i is the seventh studio album from the New York

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

-based indie pop

Indie pop

Indie pop is a genre of alternative rock music that originated in the United Kingdom in the mid 1980s, with its roots in the Scottish post-punk bands on the Postcard Records label in the early '80s, such as Orange Juice, Josef K and Aztec Camera, and the dominant UK independent band of the mid...

 band, The Magnetic Fields

The Magnetic Fields

The Magnetic Fields is the principal creative outlet of singer-songwriter Stephin Merritt...

. Several Magnetic Fields albums feature a strong cohesive theme; the songs of i are connected by their starting with the letter "i

I

I is the ninth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:In Semitic, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative in Egyptian, but was reassigned to by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound...

", also the tracks are arranged in alphabetical order.

Merritt here ditches many of his past synthpop

Synthpop

Synthpop is a genre of popular music that first became prominent in the 1980s, in which the synthesizer is the dominant musical instrument. It was prefigured in the 1960s and early 1970s by the use of synthesizers in progressive rock, electronic art rock, disco and particularly the "Kraut rock" of...

 and electropop influences for an album largely led by guitars and strings. The album was followed by Distortion in 2008, which is also free of synthesizer

Synthesizer

A synthesizer is an electronic instrument capable of producing sounds by generating electrical signals of different frequencies. These electrical signals are played through a loudspeaker or set of headphones...

 instrumentation. Realism

Realism (The Magnetic Fields album)

Realism is an album by The Magnetic Fields. It was officially released on January 26, 2010 by Nonesuch Records.Described by songwriter Stephin Merritt as "my folk album", the instrumentation of Realism is largely acoustic, stark in contrast to the band's previous album, Distortion, released in 2008...

, the third album in the so-called "no-synth trilogy", was released in early 2010.

Track listing

1. "I Die" – 2:14
2. "I Don't Believe You" – 3:40
3. "I Don't Really Love You Anymore" – 2:33
4. "I Looked All Over Town" – 2:39
5. "I Thought You Were My Boyfriend" – 4:24
6. "I Was Born" – 2:01
7. "I Wish I Had an Evil Twin" – 3:16
8. "If There's Such a Thing as Love" – 2:57
9. "I'm Tongue-Tied" – 2:49
10. "In an Operetta" – 2:02
11. "Infinitely Late at Night" – 2:45
12. "Irma" – 2:23
13. "Is This What They Used to Call Love" – 3:04
14. "It's Only Time" – 4:25

Performance

• Stephin Merritt
  Stephin Merritt
  Stephin Merritt is an American singer-songwriter based in Los Angeles , best known as the principal singer and songwriter in the band The Magnetic Fields...
  
   - vocals, instrumentation
• Sam Davol
  Sam Davol
  Samuel Bradford Davol is a musician best known for his work with the indie pop band The Magnetic Fields. He is featured several times in videos for The Magnetic Fields, and in the opening for "Born on a Train", his cello is featured at the beginning of the video...
  
   - cello
• Claudia Gonson
  Claudia Gonson
  Claudia Miriam Gonson, is an American musician best known for her work with The Magnetic Fields. She occasionally provides the band lead vocals as well as performing the piano or drums...
  
   - drums and percussion, piano, harpsichord, background vocals
• John Woo
  John Woo (musician)
  John Woo is a musician best known for his work with the indie pop band The Magnetic Fields.- References :...
  
   - banjo, guitar, electric sitar

Production

i was produced by Stephin Merritt and recorded by Charles Newman and Ravi Krishnaswami. Additional production and mixing was provided by Charles Newman. The album was mastered by Jeff Lipton at Peerless. Vincent Giangola provided additional editing on "I Don't Believe You" at Mother West/Night Owl. "In an Operetta" was arranged by Claudia Gonson; the harpsichord on the song was recorded by David Merrill. "Irma" borrows its melody from the song "Taking Tiger Mountain" by Brian Eno

Brian Eno

Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...

.

The cover art, Gravity in Four Directions, is by Fred Tomaselli. Album design is by Evan Gaffney Design. The band's logo is by Michael English.