Prolific songwriter Stephin Merritt seems to respond best to creative prompts. Sixty=Nine Love Songs? Sure. A dozen songs that start with the letter I? Easy. One song representing each year of your 50-year-old life? Okay.
All have been projects for his band The Magnetic Fields over the years. The latest was 30 songs each clocking in at 2 minutes, 35 seconds or less, called “Quickies.”
An accompanying tour for the collection, released in May 2020, did not come so quickly, though, due to the pandemic. A series of City Winery residencies for the band across the country, first planned for March 2020, was delayed at least a couple of time until it finally got running this fall, making its most recent stop at the Washington D.C. outlet for a three night stand.
It’s a compact crew, especially compared to the last time Merritt was here four years ago, amid a spectacular stage set and larger (but largely unseen) backing band of six doing “50 Song Memoir” in order over two nights.
Here, evenly spaced across the stage was Merritt, perched on a stool to the right, alongside cellist Sam Davol (who switched to broken bongo from time to time), Shirley Simms on ukulele, vocals and autoharp and Claudia Gonson on piano, vocals and toy tambourine.
It was sparse looking compared to the fussy, colorful, toy-filled stage last time. And were they spaced because of COVID considerations? (Simms and Davol wore masks, except when she was singing or he sipped tea; the audience, packed as they were, had to have shown vaccination proof or negative test results, and were asked to wear masks when not downing wine — about half did).
Perhaps to solve the spacing question, Merritt oversaw the unfolding of an aluminum ladder before the show started that stayed up the whole time, with seemingly no other purpose than to fill the gap between musicians.