For this week’s Music Monday, we bring you the infectious pop stylings of Boston natives, Magic Man. Perhaps you’ve heard their most recent single titled Paris, a dreamy pop-dance opus that shows off the five piece outfit in a weird world where body parts go missing but everyone keeps dancing anyway. Or maybe you’ve had the privilege of catching them perform live at one of the various festivals they’ve been slotted to play. Either way, get hip to the magic right here, right now. Be warned though, you’ll be walking away with a song stuck in your head.
Check out behind the scenes photos of Magic Man.
Check out our Q & A with founding members, Alex & Sam
AEO: Hey, guys! How are you?
Magic Man: Great. We’re on our way back from Canada. We just played Toronto last night.
AEO: Oh, very cool! Toronto is such a cool city.
MM: Yeah, we were only there for 24 hours. But it was a lot of fun.
AEO: So, your first release, “Real Life Color,” was sort of inspired by your experience moving around France and working on organic farms. Can you tell me a little bit about that whole experience?
MM: It was the summer after our first year of college. We decided to take this trip after I had taken some French classes in Paris. And we were just trying to find a way to travel around the country and we found this program where you can trade labor on organic farms for room and board so that seemed like a great way to do that. We got to meet a lot of interesting people, had a lot of cool experiences. Then during our down time – it was the middle of August so it was super hot – most people would take a long siesta in the middle of the day, we just started writing some songs.
AEO: That’s interesting that you started out just writing on your laptop because that’s what was available to you. I’m really curious what your music writing process was like and how it’s grown since then.
Image Source: Gavin Thomas
MM: It’s almost exactly the same as it was in the beginning where one of us would come up with a little idea, whether it’s a cord progression or a melody. Then we’d just work on it for awhile then pass it on to the other one who would then take it a little bit further. We’d just go back and forth and it would basically be a 50/50 collaboration.
We started off just with Garage Band and a built-in microphone on the laptop so we were definitely limited. But even with those basic programs, if you spend enough time tweaking things you can come up with some cool sounding electronic music.
AEO: How has adding more members changed the way you make music or changed your sound?
MM: Once we started playing with a full band and really enjoying the energy that that brought to the live show, we kind of started writing with the band in mind; live drums, bass, guitar, keys and kind of started shifting our writing from being what we had available when we were traveling, which was just a computer, to kind of thinking a little bit larger scale in terms of sounds.
Be sure to check out their most recent release of synth laden power pop, “Out of Mind,” out now on Columbia Records. Stream the single below!
