Magnetic Fields’ Merritt Dares to Stalk Love Songs

Who wrote the book of love? That question from the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll has an answer for the independent rock world of 2000. Stephin Merritt, a reclusive New York pop auteur who makes records under several band names, came blinking into the bright light of cult celebrity last year when his group Magnetic Fields released a three-CD set called “69 Love Songs.”

In the album, Merritt stalks popular music’s favorite subject with a relentless determination to corral its full sweep, from euphoria to despair. It’s an audacious ambition, but Merritt pulled it off with a combination of candid self-revelation, stylistic chutzpah and a way with words that raised the dreaded Cole Porter comparisons. “Love Songs” came in as the No. 2 album of the year, behind Moby’s “Play,” in the Village Voice’s influential pop critics’ poll.

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The original plan for Magnetic Fields’ L.A. show (a rare West Coast appearance for the road-shy Merritt) was ambitious as well: all 69 songs, played in order over two nights at the new club Knitting Factory Hollywood.

The show moved to the El Rey for just one night when the Knitting Factory delayed its opening last week. Though the concert didn’t add greatly to what we get from the album, its 32 love songs were enough to affirm Merritt’s place among pop’s essential rugged individualists, in the wing with Randy Newman, Lou Reed, David Byrne, Leonard Cohen, and such contemporaries as Rufus Wainwright and Eels.

The wry, rumpled singer sat on a stool and said little between songs, his amused manner conveying a wry, faintly ironic attitude. Merritt might display the warning signs of a cynic, but when the music got rolling Sunday he was all heart. Merritt’s descriptions of heartbreak are so dolorous--especially when carried by his subterranean, deeper-than-Johnny-Cash-voice--and his upbeat images so disarming (in one, his heart is “running around like a chicken with its head cut off”), that his remarkable musical range never calls attention to itself.

But within the rough-edged, often austere context of Magnetic Fields’ sound, Merritt is a pop encyclopedist whose musical breadth--cabaret to synth-pop, show tunes to mountain music-- matches his emotional scope.

The arrangements Sunday went from the solemn, spare strum and pluck of ukulele and banjo to a Fleetwood Mac-like mainstream pop richness, with shading and propulsion added by singer-keyboardist Claudia Gonson, cellist Sam Davol and guitarist John Woo. When it comes to love, the fundamental things apply, this music says, across generations and cultures--from Civil War to modern rock, Broadway to the backwoods.

Merritt believes in love’s profundity and transcendence, as well as its perils. “Love can kill people, can’t it?” he says in “My Sentimental Melody.” But he also has Busby Berkeley dreams, and when he sang about those on Sunday, the wary bard left his stool and took a slow, solo spin around the stage.