Stephen Merritt's Magnetic Fields Celebrate Five Decades Of A Life Worth Singing About

Stephin Merritt has always been fond of a good concept to tie his songwriting together, but his most recent project, 50 Song Memoir - the 11th recording released under The Magnetic Fields banner - is by far his most ambitious outing yet in both scope and execution.

Having recently hit his half-century, Merritt set out to write a song correlating to each year of his life thus far, following a proposition from his label who'd been impressed with his efforts scoring and writing songs for a well-known American podcast.

"I musicalised an episode of This American Life - or a segment of This American Life - using a news story that they had done about a Mormon cult member who left his religion and in the process lost his wife and family and job and all his relatives," Merritt explains. "So I needed to say only true things that he'd told [podcast host] Ira Glass, so it was good practice as it turns out for writing this album because I became essentially a particularly respectful journalist."

The project brought its own peculiar challenges, not least being that despite the size of his discography Merritt had little experience writing from a first-person autobiographical perspective.

"Two or three years ago, Rolling Stone asked me to make a list of 15 autobiographical songs that I had written and I couldn't really come up with 15 of them - and I have a lot of records out," he smiles. "I don't look at my own life as the automatic source of rhymed lyrics, for the good reason that most of the things that I do and places that I live in don't rhyme.

"[But the process] wasn't painful. I didn't want to write about anything painful, I didn't want to be bursting into tears on stage. And I didn't want to be miserable in the process. It's not that I only wrote about happy things, but I didn't write about anything that was going to destroy my life for the whole touring arc."

In terms of eras of his life it was the bookends that he found most challenging to chronicle ("my first two years and my latest two years were both unprocessed," Merritt reflects) but things get fascinating when covering his bohemian childhood, the singer having been raised in cult-like surroundings in Vermont commune.

"I didn't have a normal childhood, so for me normal childhoods are fascinating."

"I didn't have a normal childhood, so for me normal childhoods are fascinating," he chuckles. "Having slept on a mattress on the floor for much of my life I regard bed frames and couches and things like that as hopelessly bourgeois and I feel kind of guilty whenever I look at my bed with an actual headboard on it. And I remember that some people have whatever they're called 'footboards', and some people have matching bedspreads and curtains."

Things get meta in Be True To Your Bar, which finds Merritt sitting in a drinking establishment writing his 1999 conceptual opus 69 Love Songs. "I still do that, I have never stopped doing that," he tells of writing in bars. "I stopped drinking for a calendar year around 2013 - I stopped drinking for a year to see if it would have any influence on my health, and other than gaining ten pounds it didn't have any influence on my health.

"I recommend it though, it's interesting. What's interesting about it is how boring it is, of course. As with anything you do habitually you realise that you're doing it to cover up how bored you are. Since nothing particularly happened I went back to drinking - probably not as much as before, but it's hard to tell.

"But during the year that I wasn't drinking I only wrote two songs - which is a lifetime love for me - so it is clear that drinking helps, at least for me, to turn off that nasty internal editor who says that everything has already been done and that everything that is mildly amusing is not hilarious and doesn't need to be turned into a song."

Such humour is rife in Merritt's writing, with even the most serious topics broached using deft wordplay.

"I think the great lesson of Bob Dylan that everyone should have learned 55 years ago by now is to not be afraid be to be silly," he smiles. "You can have all the freedom that you want if you're not afraid to appear ridiculous. Not too many people seem to have paid heed to that but that's ok, I'm all in favour of everyone being a terrible lyricist because that way I corner the market by being reasonable with words."

Melbourne Festival presents Stephin Merritt and The Magnetic Fields in 50 Song Memoir, 21 Oct (songs 1 - 25) & 22 Oct (songs 26 - 50), Hamer Hall