MAJICAL CLOUDZ

Our record “Impersonator” is out today. THANK YOU FOR LISTENING TO IT. I mean that in the sincerest way possible. When the songs were written, not in my wildest dreams did I think this many people would be interested in hearing it (at the time, even my own interest in hearing them was not always there). I wrote a couple of things down that Matt and I wanted to say about the record and about how we approach performing. I realize that it’s a bit long-winded, so tune out at anytime.

Why is the album called Impersonator?

When I was thinking about possible names for an album and I came across “impersonator”, the word immediately connected a lot of different things that were floating around in my head. At the risk of sounding pedantic, I feel like it does make sense to try to explain my thought process regarding that word.

The first song on the album, also called “Impersonator”, is about the idea that when you don’t believe in yourself, you also won’t really believe in the legitimacy of anything you do or anything you are. Someone might say, “She does this” or “he is accomplished at that” but unless you have confidence in your ability to do it, you will feel like a fraud.

In the case of the song, I am singing about being seen by a friend as someone who “makes music” while believing that I don’t deserve the title. At the time I wrote it I was lost as a person and because I didn’t know who I was, the self-identity that was given to me from people around me seemed fraudulent.

One of my closest friends once told me, “if you have lost all confidence in your ability to make music, you should write a song about that very problem,” so I did. That sounds cheesy, but doing so put me into visceral contact with the simple idea that making art feels good when the impulse to make it is to explain yourself and tell your own story.

So titling the album “impersonator” is a reference to the content of the music and the mentality that went into making it. I felt like a fraud, so I wrote about it. That led me to write songs about my fears, desires, and about things I wanted to say to people but didn’t know how. So in one sense “Impersonator” is a summing up of the lyrical content of the album.

In another sense, it references how central the notion of an engaging performance became as myself and Matt developed these songs and started to play them live. Even going into the first show, the priority of the band was always about creating something live that was more than just playing the songs. We wanted to create an atmosphere that could be at times contradictory and surprising but that would never alienate the audience.

I do not have a composed, calculated stage persona. I say embarrassing things and make strange decisions. Sometimes it feels very serious onstage, and other times I can’t help but laugh at myself for being there. If you think I look nervous, seem unpolished, seem uncomfortable, you wouldn’t be wrong. I love performing and it is an experience that I would never decline, but that I enjoy it does not mean I am always at ease with it.

When myself and Matt perform we want it to feel new every night — not in the musical sense of improvisation or variations on a theme, but in an emotional/performative sense. I don’t want to know what is going to come next. Sometimes I go confidently forward, other times I feel like the crowd could kill me with a false move.

The songs we play are serious and the lyrics very personal and often dark, but that doesn’t mean the atmosphere of a performance needs to be serious and dark. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes lots of people are laughing and I’m laughing. The point is, the atmosphere of the show should never be dictated — it should come spontaneously.

Although it might seem like an abstract connection, the word “impersonator” also contains that meaning for me. It refers to a whole range of people who perform for very different reasons — to generate laughter (in the case of Jimmy Fallon on SNL), to gain acceptance (in the case of Frédéric Bourdin), or to be a vehicle for nostalgia or celebration (in the case of an Elvis impersonator). “Impersonator” makes me think of all those impulses rolled into one. So for me the title is also a reference to all the possibilities of being up onstage with a microphone.

How were the songs/recordings on the album made?

I wrote the songs over the course of 2012. It’s probably unnecessary to go into detail on the personal reflections that went into the songs because I spoke about that earlier (above).

I made rough versions of the songs and then would show them to Matt more or less as they were written. We settled on a simple way of performing the music. We made samples and loops of the parts and loaded them into an MPC — Matt triggered those samples, played the lead keyboard parts overtop, and sang the vocal harmonies. I simply held a microphone and sang the lyrics so that I could give a focused performance.

After we had played a number of shows, we decided to make quick recordings of the songs. The original plan was to set everything up, run all the signals through Matt’s analog mixing desk, and then whatever came out would be the track. But as we played more we decided that we wanted to do the best we could with the recordings, so we gave them more time and put more thought into it. We would do a rough mix together, I would re-record vocals, we would add parts or change the sound of parts if we thought it could sound better, and then Matt would do a more meticulous final mix. That process happened at least once with all the songs but usually it happened twice because after playing a song a number of times live it would inevitably evolve, either musically or lyrically, and then the recording would also have to change.

Over the course of recording we figured out a style that tied the songs together. Some of that can be chalked up to random ideas we had that we liked and so incorporated into multiple songs. For example, we ran specific parts that we had already recorded into a reel-to-reel tape machine, slowed the machine to half-speed, then recorded it back into the computer. This resulted in the part being pitched down an octave. We would then mix that with the original sound.

The record was recorded and produced sporadically over the summer and the fall, then finalized in the early winter. We settled on the 10 songs simply because we thought they were the best ones we had, and were also the ones that fit together the best.

Again, THANK YOU FOR LISTENING TO THE RECORD AND FOR CARING ABOUT OUR BAND. We are so, so happy to be doing what we’re doing right now.

Devon