Stephin Merritt is not the sentimental type. He is famously dry and laconic in interviews, and the sharply constructed songs he writes for Magnetic Fields are known for their bite. But many of those songs can be surprisingly sweet and tender, too, most notably on the band’s 1999 breakthrough album, 69 Love Songs.
Magnetic Fields’ latest album, 50 Song Memoir, pairs withering observations with disarming vulnerability. The concept for the album—one song about each year in Merritt’s life—was proposed by the president of Nonesuch Records. The potential yield of such a challenge is so rich, it’s a wonder no one had thought to do something similar before. It’s also possible the concept has occurred to a lot of people, but the idea of so deep a dive into one’s personal past seemed intimidating. Merritt, however, says he had no problem looking back.
“The project was difficult, but not psychologically difficult,” Merritt says. “I didn’t do any soul-searching when making this record or make myself cry when I was writing the songs.”
Though he started out making synth-pop records for influential indie label Merge in the early 1990s, Merritt’s lyrics have more in common with early 20th century songcrafters like Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, or Jerome Kern than any of his contemporaries. Until this album, he says, he had never written an autobiographical song. He has avoided the confessional singer-songwriter lyrics that flourished in the 1970s and remain disproportionately influential on pop music today. When faced with a project whose very purpose was autobiography, one might wonder if he was tempted to try his hand at this earnest, MOR folk-rock style.
“If anything, I think I’ve done a parody of that type of songwriting,” he says. “I think musicians’ lives are boring, and that includes mine. Once you start touring, your life becomes very similar to other musicians’, and that’s what a lot of those type of songs are about.”
Instead, in 50 Song Memoir, Merritt sings about a cat that hated him at age 3, atheism, sparring with an ethics professor, Ethan Fromme, Tetris, an unmade Ang Lee movie, and, often, love, but not in the ways you might expect.
At Big Ears, Magnetic Fields will present 50 Song Memoir in its entirety across two evenings, 25 songs each night. In addition to a seven-piece band and video projection, the stage will be filled with “50 years of artifacts” from Merritt’s life, adding an extra layer of autobiography.
“These are my personal belongings,” Merritt says. “We did have to settle on what we were bringing once we realized how breakable some things were and what that would mean when transporting them.”
The five-disc 50 Song Memoir set includes a recorded interview with Merritt by the writer Daniel Handler. At one point, Merritt reflects on how slippery and unreliable memories can be: “In some memories, one is all alone.” More vexing, as Merritt discovered, was how some memories disappear altogether, something he addresses in the album’s penultimate track, “I Wish I Had Pictures.”
“When I took on the project and started to write songs, I realized, ‘Oh God, I can’t remember anything,’” he says. “And that was troubling. What’s the point of not being dead if you can’t remember anything? So I guess I did make myself cry. I cried when I wrote that song.”
Magnetic Fields will perform 50 Song Memoir at the Tennessee Theatre (604 S. Gay St.) on Saturday, March 25, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, March 26, at 1 p.m.
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Eric Dawson is Audio-Visual Archivist with the Knox County Public Library's Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, and with Inside the Vault combs the archive for nuggets of lost Knoxville music and film history to share with us. He's also a longtime local music journalist, former A&E editor of the Knoxville Voice and a board member of the nonprofit performance venue Pilot Light.
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