Stephin Merritt, leader of The Magnetic Fields: “If I listen to music with endless guitar solos, I tune out”

Stephin Merritt (New York, 59 years old), leader of The Magnetic Fields, is one of the most prolific and brilliant American pop composers of his generation.

In 1999 he wrote

69 Love Songs

, a monumental work that became one of the most influential albums in pop and a cult work for the LGBTQI community.

The album was a motley and eclectic collection of songs about love that mixed genres such as

synth pop

, folk and

country

and recounted romances with convicts, crimes of passion and impossible

affairs

at service stations.

“My intention was to be the only person on earth who liked all 69 songs,” he says about the album, which turns 25 in 2024, sitting in a bar in Greenwich Village, New York.

The anniversary has pushed the band back to the stage on a tour that will pass through Barcelona on September 4 and 5.

“I don't like playing live.

I don't even like to travel.

“I’m a creature of the studio,” says Merritt, known among music journalists for his monosyllabic responses.

When he conceived of

69 Love Songs

, he would never have imagined that quite a few Gen X brides would end up walking down the aisle to

The Book of Love

, probably the best-known song on the album.

More information

“At that time, I expected to die young of AIDS”: story of the (very long) masterpiece of The Magnetic Fields

69 Love Songs

was not a work about love, but about love songs.

But people didn't understand it that way.

Fans interpreted his songs literally and made them their own, in a kind of sentimental soundtrack for a generation.

They ended up in romantic

mixtapes

and declarations of love.

“It's an album for breakups, to listen to alone,” he says, laughing.

That disconnect that exists between the audience's sentimentality and Merritt's dispassion is perhaps what has made

69 Love Songs

such an acclaimed and popular work.

“People place a lot of importance on music and its connection to emotions, but for me, a big part of the experience with music is that it generates ideas,” he says.

In fact, for Merrit

The Book of Love

—slow, melodic and folk—is the most stomach-churning of her songs.

Not only because it has become the cliché of romanticism that it was partly intended to parody, but because, since she had to perform it live at a friend's funeral, she has barely managed to finish it live.

“It's difficult for me to enjoy it.

“She has too much baggage for me,” she says.

The song has also brought her joy: thanks to the

royalties

she received from Peter Gabriel's famous version, Merritt paid for the down payment on her house in Los Angeles.

“Thank you, Peter Gabriel,” she says tersely.

In addition to propelling The Magnetic Fields,

69 Love Songs

established Merritt as one of the most talented pop lyricists of the turn of the century.

His compositions are brief (“if I listen to music with endless guitar solos, I just tune out”) and are characterized by lyrics that oscillate between stark wit and tender, witty sentimentality with the power to provoke sobs and half-smiles in equal measure.

Merritt is also famous for accomplishing all this without writing particularly personal songs.

With the exception of

50 Song Memoir

, an autobiographical album with a song for each year of his life, he rarely sings about himself.

This artistic decision has in part to do with the fact that Merritt is gay.

As she explains it, artists like Taylor Swift can write about her life and expect millions of American teenagers to identify with her.

“Traditionally, gay men are not in a position to do that,” she says.

“We maintain a special distance so that the public is not horrified.”

And yet, LGBTQI audiences have traditionally connected in a special way with The Magnetic Fields songs, full of nods to queer culture and gay and bisexual love stories.

Merritt, however, refuses to classify

69 Love Songs as a characteristically

queer

work of art

, but as a work “with Shakespearean sweep”, that is, one that captures all types of stories and with which, therefore, it is easy to identify. .

Or at least, in part: “There are also murderers and aliens.”

Merritt had a peculiar childhood.

Her mother, who lives in the Bronx and whom she sees frequently, was a hippie who moved from commune to commune dragging her son, who grew up surrounded by gurus and other peculiar characters.

She did not meet his father, a singer, until he was 40 years old.

“I love the idea of ​​chosen family.

I wish I had met her decades earlier,” she says.

On his tours and on his albums, Merritt always surrounds himself with a cast of collaborators and musicians who have accompanied him intermittently since his adolescence: the singer and guitarist Shirley Simms, his manager and pianist, Claudia Gonson, the cellist Sam Davol and guitarist John Woo.

What worries him these days is getting everything he had in his three-story house in Hudson, a rural town in upstate New York where he lived during the pandemic, to fit in his one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, where he lives with his two dogs Edgar (by Allan Poe) and Agatha (by Christie).

It is not a simple task.

Anyone who has seen

Strange Powers

, the documentary about The Magnetic Fields, will know that Merritt lives surrounded by instruments (he can play more than a hundred, including unusual synthesizers like the

swarmatron

or the abacus, a kind of mini piano that sounds like a music box) and dozens of notebooks in which he continues to scribble songs.

Because he continues writing, of course.

Today, Merritt continues to spend his evenings in gay bars in the central West Village, where, leaning on the bar, he goes in search of inspiration for his stories.

His

modus operandi

is the following: he drinks cognac, hunts down conversations in the air that end up becoming compositions and listens to the songs they play and thinks about how he would improve them.

He refuses to reveal which of his favorite venues are: he did so once in an interview and was besieged by fans who showed up every night to talk to him.

“I couldn't work,” he complains.

After saying goodbye to him, he walks slowly away with his hands in his pockets, in search of another pop masterpiece.

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