Gothic Archies

Gothic Archies

AN UNFORTUNATE SOUNDTRACK
With His Gothic Archies, Stephin Merritt Complements Lemony Snicket's Melancholy Mood
Stephin Merritt first met Daniel Handler when Merritt's band the Magnetic Fields began work on their opus box set, 69 Love Songs, to which Handler contributed accordion. Handler, in turn, drafted Merritt to write songs for A Series of Unfortunate Events, a new series of verbose, cheerfully bleak children's books he was writing under the nom de plume Lemony Snicket. It was a match made in purgatory, which here means somewhere between heaven and hell and containing elements of each. Recording as the Gothic Archies (not to be confused with his endeavors as the 6ths and Future Bible Heroes), Merritt wrote comic, cynical songs like "Smile! No One Cares How You Feel" for the audiobook editions of each Lemony Snicket novel, from The Bad Beginning to the 13th and final tome, The End,. Now they've been compiled on The Tragic Treasury: Songs from a Series of Unfortunate Events. Merritt spoke with Barnes & Noble.com's Steve Klinge about the Gothic Archies' bitter, fun "Gothic-bubblegum" songs.

Barnes & Noble.com: Do the songs follow very closely the plots of the Lemony Snicket books?

Stephin Merritt: Some of the songs follow very loosely and some more closely. None of them give away the plot of the book.

B&N.com: I was wondering about "Shipwrecked" from the last book, The End, since that song seems very plot-driven. It's hilarious. No spoiler alerts necessary with that one?

SM: It is very plot-driven but it doesn't give away the plot of the book. When we last heard from the Baudelaires, they were about to be shipwrecked, so it's okay for them to be shipwrecked. The plot of the song doesn't follow the plot of the book; it's similar, but it's another shipwrecked situation.

B&N.com: Were you the kind of kid who would have read Lemony Snicket books?

SM: Yeah. I read everything. I'm the kind of kid who read everything, except maybe sports books.

B&N.com: Do you have a favorite among the books?

SM: I actually like them better and better as they go along. They get kind of more serious, and the things that happen are even worse. The books start off with the Baudelaires' parents dying and get worse from there.

B&N.com: That tragic worldview can be played for hyperbole, but there's a truth to it as well.

SM: The world is actually so horrible it's funny, so it's important to dwell on that.

B&N.com: How do you think it works to present that cynical view in books and songs that are ostensibly for a young audience?

SM: I take Daniel's lead in this, and I feel free to use long words that many adults don't know. I just don't use any obscenities -- or anything that anybody in the Judeo-Christian West might consider an obscenity.

B&N.com: These songs are both bitter and funny at the same time.

SM: Yes. I think "bitter and funny at the same time" is my general mode of existence, and that's why so many of my songs come out that way.

B&N.com: Kids can gravitate toward the bitter and horrible, perhaps more so than adults would like to think.

SM: I think it's Bruno Bettelheim who says that the truth in fairy tales is not that dragons exist but that dragons can be overcome. And you can't show that without showing the dragon.

B&N.com: So maybe your Gothic Archies songs are doing a child development service in some ways.

SM: It's sort of the childhood equivalent of listening to Billie Holiday. You hear somebody with a rather agonized voice, me, singing about terrible situations, in a voice that sounds like maybe they are not going to survive the situation, but they do. And then there's another terrible situation, and there's another afterward.

B&N.com: Beyond the plot constraints to the songs, did you set up any parameters for this project?

SM: No, not really. I was trying to use the variety show format that I used in 69 Love Songs, making the songs maximally different from each other. I made a point to try to use every instrument in the house -- even things I was saving, thinking one day I might use it, I made a point to use on this record. It might be in "Shipwrecked," I had a curtain made of plastic cups that when you shook it, it made quite a racket; it sort of sounded like very, very large chimes. So, I used it once and threw it away…. On "Crows," I used a recording of helicopters that I made with my assistant years before. It's a helicopter solo.

B&N.com: Since you call the Gothic Archies "bubblegum," what is your definition of bubblegum music?

SM: Where the concerns of Gothic rock are to set a mood and never break that mood, the concerns of bubblegum are to immediately present melodic hooks and never let the listener's attention wander, ideally creating the desire to listen to the song again and again, combined with a modernist sense of concision whereby nothing needs to happen exactly the same way twice. Like in the Lesley Gore song "Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows": That song is about a minute and 57 seconds long, but it contains guitar solos and four different melodic sections and doesn't seem particularly short. So much happens in that. I try for that kind of aesthetic, which I associate with bubblegum. That's clashing with the Gothic rock aesthetic. The Ur-Goth song is "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Bauhaus, which is at least six minutes long, depending on which version you're listening to, and is about very creepy guitar sound effects and dub echo sounds and explores the musical equivalent of the dread mood from vampire movies. Dread is an inherently slow-moving mood. But not in the Gothic Archies! [laughs]

October 2006