SFBG: I listened to it on a CD, but all I had with me was a laptop, and I wanted to throw it in as soon as possible.

SM: It wasn’t as bad as it could get. It could be an MP3 on laptop speakers. Were you able to hear the lyrics?

SFBG: Yeah, I had more trouble hearing the lyrics through the small speakers, it really just seemed like a lot of feedback and distortion.

SM: Can you hold on one second, the tea kettle is going off in the other room.

[One minute later]

SM: Sorry about that.

SFBG: No problem. So, why did you decide to incorporate the feedback and distortion into the album, and was that a preconceived idea from the start?

SM: I had written the whole letter, including the order of songs, with a different idea in mind. I had lunch with (Nonesuch Records President) Bob Hurwitz… [Indecipherable]

[Irving, Merritt's Chihuahua named after Irving Berlin, begins to bark.]

SM (in background): Go bark in the other room!

SM: Oh no! The maids are here! This is gonna take a minute. Could you call me back?

SFBG: Sure, how much time do you need?

SM: Well, you know, then the dog won’t be barking. Can you call me back in three minutes?

[Three minutes later]

SM: The dog doesn’t like the maids.

SFBG: So, you were talking about when you decided to incorporate the feedback into the album.

SM: Right, I was having lunch with Bob Hurwitz and he suggested that we make the next Magnetics Fields record quickly and I thought that by emulating Psychocandy I would be able to make the next record quickly because as long as everything was sort of in the range of almost feeding back, it would be really easy to mix. We could record and mix quickly and get the record out.

Well, it was really easy to record and we recorded the whole thing in a month, but then it took a year and a half to mix and master. A year into it, it occurred to me to have Shirley [Simms] sing half the songs, so we had to revisit all of the mixes for the songs. So we had to mix half the record over again. That’s the last time we do that.

SFBG: You’ve said before that you tend to set constraints for albums with the titles, like 69 Love Songs, I, Showtunes. With the new album, it seems that the distortion was sort of an afterthought as the songs were already written, so would you consider that a similar constraint as in the past?

SM: No, the constraint is only in the production style.

SFBG: Are there any other themes to the album beyond the production style?

SM: A Swedish journalist told me that I had inadvertently made a concept album about loneliness. But I don’t agree.

SFBG: When you perform one of the new songs, you will not perform it as it is on the album. How will the live performance compare?

[More barking from Irving]

SM: Sorry. Well, yeah, we always ignore the sound of the album when we play live. We ignore the changes between albums. The only difference between this one (and previous performances) is that Shirley will be singing some songs as well as Claudia [Gonson] and I will be playing a bouzouki instead of a ukulele for a little extra oomph.

SFBG: Will Daniel Handler be performing accordion with you?

SM: Daniel will be there for San Francisco and LA.

SFBG: As we talked about before, the feedback can get really intense on the album. When you recorded it, how much of the feedback and distortion was added digitally after the fact?

SM: You can’t add feedback, unfortunately. The distortion was entirely spot. Adding distortion would also be really cheesy and digital sounding. I think you’d be able to tell. There’s still a lot of editing, but not of that kind.

SFBG: Your other recent efforts seemed to emphasize lyrics in the mixing. You were asking earlier whether I could even hear the lyrics when listening to it on a laptop, but even with headphones, some of the songs are so heavily distorted and filled with feedback that some of the lyrics are incomprehensible, for instance "Till the Bitter End." I really had to sit down with the lyrics and follow every word for some parts of that song. Why did you decided to mix the vocals lower than you had previously done?

SM: It’s not so much that the vocals are mixed lower, it’s that the instruments are mixed higher. [Laughs] The instruments are more voice-like. The fun of distorted guitar has always been that it sounds more like a cello or a violin more than it sounds like an acoustic guitar. It sounds more like a human voice - or in the case of Adrian Belew, I guess it sounds more like animal voices. In any case, it sounds voice-like which makes it compete with the voice in the mix. In this case we had distorted guitar and cello and accordion and organ and piano.

SFBG: As far as the feedback goes, I read that you fed the piano through the amp to make feedback…

SM: The piano is actually touching the amp, which is touching the wall. We put the amplifier between the piano and the wall.

SFBG: Especially in songs like "Too Drunk to Dream," I feel like I could hear the feedback on the high notes but not so much on the low notes.

SM: That’s because there are no low notes. The only use of piano on the entire album is the top two octaves of the piano. Anything other than that that sounded keyboard-y is probably the electric organ.

SFBG: So there was no feedback for the electric organ?

SM: Well, you can’t make the electric organ feedback, but you can make the amp feedback, which is what we did. Which is a point that maybe only I care about. It’s still frequently dependent feedback, but not in the same way (as the other instruments).

SFBG: Is Distortion merely label, or does that have any kind of double-meaning?

SM: Feel free to interpret it as having a double meaning. Far be it from me to deny extra levels of meaning.

SFBG: There’s a Swedish pop band called Suburban Kids with Biblical Names and they carry an uncanny resemblance to the Magnetic Fields. Have you heard them?

SM: People ask me this question with rotating band names constantly, and no two people seem to agree on what exactly sounds like the Magnetic Fields, so I’ll take that with a grain of salt. I think it’s very unlikely that a band with a name as awful as Suburban Kids with Biblical Names would have the imagination to sound exactly like the Magnetic Fields, whatever that would consist of.

SFBG: Do you prescribe to the idea that imitation is a form of flattery, or does it bother you when bands mimic your sound?

SM: I’m not aware of anyone actually succeeding in mimicking my sound, whatever that is. So, until it actually comes up, I won’t be able to comment.

SFBG: Well, one thing that this band does share in common with you is they’ve use their music in advertising, Shell Oil specifically. They’re in Sweden, and their ad plays in America. Their song even plays while people are pumping gas at the station. I doubt they have to hear it that much. For your Volvo commercial, the only version I’ve seen is online and it seems to be Australian. Does that run in America, too?

SM: That’s what they tell me. I don’t watch TV, but apparently the Volvo commercial ran quite a lot.

SFBG: Did you ever aspire to work in advertising or is this something that you did out of financial necessity?

SM: I have no problem with working in advertising, and it pays really well. Some of my favorite artists have done a lot of work in advertising. The bubblegum scene was half advertising, half Top 40, although Kasenetz and Katz themselves were not involved in ad work as far as I know. Joey Levine and Ron Dante, those people were very much involved ads, while making brilliant bubblegum records as sort of their night job.

SFBG: I read that you’re working on a movie musical with Daniel Handler. Is that still in the works?

SM: We haven’t worked on it in a while, but yeah.

SFBG: Can you tell me anything else about that project?

SM: Sure, it’s called The Songs from Venus. The screenplay is maybe two-thirds finished and it’s sung through. It concerns an invasion from Venus in the form of a record that comes down from the sky and makes everyone fall in love - thereby, invading the world. But, there’s an odd number of people in the world.

SFBG: Are you both sharing the duties for songwriting and scriptwriting or are you focusing on the songs?

SM: It’s so foggily divided that we’re sharing credit for both.

SFBG: You have a constant flow of projects, it seems. Do you think the Magnetic Fields will be a lifelong project for you, or if any current band members left would you revert to a different name?

SM: We’ve shuffled around our membership enough so that I don’t feel that the Magnetic Fields needs to correspond to particular people other than me. I can imagine that if I dropped dead, the rest of the Magnetic Fields would keep going. I don’t know where they’d get their songwriting material. I have a pretty big trunk so they could keep going for a decade or two without missing me.

SFBG: Do you have any new plans with other projects?

SM: I’m currently writing a new Magnetic Fields album - I’m trying to do two in a row. But we’re also talking about a Future Bible Heroes album.

SFBG: Right now you’re making short stops in bigger cities for this album’s tour, but do you feel like you’d ever go on another full tour?

SM: Not with the current set-up and my hearing trouble. But I did just get isolation headphones. I’m going to investigate the possibility of my wearing isolation headphones on stage. And if that were to work, then we could play anywhere anytime.

SFBG: So that’s the biggest obstacle.

SM: Quite a big one it is. For a musician, I’m not going to screw up my hearing for one show in Boise, beautiful as Boise may be.

SFBG: Do you currently wearing ear protection while performing?

SM: For this little tour, yes I will be wearing an earplug while Claudia and Shirley are singing. I can’t wear one while I am singing because it would just make me louder.

SFBG: How could isolation headphones help you?

SM: They would turn down the rest of the world without turning up my vocals. Very different from an earplug, which turns up my vocals.