album" conceived by the prolific songwriter Stephin Merritt. He has several bands, the Magnetic Fields being but one. He has been quoted as saying he came up with the idea to write 100 songs about love "as a way of introducing myself to the world", but settled on 69. According to his website houseoftomorrow.com (which details all of his various incarnations) , he originally came up with the idea that the album would become a live musical revue with varying performers in different venues. The band did a limited tour of the album, possibly not to be repeated as Merritt always has a new project on the go. The year ...  Read the complete review

Ask twenty Magnetic Fields fans to name their favourite track on 69 Love Songs and you'd probably get twenty different answers. That's if you can find twenty fans in the first place. I haven't encountered any other Stephin Merritt obsessives, and I've been looking since 2000. In fact, before I bought this album, I used to think that Merritt (who pretty much IS the band - and Future Bible Heroes, and The Gothic Archies, and The Sixths, for that matter) was just one of those weird conceptual musicians that broadsheet newspapers mentioned in their arts sections ...  Read the complete review

'69 Lovesongs' is phenomenal! Stephin Merritt's songwriting ability simply cannot be understated. Not only does he play hundreds of instruments, but he writes the wittiest, most cynical and intelligent lyrics that i have heard in a long time. Some people may think that 69 tracks on 3 cds is a little excessive for an album, but the project was initially to write 100 lovesongs, for a live act. However when the group realised that it would take well over 4 hours to perform 100, they dropped down to the next most significant(?!) number- sixty-nine. When listening to this album it may seem curious to call them lovesongs, but ...  Read the complete review

Magnetic fields are a curious little band that have been creating off the wall music for a decade or so now, and despite writing some cracking stuff they've been ignored by 99% of the western world. Why? Because they insist on releasing stuff like this. Dont get me wrong 69 love songs is a wonderful album, but its 69 tracks on THREE cd's. Hardly a marketing mans dream is it? Its takes some patience just to listen to the first 23 track cd, but then there's 2 others... It's such a large opus theres a A-Z track listing as well as the usual! It sounds like commercial suicide, but it is in fact an absolute wonder of the modern world. There's ...  Read the complete review

The patchiest album ever? I'm not suggesting that the magnetic fields have overstretched themselves on this album, but.... oh wait , yes, i am. 69 songs about love..... just for the point of sexual innuendo? When it's good, it's seminal. Clever lyrics and strong melodies come together to create songs that should be timeless classics, such as "Book of Love" or "Busby Berkely Dreams". Stephen Merrit's baritone voice is lovely. A lot of the tracks feel like fillers, they are experimental and playful, but it doesn't sound like the ideas behind them have been fully realised. This is probably due to time constraints in the ...  Read the complete review