Huh… why am I so curiously non-surprised? Well, I suppose when you’ve already put out 69 songs at one time and called it an album, throwing another 50 of ‘em out there at once feels just sounds like a tasty little EP.
Yep, yours and my favorite chamber-pop trope-fucker-around-wither Stephin Meritt and his merry band of Magnetic Fields have just blown exactly 0.00 people’s minds with the announcement of a new album called 50 Song Memoir, an “autobiographical work featuring one song for each year of Merritt’s life,” the subject matter ranging in subject matter from “bedbugs and Buddhism to [Merritt’s] conception by hippies on a houseboat in St. Thomas.” Don’t get me wrong: 50 songs is still 48.5 more songs than I’ve ever managed to complete, but I mean… this is still child’s play for these cats, right?!
Unlike the breadth of these records this band keeps making, however, details on this release are still somewheat slim… but we do know we can expect the album in 2017 via those adventurous motherfuckers over at Nonesuch. In the meantime (sort of), a “seven-member group of musicians playing 50 instruments” is slated to premiere the album live in over two evenings at the Brooklyn Academy Of Music’s 2016 Next Wave Festival, after which they’ll reprise the herculean effort twice more over on that other, crappier coast of America. Check below for those dates, as well as for MY ABSOLUTE PERSONAL FAV Mag Fields video! (Yeah, it’s kinda artsy, but that’s why I love these guys so much!!! <3 <3 <3)
50 Song Memoir performances:
12.02-03.16 - Brooklyn, NY - Brooklyn Academy Of Music
04.27-28.17 - Los Angeles, CA - Royce Hall, UCLA
05.06-07.17 - Seattle, WA - Moore Theater