This is the best picture of the Magnetic Fields we had handy. As you can see, they aren't actually playing at the moment, but you get the idea. Stephin Merritt is third from the left.

Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields once remarked that if he were a book, he would be Italo Calvino's Baron In The Trees. Calvino was a formidable member of Oulipo, a group devoted to creating new art through the use of invented forms and deliberate constraints. Good examples of Oulipo work include Raymond Queneau's Exercises In Style, where a banal incident is humorously recounted in 99 distinct methods, and Some Thing Black, which subsitutes humor with various styles of laments to depict the grief over a young, dead loved one.

In style, intent, and substance, 69 Love Songs both attempted and achieved the same level of artistic achievement as the above-noted works. The music in the 1999 box set was wildly diverse, and the lyrical focus centered, yet composed in a variety of different manners. As with all Oulipo projects, much of Merritt's purpose in this work was to have fun: that's the only way a rhyming-exercise song like "Reno Dakota" can ever come into being.

As with every other epic of the imagination, a few songs (especially "Love is Like Jazz") in the Magnetics Fields' box set did not excel as highly as others. The Magnetic Fields' songs seemed to be least successful whenever the lyrics, no matter how clever, were at their most experimental. If Stephin spoofed a genre, or imitated a warning label (as with the well-written but melodically stilted "Epitaph For My Heart"), his lyrics were matched head to toe with peculiar instrumentation from the group. It should be noted that while Merritt alone played over fifty instruments on the box set, he played almost all of the 50 successful numbers with just ukulele or guitar. It is the "filler" that is populated with all the other instruments, and it is this filler that the Magnetic Fields, when promoting 69 Love Songs, cannot take with them on tour. They simply don't have a tour bus that can handle all the instruments.

As a result, the 69 Love Songs tour ends up becoming one of the most convincing justifications for the Magnetic Fields to get their work showered with the superlatives it deserves.

Their show at D.C.'s Black Cat (on January 22) boasted almost two full hours of impeccable pop drawn from the new release. Using only ukulele, piano, cello, guitar and the voices of Stephin and Claudia, the four Magnetic Fields members assigned the sparest of arrangements to their greatest and simplest love songs.

To begin the night, there was "Book Of Love" -- and what a fitting opener! Thereafter, the set swung back and forth through all the emotions that love holds. Merritt kept time throughout, drinks of hot tea and wine held dangerously in each hand. Featured songs included the one about Papa being a rodeo (Coverd by Kelly Hogan on her forthcoming Bloodshot album -- Ed), the one about Busby Berkeley's dreams...and how about the other song a person can't help but love? Yes, the bunny rabbit song was there too -- as with all the other songs, so simply structured that it stays in your head like "Karma Chameleon". Among these, perhaps "Washington DC" generated the strongest response. As sung by a delightfully embarrassed Claudia Gonson, the chorus grew sillier and sillier each time the audience cheered along.

What made all the songs stand out more, in all their ragged charm and glory, was the band's surprising disinterest -- given their strong wit -- in between-song chatter. Other than being amused when a fan requested a song cycle about the Super Bowl, Stephin (and crew) barely spoke a word. Sam Duval, the extraordinary cellist, kept his eyes to the ceiling when they weren't on his instrument, as if in permanent reverie, and John Woo, when resting, did the same -- but with his eyes fixed on us.

As for "us", we fans of the Magnetic Fields were hopefully not an accurate sampling of those who adore them! If we were, then where were Stephin's thirty-something peers, for whom this music mostly seemed to have been made? Where were the grandfathers, whose hearts have always kept beat to Irving Berlin, or all the parents who know what it's like to be cool, neglected, and a professor at a girls' college ?! Instead, there were only indie-pop fans: many of them gay, most of them tiny, and the majority of them unaware that liking Stephin Merritt means you must like "the Donkey Serenade" too.

If you have yet to hear the Magnetic Fields, and have the chance to see them in concert, then run there, and bring the elders too. They might not like to hear a man compare himself to a "Rockette"...but then again, why the hell not? Rockettes rock.