credits: NPR

Stephin Merritt

Nobody knows what his race is.

Included in our GET TRIO email this morning was a piece on Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields’ new album, Distortion, coming out later this month.

We clicked through the link and found a piece on NPR’s “Project Song”: a musician picks a word and image to inspire a song they have 48 hours to complete.

credits: Phil Toledano

Man of a Million Faces

The photo that inspired the Merritt's song.

For the first installment of the show, Stephen Merritt selected the phrase, “1974”, and Phil Toledano’s photograph of man wrapped in dolls; the union gave birth to the song “Man of a Million Faces.”

Toledano competed in PHTHRD last summer; Merritt composes, plays and produces most of the Magnetic Fields’ music with a voice that is like a deep pine forest.