"Don't fall in love with me yet, we only recently met ..."
That's how it starts.
"Zelda looks lonely, I want a zebra."
That's how it ends.
Don't ask me to describe the whole thing in one go. I'd only descend into drooling hysterical fandom, and that isn't what Elidor is about. The plain facts are these: New York's Stephin Merritt, the near-genius behind, among others, The Magnetic Fields, has written, played, and sung much of, a triple CD called "69 Love Songs", currently getting the exposure and praise it deserves in the UK after a shamefully delayed release. That's the easy bit to write.
The content is extraordinarily wide, varied, diverse and deeply wonderful. Among the many high points are "Busby Berkeley Dreams", one of the best songs ever written about a simple and uncritical faith in the concept of love, "Come Back From San Francisco" (has there ever been a better song about the feeling when your lover is at a seemingly unreachable distance?), "I Think I Need A New Heart" (the definition of how it feels when love songs on the radio affect you despite yourself) and "Promises of Eternity", a perfect evocation of how it feels when Time and Love work alongside each other, as the defining forces in your life. Then there's "Kiss Me Like You Mean It", one of the few quasi-gospel songs I can listen to without cringing, and "Papa Was A Rodeo", which similarly turns the cliches of retrospective country songs into something utterly wonderful. You can tell what I meant about not wanting to have to describe too much of this record in one go, at least not at the moment.
I don't think anybody else, bar Nick Currie, could create such a brilliant record which is also a compendium of virtually every style extant - most of the time, such things are exaggerated, annoyingly self-conscious acts of "eclecticism". But here we go from mock-flamenco ("World Love"), to joyous Kennedy-era girl-group pop ("Washington, DC") to early 80s British pop at its finest ("Long-Forgotten Fairytale") and there's no sneering, no smugness, no superiority whatsoever, just a deep sense of love for pop music, what it is, what it can do. A song like "A Pretty Girl Is Like ..." is beyond perfect, the kind of thing you sing to yourself at every opportunity you take, you can sense already that you'll still be singing it in 25 years' time, but crucially the historical weight of such a concept doesn't matter. Merritt is clearly above and beyond all my usual instinctive reactions - my reaction to American appropriations of "Irishness" normally makes Bono's sound mild. But Merritt's "Abigail, Belle of Kilronan" is a deeply, profoundly moving song, encapsulating the tragedy of war, and the feelings of leaving your loved one, perhaps forever. Not a trace of separation from, or superiority to, the song's ostensible subject, its exterior.
Of course when you set yourself the target of writing 69 songs (originally, it was 100!) concerning love in some way, then there will have to be weak links. "Punk Love" and "Experimental Music Love" last less than a minute, and are simply repetitions of their titles over simplistic pastiches of the genres from which they take their names, while "Love Is Like Jazz" is an extremely poor knock-off set to a child's idea of what jazz sounds like. "For We Are The King Of The Boudoir", as mock-medievalism, is seriously inferior to even the worst tracks on Momus's "The Little Red Songbook", and "It's A Crime", with its 1983, Culture Club-ish sonics, shows Merritt's early 80s Anglophilia at its least appealing. But even the fillers have a way with words that would shame virtually anyone else - the way "Fido, Your Leash Is Too Long" confuses shit with Shih-Tzu and fuck with foxhounds, the way "Underwear", restrained though it might be, seems to define euphoria.
I know "When My Boy Walks Down The Street" is the finest gay love song I've ever heard. I can barely hold back the euphoria I feel when I hear "Reno Dakota", "Yeah! Oh Yeah!", "Sweet-Lovin' Man", "The Luckiest Guy On The Lower East Side" and "I'm Sorry I Love You". I want to shout it from the rooftops, attempt to convince the entire world of Merritt's brilliance.
As it is, I guess loving it is a pretty good compromise.
Robin Carmody, 3rd August 2000
Promises of eternity:
http://www.elidor.freeserve.co.uk/music.htm
(Crazy for you but) not that crazy: