Meryn Cadell

Meryn Cadell is an American-Canadian writer and performance artist. He is an assistant professor of song lyrics and libretto writing in the Creative Writing Program at University of British Columbia.

Cadell is a transsexual man who transitioned in 2003. He released most of his recordings between 1988 and 1997.

Cadell was born in Brooklyn, New York, grew up in Waterloo, Ontario and later moved to Toronto in the mid-1980s. A graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design, Cadell re-released an independent cassette titled Mare-In Ka-Dell in 1988 while active as a performance artist in Toronto's Queen Street West scene. As a performance artist, Cadell was particularly known for performing with a heating duct to add reverb.

Cadell soon signed to Intrepid Records, and recorded with Jim Creeggan of Barenaked Ladies, Bob Wiseman and members of Rheostatics. Those sessions were released in 1991 as the album Angel Food for Thought, whose first single "The Sweater" became a surprise Top 40 hit in Canada in 1992 and was very popular on college radio and alternative stations in the states. "The Sweater" is a spoken word monologue, with a musical backing track—the first 20 seconds of Syd Dale's "Walk & Talk." The monologue revolves around a girl's thoughts about a boy's sweater. The Sweater Song, Weezer's first song, was written as a reply to this song and both were often played back to back on KROQ in Los Angeles at that time.

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