Speaking of wedding songs, the last and best track on i is one that many people have chosen for their ceremonies. Evidence below. Just a couple of months after i came out, there was a thread on the mailing list about whether It's Only Time made a great song for a wedding.
Many thought it did, while others observed how sad Stephin's voice sounds. Here's my contribution to that discussion, from July 2004,
At one of the London gigs recently, Claudia mentioned they'd been told of 2 or 3 people who'd used the song at weddings, to which Stephin added "…which just goes to show they misunderstand it" or something similar.
To me it certainly sounds like it could be heard as a declaration of determined and unblinking, but unrequited, love. The sad bits are 'If rain/snow won't change your mind, let it fall. The rain/snow won't change my heart at all'
Mind you, it's not as extreme as Bob Dylan's Wedding Song, which makes a declaration of love sound like an Old Testament curse.
…which just serves to remind me of how rarely I have a new idea. Though my thoughts about this song have moved on slightly. It's not just a song of unrequited love; it's a song of vampire love. Yes, that's right: the singer is undead. Hence "Why would I stop loving you a hundred years from now?" and "Years falling like grains of sand mean nothing to me — It's only time."
Before you write this off as madness, remember vampire songs run throughout Stephin's writing career, from Born on a Train ("turns into walking dead like me") and Crowd of Drifters ("You meet all kinds of people / Some of them cast no shadow / They have no reflections") from Charm of the Highway Strip up to Walk a Lonely Road from the latest album. And if you're still in doubt, there's the more direct I'm a Vampire from Eternal Youth along with the more distantly related Zombie Boy.
So there's today's pet theory.
As for the rest of i, it felt as though Stephin were delaying the official follow-up to the greatest album ever made by releasing stuff in his other guises (The 6ths, Future Bible Heroes, soundtrack artist) to forestall comparisons. It couldn't work, of course. The first Magnetic Fields album, four and a half years after 69 Love Songs, was always destined to be compared to its predecessor — not least by those who had missed "the event" of that album's release at the time.
Unless it managed to be an even better greatest album ever made, i was always going to suffer from that comparison. It still does. But the inevitable sense of disappointment has passed into acceptance, rendering the album's many charms more accessible. Charms like the arrangements and recording, which are even better than on 69LS, and the flashes of dada nonsense in the accompaniment to I was Born.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
Yes, another vampire song.
I never felt disappointed by it - and I've never understood the mindset that could consider it so.
Possibly because I don't, and didn't, see 69LS as an entity to compare other entities to, it's part of the body of work - 'i' is another addition to that.
Posted by: mym | 02 September 2010 at 11:11 AM