If music writers love to place artists in genres, it is a more-than-usually fruitless task with Magnetic Fields, the brainchild of “composer, multi-instrumentalist and bubblegum purist” Stephin Merritt. Many people discovered Magnetic Fields (named after the surrealist André Breton’s novel Les Champs Magnetiques) with their 3-CD box set 69 Songs, which was released in 1999. The titles themselves suggested some of his musical playgrounds, such as “Punk Love”, “Love is Like Jazz” or “World Love”. Others referred sometimes obliquely to Billie Holliday, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Fleetwood Mac or Irving Berlin. Merritt said that the album “was not remotely an album about love. It’s an album about love songs, which are very far away from anything to do with love”.
There is, though, no doubting the emotional resonance instant classics like “All My Little Words” or “I Don’t Want to Get over You” have. Merritt could have been speaking of his own album when he praised Laurie Anderson’s “heartbreaking melodies with words that make fun of heartbreaking melodies.” The album was conceived “as a way of introducing myself to the world” in a gay bar, where Merritt says he writes most of his compositions.
Merritt’s clever romanticisms have led people to compare him to classic exponents of the song-writing craft of decades ago like Cole Porter. He has said he admires Tom Waits, Kate Bush and Stephen Sondheim, if that gives us a clue. His pet Chihuahua is named Irving Berlin. If Merritt is not quite as well known yet as such mentors, that may be because besides Magnetic Fields he also hides behind other band names like the Gothic Archies, the 6th or the Future Bible Heroes. His relations with the media are rarely straightforward either. As Alexis Petridis put it in the Guardian, “his interview technique involves the perennially winning tactic of being as difficult and diffident as possible.” His look, says Petridis unkindly, is "like an academic from a minor university who has found out his department's budget has been slashed." Furthermore, he says he doesn’t want fame: “I don’t really care about fame, but I do care about money. I want the facilities that Abba had. It’s a constraint not to have an enormous apartment with reverb chambers and an empty swimming pool where I can record the drums if I want to.”
About the only genre Merritt says he dislikes is indie rock, which he complains is generally too “twee”. Naturally, that is where the Magnetic Fields albums tend to be racked when a genre has to be found for them in stores or on-line. “The thing to do is to make a category you like. The Magnetic Fields make variety music. There were a million TV variety shows in the 70s, and now there’s no such thing any more.”
After graduating from high school, Merritt took a number of jobs, including writing the astrology column for a lesbian weekly under the name of “Madame Cheva”. He attended NYU Film School, an art school in Boston and for several years the Harvard Extension school, studying industrial culture. Claudia Gonson formed the first version of Magnetic Fields to play his songs. Merritt decided to join so he could “salvage his songs”. He recalls, “I didn’t want to be in a live band”, but he said to Gonson, “You’re not doing this well enough. You need my help”.
While there is understandably intense interest in the band’s songwriter, Magnetic Fields have evolved into a fairly conventional band structure with a fixed core over several albums, including Merritt on ukulele and vocals, Gonson on keyboards and vocals, John Woo on acoustic guitar, Sam Devol on cello, and Shirley Simms on autoharp and vocals.
After 69 Love Songs, the bands were signed to the prestigious label Nonesuch and produced a “no-synth trilogy” of i, Distortion and Realism. The often melodramatic songs from the album i begin with the letter I. Distortion was conceived as an homage to the feedback-heavy sound of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy album, featuring the tragic-comic ‘Too Drunk Too Dream’ and the “delightfully misanthropic revenge fantasy” “California Girls”. Realism is supposedly a folk record, with drum sounds provided by “tablas and tree leaves” – as if Shirley Collins had a line in withering put-downs, but still manages to brilliantly chart the emotional temperature of usually doomed relationships with incandescent songs like “Painted Flower” or “Always Already Alone”. Other projects include the music for Neil Gaiman’s musical Coraline, and a score for a film version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.
The band play London tonight, and the appreciation by Londoners towards Merritt and the Magnetic Fields is mutual: "I wish we would tour only in London. I would happily spend a month in London,” says Merritt, who loves the “amazing bookstores and delightful gay bars that I can write songs in. What I would like to do is have a musical playing in London. But unfortunately I am stuck in this touring pop group.”
- Check out what's on at the Barbican
- Find Magnetic Fields CDs on Amazon
Below: Video of "All my little words"
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