“In a lovestruck daze? Try out “When My Boy Walks Down The Street.” Looking for a soundtrack to playful consummation? “Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits” should do the trick. Are you a lover in showbiz? “Acoustic Guitar,” “Busby Berkeley Dreams” and “Papa Was A Rodeo” should effectively tug at your heartstrings.” —MJ Lawrence
Stephin Merritt, the lyrical genius behind 69 Love Songs, once famously commented that his album wasn’t about love, but “about love songs.” The album won’t celebrate its 15-year anniversary until September, but there’s no better time to fall in love with Merritt, our postmodern Cole Porter, than this Valentine’s Day weekend.
The album is admittedly best suited for the brokenhearted — I’ve made self-help mix CDs solely comprising tracks from the album (featuring the likes of “I Don’t Want to Get Over You,” “Meaningless” and “A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off”). But, just as it’s a pastiche of styles and genres — ukuleles, handclaps, harpsichords, banjos, ocarinas and bongos comfortably coexist with distortion, spiky synths and spoken word — it also touches on virtually every other shade of love, too.
In a lovestruck daze? Try out “When My Boy Walks Down The Street.” Looking for a soundtrack to playful consummation? “Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits” should do the trick. Are you a lover in showbiz? “Acoustic Guitar,” “Busby Berkeley Dreams” and “Papa Was A Rodeo” should effectively tug at your heartstrings.
The album is both morbidly hilarious (“Are you reaching for a knife?/ Could you really kill your wife?” on “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!”) and morbidly sad (“You’re dreaming of the corpse you really love” on “The One You Really Love”). Elsewhere, the album’s understanding of long-distance relationships is cheeky. “Come Back From San Fransisco” and “Washington, D.C.” take inventories of the cities’ most well-known attributes only to slight them — the tourist attractions don’t begin to compare to the attraction of a displaced lover.
Some of the album’s most meta moments stem from Merritt’s fascination with his own focused insecurities. In “All My Little Words,” vocalist LD Beghtol, singing Merritt’s words, “could never make [his lover] stay”, not even if he could “write for you the sweetest song you ever heard.” Even though music fails Merritt, it seems, in “Words” and elsewhere, to be compelled by and thus inextricably bound to love. “That’s where music comes from,” Merritt sings in the famous “The Book of Love.”
The titular “69” is obviously one of many sexual jokes deployed on the album, but such a high quantity points to more than just reciprocal oral sex; it signifies trying, over and over again, to write the perfect love song, failing every time (at least in Merritt’s own opinion, probably), but feeling endlessly compelled to keep trying. Insanity is often defined as doing the same thing repeatedly, expecting different results. This may be true, but Merritt knows better than anyone: Love makes us “Absolutely Cuckoo.”
