Stephin Merritt Undistorted

SM: No, I haven't had time!

LA: Well, you better get to work. Fifty's a lot.

SM: [I've] been working on this musical, Coraline, back in New York, the Neil Gaiman adaptation. And I've been doing these three commercials.

LA: But do you have story ideas? You should probably be thinking about, at this point, your first five if you're going to do fifty. Sorry to put pressure on you, I don't mean to put pressure on you.

SM: I have a whole lot of offers to do stage musicals, and I have a lot of ideas for them. But at the moment I have no offers to do film musicals, so I figure I will do a stage musical, and see if they can be adapted ... It seems like the stage musicals usually actually happen when producers say they will happen, whereas film projects fall through more often than not.

LA: And it seems as though maybe the aesthetic aspirations of a your idea of a film might not necessarily be along the same lines as a present-day Hollywood film.

SM: Well, I really liked Hairspray, although that came from the stage of course, having come originally come from the film of course. Original Hollywood musicals have not been raining down on us recently. They all seem to be Broadway adaptations. But there have been other recent film musicals that I've really enjoyed.

LA: Which ones?

SM: They're a little… left field. The Saddest Music in the World, Dancer in the Dark, The Happiness of the Katakuris by Takeshi Miike.

LA: I don't know that.

SM: It's a zombie musical made by Takeshi Miike, who usually does shocking Japanese horror movies, like Audition. I think he also did the original version of The Ring. But he made a musical. [Editor's note: Ringu was actually directed by Hideo Nakata.]

LA: I actually spoke with you around the time that 69 Love Songs came out, and at that point at the turn of the century, I asked you whether or not, with the turn, you thought there would be an aesthetic shift in music to reflect the culture's excitement about the new millennium. You acknowledged a similar excitement – that the psychological shift might manifest itself in the aesthetics of the time. I'm wondering, eight years in, whether that indeed you feel like has happened, or whether it's been a great disappointment.

SM: Well, there has been a shift. It just seems like nothing has happened, because I think what has happened is subtraction rather than addition. Dance music died … and, so, we don't seem to have much from Britain anymore. They've already [inaudible] the British Invasion but I don't know that they're actually doing anything to invade us with.

LA: Well, they're all those female singer songwriters coming over…

SM: Yeah, yeah... So anyways, nothing interesting is happening but the technology is changing, so, the people have to listen to music, or feel they have to listen to music, on incredibly crappy sound quality mp3's. I guess the kids don't care about the sound quality, as usual, so it's just like the days of cassettes or in the days of 45 rpms, singles. People are listening to unbelievably awful sound quality, only this time it's even worse. So I think in maybe ten or fifteen years we'll get an even worse format. The idea of listening to music on your cell phone didn't actually seem to catch on, only because it's only in one ear. Maybe that'll take place for real in a while. And ringtones, the most wanted ring tone industry, never took off.

LA: Other than as a signifier --  "This is who I am when I'm standing in a line."

SM: But that's like wearing the T-shirt. That's not buying the record.

LA: Were you thinking about any of this when you were trying to decide how Distortion was going to sound? Were you thinking about how it was going to sound on computer speakers?

SM: No, but I was aware that high fidelity was not where music was going. Actually I think people are really confused about high fidelity at this point, probably because of all Top 40 music being synthesized. They actually don't understand the difference between synthetic piano and a real piano. And synthetic piano is what they hear more often. So when they hear a real piano, they think it's sort of lo-fi. I think the audience is confused in a number of ways.