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If the Magnetic Fields' mastermind Stephin Merritt almost always writes songs about difficult love, that's because it's a formally appropriate subject for pop songs. In fact, the thing he loves most is pop music itself, as perverse a companion as it can be. He acknowledges its bare-faced deceptions and impossibilities, because he knows that they make pop more affecting, not less. Which means that, as constantly and emphatically as his songs evoke a very specific kind of distance from their audience, I can't distance myself from them. Merritt's records have been my companions for almost 15 years; I know his songs by heart.

All of my strongest associations with his work, even at its most coolly formalist, are emotional: hearing two Merritt songs in 1990, then developing a hopeless crush on somebody who actually had a whole tape of them; watching two dear friends' first dance, at their wedding, to "With Whom to Dance," a song about music becoming a refuge when love fails (that "whom" is so Stephin); joking with someone about how "Strange Powers" was "our song," and then realizing that it had become just that; having someone I'd been flirting with freak out when I bought her Get Lost, because she thought the message I was trying to send her was the album's title rather than its songs (years later, she wrote to me to ask what Magnetic Fields songs she should play at her wedding); playing "Smoke and Mirrors" on repeat after a breakup, hoping that it would bless me with distance and secretly enjoying the way it aestheticized what I was feeling.

Merritt has written some of the most immediate, beautiful and memorable songs I've ever heard; they're also deliberately plastic and static, which makes a lot of sense in terms of theater theory. (I'm going to try to explain. Please bear with me.) The playwright and theoretician Bertolt Brecht was opposed to "Aristotelian" theater — the ideal for drama that Aristotle presented in his "Poetics," in which the audience believes they're watching a representation of reality on stage. Watching an Aristotelian play, you suspend your disbelief, you identify with the characters and you believe their situations are universal. (The musical equivalent to this would be listening to a performance that you understand to be a band expressing the truth about their lives and yours too, feeling emotions so powerfully that they burst into song and probably also playing "real instruments" in real time.)

As far as Brecht was concerned, Aristotelian theater is pernicious, because it doesn't take into account the historical context of what it represents, and therefore creates the impression that the human condition is permanently fixed. His solution to this was what he called the "Verfremdungseffekt," or "distancing effect," in which theater-makers use whatever devices they've got to remind the audience that they're watching a play, not a representation of reality; the idea is that the spectator "no longer accepts the world but masters it."

That brings us back to the Magnetic Fields, the most Verfremdungseffekt-loving band I can think of. It's always a mistake to assume that what you're hearing on Magnetic Fields records is "self-expression" or "realness"; the most recent one was called i, a neon-sign-decorated trap that a lot of reviewers ambled straight into. Merritt is besotted with the entire history of popular music, and its infinite capacity for formal trickery and distancing gimmicks.

So the hallmarks of the Magnetic Fields' discography are conceptual elegance and transparent deceptions. Their recordings are obviously products of the studio, impossible to play the same way live (acoustic instruments are made to sound like electronic gizmos, and vice versa). The Charm of the Highway Strip is ostensibly an album of country songs, but its lyrics keep alluding to vampires. The band's 1996 EP The House of Tomorrow consists of five songs written according to a single formula: a simple chord sequence repeated for each song's entire two-and-a-half-minute length. Merritt works with famously expressive singers (especially for his other band the 6ths, whose fantastic second album, Hyacinths and Thistles, is available on eMusic) — and instructs them to sing as inexpressively as possible.

But Merritt's crowning conceit to date can be found on the Magnetic Fields' magnum opus, 69 Love Songs, which is precisely that: three discs' worth of love songs, written in every pop idiom Merritt's capable of pulling off convincingly or mocking entertainingly: country-and-western, Celtic folk, civic-pride song, blues, Fleetwood Mac. Which of those idioms are really his? The point is that none of them are really anybody's — or rather, they don't belong to performers, but to listeners who understand how they're supposed to be affected by them. To confuse them with realness is to mistake a mask for a face.

The point of Brecht's protest against Aristotle was political, and so is Merritt's protest against — well, name your "authentic" rock star of choice here. Expecting (or demanding) "realness" in pop music is ultimately reactionary: it says that the way that music sounded in the recent past is the normal and correct way for things to be. Merritt's obsession with form and formalism — reaching back before rock to what used to be called "American popular song" and, more recently, beyond that to Chinese opera — means that you have to think about his songs in a broad historical context. And that's a reminder that normalcy (or normativity) in pop changes constantly, and is always about to change again. By extension, it also says the same thing about the matters of the heart that Merritt's lyrics are about. If his songs were meant to be "real," they'd imply that love denied is simply the way of the world--but that's a matter of context, too (and for Merritt, whose song-publishing company is called Gay and Loud, it's a big deal). For a listener who "no longer accepts the world but masters it," any love is possible.