The Charm of the Highway Strip is the fourth studio album by The Magnetic Fields, released in 1994. It is the first Magnetic Fields album to have its original release with Merge Records. Its title, lyrics and musical styling are a nod to country music, though the songs of Stephin Merritt remain rooted in classic pop and synthesizers. Virtually every song deals with roads and travel - and several songs' lyrics implicitly reference vampires.
The title of the album comes from a quote by J. B. Jackson, 1959: "Let us hope that the merits and charm of the highway strip are not so obscure but that they will be accepted by a wider public."
This is the group's first full album in which songwriter Merritt also takes lead vocals.
The album was released on vinyl for the first time on May 6, 2008, via Merge Records, the first appearance of any Magnetic Fields album on vinyl.
Arcade Fire covered "Born on a Train" during a live performance on the KCRW program Morning Becomes Eclectic.
Lush covered "I Have the Moon" as a single B-side, and in the Japanese/Canadian released album Topolino.
The song "Dust Bowl" was used during an episode of the television series version of This American Life ("Pandora's Box").
The album is ranked number one on the music critic and historian Piero Scaruffi's list of the best pop albums of all time.
Read more about The Charm Of The Highway Strip: Track Listing, Personnel
Famous quotes containing the words charm, highway and/or strip:
“All the charm of all the Muses
often flowering in a lonely word;”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“My manner is the footnote to your immoral
Beauty, that leads me with a magic hair
Up the spun highway of a vanishing hill
To Words....”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“The annals of this voracious beach! who could write them, unless it were a shipwrecked sailor? How many who have seen it have seen it only in the midst of danger and distress, the last strip of earth which their mortal eyes beheld. Think of the amount of suffering which a single strand had witnessed! The ancients would have represented it as a sea-monster with open jaws, more terrible than Scylla and Charybdis.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)