From beneath tousled brown hair, Stephin Merritt carefully surveys the elegant barroom. Has anybody noticed? Thankfully, no. Even better, tiny Irving still sleeps safely in the red bag slung over Merritt's shoulder. The swanky Town House Bar on New York's Upper East Side is just the kind of place that would bounce a guy for smuggling in a sleeping Chihuahua, and Merritt has already been thrown out of here once (he wouldn't take off his baseball cap. Why not? Four words: head lice, shaved dome). But luck is with Merritt tonight, and no one on staff, nor any of the well-dressed professional men clinking glasses around us, has given Merritt or his satchel-full of puppy a passing glance.

Which is fine with Merritt, the slight, thirty-plus leader of the Magnetic Fields, standing patiently in the classy gay piano bar where he was first struck by the notion of doing a triple album's worth of love songs. 69 Love Songs is a wide-ranging and poignant song cycle that's already sold out its modest first pressing. Magnetic Fields albums have long been Merritt's primary means of exploring themes of modern life (previous records have investigated vacations and road trips), and this latest project is no different. Using five different singers and scads of guitars, synths, ukeleles and rhythm machines, Merritt's latest delves into love in its many splendors: joyful, depressing and hilarious.

And the idea of doing sixty-nine of them came to him at this slyly decorated bar. Hanging on these striped walls are paintings of gentlemen on the hunt, attending to their hounds and horses. Well-muscled waiters pad past sturdy red leather chairs and over thick, ornately patterned carpets. This could be the most elegant pick-up joint in Gotham. But Merritt doesn't seem like the sort of fellow you'd meet here. Dressed in brown moccasins, blue jeans and a navy blue knit sweater with white snowflakes, he's the most unassuming-looking guy here.

While a bearded tuxedo-clad gentleman pounds the baby grand and belts out "Part of Your World" (The Little Mermaid), Merritt and I scope out a place to sit and chat about love songs, gay bars and why he named his puppy after Irving Berlin ("Big ears").

"I always write in either cafes or bars," he says, speaking as low and rumbly as he sings. "I think I wrote one of the sixty-nine love songs at home." Impressively, Merritt encounters little trouble remembering new melodies in loud, crowded rooms. "I read in an interview with Abba when I was little that they didn't write anything down because they figured if they couldn't remember a melody, then neither would anyone else."

Anybody who namechecks ABBA is gunning for overpowering hooks. Merritt wins plaudits for his sharp wit, but it's his melodic gift that's undeniable. A lyric like, "Reno Dakota, I'm reaching my quota / Of tears for the year / Alas and alack, you just don't call me back / You have just disappeared / It makes me drink beer," might not send every wronged lover laughing on their way to the fridge for another cold one, but few will be able to resist the melody those words are put to. Merritt, like the Everly Brothers with their "Bye Bye Love," has mastered the equation: Depressing Lyrics + Buoyant Melody = Memorable Song. One gets the feeling that Merritt could have opened up a fortune cookie when he was a teenager and found the following advice: "For those who feel, life is a tragedy. For those who think, it is a comedy." If that had happened, the young songwriter would've taken both sides to heart.

This is to say that Merritt builds feeling into his songs by stacking emotions. "Reno Dakota," so short it could be called a ditty, is nevertheless complex. Clocking in at 1:05, and performed by banjo (by Fieldster John Woo) and voice (Fields pianist, drummer, manager and now part-time singer Claudia Gonson), the song manages to evoke the frustration of being blown off by a lover, confusion at why, brimming annoyance ("Do not play fast and loose with my heart!") and, finally, humor. The clever internal rhyme scheme, plus the way the melody rises during the gag lines (Concert audiences giggle spontaneously), play maraschino cherry to the tune's cocktail. And while these are among the many facets that make 69 Love Songs so fine, Merritt dreads talking shop about this stuff.

"I've read interviews with songwriters where people say the dumbest things," he says, sipping Hennessy. "I'm anxious about saying them myself." Still, he will allow this much.

"I don't sing many songs that are about me, and I can't remember which ones are and which aren't, and my mother wouldn't be able tell," he says, casually tossing the idea of the song as autobiographical statement out the window. "Most songs are so vague that they're not autobiographical. For example, if I say, 'I used to love you, now you're gone, and I don't know if I love you anymore,' how do I know whether I'm writing that because I feel that way or because I've heard that other people feel that way or that I used to feel that way? It's a simple combination of emotions that people have, and that's what songwriting's about. It's not really about writing down your personal life."

His anti-singer-songwriter bias makes country music a perfect vehicle for Merritt. "Country is where the songwriting tradition is still alive at all, so it's pretty natural for me to be into country," he says, describing the distinction as "songwriting for any singer as opposed to the singer's own voice and persona." Even a casual listen to 69 Love Songs will turn up country flavors, songs like "A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off," and "Papa Was a Rodeo," that use rural imagery and country styles to portray a man running around on his wife or two loners negotiating a tryst. There's also the hilarious "Night You Can't Remember," a wronged lover's waltz that lifts a line of melody from Coley Jones' 1952 "Drunkard's Special." What puts the record over the top are strange and wonderful gems like "Sweet Lovin' Man," which could easily be a No. 1 smash hit for, say, Shania Twain.

"Sweet Lovin' Man" is a rhapsody about finding Mr. Right, as mainstream a song idea as there ever was. The Magnetic Fields version is typically inviting: warbling Casio-like keyboard, stinging guitar arpeggios, driving drum machine and Claudia's earnest, pretty singing which makes the song sound triumphant rather than sad. Like most Magnetic Fields records, its sound is exact yet homemade, not nearly slick enough for commercial radio. Has Merritt ever considered hawking his songs on the open market, where they could earn him a fortune? "That used to be done by publishing companies and they just don't do it anymore, outside of Nashville," he demurs, mentioning his being a gay New Yorker as an impediment to success down South. "I don't think they'd like me very much in Nashville, but maybe they would. Of course, I'd be delighted if ShaniaTwain covered 'Sweet Lovin' Man.'"

The very idea of indie-pop to mainstream country crossover is only not ridiculous because of Merritt's breadth of influence. "When I was ten Iwas into bubblegum rock," he begins. "I'm now also into Thirties war songs andForties show tunes and Fifties exotica and elevator music and Sixties psychedelia and Seventies art rock and Eighties new wave and Nineties um ... um ... Stereolab and High Llamas, whatever you want to call that. And I like Gilbert and Sullivan."

Unsurprisingly, this translates into a very broad-sounding triple album. Ditto Merritt's use of a wide array of source material. "In making 69 Love Songs I looked at all kinds of love documents. Personal ads, a lot of advertising, two books of love letters, one on how to write a love letter and one of famous love letters that I pillaged. I also looked up love in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, which is an excellent hunting ground."

Merritt's hunting rarely leads him toward jazz or R&B, but best among all sixty-nine is his consummate homage to Billie Holiday, "My Only Friend." A long, dark night of the soul song, "Only Friend" is written as a love letter to Lady Day avowing, "You and me, we don't believe in happy endings." Again, Merritt builds the song by stacking emotions: the bleak morphs into the goofy ("Can you save my life this time? Can you cry so beautifully? You make me troubles rhyme"), and admiration becomes pity ("Billie you're a genius, enough to be a fool / A fool to gamble everything and never know the rules"). Each line pulls the listener in a new emotional direction, until "My Only Friend" becomes what it's about: a song to rely on in time of trouble.

And Merritt himself, finally, pulls his listener in new directions.

When I ask my standard end-of-interview-Is-There-Anything-Else-You'd-Like-To-Talk-About question, he brings up the question of race. Why is music so segregated, he wants to know? "I think race in music is criminally under-discussed. In how many bookstores is Toni Morrison in the black section, and how long would there be a black section in a major bookstore chain before people complained?" he asks. "Black is not a genre like horror or science fiction.

"When I was in sixth grade in Boston, I was told that I wasn't supposed to play with Italian kids because I was in the Irish camp," he remembers. "In Boston, the Irish are affiliated with indie rock and the Italians are associated with mainstream rock and they don't like each other; they don't want to like each other. And blacks are off the map."

Why is his audience almost entirely white and Asian? Should he be doing something different? "I don't know what the answer is," he admits. "I'm suggesting that what needs to be done initially is to stop putting black and white artists in separate categories in record stores and on radio stations. It's offensive."

These difficult and usually ignored questions stare at us from the very center of pop music. And while Stephin Merritt doesn't have the answers, he's proven more than ready to ask the tough questions.

RODD McLEOD
(December 3, 1999)