The Oceanic Hum

The Magnetic Fields “’66: Wonder Where I’m From”

“Wonder Where I’m From” is the first song on Stephin Merritt’s 50 Song Memoir, a record with a song for each year of his life up through the age of 50. This is the one that is ostensibly about the first year of his life, but since he can’t possibly have any memory of that time and probably didn’t have much interest in literally singing about being a newborn baby, the song is written more as an intro to the project. The song, which sounds like a luau as imagined by Paul McCartney circa Revolver*, is a meditation on the idea of being “from” a place. Merritt’s family moved so often when he was a child that he doesn’t feel rooted to any particular place other than generally being from the United States and the Northern Hemisphere. But it’s not entirely literal. He’s also wondering about how and why he exists, and what places and things meaningfully contributed to the construction of his identity. As a discrete song, it’s an open-ended thought, but in the larger context of the project, it’s essentially setting up the “plot” for the story of his life.

* Please note that Revolver came out in 1966, the year this song is set. I wonder if Merritt deliberately intended the bass melody to be so Beatles, but either way, I love that it strongly resembles the squarest aspects of the band in that time.

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