“Born on a Train” - The Magnetic Fields
(Words/music: Stephin Meritt, available on The Charm of the Highway Strip, Merge Records 1994)
Night one of XX Merge was a night largely built around intimacy. Ranging from Lou Barlow’s solo performance to the small choir of voices Oakley Hall assembled in their band to the Rosebuds’ coaxing of the crowd to accompany them, this opening night put “small” songs into the spotlight. Looking back, this was the perfect night for the Magnetic Fields’ performance as a quintet of strings, piano, and voice. In the past, some of Stephin Meritt’s aesthetic choices in his arrangements prevented me from delving deeper into his catalog. Sometimes, the synthesizers and drum machines work well, but often I find that they mask Meritt’s beautiful songs. Last night, Meritt and vocalists Claudia Gonson and Shirley Simms took center stage, letting Merritt’s eye for beauty and wry sense of humor shine in the spotlight. The crowd in the front of the Cat’s Cradle played right into their hands, laughing at the humor in “California Girls” and “Yeah, Oh Yeah,” and Meritt even smirked delivering the lines about living in a dive bar in “Papa Was a Rodeo.” Last night, the songs sounded like the precious creatures Meritt sculpted (the same ones that are sometimes hard to find underneath the synthesizers). In this setting, the songs felt fragile, beautiful, lonely, and heartbreaking – often in rapid succession and often simultaneously.
“Born on a Train,” a song that wasn’t performed last night, is one song that works with its electronic arrangements. Like most of Meritt’s best compositions, “Born on a Train” paints loneliness in a melancholy light, comparing emotional disconnect with the restlessness of perpetual travel. Musically, the song kind of feels like traveling on a train with the persistent percussion and the fast moving sounds around it. In this case, the synthesized sounds help make it sound like a chamber-pop composition. However, the synthesized sounds combined with the real strings give it a woosy, daydream feel. In this state, it’s hard to imagine what’s real and what’s a dream. It gives the narrative an interesting bend – does the narrator feel heartbroken or does he truly accept his wayward state? Then again, it could all be a dream – the narrator may be dreaming of having to leave a lover he’s never met as he’s roaming down another nighttime road that looks the same as all the others. If that’s the case, it’s an even more heartbreaking story of someone so lonely that they dream up people to miss.
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