Fifty shades darker
Stephin Merritt’s latest breaks his life into 50 witty pieces. By Jim Farber.
HOW CAN you sum up a half-century life in a song? Stephin Merritt has found a novel way – penning 50 different pieces, one for each year of his life so far. If that makes for a massive, and factually questionable, project, Merritt tackles it with both cunning and pith. Memoir isn’t the first time this songwriter has dreamt up a daunting conceit. Merritt made his name with his band The Magnetic Fields in 1999 by penning 69 Love Songs, a sprawling set which beguiled listeners by lacing those love songs with scepticism, agony and bile. Askew music and desert-dry vocals sealed its withering mission. Merritt’s new project takes an equally arch approach to its subject. The author superimposes an adult’s level of awareness even on his one-year-old self. The first track, set in 1966, finds him asking, with a poised bemusement, “I wonder where I’m from.” By the age of three, Merritt has experienced the first in a seemingly
endless series of rejections – this one by a family cat named Dionysus. The next year, he assesses the connection between the death of Judy Garland and the modern gay rights movement. From there,
Merritt sifts in sly pop culture references to New York clubs (Danceteria, The Pyramid), and a wide swath of his youth’s idols, from John Foxx to Edith Wharton. Much of the album’s early plot involves Merritt’s dippy hippy mother, who has a thing for dead-beat men and spiritual charlatans. The author reacts by avoiding eye contact and creating worlds of his own. As always, Merritt’s verse approaches nearly everything with a wry horror. The chorus in one key piece – ’85 Why I Am Not A Teenager – echoes the way the world treats young aspirants with the edict: “Piss on your dreams/Muzzle your screams”. Accordingly, much of Merritt’s music sounds squashed, dazed or appalled. It miniaturises ’60s chamber-pop and ’80s new wave with a sound that’s both screwy and inventive, hilarious and tortured. Often, it’s quite catchy. Every instrument – and there are more than 50 – sounds like it was manufactured in Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. The first half of Memoir tends towards the smug or the accusatory. But things pivot crucially in his 27th year, in the song ’92 Weird Diseases. Here, Merritt wonders, with good reason, if he has Asperger’s. By his thirties and forties, the writer becomes more vulnerable and open, if no less subversive and riotous. He’s most moving in ’11 Stupid Tears, where he can’t let go of a failed love. Towards the end, in ’14 I Wish I Had Pictures, Merritt finally drops his poses and admits that “the things I remember are probably wrong.” In factual terms, that’s true of most memoirs. Emotionally speaking, however, Merritt has recreated an inner life that sounds agonisingly real.