
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The Magnetic Fields
Saturday, April 16
7:00 pm
The Fitzgerald Theater
10 Exchange St E, St Paul, MN 55101
Effective immediately, all concerts and events at First Avenue and associated venues will require either proof of a full series of COVID-19 vaccination, or proof of a negative COVID-19 test taken in the prior 72 hours. More info HERE.
Doors open at 7PM | Show starts at 8PM | All Ages | Tickets start at $39.50
The Magnetic Fields are pleased to announce a tour of select US and Canadian cities in April 2022. This tour follows their twice-rescheduled Fall 2021 tour of seven City Winery Locations around the US. These intimate concerts will feature a setlist spanning the band’s three-decade career, including material from their earliest albums in the 1990s and their iconic triple-album 69 Love Songs.
Lead singer/songwriter Stephin Merritt will be joined by Magnetic Fields’ members Sam Davol, Shirley Simms, Chris Ewen, and Anthony Kaczinski.
The tour also celebrates the release of a special 20th-anniversary vinyl edition of The Magnetic Fields’ 1992 EP, The House of Tomorrow.
To date, Stephin Merritt has written and recorded twelve Magnetic Fields albums, including the beloved 69 Love Songs and 2017’s 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 … 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. Stephin Merritt also releases albums under the band names the 6ths, the Gothic Archies, and Future Bible Heroes.
Singer, guitarist, and folk music interpreter Jake Xerxes Fussell has distinguished himself as one of his generation’s preeminent interpreters of traditional (and not so traditional) “folk” songs, a practice which he approaches with a refreshingly unfussy lack of nostalgia. By re-contextualizing ancient vernacular songs and sources of the American South, he allows them to breathe and speak for themselves and for himself; he alternately inhabits them and allows them to inhabit him. In all his work, Fussell humanizes his material with his own profound curatorial and interpretive gifts, unmooring stories and melodies from their specific eras and origins and setting them adrift in our own waterways. The robust burr of his voice, which periodically melts and catches at a particularly tender turn of phrase, and the swung rhythmic undertow of exquisite, seemingly effortless guitar-playing pull new valences of meaning from ostensibly antique songs and subjects.
Fussell’s new album Good and Green Again was released January 21, 2022 via Paradise of Bachelors. Produced by James Elkington, Good and Green Again navigates fresh sonic and compositional landscapes and is his most conceptually focused and breathtakingly rendered to date. Fussell and Elkington enlisted a group of formidable players hailing from Durham, North Carolina (where Fussell lives) and elsewhere, including regular band members Casey Toll on upright bass, Libby Rodenbough on strings, and Nathan Golub on pedal steel. They were joined by welcome newcomers Joe Westerlund (Megafaun, Califone) on drums, Joseph Decosimo on fiddle, Anna Jacobson on brass, and Bonnie “Prince” Billy, who contributes additional vocals.
If overall Good and Green Again sounds a little sadder and slower than Fussell’s past records, well, maybe we’re all a little sadder and slower these days. A smoldering mood of regret and loss pervades, a distinct vibe of vanitas. But three airy instrumentals, all Fussell originals, punctuate the program, offering respite and light in the form of crisp, shuffling play-party tunes, each in turn somewhat more hopeful and exuberant than the last. Their resemblance to lullabies is, perhaps, not coincidental. Fussell and his partner welcomed their first child into the world during the making of Good and Green Again. These lovely songs bear that promise in letters of bright gold.