By David Chiu

If listening to the Magnetic Fields’ latest album, Distortion, conjures up The Jesus and Mary Chain’s 1985 classic debut Psychocandy, you’re not off the mark. Those long familiar with the Magnetic Fields’ indie pop may be jolted by the sound on Distortion, which is heavy on the reverb and noisy feedback. But that was Stephin Merritt’s intention.
“I wanted to imitate Psychocandy, so that I could make a record quickly,” explains Merritt, the Magnetic Fields’ frontman and the band’s driving force. “I thought I would do a quick and dirty record.”

Featuring Merritt along with band members Claudia Gonson (pianist/percussionist), guitarist John Woo and cellist Sam Davol, Distortion is certainly a sonic departure from the last two Magnetic Fields albums: the epic collection 69 Love Songs (1999) and i (2004).

Merritt remembered that he had heard the Jesus and Mary Chain song “You Trip Me Up” before the Psychocandy album was released. “They were on the cover of the NME,” he says. “Before they even had a single out. They were a really big deal. So really ‘You Trip Me Up’ was the major revelation, although I don’t remember what the B-side was.”

Distortion’s melodic tunes such as “Too Drunk To Dream” and “Zombie Boy” continue to showcase Merritt’s melancholy and subversive sense of humor. A standout song from the album, “California Girls,” may sound like a power-pop homage to the Beach Boys, but it’s not a cover of their 1965 hit. Instead it’s a critique of young females preoccupied with looking good. Merritt explained that he also wanted a song that began with the letter ‘C.’

“I find it useful when thinking of songs to think of 26 at a time, by thinking of song titles for each letter,” he explains. “This helps me come up with songs like ‘Xavier Says’ and ‘Zombie Boy’ that I otherwise might not think of.”

Another stellar example of Merritt’s songwriting on the new album is “The Nun’s Litany,” sung by Shirley Simms (who sang on 69 Love Songs), in which the narrator delivers lines like, “I want to be a topless waitress” and “I want to be
a dominatrix.”

“I think I began writing it for [the i album],” says Merritt, “because the original title was ‘I Want to Be a Playboy Bunny,’ until I realized that Playboy would sue me. So I just think it took a really long time to come up with all of the particular things that the character wants to be.”

The album concludes with the lovely melancholic ballad “Courtesans.” “We definitely deviated from Psychocandy in that we didn’t do the almost distortion-free ballad that they did,” explains Merritt. “I had a particular take on Psychocandy that I wanted to explore—I wanted to do aspects of Psychocandy.”

Given the sentiments of his lyrics, Merritt was asked if he considers himself a pessimist. “A pessimist is always right in the long term. If you read anybody’s biography, you know the ending.”

Does he think that there are too many love songs out there? “I feel like all the rest of music history exists for me to gleefully plunder,” says Merritt. “I’m glad that there is too much of everything. I’m more or less sick of everything that has ever been done in popular music. So I play with that. Everything has been done to death, and that’s the basic precondition for the Magnetic Fields.”

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