Inspiration
This fantasia begins and ends with The Magnetic Fields' album. These 69 love songs are near and dear to our hearts, as we are both longtime fans of the band and their work. Each of us have personal journeys of falling in love with this album, and this fantasia is the culmination and continuation of that adoration as a creative team. Below is a look into our individual connection with the music, which we hope will come across in our work and inspire similar connections in our collaborators and audiences.
Izadorius
"I grew up in a literal town called Chicago in the grand state of Illinois with my family. My family is my dad, my mom, two siblings. and so many cats. So many cats, but they're all dead. Well, only some of them, actually. A lot of them are alive.
But basically, I've been listening to the Magnetic Fields since I was negative one. In utero. My dad was obsessed with 69 Love Songs. And when my dad likes an album, he listens to it constantly, annoying everyone around him. They hate him, and therefore hate the music. He's truly a horrible fan to have. Anyway, I took a break from the band for a while but ended up coming back to it in my teens. The connection can certainly be attributed partially to nostalgia, but it's also just good music. It's an album my siblings and I connected over, the first band that we all liked. I have vivid memories of certain tracks, such as "Reno Dakota," being blasted on repeat throughout my childhood home. I didn't know what it was about then, and listening to the song now combines those past memories and events that have happened since then to create a whole new experience. Overall, I just love how poetic and witty the lyrics can be. I'm by no means a poet, and I think music is a way to frame poetry in a way that's more accessible to people. The album also explores so many perspectives on love. I feel like there's some really great models of relationships and tidbits of advice there. It's a great reminder of what love can be." |
Wendy
"69 Love Songs was introduced to me via a good friend's solo violin concert my senior year of high school. Graduating makes even rational people sentimental and weepy, and I was no exception. So when I heard my friend's instrumental rendition of "The Book of Love," I was a pitiful mess by the last note. I thanked him for sharing his art with me, and I went home to look up the song that moved me so. What I found was Peter Gabriel's 2010 cover version, which I hated. I shut the song off and didn't listen to the Magnetic Fields again until months later.
That summer, feeling depressed and stuck in my small Texan town, I was working at a sandwich shop with a bunch of twenty-somethings whose favorite activity was playing "my music taste is more obscure than yours" with the aux cord in the back. It was mostly Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, nothing special, everything you would expect from dudes who smoked weed out of gatorade bottles in the alley on break. But one night during closing, my co-worker played a song that made me stop mopping the floor for a minute and listen: Papa was a rodeo Mama was a rock-n-roll band I could play guitar and rope a steer before I learned to stand Home was anywhere with diesel gas Love was a trucker's hand Never stuck around long enough for a one night stand Something about the lyrics was so simultaneously country and queer in a way I had never heard before. As a newly-out lesbian who has always struggled with growing up in a narrow-minded, majority conservative state, the music spoke to me on a personal level. I couldn't count the number of times I blasted this song with the windows rolled down late at night that summer, simultaneously feeling right at home and dreaming of living a million miles away.
I am now a couple years older, much more comfortable in my sexuality, and living approximately 1,389 miles away from my hometown. But despite the vast improvement of my overall quality of life, including a dramatic change of circumstance, this song gets me every damn time." |
Early Development
It began with a Trello board. The following Trello board, to be exact:
69 Love Songs (more or less)
We began with each song, tracking recurring themes, defining references or unfamiliar terms, and beginning to brainstorm potential characters.
69 Love Songs (more or less)
We began with each song, tracking recurring themes, defining references or unfamiliar terms, and beginning to brainstorm potential characters.
We then began to assign songs to specific characters, stringing them together to form loose plotlines.
Then, after fleshing out characters and plot a bit more, we began to put songs in sequence based on the three act structure we plan to follow.
The overarching story then began to take shape in our minds, allowing us to start the process of writing plot and dialogue for what will ultimately be the final script and score of this fantasia. This Trello board continues to be a resource for us and a constant reference point to keep us on track, writing in line with our original ideas.