Stephin Merritt is a singer-songwriter of the Magnetic Fields. Six months before the twenty-five year anniversary of their hit album, 69 Love Songs, Merritt joined The Harvard Advocate for an interview. He sat in his New York apartment, surrounded by books and paraphernalia. We spoke about Boston in the 70s, love in the 2020s, and what he’s been reading lately.
This interview has been condensed for brevity and clarity.
The Magnetic Fields sort of got their start at Harvard. Do you have any fond memories of Boston?
I spent parts of my childhood and teenagedom in mostly suburban Boston. The day that we arrived in 1974, there were race riots going on. There were people throwing things and screaming and yelling because the schools were being desegregated, or threatening to be slightly less segregated. So people were up in arms, and it was awfully late to be having that argument but apparently, South Boston is especially conservative and they were having it. So my first impression of the Boston area was that it was a hotbed of racism and I was being thrown into a school system that was in turmoil about desegregation. And my impression never got much better.
I have some fond memories of Boston. I mean, there were shops I liked. I liked the huge number of bookstores that used to be in Harvard Square, most of which are not there anymore. Is the Grolier Poetry Shop still there?
Yup, it’s still standing strong.
All is right with the world.
What was your experience of the music scene in Boston in the 70s and 80s?
I wasn’t really in the music scene. The kind of music I made was not the kind of music that the music scene wanted to be about. And like the school system, the ways that people socially organize themselves around music, or almost explicitly insisted that there were two magazines about the rock and rock adjacent music scene in the 80s. There was The Noise, which basically covered the Irish people, and the Beat, which covered the Italian people.
I went to an elementary school in Newton and I was told by a teacher in fourth grade to not socialize with people from the ethnic groups that were not my ethnic group. And I thought that was just ridiculous and I thought that was an eccentricity of her own, until I encountered the music scene, where things were again sorted by ethnicity, and people just didn’t talk to each other. It was really strange, and these were not different genres of music – the only thing different was the ethnicities and the performance. We noticed that many of the bands covered in The Beat had the singer’s last name as their band name, and none of the band names in The Noise had that.
There’s no reason the two magazines couldn’t have merged and covered the same people. But no, the listings were different. Sorry to keep returning to racism but that heavily colored my experience in Boston in the 80s – racism all the time.
But in New York, that's just not a reality. It's not like that. It wasn't like that and it's still there may be ethnic tilts to the audiences, but everything goes.
There's sort of like a lack of genre and a lack of like allegiance to a genre in a way.
Right. We played with the Apollo Theater, we were completely comfortable playing at the Apollo Theater. No one batted an eyelash. Whereas in Boston that would have been a very big deal.
Speaking of genre, you once mentioned that 69 Love Songs arose out of an interest in the genre of love songs, which has very little to do with music, but it is mostly held together by the extra musical concept of love. A lot has changed in the 25 years since the album was released, including some changes in what we experience as love. I’m thinking about, specifically, like love and the Internet, love and social media, etc. Would your approach to the album change if you wrote it now? Would you think about love any differently?
Yeah, there would be a lot more explicit sex. There would be a lot more three ways and triples and polyamory there will be probably a lot more almost anonymous sex from the computer. There would probably be a lot less about the expectation of monogamy. And society through kink lenses because I’m surrounded by gay people.
My sense of what people do with their love lives is very much a function of the fact that I live in New York. When I was in Mexico City a year ago, I felt like gay love from Mexico city was different. I didn’t like it, I wasn't comfortable with it, but I didn't know it and I was only seeing the most visible parts. So in most of Europe, life is essentially the same as it is in New York. But that's not true all over the world. That's just New York and Europe. And I bet if I had written songs in Tokyo, I would have had a very different experience too. So the world is changing. But not all at the same rate and not all in the same direction. But I did. I did write it in New York and live in New York.
So I guess it would again be a New York centered album. Again, slash still. Love in New York has changed a great deal in the last 25 years.
Yeah, it has. Your songs also have a really interesting sense of place, like they sort of flit from like New York to San Francisco to DC and to all these different places within the US and without it. How do you negotiate with setting in your work, especially since a lot of pop songs nowadays are pretty vague, and I believe at least sort of intentionally obscure those details to make it more universal.
Well, most of the songs in 69 Love Songs are vague. It’s just that a few of them are specific. And it’s in the nature of New York that we’re very interconnected with other cities. And Washington is a train ride away. And gay New York is always in conversation with gay San Francisco, which is better in many ways. But we can’t really change New York to be more like San Francisco, because we’re only 3% of the population.
I don't know that I would want to be back in New York of 1999 especially knowing what was about to happen.
But yeah, the 25th anniversary of 69 Love Songs has encouraged me, at least, to do a lot of thinking about what has changed. And certainly my life drastically changed immediately after 69 Love Songs was released.
I had zero money at the time and now I have a whole apartment. I really spent 1998 and 1999 only working on 69 Love Songs. So my life is not at all like that now. I have two dogs, named Edgar and Agatha. They are not named after the mystery novel awards. They are named after Edgar Allan Poe and Agatha Christie, because their origins are mysterious. So it seemed like a good idea, at the time. If I were naming them after the awards, they would be Hugo and Nebula.
Speaking of your apartment, what’s on your nightstand right now?
What’s about to be on the nightstand is a cup of tea, which I will make between my interviews today. Were you asking about books?
I was asking about both.
A magazine called Cave Hollow. I can't tell you anything about it. I haven't opened it yet. But it's made by a friend of mine. The Book of Love by the wonderful writer Kelly Link, who we have known for 20 years. She opened for us a few times on tour. And we stayed at her delightful, many-colored house. And this music book, Listening to the Music Machines Make, which is named after an Ultravox song, is a history of the beginnings of synth pop. I haven’t cracked that yet. I just got it, and I’m looking very much forward to reading it.
What songs have been stuck in your head lately?
Well, that song that is stuck in my head right now is the Ultravox song that the book is named after. I don't remember what was in my head before actually, I'm always bad at that. I can tell you what is in my head, but I can’t tell you what was in my head.
That makes sense. You write a lot of music in bars. What’s your drink of choice?
Hennessy or Courvoisier
The Magnetic Fields will be performing at The Roadrunner on March 24th and 25th, on their 69 Love Songs 25th Anniversary Tour.
2025