Stephin Merritt
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Stephin Merritt (born 1966) is a New York singer-songwriter. He created and played principal rôles in following bands:
He briefly used the name The Baudelaire Memorial Orchestra as an attribution for a song written for Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, entitled "Scream and Run Away". Further music was recorded for the audiobook versions of the series and is attributed to The Gothic Archies.
Under his own name, he recorded and released the soundtrack to the film Eban and Charley.
The soundtrack to the late Nickelodeon show Pete and Pete featured many Stephin Merrit-written songs.
He and director Chen Shi-Zheng have collaborated on three pieces of musical theater.
Personal
Merritt, like his musical collaborator Claudia Gonson, is openly gay. His lyrics are known for bending and blurring the gender line; examples include the song "When My Boy Walks Down The Street", sung by a male vocalist, which contains the lyric "and he's going to be my wife". He is fascinated with the undead, often making veiled or explicit references to vampires. Other frequent motifs in his lyrics include trains and railroads, the moon, dancing, eyes, and, of course, love.
Merritt has a Chihuahua named Irving, after Irving Berlin. He is Jewish by ethnicity (but non-observant), and was raised Buddhist by his counter-culture mother. He is a smoker, and is known to light a cigarette while performing on stage. He has worked as a copy editor for Spin Magazine and Time Out New York.
External links
- Stephin Merritt Biography (mixed English and German) (http://www.kutilek.de/musik/sm/biografie.en)
- The Village Voice - "As Hundreds Cheer" (http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9948/tannenbaum.php)
- The Distant Plastic Treehouse - "a hangout for Stephin Merritt fans" (http://www.rustyspell.com/merritt/)
- The House of Tomorrow - The web site of Stephin Merritt (http://www.houseoftomorrow.com/)
- Stephin Songs - The music and lyrics of Stephin Merritt (http://stephinsongs.wiw.org/)