mitchco a go go!

I was lucky, lucky, lucky enough to see The Magnetic Fields on Friday night in Bloomington, at the Buskirk Chumley theater. The Magnetic Fields are one of my favorite bands, but saying “favorite bands” doesn’t even begin to describe it. I don’t think I would understand myself emotionally in relation to other people without 69 Love Songs. That’s right, an album single-handedly saved me from the autism spectrum.

I have spent so many hours of my life listening to their albums, and the voices especially of Stephin Merritt, Claudia Gonson, and Shirley Simms are permanently ingrained into the folds of my brain. Just seeing Shirley open her mouth and having that voice come out of it was a sort of magical-visceral experience that made me feel giddy and disoriented. And it was weird to look up and see John Woo and Sam Davol sitting in front of me, playing their stringed instruments, wearing the same facial expressions that I use to watch NBC on Thursday nights.

What I didn’t expect was how wonderful it was to see how ordinary all of them were. Tired and kind of goofy and dressed about as well as I was, but making all of this beautiful wonderful life-saving music right there 15 feet away from me.  It was so different from seeing Morrissey last year– he really does have this enormous, messianic stage presence, presence being the key word. But the Magnetic Fields, I felt like I already knew them all, almost like I’d already dreamed the concert beforehand, that kind of familiarity.

I was especially blown away by Claudia Gonson. I loved how she interacted with SM, I loved how she played a little egg shaker, I love how the rag-timey piano piece on “We Are Having A Hootenanny” made MBL and I giggle each time she played it, and I loved her voice, and how she counted the band off before each song. This clearly wasn’t from the show in Bloomington, but it’s CG and SM covering Katy Perry together, and I love it:

Oh, be still my heart. This has been Courtney for Mitchco Industries with, let’s face it, a bit of a crush now actually.

Tags: katy perry, the magnetic fields

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 1:22 pm and is filed under live, music, what are these young homosexuals doing. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.