The 'I' of the Beholder

About fifteen years ago, looking for something to play on my college radio station, I cued up a reel-to-reel tape I'd found in a pile by the wall--and fell in love. The tape was by a local Boston band, Buffalo Rome, and the song was called "You Love to Fail." "Maybe tomorrow I'll see love in your eyes; then mine will die," sang a woman with a voice like distilled water, almost without inflection. "You love to fail. That's all you love." The instrumentation was shimmering, curiously static electronics; the melody was as heartbreaking as the words. I wondered if I'd ever again hear anything like it.

A year or so later, I discovered that Buffalo Rome wasn't just an anonymous one-off project. They'd changed their singer and their name; their mastermind, a strange little man named Stephin Merritt, was in the process of recording a CD as the Magnetic Fields, named after a book by André Breton and Philippe Soupault. That album, Distant Plastic Trees, came out only in England at first. A friend taped it for me, and I almost wore the tape out playing it for everyone I knew, and then copying it for most of them. Another friend released one of its songs as a single on his tiny Boston label, Harriet Records; "100,000 Fireflies" became a small classic of the American independent pop underground. Not a hit, exactly--the Magnetic Fields have never had a hit, or anything close to one. What they do have is a hard core of devotees.

Through the 1990s, the Magnetic Fields continued to be something of a secret, spread by word of mouth. Merritt took over singing, in his deadpan baritone; the band's lineup stabilized to include guitarist John Woo, drummer/keyboardist/singer Claudia Gonson and cellist Sam Davol. Side projects emerged: The 6ths (named after the hardest word for lispers to pronounce--their first album was Wasps' Nests), in which Merritt's songs were sung by guest vocalists; Future Bible Heroes, a collaboration with Gonson and multi-instrumentalist Chris Ewen; a "goth-bubblegum" joke band, the Gothic Archies... And Merritt kept producing Magnetic Fields albums, refining his songwriting and developing increasingly eccentric sounds in the studio.

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