Article Feedback: Hyacinths And Thistles

Little to disagree with there, Tom. It feels like a very slight addition to the Merritt canon - the absurdly extended outro to the last track only draws attention to the watery brevity of what goes before.

Your article's only omission was a failure to put a name to the vocalist on "You You...". I just think Katherine Whalen deserves a specific mention - I know nothing about her or her band, but for my money it's the best non-Merritt vocal on a Merritt song I've heard.

Is it the same Katherine Whalen from the Squirrel Nut Zippers? I haven't heard it, but from what I've heard her solo work was also decent.

Astoundingly, I have heard the song that Steady Mike mentions. And I wouldn't mind knowing why he thinks it's 'the best non-Merritt vocal on a Merritt song'. He will be uninterested to know that I have reneged on my earlier suspicion of the first two Magnetic Fields' LPs' vocals, and would nominate, say, 'Josephine' (bang on the melody), 'You Love To Fail' (at least there's a useful twang in the line 'Well, hey, whatever turns you o-o-on'; and the melody+harmony effect of the chorus threatens to empty the book of melodic superlatives), 'Smoke Signals' (for its range and purity of 'tone', or do I mean 'timbre'? Anyway, think what she could have done with the Cure's similar 'A Thousand Hours') - etc etc; or for that matter, and rather later in the day, the epic sweep and Janus-faced concurrent in/sincerity (as they might say at the ICA) of 'Sweet- Lovin' Man'.

'You x 5' seems to me decent but not outstanding - I can't really see why Tom Ewing sees it as (I think) the smartest pop song in this particular canon. A line like 'You make everything beautiful seem true' (I may be misremembering that, don't have access to the song) makes a kind of sense in the context of talking about romance, but I actually find it rather clunking in a pop song. The opening re. 'I don't know quite how to put this decently', etc, is OK, and seems to open up an ambiguity: does she then manage to put it decently, or not? I think 'not' may be the point. The verse melody is textbook- fine, but the chorus is slacker; and I don't really approve of the use of the word 'Tis' in a pop song. Retro is fine, but C16 retro may not be what we need. All in all, the song seems to me to have taken a quarter of an hour to write, which I suppose isn't a criticism.

re. Tom E's more general, theoretical issues re. voices and songs - good songs and bad voices, vice versa, etc - I think he was very thoughtful and on the ball. It's true that if either side of the equation goes wrong, the final product doesn't seem to work. A qualificatory, supplementary question might be: are any songs singer- proof? I mean, are there a precious few melodies (or lyrics, musical settings, etc for that matter) so good that they're hard to ruin?

Actually I doubt it: imagine, if you care to, Robbie Williams singing 'The Boy With The Arab Strap'.

Merrit puts great thought into his choice of singers, just as pop writers of yore did. Notice for example how he gives Miho Hatori "Rindy Rue" er, I mean "Lindy Lou". So there's clearly an intent to place singers in unfamiliar situations. This lends a certain amateurish charm to the album, where Merrit's melodies seem naked and worthy of attention in themselves, unsheathed from the electro-pop arrangements that he's normally about in most Mag Fields stuff (not 69 love songs, however). Also, Merrit has very limited arrangement skill, very capable, but using the same types of chord structures and suchforth over and over. So by stripping them down to the essentials it feels more like a songbook, in the classic "Cole Porter Songbook" "George Gershwin Songbook" etc. style.

I haven't had it entirely sink in, but the tunes feel classic, and as I've never heard Merrit's own interpretations, they stand up well. With songs like Merrit's, which are so durn good, the singer and tune itself have historically always become interlinked, partly by how well they fit, and partly because interpretation means so much to classic tin-pan-alley stuff. This isn't a fake "tribute" album to Merrit, so much as his show of devotion to the voices he loves best.

Mr FoxyPine asks why I love the Whalen vocal so much. Where to start?

I love the phrasing, the resignation, the langour, the smokiness, the restraint, the hint of nasality. The way it recalls a handful of my favourite North American female voices of the last half-century, London, O'Hara, Harry, Holiday, Berry... The way, on headphones late at night, with the traffic outside briefly containing itself, I can crawl inside the envelope of the voice, and look out through it.

I won't argue that it's not necessarily a Merritt classic, but graced with such a delicious voice, it's a sublime episode amid a mediocre (and occasionally ill-conceived) record.

Having said all that, as with everything on "Hyacinths...", I'd still love to hear SM do it himself.

I know what you mean. I'd love to hear Steady Mike do it too.

Boh!