From the Vault/Saddest Songs: The Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs Vol. 1

My friend Bix understood exactly how I felt about the Magentic Fields 69 Love Songs vol 1.  I had put "The Book of Love" and "All My Little Words" on a mix I made for him, and he came up to me with this wonderous look on his face, as though he couldn't believe I knew the Magnetic Fields too.  Because with all the white noise of music out there, between Lady GaGa and Nickleback and Katy Perry and Justin Beiber and all the other billions of bands overtaking the airwaves, it's almost wonderous to find someone who knows the same little band you do

He, like me, played that album over and over and over, terrified to listen to anything else by them for fear it wouldn't be as good.  "Then I heard "Papa Was a Rodeo," he told me one night over champagne at an art gallery in Brunswick Maine.  "And I played that one over and over.  And I knew."  He had this dreamy, sincere look on his face, as though the two of us were speaking the secret language only Magnetic Fields listeners understand.  Because there's something so intimate about the music that you swear you must be the only person on earth who feels the lyrics, and when you find someone else who feels them that same way, it's almost magic.

My sister Shaun, giver of all things wonderful and musical (including The Smiths and Siouxsie and the Banshees) gave me 69 Love Songs for Hanukkah one year.  I took to it instantly, playing it through headphones on my discman, laying on the inflatable mattress I slept on during visits home, mouthing along in the dark as though the words on my breath might somehow reach their intended targets in the universe.

69 Love Songs was my album for boys who had no intentions being for me what I needed or wanted them to be.  "Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side," "Absolutely Cuckoo" and "My Sentimental Melody," in that order, were all songs for Dwight, spelling out the ever-deepening emotional divide between us.  "Come Back from San Francisco" went on the first CD I made Michael, "I Don't Want to Get Over You" was for James, who I eventually got over and "Reno Dakota" was for Jay, who had a habit of vanishing for years on end, leaving me wondering if or when he might ever reappear. 

And like any good album, it grew on me.  I discovered songs that I'd skipped in early listenings now held a curious truth to them, like the cleverness of "Chicken With it's Head Cut Off" and I can't hear "All My Little Words" without picturing Jay Karns in the shower and Walton Goggins lifting weights.  

The Saddest Songs In the World, PT 2

This week's entry: "My Waltzing Days Are Over" by the Innocence Mission.

I think I got dumped to this song.

It was given to me on the 3rd in a series of mixes by a guy who'd previously given me songs like Matthew Sweet's "Winona" ("would you be my little movie star/would you be my long-lost girl?") and Stevie Wonder's "Knocks Me Off My Feet" ("there's something about your love/that makes me weak") I had, in turn, responded with Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher" and The Magnetic Fields, "I'm Tongue-Tied."  This went on for about two years until just after New Years in 2007, when he presented me with the 3rd CD, this time, minus the "love" next to his name.

There were two songs that said the dreaded words of every lover--"we can't keep doing this."  Billy Bragg's "A Lover Sings" was a mournful lament to the sex we never had.  The other, of course, was "My Waltzing Days are Over."

I am no fool, I have no romantic notions
In my head
at my age
I'm content to watch

If you haven't figured it out, he was a little bit older than me.  I was his Manic Pixie Dream Girl.  We drank black coffee and talked about Raymond Chandler novels and traded vintage paperbacks.  He was the first person to tell me I was smart.  To a 22-year old just out of a bad relationship, that was a hundred times better than even the most flowery "I love you."

And it didn't end quickly either.  It ended slowly as both of us descended into our our age-respective misery.  I didn't get into grad school.  He didn't get tenure (which my mother said was my fault).  We were both stuck in this miserable dying town and couldn't unite in our misery--so it became rubber bullets we shot off each other, bouncing back off the kevlar coldness we'd girded ourselves with.

I got it.  We didn't have anything that could save either of us; he wasn't going to leave his wife and I didn't want him to.  It was something beyond love or sex, it was just a connection . . . two lonely, frustrated romantics reaching out for each other.  But waltzes have to end sometime, and, as the Wallflowers said, "It takes two to tango, but boy, it's one to let go."

God, I miss him.  I miss having that connection with somebody.  I hate that it had to end like that, drift off for no reason other than that it just didn't work.  Bad timing, misalignment, whatever.  He broke my heart because he let someone else give his explaination, and it's beautiful and haunting and perfect, but they aren't his words.  And he's out there somewhere, maybe he found a new Manic Pixie Dream Girl, maybe he's miserable, I don't know.  But what I wouldn't give to sit across an IHOP table with him one more time, share one more endless pot of coffee, have him play one more song for me. 

"My Waltzing Days are Over" is sort of indie so I don't have a video or anything to put with it.  Instead, here  is a picture of Robert Clohessy in Oz, who sort of looks like the guy who gave me this song.

The Saddest Songs in the World: Part 1

Sad songs are kind of my thing. I’m an ex-goth and a Morrissey junkie. But I’m not talking teenage melodrama, I mean the kind of songs that rip your heart out of your chest and heft it into traffic. . . . this will be an ongoing, randomly updated segment in the column, so feel free to post your own in the comments section.

This week's entry: “Time to Pretend” MGMT

Songs don’t get any sadder than this. They just don’t. MGMT has managed to create a lush electronic wasteland where the narrators are so tragically aware of the choices they’ve deliberatly made, that the only thing left to do with their spent lives is OD. Bummer.

It’s the bridge that kills me every time:

I miss my sister, miss my father
Miss my dog and my home
Yeah, I miss the boredom
And the freedom
And the time spent alone

These are the things we forget about as we grow up. This is the end of innocence, right here.  But it's delicatly handled, simply shrugged off as, "well, live and learn."  There's no self-grandizing nostalgia, just the very simple admission that maybe hanging out in Paris, shooting drugs and banging models isn't what life is all about.

And it’s the most depressing, most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. Morrissey has never written a single line that conveys as much melancholy as “Time to Pretend,” let alone a whole song.

It's also got a really bizarre music video