Features Track By Track: The Magic – Ragged Gold

The Magic are preparing to release their debut LP, a record that’s been five years in the making, through Half Machine Records. We asked the duo, made up of Geordie and Evan Gordon, to pop us together a track by track guide to their first full length, alongside an exclusive stream.

“After over five years of re-tracking, re-mixing and re-jigging, I am very proud of how this record turned out. Most of all, we learned everything we need to know about production and recording, and were able to create some magical moments in sound. A big thanks to Roger Leavens and the staff at his amazing studio BOOMBOX in Toronto, Jimmy Shaw and Leon Taheny at Giant Sound in Toronto, Andy McGoffin at The House of Miracles, London and Sylvie Smith, Andrew Collins, Martin Eckhart and Aaron Curtis for playing.”

1. Lightening Strikes
This is the newest of all the songs on the album. We made the instrumental for Liz Powell of Land Of Talk, with the hopes that she would write words and sing and we would release it as a single. Geordie had done a demo with just keyboards, drum machine, and singing gibberish into a dictaphone (you can hear this coming through at the end of the track). We laid this down and built up the instruments in one afternoon at Pipe Street, our family studio in Guelph. Liz never came through, although we still love her, so Geordie whipped up some lyrics and we recorded them on the last day of mixing.

2. Night School
This is one of the oldest Magic songs, and one of two on the album that were lost in a hard drive crash and re-recorded. This song would become the archetype for this record. I can remember Geordie playing me the four-track demo and explaining how he wanted to make a new album of pop songs. In classic pop style, he built the words from the hook up. We went very 80s for the sound, inspired heavily by Hall & Oates. The original recording had even more radical phaser guitar playing, but we were able to re-create it pretty well. The electric drum solo was out of control for a long time, but we reeled it in on the last days of mixing. The piano lick references the hook from the song, ‘What’s Luv?’ by Fat Joe (ft. Ashanti & Ja Rule)!

3. Magic Love
This is the only Magic song that I had nothing to do with. Geordie worked on it with Roger Leavens while I was on tour with Islands in Europe. Before I left, Geordie had told me that he wanted to write a song based on Greek Myth and was going to the library to research. I’m not sure if it is based on an actual myth or not, but this is a song from a mortal woman’s perspective about a God coming down and impregnating her. Geordie and Roger really hit it off in the studio and used lots of gadgets including the ARP 2600. I was proud of them and this inspired us to work with Roger more to mix and finish the record.

4. No Sound
Another very old song, built up from a demo Geordie made.The drums are some stock hip-hop sounds on the MPC, with some brushwork on a snare added. We built up the vocal intro to sound like it was sampled from an old record. I love Geordie’s off the cuff guitar solos. Our good friend Andrew did the saxophones arrangements, referencing blue-eyed soul like Van Morrison. Roger really brought this song together in the mix, it was very messy before. Now it stands out as a great proto-soul tracks. I have a rule that you must use vibra-slap on the record but only once, and here it is!


5. Fifth Business
This is another of the original Magic songs we lost in the hard drive catastrophe. It was a blessing in disguise, as this version sounds way better. Originally this was straight up rock song, but our obsession with Giorgio Moroder brought the electro trance elements to the forefront. The resulting mix is amazing. I think it’s like a futuristic rock-a-billy song. We used our dad’s very broken Yamaha DX7 (which we are told once belonged to Brian Eno!) for the synth at the end. The patch was called Tubular Bell Expansion. We spent a while arguing if we should cut the end off, but then we decided to dance around to it, and it ended up staying the full length

6. Door To Door
Listening back to this song while writing this, I realise why you shouldn’t work on an album for over five years! We picked away at this song for nearly that long and really over-did it! The result is great but there’s everything in here! Geordie played the violin and we multi-tracked it about 16 times to make it sound like a string section. I was insistent that we put bongos in this song because if you listen carefully enough to any No. 1 hit, it will have bongos. The keyboard solo in the middle was done about 100 times over the years till we found the right one, on Roger’s Moog Voyageur with all three of us working the knobs. And of course we needed a saxophone solo, so our friend Martin Ekhart came in and blasted away. The drums on this and most of the songs were recorded at Metric’s studio by Leon Taheny and played by Aaron Curtis.

7. Mr Hollywood
This track is my favourite example of brother power, and one of my favourite experiences in the studio I have ever had. We whipped this one out in a couple of days at our family studio in Guelph. The instrumental hook is a mix between heavily multi-tracked violins and four mandolins mixed with a Yamaha CP10 electric clav sound. One of the greatest moments was recording the guitar parts, me in the left and Geordie in the right side. Within a few takes we had made the most perfect syncopated part. This song, we figured, would make us rich, and I still hope it will. It is about closeted gay Hollywood stars like Carey Grant and Rock Hudson dealing with their double lives.

8. Call Me Up
We first cut this song with Geordie singing lead, but decided to give it to Sylvie because it suited her better. The instrumental hook contains a menagerie of mellotron, clavinet, 12 string guitar, organ and something else I can’t even remember. Roger really helped cement this one as a driving pop song. Until he got his hands on it, it was a little bit too reggae! This song is destined to be sold to a mobile phone company!

9. Parasite Paradise
Geordie wrote this after a long Kate Bush bender. It’s complexity was a bit beyond us, and it took a lot of sifting through to bring it out of the 80s to present day. I am particularly proud of the backwards reverb on the back up vocals. In lieu of a fairlight, we used a very primitive Akai sampler for the ‘doo-doo’ human voice samples. This song also features left and right panned bro-powered guitar takes.



The Magic’s new album ‘Ragged Gold’ will be released on 25th June via Half Machine Records.