1. The Magnetic FieldsGet Lost
I got into the Magnetic Fields in my first year of college. I’d visited my good friend Bryce who was a year older than us and one of my and Gerritt’s [Wilmers, Future Islands keyboard player] best friends in high school. He was like, ‘You should check out The Magnetic Fields, this guy’s like a gay Johnny Cash!’ I didn’t know much about Johnny Cash but I was like, ‘This guy’s voice is really interesting.’ At high school I was all about hip hop and getting into jazz, so it was really new to me. After Bryce told me about The Magnetic Fields I went to college, and within the first six months I met William [Cashion] from Future Islands, and he said ‘You should borrow this album, 69 Love Songs’
I became really consumed by The Magnetic Fields as a heartbroken late teenager trying to figure out the world. I found a copy of Get Lost at a used CD store in Greenville, North Carolina and it blew me away. I was listening to this record yesterday and it had been years since I listened to it, and I was like, ‘This album is so good!’ It’s also a somewhat brutal romance; what does he say, ‘Time provides the rope, but love will tie the slipknot / And I will be the chair you kick away’… That’s the kind of stuff that threw me off my axis for what I thought was doable in indie music.
