Well my heart’s runnin’ round like a chicken with its head cut off
All around the barn yard falling in and out of love
Poor thing’s blind as a bat
Gettin’ up, fallin’ down, gettin’ up
Who’d fall in love with a chicken with its head cut off?

So when 69 Love Songs came out, myself and pretty much everyone I knew was devouring the 3 CD set and talking about this or that song pretty much 24/7. I had just started dating a neat guy who lived in Seattle (remember I lived in SF) and he, too, was going to make his way through all 69 songs. However, after listening to the fourth one he called me and said “You totally need to listen to this song. Because that’s me.” Reader, it was true, and I’m glad he warned me; it was still a very nice little romance.

Listen to “Chicken With Its Head Cut Off” – it’s song #4 on this page.

The Magnetic Fields have held fast to their spot in my top tier of bands for awhile now. I’ve been thinking and writing about them enough in the last few days that I thought I’d do a little rundown of my favorites – starting today I’ll profile one song a day. I hope you enjoy!

March 1st: “Two Characters in Search of a Country Song”

You were just like me
you were one big bruise
In the game of life
you were playing to lose

I love this song because it mentions Annie Oakley, Calamity Jane, and (the Devil and) Daniel Webster. It’s about the Wild West and about being sad.

You can watch/listen to it here.

March 2nd: “The Desperate Things You Made Me Do”

Time provides the rope
but love with tie the slipknot
and I will be the chair you kick away

This is a synth heavy song, like the rest of “Get Lost”, and it’s super sweeping and moody. It’s great to listen to after a break up, or if you just feel like staring out at the rain and brooding.

Listen to the song here.*

March 3rd: “The Flowers She Sent and the Flowers She Said She Sent”

I saw you standing at the airport
With your chihuahua in your hand
Crying on the moving sidewalk
On your way to Disneylandstrong

This song puts a big lump in my throat, and I’m not even sure why. I think it has something to do with the melody and the the lighthearted singing of some silly lyrics that when you listen to them are quite sad. Are you noticing a sad trend here? There’s a reason that melancholy looking girls in black turtlenecks love this bad.

Listen to it here.

March 4th: “I Was Born on a Train”

And I’ve been making promises I know I’ll never keep.
One of these days I’m gonna leave you in your sleep.
I’ll have to go when the whistle blows-
The whistle knows my name.
Baby, I was born on a train.

“The Charm of the Highway Strip” is probably my favorite Magnetic Fields album. All of the songs are about leaving, traveling, moving, and momentum. This song is really jangly and it’s got a great rhythm. It gets stuck in my head for days at a time, and since I’m playing it as I type, I’m going to leave my break in a minute or two to sit at the refence desk bobbing my head to a silent soundtrack.

Listen to a kosher full version here (scroll down to “Born on a Train”)

* These are, by and large, links to YouTube videos made by fans. The Magnetic Fields obviously aren’t getting money every time you watch, so if you like the song(s) please consider hopping over to iTunes and buying your own copy so you can delight in them again and again. Or better yet, get them on CD or vinyl!

A few nights ago, Sky and I saw and FAN-frickin-tastic music tour movie. Technically, that’s what it was. In reality, it was more like an adrenaline mainlining rockfest in your heart that made you want to jump out into the street and play drums really hard. Except I don’t know how to play the drums. If I did, though, watch out…

Under Great White Northern Lights played for 2 nights @ Northwest Film Forum. It’s a documentary film following the White Stripes as they tour the breadth and width of Canada, including all sorts of little, out of the way towns. They didn’t just play large evening events, either. They visited schools and bowling alleys and retirement homes and played short afternoon sets. My favorite was a last minute (5 minute warning via cell phone notice) performance on a city bus.

Watching Jack and Meg play their little hearts out was amazing. I liked the White Stripes in a “if they are playing on the stereo I’m happy, and once in awhile I may want to hear a specific song of theirs and put it on” kind of way, but never in a OHMIGODTHISBANDISAMAZING way. But now I kind of think they are amazing. Their live performances offer something I really enjoy seeing in a band or singer: I want them to look like they are having some sort of excorcism. This doesn’t mean they have to be twisting their faces all crazy — excorcisms can be more low key. I just want to see them letting the music out like it’s trapped inside of them and they need to let it free. I listened to a lot of Nina Simone and Grace Slick in my formative years.

At first it was odd to see this movie a few nights after seeing the Magnetic Fields. I mean, Stephen Merritt isn’t exactly the most emotive dude, right? His singing persona is based largely on his monotone and slightly flat notes. However, the more I thought about it, the more sense it made that I loved both bands. Stephen Merritt may not be all wild about it, but he’s also excorcising his musical demons: the man appears to obsessively create music, to the tune of more then 3 bands going at once and a ton of albums. His excorcism is methodical and ongoing.

Man do I love music.

Sidenote: I remember when the White Stripes first got to be household names and a ton of band dudes I knew complained constantly about how Meg White was just there to be hot with her boobs bouncing as she played the drums. At the time I thought this was just dumb sexist dumbness and usually said as much. But now that I have seen Meg White play I can testify that she is a sick, sick drummer and those band dudes were probably way threatened by her skills and had to make it about her boobs to save face.

Tuesday night, Sky and I saw the Magnetic Fields play at Town Hall. It was a lovely show – they played a lot more old songs than I’d expected. I was struck (again) by how melancholy and ennui evoking Merritt’s lyrics are: most of the walk home I felt as if my reality had been pierced full of thousands of tiny holes. It was hard to tell if the resulting out-of-sorts feelings were even related to my present life or if they were echoes of emotions I’d felt in the past when listening to the songs. It felt like 1998 all over again.

Here are some bits and pieces that I remember…

They played “I Have the Moon” which contains lyrics that held the highest seat of lyrical honor in the late nineties: it was my e-mail signature line for many months:

O\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\O
\\You have to fly around the world all day //
\\to keep the sunlight on your face ////////
O\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\O

I had no idea that this song was about a Vampire in love, but apparently it is; Merritt’s intro to the song was “This is a song about vampires and apartness.”

It was great to see that my imaginary boyfriend, Sam Davol, had aged well. Click his name to read a sweet little NY Times article on how he revamped a Boston loft in which to raise his little twee family.

They ended the show (if you don’t count the encore) with one of my absolute favorites – 100,000 Fireflies. I’ve spent weeks at time with this song stuck in my head, and it was amazing to hear it played live. It’s a really unique song in that I can’t think of many others that have the same quality: it’s intense but breezy and light, and if I had to describe it with one word I’d call it “twinkly.”

Why do we still live here
in this repulsive town?
All our friends are in New York.

Why do we keep shrieking
when me mean soft things?
We should be whispering all the time.
- 100,000 Fireflies, Magnetic Fields

You can listen to the song by playing this YouTube video (nevermind the weird, blurry fankid graphics that go along).

For those playing along at home, there’s a set list posted on the Line Out review of the show.

So much has been stuffed into my brain the last 48 hours that I can’t think of much other than “sleep” but I can’t sleep right now because my brain feels too stuffed. Right? Right.* Instead I’m going to spend a few minutes writing about movies and then go try to join the spooning that my cats are doing right now on the rug. Sometimes they let me.

Desk Set : watched last Friday w/ Katie & Sky
This movie wasn’t half as fun as I thought it would be. I love me some Katherine Hepburn, or at least I thought I did, but I spent much of this movie confused because she was laughing her crazy head-thrown-back New England laugh and I didn’t understand what what so godamned funny about the plot. Maybe you had to be there. The clothes were great and I took some small pride in the fact that the librarians were better than a machine (even if they were rattling off complex, memorized answers just like robots most of the time). Anyway, this is one of those LIBRARIAN movies that you’re supposed to watch and so I watched it and I think Party Girl should be our group movie if we get to vote on it.

Divorce Italian Style (Divorzio all’italiana if you’re being fancy): watched last night w/ Sky
This movie was hilarious and I really enjoyed that they made a totally hot lady (Fefe’s wife) look “ugly” by giving her a unibrow and a mustache. Those hips were out of this world. Also the weird dubbing was pretty great and I loved all of the clothes and I’d like to live in a castle now.

Visual Acoustics: watched tonight w/ Sky
This film has been selling out @ Northwest Film Forum – so much so that they were showing it in both theaters tonight. It’s a documentary about Julius Shulman, a world famous photographer who is best known for capturing modern architecture in Southern California: Case Study Houses, Palm Springs, etc. He was a swell guy and the documentary had a lot of great footage of him visiting with all sorts of people: previous owners of houses, new owners, and architects. Shulman was a pleasure to watch, and his photographs were amazing. That’s about all that was good about this documentary, though. There were all sorts of woozy special effects, random Jib Jab style animations, a not very cohesive story line and weird edits throughout. It seemed more like a really long Power Point presentation (with some video thrown in) than a film. A few times they didn’t give names of people who were talking until they’d been on screen for a minute or so – super frustrating.

It wasn’t an awful documentary, but it wasn’t a good one, either. I’m a connoisseur of the documentary film, and it makes me cranky when I see half of Seattle lining up to see a mediocre one when there are so many AMAZING ones slipping under the radar every day. I also take issue with people who assume documentary making is easy, or easier than making a fiction film.

* Brain is stuffed due to entirely new job in entirely new place which I don’t really want to talk about because I’m still trying to reconcile myself with the fact that I have an entirely new job in an entirely new place