What We Talk About When We Say Nothing

What Stephin Merritt says: I'm not sure I directly asked them not to emote, but I gave them the demo recordings in which my voice was completely expressionless, and I asked them not to play around with that too much. I didn't want them to be changing the melody or tacking on whooping at the end or anything like that. Sometimes when I give a singer a song, they think of it as a starting point. And I don't think of it that way.

What City Pages thinks: Here, Merritt sounds a bit like Cole Porter, whom he has been absurdly compared to. The Porter comparisons have less to do with Merritt's music, which tends to be simple (more Brill Building than Broadway, more Richard Carpenter than Richard Rodgers), than with his occasional fondness for unconventional rhyme schemes. Or his persona, which is "urbane," which is another word for "gay." On Magnetic Fields' 2004 release i, Merritt flirts with pre-rock or anti-rock pop--the lugubrious and dinky "I Die," the delightful "In an Operetta," the "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?"-derived "Is This What They Used to Call Love?" But that isn't where Merritt's at his best. He still excels at doleful ditties, bright, even bouncy tunes paired with lyrics that are both sincerely, deeply sad and good-humored about their sadness. He is, it seems, not a modest man, but he is a modest songwriter. Like Elvis Costello or Paul Simon, he comes closest to greatness when he's furthest from Greatness, when he's churning out tunes as if he's on a tight deadline and high on inspiration.

But back to Cole Porter. Like most of the great Broadway composers (and like Merritt), Porter didn't much care for jazz. He didn't like singers messing with his melodies. If the song were supposed to end with a bluesy glissando, Porter might have argued, it would say so on the sheet music. Considering that Merritt as a singer has a contentious relationship with pitch, he is perhaps not in the greatest position to argue for the sacrosanctity of his tunes. Every time he applies his wonderful, froggy, flat voice to them, they're changed a little. But it's not a "completely expressionless" voice, as he claims. His singing has a touch of Nico's flat-affect syndrome, but there's some of Ray Davies's plaintive croak, too, and he has a cunning croon, as on "Infinitely Late at Night." It seems to say: Come hither--wait, that's too close.

What CP says: Are you a Judy Collins fan?

What Merritt says: I'm a huge fan of the Judy Collins album In My Life. It's a definite template for me.

What CP thinks: I heard that this guy doesn't suffer fools lightly, which puts me at a real disadvantage, but gosh, I think we're really hitting it off now. He and I share a fondness for Judy Collins, and ABBA, and Stephen Sondheim, which might suggest that both of us are white. I wonder: Do the Magnetic Fields, with their rhythmic austerity, trebly acoustic palette, dry vocals, and paucity of improvisation, play the whitest American music that one doesn't dance to under the direction of a caller or while wearing a polka-dot dress? If so, why would that bother me?

What CP says: Do some of your lyrics make you laugh, even after you've been performing them for a while?

What Merritt says: I'm a sucker for the ending of "It's Only Time." It doesn't make me laugh, exactly. Things don't generally make me laugh more than three or four times.

What CP thinks: It's funny, until a few weeks ago I thought this guy was an Englishman or a New Zealander who had settled in New York as a young adult. But that's not true. He's just a regular old American. That troubled me, because I thought the fussy and pretentious aspects of his music, which fortunately are greatly outweighed by airy and witty aspects, were attributable to him being from England or a former English colony, where I understand smart people don't have to pretend not to be pretentious. I must have had him mixed up with the guy from Luna, or maybe Cary Grant.