The Luckiest Guy On The Lower East Sideby Brighid Mooney
The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side
by Brighid Mooney
"Who will mourn the passing of my heart? Will its little droppings climb the pop chart? Who'll take its ashes, and singing, fling them from the top of the Brill Building?"1
These few lines from the Magnetic Fields’ "Epitaph For My Heart" don't exactly obscure any deeper meaning, but somehow in just three sentences they manage to encompass nearly everything that their writer, Stephin Merritt, is about: mourning, death, the heart, ashes, the search for someone who can effectively sing his songs, and an overt reference to an inimitable icon of pop music. But does reducing Merritt's artistic philosophies to mournful Brill Building-style pop do his vast musical catalogue a great injustice? And can the work of Stephin Merritt, in any of its many guises, really be downplayed as "just pop music"?
Since his humble beginnings as a young ABBA fan who revered Irving Berlin and worshipped Phil Spector, Merritt has remained steadfast in his dedication to bubblegum purism. Merritt himself is revered by hundreds – no, thousands - of jaded, yet pop-loving, college students for the wit and sophistication of his lyrics and the simple, singular joys of his ever urbane melodies. But his songs remain unequivocally true to the traditional pop sound. It's the experimental nature of his music and the melancholy contrast of his lyrics that keep him from getting lost within the horde of bland, insipid modern bands that currently crowd the airwaves. Well, that and perhaps the fact that he tends not to be played on those same airwaves. Or many at all, really. Brilliant (in one Future Bible Heroes song he rhymes the word "luau" with "like, wow") and cantankerous (he gives notoriously difficult and terse interviews), Stephin Merritt is a force to be reckoned with in popular music. Considering the reach of that force, it remains a mystery as to why the pop-loving masses have yet to fully embrace him.
Take A Chance On Me
Stephin Merritt was born in 1966, the progeny of two 1960s folk singers. He never knew his father, Scott Fagan, but his mother was deeply entrenched in the hippie ideology and she raised Merritt in a predominately communal environment and within a doctrine of Tibetan Buddhism. They moved often and by the time he was 23 he had lived in 33 different homes in six different states. Merritt has said that he was never presumed to be straight so there was never any need for him to come out. And that kind of nomadic upbringing, coupled with an isolating homosexuality, seems to have made him an outsider, a role he continues to play even now. He was the perpetual new kid, and the characters who reside in his songs reflect that, often being sympathetic outcasts, constantly searching for love and acceptance, but rarely finding it.
Merritt eventually settled in Boston where he attended Harvard and met the people who would become members of his first band, the Magnetic Fields: Claudia Gonson, John Woo, and Sam Davol. Despite being a full band, the Magnetic Fields are wholly Merritt's creation and their music belongs solely to him. He writes the songs, plays most of the instruments, and in recent years has started doing nearly all of the singing as well. A self-professed "awful singer," his voice is deep, droning and morose, but with an unexpected amount of range. His voice is often likened to that of Johnny Cash or Leonard Cohen. For Merritt, the emotion of the song can be found in just the words and the notes, and he often asks the singers he employs for his various projects to "sound bored," presenting the songs in an open, unembellished way rather than performing them. The result is frequently mesmerizing, with the inherent humor and sadness of the songs flowing out, unobstructed by superfluous vocal ornamentation. On the first several Magnetic Fields albums, Susan Anway performed this task with an exquisite boredom and beauty. Later Merritt took over, delivering the songs himself in his trademark lackadaisical style.
In 1994, he moved the band to New York where he currently lives and works, hanging out in gay piano bars and drawing inspiration from the world around him. Equally enthralled by both bubblegum pop and experimental music, Merritt is a studio wiz and a big fan of music technology. The influence of both can easily be heard in his music, which incorporates predominately major chords with a barrage of electronic sounds and untraditional pop instrumentation, including cellos, harpsichords, banjos, ukuleles, and the occasional electric sitar. Merritt is also a music critic, that thing usually most loathed among musicians. He once worked as a copy editor for Spin magazine and is currently employed as a writer and critic for Time Out New York. These extracurricular duties keep him at the forefront of information on popular music and also keep him continually on the cusp of new musical technology. He believes that the state of avant-garde pop music has stagnated recently, mostly due to no new musical technology breakthroughs in several years. Nothing sounds new or futuristic, and for Merritt, that is a very disappointing fact.
Pure Pop For Now People
Undeniably one of the most prolific musicians working today, Merritt writes and produces for four separate bands, and over the last several years has also written complete movie soundtracks, as well as various songs for children's television shows like The Adventures of Pete and Pete on Nickelodeon. The Magnetic Fields remain his highest profile musical project, having gained attention outside of the indie-rock community with 1999's epic 69 Love Songs. The other three of Merritt's bands mostly languish in obscurity, but each serves as a distinct outlet for his seemingly ever-flowing river of creativity. In addition to the seven albums released by the Magnetic Fields since 1991, Merritt has also made two albums with the 6ths, which is not so much a band as a personal studio project. For the 6th's 1995 album Wasp's Nest, Merritt wrote a collection of songs and contracted well-known indie rock singers to sing each of them, including Amelia Fletcher of Heavenly and Yo La Tengo's Georgia Hubley. There's also the Future Bible Heroes, a collaborative 80s style pop band for which Merritt co-writes the songs with former Figures On A Beach member Chris Ewan. And last, and probably also least, there is the Gothic Archies, a "bubblegum goth" band that has so far released just one album, 2003's New Despair.
But it is the Magnetic Fields that get the brunt of his focus. Their first five albums were critically appreciated but mostly commercially ignored. That changed when they released 69 Love Songs, an aptly named three disc album that Merritt has referred to as "a collection of singles." A bold move for any band, much less one that had heretofore barely sold any records, 69 Love Songs brought the Magnetic Fields their first glimmer of attention from outside of the indie rock underground. On the album, Merritt played over ninety different instruments and sang 45 of the album's 69 songs, because, as he puts it, no one should have to sing 69 songs all by himself.2 As well as splaying the concept of love into a spectrum of emotions, the album also made the Herculean attempt to perform the love song in as many different musical styles as possible.
That kind of ambition is not unusual for Merritt, who has often made it a goal to have each song on an album represent a distinct style of music. Though previous albums from the Magnetic Fields like The Charm of the Highway Strip, which featured an electro-country sound, and Holiday, which was more in the vein of euro-pop, managed to keep a cohesive feel, perhaps from having a clearly defined concept in mind. Despite its obvious concept, 69 Love Songs was sprawling and immense, as though Merritt had been holding back every song he had written during the previous three years. In truth, he hadn't been holding out, but instead wrote nearly 100 songs for the album almost from scratch. The styles on 69 Love Songs run the gamut of popular music from punk rock and madrigals to country ballads and 60s style pop. The lyrics are consistently facetious, absurd, comical and despairing in equal measure, filled with the Warholesque clichés that Merritt has relied on for years. "I use all the common songwriting clichés,"3 he once confessed. And indeed in Magnetic Fields songs alone there are countless references to Paris, the moon, roses, time and infinity, eyes of varying colors (but mostly blue), dancing, rain, railroads and highways. All of these things wrap around his isolated, iconoclastic characters like a warm blanket of familiarity. Lacking the love they seek, there is always the moon or the highway to turn to, and they do so again and again.
Silly Love Songs
“Regardless of what Stephin Merritt may say in an interview, his songs seem to be about loneliness, isolation, and the need to be recognized by another person,”4 Claudia Gonson, his friend and Magnetic Fields cohort, once said. What could possibly possess a person to write 69 songs on the single subject of love? Though he actually started out with 100, a drop in the bucket compared to the huge number of love songs he's written altogether. For Merritt there seems to be no subject more intriguing, mysterious, comical or appealing. And the subject itself wields a never ending supply of inspiration. It is a topic he attacks time and time again from the varying angles of lust, playfulness, unrequited desire, heartbreak, disappointment, resignation and acceptance. With both humor and sincerity, Merritt is writing love songs for people who don't believe in love, true or everlasting. He gives a unique voice to the brokenhearted, as his characters remain faithfully self-deprecating, their sense of humor fully intact, with wounds always open and on display.
"I wouldn't be interested in love as a subject matter if it weren't so scary. I think of love as something dark and horrifying, and love and death as nearly the same thing,"5 Merritt has said. Love in the world of Stephin Merritt is indeed a truly frightening thing. Never certain, never eternal, never unshakeable, and often unreciprocated, exploited, or misunderstood. "Well, I'm sorry that I love you," he sings, "it's just a phase I'm going through."6 A lifelong, all-enduring, completely inexhaustible phase.
Merritt's characters constantly teeter on the brink of self-actualization, moving back and forth between a painful self-awareness and stubborn, deliberate blindness. They are forever reaching out and finding nothing, or gaining a tentative hold, only to lose it within three and a half minutes time, trapped inside an endless array of pop despair. And yet, they give as good as they get. They laugh at themselves and this absurd world they have to blindly navigate their way through. They are you. And me. And Merritt himself. Which may be why they strike a chord in the relatively few people who hear them. Love is a dark and dirty business, full of trials and mishaps and promises and lies. Stephin Merritt, more than most, has never been afraid to dig to the core of insular human existence, where love is unpredictable at best, and misery is tempered by humor and an infinite abundance of cheerful major chords.
"We belong together, like sex and violence; like death and silence."7 Like pop music and love. Like Stephin Merritt and Manhattan piano bars. He may be writing about something as old and as thoroughly explored as time itself, but with an incessant supply of heartbreak, an oblique vision of the world, and an interminable perspicacity, Merritt is well equipped to bring an innovative and unique understanding to this never quite exhausted subject. Insightful, literate, and absurdly comical, the songs of Stephin Merritt transcend the curse of being called "just" anything, but they will always and forever be pop. Just as he intends them to be.
Credits:
1. The Magnetic Fields. “Epitaph For My Heart.” 69 Love Songs. Merge, B00000JY1X, 1999.
2. Wohlfeld, Carsten. “The Summer Of 69 – Stephin Merritt talks.” Luna Kafé, August 15, 2000.
3. Drischler, Kendra. “Interview with Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields.” The Daily Californian, July 22, 2004.
4. Walters, Barry. “Sweet Singin’ Woman.” The Advocate, May 9, 2000
5. Lynch, Monica. Unknown Date & Publication name. http://www.kutilek.de/musik/sm/stephin.pdf, page 10.
6. The Magnetic Fields. “I’m Sorry I Love You.” 69 Love Songs. Merge, B00000JY1X, 1999.
7. The Magnetic Fields. “Heather Heather.” Pieces Of April Soundtrack. Nonesuch, B0000DZTIO, 2003.
by Brighid Mooney
"Who will mourn the passing of my heart? Will its little droppings climb the pop chart? Who'll take its ashes, and singing, fling them from the top of the Brill Building?"1
These few lines from the Magnetic Fields’ "Epitaph For My Heart" don't exactly obscure any deeper meaning, but somehow in just three sentences they manage to encompass nearly everything that their writer, Stephin Merritt, is about: mourning, death, the heart, ashes, the search for someone who can effectively sing his songs, and an overt reference to an inimitable icon of pop music. But does reducing Merritt's artistic philosophies to mournful Brill Building-style pop do his vast musical catalogue a great injustice? And can the work of Stephin Merritt, in any of its many guises, really be downplayed as "just pop music"?
Since his humble beginnings as a young ABBA fan who revered Irving Berlin and worshipped Phil Spector, Merritt has remained steadfast in his dedication to bubblegum purism. Merritt himself is revered by hundreds – no, thousands - of jaded, yet pop-loving, college students for the wit and sophistication of his lyrics and the simple, singular joys of his ever urbane melodies. But his songs remain unequivocally true to the traditional pop sound. It's the experimental nature of his music and the melancholy contrast of his lyrics that keep him from getting lost within the horde of bland, insipid modern bands that currently crowd the airwaves. Well, that and perhaps the fact that he tends not to be played on those same airwaves. Or many at all, really. Brilliant (in one Future Bible Heroes song he rhymes the word "luau" with "like, wow") and cantankerous (he gives notoriously difficult and terse interviews), Stephin Merritt is a force to be reckoned with in popular music. Considering the reach of that force, it remains a mystery as to why the pop-loving masses have yet to fully embrace him.
Take A Chance On Me
Stephin Merritt was born in 1966, the progeny of two 1960s folk singers. He never knew his father, Scott Fagan, but his mother was deeply entrenched in the hippie ideology and she raised Merritt in a predominately communal environment and within a doctrine of Tibetan Buddhism. They moved often and by the time he was 23 he had lived in 33 different homes in six different states. Merritt has said that he was never presumed to be straight so there was never any need for him to come out. And that kind of nomadic upbringing, coupled with an isolating homosexuality, seems to have made him an outsider, a role he continues to play even now. He was the perpetual new kid, and the characters who reside in his songs reflect that, often being sympathetic outcasts, constantly searching for love and acceptance, but rarely finding it. Merritt eventually settled in Boston where he attended Harvard and met the people who would become members of his first band, the Magnetic Fields: Claudia Gonson, John Woo, and Sam Davol. Despite being a full band, the Magnetic Fields are wholly Merritt's creation and their music belongs solely to him. He writes the songs, plays most of the instruments, and in recent years has started doing nearly all of the singing as well. A self-professed "awful singer," his voice is deep, droning and morose, but with an unexpected amount of range. His voice is often likened to that of Johnny Cash or Leonard Cohen. For Merritt, the emotion of the song can be found in just the words and the notes, and he often asks the singers he employs for his various projects to "sound bored," presenting the songs in an open, unembellished way rather than performing them. The result is frequently mesmerizing, with the inherent humor and sadness of the songs flowing out, unobstructed by superfluous vocal ornamentation. On the first several Magnetic Fields albums, Susan Anway performed this task with an exquisite boredom and beauty. Later Merritt took over, delivering the songs himself in his trademark lackadaisical style.
In 1994, he moved the band to New York where he currently lives and works, hanging out in gay piano bars and drawing inspiration from the world around him. Equally enthralled by both bubblegum pop and experimental music, Merritt is a studio wiz and a big fan of music technology. The influence of both can easily be heard in his music, which incorporates predominately major chords with a barrage of electronic sounds and untraditional pop instrumentation, including cellos, harpsichords, banjos, ukuleles, and the occasional electric sitar. Merritt is also a music critic, that thing usually most loathed among musicians. He once worked as a copy editor for Spin magazine and is currently employed as a writer and critic for Time Out New York. These extracurricular duties keep him at the forefront of information on popular music and also keep him continually on the cusp of new musical technology. He believes that the state of avant-garde pop music has stagnated recently, mostly due to no new musical technology breakthroughs in several years. Nothing sounds new or futuristic, and for Merritt, that is a very disappointing fact.
Pure Pop For Now People
Undeniably one of the most prolific musicians working today, Merritt writes and produces for four separate bands, and over the last several years has also written complete movie soundtracks, as well as various songs for children's television shows like The Adventures of Pete and Pete on Nickelodeon. The Magnetic Fields remain his highest profile musical project, having gained attention outside of the indie-rock community with 1999's epic 69 Love Songs. The other three of Merritt's bands mostly languish in obscurity, but each serves as a distinct outlet for his seemingly ever-flowing river of creativity. In addition to the seven albums released by the Magnetic Fields since 1991, Merritt has also made two albums with the 6ths, which is not so much a band as a personal studio project. For the 6th's 1995 album Wasp's Nest, Merritt wrote a collection of songs and contracted well-known indie rock singers to sing each of them, including Amelia Fletcher of Heavenly and Yo La Tengo's Georgia Hubley. There's also the Future Bible Heroes, a collaborative 80s style pop band for which Merritt co-writes the songs with former Figures On A Beach member Chris Ewan. And last, and probably also least, there is the Gothic Archies, a "bubblegum goth" band that has so far released just one album, 2003's New Despair.
But it is the Magnetic Fields that get the brunt of his focus. Their first five albums were critically appreciated but mostly commercially ignored. That changed when they released 69 Love Songs, an aptly named three disc album that Merritt has referred to as "a collection of singles." A bold move for any band, much less one that had heretofore barely sold any records, 69 Love Songs brought the Magnetic Fields their first glimmer of attention from outside of the indie rock underground. On the album, Merritt played over ninety different instruments and sang 45 of the album's 69 songs, because, as he puts it, no one should have to sing 69 songs all by himself.2 As well as splaying the concept of love into a spectrum of emotions, the album also made the Herculean attempt to perform the love song in as many different musical styles as possible.
That kind of ambition is not unusual for Merritt, who has often made it a goal to have each song on an album represent a distinct style of music. Though previous albums from the Magnetic Fields like The Charm of the Highway Strip, which featured an electro-country sound, and Holiday, which was more in the vein of euro-pop, managed to keep a cohesive feel, perhaps from having a clearly defined concept in mind. Despite its obvious concept, 69 Love Songs was sprawling and immense, as though Merritt had been holding back every song he had written during the previous three years. In truth, he hadn't been holding out, but instead wrote nearly 100 songs for the album almost from scratch. The styles on 69 Love Songs run the gamut of popular music from punk rock and madrigals to country ballads and 60s style pop. The lyrics are consistently facetious, absurd, comical and despairing in equal measure, filled with the Warholesque clichés that Merritt has relied on for years. "I use all the common songwriting clichés,"3 he once confessed. And indeed in Magnetic Fields songs alone there are countless references to Paris, the moon, roses, time and infinity, eyes of varying colors (but mostly blue), dancing, rain, railroads and highways. All of these things wrap around his isolated, iconoclastic characters like a warm blanket of familiarity. Lacking the love they seek, there is always the moon or the highway to turn to, and they do so again and again.
Silly Love Songs
“Regardless of what Stephin Merritt may say in an interview, his songs seem to be about loneliness, isolation, and the need to be recognized by another person,”4 Claudia Gonson, his friend and Magnetic Fields cohort, once said. What could possibly possess a person to write 69 songs on the single subject of love? Though he actually started out with 100, a drop in the bucket compared to the huge number of love songs he's written altogether. For Merritt there seems to be no subject more intriguing, mysterious, comical or appealing. And the subject itself wields a never ending supply of inspiration. It is a topic he attacks time and time again from the varying angles of lust, playfulness, unrequited desire, heartbreak, disappointment, resignation and acceptance. With both humor and sincerity, Merritt is writing love songs for people who don't believe in love, true or everlasting. He gives a unique voice to the brokenhearted, as his characters remain faithfully self-deprecating, their sense of humor fully intact, with wounds always open and on display.
"I wouldn't be interested in love as a subject matter if it weren't so scary. I think of love as something dark and horrifying, and love and death as nearly the same thing,"5 Merritt has said. Love in the world of Stephin Merritt is indeed a truly frightening thing. Never certain, never eternal, never unshakeable, and often unreciprocated, exploited, or misunderstood. "Well, I'm sorry that I love you," he sings, "it's just a phase I'm going through."6 A lifelong, all-enduring, completely inexhaustible phase.
Merritt's characters constantly teeter on the brink of self-actualization, moving back and forth between a painful self-awareness and stubborn, deliberate blindness. They are forever reaching out and finding nothing, or gaining a tentative hold, only to lose it within three and a half minutes time, trapped inside an endless array of pop despair. And yet, they give as good as they get. They laugh at themselves and this absurd world they have to blindly navigate their way through. They are you. And me. And Merritt himself. Which may be why they strike a chord in the relatively few people who hear them. Love is a dark and dirty business, full of trials and mishaps and promises and lies. Stephin Merritt, more than most, has never been afraid to dig to the core of insular human existence, where love is unpredictable at best, and misery is tempered by humor and an infinite abundance of cheerful major chords.
"We belong together, like sex and violence; like death and silence."7 Like pop music and love. Like Stephin Merritt and Manhattan piano bars. He may be writing about something as old and as thoroughly explored as time itself, but with an incessant supply of heartbreak, an oblique vision of the world, and an interminable perspicacity, Merritt is well equipped to bring an innovative and unique understanding to this never quite exhausted subject. Insightful, literate, and absurdly comical, the songs of Stephin Merritt transcend the curse of being called "just" anything, but they will always and forever be pop. Just as he intends them to be.
Credits:
1. The Magnetic Fields. “Epitaph For My Heart.” 69 Love Songs. Merge, B00000JY1X, 1999.
2. Wohlfeld, Carsten. “The Summer Of 69 – Stephin Merritt talks.” Luna Kafé, August 15, 2000.
3. Drischler, Kendra. “Interview with Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields.” The Daily Californian, July 22, 2004.
4. Walters, Barry. “Sweet Singin’ Woman.” The Advocate, May 9, 2000
5. Lynch, Monica. Unknown Date & Publication name. http://www.kutilek.de/musik/sm/stephin.pdf, page 10.
6. The Magnetic Fields. “I’m Sorry I Love You.” 69 Love Songs. Merge, B00000JY1X, 1999.
7. The Magnetic Fields. “Heather Heather.” Pieces Of April Soundtrack. Nonesuch, B0000DZTIO, 2003.
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