Jenny Miller is a TNG Staff emeritus. You can find her shuffling around in her slippers at jennymiller.com.

The Magnetic Fields are touring their latest album, “Distortion,” and playing at GW’s Lisner Auditorium Sunday night. The great Claudia Gonson, singer, pianist, drummer, and manager of all projects Stephin Merritt, spoke with The New Gay in advance of the DC show. TNG Jenny Miller was tapped because she is a rabid fan. Claudia was very patient with her.

Magnetic Fields play this Sunday at the GW Lisner Auditorium. Prices vary. Show starts at 8.

The New Gay Jenny Miller: Hi Claudia, this is Jenny Miller from The New Gay. Did you just get off the phone with Zack?

Claudia Gonson: Yes, just literally one second ago. I was also just looking at your website, which I accidentally went to the porn version (the .com) of the first time around, so it was rather amusing.

TNG: My grandma did that, too.

CG: [laughs] She’s like, ‘what kind of smut are you working for!?’

TNG: So how’s the tour going? Are the people liking Distortion?

CG: Yeah its going well, the orchestration of these songs on tour are remarkably different in that they are not distorted, so the main thing that is going on on the record doesn’t happen live, we’re almost like a little chamber group live. So we’re using, you know, cellos…

TNG: So they’ve got a completely different sound.

CG: It’s totally different, it sounds like a really quiet little chamber group playing acoustic versions of these songs that are extremely noisy normally, so I think people were surprised and pretty delighted. You know, I think some audiences are used to being able to kind of scream and shout during shows and talk to each other, and take pictures and check out their Facebook pages and all the things that people do in live concerts, and we’re really very quiet and we have solely seated concerts so I think people are a little not used to that. People want to jump around, but then after a few minutes they’re like, oh ok this is cool, we get to listen to the words and really focus and I think it makes them very excited, at the end they’re jumping out of their seats, so it’s been a pretty good tour.

TNG: What do you do when you’re not touring? Or is managing Stephin Merritt’s projects a fulltime job?

CG: Yeah, as any manager will tell you, it’s sort of like, what’s the word, self-made, so you can work one hour a day and your band won’t be that well known, or you can literally work every hour of every day of your life, including your sleeping hours, and you’ll get a lot more attention for your band but you’ll feel like you haven’t done enough. So, my sense of how much work I have to do is huge, but it just depends on how much energy I have to do it all…at any given time there’re a million things to do.

TNG: Have you managed to get a little better balance over the years?

CG: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been doing it so long it’s kind of unbelievable. I started doing this in college so, two decades of working and it’s grown with me. There were times when the band was not working as hard and then in the last 10 years, since 69 Love Songs came out, it’s been really fulltime enterprise.

TNG: Are you still working on your PhD?

CG: No, that was one of the things I started doing in the middle of my managerial career when the band was not as busy. I was getting a PhD in English and I did it for a long time. Actually I worked part-time, was in grad school for years and years and years, but eventually I decided that the work for the band was swamping my life and I couldn’t effectively do the PhD at the same time so I dropped out.

TNG: Are you ok with that?

CG: Um not really, I’d love to have two lives. And be able to be everything and do everything. I’d also really like to be a justice of the Supreme Court and a marine biologist and a wild game veterinarian and a filmmaker and there are three or four other things I’d like to do…actually I think it’d be really interesting to be a doctor, even though I’m completely retarded when it comes to all things scientific … [laughs] I think my problem is that I’m just a complete dilettante and I’d love to do everything.

TNG: There’s just not enough time in a life.

CG: Yeah. I have a fantasy of being a shrink, too, but I feel like that’s such a thing that only rich people do, is go to see shrinks, and I feel like that would be weird to hang around a lot of rich people…telling me how many problems they had…so, I don’t know, I’m caught up in trying to decide..basically I find Freud fascinating [laughs] so I feel like it would be fun to get a psychoanalytic degree but I don’t know how much I’d want to apply it.

That didnt really answer your question…

The point is my whole life I’ve done the Magnetic Fields, so its really hard for me to know what else I could seriously undertake at this point, but I do have all these fantasies.

TNG: You guys did a European tour this summer, right?

CG: We did. We went all over Europe for June and July.

TNG: Were people there at all interested in our upcoming election?

CG: Yeah, I mean, its interesting because you just assume everybody’s gonna be like well, what candidate is there besides Barack Obama? but some people were a little more just down about America generally, so it wasn’t really about Barack being good or bad, I think they were just like, no matter who is in control, it’s gonna be bad because America is bad. So yeah, we definitely got a flavor of the dismay, the anti-American dismay. But, not as much as you’d think, probably because we’re a little bit shielded from talking to people on tour. We were on a breakneck schedule where we had to get up every morning, go straight to the airport, go to the next country, go straight to sound check, g
o straight to the venue, play, go to bed, then get up the next day. So we didn’t have a huge amount of one on one with people, but, I had a sense that maybe people were a little less anti-American then they were in other times I’ve been on tour in Europe, but that just might be because I didn’t talk to that many people.

TNG: Maybe our reputation will improve if Obama wins.

CG: We were actually booed in the ‘90s during the Clinton era, because people were so angry at Clinton for bombing in the Gulf.

Personally I feel like if Barack is not elected the whole world will be depressed.

TNG: I had an argument with a friend because I called Stephin America’s Greatest Songwriter. What do you think?

CG: And they said….who did they think it was?

TNG: ….

CG: Cole Porter…

TNG: Yeah, that’s what she said!

CG: Or Irving Berlin? Irving Berlin of course was not American by birth, he immigrated here….

TNG: The times I’ve seen you guys play, particularly the last time here at the 9:30 Club, Stephin came off like a bit of a curmudgeon, while you provided the friendly stage banter. Is he a grumpy genius, or does he just seem that way? And do you consciously try to lighten things up on stage? Or am I just reading too much into that…

CG: [laughs] No, I think that’s correct, and I think its not on purpose in any way that’s planned. I think Stephin really doesn’t enjoy the rigors and stresses of being on the stage day after day. I don’t think he really sees performing as an important aspect of his working life they way that some artists do. And I think he’s been pretty clear about that in the press. He’s just like, ‘I don’t like touring, it’s just not interesting to me.’ But he really does make a beautiful concert. So I have a sense that he doesn’t really bring that to the degree that it would ruin the show.

I think he pretty much just gets up there and sings away but he doesn’t tell everyone he loves them and stuff like that [laughs]. On the other hand he’s very funny on stage, I don’t know if he was during your show, but he can be really funny.

TNG: You guys are living on opposite coasts now.

CG: We are, it’s a recent change in our lives. We’ve always lived in the same city, pretty much our whole lives, so that’s a big one. But he’s really happy out there, and that makes me happy, so as much as I wish he were here, I think he’s really, really happy in LA.

TNG: Your astrological chart is online. Is that because you’re into astrology, or is that just because you’re famous?

CG: Some fan’s into me, I don’t know, it’s very odd that that happened, I have no idea who that person is. But sometimes I look at it and try to figure out if it’s true. They have slightly incorrect information. They have my birthday, but I don’t think they have my birth time or birthplace right or something, so, I can always satisfy myself by thinking if it’s not true it’s because they didn’t have the right information.

TNG: The gays will probably want to hear about your pets. Do you have any? What about kids?

CG: My pets. I have 2 cats. Stephin has one dog. Stephin’s dog is sort of famous. His name is Irving, after Irving Berlin. My cats are…there’s a big cat and a little cat, and the big cat likes to beat up the little cat. And he’s a bit of a bastard and he loves me and only me, and the little cat is an incredibly sweet gregarious lover of all people who will purr and love you no matter who you are.

TNG: Kids?

CG: Oh, that would be nice. Do you have any ideas for me? Bring me children, I will happily have them.

TNG: This is a question from a caller — If you could form a supergroup of women, who would be in your lineup?

CG: Hello, my little kitty is now sleeping on my stomach and it’s very cute. Um, she must’ve known we were talking about her. Hm….supergroup of women. It’s a complicated answer because it demands famous people, of course there are a lot of fabulous unfamous women that I know. But let’s say in the famous world, Eve Sedgwick, who also happens to be a friend, she’s a queer theorist. Um, my brain is slow today because I’m very jetlagged. Laurie Anderson! Joni Mitchell. And Gracie Allen. That’s my list.

TNG: What’s satisfying about drumming for the band?

CG: I should correct you, I haven’t drummed in the band since 1998. Did you see me on drums at the 9:30?

TNG: [feeling stupid] Um, no. I think piano…

CG: Yeah, it was piano. Stephin has a really acute high-end distortion, or sensitivity I should say. Like, feedback happens in his ears, whenever there are high-end sounds, so drums would kill him, and applause really, really hurts his ears, which is another reason he’s sort of unhappy live, when he plays live. So, I switched from drums after having played drums for the band for a decade, I switched to piano, to quiet down the stage sound. So we now play entirely acoustically.

I have a real piano, I don’t play with a keyboard or anything, I play with a real actual baby grand piano.

TNG: Is that easier or harder than lugging drums around?

CG: It’s much less. Because we rent them at the venues. So I just show up with my little music book and that’s it. I’m incredibly portable. I have the least pain of any band member. And then there’s cello, and we used to have a banjo, but now [John Woo] plays acoustic guitar, and Stephin used to play ukulele but now he plays a Greek instrument called a bazuke.

So we’re kind of like a chamber pop group now with almost no rhythm section except for whatever I can bang out on the piano. And no bass, except for whatever [Sam Davol], the cello player, and I can bang out on our instruments.

TNG: The switch to all-acoustic was pretty much because of Stephin’s ear problem?

CG: All because of the ear pain, yeah, although it kind of worked out. We’ve gotten older, we’re more subdued, and we like being in these sort of quiet theaters, so its kind of taken the right turn for our natures. We’re no longer young and into rock, we’re older and into quieter, kind of stagier music.

TNG: Do you have any side projects of your own?

CG: Kind of no but kind of yes. I’ve just started talking to a friend about trying to get some songs that I’ve written over the years recorded. I’m kind of closed off about that stuff, I don’t tend to publicize my own songwriting because I do it very rarely and I’m very hesitant about it, but I’m trying to get myself out of the closet.

TNG: Just to be doing something creatively on your own?

CG
: Yeah, to feel like I’m, it’s just like anybody, if you want to make jewelry or do some painting or try to write poetry, it’s just a feeling of doing something that’s your own and expresses yourself. I like to do crafts sometimes for the same reason…sit around and play with strings and rubber stamps. And glue.

TNG: Will you make sure to play “Washington, DC” next week?

CG: Will I what? Will I make sure we do? We are!

TNG: I meant the song!

CG: Oh! I was like, of course we’re going to play Washington, DC next week, we’d lose thousands of dollars! No, unfortunately that song is not on the set list. I’ll talk to the band about it but I suspect they’re pretty…if they haven’t rehearsed something they’re pretty weird about doing things spontaneously. I’ll see if there’s any way we can whip it up, but I’m not too sure.

TNG: It would make the people happy.

CG: People would be very excited if that happened, I’m sure.

TNG: I will let you go now. Thanks so much for talking to us today. We’ll see you at the show.

CG: Thank you!

* * *

P.S. In Claudia’s pre-gay high school days, her boyfriend made her an excellent mix tape.

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