Stephin Merritt and the Alchemy of Impermanence
Songwriter Stephin Merritt on his artistic philosophy, personal history, and current creative state. Plus: Emma Straub!
“The overall meaning of most of my songs is this is what my record collection looks like, and this is how my brain works.” - Stephin Merritt
Stephin Merritt refers to himself as a “hippie brat.” His childhood was marked by constant movement, shaped by his mother’s spiritual wanderlust. By the time he turned 22, they had lived in 33 different places. He recalls this itinerant upbringing as disconnected from other kids: “I never liked children — even as a child,” he admits. From an early age, impermanence wasn’t just a concept — it was his reality.
To speak with Merritt is to encounter a mind both deeply thoughtful and delightfully contrarian. Best known as the creative force behind The Magnetic Fields, he has spent his career crafting songs with sharp wit, emotional resonance, and a strong sense of artistic control. He’s perpetually out of step with convention, yet deeply engaged in an ongoing conversation with culture itself.
Impermanence permeates Merritt’s work, from his obsession with synthesizers — ephemeral, unpredictable, and endlessly modifiable — to his love of brevity and miniature forms. Quickies, his 2020 album of short songs (each under two minutes and fifteen seconds), exemplifies this. So too does Distortion, built around the conceit of every track drenched in feedback, and I, a record where every song begins with the word “I.” These constraints aren’t limiting for him — they’re creative fuel. “He likes organizing principles,” says his longtime friend and former assistant, novelist Emma Straub.
To mark the occasion of his 50th birthday, he released 50 Song Memoir in 2017 (two years after his actual 50th birthday), which mapped his life year by year in song. He described it as “a mix of autobiography (bedbugs, Buddhism, buggery) and documentary (hippies, Hollywood, hyperacusis).”
The Magnetic Fields toured throughout 2024 to mark the 25th anniversary of their landmark triple album 69 Love Songs, widely considered to be Merritt’s masterpiece: a sprawling, ambitious, and cheeky tribute to the idea of love, presented in nearly every style imaginable, and that proved a songwriter could be both profound and irreverent. “The union of high and low art, pop and bubblegum meeting the more esoteric end of music — with an emphasis on lyrics,” he calls it. Its brilliance lies in the juxtaposition of the earnest and the absurd, the profound and the punny.
The 25th anniversary tour for 69 Love Songs continues this year. Check https://www.houseoftomorrow.com/calendar for details.
That playful yet rigorous approach extends to his many side projects — the 6ths, the Gothic Archies, Future Bible Heroes — all of which offered new creative identities and fresh constraints. Straub calls Merritt “a hungry hungry hippo for the things that he loves,” pointing to his voracious appetite for books, music, and film. Merritt’s songwriting often serves as a kind of cultural mirror: “The overall meaning of most of my songs,” he says, “is this is what my record collection looks like, and this is how my brain works.”
He places himself within the folk tradition — not so much in sound, but in ethos.
“The originality brigade drives me crazy. The folk process is so much better than originality. If something is traditional but tweaked, that’s interesting. But if something is violently original, it’s incomprehensible and dull. Only in relation to other culture does a work of art acquire any interest.”
Yet behind the clever wordplay and conceptual structures is an artist shaped by solitude and strangeness. Merritt has long described himself as suffering from a host of “weird diseases,” and since 2020, he’s battled the effects of long COVID, which has drastically slowed his productivity. “The gods have punished me for my dependence on inspiration by withdrawing it,” he muses. Still, he has shelves full of notebooks containing unreleased songs, and he isn’t entirely resigned: “Suffering is life itself.”
Stephin Merritt’s work exists in a space of contrast — sophistication meets sentimentality, intellect meets absurdity, minimalism meets maximal ambition. His music insists that true originality isn’t about inventing from scratch — it’s about remixing, reframing, and refining. Impermanence, in his hands, becomes not a source of instability but a wellspring of invention.
Whether he's talking about sea glass, greeting cards, quickies (in song form), or the future of AI-generated music, Merritt’s mind is sharp, restless, and mischievous. We spoke recently about aging, solitude, and the current state of his creativity. As ever, his voice remains singular — even when he insists he's part of a larger chorus.
But first, Emma Straub shares warm, funny, and revealing memories of her friendship with Stephin and her time as his personal assistant more than 20 years ago. And she makes her case for why “The Magnetic Fields are the best band.”
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