måndag 5 Feb 2007, 14:35

This month's song is an oldie, from 1991's Distant Plastic Trees. I think I first came to know this song in high school, from the cover that appears on Incidental Music 1991-95. When we were in college a few years later and someone mentioned The Magnetic Fields and how great they were, we listened to this album and I remember chuckling at how much it did not rock; specifically the version of the song I knew, 100,000 Fireflies, which in the MF version has like MIDI bells as its main instrument and a certain whimsical airiness. We shrugged them off and didn't pay attention again until 69 Love Songs came out. But recently I've been spending a lot of time away from my music collection and listening on my laptop, which only has a few albums on it, including all of the old Magnetic Fields stuff, and I have totally rediscovered this song. What's great about it? The lyrics are hilariously desperate. I love how TMF never sacrifice the proper flow of English sentences in order to make a syllable fall in the right place; a great example is when Susan Anway sings "Someone else's might have not made me so sad, but this is the worst night I ever had." The song seems to shift and invert itself for the purpose of getting that lyric out, rather than some contortion or filibuster "yeah" or "oh" thrown in there to make the meter match up correctly. Musically I find it very clever, particularly that part and the part that begins "You won't be happy with me…", despite the MIDI bells. What's most remarkable to me is that I went back and listened to the Superchunk cover (100,000 Fireflies) and found it utterly without merit (pun intended). I think Superchunk wrote and performed some great rock songs in their day, but this cover removes almost everything that is great about the original. In a way I think it might be responsible for me not understanding the Magnetic Fields for another 5–10 years! Anyway, hats off to you, Magnetic Fields, for enriching January 2007 with 100,000 Fireflies.