Interview: Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt

"I want my shoes. Destroy the world. Goodbye."

Photo by Chris Buck

Stephin Merritt, the musician behind ventures as diverse as the Magnetic Fields and the Lemony Snicket audiobooks, is having a good year. The Magnetic Fields' eighth studio album, Distortion, a twisted, feedback drenched homage to the Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy, came out in January. More recently, Merritt's been immersed in writing the music and lyrics for a theatrical adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Coraline, timed for release at the same time as the film version, directed and animated in 3D by Nightmare Before Christmas creator Henry Selick.

We spoke on the verge of the Magnetic Fields' first full US tour for Distortion, which kicks off October 10 and lands in Jersey City, at the Loews Jersey Theatre, on October 23. In between rehearsals for Coraline and recording new Magnetic Fields material, Merritt still found the time to converse about New York's financial collapse (which his mother may or may not have predicted), the fundamental untrustworthiness of the French (and of Europeans in general), and about how everyone in Merritt's new hometown is shockingly shallow.

You're known to be pretty averse to loud noise. Are you making any concessions to the feedback or volume of Distortion when you're playing live?

Ordinarily we completely ignore the sound of the record when we develop the live show, but in this case I have made one tiny concession, which is that instead of playing the ukulele, quietly, I'll be playing the bouzouki, quietly. And the bouzouki is a little bit louder than the ukulele: It has metal strings. So it seems a little more heavy. A little more uh, slightly towards the sound of the record...but only slightly. So that's the difference with the instrumentation, and the other difference is that Shirley Simms, who sang half the album, will actually be coming along and singing. Not half the songs, but a lot of the songs.

On Distortion, there was a lot of effort put into avoiding synthesizers, and doing all this really painstaking work with reverb and feedback to get the sound of the record. Is it tough to let that go? I know you were really enjoying the way that feedback was filling in some notes that you then didn't have to figure out.

Well, it would be impossible to get more than one instrument at a time to be in that sort of feedback boat.

I think a song like "Old Fools" might be unbearably sad without some sort of triumphant kind of noise behind it.

We specialize in unbearably sad.

Actually, I thought Distortion was a really funny Magnetic Fields record.

You thought it was funnier than other Magnetic Fields records?

I did.

Thank you for saying that. Because I have been worrying that Distortion had less--not less humor on it, but that people couldn't really tell that it was being funny.

I think "Three-Way" is really funny. I think "California Girls" is really funny...

I think it's all really funny. But you know, my mother doesn't get it. Because she gets distracted by the distortion and feedback, I guess. My mother says she misses the humor. But I think that's just cause she's not used to listening in that way.