Yesterday we brought you our conversation with Bear in Heaven, and today we’re happy to share our chat with solo project turned full band Here We Go Magic. Drummer Peter Hale sat down with us at this year’s Pitchfork Festival to shed some light on how the band came to be and where they’re going next.
DB: Thanks for sitting in the heat with us for a few minutes! Have any of you been to Pitchfork Festival before?
PH: No, we haven’t. We’ve played the Pitchfork stage at a few festivals — Primavera and South by Southwest — but this is the first time we’ve been here, and it’s really cool so far.
DB:Are you guys able to see any other acts today? Who are you trying to catch?
PH: Well, we definitely are all big fans of Cass McCombs. We’re gonna try to check him out in a bit. And I really like St. Vincent a lot so I’m hoping to see her later. And I saw Pavement in Liege, Belgium and it was like, life-changing, so I might want to repeat that again because they’re just magical.
DB: Ok, so how did this go from this Luke Temple solo project to this full band that it is now?
PH: Well, Luke had been working on what became the first Here We Go Magic record and he and I had just started to jam, just as this thing that was kind of different than that, and we had a trio put together and we just started jamming, and then the album came out and started getting a lot of great attention, and so I don’t know if there was like a singular moment, but there was definitely a change where we were like, we should really start to take this material into what we were doing, and that required more people. So, we got Mike [Bloch] to come in, who’s a friend of Luke’s before, and then through other friends of friends we ended up with Kristina [Lieberson] and then Jen [Turner] finally joined in April of last year. And since then it’s been like, pretty much overnight, it became a band. We went out on the road and pretty much just threw it all out the window. And before we knew it, we were like a real band. We made a record together living together, and the record was just born out of us living together instead of thinking, oh, we’re gonna go make a record, ya know?
DB: Right, and that’s actually what I was going to ask next. Did you guys all collaborate on this record or…
PH: Well, we had some stuff that we had been playing on the road that was original for the five of us, so we knew that we wanted to do that stuff, but we had been touring so much that we didn’t really have that real writing time, and Luke is into that real, you know, he likes to sit down and write, you know, he’s a songwriter, one of the best songwriters I know. So when we got there, it was like, we’d get up and have coffee and Luke would go out on the porch and, you know, write a new song in the morning, and then he’d take it to us and we’d jam it all afternoon, and by the middle of the afternoon we’d start putting it to tape. So the album was recorded just like how you’d demo something, but it was just the record. So it was collaborative in the sense that he would write melodies and lyrics and then we would just jam out and write our own parts and start recording it.
DB: That’s great, and I’m really looking forward to seeing you guys later today because, you know, have the songs from the first album kind of evolved with the addition of the full band?
PH: Yeah, definitely. There’s no way to really, um…that aesthetic of that record is so palpable on the album and I think it would be a disservice to the record and to the band to try to duplicate that. So, you know, songs like “Tunnelvision” and “Fangela” and “Only Pieces” that we play in the set really have a more bombastic kind of psychoactive incarnation. They’ve definitely become more rockin, ya know, without losing any of the integrity of those beautiful songs. And that is kind of the bridge to the stuff that we do now because it’s all keeping in mind the layers and repetition and all the voices and everything, that’s all in the new material too, but like, the bridge when we play “Fangela” live is definitely how we ended up with the aesthetic that we take to the new record and beyond.
DB: And thanks for that perfect segueway. My last question is just kind of what’s up next for Here We Go Magic? I know you’re touring some more still, anything else going on after that?
PH: Well, on Wednesday we fly to Australia to play with Grizzly Bear who are buddies of ours and they’ve been instrumental in helping us get to where we are, and so it’s great to join up with them again. And then we’re back for our own little two week tour from the west back to New York with Beach Fossils who are friends of ours from New York, and then a couple weeks off before some more festivals in Europe, and then we start again with Dr. Dog in October.
DB: Oh perfect, yeah, I’ve got that show on my list for the fall
PH: Yeah, they’re awesome. They’re one of my favorite live bands. They put on a sick show dude.
Thanks to Here We Go Magic again for taking some time out of their Pitchfork Fest for us. It was really great to see them play after talking with them, because you can tell they’ve got great chemistry on stage and off. Check out a bunch of pictures from their Pitchfork set after the jump. My personal favorite is the picture of Peter and Jen having a moment.
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