Podcast #14: Stephin Merritt’s Strange Powers

MusicFilmWeb: See It Loud

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Stephin Merritt might be the least likely icon in indie rock, a prodigious song stylist whose incisive, melodic, and musically off-kilter odes to love, lust, and heartbreak owe more to Tin Pan Alley than to Nirvana or the Clash (although he did write a song called “Punk Rock Love”). While his band, The Magnetic Fields, has attracted a small but rabid following, Merritt has largely avoided the spotlight, earning a reputation as dour and disdainful on those occasions when he does surface.

Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields celebrates the artist while stripping away much of the anti-hype surrounding his personality. Taking advantage of 10 years of close proximity to Merritt and his manager/bandmate/soulmate, Claudia Gonson, directors Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara show a unique creative mind at work while revealing one of the most productive partnerships in contemporary popular music.

With Strange Powers set to open in US cinemas October 27 and making the European festival rounds, See It Loud talked to Kerthy Fix about her idiosyncratic subject, whether his music owes more to Irving Berlin or Cole Porter, and her upcoming doc about feminist synthpunk band Le Tigre.

This edition references a vulgar term for drunkenness but is otherwise clean. The opening theme by Los Musicos de Jose was provided of Mevio’s Music Alley.

Update: Strange Powers will screen at the In-Edit Beefeater music doc festival in Barcelona on November 1 and 4; the dates had not been set when the interview was recorded.

Movies in this one:

Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields

Dave Chappelle’s Block Party

Le Tigre on Tour

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