2017 House Programs The Magnetic Fields // 50 Songs | Page 3

On Wednesday, October 22, 2014 at 1.45pm, at
the Grand Central Oyster Bar, Nonesuch President
Robert Hurwitz told me he had a swell idea for a new
album by The Magnetic Fields: an album marking
my 50th birthday with 50 autobiographical songs.
I had just completed a rigorously factbased mini-
musical for the radio show This American Life, and
it seemed like an idea I could take further, with
myself as the subject.
So I started recording at my 50th birthday party—
which I forgot to put on the album—and meant
to finish in a year; I was seven months late. Most
of the recording I did at home, as usual, with the
plan to use 50 instruments, but I ended up playing
twice that, and involving 13 other performers
(who played 40 other instruments). The record
also expanded into the past as I incorporated
recordings from 30 years ago, and fragments of
songs I wrote as a teenager.
For the concert version I am working with some
musicians I have known for decades (I met Shirley
Simms when she was nine and I was 12) and some
not (Quince Marcum I met a month ago; I don’t
even know where he lives). But I expect us all to
reunite for 100 Song Memoir, half a century from
tonight. Possibly on Mars.
—STEPHIN MERRITT, Writer and Arranger
Written for the premiere of 50 Song Memoir at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music on 2 & 3 December 2016
The first image that came to my mind when I started
thinking about a framework for the concert was
Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.
I imagined Stephin singing into a tape recorder
in an enclosed space, traveling backwards and
forwards through time and calmly moving from
reel to reel. I thought of it as a memory archive.
But what would a Stephin Merritt memory archive
look like?
His house of course. An environment full of
musical instruments, books, toys, unusual
portraits, tiki bars, space ships, robots, geegaws,
tchotchkes and dollhouses. Stephin collects tin
dollhouses. And that’s the space you find him in.
He is inside one of his dollhouses as if transported
there by a science experiment gone awry,
surrounded by 50 years of ornaments and gadgets.
Outside the dollhouse are the six musicians who
play 50 assorted instruments and accompany him
on the magical mystery tour through his past.
The things on the set are all from his home. Above
him is a picture frame. And inside this frame
you will see a shifting landscape of images and
text—think of it as a speech balloon in a comic,
some of the things you will see are true and some
will be less true but they will all tell the story, in
fragments, of Stephin Merritt’s life.
—JOSÉ ZAYAS, Director