Unbest

Meghan O’Dea on The Magnetic Fields’ “I Think I Need A New Heart” (from 69 Love Songs, 1999)
(iTunes, Rdio, Spotify) 

One warm spring day around last Easter, my boyfriend invited me over for supper before we went out for the evening. I let myself in with the key he had given me only a week or two into our brief courtship and was met with the usual twang from the tinny speakers he kept in the bedroom. I hadn’t yet picked up on the growing distance between us, and I hadn’t yet become aware of the sense of obligation that oozed from him whenever we hung out. It was just another night.

We tucked into dinner, and a male singer’s warm baritone replaced some breezy dream pop, singing, “‘Cause I’ll always say I love you when I mean turn out the light.” At the time the line reminded me of The Princess Bride, and how Westly always says “as you wish” no matter how much Buttercup bosses him around. I couldn’t help picturing my boyfriend and I curled up in bed, him sleepily drawling at me to turn out the light, his voice soft with the depth of his feelings for me.

I asked him what we were listening to. He told me it was the Magnetic Fields.

A month later I was huddled next to my speakers in the throes of that phase of brokenhearted grief where you cry compulsively into whatever alcoholic beverage you happen to be clutching as you try to articulate the enormity of your feelings with other people’s lyrics. It was a total Nick Hornsby/Rob Sheffield moment, one dictated by the strange whims of the iTunes shuffle algorithm. That same Magnetic Fields’ number, “I Think I Need a New Heart,” popped out of the speakers, shocking me back to that night only weeks before when I’d still been so happy. As I actually listened to the rest of the song, I realized I had been as mistaken about its meaning as I had been about the depth of my ex’s feelings.

“I Think I Need a New Heart” opens to the standard jangling, upbeat melodies the Magnetic Fields churn out with a deft, casual ease and consistency. The instruments provide a contrast to the emotional pain of the song’s narrator as he breathlessly describes being dumped. It seems like a standard pop variation on a theme. Then the bridge hits. The jingle jangle drops off. It’s Merritt alone with his acoustic guitar, crooning his confessions. “’Cause I’ll always say ‘I love you’ when I mean ‘turn out the light’, and I’ll say ‘let’s run away’ when I just mean ‘stay the night.”

“How fucked up is that?” I tearfully asked my chardonnay when I heard the whole thing. (A comparable sucker punch is “You Fit Into Me,” by Margaret Atwood: “You fit into me/ like a hook into an eye/a fish hook/an open eye.”) After the bridge, the chorus returns with a rich cacophony of incongruously cheerful sounds. Like any good pop song, it starts and ends with the same melody, but The Magnetic Fields put that structure to meaningful use. The chords repeat themselves over and over just as the cycle of dysfunction perpetuates in the characters’ lives. The narrator returns to the titular refrain of needing a new heart. He’s brokenhearted, all right, but not because of this particular dumping—he came out of the box this way.

Part of what makes this song so great is when you recognize that your life is great because you aren’t trapped in that same cyclical melody. In the months after the breakup, I learned not to be blinded by the perpetual fantasy of infatuation. I learned to look at people more objectively, and to kill off the last of my adolescent codependence and naiveté. I also learned to negotiate forgiveness. My ex isn’t a villain or a study in warped psychology, but he’s not a white knight either. He’s a beautiful, faulty person who isn’t the guy for me. Over time this song stopped serving as my salve and became one of my favorite lessons in how to write, something I picked back up in 2011 for the first time in years. “I Think I Need a New Heart” taught me about the poetry of pop. It taught me about the impact of brevity and repetition. It was a lesson in how much character progression you can cram into two and a half minutes. It was my anchor, and now it’s my inspiration.

Meghan O’Dea blogs here and tweets here.