Magnetic Fields Get Reactionary on New Album

Posted on Aug 1st 2009 12:00PM by Steve Baltin
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Rest easy, Magnetic Fields fans -- auteur Stephin Merritt tells Spinner there is new music from the band on the way. "I'm almost done with it and it should come out in January," he says of the forthcoming material. Much of it was done while he created the music for the theatrical version of 'Coraline,' and he says working on the two projects were completely different. "Working on theater happens in a room with a lot of other people, unlike working on a record," he says. "So they don't actually collide [or] interfere with each other."

With both bodies of work coming from the same mind in the same timeframe, do the projects inspire each other? "It's more that one wants to take a vacation from project A and make project B as different as possible from project A," he says.

Got it. But doesn't that imply that by trying to make them as opposite as possible that there is a connection between the two? "Right, like 'Distortion,' the Magnetic Fields album was also written and recorded in the middle of making 'Coraline' and it couldn't be all that much different from 'Coraline,'" he says. "[This new album] is a reaction against both 'Coraline' and 'Distortion' probably, though not deliberately."

While even Merritt says he doesn't yet know how this new work will compare to 'Distortion,' he understands the thinking because it's been like that for almost all his work. "Certainly, the Magnetic Fields album 'I' was a reaction against the previous record, which was Future Bible Heroes' 'Eternal Youth,'" he says. "In the meantime, I haven't done another Future Bible Heroes album, but we're developing [one]."