A Conversation with Stephin Merritt - Fall 2004

Stephin Merritt is a force to be reckoned with. Widely considered one of the most prolific and gifted songwriters currently making music, he manages to fairly regularly release music under four different monikers-The Magnetic Fields, The Gothic Archies, Future Bible Heroes, and The 6ths-while still making time to accommodate various literary and theatrical projects on the side. Like a musical version of Joyce Carol Oates, he puts out more music in the course of a year or two than many artists manage to cram into a decade. In 1999 his primary band, The Magnetic Fields, released 69 Love Songs, a sprawlingly ambitious 3-disc homage to love songs in all of their various forms. Hailed by many as an instant classic, it would be a hard act for most bands to follow. Luckily, Merritt never seems to run short on ideas, opting to release another 6ths album and write two operas with Chen Shi-Zheng before finally writing another Magnetic Fields album, the recently released and simply titled "i".

In person, Merritt is soft-spoken, serious, and more than a little intimidating. He has a reputation for being somewhat sullen and difficult. However, on the afternoon I sit down with him for coffee, he is perfectly charming and not at all the melancholic troubador so often portrayed in his music. Eager to chat about his various projects and the new Magnetic Fields record, he actually appears-dare I say it?-happy.

TCR: People loved 69 Love Songs so much, it must have been daunting to try and follow that. What was your plan when you went into the studio for this record?

SM: I thought I would just make a soft rock record, figuring that soft rock encompassed enough genres that I could just hop around and not worry about needing some organizing theme like with 69 Love Songs. But half of the songs titles happened to begin with the letter I, so I kind of stumbled upon that as a theme, or concept, or whatever. It's kind of like a parody of 69 Love Songs in a way...an even more slender thread with which to yoke together all of these stylistic exercises.

TCR: Where you worried about following up 69?

SM: Oh yeah. It took me a really long time to figure out a way to do it. I knew that no matter what I did with Magnetic Fields, it was going to be compared to 69 and that there would be some backlash of people saying, "It aint no 69 Love Songs." And there was a little bit of that, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

TCR: Were you sick of the last record? It was so popular and was talked about for what seemed like such a long time...

SM: Well, luckily I never really got sick of the songs because there were so many of them. I'm very glad that I no longer have to answer the question of why there were 69 songs though.

TCR: People turned it into a sex joke every time?

SM: Why 69? ha ha ha ha ha. It got old.

TCR: So all the songs on this record have titles beginning with the letter "i". Was that an accident, at least at first?

SM: I realized it about halfway through making the record, so I threw out all the songs not beginning with "i" after that.

TCR: Couldn't you just have renamed those songs?

SM: No.

TCR: I like the idea that you create these different frameworks to work in, like setting specific parameters to impose on the songs.

SM: Well, in a world of possibilities you need to have some parameters before you start. You have to know if you're a Chinese landscape painter...or Andy Warhol. And then you discover how to be Andy Warhol doing Chinese landscape painting.

TCR: What have you been doing since the last Magnetic Fields record? You wrote two operas, right?

SM: Yeah, well, I did that and a 6ths album, some Future Bible Heroes, and a lot of Gothic Archies tracks for the "Lemony Snicket" audio books.

TCR: It's amazing how popular those Lemony Snicket books are.

SM: I think those might be my most popular recordings, actually.

TCR: How did you get involved in opera?

SM: The director,Chen Shi-Zheng, called me and wanted to collaborate. So, we've done two productions so far and we're working on a third. This one is an adaptation of some Hans Christian Andersen stories.

TCR: Do you have a background in that type of music?

SM: Only a certain familiarity with Brecht and Weill and those shows. Brecht's aesthetic is hugely based on Chinese opera. I had minimal culture shock, but there are certainly translation problems. It's interesting dealing with Chinese musicians whose grasp of English ranges from none to...very little.

TCR: How do you direct the musicians then?

SM: Luckily there's a music director, so I don't have to deal with the musicians directly all that much. I'm writing the arrangements, so I deal with certain kinds of problems...like, the musicians can only play in a certain key..and you find that out on opening night.

TCR: It must be an interesting change from dealing with a more straightforward band arrangement.

SM: Well, I've never even had a very straightforward band arrangement. But I like working with actors and singers, and I'd like to try doing the same thing in film. Actually, I'd like to do big film musicals where everything can be perfected...in a way that they can't be in a theater. And by perfected, I mean "lip synced".

TCR: I'm curious, given you interest in theater, why do you think you didn't end up doing that instead of rock music?

SM: Hmm...it took me a long time to become a good lyricist, and I wouldn't have wanted to be doing theater music before I was a good lyricist, so I like the route I've taken. I did an interview earlier today about Cole Porter, so I was recently looking at some very early Cole Porter lyrics, which, shockingly, were kind of trite and silly and dumb.

TCR: You've scored films before, right?

SM: I went to film school and did my own sountracks, but other than that, no. There were songs of mine placed in movies, but always pre-existing songs. I did do some stuff for a show called "The Adventures of Pete and Pete", but that's about the extent of my sountrack experience.

TCR: Do people ask to use your music in their films a lot?

SM: A few times a year, I guess. Not too much.

TCR: Are you doing a full-scale tour for this record?

SM: We don't really tour too much. I don't like playing live and I really don't like touring. I like songwriting.

TCR: What is it about playing live that you don't like?

SM: I don't really understand why anyone likes it.

TCR: Is it a control issue? Maybe you don't like the fact that the songs can never sound as perfect when played live?

SM: One of the things that people like about going to see live music is that it's much louder than you can listen to music comfortably at home. Well, we're not. I have hearing damage and can't really play above a certain volume. We're very quiet and we need to have very long sound checks to make sure that we're audible, yet very quiet and it's all a bit grueling.

TCR: Do people tend to confuse the persona in your songs with you as a person, or are those two things really the same?

SM: Well, I'd like to think that I vary the personas in the songs enough so that it would be impossible, but I guess I don't. I like songs about unrequieted love and tragedy and sorrow and I suppose people confuse that with me rather than with my personal taste....It's hard to tell what people think of me.

TCR: That's interesting. I would think it would become tiresome to always be portrayed as this mope, but I think people often fail to see the sense of humor in so much of your work.

SM: People with no sense of humor often fail to see the sense of humor in others. There are also cultural differences. A midwestern sense of humor is often undetectable by a New Yorker, and vice versa.

TCR: How long have you been in New York?

SM: 10 years? I was born in Yonkers, but I moved around a great deal.

TCR: Were you a musical child?

SM: I wrote songs, but I didn't become very good at any particular instruments. I took lessons in piano, guitar, percussion, recorder, and the flute, which was a disaster. I had a hippie mother, so I went to a lot of progressive schools. Lots of music lessons.

TCR: How many instruments can you play now?

SM: You mean how many would I actually play in public? Guitar family, keyboard family, percussion family...

TCR: How did you support yourself when you came to New York, other than playing music?

SM: I copy edited for Spin and TimeOut, and I wrote for magazines.

TCR: Do you think of yourself as a good collaborator?

SM: I like collaborating with other people as long as I don't have to be in the room with them while I'm doing the work. Like, with Future Bible Heroes, we each do our own thing in isolation. It's great. With the Chinese operas, I go off and write the songs and come back and discover that the actors can't sing it for some reason and then I have to change it.

TCR: Do you write every day?

SM: Ah, no. I haven't written a song in three weeks. I don't write when I'm on tour, and I'm usually exhausted when I get back from a tour, so I don't write then either, which is where I'm at right now.

TCR: I appreciate the fact that you aren't afraid to make such unabashedly emotional music.

SM: Because I write in character so much of the time, I don't have to feel like it's really me talking, so I don't have to be worried that I'm putting too much of myself out there...when in fact I really am. I kind of think of it like I'm putting everyone out there, not just myself.

TCR: I was thinking about a song like, "It's only time", on the new record...

SM: Well, you've got an openly gay singer singing "marry me" in a discernable character, which has become a political statement since I wrote the song. So, I've had complaints about the song from one end saying that it's a stupid, treacly song that doesn't work to subvert any clichés, so it's terrible in that way. And the other side saying that it's overly political and I've ruined a perfectly good song by overly politicizing it.

TCR: I don't' really think either of those things are true.

SM: I don't either.

TCR: Do you feel politicized in terms of your sexuality? Do people always have to make an issue of it?

SM: I was recently interviewed by a radio journalist who wanted me to talk about the new queer uprising, of which I know nothing about. But I think an openly gay person singing about love is inherently political, or will always be seen as somehow political.

TCR: Do you get recognized a lot?

SM: Not really, maybe once a week.

TCR: Is it weird for strangers to want to come up and talk to you?

SM: No, not really. Strangers have always wanted to come up and talk to me. I don't look threatening, but I used to have an outlandish dressing style which made people almost involuntarily need to come up and talk to me.

TCR: What was so outlandish about it?

SM: Well the last car crash I caused, I was wearing a poncho depicting an arab scene with camels, thigh high black leather platforms, fishnet stockings through which clearly showed glitterly striped underwear, black lispstick...no gloves, it was summer. I'm not sure what I was wearing under that poncho.

TCR: It's hard for me to imagine that ensemble on you...plus, causing a car wreck can't be that easy.

SM: Nah, it's not that hard.

"i" is available on Nonesuch Records.

- T. Cole Rachel