Beloved for creating songs that are simultaneously tender and witty, sweet and subversive, uncluttered and rich, laconic and entrancing, The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt—whose mellifluous baritone is immediately recognizable—stopped writing at the onset of the pandemic. “I gave up,” he tells us. “I started doing a lot more photography.” He gave up because Merritt’s ritual is writing exclusively in bars, an impossibility in NYC for …
The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt on Brevity, Dread + Writing Songs in Bars