monday, july 19, 2004
Saturday, Magnetic Fields
Lizzy, Sarah, and I went to see the Magnetic Fields perform on Saturday night at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre. It was quite cool, of course. They played most of i, part of 69 Love Songs, Vol. 1, and some other stuff.
The tickets were a birthday present, so it was extra-cool that they played “I Was Born” first (see my birthday post). And they played “I Die” last.
The band talked a lot between songs and Claudia, the pianist, said some funny things, like “Thank you for coming all the way from Silverlake” and “The audience is good-looking. I like their eyeglasses.” Stephin Merritt, singer and ukulele-player, scolded the audience when we cheered over the “first funny line” of “The Book of Love”.
Some of the songs were a bit boring without synthesizers. I find i sort of boring because of the lack of synthesizers, too. Most of the songs they played sounded similar to, or not as good as, the album versions — except “The Cactus Where Your Heart Should Be”, which was a lot better without the harpsichord. I hate harpsichord.
Also, I am a super-bona-fide bootlegger now! I used my camera to record bits of several songs and nearly all of “I Don’t Believe You” (4 mb). The sound quality is total crap, partially because my camera was sitting in my lap and partially because Stephin’s voice is so wonderfully deep that his microphone couldn’t pick it up properly and my little dinky camera couldn’t pick it up well at all.
That’s a picture of the performance of “Yeah! Oh Yeah!”: Stephin stood on his stool and Claudia sat on her piano bench (and fell off at the appropriate moment). They acted out the song and it was just awesome.
The opening guy, Darren Hanlon, was very good…lots of melody and mixed-up metaphors and nice silly stuff. I might even buy a CD because I can’t find many of his songs to download. A little clip of him performing (1.5 mb)…just for fun.
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