"What do you do about the morning sunlight?" Stephin Merritt asks, like a newcomer seeking advice from a local about earthquakes or some other native affliction.
Merritt knew he'd be dealing with this when he moved to L.A. from New York, and he does what he can to resist. His Los Feliz apartment is darkened by heavy curtains. When he parks his Mini Cooper after a short drive, he fits a foil-surfaced reflector inside the windshield. He picks the shadiest block for the walk to a bistro on Vermont.
But it's one of the city's unseasonably warm winter mornings, and a year and a half after relocating, he's still squinting in the face of the inevitable.
"There's so much sunlight here," he says in his deep, droopy voice. Finally, he concedes a point. "It's nice not to have to pay attention to the weather, I guess."
Merritt might be a grudging transplant, and as the owner of a Manhattan apartment he can claim bicoastal status, but he's ours now, and like a museum's acquisition of a coveted artwork, his presence has enhanced L.A.'s creative landscape, even if he stays pretty much out of sight.
He is, after all, one of indie-rock's most acclaimed figures, with a hand in four different bands and a growing presence in the borderlands between pop and theater. "69 Love Songs," a 1999 collection by his group the Magnetic Fields, was a watershed in indie annals, an audaciously ambitious three-CD panorama of pop vernaculars that opened new horizons for singer-songwriters toiling in the underground.
It finished at No. 2 in the Village Voice critics' poll, and the success brought its reclusive auteur out from obscurity. He signed in 2002 with the Warner Bros.-distributed boutique label Nonesuch, where he's in the company of such multifaceted artists as Randy Newman, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson and Brian Wilson.
Though he recently made an unlikely connection with Volvo for a TV commercial, he remains a cult artist with decidedly wary sights on bigger game.
"I feel like I'm approaching the mainstream in significant ways that I haven't done before, and I don't especially care whether they lead me more toward the mainstream or away from it, because I think the mainstream is always changing." Merritt says.
"Who cares anyway? I don't want to follow what I happen to think from moment to moment is the mainstream, and I'd probably be totally deluded about it anyway. I'm happy being halfway between being an art project and a commercial proposition."
