The Magnetic Fields

The Magnetic Fields are the band that serves as the main musical outlet for the inventive and prolific songwriter Stephin Merritt, who goes through what can be best described as songwriting sprees. These spurts are often organized around some theme: the band's 1999 album 69 Love Songs comprised 69 songs about love, and their 2017 album 50 Song Memoir was Merritt's account of his own life with a song about each of his 50 years on earth. His songs have a lot of humor built into his lyrics, and they are highly melodic without being playful. They come with enough idiosyncrasies to give their pop an odd, off-kilter feel. The band has gone through stylistic shifts over the years without much fluctuation in the quality of the overall output, including multiple folk-inspired periods, such as Realism (2010), and albums where they crank up the noise, as in 2008's Distortion.