THE MAGNETIC FIELDS at Queen Elizabeth Theatre (190 Princes’), Monday (February 8), 7:30 pm. $30.50. 416-870-8000.
Stephin Merritt wants to know if it’s snowing in Toronto. He already knows that it recently snowed in Vermont and Montreal, and that weather tends to travel east. His meteorological tab-keeping makes sense, considering he and his Magnetic Fields are about to tour their just-released album, Realism (Nonesuch).
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Winter touring, after all, means snowstorms and travel delays and, when you’re flying, lost instruments that need to be replaced by rentals.
“We had a three-day residency at Cadogan Hall in London,” recalls Merritt over the phone from New York, “and for the first two days we had a rented cello that we called Mr. Squeaky. It was a terrible fellow. It wouldn’t be such a problem if [the lost instrument] were an acoustic guitar. Or a bouzouki, although it was a problem when my bouzouki went south. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, having to play an unfamiliar bouzouki for the first time, onstage.”
Bouzoukis and cellos are just two of the instruments found on Realism, the Magnetic Fields’ acoustic, orchestral folk album. Flugelhorns, banjos, tubas, sitars, cajón and tablas are packed in alongside Merritt’s distinct, deadpan baritone, wry lyrics and the high, sweet voices of Claudia Gonson and Shirley Simms. But don’t expect “folk” in the typical sense of the genre. The album was inspired by the “variety folk” found on Judy Collins’s late-60s albums In My Life and Wildflowers.
“She was considered a folksinger, but there’s no folk on either album,” Merritt says. “Instead, there are Joshua Rifkin’s wonderful arrangements and Collins’s brilliant genre-hopping. She does Marat/Sade and Bob Dylan’s Tom Thumb’s Blues and the Beatles’ In My Life and Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne, all on the same album. Songs that have nothing to do with each other except that they have good lyrics. Well, In My Life doesn’t even have good lyrics.”
The 44-year-old sardonic indie icon is partial to concept albums. The band’s breakthrough was 1999’s 69 Love Songs, featuring 69 songs about love songs. Realism brings to an end their no-synth trilogy, which includes 2004’s i, an album whose song titles begin with the word “I,” and 2008’s Distortion, which features so many layers of distorted instruments that it took a year and a half just to mix.
“There was a total stasis in the world of synthesizer manufacturing,” Merritt explains about the synth-free decision. “There was no new technology. Every synthesizer sounded like it was 1981, since technology hadn’t really changed since then. That led to the horrific electroclash so-called movement/marketing category. Now things have changed, and I’m gleefully buying up the new sounds to stick onto the next record.
“I’m hoping I can scoop Björk,” he adds dryly. “And Matmos. They’re probably my two rivals in the field.”
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