Stephin Merritt is not a nice man.
At least that seems to be his reputation in the media. And I suppose he has said some things that would lend credence to that assumption. For example, in an interview last February with Paste Magazine, after being asked if he would release a Christmas EP, he stated, “I’m not really sure that I can foist a Christmas album onto my atheist public. I obviously hate Christmas and everything to do with it.” And perhaps the fact that his tone of voice has been described in ways ranging from “bored” to that “of someone explaining the obvious to a particularly slow child” (Thomas Bartlett for Salon) doesn’t really help his case either.
But as someone who has read many interviews with Merritt, I tell you that he is not the jerk that his reputation makes him out to be, although I kind of like it when he gets tetchy. As far as I can tell, he just has a low bullshit tolerance. He worked as a music critic for years (pretty sure I read somewhere that he published some of the “most acerbic reviews ever”) before starting to focus solely on creating his own work, and the man knows what’s fucking up, to say the least. If the person talking to Merritt has something intelligent to say relating to one of his projects, Merritt will be perfectly cordial, but if not, he will respond in a way that only a man who wrote “I Wish I Had An Evil Twin” can. It might be an exaggeration to say that he can sense weakness in people and then pounces on it like a particularly ferocious tiger…but then again, it might not.
Public image aside, most critics agree that Merritt is one of the greatest songwriters of this generation (commonly compared to Cole Porter). Hopefully at this stage in your life, you have at least heard of Stephin Merritt in the context of his band The Magnetic Fields, specifically his opus 69 Love Songs, a three-disc album released in 1999, with twenty-three songs each (ah, the symmetry). Really you have no excuse not to—Daniel Handler ’92 played accordion on the album (that’s Lemony Snicket, folks). If you haven’t experienced this masterpiece, I’ll tell you right now, you don’t know anything about love and very possibly are a robot (also, never speak to me). Beyond this, however, I’ve found that most people have never heard of any of his other work, either with his other bands (Future Bible Heroes, The 6ths, and The Gothic Archies) or his outside projects (he wrote the music for the stage version of Coraline). And it’s a damn shame, because it’s fantastic. It might be impossible for me to exaggerate my admiration for this man. In my eyes, he is less of a man and more of a mythical beast that writes clever songs about love and death and then disappears if you try to look at him too closely (better than a unicorn). At least I’m not alone; one French fashion label actually produced a line of shoes called “Stephin: The Shoe Drawn in Homage to Stephin Merritt.”
I am pretty much trying to tell you that you might be a horrible person if you didn’t know who Stephin Merritt was before reading this article. But, never fear, there is a chance for you to redeem yourself! The newly released documentary Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields is playing a limited engagement this weekend at Real Art Ways in Harford. If you don’t have time to check it out, I highly recommend making an effort to become familiar with his body of work. If you remain unconvinced, let it be known that he writes exclusively for people in love, unrequited, returned, misplaced, and otherwise (the entirety of 69 Love Songs), people who are slightly morbid (“Death Opened A Boutique”), and people who love surprisingly apt similes (“Love Is Like A Bottle of Gin”)—basically, the population of the Wes ACB. You have no more excuses. Go forth, and listen.
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