Original press release for the 1994 Magnetic Fields album The Charm of the Highway Strip, issued by U.S. label Merge Records.
This is the first of a week’s worth of press releases, press kits and other promotional paper materials that I’ll be posting to the blog. And this one was inspired, sadly, by the recent death of original Magnetic Fields vocalist Susan Anyway.
However, this was the first album the band released without Anway, as songwriter Stephin Merritt took over vocal duties. And it was their first for Merge, after two earlier albums for small indies that I generally think of as one unit, since those first two only became widely available as a combined release on a single CD.
The text of this release doesn’t even fill a half sheet of paper. But that’s just fine, as the music more than speaks for itself. I had a promo cassette of this album that practically lived in my 1987 Honda Accord hatchback, which I did indeed occasionally drive along long Vermont roads that spring and summer I was living in Boston.
