Stephin Merritt played DJ to an eclectic crowd last night at London's George & Dragon pub. The photo here captures Merritt at the helm, conveniently positioned in front of a poster for The Magnetic Fields' upcoming Nonesuch release, Distortion, out in January:

Stephin Merritt will be DJing at the George & Dragon pub in London on December 10. He's been a regular at NYC’s Beauty Bar night "The Phantastic Invisible Tentacle" and a co-host of the Nowhere Bar’s "Runt" party. This marks his return to the London venue, where he'll be spinning his eclectic mix of late '60s and early '70s bubblegum and psychedelic pop songs. Distortion, the forthcoming The Magnetic Fields album, was featured on BBC 6 Music's Roundtable and scored high on the show's rating scale.

Uncut magazine (UK) has a preview of The Magnetic Fields' upcoming Nonesuch release, Distortion, that is best summed up by its final sentence: "What a curious and excellent album, all round."

The Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt is "an incredibly prolific, creative, and nimble songwriter with the perfect dose of temperamentality needed to attain the moniker of artistic genius," says NPR's Talk of the Nation assistant producer Sarah Handel in an appreciation. "I've seen him live a handful of times, sometimes petulant due to rowdy drunks playing pool, but more often poetic and generous, taking requests from the audience and playing like he's got all night.

Today, NPR has launched a new multimedia music site at npr.org/music, incorporating content from its national programs and several partner stations' programming. Among the site's features are artist interviews, concerts, and live broadcast streams from the member stations. One special feature is Project Song, which challenges songwriters to write and record a new song in two days. Participants are asked to choose from a stack of images and words and write a song based on one of each. Kicking off the series is The Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt, who used the project to create "A Man of a Million Faces."

Stephin Merritt has joined Rufus Wainwright, Imogen Heap, Brian Eno, and others in contributing tracks to Plague Songs, a UK compilation that pays homage, in song, to the Biblical plagues. He's written a little ditty about lice, or more precisely, "The Meaning of Lice," and Pitchfork says: "Only one man could successfully write and record a wistful, feel-good, disco-danceable, three-minute ode to parasites and pestilence—with a chorus that includes the word 'subcutaneous'—and that man is Stephin Merritt."

Listen to The Gothic Archies, a.k.a. Stephin Merritt, and author Daniel Handler perform songs from The Tragic Treasury and discuss the new Lemony Snickett book live on NPR's All Things Considered at npr.org.