By Vish KhannaStephin Merritt is the man behind remarkable musical projects like the 6ths, the Gothic Archies, Future Bible Heroes, and the Magnetic Fields. Now splitting his time between New York and Los Angeles, he's one of the most accomplished and significant pop songwriters of the past 20 years. He's also highly regarded for his forays into cinematic soundtracks, musical theatre, opera, and writing jingles for TV commercials. The ninth album by the Magnetic Fields is a stellar one called Realism, which was released January 26. They're set to kick off a world tour that brings them to Montreal on February 6 and Toronto on February 8. Stephin Merritt spoke with us ahead of this road trip.
Realism is meant to conclude something called the "no synth trilogy," which includes the 2004 Magnetic Fields album i and the 2008 release, Distortion. I can understand your compulsion to explore a new sound or direction for the band but why a trilogy? Well, actually the problem was that there were no interesting new sounds to be played at the time. So, I thought I would give up the synthesizer for a while until there was something. Three albums seemed to be long enough and now, in fact, there are new synthesizers and I've been collecting those. So, clearly the next Magnetic Fields album will have synthesizers on it but probably all new ones ― probably no synthesizers that people have been familiar with.
Synthesizers from the future? No, synthesizers from the present. But not from the past.
All right, that makes more sense. Thank you for clarifying that. [Laughs]
You've said that Realism and Distortion are particularly connected to one another in this trio of records ― a kind of vague "True and False" dynamic. Why is that? I wanted to originally have albums called True and False but I couldn't actually decide which one was which, so I called them Distortion and Realism. Distortion is about doing to other instruments what say, the Jesus and Mary Chain, did with the electric guitar, which was to make it sound more like a vacuum cleaner than a classical guitar. So we made the accordion sound more like a vacuum cleaner than an accordion and that sort of thing. It was all recorded in the live room of the studio. It's not mixed to sound like that; it was recorded that way. The musicians kept thinking they were being incredibly loud and wanting to turn down but, actually, they were quite quiet. In order to make the speakers overdrive, you have to turn the speaker down and the input up. So, what sounded like [makes static sound] "Kweeeeeeck," was actually pretty quiet. So that was the sound of Distortion. And for Realism, I decided to make an out-and-out folk album. An orchestral folk album anyway; since one of our band members is a cellist, we couldn't make a straight folk album. But my favourite folk albums are the two, mid-'60s Judy Collins albums, Wildflowers and In My Life, where she has arrangements from Joshua Rifkin that are completely changing the incantation with every new song and there's no two songs in the same genre. That's what I thought of as folk when I was little and that's what I think is good folk now. There's hardly any acoustic guitar on the whole record, unfortunately, but it's folk.
I think it's folk; I see where you're coming from.One of the things that strikes me most about Realism is how surreal it actually is. Songs like "We Are Having a Hootenanny" and "The Doll's Tea Party" in particular seem to have a psychedelic haze about them. I'm not trying to insinuate that you've made some kind of stoner record here but do you suppose you were exploring some kind of "heightened realism" with this album? Oh, I don't know about that. I was probably just overly influenced by Judy Collins in 1967. That's why there's backwards piano and such things.
Yeah, and a general haze if that makes any sense. Hm (pauses). I'd have to listen for it.
I'm not saying it's a distortion hum. Just a playful, dreamy aspect to the record. Right, that's probably also true of Distortion actually.
Yeah, and a few of your records to be honest. But something about this one grabbed me that way and I wondered if that was intentional on your part. Um, not as far as I recall.
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