The Magnetic Fields have announced a fifteen-concert European tour this November. The shows, featuring songs from throughout the band's career, start at Sala Apolo in Barcelona on November 4, followed by dates throughout Spain, France, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Türkiye, Greece, and Austria, culminating at the Blue Bird Festival in Vienna on November 24. Tickets go on sale this Friday. They will tour the US with songs from 69 Love Songs next year in celebration of the album's 25th anniversary. Details and tickets below; for all the latest, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.

The Magnetic Fields' 2004 Nonesuch debut album, i, released on vinyl for the first time for Record Store Day 2023 this spring, is now available in the Nonesuch Store. This limited-edition LP is on 140-gram, gold-colored vinyl. "Stephin Merritt is an incomparable lyricist capable of balancing arch wit with painfully acute observation," the Guardian said upon the album's release. "The most exciting dissector of modern love around."

The band's latest album, Quickies—released last year to critical acclaim—is twenty-eight short songs by Stephin Merritt, ranging in length from thirteen seconds to two minutes and thirty-five seconds, performed by Merritt and band members Sam Davol, Claudia Gonson, Shirley Simms, and John Woo, along with longtime friends and collaborators Chris Ewen, Daniel Handler, and Pinky Weitzman. Mxdwn says: “It’s like Merritt has made a storybook here, a collection of character sketches, or maybe even poignant profanity, such that Quickies is undeniably vivid,” while the New Yorker praises Merritt as “a mordant wit whose work connects upon contact, and whose obvious sophistication never curtails his naughty streak.”

To date, Stephin Merritt has written and recorded twelve Magnetic Fields albums, including 69 Love Songs and the 2017 critically acclaimed Nonesuch box set, 50 Song Memoir, which chronicled the first fifty years of the songwriter’s life with one song per year. New York magazine called the box set “a celebration of Merritt’s sky-high range as a writer and a player, through the exploration of the circumstances that helped cultivate it … a delightful flip through the untold back pages of one of rock’s most singular voices, and, all in all, the best damned Magnetic Fields album in the last ten years.” Merritt has also composed original music and lyrics for several music theater pieces, including an off-Broadway stage musical of Neil Gaiman’s novel Coraline, for which he received an Obie Award. In 2014, Merritt composed songs and background music for the first musical episode of public radio’s This American Life. Stephin Merritt also releases albums under the band names the 6ths, the Gothic Archies, and Future Bible Heroes.

THE MAGNETIC FIELDS ON TOUR

*69 Love Songs 25th Anniversary