"What I was attempting to get away from was the synthesizer as a glorified electric organ, although I like electric organs," Merritt says. "And now we have synths that do not imitate keyboards ?that do not even have keyboards. You can't tell them what note to play, and you would not want to bother simply because they'd be ridiculously inefficient at doing that. You tell them how to behave. The area of the thumb pad over the circuit determines the pitch. It's so uncontrollable that you'd by no means attempt to play a scale. You receive screechy and staticky noises."
He mentions 1 much more antique synth module beats by dr dre, Buchla's Supply of Uncertainty, which resembles the console of a 1960s sci-fi starship if it had been piloted by a telephone switchboard operator. "It allows you to adjust the randomness with the voltage. It's lots of fun but you cannot play a single note on it ...Traditionally in pop music there is two kinds of instruments: drums and 'other.' The drums do unpitched and not particularly focused sound beats headphones, and everything else is supposed to possess a tone you are able to determine effortlessly. So on this album we've added a category, the unpitched electronic sound; they're correct up there within the foreground Dr Dre Beats, buzzing away, confusing you. It is analogous towards the way we utilized feedback on Distortion: I've taken my Jesus & Mary Chain admiration into a different context."
Otherwise Dre Beats, the personnel and instrumentation on the new album are the same as for most of the past decade, including cello monster beats, guitar, accordion beats by dre studio, banjo and guest vocalists. He credits a couple of non-musical influences: "I'm encouraged by Fassbinder and Ozu to keep working with the same people and attempt and get different things out of them. The taste in music of the band members of the Magnetic Fields seems to be laughably nothing to do with what they end up playing in the Magnetic Fields. ...I think of them as a repertory of actors. I just wish I could put them in different wigs and things."
Touring (which he hates, and which begins this week) dr dre headphones, the band will play acoustically, on guitars beats pro, ukuleles and the like, as it has ever since Merritt developed hyperacusis monster headphones, an oversensitivity to certain sounds, in his left ear. (His reputation for "difficulty" has not been helped by the fact he puts his hand to his head and winces whenever audiences applaud too enthusiastically.) Rearrangement isn't a problem Beats By Dre, though, as Merritt keeps his recording decisions completely separate from the style and content of the songs. "I always pretend that as the writer I have amnesia, and the producer comes into the studio with no knowledge whatsoever of the song."?
Given his penchant for synthesizers, his long-established songwriting routine of sitting in loud gay bars with a notebook and a drink, and his mimic's gift for nearly every genre, I wonder why he's by no means composed in any mode of contemporary dance music, like Euro or house.
"Anyone can make a techno record," he says. "I'm willing to defend that statement. I could probably teach my mother to make a techno record in a few hours ...One thing that I never do is the genre happening at that moment; by the time it comes out, it will be old hat. It would be ridiculous for me to attempt to make a dubstep record. Even though I did hear a new genre that sounds appealing, at least for a laugh: deathstep ? much more aggressive, involving guitars of the heavy-metal variety. Which opens up a whole rainbow of possibilities, like death calypso, death samba, death New Age."
There is at least one song on the record, however, that's very 2012: "The Machine in Your Hand," in which the protagonist wishes he could become a smartphone in order to get his beloved's attention. Merritt is surprised when I suggest there's by no means before been a Magnetic Fields song acknowledging the existence of digital culture.
"Really?" he says. "That would be an elaborate coincidence ...Well, now there is." But, true to form, the actual inspirations are older: "It's an answer song to two different original songs, Ultravox's? 'I Wish to Be a Machine' and ABBA's 'Dum Dum Diddle.' " He sings: " 'Dum dum diddle/ to be your fiddle/ I think then maybe/ you'd see me baby' ? but instead of a violin it is a gadget, and instead of a pocket calculator it is now a personal machine."
Does Merritt himself have an online life? I know most Magnetic Fields business over email is conducted by his bandmate and friend Claudia Gonson. "I'm not on Friendster, Myspace, Twitter or the other one," he says, "but I do play Scrabble and Words With Friends with multiple people at the same time. So I'm totally guilty of the behavior mentioned within the song. But almost everyone is. My own mother has become one of those people with whom you can't have a conversation."
His songs, though, still dwell on human-on-human interaction, in whatever social-sexual configurations and however doomed ? most impressively on the new album on "Andrew in Drag," in which a straight man is hopelessly smitten with how another straight guy once looked in a dress: "I'll never see that girl again, he did it as a gag/ I'll pine away forevermore for Andrew in drag." It's practically a gender-studies thesis in comic verse, with, as in all Merritt's best, a bitterly poignant undertow.
In 1990s-era Magnetic Fields songs ?the first synth period, starting when they formed in Boston ?that subtext tended to emerge instead from images of iconic environments, such as the beach, country roads and city streets, and the types of music associated with them. But at some point it became much much more about dialogue and characters.
"I do not think it was deliberate in any way," he says. "It was to do with my personal psyche: I got interested in people. I don't know why, but a lot of music people are not interested in people, so much as in places and things ...I think it's much more true of men than women: Not that it's an innate difference, just that women are encouraged early on to be interested in people while men are encouraged to acquire a facility with things, more directly. I have nothing much more to say about that, but it certainly is conspicuous in my life."
I ask if that shift also meant that his songs became much more about life rather than songs about songs, as he usually frames them. "I still feel like the conversation is mostly about music," he says. "But music is still something that's done only by people ? except for the Thai Elephant Orchestra." (That's a real thing, by the way, billed as "the world's biggest orchestra, at least by weight" ?look it up on YouTube.)
The Magnetic Fields is not Merritt's only band, although in recent years theater and film work has largely taken the place of his once-abundant side projects: "In the past 10 years, I've only put out one Gothic Archies, 1 Future Bible Heroes and 1 Sixths album. And four cast albums and two film soundtracks. But other than that I haven't really been up to very much."
The Magnetic Fields, however, remains his prime and best-known gig. As the band attains the legal drinking age this year, I wonder if he hears their influence among younger musicians. He hesitates. "There was that Strokes song that sounds conspicuously like the Magnetic Fields ['Ask Me Anything']. But how would you go about being influenced by the Magnetic Fields? We change all the time."
Many bands labeled "chillwave," among others such as the Dum Dum Girls, I suggest, marry 1960s-style beach, girl-group and bubblegum pop to dense low-fidelity textures in a way that recalls the early Magnetic Fields.
"I can think of combinations," he enables. "Like if Vampire Weekend were producing Robyn, you'd come out with basically a Magnetic Fields song. If ever I win a billion dollars, in some fictional lottery in which you do not have to buy a ticket to win, I could hire Vampire Weekend and Robyn to complete my career for me. They're both wonderful but each on a completely different level."
If it is much more difficult to hear the influence of more recent-vintage Magnetic Fields among other musicians, that may be a matter not only of time but of adaptability: The newer songs are not so much diminished in emotion as higher in specificity, with fewer gaps for the listener to project into psychologically. To go on a limb, it might partly relate to cultural changes (along using the settling effect of age) that make it more comfortable for Merritt to write unambiguously from a gay perspective and with a gay sensibility, rather than the way he once navigated through the indie-rock ghetto with a slippery-pronouned, allusive and elusive queerness that was very 1990s in affect.
If Merritt is currently writing less like some amalgam of Morrissey, Cole Porter and Hank Williams and more like a salon wit such as Noel Coward, there is an ease there that he has earned. And if his past record is any indication, his muse won't stay in place for long. As they say about the weather in New England, where the band began: If you don't like what the Magnetic Fields are performing now, wait a minute. But first, perhaps, attempt listening again.
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