Stephin Merritt
Stephin Merritt On Why He Wears Brown
Stephin Merritt wears brown on the outside because brown is how he feels on the inside. Or something like that. The beloved Magnetic Fields front man explains his penchant for the color that dominates his wardrobe in an interview with New York magazine this week. For one thing, he says, he wears brown instead of black because he doesn’t want to “look like a French tourist in Soho.” Zing! But brown also matches his hair and his eyes and, most importantly, his cute white and beige dog with a little brown nose. Awww! More from the interview after the jump. read more »
The Week in Music: It's a Merritt-ocracy! That Guy From American Pie Sings, Band of Horses Guitarist Goes Solo and Ringo
What a double-edged sword 69 Love Songs has become for the Magnetic Fields. Perhaps the apotheosis of Stephin Merritt's clever talents, it is a sublime piece of novelty that manages to transcend its gimmickry. Yet since that flurry of content, the band has only managed two albums in eight years, 2004’s i and Distortion to be released today. (Read J. Gabriel Boylan's review here.) It's not that Merritt has run out of ideas; he has certainly kept busy. Here's hoping you'll find many of them on the new album. For a limited time, the entire album is being streamed on their myspace page—yay, Web 2.0!
From one New York musician to, er, another ... Thomas Ian Nicholas. You may remember him from such movies as Rookie of the Year and American Pie—he always played the straight man. He's branched out in a new direction—singer-songwriter—and he couldn't be more earnest on his debut album, Without Warning. (You ain't kidding!) Here he is playing in the streets of Brooklyn. read more »
Magnetic Personality Disorder
There are two people's voices I can impersonate well: that of Magnetic Fields frontman Stephin Merritt and Project Runway frontman Tim Gunn. It seems Merritt is forever impersonating as well, or perhaps just exploring the many forms of his beloved pop and rock songcraft. (Alas, Mr. Gunn specializes in another kind of craft, one that falls outside the purview of this review.) Of course this diversity was most prominent on the Magnetic Fields' 1999 compendium 69 Love Songs, for which he and the band ran through nearly every permutation of the love-song conceit, and came to rest on the lucky number.
Yet, while the band has always been a sucker for a blunt conceit, the years since the release of 69 have seen the very bluntness become esoteric. 2004's i was a string-laden soft-pop ode to melodrama where all the songs began with the prime pronoun and were arranged alphabetically. Then there's the string of Mr. Merritt's side-projects, from the guest-vocalist-heavy 6ths to the Gothic Archies' morose children's songs, an accompaniment to the Lemony Snicket Series of Unfortunate Events books. Showtunes was a 2006 collection of Mr. Merritt's work for Chinese theater director Chen Shi-Zeng. Recently Mr. Merritt's voice even graced a Volvo commercial. read more »
Stephin Merritt is First Pick for NPR's 'Project Song'
Stephin Merritt wrote and recorded a little ditty called "A Man of a Million Faces" for NPR's Project Song... um, project.
Stephin Merritt: On Sincerity, Misery, and the African-American Musical Tradition
"All the articles begin, 'Stephin isn't such an asshole after all!'" said Stephin Merritt on Monday, the night before the release of his new album.
He was sitting in a lady's salon chair in 14th Street's Beauty Bar, with his head beneath an old domed hair dryer. "No one who is not an interviewer has ever called me an asshole," he said. "People regularly tell me how nice I am."
It's hard to imagine niceness when Mr. Merritt's songs are so forlorn, and his words are so cataclysmic witty, and that voice has such gravity.
But Mr. Merritt is disliked for other reasons besides lyricism. Two years and some months ago, The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones described Mr. Merritt's musical tastes as those of a rockist cracker. Also, Mr. Frere-Jones wrote: "Get that fucking chihuahua away from me, NOW." Mr. Merritt has a chihuahua.
Earlier this year, Jessica Hopper continued the conversation, expressing distates for Mr. Merritt's love of music from "Song of the South."
John Cook, writing for Slate, took issue. David Carr did a blow-by-blow of the lengthy affair, and wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Merritt "clearly needs help with his bubblegum issues."
Speaking of which, his new release is under the name The Gothic Archies, which is his side-project for bubblegum-pop Goth. The Tragic Treasury compiles memorably absurd songs written for Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.
"It's over-the-top misery," Mr. Merritt said. "It's perfectly sincere, but there's no effort to make it tasteful."
With polka-like baselines, refrains of harmonized birdcalls, amateur accordions and circus sound effects, it's his whitest album ever: white like Agnetha and Anni-Frid eating un-toasted Wonder Bread.
Mr. Merritt agrees, sort of. "That's not insane, just incomplete," Mr. Merritt said. "I think there's an enormous African-American tradition of over-the-top misery, going to back to the blues and Screamin' Jay Hawkins--no, back to spiritualist work songs."
But "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" and "The Banana Boat Song," the examples he brought up, feel more sincere than "Smile! No One Cares How You Feel" or "The World Is a Very Scary Place."
"If you get too maudlin it's just funny," he said. "That doesn't mean maudlin isn't sincere." Tragic Treasury is indeed very maudlin, but it's also very catchy, and most its songs are textured and even beautiful.
"Finally, Stephin Merritt can sing in the register he was born to sing," he sighed, meaning that he allowed his voice to go to its deadpan depths. Mr. Merritt claims he sings lower than Johnny Cash, Lee Hazlewood and Tom Waits. This is probably true. "It's sort of a supernatural ability, kind of like a magical power, except it's completely useless."
"I think if you have a really low voice it automatically makes you a good lyricist. No one wants to hear you just say, "C'mon, baby."
On Friday the 13th, Mr. Merritt will be performing with Lemony Snicket in the Union Square Barnes and Noble, singing lyrics like, "The world is a very scary thing/ I find it's curled all my toes and it's curling my mind" or "Even geeks, even other freaks, hate the freakshow."
Maybe he would stick to straightforward romance if his voice were more like Barry White's. "Such a sexy baritone," Mr. Merritt said. "Listen to Barry White when you want to get to third base."
— Max AbelsonRum and Stumpy and the Lash
Stephin Merritt, in a Magnetic Fields publicity shot
Given this week's Slate article on Mr. Merritt, the song "Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah," race, and dispute with Mr. Merritt by music critics Jessica Hopper and Sasha Frere-Jones, The Transom thought tonight might be a nice evening to stop by Mr. Merritt's party.
Nine fellows were on the street outside, smoking in the mist. Two were baldish, two were bearish. One was kind of short.
The Transom was equally delighted to be carded and to discover there was no cover charge.
Inside the light was all red. Thirty or so men loitered, an average age being perhaps 36. An apparently off-white D.J. was playing verifiably white music from a collection of compact discs; it may have been Yaz. It was decidedly Yaz-like. Some played pool.
None of the men appeared visibly short. (Some were sitting.) Mr. Merritt was most certainly not there, or at least not yet. It was 11:40 p.m. A story had been going around town that a few weeks previous at Runt, a similar crowd, height-wise, had watched in discomfort as a very short man, perhaps a midget, danced alone under the red light in the middle of the bar.
In a recent issue of Out, Mr. Merritt explained that among gay men, stereotypes of short men included qualities of passivity and submission. Other short men quoted in the magazine said that they had found that many men of "normal" height were concerned about the size of the genitalia of short potential sex partners. This is absurd; all imagined correlations between any other physical traits and penis size have been long disproven.
(Or, at the very least, those correlations have been proven mightily unstable.)
A great number of gay porn stars are quite short, to good effect. On film, naked, their relative proportions are often flattering. It is a question of scale.
Naturally-occurring issues of scale are not unlike the making of perspective in two dimensions. Leonardo da Vinci wrote something in his notebooks that applies as well to any critical dust-up as it does to making drawings of the human body: "There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near." read more »
