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Stephin Merritt
A legendary curmudgeon with a professed dislike of most popular music and a distaste for playing live, Stephin Merritt is also a consummate musical craftsman. An aesthetic throwback to the Tin Pan Alley days of songwriters such as Irving Berlin, Merritt rejects the common modern idea of singer-songwriters whose work reflects their personal feelings; his often-sardonic songs are often meta-textual ideas about the act of pop songwriting. However, in a variety of distinct projects -- most notably The Magnetic Fields, whose 1999 three-disc set 69 Love Songs was immediately hailed as a modern pop classic -- Merritt has also written some of the most timeless and appealing songs of his era.
