The Magnetic Fields Announce New Album ‘Quickies’ & Share Single

The Magnetic Fields announced a new album, Quickies, due out on May 15 via Nonesuch Records. The group also shared the single, “The Day the Politicians Died.”

Quickies is a 28-song compilation — arriving physically on CD and in a 7-inch vinyl box set — of shorter works that span 13 seconds to two minutes and 35 seconds. The Magnetic Fields’ Sam Davol, Claudia Gonson, Shirley Simms and John Woo as well as friends and collaborators Chris Ewen, Daniel Handler and Pinky Weitzman joined frontman and primary songwriter Stephin Merritt to record the album. Merritt spoke about the interesting concept in a statement:

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.

The single “The Day the Politicians Died” arrived with an accompanying video. Check it out below: