The summer sun is marking its return in a big way this afternoon, the kind of mid-'80s boiler that Hudson hasn't seen in a year. But beneath the umbrella of the coffeehouse courtyard where Stephin Merritt sits, it's not the glare that's testing the comfort level: It's the humidity. True, we're not into the dreaded dog days of August yet, but the mugginess is nevertheless bothersome, a sticky steam bath that makes movement a less-than-enticing proposition. Thankfully, we don't have to move. For the moment. And there's a bonus: After a few minutes of conversation, Merritt's famously cool, deliciously dry wit has reduced the oppressive air to so many harmless cubes of ice. Or it least it feels like that. Cocktails, anyone?
Not today. It's mint iced tea for Merritt—perhaps surprising to some of his fans, since the singer-songwriter's work as the genius behind, most notably, the Magnetic Fields, is well spiked with bittersweet tunes about the demon drink. "Last year, after decades of sitting around in bars writing songs about drinking in bars, I stopped [drinking]," he confesses in his trademark measured monotone. "I thought it would improve my lung function. It hasn't. Actually, the drinking songs on the new [side project] Future Bible Heroes record were written after I'd quit. But, really, the worst thing about my not drinking is that it hasn't made much of a difference overall for me. It is cheaper, though. And it's kept me out of trouble—in some ways."
Whatever kind of trouble Merritt's alluding to, it's hard to figure when, exactly, he'd have a spare second to get into it. In addition to his crushing catalog as a solo artist and with his bands the Magnetic Fields, the 6ths, Future Bible Heroes, and the Gothic Archies, as well as myriad other recording and touring projects, the composer dubbed "the Cole Porter of his generation" by Time Out New York also regularly writes music for film, TV, and theater. The weekend before our interview, he presented a new minimusical at a broadcast of NPR's "This American Life" from the Brooklyn Academy of Music; not long before that, he performed a solo ukulele accompaniment to Todd Browning's 1927 silent The Unknown at the San Francisco Film Festival and did the music for choreographer Rashaun Mitchell's dance piece "Performance." Next, he's off to DJ and judge short films at the Provincetown Film Festival. Does the 49-year-old force of nature ever allow himself a day of rest? "Actually, I took a day off yesterday," he confesses. "I helped my friend bring his dog to the vet and I put all my CDs in alphabetical order. That was my relaxing day." Not exactly the kind of respite one equates with the rock-star life. But, then again, it's hard to picture the droll dean of snide indie snark lounging poolside or swinging a wedge out on the golf course.
Merritt was born in Yonkers and raised mainly in the Boston area by his single mother, a teacher and physical therapist. "When I was 23, we counted everything up," he recalls, "and by then, I had lived in 33 different places." He didn't meet his father, folk singer Scott Fagan, until just last year, at a screening of a documentary about Fagan's mentor, songwriter Doc Pomus. Merritt says the meeting was, predictably, "complicated." (Fagan, who composed the music for the pioneering 1968 Broadway rock opera "Soon," recently held a Kickstarter campaign to fund an album of covers of his son's songs.) "My mom was big on Shakespeare, and she exposed me to his plays as early as possible—not that they stuck with me," admits Merritt. "But I guess that's where I got my love of the theater and stage sets."
Moving around so much as a child unsurprisingly made it tough to forge friendships, especially for a natural outsider, and it was literature and music that became Merritt's closest early companions, the latter in particular. The Beach Boys and Phil Spector were formative heroes, for their sublime songs and arrangements. "The Beatles, Queen, Fleetwood Mac, the Bee Gees ... I consider myself lucky to have grown up in an era in which you had all these bands with multiple singers and great songwriters," he says. Perhaps the most immediate influence on Merritt's brand of skewed-but-hummable pop was Abba. "As a composer, Irving Berlin is my model," offers the songwriter. "But, yes, as far as contemporary pop music goes, for me Abba is the pinnacle." It was the Nordic foursome that inspired him, at age 14, to begin making the four-track recordings with a cheap synthesizer that sowed the seeds of the lo-fi electro/chamber pop sound he eventually took to soaring heights with the Magnetic Fields, et al.
Although Merritt's circle of high school friends was small, it included the older sister of Claudia Gonson, who sings in Future Bible Heroes and has contributed vocals and drums to the Magnetic Fields (though just the former on stage; live percussion and loud sounds are painful to Merritt, who suffers from a hearing condition called hyperacusis). "Stephin and I met in 1983," says Gonson, who is also Merritt's long-time manager. "My sister walked in the door with him, and I happened to be sitting at the piano and playing. He immediately sat right down next to me and started playing, and we've been great friends ever since. I'm pretty outgoing and he's very reserved, so with us I think it's a case of 'opposites attract.' He named his publishing company Gay and Loud for the two of us [laughs], the second part being me. [Merritt is, as Wikipedia puts it, openly gay.] He'll come up with these crazy, off-the-wall ideas for projects, which as a manager I sometimes have to explain to him are impossible to do. But then again, a lot of them sound ridiculous at first and then Stephin persists and they turn out to be brilliant. The best example is 69 Love Songs [1999, Merge Records]."
Although the Magnetic Fields had released five critically adored albums prior—including two featuring vocalist Susan Anway, 1990's Distant Plastic Trees and 1991's The Wayward Bus (since reissued as a twofer), and 1994's Brian Wilson-endorsed The Charm of the Highway Strip (all on Merge)—it was the insanely ambitious and, er, cunningly titled three-disc breakthrough 69 Love Songs that cemented Merritt's genius and won him the undying ears of aficionados of erudite pop. Number 465 in Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, the opus was originally intended to be a musical revue a la Stephen Sondheim (another Merritt muse), but, owing to logistics, has only been performed live a handful of times. The biting, bitter words of those "songs-about-love songs"—"I Don't Believe in the Sun," "I Think I Need a New Heart," "No One Will Ever Love You," "How Fucking Romantic"—are delivered in Merritt's downcast bass voice and Gonson's surreally carefree chirp against a gray-hued synth pop/cabaret backing that plays like Kurt Weil meets Ian Curtis. Since that masterwork's ascension, the Magnetic Fields have released four more exalted offerings, 2004's i, 2008's Distortion, 2010's Realism (all Nonesuch Records), and 2012's Love at the Bottom of the Sea (Merge); a new album is planned for 2015.
And then there are the side bands. The 6ths, a project that sees Merritt's songs sung mostly by an ever-changing cast of vocalists, has produced two albums: 1995's Wasps' Nests (London Records), featuring performances by Lou Barlow (Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh), Dean Wareham (Galaxie 500, Luna, Dean & Britta), Georgia Hubley (Yo La Tengo), and others; 2000's Hyacinths and Thistles (Merge) ups the ante with cameos by Odetta, Gary Numan, Melanie, Bob Mould, and Soft Cell's Marc Almond. The Gothic Archies, a self-described "bubblegum-goth band" (geddit?), is the duo of Merritt and Magnetic Fields accordionist Daniel Handler, who is perhaps better known by his literary pen name: Lemony Snicket. "Mr. Merritt's songs are romantic but scathing, ambitious but compact, experimental but catchy, and heartbreaking but artful," says the novelist, who with the Gothic Archies has recorded three albums, contributed music to the audiobook versions of his own best-selling A Series of Unfortunate Events books and Neil Gaiman's Coraline, and soundtracked Nickelodeon's "The Adventures of Pete & Pete."
Future Bible Heroes is the trio of Merritt (lyrics, instruments), Gonson (voice), and Christopher Ewen (melodies, instruments), and has thus far waxed three albums of sickly subversive electro-dance pop, all of which were recently repackaged as the box set Memories of Love, Eternal Youth, and Partygoing (Merge). 2013's Partygoing is defined by Merritt as "a party album about aging, suicide, loss, and despair." A colorful candy shop of percolating synths and happy vocals, its aim would seem to be to get blissful revelers shaking their booties to movers like "Sadder Than the Moon," "Digging My Own Grave," and "Let's Go to Sleep (And Never Come Back)"—only to have the lyrics creep up, sink in, and stomp all over their buzz. Another plum track is "Keep Your Children in a Coma," whose blackly amusing lines suggest modern parents place their kids in a stupor because "You can't let them go to school / for fear of bullying little beasts / And you can't take them to church / for fear of priests."
Humor aside, Merritt's themes tend to focus on those two most ageless absolutes: love and death. "Sticking to [universal] topics like those allows me to get on to what I want to say without having to overly explain anything," he says. "I have no wish to express myself personally. I don't think that's necessary to enjoy the music. It doesn't matter to me if [Abba song] 'The Winner Takes It All' is about Björn Ulvaeus's divorce from Agnetha Fältskog or about Benny Andersson's divorce from Frida Lynstad." A former editor at SPIN and Time Out New York, Merritt recently wrote the text for 101 Two-Letter Words (Norton Books), a book for Scrabble and Words with Friends players. With illustrations by the New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, the rhyme-rich tome is due out in October. Lately, the lyricist has found inspiration in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official listing of all mental diseases recognized by the American Psychiatric Association. "It reminds me of [British death metal band] Carcass, who get a lot of their lyrics from medical manuals," says Merritt with a hint of a smile. "Those are some of the best lyrics in popular music."
After six years in LA, Merritt moved to Hudson in 2012, lured to town by the "pornography" of the local real estate ads. "I went to LA because I wanted to make my own Hollywood musical," says the composer, who created a musical adaptation for Gaiman's Coraline and is currently developing productions for both the Public Theater in New York and the National Theater in Washington, DC. "One of my ambitions in life is to have my own theater," says Merritt. "To have my own stage to perfect my work on would be wonderful."
Overly ambitious,you think? Just give him time.
Stephin Merritt will perform at Club Helsinki in Hudson on July 25 at 9pm. Tickets are $15 in advance and $18 day of show. Helsinkihudson.com. Houseoftomorrow.com.
