Hyacinths and Thistles — it's a tongue-twister again, like Wasps' Nests — will always be in the shadow of The Greatest Album Ever Made. I suppose everything is in that shadow, but you know what I mean: it's both in the shadow and very close to it. Stephin Merritt recorded it in 1998, the year before 69 Love Songs came out in the US, but it didn't come out (in its full US version) until 2000. In the UK, 69LS didn't come out until June 2000, I discovered it in July, and Hs&Ts came along at the start of September. No wonder I was a little giddy.
In the story I told I mentioned that Tim and I had already heard some of these songs live at Ronnie Scotts in Birmingham, all sung by Stephin rather than the guest vocalists that feature on the CD. A few months later, a few of us saw what I think remains the only "6ths gig" at Shepherds Bush Empire, where Marc Almond, Sally Timms, Sarah Cracknell, Neil Hannon and Amelia Fletcher all performed their 6ths songs, with the rest of The Magnetic Fields backing them. Lots of fun with long woolly scarves that evening.
Anyway, if Hs&Ts weren't in 69LS's shadow it would stand out as an astonishing album of rare genius. Brilliant song after brilliant song after brilliant song. Here's some notes on a few of them.
He Didn't is one of Stephin's many exhortations to dance that gets it title, according to legend, from the fact that the man to whom it was addressed "in real life" didn't take up the invitation. Crooned by Bob Mould of Hüsker Dü like you've never heard him before.
I've Got New York features faded folk filly from the fift… errr sixties [sorry], Melanie, singing a song to an answering machine down the line from a callbox after a night on the juice, her voice cracked; and her only accompaniment is a toy piano played by Margaret Leng Tan, the acolyte of John Cage and Morton Feldman. This drunken folly manages to end up echoing Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land ("from the Great White Way to Little West Twelfth; from the big blue bridge to the Hudson's swells"). How irresistible does that sound?
Kissing Things, performed by Sarah Cracknell, was originally written with Tom Waits in mind. Surprise, surprise, they couldn't get him.
Waltzing Me All the Way Home: it's worth reading Ernest Paik on this song and on Odetta, including the quote that Stephin cried at the recording session, because it was so beautiful, and because she'd been an idol of his as a singer since he was a child. Very sad that she didn't get to sing at Obama's inauguration.
Oahu: the 25-minute coda to this song shows, as with Hit to Death in the Futurehead that there are smarter ways to fill up the blank space on a CD than "surprise" "hidden" tracks. Unlike The Flaming Lips' track, Oahu is actually quite pleasant to leave on until the end. It sounds like Jean-Michel Jarre with wit.
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