This week’s Interrogation was supposed to be an interview
with Stephin Merritt. It didn’t go so well. The last time you tried to
interview him, at Bumbershoot in 2000, didn’t go so well either,
right?
The Magnetic Fields came to play Bumbershoot, and the organizers
asked if I’d be up for moderating a “songwriters salon” featuring
Stephin Merritt and Sally Timms of the Mekons. I love both bands, so I
said yes. A couple of days before the event, Timms had a family
emergency and had to bail, so instead of moderating a discussion
between Timms and Merritt, I ended up doing a one-on-one, live-onstage
interview with Merritt, and it was a fucking disaster.
What happened?
Very little. At the time of the Bumbershoot interview, I was
completely infatuated with 69 Love Songs—when I wasn’t
listening to it, I was thinking about it, and when I wasn’t doing
either, I was swimming through the related media coverage: the
Village Voice cover story, the Terry Gross Fresh Air interview, Merritt’s past writings for Time Out New York,
everything I could find. I was a freak, and my rabid fandom made me the
worst interviewer in the world.
How so?
I knew from all my reading that he was a notoriously difficult and
prickly interviewee, even a notoriously difficult and prickly
person—in the Village Voice profile, Merritt’s former
coworkers at Spin told how they were sure the mute and scowly
copy editor hated their guts. So, I thought I’d honor this great and
prickly artist by bringing only the freshest and most fascinating
questions to the interview—I wouldn’t bore him with any of the
same old questions about love songs he’d been answering for months.
Unfortunately, these were exactly the questions the audience was hungry
to hear Merritt answer, and my three-part questions about the intricate
conceptual differences between Merritt’s various band configurations
and the forthcoming 6ths album—which none of the audience had
heard yet, not having advance press copies—bored and confused
everyone.
So it was your fault.
Well, Merritt’s one-word answers and long stretches of scowly
muteness didn’t help. Eventually, we just sat there, silently staring
at each other. It was a standoff—he wasn’t going to force himself
to be bubbly and forthcoming for my sake, and I wasn’t going to force
myself into some solicitous Larry King buffoonery for his sake. It was
extremely odd and awkward, perhaps one of the great Dada moments in
media relations. Afterward, Merritt came up to me and apologized.
That’s nice. Then, a week ago, you tried to interview him
again for this column. How’d you fuck it up this time?
I figured a lot of the difficulty of our first encounter came from
the live setting—
interviews-as-performance are weird things,
and I hoped restricting our conversation to a private phone call would
help things. I was wrong.
What happened?
It started fine—I’d prepped a bunch of straightforward,
nonwonky questions about Distortion and the tour and his
surprise side career as the voice of Volvo, and braced myself for the
long pauses. Before his publicist connected us, she asked, “Have you
ever interviewed Stephin before?” I told her, “Yes, but tell me what
you tell people who haven’t.” She said that he spoke very slowly and
thoughtfully and essentially that I shouldn’t let it spook me. I
thanked her for the warning and she put me through. But as soon as I
heard his first long, exasperated sigh, I was doomed.
What do you mean?
It’s like I had post-traumatic stress disorder. Just hearing his
voice dragged me back to the horror of the Bumbershoot fiasco, where
we’d been trapped onstage. Only this time, it was just the two of us on
the phone, and I could feasibly end our suffering at any time without
leaving an audience high and dry. So I slogged through a few short
questions, and then I hung up.
What did you manage to ask him before pussing
out?
I asked about the recording of Distortion, and the design
of the CD cover, and when he deigned to speak, he was actually pretty
forthcoming. He explained how they rigged the mics and amps to get
feedback out of the piano, and how the Distortion artwork was
his idea, originally intended for another record that’s since been
shelved, then resurrected as a twist on the distortion theme.
That sounds perfectly lovely.
Yeah, but what these recollections can’t capture
is the deep,
inherent contempt for the whole interview endeavor that seems to
radiate from the core of Merritt’s being. Maybe it’s deep
thoughtfulness or light Asperger’s, but it affects me like the smell of
burning hair. And here’s where my deep love and admiration for
Merritt’s work bites me in the ass as an interviewer: The way I see it,
the world is packed with people with decent social skills and zero
songwriting ability, and those rare folks with world-historically
brilliant songwriting abilities and compromised social skills are worth
coddling. Maybe if I weren’t so admiring and protective of Stephin
Merritt’s artistry I’d be able to interrogate the shit out of him, go
for the jugular with questions sure to piss him off and clam him up,
like, “Why do you still agree to do interviews when it’s clear you’d
rather eat glass?” or ridiculously offensive stuff like, “Why do you
hate black people so much?” Maybe if I weren’t such a fan, I could at
least force him to be the one who hangs up.
The Magnetic Fields play Town Hall Thurs–Fri March
6–7, 8 pm, $27.50, all ages. Sold out.
