For the special “Love Package” in our February issue, we solicited commentary from various experts on love in its many forms, and we had a lot of good material for a limited amount of space. We asked Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields for advice on how to write a love song. As you may remember, The Magnetic Fields released the category-killer 69 Love Songs in 1999. Yes, it comprised 69 songs, and yes, it had to be stretched over three discs. Improbably, this behemoth topped many critics’ best-of-1999 lists, including that of former Playboy and Village Voice contributor Robert Christgau. Here’s what Merritt had to say about that trickiest of song genres.
PLAYBOY: What is the relationship between a writer of love songs and the cliches of love?
MERRITT: You can't write a sonnet, for example, without interacting with the traditions and expectations of the form; nor would you want to. If you don't like cliches, be silent.
PLAYBOY: Do you need a lot of different lovers to write a lot of love songs?
MERRITT: I think zero lovers would work fine for most songs, which just describe infatuation or rejection rather than the specifics of an ongoing relationship. Your basic “you treat me bad” song, so popular with garage rock bands, has been written well by many virgins raised in military academies.
PLAYBOY: Can you write love songs in the abstract, without any particular person in mind?
MERRITT: Many or most of my songs have been written without an existing person in my mind, but I make people up all the time. Almost no love songs actually describe their characters anyway, so even a detail like "nice hair" is getting awfully specific; if the listener's loved one is bald, identification will suffer.
PLAYBOY: Which is more important for writing a love song: Realism or idealism?
MERRITT: Idealism, in the sense of being widely generic. Realism is irrelevant, because love lyrics are so resplendent with metaphor that if I say, “and I love the way you turn into a wolf when the moon is full,” any nonschizophrenic listener will assume that's a metaphor. Even if I filled in more details (“and burst out of your expensive suits — maybe you should take them off when you know the moon will be full?”), it would just seem like an allegory.
PLAYBOY: What's the worst line about love you've ever written?
MERRITT: I once made a list of improbable “love is...” similes, out of which I developed my song “Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin.” It almost doesn't matter how ridiculous the image is, if you can back it up with a meaningful statement. There's a Monty Python routine where someone says, “Your majesty is like a stream of bat's piss,” and then has to back that up: “...shining out like a shaft of gold where all around is dark.”
PLAYBOY: What's more important to a love song: Self-analysis by the lover or praise of the loved?
MERRITT: Analysis might be too strong a word, but most love songs say, “I feel the following ten sensations in connection with you,” rather than, “what intriguing characteristics you have; allow me to give some examples.”
PLAYBOY: “Love song” implies a certain amount of success — many of your “love songs” are more like frustration songs, lust songs, obsession songs, breakup songs — does conflict make a “love song” more interesting?
MERRITT: Conflict makes everything more interesting. Happiness is where stories may begin and end, but won't do for the middle.
RSS 2.0
Comments on this entry:
The Magnetic Fields haven't ever made a real song. They prance about in a haze of self-congratulatory masturbation while fully expecting anyone to join in. Well, no thanks, I won't be shaking their hand. I'd like to remind the hair-gel audience that when it comes to the elaborate hoax of this so-called music project that they're just getting spammed in the end. I'd give the album one star out of three, were it relevant at all, which it isn't. They are the equivalent of those magazines who, instead of at least cut, copying, and pasting some content from other magazines to assemble a collection of various other-peoples' ideas, instead just hand you the same magazine they were too lazy to start cutting from while telling you that they wrote the magazine, published it, and are responsible for all its sucess. Oh, and that magazine is Playboy, by the way.