THE MAGNETIC FIELDS
BY JAMIE ROBASH
In a masterful career on the brink of spanning nearly two decades, the mopey morbid-sounding maestro behind The Magnetic Fields, Stephen Merritt, has purposely put Oulipian constraints on himself and his three other band members. These constraints have resulted in some of the most ingeniously limited pop-rock albums of our time, including the grandiose three-volume 69 Love Songs, the inward searching and symphonic i, and the Jesus & Mary Chain-styled fuzz-ridden Distortion. On his most ambitious project to date, 50 Song Memoir, Merritt looks back at his first 50 years of life by writing a song for each year using 50 different instruments in total.
