The Magnetic Fields begins its two-month international tour, performing music from its recent Nonesuch release, Realism, at George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium in Washington, DC, this Thursday. The album opens the latest edition of NPR's All Songs Considered, in which host Bob Boilen plays the album's opening track, "You Must Be Out of Your Mind." Listen now at npr.org.

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The Christian Science Monitor staff selects the album among Six Picks to recommend this week. The Monitor describes Stephin Merrit's writing as "delicately crafted pop songs with wit and deft musicality" to say that this new album "capitalizes on Merritt's trademark wry observations and musical sleight of hands." What's more, it's full of songs whose "chorus you can't get out of your head." Read the review at csmonitor.com.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer gives the album an A-, calling it a "charming album, a fun exercise in faux-folk that also has 'We Are Having a Hootenanny' and 'The Dada Polka' to recommend it." The Milwaukee Journal Sentinal puts Realism in its CD Spotlight, with writer Jon M. Gilbertson finding that the album "constructs an alternate reality in which emotions are actors strolling through a vast play whose stages are the heart and the mind."

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And speaking of "faux-folk," as the Plain Dealer does, though Boilen suggests that audiences generally get what they would expect on Magnetic Fields albums from such truth-in-advertising titles as 69 Love Songs and Distortion, with Realism, says CBC News arts writer Sara Liss, things get a bit more complicated.

Though this may be the band's folk-inspired album, its lyrics are far from the straight-ahead sincere one might expect from the genre, such sincerity being a notion Stephin dispels in the video interview series at nonesuch.com/media. But then, says Liss, "Musically, Merritt mines the conventions of popular music, only to turn them on their heads."

And speaking of "alternate realities," as the Journal Sentinal does, further on in the CBC's interview with Merritt, the singer-songwriter reveals that under different circumstances, he'd be happy to take away the first half of the hyphenate in deference to a certain Canadian label mate of his. "I think in the ideal world," he tells Liss, "I'd stop singing, k.d. lang would stop writing songs and we would work together only—k.d. lang being the best famous singer in the world ever. She sure is fantastic, and I would love to write for her."

You'll find the CBC News article at cbc.ca.

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Realism is available now in the Nonesuch Store. k.d. lang's first-ever career retrospective, Recollection, is out next Tuesday, February 9, and is available for pre-order now in the Nonesuch Store with an exclusive, limited-edition signed photo of k.d.

For Magnetic Fields tour information, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.