Here We Go Magic: My First Official Interview!

I’m not going to lie. I almost bitched out.

I’d never interviewed a band before, and I’d planned on descending upon my first such experience with a great deal of impenetrable coolness and informed insight. Upon my arrival at The Earl on August 6th, however, I realized that I was neither cool nor informed. In fact, I was woefully unprepared and kind of sweaty. It seemed best to just watch Brooklyn-based indie rockers Here We Go Magic from the shadowy corners of lameness and then flee the scene. But then, all of a sudden, I realized that this was one of those do-or-die moments, and it was time to do. So I did. And it was splendid! Read on, friends.

Enter Luke Temple, Here We Go Magic’s founding and formerly only member, an amiably disheveled and disarmingly unassuming guy with a mustache. He smoked a cigarette on the sidewalk outside the venue while I fumbled around, trying to introduce myself as someone who was not retarded. I failed, but Temple was totally cool.

“So, uh, where did you get your name?” Proving myself an ultimate noob from the get-go seemed like a safe way to play it. “Well, I was on a train, going to New Jersey and staring out the window at Newark—the toilet of America,” Temple deadpanned. I liked him already. “It was very unromantic, in fact there’s nothing magical about it at all, and I was saying to myself, ‘Here we go, this is really depressing. But maybe I should think good thoughts,’ so I was like, ‘Magic! Here We Go Magic!’ I just flipped it, you know?”

Beginning his music career as a solo act, Temple recorded Here We Go Magic’s eponymous debut album in his apartment, entirely alone. As such, he explained, “the whole record has a real hushed quality, just out of necessity. After work, I’d start at like 8:00 at night and go ‘til 10:00 in the morning. I’d have to play real quiet because I had neighbors and thin walls. It was much more of a personal, internal kind of trip—I did the whole thing on headphones, pretty much sitting on one chair, very simple set-up, very limited. I worked very quickly as a result of that.”

Then, he had to throw a band together very quickly. Due to all the digitally-layered sounds of his first album, there was no way Temple could physically perform by himself in a live setting. Which wouldn’t have been a big deal, until he caught the attention of one Edward Droste, frontman for another Brooklyn-based indie rock band, Grizzly Bear.

“Ed heard ‘Tunnelvision’ on, like, satellite radio while he was on an airplane or something weird like that, and he really liked it so he wrote about it on his blog,” Temple told me, without a touch of conceit. “Meanwhile, I didn’t know that happened. I was visiting my mom over Christmas and I remember checking the computer one day, and normally we were getting like fifty MySpace hits a day, and all of a sudden on this day there were like, fifteen hundred MySpace hits, and I was like, what? Is this some kind of glitch? Was there some kind of back log that just suddenly got filtered through?”

Suddenly, Temple’s little lone musical project was catapulted into the public eye. From there, it was only a matter of time until Droste called upon Here We Go Magic to sign on as openers for his 2009 tour.

“It’s amazing, we became a band and then all of a sudden, like two weeks later, we’re off on this tour with Grizzly Bear. We didn’t even really have our shit together at that point. And it was right after [Grizzly Bear released their third album] Veckatimest, which went to #8 on the Billboard charts. That was when they kind of crossed over from indie to this mainstream success, so we were playing for, like, three thousand kids a night. It was an unbelievable introduction into being a live band,” Temple said. “Plus, I’ve been a huge fan of Grizzly Bear’s music for a long time so that was kind of like a little dream come true for me.”

Ultimately, Here We Go Magic’s evolutionary story is almost uncannily similar to Grizzly Bear’s. Not only did Edward Droste also begin his music career as a solo project, but Here We Go Magic’s dreamlike propulsion into the public eye mirrors Grizzly Bear’s own big break, when they toured with Radiohead in 2008 after receiving some serious accolades from guitarist Johnny Greenwood. In a way, Here We Go Magic has entered into an interesting legacy of musical networking, where the bands themselves select their successors.

Of course, what is music anyway if not a constant progression, a constant cycle of give and take? Luke Temple cites his own evolution from solo project to five-piece band: “Working with a band is sort of a democracy—you have to compromise and be introduced to everyone’s distinct contributions.” This past June, Here We Go Magic released their second album Pigeons—Temple’s first foray into recording with a full band.

Onstage, delicate, ethereal dream-drops like “Fangela” and “Tunnelvision” transform into jangly, freewheeling, almost raucous jam-outs. But it’s a controlled kind of chaos, and what’s lost in sheer sonic beauty is redeemed by Temple’s unflappable likability. He is the ideal anti-frontman—no irritating stage banter, no pretentious airs, no showboating, just passionate grit and humble aptitude. And despite his solo success, Temple remains utterly willing to embrace the fact that being part of a band means relinquishing a fair share of autonomy: “Now that we’ve toured for a year straight, by the time we record the next album it will have been almost two years probably, and I’m really excited about that because we have a dynamic together that we didn’t have when we made that first record, so it’s just going to keep changing.”

Goodbye, Newark. Here We Go Magic.

By Hilary Cadigan
Photos by Christina Krudy and Hilary Cadigan

Vetiver & The Clientele (The Earl, Atlanta 2/25/10)

In a gray fedora, button-down shirt, and jeans, Vetiver frontman Andy Cabic stands as a portrait of classic cool, but he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would brag about it. Vetiver, a band often characterized by their association with Devendra Banhart and the rather contentious “freak folk” label, surpasses pigeonholing with a unique style that is simpler, yet more nuanced than any one particular genre. In concert, however, the band outdid even their own skillful recordings, extending delicate melodic structures into rollicking jam sessions without batting an eye. Much to the delight of an affably bearded crowd, Vetiver at times came across as a scaled-down reincarnation of the Grateful Dead, except with less hair and more synthesizers.

To remove any doubt (and effectively supersede my comparison), the band ended their performance with a nimbly-rendered cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Don’t Ease Me In.” But don’t write them off as just another bunch of Deadheads. Even their most Garcia-tinged tracks, such as the countrified B-side “Wishing Well,” were inculcated with small yet defining details—an electric organ opener, a mournful harmonica solo, the gentle caress of synthesized piano—setting them apart from their predecessors. Tracks like the infectious “Another Reason to Go,” a classic drifter’s anthem, featured an unexpected combination of rocksteady beats and blistering synth-horns that illustrated the band’s dexterity.

Vetiver provided their successors, The Clientele, with a very tough act to follow. Both bands began with correspondingly mellow vibes, but Vetiver’s performance set up expectations of escalation, starting off slow and spiraling into full-on rock-out, while The Clientele proved unable to fulfill these expectations.

The Clientele’s new album Bonfires on the Heath constructs a painstakingly maintained atmosphere of slow-motion reverie. Exemplified with the cooing undulations and smoothly enhanced xylophone of their title track and the tender vocal repetitions of the swooning, wedding-ready serenade “Never Anyone But You;” the power of the album lies in its ability to sustain this atmosphere, cradling listeners within it like a room full of pillows.

Somehow, this power did not translate into the live show. Despite the lovably British temperament of frontman Alasdair MacLean and the Alice in Wonderland languor of gorgeous keyboardist/violinist/percussionist Mel Draisey, The Clientele’s portion of the concert fell curiously flat, sounding like what Bob Dylan might resort to if influenced by Coldplay and consigned to adult contemporary. Plagued by technical difficulties, including a squealing mic that kept disrupting what should have been a dream-like flow, the band seemed somewhat deflated from the get-go. This deflation escalated into a sense of mutual boredom for the band and the audience, transforming hypnotic ambience into the monotonous chore of trying to stay on one’s feet.

I probably would have enjoyed this music a whole lot more if I was sitting down, maybe in a grassy field on a sunny afternoon, maybe in a room full of pillows, maybe tripping on acid, but the Earl just didn’t feel like the right venue to fully appreciate what the band has to offer. Moreover, perhaps because of the contradictory crowd-pleasers they had to follow, it seemed like The Clientele had grown too disenchanted with their own work, or at least this particular presentation of it, to garner the confidence they needed to pull it off, setting themselves up for what can only be described as a self-fulfilling prophecy of mediocrity.

Review & Photos by Hilary Cadigan