'I can't understand your accent," grumbles Stephin Merritt. "Try speaking a little sl-oo-wer." They warned me about this. Merritt, insouciant front-man of New York's finest pop oddities The Magnetic Fields, is a notoriously truculent interviewee, all sighs and sharp intakes, the kind of guy who will chew over your question for 50 seconds and then mutter, "yeah . . . whatever . . . "
OK . . . How . . . about . . . now . . . Any better? "Hello? Hello? . . . No, I still can't hear you. Maybe it's my air-conditioning. Wait a minute."
He puts the receiver down. There is a muffled thud, metallic footfalls, a grinding noise. Jeez, where does this guy live? Castle Gormenghast? You can just picture Merritt clanking around some musty sepulchrian nest, hemmed in by hissing pipes and groaning chains. His songs are baroque and ghostly, full of creeping shadows and sad endings. When he returns I ask him about his new side project, The Three Terrors, a joke group that performs Hollywood show tunes. Is he reacting against the recent success of the Magnetic Fields?
"The Three Terrors . . . show tunes . . . How do you KNOW all this stuff?"
Have I spooked him a little? Truth is, I know about his many extra-curricular activities because I'm a fan. However, Merritt probably regards fans as pitiable no-lifers. I tell him I read it on the Internet.
"Hmmm . . . " another pause. He's forgotten the question. I wait for him to ask me to repeat myself. He doesn't. The silence goes on for some time. Oh boy.
He doesn't act this way on purpose. Merritt is text-book awkward-shy. The Magnetic Field's current album, the sprawling, polyglot 69 Love Songs was a huge cross-over hit. It took away his anonymity, put him on the front pages of Village Voice and Spin magazines. Variety named him one of America's most influential gay celebrities. The mantle sits uncomfortably on his shoulders.
He doesn't regret making a popular record: "I'm not sick of 69 Love Songs. This is a great album to tour because there are so many songs on it. There is such a wide choice of material. It keeps you interested. I don't think I could ever get sick of that album. It's about love - how can you get tired of love?"
Ah yes. Love. Few songwriters have mulled over its intricacies with such scholastic fervour. Love is Merritt's great obsession; his muse and his tormentor. Last year he put out a single entitled I'm Lonely and I Love It. He has penned songs called You Can't Break a Broken Heart and I Don't Want to Get Over You. Sounds like he's had his heart broken a few times.
"The songs on 69 Love Songs are neither abstract nor personal. Love is such a huge thing. If I have written, like, three songs about myself on that album it would be too much."
Juxtaposing gothic country blues, flippant Euro-pop and anguished balladry, 69 Love Songs flings its net widely. Merritt cites an incongruous range of influences: Abba, Irving Berling (after whom his beloved puppy Irving is named), Tom Waites and the German industrial group Einsturzende Neubauten. He seems loftily contemptuous of mainstream "alternative" rock.
"Rock music is dead. It lived between 1965 and 1995, and the last 10 years were pretty terrible. It doesn't mean anything much to me . . . "
There's a certain irony to Merritt's loathing of interviews. An accomplished journalist, he held down an associate editor's position with Time Out New York until 69 Love Songs took off. His prose gives him away: it is arch, tetchy, disdainful of the less "sophisticated". He nurses literary ambitions, but, after composing nearly 1,000 songs in the past decade, finds it difficult to channel his energies into unexplored avenues.
"I've tried sitting down and writing stuff, but every time time I do it just seems to turn into a song."
Away from the Magnetic Fields, he fronts an array of side projects, most notably The Sixths, a group with a rotating cast of vocalists. The last Sixths album, Hyacinths and Thistles, featured fading counter-culture luminaries Gary Numan and Mark Almond. A previous, superior outing boasted intriguing collaborations with Galaxie 500 singer Dean Wareham and New Zealand lo-fi granddaddy Chris Knox.
There have been suggestions that Merritt, frequently (and unfairly) disdainful of his own singing voice (a dolorous bassoon pitched somewhere between Nick Cave and Ian Curtis), is setting himself up as an old-time songwriter in the Burt Bacharach/Cole Porter vein. He recoils at the idea.
"I don't think people can add anything extra to my songs. My songs don't take on a new life when someone else sings them - they have that life when I write them. You could say those singers become a reflection of me when they sing my songs."
69 Love Songs has just been reissued by Circus Records.