"100,000 Fireflies" by The Magnetic Fields
God, I love this song. I think it might be the saddest song ever recorded, but it never fails to make me want to jump with glee.
This is the first song by The Magnetic Fields I ever heard. It was on a twee compilation my roommate bought. We both agreed that this song was one you wanted to play over and over again, but refused to because of the risk that you might get sick of it, which would self-evidently be a tragedy. Because it was that perfect.
Maybe it was the time. This was the early 90s, when that vogue for the wispy female vocals over layered electronic textures was really beginning to kick in (oh, for Heavenly and Mazzy Star), which this song was... but it also wasn't. Stephin Merritt, who it later turned out was behind all this goodness, has said in interviews that he's interested in Abba-style bubble gum pop and 1950s-era experimental electronic music and nothing in between, and that's exactly what this sounds like. It's like Steve Reich recording the Ronnettes in somebody's parents' basement. It's like a diorama of pop history made by a broken-hearted 13-year-old... or a 25-year-old who feels 13 and stupid again.
Why am I saying what it's like? It's there, right there at the link. Go listen to it.
I have a mandolin. I play it all night long.
It makes me want to kill myself.
I also have a dobro. Made in some mountain range.
Sounds like a mountain range in love.
But when I turn up the tone
On my electric guitar...
I'm -- afraid of the dark without you close to me.
I'm -- afraid of the dark without you close to me.
I love the hook -- that just-slightly weird piano sound (pitch bent up an octave? a toy piano? phaser pedals? a homemade synthesizer?) with the fake 60s girl-group snare whacking out a mechanical heartbeat. It's so brilliantly cheerful, like children's music from a TV show. And the fact that it has a bridge that it never comes back from -- you want the narrator to return to the wistful optimism of the first two verses, but she can't because everything has fallen apart, and the instruments stop playing one by one until all you're left with is one hand on that frantic, alien piano.
Actually, every verse is different. There's a kind of meter forced by the melody, but there's barely any rhymes and the words are fragmented. Bits of cliched lines sneaking in between wishes for suicide and lovers' fights. It's like the last page of The Waste Land done with the history of 20th century popular music instead of the history of Western literature. And it feels the same way, too -- that weird nostalgia, that desperate grasping after meaning.
I went out to the forest and caught
a 100,000 fireflies
As they ricochet 'round the room
They remind me of your starry eyes
Someone else's might not have made me so sad.
This is the worst night I ever had.
'Cause I'm -- afraid of the dark without you close to me.
I'm -- afraid of the dark without you close to me.
I've already written too much.
Nothing The Magnetic Fields have done since -- and even if they'd never recorded this one song, they'd still be one of my favorite bands -- has even come close. |
