The Magnetic Fields
Indie Pop Legends
An intimate, orchestral-pop experience featuring material spanning their 20+ year career
Why you should see this show…
It was The Magnetic Fields 1999 album 69 Love Songs, that brought them from the fringes to the heart of the alt-rock nation. The Guardian’s Betty Clarke called it “an album of such tenderness, humour and bloody-minded diversity, it’ll have you throwing away your preconceptions and wondering how you ever survived a broken heart without it.” The album made many critics’ year-end top 10 lists. The eclectic group are beloved for creating songs described as “simultaneously tender and witty, sweet and subversive, uncluttered and rich, laconic and entrancing.”
Tonight’s intimate concert will feature material spanning throughout The Magnetic Fields’ 20+ year career, including songs from the epic opus, 69 Love Songs.
The Magnetic Fields Bio
“Merritt’s pure alt-country/folk melodies rank among the greatest ever written, but what elevates him into the pantheon of leftfield gods is his almost casual ability to melt arch wit into profound emotion. “ – UNCUT MAGAZINE, Sept, 2022
Featuring cello, piano, ukulele, and additional acoustic and electronic instruments, concertgoers will be treated to an intimate, orchestrated experience that will delight long-term fans, who will be hearing the older material performed live for the first time in a decade. Audiences can expect to hear songs spanning back to the earliest albums in the ’90s. Also 2016’s 50 Song Memoir, as well as from their most recent album, Quickies, released on Nonesuch in May 2020.
The tour also celebrates the release of a special 20th anniversary vinyl edition of their 1992 EP, The House of Tomorrow.
The band features lead singer/-songwriter Stephin Merritt, joined by both longtime and more recent Magnetic Fields’ members: Sam Davol, Shirley Simms, Chris Ewen, and Anthony Kaczynski.
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.” 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.
Lomelda Bio
Lomelda’s fifth, upcoming album is called Hannah. The album stretches and shrinks into many of Lomelda’s different forms, from expansive “Wonder” and rock band “Reach” to meandering “Stranger Sat By Me” and finger picking “It’s Infinite.” Through this range of moods, Hannah sings stories of strangers, suns, dogs, moms, brothers, favorite bands, “oh god!”s and big shots as well as herself, by name. She rejoices and reviles her god-given name and then flips it around to name herself Hannah once again. It is an album of confession and transformation made ultimately singable.
Hannah was produced by Hannah and her brother Tommy Read at his studio in Silsbee, TX. Over the span of a year and some change, it was recorded three different times before Hannah called it complete. In this, its final 14 song shape, Hannah was released on September 4, 2020, by Double Double Whammy.
Dining Option
Our Concert Hall menu is fast to the table and allows you to dine right in your ticketed seat. Tableside food service will start 2 hours before showtime and the kitchen will close approximately halfway through the show. Tableside beverage service will continue throughout the concert.
