It's certainly feasible that Merrittmight one day record an untitled opus, though. With the most eminent of hismany bands and projects, The Magnetic Fields, he's established himself as theking of the high-concept album. The Magnetic Fields' 1999 breakthrough, 69LoveSongs, was a three-album compilation of just that. It was followed by2004's i, in which every song beganwith that self-centered letter, then 2008's Distortion,a left-field foray into noise-pop from a band typically associated with moreornate synth and baroque sounds.
Merritt's latest Magnetic Fields albumis a counterpoint to Distortioncalled Realism, an (almost)all-acoustic folk album. It's more eclectic than that description suggests,appropriating not only the folk revival records of the '60s but also dark,Leonard Cohen lamentations, pastoral British folk and Tin Pan Alley pomp. Forgood measure there's also a hootenanny, a polka and a Christmas song. Astute inits homage to '60s folk LPs, Realismclocks in at just 35 minutes, and each song is kept concise. One of them, “IDon't Know What to Say,” ends with an overzealous, very of-the-era fade-out atthe two-and-a-half-minute mark.
The joke behind the album, if you cancall it a jokeand again, with The Magnetic Fields it's always difficult totellis that there really is no such thing as “folk” music.
“I was attracted to folk being thismore or less meaningless category, where performers who knew traditional musiccould attempt pretty much any style they wanted and it would all be classifiedunder this umbrella term,” Merritt says.
Though some ears might read Realism as an A Mighty Wind-styled sendup of the folk revival, Merritt maintainshe has a real affection for these sounds.
“It's the music that I first rememberhearing, actually,” he says. “My mother was a coffeehouse, folky beatnik, andthese were the records she played. I was especially big on Judy Collins and heralbums In My Life and Wildflowers. Collins could do 14different things on each album, sometimes with mixed results, but basically shesang them all well, if not beautifully.”
It's that variety that most endearsMerritt to the LPs of his youth.
“When I liked The Beatles, what I likedwas Revolver and Sgt. Pepper,” he says. “I thought that changing the style of musicevery three minutes was a necessary part of being entertained for half an hour.This was before radio formatting divided music into genres that only a smallgroup of people were willing to listen to. With early AM and FM radio, youexpected to hear something different every 10 minutes. That's disappeared.”
To illustrate his disdain for genreclassifications, Merritt recounts a recent conversation he had with Robin Gibbof The Bee Gees.
“It was really clear that he hatedbeing referred to as a disco artist,” Merritt says. “The Bee Gees had done somany types of music in their decades-long career. They did what one calls discofor two or three years out of their 30-year career, and even then they referredto it as white R&Bin the U.S. we can't say white R&B because thatsounds racist, but they're Australian, and it's a different scene there. Buteven the Bee Gees were… hold on, Irvingis doing mischievous things.”
Merritt has stopped to reprimand his dog, who was named after Broadway composer Irving Berlin and is currentlyrummaging through Merritt's suitcase. When Merritt's train of thought returns,he vents that despite his own eclectic output, he too is lumped intocategories, usually “rock” or “indie.”
If The Magnetic Fields had to beclassified, he says, he'd prefer it be under his own term: “variety pop.”
TheMagnetic Fields headline an 8 p.m. show at the Pabst Theater with opener LauraBarrett on Thursday, March 4.
Correction: The print version of this article incorrectly referred to Merritt's dog as a cat.
