WTJU 91.1 FM

Stephin Merritt’s place in the American songbook is well-earned. Most known for his work leading The Magnetic Fields, he’s released albums with Future Bible Heroes, The Gothic Archies, and The 6ths; under his own name, he has contributed to film scores, musicals, and Chinese operas. Sardonic but not to the point of losing his humanity, his most-acclaimed works such as 69 Love Songs temper clear-eyed cynicism with a sense of irony uncorrupted by the internet era.

I met Stephin in a hotel bar in Knoxville, Tennessee, too early to be upset that it was closed. We were both in town for Big Ears Festival, at which he would later perform his latest album with The Magnetic Fields, 50 Song Memoir, in full. A rare venture into autobiography, the record is a pleasure to enjoy in full, with individual tracks that stand on their own just as well. Despite the songs’ brevity, it’s an effective portrait – Merritt provides a comprehensive accounting of 50 years of not only his own life, but of America, from New York City to a Vermont commune.

What draws you to sprawling, numerically-significant albums? I imagine that it’s somewhat unusual for artists to have that great a sense of structure prior to writing a record.

I was thinking recently, since everyone asks me this question several times a day, about the Rolling Stones, who you would think would be the opposite of that. But they also do a lot of theme albums – they have their country album, they have Their Satanic Majesties Request… Some Girls is said to be their disco album, although no one at the time would have thought that made sense. Roxy Music did a sort of theme career, changing very, very slowly over the course of their career. Maybe the opposite of that is Felt, who are an entirely different band on several of their albums.

I like best the Frank Sinatra albums where there’s a title that explains what all the songs are. This one’s in London, or this is the one with Antônio Carlos Jobim. I like being told what’s going to happen for the next half hour, and then it unfolds, rather than “here’s my new album.” Nancy Sinatra did the same thing: Nancy in London, and Moving with Nancy, the songs from her TV special. Country My Way is country her way.

I see myself as doing pretty much the same thing. Sometimes I’ll do parodies of it, like i, where all the song titles begin with “i” and that’s the whole theme. Whereas secretly the theme of “i” is that it’s a soft rock album with only six instruments on it. But the theme that everyone notices is the one that’s in the title.

Which has no relationship to the music itself.

Zero.

Was it disruptive to your songwriting process to start inserting yourself and your own experiences into your lyrics?

Oh yes. Ordinarily I can guide myself by rhyme, or meter, or caprice, whereas if I have to strictly maintain a truthful autobiographical stance every line is much more constrained than usual. So yes, it took me longer to write all of the songs. In some ways it was easier, because I knew where they were going, but that’s also a problem because I like to surprise the listener. I usually do that by surprising myself, but since all of this had already happened I could surprise myself, and had to find other ways of surprising the listener.

Was the adherence to the truth self-imposed? I imagine that memoir as a genre allows a little room for fictionalization, or at least interpretation.

I stuck to what is true or an obvious metaphor – Judy Garland, for example, didn’t actually ride back to Rigel 5. Similarly, Allen Ginsberg didn’t specifically write a sonnet, but he was there at the Stonewall… activities. As was Taylor Mead. So, reasonably true.

The album was commissioned, right?

It was all Bob Hurwitz’s idea, the president of Nonesuch at the time. All I had to do was write, record, play, and sing it. And have lived it.

Is autobiography something that you might eventually have arrived at without an outside impetus?

Hell no. I don’t have an autobiographical impulse, and I would never have both decided to do it and done it. My convenient excuse for doing it is that I was told to, which gave me permission to do it. Never again.

There’s some anthropological merit to it, at least. Did it take any great effort or intentionality to keep some authorial distance from the characters in your previous work?

I don’t think of my songs as being character-driven so much as situation-driven. Characters are, maybe, implied. I think that songs, as a form, are too short to be decent character studies. Just as haiku are never about characters. My songs are only a little bit longer. There are lots of short story-length character studies, but songs are a lot shorter. Maybe Lydia Davis is the only comparison.

“Character-driven” would also imply that figures transcend the song in which they appear.

Right, which is very, very rare. There’s a David Bowie song “Ashes to Ashes” in which he re-introduces the character Major Tom from Space Oddity, and then there’s the song “Major Tom” by Peter Schilling. But that’s very rare. Unless you think of all of those women named Lola in cowboy songs as the same woman.

I’ve read repeated references, perhaps over-mythologized, to you doing most of your writing in bars.

It could hardly be over-mythologized, because I really do it all the time. I rarely write songs outside of bars. I usually have something else that I should be doing, so the space that I give myself to work is sitting around in bars. Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility; you need to not be feeling tempestuous in order to write about feeling tempestuous.

What are you usually avoiding?

I have to be interviewed, although here we are in a bar. I have to go on tour, I record, I answer my e-mail. I feed and walk the dogs. I listen to other music. It’s not only the daily responsibilities of life, but also the other aspects of music-making. I’m completely capable of only recording one song for months, 12 or 16 hours a day, if I didn’t have something else to do. But I do have something else to do, which is write the other 49 songs on the album. It would be a noble experiment to spend a year-and- a-half on one songs, other than 50 songs.

I already had a teetotalling year, in 2013. I didn’t drink at all, so I didn’t write any songs [laughs]. I think I wrote two that year, and weirdly didn’t lose any weight or have any health improvements. In fact, I think I gained ten pounds. I was probably eating when I could have been at bars drinking and writing songs. But really, what else would I be doing at night? I would be going to the movies – generally, if I’m not writing songs I see a lot of movies and plays and I read a lot. When I am writings songs, I see zero plays, very few movies, and I don’t read as much. Having a life. I would be having a life.

How much intentionality do you approach a writing session with? Do songs gestate or tend to stand out after the fact?

I’m usually working on a particular set of songs – a musical or an album, or even a film soundtrack. I rarely have no idea what I’m doing. But sometimes.

I wrote “Punk Love” in less time than it takes to sing it, “Plant White Roses” I wrote in less time than it takes to sing it. Most of my other songs have taken at least an evening to write. Some of my other songs, like “Ethan Frome” or “At the Pyramid” have taken 30 years. So on average, it takes several years to write a song. But the median is more like an evening or two.

Did you find the experience of re-visiting some of the new album’s darker moments to be more cathartic or painful?

I limited my material to what I already remembered – I didn’t go to childhood homes for research or anything like that. It didn’t require any detective work to make this album, and I would have no interest in making myself burst into tears whenever I performed a song, so it’s not quite cathartic. I’m not sure how I would have gone about making it cathartic, but I guess that if that were the goal I could have figured it out. I don’t know why I would want to do that.

I’ve read about your distaste for live performance. Why do you think people are so intent on seeing you perform?

Maybe they think that I’ll finally fall off the stage, like Nancy Reagan at the inauguration. I guess she fell off the stairs, actually. I don’t know. I’m a huge fan of recorded music, and not at all of live music, with a few exceptions. Matmos is playing in a few minutes, and if I weren’t on tour I would love to go see Matmos… with earplugs. Just to see what they do live, because I bet that it isn’t at all what they do on record. What they do on record is generally impossible to do live, which is true of me also. Perhaps the audience would like to hear how it’s possible to play live the recordings which are mostly not possible to reproduce. Unless I just played the tape and lip-synced, which is always a temptation.

I saw an infamous De La Soul show in which apparently the DAT that they were hoping to rap over arrived late. First, we all sat around for four hours waiting for the show to begin, and then they decided that they couldn’t keep waiting and would just rap over the records. So they played the record and rapped along, and it was definitely among the worst shows I’ve ever seen.

Do you have a preferred venue or environment in which you would like your recorded music to be consumed?

I’m not sure I’ve ever thought about that. I assume, when mixing a record, that a substantial portion of the audience will be listening in the car, so that it would be a bad idea to put the vocals in the right channel assuming that the listener is driving. Same for the left channel in the British release. I put the vocal in the center, almost no matter what. A lot of people listen on headphones, a fashion which keeps coming back. They need the bass to be in the center, or they’ll get earaches quickly. If I put the bass somewhere other than the center, it’s only for a little while. I try to respect people’s pain thresholds, so I don’t get too playful with that aspect. So I do think about the listener in that sense, when I mix the record. Not when I write a song, or when I perform.

Strictly from a technical standpoint, then.

It’s all technical. But from a medical standpoint, yes.

What informs your tendency towards short songs?

Very long songs are fun, but you don’t want to hear them more than once a month. I like to make records where you might actually want to listen to the record again immediately after doing so. Long songs aren’t really compatible with that. They get too specific, so that the story they tell generally gets clearer and clearer, narrower and narrower, and becomes more like reading a novel than a haiku. So for the sake of repetition, I prefer writing the haiku to the novel.

I can imagine doing an album of long songs, where it’s built in that you probably don’t want to listen to the album more than once a month. I think Momus writes that way: long, specific songs totally absent of the expectation that you’ll put the album on again after you’ve just heard it.

50 or 69 short songs is still quite an undertaking, however.

In the case of this particular album, I think it’s much more meaningful if you listen to the whole thing. It is broken up into fifths, however, so if you want to listen to just my childhood again and again you’re totally welcome to. There was an article in The Believer by Rick Moody in which he took 69 Love Songs and lopped off the ones he didn’t like to end up with 31 love songs. I’ve never actually heard his selection, so I can’t comment on it, but it doesn’t have a dirty joke in the title. It’s a pretty meaningless number, too – it’s a long month. What else does 31 mean?

Speaking of that album, what compelled you to make something you identified as your magnum opus with so much time left in your career? I can’t think of many artists that would admit to a peak in their careers, rather than constant progression.

I don’t know that I had a sense that there was a lot of time remaining in my career. As I explain on this album, we were always being told that nuclear war was a genuine, imminent possibility. I totally expected to be killed off by AIDS at an early age. I’ve dodged a bullet on that one, so far. I’ve had enough friends who died that I never thought of myself as guaranteed to grow old. I’m definitely surprised to be 52. I think of what would be a nice album to do now, which is in opposition to thinking about what would be a nice song to do now. I proceed album-by- album, so I am thinking in terms of this year, this week. But I’m not thinking in terms of this decade.

Having touched upon so many distinct genres, do you require a certain set of parameters or constraints in order to be productive?

What would be the alternative? I’m in the middle of reading my way through the David Pringle list of the one hundred best science fiction novels from 1948 to 1984, and I’ve noticed that when things are less science fiction-like than the others, even in a relative sense, they’re disappointing. I got really frustrated trying to read Timescape, by Gregory Benford, because it’s all about scientists talking and their academic careers. Meanwhile, the alleged subject of the book is time travel by tachyon, which is a hell of a lot more interesting than the academic underpinnings thereof. And yet, 90% of the novel is about characters chatting.

Outside of science fiction, “characters chatting” is what a novel is. But given the genre expectations of science fiction, which is that either it’s an action-adventure story or a novel of ideas, the reader feels that he or she, in science fiction usually a he, has been disappointed when those genre expectations are thwarted.

So when I start out to write a song, I usually have as a starting point either a genre, or two genres in collision, or a definite way of sidestepping genre entirely. Otherwise I don’t know what the second line is going to be.

That goes back to the ease of having an album’s title being self-descriptive.

Sure, although some of my self-descriptive albums titles were tacked on later. Such as Distortion, which is basically a record review rather than a concept. Both Distortion and Realism are titles that have nothing to do with the lyrics and are describing the mixing style.

Are there any living artists that you would consider musical contemporaries?

It’s always been true for me that the popular music that I like tends to be the music that sounds like it was recorded 20-50 years prior. In the early 80’s, what I really loved was the neo-psychedelic bands. Right now, the only band that I would want to be in is Shannon and the Clams, who sounds like it’s 1963. Except for the lyrics, they could be in 1963.

I don’t know of any living musicians who are ever described as similar to me. It’s important to have at least two different heroes. All of the people who listened only to Dylan are forgotten now. Except maybe P.F. Sloan. I have dozens.

Corrigan Blanchfield is co-host of Just Take This With You (Mondays 11pm-1am). He would be happy to hear from you briefly (@_cceb) or at length (corrigan.blanchfield@gmail.com).