The Magnetic Fields

Miniature gems.

As well as brevity, it’s Merritt’s way with a lyric that makes the songs on Quickies extraordinary.’ – Guardian ‘Twenty-eight small but perfectly formed newies. For all its concision this record doesn’t lack focus or melodic ingenuity, and is variously funny, graphic, pointed and bitchy. Highly entertaining, Quickies is more than a novelty record, though certainly novel.’ – Mojo ‘Pop’s pithiest songwriter strikes again, 28 delightfully barbed Merritt miniatures. Each Magnetic Fields album reflects Merritt’s knack for writing compact verse abounding with bright imagery and double entendre, tidy and tender morsels that are romantic, sardonic, and often both.’ – Uncut, The Best of 2020 For this year’s Record Store Day “Black Friday”, Nonesuch releases a limited-edition version of The Magnetic Fields’ acclaimed Quickies. The new Record Store Day edition of Quickies is a single 12" 140g transparent magenta coloured disc version of the acclaimed 7" box set, first released in May. It features the original twenty-eight short songs by Stephin Merritt, ranging in length from thirteen seconds to two minutes and thirty-five seconds, as well as a bonus track, ‘The Witches Fly’. Merritt explains his thinking behind the Quickies concept: “I’ve been reading a lot of very short fiction, and I enjoyed writing 101 Two-Letter Words, the poetry book about the shortest words you can use in Scrabble. And I’ve been listening to a lot of French baroque harpsichord music. Harpsichord doesn’t lend itself to languor. So I’ve been thinking about one instrument at a time, playing for about a minute or so and then stopping, and I’ve been thinking of narratives that are only a few lines long. Also, I had been using a lot of small notebooks, so when I reach the bottom of the page, I’ve only gone a short way. Now that I’m working on a different album, I’m enforcing a large notebook rule so that I don’t do Quickies twice in a row.” Quickies features Merritt and other Magnetic Fields band members Sam Davol, Claudia Gonson, Shirley Simms, and John Woo. They are joined by longtime friends and collaborators Chris Ewen, Daniel Handler, and Pinky Weitzman. To date, Stephin Merritt has written and recorded twelve Magnetic Fields albums, including the beloved 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 theatre 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.