Magic Kids are a crew of indie-pop kids who hail from Memphis, Tennessee. The band specialize in a kind of exuberant, sunny, perpetually upbeat, slightly-twee brand of pop steeped in the production of Phil Spector, the songwriting of the Beach Boys, and the sweetly-naïve optimism of the Langley Schools Music Project. After releasing the awesome single "Hey Boy" in 2009 and touring with breakout band Girls, Magic Kids were signed to super-hip, Matador-bankrolled imprint True Panther Sound. Thereafter, they set about recording their debut album, Memphis, named, of course, after their hometown. The album showcased not just the Brian Wilson-esque voice of Bennett Foster, but a genuine love of old-fashioned, grand arrangements that belied its authors' musical inexperience.
Interview: 17 August 2010
What were your beginnings in making music?
"I just first started messing around in high-school. Like, someone would leave a guitar around, and I would just start playing it. Me and Alex [Gates], who plays guitar in Magic Kids, were in a lot of bands in high-school where we had no idea what we were doing musically."
Did you not think making music would be what you'd be doing once you were all grown up?
"I always expected it was something I was going to do with my life, even when I didn't know how to play three chords. I guess I never stopped to think why there was any reason why I shouldn't do that. I remember going on tour with bands where, I don't know why we thought anyone in other cities would want to hear us, but we never thought they didn't."
So, you owe your career to delusional optimism?
"Well, I'm hoping that it's not where I am now. I think people really do want to hear Magic Kids. We're definitely better than those other bands; if you could hear our other bands, you'd know that. We've put so much more into this one. I think we could tell, when we were recording our first Magic Kids song ['Hey Boy'], it was different than other things we'd recorded. Probably mostly because we spent seven months recording it instead of just one night."
How did it take seven months? A lengthy learning process?
"Definitely. In a lot of ways. Just trying to figure out how to record things where the arrangements stand on their own, without be dulled by fuzz and static. Where the arrangement would have to be full enough that it sounded big by itself, not by the noise of our bad recording. We were just trying to do everything bigger and better than before. To see our ideas through the end no matter how hard it was, or how long it took. As we went on, I grew more and more afraid that we would mess things up. Like, the song started to seem too good, I was worried that if we recorded one more thing we could ruin it. But, we knew what we had to do to finish it."
Was it, at the time, very much a recording project? Or were you dreaming of this being a band?
"I think we were dreaming of the band we wanted to be. It wasn’t the product of a functional band at the time; we made it more as a recording project, but we were hoping that the song would force us to start this new band. I remember that we played at SXSW in 2009, and we’d never played a show at all until like the day before we left to go to SXSW. We pretty much agreed to play at the Goner Records showcase in Austin to make us finish our record and be a real band."
Was the process of becoming a 'real band' a struggle?
"Everyone in Magic Kids, we’d all played in bands together before, so we didn't need to learn how to play together, or struggle to have to find people to play. But, where it can be a struggle is trying to do our ideas justice."
How indebted to Phil Spector productions or Beach Boys albums are you? To a listener it seems like an immense debt.
"It's not like we're hopelessly obsessed and dedicated to reliving the '60s, or anything awful like that. But there's definitely similarities to them in our approach. Phil Spector could take a simple pop-song and give it the full, grand treatment. In the '90s it seemed like there was this mentality that prevailed that if you had a simple pop-song you should record it on a four-track, as simply as possible. That adding any more than that would somehow ruin the song. I understand where that punk mentality came from —that layers of instruments was like prog-rock, or that a big radio pop-song was something built by a committee— but the idea is just so limiting. We're trying to take that back: make it okay to take simple pop-songs into grand places."
Do you feel, then, that you're swimming against the current trend towards lo-fi recordings, the sound of degraded tape quality, using poor recordings as a stylistic choice?
"In a way we are, but not because we're saying that lo-fi is bad. We love lo-fi recordings, we’ve made a lot of them ourselves, and will continue to do that; the immediacy that approach can bring is awesome. But what we're doing with Magic Kids recordings has a completely different approach, that brings with it its own rewards. Which isn't to say that we're an advertisement for hi-fi: I think our debut seven-inch showed you could make a big record in your basement, and that home recording should never be an excuse to not try as hard as you can."
How long did you spend making Memphis?
"I think it was about two months."
How did you go from seven months for one song to an LP in two?
"We had to make some sacrifices. But, mostly we had a great engineer. Our seven-inches that we released, they were just recorded by ourselves at home, and we had to engineer it ourselves, which is why it took so long; we were literally learning how to do it as we went, working out how to set things up. For the album, we had Shane Stoneback engineer, and he would already know how to do pretty much anything we could dream up. That was a big help. And we got to go in real studios, which made us hurry up. Like, we could've kept fine tuning everything for another two months if we'd had the studio time, making little adjustments. We could've kept going on forever. So, it was good that we had something that made us stop: running out of money."
