Music Arcades: The Magnetic Fields: 69 Love Songs

Sound the trumpets, here it is! The greatest album ever recorded, and in its definitive form — the US Merge Records boxed set with 73-page booklet featuring a song-by-song guide to the album in interview between Stephin Merritt and Daniel Handler.

You can't really be without that booklet if you really love the album and want to explore as many of its pleasures as possible. I tried to include as many of the essential points from the booklet as possible in the 69 Love Songs wiki, as well as adding some of my own pleasures, plus the footnotes and references that I'd collected and rooted out.

Later on, of course, LD Beghtol, who sings lead on 6 of the 69 songs, starting compiling his own guide to the album in book form. He solicited fan contributions, but I didn't initially understand what he wanted. Then he got in touch just as we were about to head off on holiday last year, saying his deadline was in three days and he'd really like to include something from me. I panicked a bit at the thought of missing this opportunity, copied the album onto my iPod (I've only got the 512 MB version) and listened to it in the car on the way down to Cornwall, posting in my contributions from an internet café in Falmouth over the following week (LD kindly gave me an extension). I like the way it came out — though at least one of my contributions lost its sense by being edited a little harshly — and LD was kind enough to call me a gentleman, in print. The bear!

I've lost count of the number of copies of this album that I've owned in its various incarnations. But it's certainly over 20. I keep a few on hand as random gifts (I gave Lucy one for our first Valentines Day, a hasty fallback option that managed to be 138% appropriate), and always buy them up when I see them going cheap. I checked downstairs, and my current stock is three, not including Lucy's copy. I've got two copies of the US Merge box set, one with its cellophane wrapping still sealed (Liz imported that one from NYC for me). That's kind of in case there's a nuclear war and all the cardboard in the world disintegrates unless it's sealed in cellophane, and then at least the cockroaches to whom the planet is bequeathed will still have a copy of 69 Love Songs, so they'll know we at least had a wry smile on our faces as we blew ourselves apart.

Needless to say, this is not the end of my comments on 69 Love Songs…

Buy this version of the album direct from Merge