In celebration of the 25th anniversary of its release, the Magnetic Fields will perform 69 Love Songs—the 3-disc masterwork that marked a significant breakthrough for the American band— for the first time in over two decades.

The select run of dates will take place in Spring of 2024, with performances in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Greater Boston and Los Angeles.

The tour will feature all the players from the 1999 triple disc, including Claudia Gonson, John Woo, Sam Davol, Shirley Simms and composer Stephin Merritt, joined now by recent members Chris Ewen and Anthony Kaczynski. The Magnetic Fields will play the album as it was originally performed in the early 2000’s: in order over 2 nights.

Singer, guitarist, and folk music interpreter Jake Xerxes Fussell has distinguished himself as one of his generation’s preeminent interpreters of traditional (and not so traditional) “folk” songs, a practice which he approaches with a refreshingly unfussy lack of nostalgia. By recontextualizing ancient vernacular songs and sources of the American South, he allows them to breathe and speak for themselves and for himself; he alternately inhabits them and allows them to inhabit him. In all his work, Fussell humanizes his material with his own curatorial and interpretive gifts, unmooring stories and melodies from their specific eras and origins and setting them adrift in our own waterways.

Fussell’s new album Good and Green Again was released Jan 21, 2022 via Paradise of Bachelors. Produced by James Elkington, the record navigates fresh sonic and compositional landscapes and is, perhaps, his most conceptually focused to-date. Fussell and Elkington enlisted a group of formidable players hailing from Durham, North Carolina (where Fussell lives) and elsewhere, including regular bandmembers Casey Toll on upright bass, Libby Rodenbough on strings, and Nathan Golub on pedal steel. They were joined by welcome newcomers Joe Westerlund (Megafaun, Califone) on drums, Joseph Decosimo on fiddle, Anna Jacobson on brass, and Bonnie “Prince” Billy, who contributes additional vocals.