DM) Where did you get your start in music?
MM) When I was little I took piano and clarinet lessons and
sang in church and school choirs and what have you, but I never
really got anywhere till somebody showed me the basics of playing
a drum kit after school one day. From there I taught myself drums
and guitar and played along with Pink Floyd records and the radio;
in high school I played in new wave cover bands and then started
my own band where I wrote songs and sang from behind the drums.
That got kind of dumb after a while, so I figured if I was going
to perform my own stuff I ought to learn guitar well enough to
front a band. To this day, that still hasn't happened, but I
started fronting bands anyway.
Anyway, when I was going to college there wasn't room to pack
all the music equipment I'd amassed by then, so all I took was
my acoustic guitar. In my freshman dorm I met a guy named Justin
Roberts who had the same weird tastes in music I'd developed;
we started a duo called Pimentos for Gus and eventually added
a fiddle player and rhythm section. When we started the idea
was just to mess with a complacent campus, so we'd play medleys
of Willie Nelson, the Sex Pistols and the Love Boat theme, stuff
like that, but eventually we started playing more and more originals,
and much to our chagrin people actually started to like us.
Once we graduated we moved to Minneapolis and put out 3 CDs,
then broke up due to artistic and personal similarities. People
moved away or went to graduate school or what have you. I'd started
doing some solo recording as a side project, so that became my
main focus. The result as the first Mike Merz & the Can o'
Worms CD, Buzzkill Nation.
DM) What musicians have inspired you and do you listen to?
MM) When I was playing the drums and trying to learn guitar,
I was really intimidated by what I perceived as the requirement
of technical proficiency involved. It seemed like you needed
to know all this stuff or you weren't qualified to play at all.
Then I heard the Cramps, which was my first experience of thinking
"Wow, these people can't play to save their lives but they're
so passionate about it that it doesn't matter, and they write
these great songs." That was a milestone for me because
I realized that songwriting was more about doing something well
than about doing something complex necessarily. So that was a
huge step forward for me.
Punk rock and its offshoots were a huge influence on me: I think
punk rock was to pop music what the Reformation was to Christianity,
in terms of functioning as both a radical and reactionary movement.
What I love about punk is that it cleared the slate, took us
back to square one and than invited people to dabble with it
to see what happened. A lot of bands, like the Smiths and the
Meat Puppets and the Violent Femmes and even Husker Du and the
Replacements-- not to mention the Cramps-- injected strains of
more traditional, melodic sorts of music into punk and the results
were great. That sort of thing was a huge inspiration for me,
that kind of neo-country or neo-folk that acknowledged we're
not in Kansas anymore, that our culture's way too far gone for
us to "genuinely" make any kind of music, but that
what we have to do is sift through our media-blitzed psyches
and cobble something together and, damn it, just write good songs
again.
I've gotten a lot of inspiration from folks in the 80s to early
90s who were out there doing music which was blatantly, obviously
un- or even anti-commercial to the point where you just had to
love them for the guts it took to do something like that-- people
like Eugene Chadbourne and the Sun City Girls and all these random
Shimmy Disc acts like the Tinklers and Rebby Sharp. That's what
I wonder in this post-Nirvana, even post-indie rock world: where
are the Eugene Chadbournes and Sun City Girls of today, and how
will we ever find them now that major labels have squeezed every
last bit of interest out of what they call "alternative?"
Nowadays I look to the sort of nouveau, post-punk or even post-rock
singer-songwriter for inspiration-- Vic Chesnutt, Will Oldham,
Lisa Germano, Chris Knox, even David Byrne's more recent stuff.
It's really inspiring that people like this can have careers
now-- otherwise I'd probably just give up.
DM) What are the differences between your albums?
MM) My first record, Buzzkill Nation, was a massive project
that didn't start out as a band thing really but as a giant experimental
bunch of sessions where I indulged every single "what if"
I'd stored up over a few years-- you know, "What if there
was a sitar playing over electronic drums with fax machine samples
in the background?" and what have you. So there's this giddy
sense of displacement the whole time. And although there's a
great deal of humor going on, a lot of it's quite sardonic, and
it's an album where I'd decided to write some pretty painfully
honest songs that came right from me rather than being filtered
through a band presentation-- so although a lot of the lyrics
sound be kind of obscure, there's a kind of passion and emotional
honesty that comes through whether I'm being literal or not.
Whereas my second record, Merzworld, is diametrically opposed
in a lot of ways. First of all, Buzzkill Nation took me almost
two years to make, and I wanted to challenge myself to make my
next release quickly, to preserve more of a fresh vibe. So I
forced myself to make the entire record (although only a 5-song
EP) in about a month, which for me is the blink of an eye production-wise.
Also, I wanted to mess with the honesty quotient a little bit.
I get really tired of the rampant earnestness inherent in the
singer-songwriter genre; 99 per cent of it I just don't buy,
and the whole thing to me often seems to be an exercise in narcissism,
which it inherently must be to some degree. So it's this weird
situation where you're making yourself vulnerable to people and
humbling yourself to them, but at the same time you wouldn't
be doing it if it weren't all a massive ego trip. So I wanted
to subvert all that and send it up a little bit, which is where
all the
Orwellian imagery, soul-searching/self-loathing, and "revelation"
on the record come from. I wanted to point out that when a singer-songwriter
puts the moves on us, so to speak, we should be very, very suspicious.
DM) What do you mean?
MM) I think of it in terms of motives-- why on earth would
someone want to present detailed dissertations on their personal
lives to thousands, maybe even millions of strangers? Therapy?
OK, but why the millions of people part when it's such a personal
thing? Why not just go to a therapist and resolve your "issues"
and be more content with yourself, if that's the whole point?
Obviously there's got to be some serious self-centeredness involved
here, and as a culture we at least pay lip service to not liking
self-centered people, so why do we like singer-songwriters?
I suppose we like them because we like feeling an intimacy
with our entertainers. But we need to keep in mind that entertainers
prey on this need, which is likely, brought about by the fact
that we often can't relate to people we actually do know and
see every day. We superimpose way too much on entertainers and
singer-songwriters in particular, because we expect them to be
"honest" and find "truth" to "share"
with us. But we should remember that in the meantime entertainers
are essentially simulating this experience in order to procure
a quick buck.
Before this gets *too* cynical, let me lay out what I feel
like we *should* expect from singer-songwriters, or rather from
artists in general: we should expect to be made to feel something,
maybe (but not necessarily) even think about something in a different
way, to see the world illuminated slightly differently than it
was before. No problem there. But I have to laugh about this
"intimacy" people expect from performers, like there's
some kind of personal connection there. Get over it. Just enjoy
it for what it is: a show.
DM) If not to reveal an intimate ion of yourself, what's your
motivation for performing?
MM) I like to write songs, and I like to record them and play
them for people. And it's not that I want to stifle any sort
of revelation, but my game is more to craft a well-made piece
than it is to use my platform for confession or to sway someone
toward my political views or what have you-- I have plenty of
other venues in life for those things. If I wind up revealing
something about myself, that's fine, but as long as I reveal
*something* it doesn't matter if it came from within me or if
I'm just putting elements together skillfully. I think it's important
for us to remember that artists and entertainers manipulate us--
that's how they work effectively, is by pulling our heartstrings
to make us feel a certain way. If it's done right, this manipulation
can cheer us up or immerse us in cathartic sorrow or whatever
the artist's intent might be.
DM) What was the most intense reaction you've had a fan have
to one of your songs?
MM) Definitely tears. I've heard tell that both "Moon
Tune" (which I did with Pimentos for Gus, my old band) and
"Like Riding a Bike" (a new song that I'm currently
working on for my next album) have moved people to tears, which
is actually quite nice. "Moon Tune" isn't really a
sad song but rather a poignant one; it's about being far away
from the person you love and how to deal with missing them, but
I guess it's pretty effective in dealing with that. "Like
Riding A Bike," on the other hand, is about "going
around and around" with someone, being in a relationship
that consists of unhealthy cycles and how easy it is to fall
into that pattern rather than finding the courage to break it
off and be lonely but maybe healthier. People seem to relate
to that one too.
DM) You seem to have a real passion for this. Have you ever
thought of giving up?
MM) Absolutely. By the time my last band, Pimentos for Gus,
had broken up, I was so sick of the music business and being
a musician that I was very, very close to hanging it up and becoming
a painter or putting my college degree to use or something. I
was sick of working crappy service jobs where I took orders from
morons and struggling endlessly for such minimal rewards. But
once I tested the waters as a solo musician, I found that if
I really tried I could reorient my life in a way where I could
bring all the spheres of my life into more harmony. I've reached
a relatively tolerable point job-wise now, and although I'm still
unsigned for the time being, I'm exploiting that freedom to do
absolutely anything I want artistically, to really challenge
myself and my audience. I don't agree with the adage that you
can't ever doubt yourself as an artist-- I think doubting oneself
is an step toward growth-- but there comes a point where you
just have to move forward and not fret so much about what will
happen. If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I want to be remembered
for creating rather than for sitting around doing bong hits or
something.
DM) If you got hit by a bus tomorrow, what would you like
your gravestone to say?
MM) "I WAS PUSHED!!!"
DM) What is the most common question you've been asked in
interviews?
MM) "What do you write first-- words or the melody?"
Which is funny, because it presupposes that songs consist of
either words accompanied by music or the other way around. Neither
of which is true, because a song (a good song, anyway) is what
happens when those two elements merge to create something more
than the sum of its parts-- a gestalt, as it were.
