Down Beat: “Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields,” by Kurt Loder

In attempting to fathom the woeful worldview of songwriter Stephin Merritt, it helps to know that he’s the product of a one-night stand involving an itinerant folksinger (whom he’s never met) and the freewheeling single mom who subsequently schlepped him around through 33 different towns until he arrived in his twenties. Merritt grew up gay and lonely, and you can hear all about it in one of his best songs, "Papa Was a Rodeo":

            Papa was rodeo, Mama was a rock’n’roll band

             I could play guitar and rope a steer before I learned to stand

             Home was anywhere with diesel gas, love was a trucker’s hand

             Never stuck around long enough for a one-night stand

"Papa Was a Rodeo" is a track on 69 Love Songs, Merritt’s 1999 breakthrough album with his odd little band, the Magnetic Fields. The three-disc set turned him into an alt-rock celebrity, of sorts – an unusual development for a guy who makes music with ukuleles and kitchen whisks, and who says his all-time favorite group is ABBA, and that “art aspires to the condition of Top 40 pop.”

For his part, Merritt has yet to really embrace his modest ration of fame. (“I’m a pretty dark person,” he says.) And so it’s remarkable that he’s spent the last 10 years putting up with directors Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara as they painstakingly assembled an 82-minute documentary about the man and his band (or bands: also name-checked are such other Merritt ensembles as the 6ths, the Gothic Archies, and Future Bible Heroes). The film is called Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, and one can see why it took so long to make. Merritt is deeply undemonstrative, and he remains a maddeningly oblique interview subject. (Lobbed an unremarkable question by one interviewer here, he glances downward and says, “I love your shoes.”)

Still, we learn a lot. We see Merritt sitting in one of the gay bars where he writes most of his songs, undeterred by the thumping disco beats. We see him in his low-rent home studio happily bickering about meter with his longtime collaborator, Claudia Gonson, and coaxing music out of such unpromising materials as a carillon of paper cups. We see him smoking a lot (he’s since quit), and naturally we see him onstage with his group, and hear a bunch of his songs, including "The Cactus Where Your Heart Should Be" and "Smile! No One Cares How You Feel." We also hear from some of his famous fans, among them Sarah Silverman, comics god Neil Gaiman (Merritt scored an off-Broadway version of Gaiman’s fantasy novel Coraline last year), and Daniel Handler (who occasionally sheds his “Lemony Snicket” literary pseudonym to play accordion with the Magnetic Fields).

The film is a piecemeal mosaic through which Merritt drifts like a small dark cloud. After 19 years of making records (he’s now 44), the man is still an elusive character. This documentary may not pierce to the heart of his art, but it comes as close as anyone’s likely to get. It allows us to savor his grumbly charm (“As an only child, of course, I resent the existence of other people”), and it offers a window into the strange power of the music he makes. Now that the cameras have wrapped, he’ll probably be happiest if we just let him get on with it.