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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)