Video: Magnetic Fields - Walk A Lonely Road

The Magnetic Fields' newest album, released Jan. 26 on Nonesuch, is a wide-reaching panorama of mystical folk, cerebral hootenanny and lyrical mastery that rides the spectrum from heartache to the spastic imagination of childhood. Strangely enough, the album is titled Realism . It's hard to articulate Stephin Merritt's wonderful capacity for adaptation and renewal. But if you had to encapsulate the philosophy of "Realism" in two lines, it would most likely be a couplet from the album's first track: [...]