A Conversation with Magic Man – HuffPost 6.30.14

Mike Ragogna: Here you are with your You Are Here EP, “Paris” being one of its featured tracks and premiered video. But enough of that. You’re a Boston act, a place from where many high-powered, iconic groups have emerged. So what is Magic Man’s superhero origin story?

Sam Lee: Well, we’re all from a mysterious alien planet where the lower gravity makes us musical geniuses.

MR: Hmm, there’s something familiar about this story. Watch it be the truth…

SL: No one would believe you even if it was! [laugh] In terms of the band, Alex and I actually grew up together, we’ve known each other since preschool, we grew up right down the street from each other. Then throughout middle school and high school we learned how to play music together. We played in a lot of bands together, a lot of different types of bands; some typical garage rock bands, some cover bands, played some instrumental, broody post-rock music. Magic Man, we started in the summer after our freshman year of college. It was the first thing we’d done together that really felt like something we could take pretty far. We self-produced and self-released our first album as Magic Man in winter of 2010, but that was when we were in college, so we weren’t really focusing on the music full time. We played a lot of basement shows, house parties, frat parties, did a little bit of touring, but really we were in school so that was taking up a lot of our time. But during that time, the band evolved from the two-piece of Alex and I to a five-piece band. We started focusing our sound more on a full rock band sound, still using a lot of the electronics and synths from when it was just the two of us and a laptop, but we tried to focus it on a more energetic, rock-oriented show. That’s kind of how the band developed the sound we have now, playing shows with the full band and writing with that sort of sweaty house party show in mind, trying to keep as much of that energy there in the music as we could.

MR: Is that how the creative process takes place? You and Alex create the core of the songs and then take it to the rest of the members?

SL: That’s exactly right. Alex and I usually come up with the songs. I’ll come to Alex with a chord progression or beat and he’ll come to me with a lyric or a melody or something like that and we’ll build the song up from there, get it to a demo state with just the two of us, and then bring it to the band to learn how to play live and to record.

MR: Do you guys come from Boston proper or one of the suburbs?

SL: We’re from a suburb called Newton.

MR: Do you think growing up in that part of the world had an influence on your creativity at all?

SL: I would say where we’re from definitely had an influence, particularly because Newton is obviously a relatively wealthy community and our parents were very supportive of our music. I don’t know how common it is everywhere, but starting in fourth grade we started playing the recorder. That was horrible. We were all really bad at it, but pretty soon after that, I took up an instrument in the school band. Newton South High School had a really good music scene. In Newton in general, there were a lot of kids playing music. Kids in bands playing in their parents’ garages or basements or wherever. I definitely feel like maybe not so much the geography of where we’re from, but the people influenced us definitely.

Alex Caplow: The mentality, yeah. The standard for what kind of music kids were playing in high school bands was far higher than just being in a jam band or playing covers. Everyone was sort of feeding off of each other’s creative energy. It wasn’t really enough to just jam out. People wanted to come see real bands with original music, so everyone was very, very passionate about their projects and about joining lots of different bands.

MR: So there was something in the dirty water.

AC: Yes.

SL: Yeah, yeah, there was definitely something in the dirty water!

MR: This is sort of an obvious question for someone as old as I am, but “Magic Man” to me references Heart’s song “Magic Man.” I’m imagining you’ve come across that a time or two.

SL: [laughs] Oh yeah.

AC: Yeah, we do come across it. It’s a great song but it’s also a coincidence. The story behind the band name is actually that when we were writing the first Magic Man songs we were in France, working on organic farms the summer after our freshman year of college. Sam was learning French. My mother is French, so I was happy to come join him. We met a lot of really interesting characters while we were there and writing music on his laptop during the day when it was too hot to work. One of the farms we were working at was hosting this circus festival by chance, so there were just hundreds of really crazy characters–jugglers, magicians–and we were doing more pitching circus tents than farming. The first person that we met was a young guy, around our age, who was an aspiring magician who called himself “The Magic Man.” He didn’t speak English very well, but he was this guy who showed us the ropes and was our first friend that we made and the first supporter of our music. He was the first to hear the songs we were working on at the time, so when we were thinking of what we should call this project, we decided we should name it after him.

MR: That’s a great story. Who influenced you guys?

SL: We listen to a ton of different music and try not to get bogged down or pigeonhole ourselves into one or two genres, especially when we’re working. We love listening to everything from Top Forty stuff to more obscure underground music. I feel like everything brings something to the table that gives you an interesting perspective. Then sometimes you hear something you like and you can steal it and use it in your own music.

AC: During the first songs that we wrote, we were listening to a lot of Arcade Fire and Postal Service and The Killers. I grew up listening to a lot of Coldplay, so we have a lot of that line between pop and alternative rock and electronic music, where all those circles intersect. That’s where we were trying to go with it, to take you to the best of all those worlds.

MR: And now comes the part of the story where the low-gravity alien gets signed to The Daily Planet…I mean Sony. How did that happen?

SL: Well, Derek [Davies] and Lizzy [Plapinger,] two good friends of ours who run the label Neon Gold had an imprint deal with Columbia. They signed our first album, Real Life Colors. We had put it up on BandCamp giving it away for free. We got some attention from blogs. It ended up on Pitchfork and a bunch of other blogs, which was great and we had some great feedback from fans. And at that point, we were kind of thinking, “We’re going to make a second album and we’re just going to do it the same way we recorded our first album. We’ll record it ourselves, produce it ourselves, friends will play on the record, and friends will help us make it.” All of a sudden, Neon Gold, our favorite label, one that’s released a ton of stuff we look up to, got in touch of us. It’s sort of like a dream come true, them wanting to work with us.

AC: It was hard to stay focused in school when that deal was presented to us. My future was no longer becoming a psychologist. I was dreading not knowing what I was going to do after school. I didn’t want to go to grad school. Then all of a sudden, we had this record deal and it was like, “You can be a musician as your occupation!” It was a great way to graduate.

MR: Congratulations! So the next step, obviously is a full album. Is this EP a sampling of what’s going to appear on that?

SL: Yeah, we recorded it in the same sessions. Once we graduated from school, we holed-up in a home studio in Providence, Rhode Island, where we moved after we graduated and really spent a year or more crafting these songs and taking ones we’d written in college and improving them. Last summer, we took those songs, we went to New York and worked with a producer there, a producer named Alex Aldi. We built the songs up from the demos and did some additional production and mixing and ended up with the songs that are now on You Are Here and Before The Waves, our album. It’s definitely a similar sonic palette, but hopefully on the album, there’s a little more variety, more room to tell a narrative and have the journey from the start of the album to the end.

MR: It’s interesting that your EP includes three songs with geographical shout outs…”Texas,” “Paris,” and “Nova Scotia.”

AC: Yeah, we actually have songs called “Chicagoland” and “South Dakota” on the album as well.

MR: Does this reveal a subconscious desire to travel the world as the band Magic Man?

SL: Alex is actually a South Dakota native from a past life; he’s been reincarnated and is inhabiting his alien body with the spirit of a South Dakotan. What do you call someone from South Dakota? Dakotan? Decoded?

AC: A South Coyote.

SL: It wasn’t something that we consciously set out to do, but we did name the EPYou Are Here kind of thinking of those geographically-named songs. Once we were putting the songs together for the EP and album, we liked the connection. Writing about places is something that we’ve done for a long time. You can see a bunch that didn’t end up on the album that use the same tricks. It’s kind of a fun exercise, to write about how a place makes you feel or what it means to you, or to use it as a jumping off point for a song, especially being people who really like to travel and being a band that started when Alex and I were traveling. Thinking about how a place might inspire you is always a good place to start a song. You might end up with something that has nothing to do with the place by the time you’re finished, but that spark sometimes is sometimes a good way to come up with an idea.

AC: Yeah, one of our favorite songs was called “Tokyo.” Tokyo inspired the song, but it didn’t end up being about anything related to Tokyo so we thought that would be confusing. It was hard to change that name, but it was probably for the best.

MR: You could have an album filled with the names of places even though the songs have nothing to do with them.

SL: Yeah, Bon Iver’s second album has a bunch of songs named after places and I’m not sure what they have to do with the songs, but I’ve always liked them. It also gives a good image to the listener, I think. You think about the place in addition to what the lyrics are saying and how they relate.

MR: Who does most of what during the creative process?

AC: We both have different expertise. Sam is definitely more towards the production side and I lean more towards the melodic and lyrics side. It’s often that Sam has a beat or a chord progression and then I write a vocal melody over it and some gibberish lyrics and we pass it back and forth. There are other times when Sam totally changes the melodies or I start off with the initial groove. It’s really just a fully collaborative process.

MR: And the lyrics?

SL: We’re both definitely involved in the lyrics. On some songs, one person will write all of the lyrics and we’ll love it and only change a few things. Other times, we’ll sit down together and one of us will contribute a verse and the other will contribute a chorus. It ranges, totally. Some of the songs I can point to and say, “Alex wrote this,” and others I can say, “I wrote the majority of that,” but the majority of the songs are a collaboration. We start with something that someone came up with, but by the time we’re done it’s something we put equal amounts into.

AC: It is interesting to think about, because I’ve heard that for most singer-songwriters, the lyrics come first, that the core of the song is like the story they start telling. For us, we put a lot more energy into making sure the song works on its own without the lyrics. We focus on the feel and melodies and the sound that we want to go for, so I record gibberish lyrics for all the songs before we actually write the lyrics. I know I want it to go… [rhythmic verbiage], so I know exactly what sound I want to be there, and then we fit in the lyrics after to make sure it fits with the mood of the song. But first, we make sure that it stands on its own without lyrics at all.

MR: I’ve often wondered how bands stay together when the song concepts only come from the lead singer.

AC: It’s all the groupies.

SL: [laughs] The fact is we all do the same amount of work when we’re on tour. We all get the same benefits. It’s just a great lifestyle that we all enjoy. The other members of the band, while they don’t write the songs directly, they’re all songwriters themselves and they have the time to work on their own projects, so they definitely continue to fill creatively fulfilled even if it’s not through this particular project. And during practice, we all throw around tons of ideas and build the songs back up for the live show. It’s definitely a collaboration.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

AC: I would say that one of the things that helped us the most in reaching an audience was putting our first album out for free. Just focusing on sharing it with as many people as possible and not at all focusing on the money side of things. We knew that most importantly, we wanted people to hear the songs and if they liked them, they would share them with their friends. That’s how we built our fan base. The album was free and that blogs would post about it and say, “It’s free! Just click on this link to get the album, it’s actually pretty good!” So I would recommend that if you’re trying to get started, really send it around to as many people as possible.

SL: On that note, one thing that’s been pretty helpful for me on this journey so far is to remember that the reason you’re doing what you’re doing is because there are people out there who are supporting you, like the fans. They’re the reason you’re there. You wouldn’t be doing it if it weren’t for them. In the same vein, you try to give back or try to appreciate them. Sometimes there’s a show you don’t want to do because you’re tired and it’s been a long time and for you, it’s just another show. But for them? iI’s the show they’ve been really wanting to see or they’re just trying to have a good time that night. It’s important to remember that while you’re doing it for yourself because it’s your art, there are a lot of other people that are keeping you doing what you’re doing.

AC: Respond to their tweets, show them that you care and it will turn them into a life-long fan.

MR: What’s the goal down the road?

SL: Have you seen the show Pinky & The Brain?

MR: So this is about world domination.

SL: Yup. World domination. But in all seriousness, I think our goal is what I was just saying. We love playing music, we love writing music, we love touring and playing shows, so we want to be able to do that as long as we can. Now that our album is done, we’re focusing on the touring side of things, trying to play for as many different people as possible, travel to new cities and new countries even and play as many shows as possible. Once that touring cycle wraps up, I’m excited to get back in the studio and lather, rinse, repeat.

MR: And hope the magic happens again.

SL: Yes.

MR: Has this interrogation missed anything?

SL: In terms of important dates, our album’s coming out July 8th, you can preorder it now on iTunes.

AC: And you get stuff immediately for pre-ordering…

MR: Like a secret decoder ring?

SL: …and also on July 8th, we’re starting a west coast headline tour from San Diego to Vancouver and then after that we’re going to be on tour with Panic! At The Disco for pretty much the rest of the summer. We’ll be traveling over a lot of the US, so hopefully, we’ll be able to see as many people as we can and play a lot of shows.

Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne