Mike Merz Interview

INTERVIEW WITH MIKE MERZ FROM TheCelebrityCafe.com ARCHIVES

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.