"Oh, Stephin, behave!" That's what a great deal of individuals appear to want to say to Stephin Merritt, the impresario from the ever-changing musical ensemble the Magnetic Fields beats by dr dre, whose tenth full-length album, "Love at the Bottom of the Sea beats headphones," rises to the surface this week.
For years, journalists and other people labeled him morose and "difficult"; in 2006 some critics even accused him of racism simply because Dr Dre Beats, for 1 thing, his musical tastes did not consist of the authorized proportions of rap (a charge you'd probably then need to apply to every other gay Dre Beats, middle-aged fancier of show tunes available). Such absurd extremes aside, though monster beats, he definitely didn't make himself simple to like: When I 1st interviewed him a decade ago, he was so terse and condescending that it was difficult not to take it personally. But some thing is different these days. Merritt now proves to be a convivial and entertaining conversationalist beats by dre studio, although nonetheless given to lengthy, pregnant pauses.
Perhaps his new base in Los Angeles dr dre headphones, where he moved from New York a couple of years ago, has helped sunny up his disposition. (He still keeps an apartment within the historical capital of pop songcraft beats pro, exactly where he speaks to me by telephone.) ?Maybe it is from spending much of the past decade operating in theater ? from opera with Chinese director Chen Shi-Zheng to the musical "Coraline" in collaboration with author Neil Gaiman-about which he says, with rare pep monster headphones, "There's absolutely nothing as exciting in the world as operating within the theater! It's so much enjoyable that it appears ridiculous to get paid to complete it." (New projects await on that front but he will not divulge particulars.) Or maybe, at age 46 Beats By Dre, he's simply mellowed a bit.
His much more affable mood appears to create more whimsical, lusty as well as outright jokey songs. But then fans and critics complain that they miss the much more wrenching emotion of his earlier function, although Merritt has usually said that the feelings in his songs are truly only Warhol-style tinted silkscreens of pointedly appropriated cliches. Merritt Dark or Merritt Lite, he cannot seem to win ? or perhaps, regardless of what mode he's in, he would not be Stephin Merritt, that pop conceptualist with an excess of "i" in his name (which gave an earlier album its title), if he played together with anybody else's expectations.
As if to ensure no couple ever again adopts 1 of his works as a wedding song (as numerous did with "The Book of Love" and other tunes from his 1999 triple-disc magnum opus, "69 Adore Songs"), the new collection dwells on want misfired at impossible barriers, as ill-fated as romance on the ocean floor: It consists of ditties of dogmatic celibacy ("God Desires Us to Wait"), rampant promiscuity ("The Only Boy in Town"), profligate betrayal ("My Husband's Pied a Terre"), drug-fueled violence ("Your Girlfriend's Face"), petty paranoia ("I Don't Like Your Tone"), choreomania ("Infatuation With your Gyration" and "All She Cares About Is Mariachi") and compulsive punning ("I Would Go Anywhere With Hugh").
I ask him if it's possible to take the comedic aspect also far. "I believe it functions as long as one goes too far in multiple directions at as soon as," he says. "Like ??Zombie Boy' [from 2008's "Distortion"] is certainly going also far lyrically: It tries to combine every offensive factor one could place in the lyric, not only pedophilia but necrophilia with kidnapping et cetera, gay, pedo, necro, possibly interracial ? all the hot buttons, but inside a silly way." It is parallel, he agrees, towards the way filmmaker John Waters combined deliberate "bad taste" with an old-fashioned sense of craft.
The most obvious change on the new disc from the "acoustic trilogy" from the final three releases will be the return of Merritt's hazy way with synthesizers, taken to new extremes. People who've visited his L.A. house say the place is packed wall-to-wall with synths he's collected, many of which did not exist the last time the band used electronics, and they are given totally free rein on "LATBOTS" ?encouraged, one might say, to misbehave.
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