Good day, all. I’ve been meaning to make a blog of all the songs of a certain band. I seriously considered Low, but someone beat me to it. I overestimated my emotional commitment to the songs of the Police, and my commitment to Pavement is just starting to mature. Frankly, the Magnetic Fields oeuvre is really varied and a lot of it hasn’t gotten the attention from me it deserves. I encountered this music when I was 17 and lusting over a charming high school girl who handed me the famed 69 Love Songs boxset and, Natalie Portman-style, told me it’d change my life. It was of course hyperbole, but I’m consistently impressed with the ability of Stephin Merritt’s work to morph, appeal to a extremely diverse crowd, and I’ve missed a large portion of the discography. I plan to fix that, starting today.

As always, credit goes to modern music’s greatest fanboy, Matthew Perpetua, curator of Fluxblog and the founder of the blog genre (“BLOGS HAVE GENRE?S!”) now being called oeuvreblogs with his Pop Songs 07, where he’s attempting to cover all the songs of R.E.M. Though “song-by-song blog” or “catablog” would have been a lot better, I think it’s a really useful tool for those who take music writing seriously. People have been talking about the death of music journalism forever, but more reasonably, it’s taken as a new mission creating discussion about music. There are of course precedents for this in the past, but I welcome the newwww style.

I’ll be covering all seven full-lengths and EPs and the box set. Cheers. And if you’re an oeuvreblogger and not on my blogroll, let me know. We gotta stick together.