It’d be hard to get your head around Magnetic Fields' latest release, if the band didn’t already have a reputation for artfully ambitious projects. The band’s new album, due out March 3, is 50 tracks long and features frontman Stephin Merritt playing more than 100 instruments. The five-disc album is called, appropriately enough, 50 Song Memoir.
Merritt, an inimitable lyricist perhaps best known for writing 69 Love Songs, says he started recording the largely autobiographical work on his 50th birthday last year, with a single song about each year of his life.
The tracks are “a mix of autobiography (bedbugs, Buddhism, buggery) and documentary (hippies, Hollywood, hyperacusis),” Merritt says in the album’s liner notes. “I am the least autobiographical person you are likely to meet. I will probably not write any more true songs after this than I did before, but it’s been interesting working on it.”
Five of the songs - one from each decade of Merritt’s life - are available to hear now with the lyric videos below.
The Magnetic Fields, 50 Song Memoir tracklist:
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