When it comes to the American band ‘The Magnetic Fields’ it’s really Stephin Merritt’s lyrics that attract me – as here in the song ‘All The Umbrellas in London’.
Although this particular song appears on their fourth album ‘Get Lost’, perhaps Merritt’s best known work to date is the triple album ’69 Love Songs’, a work of great breadth and ironic humour – by turns funny, sad and everything in between. Among the 69 songs there are many gems. My particular favourite, ‘All My Little Words’, pulls off that rare trick of being both funny and deeply moving, even in the space of a single line, as here:
‘Now you’ve made me want to die / You tell me that you’re unboyfriendable’
One reviewer wrote, ‘you will wonder how you got through a heartbreak without it.’ As if it were medicine!
But back to London and ‘All the Umbrellas’ – where our capital’s notoriously miserable weather becomes a metaphor for the singer’s tragi-comic despair:
