Latest Stephin Merritt Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Okay, a truly great song is a song that makes its own aesthetic intentions clear and then lives up to them and exceeds them in an interesting way. Alright?

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Interesting, Intention

  Source: pitchfork.com

• If you start out with a song sounding like Britney Spears, and you end up with a song sounding like Pauline Oliveros, you'd better have pretty good liner notes explaining what on earth you mean.

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Mean, Earth

  Source: pitchfork.com

• That seems like one of the differences in expectations of "serious" and "popular" music that you can actually depend on the liner notes to explain yourself? Yeah. Whereas in popular music you depend on photo shoots. A hardcore band who looked like Duran Duran would have to depend upon those liner notes.

  Stephin Merritt

  Expectations, Serious, Hardcore

  Source: pitchfork.com

• Popular music of the last 50 years has failed to keep in step with advances in musical theater, namely Stephen Sondheim. But the two have grown apart so that popular music is based more than ever on a rhythmic grid that is irrelevant in musical theater. In popular music, words matter less and less. Especially now that it's so international, the fewer words the better. While theater music becomes more and more confined to a few blocks in midtown.

  Stephin Merritt

  Block, Musical, Music Is

  Source: pitchfork.com

• My mother was into folk-rock when I was little, so I think of folk-rock as the norm from which everything else deviates. Of course, that's completely preposterous, but that's how I grew up. What is the norm by which to judge wordiness? I think I'm less wordy than Madonna.

  Stephin Merritt

  Mother, Thinking, Judging

  Source: pitchfork.com

• There's already a great deal to do writing the songs. And if I were completely in control of it, nobody would be able to say "this song doesn't work."

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Writing

  Source: pitchfork.com

• If the songs were in lumps, then you would expect to understand what was going on in the plot. Which is not a realistic goal. And also the instrumentation is different for every show, so it's more varied sonically. And people are free to make up their own plots, of course. There are pretty dense and complicated plots, and they're simple songs.

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Simple, People

  Source: pitchfork.com

• I actually prefer to hear small groups of instruments. Orchestras seem to lack a texture for me, or variety of texture. There's only about ten things you can do with one note in a string section. But a lone violin is continuously changing textures.

  Stephin Merritt

  Lone, Variety

  Source: pitchfork.com

• Well, things hold up even if they sound dated. It can be very difficult to listen to 80s pop songs with really, really gigantic smashed drum sounds. You just want to turn that gated reverb down on the snare. It sounds wrong now. It sounds amateurish. And ugly. But at the time it sounded state-of-the-art. So yeah, I think it's important not to sound state-of-the-art in a way that anybody else is going to sound. Or you'll quickly sound like yesterday's state-of-the-art.

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Thinking, Important

  Source: pitchfork.com

• There are only so many instruments you can layer on top of each other that aren't perfectly electronically programmed. "Long Vermont Roads" just cannot be performed live, because it's just too cluttered if it's played by humans. Synthesizers stay out of each other's way in a way that hand-played instruments never can.

  Stephin Merritt

  Long

  Source: pitchfork.com

• Well, hardcore is so much about the body, in that you have to play as fast as possible. I'm not sure it can be ironized. You can't play faster, though I suppose that with the help of electronics you could play faster. Yeah, if you sped it up, that could ironize it.

  Stephin Merritt

  Helping, Hardcore, Not Sure

  Source: pitchfork.com

• I think there is such a valid concept as "serious music," meaning that if you don't take it seriously, you don't get it all.

  Stephin Merritt

  Thinking, Serious

  Source: pitchfork.com

• There's a whole kind of melancholy that you can only attain with reverb. That's an example of a technology introducing a whole new meaning.

  Stephin Merritt

  Technology, Kind, Melancholy

  Source: pitchfork.com

• The adventure is when people don't know what they're doing at all. Like, I think that the first pop band to use synthesizers as their main instrument and take it seriously was probably Silver Apples. And they sure didn't know what they were doing, and they sure don't sound like anything else.

  Stephin Merritt

  Adventure, Thinking, People

  Source: pitchfork.com

• Serious music isn't listened to in a casual setting. You don't want to listen to that in headphones on the subway.

  Stephin Merritt

  Serious, Music Is

  Source: pitchfork.com

• My mother says I have boring percussion.

  Stephin Merritt

  Mother, Boring, Percussion

  Source: pitchfork.com

• I can imagine lyrics becoming better written by smart machines rather than stupid musicians. Songwriters generally have nothing to say. They may as well be replaced by machines.

  Stephin Merritt

  Smart, Stupid, Musician

  Source: pitchfork.com

• Well, there are certainly original things to say. But I'm not sure that a pop song is the appropriate format to say them in.

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Not Sure, Pop Song

  Source: pitchfork.com

• Yeah, except that when I write pop songs I have pretty strict constraints that I impose on myself. 69 Love Songs is a constraint. That the titles have to begin with "I'"s is a relatively strict constraint. Charm of the Highway Strip is all travel songs. And I am free to change the plot slightly to accommodate something that happens to rhyme conveniently.

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Writing, Rhyme

  Source: pitchfork.com

• At first I was laboring under the impression that Chinese lyrics didn't rhyme. That turned out to be untrue - they don't rhyme in translation.

  Stephin Merritt

  Chinese, Rhyme, Impression

  Source: pitchfork.com

• When you're making a singular pop song, you don't really need any subject matter. You just sort of say, "Uh, I love you." And then you try to figure out some rhyme for that, and there never is one.

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Love You, Trying

• I'm not too sure if I have a very smart approach to revealing my life. Luckily, I doubt if many people really care about my life that much.

  Stephin Merritt

  Smart, People, Doubt

• There are so many clichés in the world, especially in music, that it's a never-ending creative font to just bring two of them together and let them interact.

  Stephin Merritt

  Creative, Together, World

  Source: www.avclub.com

• If you want to write a love song, you need to not try to write it for a particular person in a particular situation. It needs to be vague, otherwise you're going to fall into trap after trap of trying to rhyme with somebody's name. Keep it vague.

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Fall, Writing

  Source: www.avclub.com

• Never try to do anything artistic when you're feeling something overwhelming. It's like driving a car: If you're experiencing road rage, pull over.

  Stephin Merritt

  Car, Feelings, Trying

  Source: www.avclub.com