Stephin Merritt calls himself a “hippie brat.” Raised by a spiritually restless mother, he spent his childhood in near-constant motion—33 homes by the time he turned 22. It was a disconnected, solitary upbringing that left a lasting impression. “I never liked children—even as a child,” he admits. For Merritt, impermanence wasn’t an idea—it was the foundation of his worldview.
Best known as the driving force behind The Magnetic Fields, Merritt has spent his career crafting songs that are equal parts clever, tender, and contrarian. His songwriting combines sharp lyrical wit with emotional resonance and often unfolds within tight conceptual boundaries. He’s perpetually out of step with mainstream expectations—yet always immersed in a cultural conversation that stretches from Tin Pan Alley to post-punk.
Impermanence is a running theme in Merritt’s work, reflected in his love of fleeting sounds (synthesizers, lo-fi textures) and compact forms. Quickies, his 2020 album of ultra-short songs, exemplifies this obsession. So do Distortion, with its wall-to-wall feedback, and I, in which every track begins with the same pronoun. These restrictions are not limitations but creative launchpads. “He likes organizing principles,” says novelist Emma Straub, Merritt’s longtime friend and former personal assistant.
Merritt’s 1999 triple album 69 Love Songs remains his masterpiece: sprawling, satirical, and sincere all at once—a compendium of love in nearly every style imaginable. “The union of high and low art, pop and bubblegum meeting the more esoteric end of music—with an emphasis on lyrics,” is how he describes it. That interplay of the earnest and the absurd is the hallmark of his style.
Across his many side projects—the 6ths, the Gothic Archies, Future Bible Heroes—Merritt has continued to explore voice, identity, and constraint. He’s also a voracious consumer of culture. “A hungry hungry hippo for the things that he loves,” as Straub puts it. Books, records, films—his work reflects them all. “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.”
Merritt identifies more with the folk tradition than with avant-garde individualism. “The originality brigade drives me crazy,” he says. “If something is traditional but tweaked, that’s interesting. But if something is violently original, it’s incomprehensible and dull.”
His cleverness often obscures the more personal elements of his story. For years he wrote prolifically, often in bars, pen in hand. But since 2020, long COVID has slowed him down dramatically. “The gods have punished me for my dependence on inspiration by withdrawing it,” he says. Still, he has shelves of unpublished songs and a mind that continues to question, observe, and reframe. “Suffering is life itself.”
Here Stephin Merritt talks about impermanence, creativity, aging, and solitude. 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.
The Magnetic Fields are touring this year to celebrate the 25th anniversary of 69 Love Songs.
