It’s no secret that I love The Magnetic Fields. What is a secret, though, or at least a less-known fact, is that my romantic Weltanschauung is contained in their song “100,000 Fireflies.”
Here are the MFs performing it live in Hamburg, Germany, a couple of months ago in March– I love the live vocal arrangement, with Shirley and lovely Claudia joining in on the chorus. And Sam Davol’s hair is especially animate in this video.
In times of great heart-sickness, I have often listened to this song literally hundreds of times in a row. Three parts of it are especially comforting to me, for giving articulation to my misery. First, the second verse:
I went out to the forest and caught
A hundred thousand fireflies
As they ricochet round the room
They remind me of your starry eyes
Someone else’s might not have made me so sad
But this is the worst night I’ve ever had
Then (and most saliently), a line from the bridge/outro:
You won’t be happy with me
But give me one more chance
You won’t be happy anyway
And finally, the chorus:
I’m afraid of the dark without you close to me
I love how the second and third parts go together– I can’t function without you, and you’re miserable anyway, so what would it hurt to be miserable with me? There’s something particularly damning about being both self-loathing (especially queerly self-loathing) and in unrequited love, and yet Stephin Merritt manages to transcend this and make a clever (and a tiny bit compelling) argument for a relationship anyway. All of this from a song he wrote as a teenager. What are the rest of us doing with our lives?
