After I stumbled across The Magnetic Fields and their 69 Love Songs album in July 2000, I couldn't believe that they'd already done four or five albums prior to that — where had I been? How did I miss them?
The earlier albums weren't available in the UK at that time, so I ordered them in two batches of imports direct from Merge Records, the first in August and the second in early September. The Charm of the Highway Strip was in the later batch.
Lots of fans rate it among their favourite albums, but I've never got entirely under its skin.
The thing about tongue-in-cheek country music is that lots of country singers already do that kind of thing very well. Nashville's full of post-modern reflexivity these days.
But then The Charm of the Highway Strip isn't even 'straight' about being a country pastiche. It's full of gothic songs about vampires (Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark vampire road movie was apparently a reference point for the album) as well as nodding towards Pirandello (in Two Characters in Search of a Country Song).
And then there's the fact that the album is pretty much Stephin Merritt playing as a one-man band, singing along to his programmed synths (the only other performer credited on the album is Sam Davol, playing cello, and I can't hear him on many of the tracks).
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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