Songs Sung New

There are some two dozen people scattered throughout the cozy downtown cafe, but it’s not hard to figure out who the quirky underground musician is.

Stephin Merritt, the critically revered songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist who is the creative force behind the Manhattan-based outfit the Magnetic Fields, is sitting at a table in the back, looking blissfully unkempt and somewhat distracted. The source of the distraction is his 6-month-old Chihuahua, Irving, who has just emerged from his nap under Merritt’s baggy sweater and is barking violently.

“Irving gets a little cranky when he wakes up,” Merritt explains, offering the puppy a bit of sausage. “He’ll calm down. Why don’t you give him your hand?”

That suggestion is a sample of the dry wit that has helped make Merritt a celebrated cult figure. It’s a quality evident throughout the Magnetic Fields’ current release, the three-CD set “69 Love Songs,” which arrived in September to spectacular notices, including a perfect 10 rating in Spin magazine and an A+ grade from Robert Christgau in the Village Voice.

“There hasn’t been a lyricist of Merritt’s kind and caliber since Cole Porter,” Douglas Wolk raved in the Spin review, while Ann Powers praised Merritt in the New York Times as “invoking precursors from Jerome Kern to the Pet Shop Boys while maintaining a patented blend of openheartedness and cynicism.” Time Out New York called Merritt “the greatest songwriter of his generation.”

Mac McCaughan, a co-founder of Merge Records, the label that releases Magnetic Fields’ albums, has a similar view of his client.

“There’s something bizarrely traditional about Stephin, in that he’s a real songwriter,” McCaughan says. “I think he’d like to put himself in the tradition of people like the Gershwins and Cole Porter--and I think he belongs in that tradition. Stephin isn’t doing anything radical with the form of the song. He’s content to work within certain parameters, and then within those parameters make amazing music.”

The North Carolina-based independent label initially planned to release “69 Love Songs” as a limited-edition three-disc set, then continue selling the volumes individually. But when the first shipment of 2,500 copies sold out in a week, Merge decided to make 5,000 more available, and another 5,000 more are currently being manufactured. The three discs can also be purchased separately.

Merge can’t measure the success of “69” by SoundScan figures, since many indie-rock outlets aren’t plugged into the electronic sales monitoring system. Still, McCaughan estimates that the album has already given Merritt--who also records under the names Future Bible Heroes, the Gothic Archies, and the 6ths--his greatest commercial success to date, eclipsing the Magnetic Fields’ fifth album, 1995’s “Get Lost.”

“ ‘Get Lost’ sold 9,000 or 10,000,” McCaughan says. “But if you count the boxed set and the separate volumes, . . . this is probably his best-selling project.”

“69” is certainly Merritt’s most ambitious project--a three-hour-plus panorama that aims to reflect the popular music styles of the past 100 years, from musical theater to country, from Irish ballads to English dance-hall, from folk to techno-pop.

“I tried to represent 62 different subgenres,” says Merritt, who is essentially a solo artist with supporting musicians, a la Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails. “I meant to respond to the whole 20th century--which I’m surprised more people aren’t doing. I had wanted to do 100 songs, but that would have been too long. ‘69’ doesn’t have the same mass-production feel, but it’s still perversely large.

“And the number 69 fit more with love,” he adds, alluding to its sexual connotation.

Merritt, who is openly gay, says he didn’t necessarily take a confessional approach in penning his piquant odes to romance.

“I think ’69 Love Songs’ doesn’t have anything on it that couldn’t have been written just as easily about someone else’s life,” he says. “I have been in some of the situations that I describe in those songs, but so has everyone else over the age of 18.”

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Merritt initially conceived “69” as a musical revue featuring a piano and four singers. In the end, he did enlist four guest vocalists, including the Magnetic Fields’ drummer and pianist, Claudia Gonson (who is also Merritt’s manager). The act’s other core backing musicians, cellist-flutist Sam Davol and guitarist-banjoist John Woo, are also prominently featured, as is accordionist Daniel Handler.

Much of the recording was done in Merritt’s one-room apartment in the East Village, where he maintains a 24-track studio. In contrast to his previous efforts, Merritt spent little time fussing over the production.

“It was deliberately underproduced, so that, (a) the songs would be focused, and, (b) it would be possible to ever get it done,” he says. “I didn’t wanna spend five years recording it--though I easily could have.”

Merritt, who declines to give his age but appears to be in his early 30s, was born just outside New York City. An only child, he was raised by his mother, whom he affectionately describes as a hippie. “She listened to psychedelic rock and folk and nothing else,” he says.

The Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” was an early favorite of Merritt, who says he has been writing songs “for as long as I can remember.” When he was a teenager, Merritt moved with his mom to the Boston area. At 14 he acquired a four-track studio and began recording under several names, “just for fun.”

After meeting Gonson, he started working with her as the Magnetic Fields. Both Merritt and Gonson went on to Harvard, along with Gonson’s friend Davol, who then joined the group. Merritt took night classes at the Harvard Extension School--one of several colleges he attended--but never graduated. After the three musicians relocated to New York in 1993, another Harvard classmate, Woo, completed the Magnetic Fields lineup.

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Since then, Merritt has cultivated a reputation as a prolific perfectionist--at least in the recording studio. To say that he prefers studio work to the concert circuit would be an understatement. To promote “69 Love Songs,” he reluctantly hit the road for two weeks in September. Gonson predicts that there will be another mini-tour in March, but Merritt hardly relishes the prospect.

“Touring is so incredibly boring and depressing,” says Merritt as he pets Irving, who has finally calmed down after eating about half of his owner’s lunch.

“And I like the songs sounding the way I want them to sound, which is never gonna happen live. No matter how good our sound guy is, or how well we play, it’s just not gonna have that same reverb on the third chorus. It doesn’t work that way.”

Merritt’s anti-road philosophy contrasts sharply with that of most indie-rock idols, who use touring as an important promotional tool--notably Ani DiFranco, whom he admires as “a great guitar player, and someone with such star quality. Meeting her was like meeting Greta Garbo.”

Merritt does share some of DiFranco’s ambivalence toward major labels, although he did put out one album, the 6ths’ 1995 release “Wasps’ Nests”--featuring other alternative artists singing Merritt’s songs--on London Records, a division of PolyGram.

“Whenever I’m offered a major-label deal, I’m offered not much more money than I’m getting on an indie label, and no prospects of making back the advance,” Merritt says. “And they want, like, a seven-year contract. London was not like that--they let me do a one-off. But it didn’t sell any more than the indie records had.”

Gonson, wearing her manager’s hat, acknowledges that lack of major-label support does work against the Magnetic Fields where radio airplay is concerned.

But, she adds, “There are always ways, as an indie band, to get yourself out there. One is college radio. Another is touring. Another is press, which has obviously been a major boon for us. The best way to continue to grow is just to exist. Some bands give up after one or two records, but we’ve been doing this for a long time.”

Clearly, Merritt’s own productivity shows no signs of waning. Even as he pushes the Magnetic Fields’ latest effort, he is at work on a new album for his electro-pop outfit Future Bible Heroes, a new Gothic Archies single, and a treatment for a film musical.

Merritt harbors other ambitions, among them producing an album for former Ronettes singer Ronnie Spector and getting involved in movie soundtracks.

And this quintessential critics’ darling wouldn’t necessarily feel tainted by a little more commercial success.

“I certainly wouldn’t mind being a pop star,” Merritt muses. “But I’m not really willing to be trashy enough to be a pop star in the current climate. I just love making records.”