No One Will Ever Love You
The Magnetic Fields
Label: Merge
Released: 1999
Far from being a concept album full of love songs, Stephin Merritt’s 3rd album 69 Love Songs is a collection of songs written about love songs themselves, and has very little to do with love. The multi-instrumentalist song writer pays homage to his influences throughout the collection, perhaps most clearly when he condenses all seventy four minutes and thirty five seconds of Fleetwood Mac’s album Tusk into three minutes and fourteen seconds on “No One Will Ever Love You”. Vocalist Shirley Simms is a fill-in Stevie Nicks on the track, conjuring the essence of Merritt’s muse so strongly that he often introduced her on stage as Shirley Nicks. The lyrics express frustration at a relationship that has grown too mundane for the narrator, asking “Where is the madness that you promised me?”. The sum of the song is bleak, moving, and beautiful in a way that is sincere without being slight.
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