After looking at the big ol' spread on Prince in this Sunday's Sun-Times, I noticed a preview for next weekend's Magnetic Fields shows in Chicago...one of the members of the band is a friend of mine from my previous life as a New Yorker, so it's not only great to see Magnetic Fields getting such a nice article, but it's kind of wild to see my friend's face right across from Prince!

Anyway, here's the story - lots of fun quotes to be had:

http://www.suntimes.com/o...err20.html


Sold-out stand proves strong pull of Magnetic Fields

June 20, 2004

BY DAVE HOEKSTRA Staff Reporter


From the time that she was a young child to her death, songwriter Laura Nyro always heard liberation in the chords and notes from her piano. "I knew there was something special in the sound, some kind of freedom," she told Bruce Pollock in his 2002 book Working Musicians.

Stephin Merritt must feel a similar vibe.

He is vocalist-songwriter-instrumentalist of Magnetic Fields, the Tin Pan Alley-pop band that will play five sold-out shows starting Friday through June 27 at the Old Town School of Folk Music.

"Freedom very much applies at the very beginning of writing a song," Merritt said from his home in New York City. "All there is is an idea. At first, it seems infinitely full of possibilities. After a few lines, it becomes clearer where it's going to go, so in that sense, the possibility vanishes. It is replaced by something I actually prefer, which is, 'Here's a puzzle I need to work out.' If I do it right, I will be rewarded with a great song. If I don't, then I'll just have to throw it away. It's like a crossword puzzle with much more at stake."

A prolific songwriter, Merritt is considering whether to perform five completely different sets during his Old Town engagement. Magnetic Fields is touring to support "i," a record featuring 14 songs that begin with "i."

The band broke through with the three-disc set "69 Love Songs" (1999). Merritt is also a member of the bands the 6ths, Future Bible Heroes and Gothic Archies (a goth/bubble-gum outfit). Besides Merritt, the Magnetic Fields touring lineup consists of Sam Davol on cello, Claudia Gonson, piano and backing vocals, and John Woo on banjo and acoustic guitar.

Back to the throwaway issue. How many songs does Merritt actually toss out?

"I generally don't finish the ones I throw away," he said. "But of the ones I do end up finishing, I throw away two-thirds or more."

Performing with so many side projects keeps Merritt fresh. "I can't imagine being a member of the Rolling Stones and playing the same songs week after week," he said. "Arrgh! Or being a jazz musician and having to play my favorite things a hundred different ways a hundred times a year. I would be so bored, I would quit. After all, who cares about noodling over my favorite things?"

Merritt plays guitar, piano and ukelele, but does not use them to write songs. "I sit around in gay bars with a cocktail in one hand and a pen in the other," he said. "It's a lot easier for me to write while there's other music playing because otherwise I would already have music going on in my head."

The "i" liner notes point out that the record was made with "no synths." The purity of the organic framework enhances Merritt's dramatic vocals.

He disagrees.

One of my true loves is '60-'70s soul music (Otis Clay, Ray Charles, Mavis Staples) where the splendor of the voice is not compromised by layers of synthesizers. "In my experience, people who say they hate synthesizers really mean they hate synthesizers on records by white people," Merritt said. "But if you feel R&B -- whatever that is -- is too synthetic, then I guess you're not making that mistake."

Our conversation suddenly turned around.

"How do you feel about organs?" Merritt asked. "I love the Hammond B-3," I said. "The last difficult interview I did was a couple years ago with B-3 wizard Jimmy Smith."

"A common complaint with synthesizers is that they're not very expressive," he said. "But people don't seem to have that problem with drums or bass guitar, which are also not very expressive. One should have a mix of expressive and non-expressive, especially for vocal music, where you don't want too many things competing with the vocal."

Merritt said that eliminating synthesizers was not a calculated strategy. He was just tired of using synthesizers with his electropop band Future Bible Heroes.

"But I noticed I ended up using a lot of different instrumental timbres that you hear out of a synthesizer," Merritt said. "Like harmonium and marimba. On 'I Thought You Were My Boyfriend,' no one seems to get their head around the fact that there aren't any synthesizers on it because their instruments are behaving as if they were synthesizers."

Magnetic Fields began more than a decade ago. The group's first two CDs "The Wayward Bus" and "Distant Plastic Trees" featured Susan Anway as lead vocalist. When Anway moved to Arizona, Merritt took over as vocalist.

Merritt, who was born in New York and grew up in the Northeast, Tennessee and Hawaii, has had a peripatetic existence. "I lived in 33 houses in my first 23 years," he said. "My mother and I lived in a few communes. I don't know what it is like to grow up in one place. We had very little. But my mother did listen to a lot of folk revival and early rock 'n' roll."

Merritt is heavy into rewriting. The new "Is This What They Used To Call Love" from "i" balances ambition with economy: "Feels like December, but it's May/I've gone as pale as Doris Day/The blue sky's torn asunder/By clouds that warn of thunder." "For that song I did write a lot of extra verses," he said. "I overwrite a great deal."

But conjuring up an album of all "i" songs wasn't overly difficult; the disc includes "I Die," "I Was Born" and "Irma." "It's really not that hard to write songs whose titles begin with the letter 'i.' It's one of the more common initial song letters in the English language," he said. "I write music and lyrics at the same time; otherwise, one of them suffers. I write songs in a wide variety of genres, and they have different needs."

Many of Magnetic Fields' late '60s pop hooks were drawn from his youth. "When I was 20 or so, I had a big collection of the second-half of the '60s psychedelic pop records," he said. "But as I become more interested in lyrics actually meaning something to me, I become less interested in psychedelia. I still like the [psychedelic] production style and I like the adventure. But the lyrics are crap. Uniformly. Well, not uniformly. Almost all crap.

"This morning in a cab, I heard the Beatles' 'Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,' which I would say is easily the best Beatles work -- one of the few great Beatles lyrics. Apparently it was written about a circus poster that was above John Lennon's bed.

"There are no rhymes, but it's graceful, iconic and easy to remember which verse follows which, because somehow he makes the lyric flow. It's a helluva lot better than 'She Loves You.' Yeah, yeah, yeah."

Copyright © The Sun-Times Company

and for those of you interested in seeing Magnetic Fields, here's some info...tix are sold out, but hey - ya never know (I'm gonna hopefully make the Saturday afternoon show):

When: 8 p.m. Friday; 3:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday and June 27
Where: The Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln
Tickets: Sold out
Phone: (773) 728-6000

someone burned this cd for me to sample, I def'ly need to check it out.