Ringing true

The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt
on folk and feedback

FAR FROM THE TREE: Stephin Merritt

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“My life is filled with pied à terres instead of homes,” says Stephin Merritt, the enigmatic baritone and scribe for Magnetic Fields, performing for the first time in Montreal this weekend. Speaking to the Mirror from his native New York City, Merritt explains that his need for home-studio space and desire to score films moved him to relocate to California a few years ago. Unfortunately, the soundtrack work hasn’t been pouring in.

“All the work that I’ve ever done in the film industry, I’ve done in New York,” he says, “but that’s okay. I have a house with an attic.”

This bi-coastal conundrum wouldn’t be the first irony to befall Merritt and his career. He has hyperacusis in his left ear, resulting in a feedback effect, yet playing his 2008 album Distortion—an homage to the Jesus and Mary Chain featuring feedback on unconventional instruments such as accordion and cello—poses less of a problem for him than his new record, Realism, dominated by straight-up acoustic, orchestral sounds.

“Acoustic guitars are the perfect instrument for aggravating [my condition],” he says, explaining that he tends to play the less aurally offensive ukulele live. Don’t expect to see a drum kit on stage either. “If I were playing entirely electrically, we could make no sound whatsoever, which would be good for me. Or it would be nice if I were no longer the singer and I could just stick in earplugs and we could sound however we want,” he adds. As Merritt was not the original singer for Magnetic Fields (Susan Anway was frontwoman on the band’s first two albums in the early ’90s), he could conceivably pass the mic to his right-hand woman Claudia Gonson, who’s already Magnetic Fields’ back-up singer, player and manager. But, “I know better than to pass the mic to Claudia Gonson,” he quips, dry as a bone.

Far from his favourite subject, Merritt’s father is Virgin Islands-based folk/exotica singer-songwriter Scott Fagan, who he’s never met. In a 2006 interview, Merritt famously slammed cross-cultural appropriation, saying that “white blues” is “fundamentally racist.” And although Fagan’s music has little bearing on Merritt’s oeuvre, he does refer to Realism as his folk album, free of electric instruments and drum sticks (there are tablas and strings instead).

“Apparently I already had the manifesto for this album 10 years ago,” says Merritt, referring to a lyric from the song “Acoustic Guitar” from his 1999 album 69 Love Songs. “There’s this line ‘She tends to faint at the sound of a drum ’cause she’s folk.’ This was only pointed out to me a few days ago.”

As for the title, Merritt explains that it’s merely a reference to the recording techniques, in opposition to those employed on Distortion, and not a comment on lyrical earnestness or the supposed authenticity of folk music. Gonson, who knows Merritt better than most, has said that his most ridiculous lyrics can be more telling than the ones you’d assume are in-depth autobiography—perhaps Realism’s Christmas song, “Everything Is One Big Christmas Tree” (partly sung in “pidgin German”) is this record’s real confessional.

“Art does not necessarily have anything to do with the real world or representing anything at all,” Merritt insists. “Realism is a preposterous idea, just as folk is a preposterous idea.”

WITH LAURA BARRETT AT THE CORONA
THEATRE ON SATURDAY, FEB. 6, 8 P.M.,
$35, ALL AGES