But comparisons to writers like Porter and Berlin, while capturing Merritt's extreme facility with clever and unusual rhymes, miss a lot of what his music is about. It's important to remember that he considers ABBA a truly great band, their songs the pinnacle of pop songwriting. What is for most of us either a guilty pleasure or a kitschy joke, Merritt seems to love without irony. And ABBA's peculiar combination of melodrama and emotional vacancy can often be heard in his own music.

There are three elements that contribute to the quality of emotional detachment in Merrit's music: his deadpan singing style, his almost constant reliance on humor, and his habit of appropriating genres in a semi-ironic fashion. Merritt was evasive about all three. When I asked him about his vocal style, he said, "I don't really like people whooping. I suppose if I could sing like Michael Jackson, maybe I would, but I can't. I don't want to make music that I can't sing along to, and I can't yelp and whoop, really. I'd be much too self-conscious." On humor: "Humor is a necessary aspect of rhyming. If you can't say anything that might be interpreted as silly, you can say very little in rhyme, which is why Bob Dylan and Cole Porter are full of silliness." And on genre: "It's important to have a lot of uninteresting elements just to go into the background, to foreground the interesting elements."

The only living songwriters I can think of who really compete with Merritt in terms of verbal facility and intricacy are rappers, so I was interested to know his thoughts on hip-hop. "In general, I liked the first two years of rap, and after that, it kind of got boring. The first Run DMC album, where the only sounds you hear are one primitive rhythm unit and one orchestra hit, I love the minimalism of that. I thought that was a great record. But once it wasn't simple anymore, I thought, Why aren't they singing yet? If they can't sing, what's the point? ... Who wants to hear pop without melody?"

After a short pause, in which he realizes what a ridiculous question he's just asked, he adds, "Only suburban teenage boys." Outkast? "I probably tapped my foot along the first hundred times I heard the goddamned thing. It's certainly no insult to Outkast to say that that's the most overplayed record since, well, since 'Into the Groove,' I think. I'm desperately sick of hearing it."

I tried playing Merritt a track by the Southern rapper Cee-lo, called "One for the Road," a dazzling display of verbal ingenuity and wit I thought he might enjoy. Before Cee-lo actually starts rapping, there's a short introduction, in which, sounding very Southern and very black, he says, "Yeah, mm-mm-mm, yeah that sho' feel good. Hello, I go by the name of simply Cee-lo Green, how d'ya do? Welcome. I thought I'd seize this opportunity to tell you a little bit more about myself, if you don't mind. This is my vision, ya know what I'm sayin'? Check me out now."

Unremarkable and tame, at least it seemed to me, but it was too much for Merritt, who stopped the song after a few seconds of this. "I think it's shocking that we're not allowed to play coon songs anymore, but people, both white and black, behave in more vicious caricatures of African-Americans than they had in the 19th century. It's grotesque. Presumably it's just a character, and that person doesn't actually talk that way, but that accent, that vocal presentation, would not have been out of place in the Christy Minstrels." Dramatic pause to prepare for the inevitable hyperbolic quip, "In fact, it would probably have been considered too tasteless for the Christy Minstrels."

Merritt does not keep careful track of what's happening in popular music these days, and seems entirely dismissive of most that he's heard. I asked him a few times if there were young and active artists out there whom he liked, and all I got was that Momus (mid-40s) is a "great lyricist," and that he likes the new High Llamas record. Since he stopped reviewing records, he doesn't get them sent to him for free in the mail anymore, so he says that "unless it's boring thumping disco music, I probably don't hear it, until my friends play it for me. Which they rarely do anymore, since I hate everything they play for me." Merritt hears so much "boring thumping disco music" because of his songwriting routine. "I sit around in cafes and bars and write. I prefer to have music playing when I write, it's sort of like having white noise. If I don't have music playing, my mind wanders. It helps for it to be music that I don't particularly like. If I like it, I'm listening to it, and that's distracting," he says. "The best is boring thumping disco, which is easy to find in gay bars."

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