epilogue
Music & Literature
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
which you locate somewhere everything from country to
easy listening to gospel to rhythm and blues to soul to the
various species of jazz, the 36 tracks on that album seem
like effortless apogees in each and every category. It’s like
the best sort of aesthetic primer on the importance of the
empathetic imagination.
69 Love Songs
by The Magnetic Fields
I’d heard The Magnetic Fields before but it
was my friend Charlie Baxter who turned
me on to 69 Love Songs in 1999 as we tooled
around Asheville, North Carolina, during
one of our rare afternoons off from teaching
in the Warren Wilson MFA program. That
nearly three-hour boxed set shoulders aside
a regiment of other amazing and deserving
albums for the last spot on my list. There’s nothing quite
like it: a three-volume concept album originally conceived
as a music revue that simultaneously sends up and celebrates a kaleidoscopic array of theatrical and pop songs as
well as the notions of love — with all its follies, ardors, ironies, and anxieties — as well as the love song itself at the
same time. What else, finally, needs to be said in support
of an album that features a Marxophone, a tremoloa and
Chicken-shakes, and offers you Stephin Merritt’s impossibly deep and comically depressive bass vocals, and lonesome-cowboy lyrics like “Home was anywhere with diesel
gas/love was a trucker’s hand/never stuck around long
enough for a one-night stand”?
Jim Shepard is the author of six novels, including most
recently Project X, and four story collections, including most
recently You Think That’s Bad.