Stephin Merritt, singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist
I initially conceived the album as a poster, to get myself out of obscurity: I pictured glitzy gold-leaf calligraphy reading “Come and hear 100 songs”. Then I thought about getting four drag queens to sing 25 songs each, but realised that since I’d have to make the album in order to teach them the songs, I may as well make it myself.
I was aware of Charles Ives’ 114 Songs, but once I got to 69 it seemed too good a number to pass up. I wrote songs at night in Dick’s bar on Manhattan’s 12th Street – which as I recall had a logo of a cartoon penis – and during the day at St Dymphna’s on St Mark’s Place, about eight hours in each. Writing in public meant I could eavesdrop, write about people around me, or be inspired by what was blasting on the stereo or by the preposterous stories in the bar’s nightlife magazines.
The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side was about my own life in high school: I became very popular once I had a car. I wrote batches of animal songs, and plant songs. After Roses, I thought “What else pricks you?” so I wrote The Cactus Where Your Heart Should Be. A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off was an idea for a T-shirt which became a parody of a country song. The Book of Love is basically a summary or manifesto of 69 Love Songs. It begins “The book of love is long and boring” because the Warholian idea of repetition is the point.
We paid a lot of attention to the sequencing of the songs. It was going to be in alphabetical order until I realised to my horror that the first eight would have been acoustic ballads. We had the band – Sam Davol, John Woo and Claudia Gonson – and I recruited friends to be the other singers. I’d known Shirley Simms since she was 10. LD Beghtol was a regular at Dick’s.
The first review I read of 69 Love Songs said I should be given “the Laureus award for ugly, miserable, homosexual, alcoholic, dwarf, genius lyricists”. Then the Village Voice put me on the cover with my chihuahua, Peter Gabriel covered The Book of Love, and suddenly we had a lot of friends. Before 69 Love Songs I came within an hour of getting an eviction notice. When Gabriel’s cover was used in a J Lo movie, it bought me a house.
Claudia Gonson, piano, drums, vocals, management
Stephin and I became friends when I was 15. I would think, “This guy should be the next Stephen Sondheim.” He would write lyrics on the back of laundry or grocery slips: stuff just poured out of him. So it wasn’t a surprise when he said he wanted to do 69 Love Songs. A big hurdle was the packaging of so much material. The record company and the distributors said it would cost a gazillion dollars and wouldn’t earn any money, because we’d sell only 5,000-8,000 records, but Stephin was persistent. In the end the budget was $15,000.
There are a lot of people on 69 Love Songs and heaps of instrumentation – 90% of it played by Stephin. Otherwise we all played whatever we were capable of. Stephin would sit in a cafe with charts, working out which songs we’d record with which people or instrumentation. For The Things We Did and Didn’t Do, everyone had two or three notes we had to play every 32 measures, which broke my brain, but that song is like a Brian Eno masterpiece. The whole project took a year.
The album was Stephin’s way of expressing a position on heteronormativity. So I’d sing a male part or a lesbian part. I sang Reno Dakota as a gay man and Shirley did Papa Was a Rodeo under the name Mike. It’s normal now, but 25 years ago it felt electrifying.
When the album came out, there was a kind of puzzled effect. Then there was a wave of critical praise and it was No 1 on all these end-of-year lists. It took two years before we were headlining big halls and meeting rock stars, but after years shouting into the wind it felt like validation. We recently got a fan letter from a woman who’d met a guy at the first 69 Love Songs concerts in 2002. They’d broken up, but she said “just for giggles, I contacted him to see if he wanted to see the reunion shows. And now we’re back together.”
• The Magnetic Fields perform 69 Love Songs in full at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 24-25 August; Albert Hall, Manchester, 28-29 August; and the Barbican, London, 31 August and 1 September
