The Charm of the Highway Strip was the third album by the Magnetic Fields, and with it they took a deeper foray into country music than ever before. While their previous experimentations with country music yielded “Plant White Roses”, one of Stephin Merritt’s best songs, it wasn’t until Highway Strip that they made it last for a whole album. However, rather than using traditional instrumentation, the Magnetic Fields released a largely synthesizer-driven album, exposing the idea of “Wild West” for the artifice it really is.
Nowhere is Merritt’s skewering of Country and Western music more explicit than in “Two Characters in Search of a Country Song”. In tossing off several famous pairs such as Calamity Jane and Wild Bill [Hickok], the Devil and Daniel Webster, and oddly enough, Jesse James and William Tell, Merritt appears to be hearkening back to a shared history with the addressee of the song. However, the pairs aren’t defined by what they do, they’re defined as being “in search of a country song”. While they may have succeeded, their achievements remain “just make believe”.
Rather than providing access to a new world, for Merritt, trains serve only to take away. In “Born on a Train”, Merritt informs his love that he’ll “have to go when the whistle blows”, leaving them in their sleep. It’s not a conscious choice for him to leave, it’s forced upon him by the trains’ coming. It’s not an especially original idea (Hank Williams dealt with it in “I Heard that Lonesome Whistle”, for example), but it nevertheless goes against the Hollywood depiction of the West. The same goes for “Fear of Trains”, the jauntiest song on the album, in which Merritt takes on the myth of Manifest Destiny. For the protagonist, Manifest Destiny is a series of trains, progressively taking everything she loves from her. While we usually think of the Conestoga wagon trains as a symbol of hope and determination to tame the West, they came to “[take] away her country”. Once she’s lost everything, all that’s left for her is an echo “down the dead rails”.
Despite being arguably one of the most artificial country albums ever released, The Charm of the Highway Strip manages to be one of the most authentic depictions of the American Southwest. It also happens to be the peak of Merritt’s songwriting. It’s no coincidence that his best songs are the ones wherein he allows country to influence his writing. When he’s not criticizing the popular image of the West, he’s writing classics like “Lonely Highway” (one of the best songs about, well, lonely highways).