The Magnetic Fields

In different musical era, Stephin Merritt would have been a Tin Pan Alley songwriter-for-hire, cranking out clever and hummable tunes for Broadway shows and cabarets. A tremendously gifted lyricist with a particular knack for the rueful anti-love song, Merritt also has an appealingly doleful baritone, pitched somewhere between Scott Walker and Leonard Cohen; it's a deceptively fluid and varied instrument which nonetheless limits his band's mainstream potential. In their original incarnation, The Magnetic Fields were an electronic duo consisting of Merritt on synthesizers and schoolfriend Susan Anway on vocals, but following their second album, Merritt took over the majority of the vocals and began incorporating traditional instruments into the group's sound. In keeping with his veneration of pre-rock songwriting craft, Merritt insists that his lyrics and music are in no way autobiographical. Therefore, every Magnetic Fields album since 1994's country pastiche The Charm of the Highway Strip has had a specific musical or lyrical brief, most famously the self-explanatory triple-album set 69 Love Songs. That album's overwhelming critical success moved the Magnetic Fields, if not into stardom, then into a higher rank of cult artist; they're now the sort of band that NPR covers when they want to appear hip.