Wired Mesh

Consider This Blog Chock-Full of Trademark Stephin Merritt Pauses

So I'm belatedly graduating from college this weekend, but let's not worry ourselves over such piddling matters. The new Magnetic Fields album is out! I went trolling through the music departments of Gunbarrel Road bright and early Tuesday morning, and found a copy of i on a stock cart in a Best Buy. I was happy.

It's an odd little album: not as obviously tuneful as the Fields' 1999 classic 69 Love Songs, and without the depths of sorrow or heights of genre-and-gender-mixing chaos that places that record at the top of my personal favorites. This new record is a mere 14 songs, and it feels a bit like a collection of lost Roxy Music tracks -- or covers of such tracks from a unusually classy gay piano bar. The lyricism, of course, is still pure Stephin Merritt brilliance. He is the most virtuoso songwriter working now, with the possible exception of Jeff Tweedy, and here he continues his string of perfect couplets ("I don't have to love you now if I don't wish to / I won't see you anyhow if that's an issue") that first make me laugh, then sink in with a strange weight. The tone of songs here is more obviously jaded than in Love Songs, where many of the characters were heart over heels, and glad to declare it. With i, Merritt seems to be taking on the role of the time-hardened broken heart. Still, under the surface lurks the sense of duende -- "the haunted premises of longing that the true Love Song inhabits," as Nick Cave put it -- that always flows in and out of Merritt's work. "I had a dream and you were in it," Merritt sings. "The blue of your eyes was infinite. / You seemed to be / In love with me / Which isn't very realistic."

In honor of such lovely gloom, I offer two very nice Magnetic Fields articles. First, a Believer piece by Rick Moody which discusses, at various points, reading aloud to rock fans, Joni Mitchell singing Charlie Mingus and, most importantly, the attempt to winnow 69 Love Songs to one diamond-sharp 31-song album. If you're willing to sift through the advertising, there's also a more current Salon interview with Merritt, in which he discusses i and his general disdain for Bjork. (The piece obliquely references Merritt's fascinating side project The Three Tenors, who apparently only perform special shows, such as "The Three Terrors Sing the Saddest Songs They Know for Valentine's Day.")

Finally, both articles make note of the Trademark Stephin Merritt Pause, which is developing an epic air of mystery in my mind. "Does it come from a youthful obsession with Harold Pinter?" Moody wonders. "Is it neurological? Is it a leftover expression of Merritt's childhood epilepsy? All I know is that Merritt takes longer to reply to a remark than anyone you know. He is two or three beats longer in reply than all your hardcore aphasics. You will be tempted to append further wasted verbiage to your initial remark. Do not do this. It will confuse things. Wait patiently. Then, at last, you will get the acerbic, laconic reply." This must be some pause.