(Indie, Pop, Indie Rock) The Magnetic Fields - 50 Song Memoir - 2017 (5CD), MP3, 320 kbps

Disc 1
1. '66: Wonder Where I'm From
2. '67: Come Back as a Cockroach
3. '68: A Cat Called Dionysus
4. '69: Judy Garland
5. '70: They're Killing Children Over There
6. '71: I Think I'll Make Another World
7. '72: Eye Contact
8. '73: It Could Have Been Paradise
9. '74: No
10. '75: My Mama Ain't
Disc 2
1. '76: Hustle 76
2. '77: Life Ain't All Bad
3. '78: The Blizzard of '78
4. '79: Rock'n'Roll Will Ruin Your Life
5. '80: London by Jetpack
6. '81: How to Play the Synthesizer
7. '82: Happy Beeping
8. '83: Foxx and I
9. '84: Danceteria!
10. '85: Why I Am Not a Teenager
Disc 3
1. '86: How I Failed Ethics
2. '87: At the Pyramid
3. '88: Ethan Frome
4. '89: The 1989 Musical Marching Zoo
5. '90: Dreaming in Tetris
6. '91: The Day I Finally...
7. '92: Weird Diseases
8. '93: Me and Fred and Dave and Ted
9. '94: Haven't Got a Penny
10. '95: A Serious Mistake
Disc 4
1. '96: I'm Sad!
2. '97: Eurodisco Trio
3. '98: Lovers' Lies
4. '99: Fathers in the Clouds
5. '00: Ghosts of the Marathon Dancers
6. '01: Have You Seen It in the Snow?
7. '02: Be True to Your Bar
8. '03: The Ex and I
9. '04: Cold-Blooded Man
10. '05: Never Again
Disc 5
1. '06: "Quotes"
2. '07: In the Snow White
3. '08: Surfin'
4. '09: Till You Come Back to Me
5. '10: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
6. '11: Stupid Tears
7. '12: You Can Never Go Back to New York
8. '13: Big Enough for Both of Us
9. '14: I Wish I Had Pictures
10. '15: Somebody's Fetish

Great album titles serve as skeleton keys to deeper understanding of the themes explored in the music. Nevermind echoed the fatalist sigh of Nirvana’s 1991 calling card “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the ennui clouding Kurt Cobain’s emotional thermostat. To Pimp a Butterfly illustrated the war between integrity and celebrity broiling inside of Kendrick Lamar throughout his 2015 opus. In his flagship outfit, the Magnetic Fields, New York singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Stephin Merritt has used album titles as ground rules for writing exercises. Charm of the Highway Strip, from 1995, is a song cycle about lives in geographic motion. The beloved 1999 triple album 69 Love Songs is literally 69 love songs; 2004’s i is a string of first-person romance narratives, and 2008’s Distortion bathed a batch of peppy surf-rock nuggets in a thick and forbidding squall of reverb.
This week’s 50 Song Memoir is another clever thematic conceit. As per a pitch put forth by Nonesuch Records president Robert Hurwitz, Merritt was to write a single song about each year of his life, to commemorate his 50th birthday. Hurwitz’s request was sneaky: 69 Love Songs — alongside a trickle of albums from his side projects Future Bible Heroes, the 6ths, and the Gothic Archies — is proof the Magnetic Fields mastermind can bang out a couple dozen songs in a year or so, but 50 Song Memoir complicates matters by forcing Merritt, a lover of the three-minute story song and a writer blessed with a novelist’s devotion to fictitious lives and neatly arranged character development, to turn the lens on himself. It was a lofty request and, for this band at this specific moment in its journey, a risky one.
Magnetic Fields albums have grown incrementally and at times gratingly more twee in the 2010s, from cloying teen pop like “The Only Boy in Town” and “I’d Go Anywhere With Hugh” to drier but still cutesy observational yarns like “We Are Having a Hootenanny” and “The Doll’s Tea Party.” Merritt is a wryly funny, famously terse figure who, even when he feels like giving, still retains a certain air of distance. “I am the least autobiographical person you are likely to meet,” he says in a lengthy interview in the 50 Song Memoir liner notes with friend and collaborator Daniel Handler, better known to fans of Gothic children’s literature as Lemony Snicket of A Series of Unfortunate Events. If Memoir indulged Merritt’s schmaltzier instincts, or revealed a life less intriguing than his formidable gallery of character sketches, it could fail spectacularly.