September 7, 1999 by A.S. Van Dorston

Stephen Merritt is on fire. What better, more audacious way to close out the century than to challenge Irving Berlin and Cole Porter as the most prolific songwriter by recording a triple album of love songs! The small, unassuming man started out the decade with his little band and five modest indie-pop albums inspired by the minimalism of Young Marble Giants, the pop-bombast of ABBA, despair of Joy Division and European synth-pop. While Magnetic Fields was always a true band, it couldn’t quite contain Merritt’s force-of-nature songwriting personality, and his tunes soon spilled over into side projects such as the 6ths, Future Bible Heroes and Gothic Archies. Even the ambitious project of writing 69 love songs couldn’t contain his ballooning creativity, resulting in over 100 songs, many of which will end up in bed with his other bands. The result is 69 love songs about various objects of desire, people of undetermined gender, musical instruments, his dog, and genres of music. The fact that about 40 of these songs are truly great is astounding. Think about it, of the triple albums in the history of rock (of which there are frighteningly plenty of), no one else came close. The music rarely eclipses the lyrics, but nicely match the moods using everything from country to jazz. The characters experience nearly the entire range of feelings — forlorn, rejected, blissful, ecstatic, feisty and vengeful. For whatever occasion, this album has at least five songs to go along with it. It is impossible to pick fewer than a dozen favorites, but suffice to say that Merritt has transcended the comparisons to other famous songwriters like Burt Bacharach, Phil Spector and Brian Wilson and become a legend in his own right with one of the best albums of the 90s.