A brilliant head rules the heart

In the music industry's currently straitened circumstances, most musicians who suggested that their record company release of a three-CD concept album would be lucky to be dismissed with a hoarse laugh. And yet, that - the CD release, at any rate - is exactly what Stephin Merritt, leader of cult New York band the Magnetic Fields, has done. Banish any thoughts of overblown Seventies concept albums; the Magnetic Fields' fifth album, 69 Love Songs, cuts no slack. An idiosyncratic collection of unusual, often hilarious, always disquieting, pop songs, they wear their art on their sleeves and, as rave reviews proliferate, look set to repeat the success of Laurie Anderson's "O Superman".

In the music industry's currently straitened circumstances, most musicians who suggested that their record company release of a three-CD concept album would be lucky to be dismissed with a hoarse laugh. And yet, that - the CD release, at any rate - is exactly what Stephin Merritt, leader of cult New York band the Magnetic Fields, has done. Banish any thoughts of overblown Seventies concept albums; the Magnetic Fields' fifth album, 69 Love Songs, cuts no slack. An idiosyncratic collection of unusual, often hilarious, always disquieting, pop songs, they wear their art on their sleeves and, as rave reviews proliferate, look set to repeat the success of Laurie Anderson's "O Superman".

Merritt, a thirtysomething New Yorker, is, at first encounter, an unsettling prospect. Small, with baleful eyes, he doesn't waste his breath on chit chat and his thoughts come perfectly packaged in a deep, slow voice. "I have a low and affectless voice," he says in a low and affectless voice. It's no surprise that his other work - as a music critic for Time Out New York - is famous for its articulate savagery.

He began writing music at an early age (both his parents were songwriters), taking guitar and composition lessons, before attending several US universities on the pretext of studying film, although he usually ended up at the electronic music laboratories. Other than a lasting love of bubblegum music, his two musical epiphanies were, he says, Berlin's Einstürzende Neubauten's first New York concert in the early Eighties - "I got scars on my neck and permanent hearing damage" - closely followed by Tiny Tim, the six-foot ukulele player who sang "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" in a startling falsetto. "He played a whole compendium of popular music - 1880 to 1980 - without stopping. There were six people in the audience and all of them were in tears, including Tiny Tim. Both were life-changing shows, although for opposite aesthetics."

While the Fields - whose fluctuating line-up now includes pianist/percussionist Claudia Gonson; cellist/flautist Sam Davol; banjo, mandolin and guitar player John Woo and accordionist Daniel Handler (Merritt plays the ukulele) - started recording some 10 years go, the singer maintains other personae for different projects. "The Gothic Archies specialise in a mood so depressing it's funny; the Future Bible Heroes are an electro-pop group and The 6th pick up the rest."

There's a persuasive selection of musical styles to be found on the album. Cod Celtic folk in "Wi' Nae Wee Bairn Ye'll Me Beget"; a gentle tilt at Paul Simon's brand of world music in "World Love"; there's psychedelia ("When My Boy Walks Down the Street" - all Merritt's lyrics are aimed at an indiscriminate mix of genders) and jazz. One country song, "Papa Was a Rodeo", has more twang and better twinges than Dolly Parton. Nor is musique concrÿte neglected: "Experimental Music Love" is the love song that the avant-garde composer Alvin Lucier never wrote. About the only genres missing are heavy metal and rap, which, he points out, wouldn't normally fit into a variety album. And Satanic rock? "Mmmm ... love songs to ... Satan? I have one, actually. A Gothic Archies song called 'Satan, Your Way Is a Hard One', written under the influence of the Rolling Stones. I did consider putting it on 69 Love Songs, but there wasn't enough love ..." and his voice tails off a little sadly.

All this raises the issue of the "authentic" voice. There will be some who question Merritt's feeling for, say, country songs, because he's not so much Appalachian whimsy as an urbane East Coaster with a sense of irony. But there is, Merritt's music suggests, no mystery to music - "I use appropriation and fraudulent authenticity and weird time signatures; I don't think it's experimental as much as playful" - and certainly no ownership in the peculiarly Volkish manner which infects much pro-authenticity thinkers.

"My interest in 'keeping it real' is pretty nil," Merritt says. "Being a Gary Numan fan, I find artifice more fun than pure confession. I'm not sure if these are opposites, but I'd rather see Oklahoma! where people burst into song than Oklahoma! where people don't burst into song. Music is inherently artificial."

The apotheosis of this view is realised on one of the album's most beguilingly catchy pop songs, "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure". De Saussure was the Swiss linguist whose 19th century theories lead to the development of structuralism. Chief among his work was the realisation that an object - the signified - is not the same as its appellation - the signifier. In other words, an eternal separation exists between everything and the price of the ability to use language is to accept this. Scritti Politti may have sung "I'm in love with Jacques Derrida" in the Eighties, but Merritt's song - in which de Saussure, having impugned the honour of songwriters Holland, Dozier, Holland gets shot - has a darker meaning.

"69 Love Songs is not remotely an album about love," he pronounces. "It's an album about love songs, which are very far away from anything to do with love. The question of authenticity seems to be connected with distance. [Ethno-musicologist] Alan Lomax went around making field recordings of toothless octogenarians in the Deep South. He knew perfectly well that he was making stars of these people, and what he was recording was their very toothlessness and octogenarian-ness, and that was cool, whereas a 30-year-old with all their teeth just wouldn't have been glamorous for Lomax. He had an inverted glamour which was directly comparable to Warhol's point-and-click films of transvestites and drug addicts. You point the machine at the misfit and certain things start. I feel like I do that. What I see as the seamless Lomax-Warhol tradition I do to myself and I do it to my friends."

If this suggests that 69 Love Songs is merely a CD set that documents a set of friends capering in front of a microphone, it would be inaccurate. The Fields are tight musicians. Margaret Leng Tan, a pianist whose new recordings of John Cage have just been released, appears on an album by The 6th, and Merritt himself has been offered a song-cycle commission for a major US orchestra. He's unsure whether to accept: "I'm not sure I want to be taken seriously. It would be somewhat imprisoning."

And yet there is something inherently serious about these songs. Their cumulative effect is one of dislocation and displacement. A beauty and, if not a suppressed passion, then certainly a poignancy become apparent. "Parades Go By" or "Asleep and Dreaming" have a poise that comes straight out of Irving Berlin. There's a precision among the words that you might expect from a man who composed and named a Pantone colour after a friend. Even so, his lyrics can be studiedly odd: "Who will mourn the passing of my heart," runs one, "will its little droppings/ climb the pop charts?"

Merritt brightens as he recounts an anecdote from a recent interview he had done with Tom Lehrer, the doyen of the parodic song. "He told me that he vastly disapproved of my idea of what rhymes and what doesn't. I love Tom Lehrer, but he doesn't love me. He said that three love songs are quite enough for any stage show and, while love songs are a necessary evil, the idea of doing 69 of them was morally repugnant to him. He tried to listen to them, he said, but he just couldn't stand it."

Tom's loss. Really.

The Magnetic Fields: WOMAD (0118 939 0930), 22 July; QEH, SE1 (020 7960 4242), 25 July; Ronnie Scott's, Birmingham (0121 643 4525), 26 July. '69 Love Songs' is out on Circus

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