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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields may be the best writer of love songs around today. But that doesn't mean he has to be nice.
May 1, 2004 | Last fall, while recording the latest Magnetic Fields record, "i" (due out on Tuesday), Stephin Merritt also found time to attend the Yasujiro Ozu film festival at Lincoln Center. Not just a film here or there, but all 36 of them, shown over the course of a month. "I don't usually see movies that aren't part of festivals. I'm not going to see any of the Orson Welles movies at the Film Forum because I wasn't around for the beginning of the festival," Merritt told me, with a trace of the pride that deeply obsessive people tend to have about their obsessions. "Ozu was important to the making of the record, actually. I had a book about 'Tokyo Story' sitting on a music stand to remind me to sing as if I were an Ozu actor, not putting my own little ego into the role, but just delivering the lines."
This is a strange thing to say, particularly for someone working in popular music, where vocal distinctiveness is prized, where we expect singers to emote and where the singer's ego, whether little or big, is so often exactly the point. It cuts to the heart of what is so unusual about Stephin Merritt and his music.
Although Merritt, who won't reveal his age but is likely in his late 30s, has been releasing records since 1990, his fame was limited to indie-afficionados until the release, in 1999, of a three-disc set by his band the Magnetic Fields titled, very accurately, "69 Love Songs."
"It's just a great title," Merritt told me. "Even if it hadn't been a good record, it probably would have been written about, just because of the title and the concept."
And write about it they did, nearly every magazine and newspaper that covers music, with reviews ranging from the delirious to the merely extremely positive. Suddenly, Merritt was being talked about as one of the great songwriters of his generation. Instead of playing small rock clubs downtown, he was performing "69 Love Songs" at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center as part of their "American Songbook" series. This kind of attention led to a contract with Nonesuch Records, a label that has been assembling a roster of the world's pop aristocracy -- artists like Emmylou Harris, David Byrne, Caetano Veloso and Wilco.
Speaking to people I greatly admire tends to make me very nervous, and judging from articles I found online, I had reason to be nervous speaking to Merritt. Almost everyone who interviews him mentions how prickly he can be, and some even portray him as a nasty man who derives great pleasure from torturing poor, innocent journalists. Although he's ferociously intelligent and quick, Merritt speaks very slowly, the better to polish his impeccably phrased responses, and his conversation is interspersed with lengthy, ambiguous pauses. Often, after a long pause, I'd ask a question, only to be interrupted and realize that he was, in fact, in the middle of a particularly drawn out response. Other times I'd be sure that he was in the middle of a sentence, and then realize, after 15 seconds of awkward silence, that he was finished with his response and waiting for another question.
But it's Merritt's intolerance for questions or statements he finds stupid that makes him so intimidating. The interview got off to a shaky start when I asked him if his new record's title "i" was derived from the fact that all but one of the songs on his new record were written in the first person.
"No," he replied, in the tone of someone explaining the obvious to a particularly slow child, "On '69 Love Songs' most of the songs are in first person as well. Actually, most of everybody's songs are in the first person." And, in a nicely poetic afterthought, "If they're not invitations to dance, they're first person."
Later we were talking about Björk, and I mentioned how innovative I thought she was. Merritt looked a little incredulous and asked me what I was talking about. This should have been easy for me: first of all, the idea that Björk is an innovative force in popular music is widely accepted; secondly, I'd written about it already. But feeling tongue-tied, I stammered for a moment, and then said something about the way she used non-rhyming lyrics, and strange, twisted phrase structures that were rare in popular music. This unleashed a minor tirade, albeit in the same monotone voice, with just an extra touch of pedantry.
