So there you are, living in L.A. minding your own business, carefully crafting your music, putting it up on the internet as one does. Some guy you’ve never heard of gets in touch to say he’s smitten with what he’s heard, and with one song in particular. You get to chatting, he sends you some of his songs, which in turn you rather dig. You arrange to meet. It would be really good to work together. Problem is, he is located 2,000 miles away. I don’t know how impulsive Dexy Valentine is in other areas of her life, but in this case, she thought a bit about it, and right then and there, simply sold everything she couldn’t carry, upped sticks and moved right across the country to join Chris in Nashville. Impulsive turned out to be good; five years later things are going from strength to strength for Magic Wands, the band that resulted from that little bit of internet magic. Their debut album ‘Aloha Moon’ has taken until this year to get out. It takes you on a bit of an odyssey: from the blissed out title track which opens the record, it’s a happy journey . If you only listened to the first couple of tracks, you’d be forgiven for thinking you had woken up in some 70’s rom-com set in Hawaii. They can and do change pace though. ‘Black Magic’ is the sort of thing that compels the any listener with half a soul to get up, clap their hands and dance.
The record closes with new single ‘Space’. It’s been getting all sorts of great press in the States, and it’s easy to see why with its haunting electro sci-fi take on love amongst the galaxies. (Scroll to the end for the video)
The album isn’t officially released over here yet, but if you can’t wait (I couldn’t) it’s easy enough to track down in iTunes and hugely repays the effort. Along the way, Magic Wands have featured on the Vampire Diaries soundtrack, and had the accolade of a remix by the XX. Given that it’s taken them four years to get this far, we reckoned they could take twenty minutes out to talk to us.
Hi guys – Mike here from God Is In The TV in the UK – do you want to introduce yourselves to us?
DEXY: Hey! It’s Dexy from Magic Wands
CHRIS: Hello I’m Chris
Tell us a bit about your history – there is this by-now folklore that Dexy had put up a track on MySpace, that Chris found it, and to cut a long story very short, Dexy, you ended up moving to Nashville more or less immediately to make music together? Do give us the full version, it sounds great…
DEXY: Does MySpace still exist? That is like talking about the dark ages. So much has happened since then. This whole year has been so topsy turvy. It will take time to remember those early days. I remember when Chris came to LA and we hung out for a weekend and he begged and convinced me to move to Nashville. I had never been to the south so I made this impulsive move where I packed up, sold all my stuff, and we drove across the country where we formed Magic Wands.
CHRIS: Yep that’s how it went, I heard ‘Teenage Love’ and loved it, and so I got in touch with Dexy and sent her some songs I’d just recorded ‘Black Magic’ and ‘Kiss Me Dead’, she mailed me a poster of a graphic she made for ‘Teenage Love’, I got her to move to Nashville to start recording, and then eventually we came back to Los Angeles to finish mixing our first EP.
So all that happened in, what, 2007? So that track ‘Teenage Love’ moved from being a Dexy solo, then it was on your 4 track EP that got released in 2009, and like the other three tracks on the EP, reappeared on your debut album this year. It sounds as though you are quite the perfectionists – in fact you said yourselves on FaceBook that you had “been up, down, sideways and all around making this album” ?
DEXY: We were so used to doing everything on a Casio and an 8 track cassette recorder that being in a big studio with a producer shell-shocked us. The first finished version of Aloha Moon was unusable because somehow the files got corrupted. For many reasons not having to do with us, this record happened in slow motion. There were a ton of creative disagreements and we worked only when we felt inspired, but at the end of the day we got support from our label and didn’t have to compromise to much for the sake of having radio singles. Aloha Moon was recorded across two cities and the desert, and the original version of ‘Teenage Love’ is the most amazing underwater sounding recording you’d ever hear, there’s about ten versions of ‘Teenage Love’ now.
CHRIS: Yeah I’ve probably never listened to a song as much as I have ‘Teenage Love’ in my life. Ha. I still love it but we’ve definitely written a lot of new stuff since then.
And from what I can gather, the album has been out for a couple of months in the US, but is expecting an imminent release here in the UK? Does that mean we can expect to see you over here playing shows?
DEXY: Aloha Moon came out April 24th 2012, only in the US so far but it’s in the process of being released in Japan, Australia and the UK. So once it is, we look forward to touring there. I’m pretty sure it’s going to take a full year before people realize our spaceship has landed and little love aliens have come out of it and are multiplying, about to take over the world.
CHRIS: Yeah we should be back in the UK again soon, there’s not an official date for the UK release but I’ve heard it will probably be in the fall.
Speaking of which – you’ve had some pretty neat support tours from what I can see. I was particularly impressed to see you’d played with the Jesus And Mary Chain – what the hell was that like? What’s it like to open for a big crowd waiting for someone like the Mary Chain or The Kills?
DEXY: It’s really inspiring to open for bands that we like musically, both band’s audiences were welcoming to us. The Kills tour was in June 2009. It was us, The Horrors and The Kills and we did the whole US tour in a car as a duo. Jamie Hince said The Horrors and Magic Wands were his favorite bands at the time. The Jesus And Mary Chain gigs were over a month ago, in June 2012, and they were cool as well. The venues were all sold out. A bunch of J&MC fans bought our CD. Jim Reid called me up on stage with them to sing on a song; it’s that’s that kind of spontaneity that keeps things exciting.
CHRIS: Yeah, it’s always kind of weird to walk out and have a couple thousand people looking at you wondering who you are and if they like you or not. Usually that feeling goes away pretty quickly because once the music starts it’s hard to focus on anything else. The feeling before that is of long hours of waiting in a small room, like a circus tiger in a cage that’s hungry but can’t eat because he can sense something is about to happen. After the show, it’s like being the last people at the party, watching people sweep the floor. Sometimes we hang out with the headliners at those shows, sometimes we just get going. At one point William Reid unexpectedly said he liked my hair, which was cool because he practically invented hair. He said I looked like the guy in Ultra Vivid Scene. I wasn’t really aware of that band.
Which leads me to a question that I used to ask all the time, but then I got told it was asked by everyone. But still, I’ll give it a go. In all this touring and making music, what has been the most ridiculous, the most rock’n’roll situation it has got you into?
DEXY: We just had six people in a hotel room with one bed in NYC. It was a non-stop orgy. People were coming and going. Every night something crazy happens on the road, maybe someday I’ll write a book about all my experiences.
CHRIS: When we came to the UK last time, we had trouble with our flights being moved around so we literally got off the plane after 11 hours, rode in a cab for an hour, did a photo shoot for a magazine I don’t even remember, then went straight to the first show venue, sound-checked and played like 20 minutes later to like everyone in the UK music industry. I was so sick from the flight and Dexy was so out of it she had to write the words to ‘Teenage Love’ on her arm to remember them. One of first shows we did was opening for the Raconteurs and we played 4 songs in like 13 minutes because that’s all we had at the time. We were playing as a two piece and our backing track was on a CD, which would skip frequently.
I see you played at an Observatory in California too, and right about the same time were enthusiastically posting photos of planets. Is that a secret passion, astronomy, like Brian May from Queen?
DEXY: We have a strong curiosity about what’s really out there, we want to know, The Observatory is a vortex of cosmic energy.
CHRIS: We are both really into space themes, UFOs, aliens, crop circles, hidden stuff. I just watched a really good documentary called Celestial by Jose Escamilla that shows close up’s of NASA full color photos of the moon and there’s like buildings, temples and spaceships on it.
It may be rude of me to ask – are you a partnership in life as well as music then?
DEXY: Music comes first is both of our mantras, we’re creative partners in art and music. There’s no rules.
CHRIS: The only rule we have is no rules. We live together but we have a special situation. We give each other freedom to wander the streets at night.
I see you quoted as living in LA. Was it Nashville before that? Why the move? Without being any sort of expert, I spent a week in Nashville a couple of years back, and it seemed like absolutely everyone but everyone that I met worked in Country Music TV. Is it a funny place to be musicians without a lap steel, or is that just my tourist’s ignorance?
DEXY: I was living in Los Angeles before the band existed. We recorded the album in California and eventually just settled back in Hollywood. Nashville had a diverse music scene, and it’s not all country. I think you just have to know what places to go.
CHRIS: Nashville is a great place and I love it there. At first glance it might seem like everything is country-fried but if you look closer there’s a lot of great rock and pop bands that make interesting music. It’s probably the most musically dense place in the country, there’s practically a studio on every corner, and it’s really pretty too. But yeah we’re in L.A. now, mostly for the palm trees.
The album (which has been on constantly since I got it, and which I love) is very varied. ‘Teenage Love’ and ‘Crystals’ (amongst others) are very summer breeze feeling, very deserving of that sometimes mis-used dream pop tag. ‘Aloha Moon’ could almost have come from a 60’s TV show, whereas ‘Black Magic’ is damnably dancey, and ‘Space’ is pretty intense and dark – quite gothy. Does that represent a timeline progression, or is your output that varied in any given week?
DEXY: ‘Space’ is one of the singles. Since the EP was a limited edition a lot people didn’t get to hear ‘Teenage Love’ and ‘Black Magic’ so we re-recorded them. All the other songs on the album are a timeline of what we wrote together in Nashville & LA up to the start of recording Aloha Moon.
CHRIS: Yeah it’s kind of a timeline but we record new music pretty regularly and it definitely varies in style a lot. The only real constants are us, a Casio keyboard and a delay pedal. Everything else is just creating the mood we want.
A lot of your music seems – how can I put it – happy and blissed out. And there was me thinking there had to be heartbreak. Or am I missing the point?
DEXY: We want people to feel blissed out. That was the goal in making an album of love songs. Some bands use their audience as a psychic dumpster for all their pain and heartbreak. We’re not really into that.
CHRIS: Yeah, I mean we have a song that’s not on the album called ‘Heartbreak Whirl’ that’s about that, but it’s more of a spaced out version of heart break. We don’t mean to be “happy” though. It’s more of a neutral feeling between happy and messed up, even the love songs. There are contrasts in all of it. But musically we have always approached it as all being in a dream, where emotions like “happy” or “sad” don’t really apply. It’s more like, “I have these feelings but where the fuck am I?”
What do you see as musically being the next step for the band?
DEXY: I’ve been spending the last couple months writing poetry and then I turn the words into lyrics, after taking a trip to space for the last couple years I think the next step is moving away from effects and electronic instruments and make something more earthy.
CHRIS: I don’t know, the new stuff we’ve been recording at home has been pretty varied.
What should I really have asked you to get under the skin of Magic Wands? And what would the answer have been?
DEXY: you’ll have to ask more questions to find out…
…………. well that’s me told – they want more questions. I’ll tell you what guys, get yourselves over here and we’ll consider it a date…
