Some months back, I came across a CD that my brother-in-law passed on to my wife for a listen. The disc happened to be The 6th’s. I carried it out to the truck because that it usually where I get to listen to “my” music. Over the next couple of weeks I became very intrigued by the interestingly melodic voice of the male singer. Without knowing who the singer was, I looked back in some of my old music and found some songs from The Magnetic Fields. The musician and vocalist responsible for these two bands is a guy named  Stephin Merritt. Stephin has been criticized lately for lending his voice and lyrics to Volvo for two commercials:

Fast forward to last weekend. I think that KCRW, Los Angeles’ public radio station is one of the best radio stations out there today. We spend quite a bit of time listening to the streaming music as well as shows and Pod-casts. While perusing KCRW’s site, I was directed to the National Public Radio main site, specifically the music portion. It seems that NPR is doing a show where they take a musical artist, let them choose from a group of photographs and words for inspiration and have them write and record a song in two days…….start to finish. Below is the video of the song Stephin Merritt wrote and recorded. This is a link to the video on the NPR website, of the process. It is worth a watch. Don’t worry, they shortened the two days into 10 minutes 45 seconds….