"I don't write autobiographical songs," composer Stephin Merritt told a BBC News reporter in December 2016 as he rehearsed for his two-night Brooklyn Academy of Music concert presentation of the Magnetic Fields's 50 Song Memoir. "I'm new to this, really."

Over the course of twenty-five years and ten full-length albums as front man for the Magnetic Fields—including the three prior Nonesuch discs, i, Distortion, and Realism—Merritt has created a body of work indelibly his own, even if the songs aren't explicitly about him. Well, some have been, at least tangentially. For a 2015 Rolling Stone article, he offered a list of fifteen tracks that could be construed as autobiographical, including the plaintive "I Wish I Had an Evil Twin" from i and the rollickingly morose "Too Drunk to Dream" from Distortion. But Merritt's song craft is sublime whatever its source of inspiration, pairing bright chamber pop melodies with wryly funny, sneakily poignant lyrics. Without naming names, they addressed feckless partners and relationships gone awry, where romantic longing and incipient heartbreak are chronic conditions. On the five-LP/five-CD 50 Song Memoir, however, the fifty-two-year-old Merritt does indeed examine his own life, year by year, up to the age of fifty. Those familiar themes reemerge on these tracks too, along with much, much more.

50 Song Memoir tells, in chronological order, the picaresque story of Merritt's life almost to date, its better-than-fiction autobiographical details augmented by entertaining footnotes ("Foxx and I," a tribute to John Foxx, the original lead singer for British new wave band Ultravox), historical digressions ("Judy Garland," an imagining of the 1969 Stonewall riot that contains a slight but charming fib about Allen Ginsberg), sports commentary ("Surfing"), instructional sidebars ("How to Play the Synthesizer"), literary criticism ("Ethan Frome"), and personal medical history ("Weird Diseases"). On the opening track, "Wonder Where I'm From," Merritt speculates that he was conceived by "barefoot beatniks" on a houseboat in St. Thomas, the Virgin Islands, and reports, on better authority, that he was born in Yonkers, NY. His musician father was not a part of his life, and his bohemian mother's wanderlust took them to communes, ashrams, and apartments from Hawaii ("It Could Have Been Paradise") to Vermont ("The Blizzard of '78"). He learned his first bitter lesson about the music business when a trumpet-playing paramour of his mom stole lyrics the eight-year-old Merritt had written and then passed them off as his own.

Merritt explores his twentysomething living arrangements ("Me and Fred and Dave and Ted"), his youthful penury ("Haven't Got a Penny"), his preferred working environment ("Be True to Your Bar"), his failed flirtation with Hollywood ("Ghosts of the Marathon Dancers"), and his romantic travails ("Stupid Tears," among several other laments). Though this set is laced with sardonic humor, it can be unabashedly moving, especially on "Have You Seen It in the Snow?," a love letter to New York City written in the aftermath of 9/11 as a holiday number for the duo Kiki and Herb's annual year-end extravaganza. 50 Song Memoir concludes with a dirty joke that also serves as a bit of a happy ending (for now). With "Somebody's Fetish," Merritt assures us that there is indeed someone out there for everyone—as a fun sexual partner, if not a forever soul mate.

Merritt turned fifty on February 9, 2015. It was a few months earlier—on October 22, 2014, to be precise—when he met with Nonesuch's then-President (and 50 Song Memoir executive producer) Bob Hurwitz for lunch at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station to discuss future projects for the label: "It definitely had to do with my turning fifty and doing a record in relation to turning fifty. During the course of the conversation, the idea evolved into me doing a record of fifty songs about me, one per year. Having done 69 Love Songs, I was familiar with the difficulties of asking the record label if you could make a multi-record set. But, in this case, they were asking me. So I didn't have any pressure and, in fact, it was Bob's idea to make it a five-disc set."

69 Love Songs, released in 1999, was an indie-rock landmark and a breakthrough for the Magnetic Fields and Merritt. (A prolific musician, he's also released albums as part of the 6ths, the Future Bible Heroes and, with Lemony Snicket author Daniel Handler, the Gothic Archies.) The three-disc box contains exactly what the title claims, a themed collection that brilliantly illustrates the breadth of Merritt's songwriting and arranging skills and his rapport with the small group of musical collaborators who work with him to this day: pianist-drummer-singer Claudia Gonson, cellist Sam Davol, guitarist John Woo, keyboardist Christopher Ewen, vocalist Shirley Simms, and accordionist Handler (on this album, a few new musicians were brought in as well, some for the recording, some for the live concert, and some appear on both). Signing with Nonesuch, Merritt released three albums under the Magnetic Fields name. He employed simple concepts to guide their creation, starting with a ban on synthesizers for what loosely became a trilogy: on i, all the songs began with the letter "I"; Distortion emulated the feedback-drenched noise-pop of the Jesus and Mary Chain; Realism, with its acoustic palette and absence of drums, was, conversely, a "folk" album.

For 50 Song Memoir, Merritt employs synthesizers and drum machines and a house full of instruments he'd collected over the years, numbering more than 100. For its lyrical content, he relied on timelines supplied by his mother Alix Merritt, who also created the cover art, and by Gonson, whom he met when they were in high school. He repurposed bits of early, unfinished songs into the repertoire and even incorporated an '80s-era recording he'd uncovered into "At the Pyramid."

"Early on I talked to my mother and Claudia about the fact that I didn't remember anything," Merritt explains, "and they each made me a timeline. So, for the first half, I depended on my mother's timeline, for the second on Claudia's. I was able to say, 'It's 1973, where did I live then? Oh yeah, Hawaii. I'll write a song about that.' Or, 'What was I doing in '74? We knew Karmu the faith healer!' So I wrote a song about how unbelievably gullible everyone is."

Fellow composer, multi-instrumentalist, and studio whiz Thomas Bartlett joined Merritt and an expanded line-up of musicians on the project, co-producing with Merritt and Charles Newman, another Magnetic Fields veteran. Hurwitz had made an introduction to Bartlett and, Merritt recalls, "I agreed to meet him at his studio in Manhattan, and we hit it off. Thomas Bartlett works very quickly, which was wonderful for our process. I would say, 'Here's an iPhone demo of a song I've been working on,' and a few hours later he would have an MP3 of a backing track. I used to work that quickly but I don't anymore. Everything takes me longer now. He's working with MIDI and I haven't used MIDI in decades. Maybe I should start again."

Merritt embarked on the project soon after his Oyster Bar lunch: "I consciously emulated what I had done for 69 Love Songs, which was to write for a few months before recording, and I started recording on my fiftieth birthday, at my fiftieth birthday party. My birthday party took place during a storm and some who came only stayed briefly, and some who were invited couldn't make it. I started recording the party thinking that I would use it on a party scene on the record—but there didn't end up being a party scene, so I forgot to incorporate that. It was the beginning of the recording of the album, and I worked every day, I believe, for the next year and a half."

While Merritt often cut his own parts at home, he also recorded at studios in New York City, Boston, and San Francisco with his far-flung cast of characters, including Handler's son Otto, who does a memorable "meow solo" on "Dionysus." Merritt continues, "I knew this record would be compared by everyone to 69 Love Songs, even by me and Bob. So I wanted to make it even more wide-ranging. I used different recording techniques, different recording media—and, in fact, there are the parts made by Thomas that I don't even know what recording media he used. I went for the widest possible variety. And I have way more instruments than I did when I recorded 69 Love Songs. I tried to use all of them but it quickly became unrealistic. I could take down from the wall a Peruvian instrument I didn't particularly know how to play, figure out how to tune it, learn how to play it well enough to come up with the part—and then put it back. That took hours. So what I decided to do instead, what I would do with every instrument, would be to use each one seven times. There would basically be seven instruments per track, each one used on seven tracks, and hopefully no pair of instruments used on more than one track. Plus there is the one-man-band track I did, 'The Day I Finally….' But everything else is used seven times, no more, though maybe a few things appear only once. To keep track, we had a few different white boards to work with, and Post-its—a lot of information on Post-its."

Each disc on 50 Song Memoir contains ten songs representing a decade in the life of Stephin Merritt. In the live setting, Merritt's memoir is divided into two evenings of twenty-five songs each. The concert version is very much a show, with Merritt center stage inside an oversized dollhouse-like set, surrounded by musical instruments, books, toys, and assorted tchotchkes. According to director José Zayas, "Stephin collects tin dollhouses, and that's the space you find him in. He is inside one of his dollhouses as if transported there by a science experiment gone awry, surrounded by fifty years of ornaments and gadgets. Outside the dollhouse are the six musicians who play fifty assorted instruments and accompany him on the magical mystery tour through his past."

Regarding his musicians, some of which have been on two or three decades of this journey, "I made a rule that I was not going to write about the people who were likely to be on stage. I don't mention anyone I work with professionally, except Claudia in passing on one song. I thought it would be really awkward for the people on stage to be sung about in the third person while they were there. If I hadn't been planning to do the album live, that wouldn't have been a problem. But. I sing a lot about my mother and I did play the songs for her to make sure she wouldn't be completely freaked out."

A 2010 documentary, Strange Powers, shot over a ten-year period, explored Merritt's work with the Magnetic Fields and his creative relationship with Claudia Gonson. That taught Merritt the elusiveness of objectivity: "It looked like a life very different from my real one. But now that I've written my own memoir, I see that there is no possibility of doing a balanced portrait of someone, even if they do it themselves. It just doesn't work like that. I don't know what my FBI file looks like, but it's probably full of things that don't appear on the album."

As for any wisdom Merritt may have acquired after a half century, he says, "Turning fifty involved planning a very elaborate birthday party—and planning for an even more elaborate album. I was basically too busy to turn fifty in a normal way. I did zero soul-searching." But he does offer one insight: "I think the secret of agelessness is to gain one pound every year so you don't wrinkle as much."

—Michael Hill