An Interview With Here We Go Magic's Michael Bloch

Here We Go Magic is no stranger to buzz. From shout-outs on Grizzly Bear’s blog to the bountiful praise with which music critics have lauded the band, HWGM is one of the few bands that warrants the phrase “meteoric rise.”

With the band’s Saturday night show at Cat’s Cradle swiftly approaching, Diversions Editor Linnie Greene talked with band member Michael Bloch about his experiences on the road and the process of writing music.

Diversions: There are a lot of different adjectives that critics use to describe your sound. How would you describe it?

Michael Bloch: I don’t know — maybe it’s the sound of all those adjectives. How would we describe our sound? You got the worst person in the band to interview for these questions, I’m so at a loss at how to — I guess like energetic, hypnotic, repetitive. I guess those are good ones, and maybe — yeah, leave those, that’s good. I guess melodic — you can put melodic too.

Dive: What kind of influences did you draw on as you recorded “Pigeons?”

MB: I think nothing very concrete. We recorded that living together for three months in this isolated house in upstate New York, and I think we’d all been — things happened kind of pretty fast. We were on tour for an unanticipated amount of time, and none of us were really used to that, so at that point I think we’d had a saturation of each other and each other’s music. You end up all listening to each other’s music. We all have really compatible but pretty different tendencies in what we listen to individually, so before the recording of that record, we had a few months of everyone listening to the same thing all the time. Everyone ended up kind of gravitating to the same sounds without even thinking about it. We had listened to a lot of kraut rock, which a lot of people pick up on when they describe the record.

Dive: Where did the name “Here We Go Magic” come from?

MB: That came from — I think that came from Luke [Temple]. He was thinking about just calling — he likes those words for some reason. He was thinking of naming one of his records that at some point, and then when he made the first Here We Go Magic records, I think he was kind of on a kick of doing things that were just the name of the project and not the name of the album anymore. He recorded another one with a different band that was called Brain. That was just like a project with the band and the album called Brain. I think there were only like 300 copies made and we lost all of them. Here We Go Magic was the second one in that line. I think inside he just really wanted to be in a band and start a band and not be the songwriter guy that has everything on his shoulders all the time. It kind of stuck. It felt like it worked with his music, and then once it was assigned to the music it was like why not have that be the band name.

Dive: I read that Luke Temple was a muralist — do you think Here We Go Magic’s music takes a lot of its influences from visual art?

MB: Yeah, I think it definitely — I mean, I’ve played with him for a bunch of years, so I know him pretty well as a musician at this point I’d say. I think that it’s funny — there are some musicians that are really kind of linearly oriented or something, mathematically oriented. It’s a different way of picturing music in your mind as you’re creating it, and I think that Luke is definitely a visual musician. He thinks of it as kind of fashioning a visual piece as far as what you can hear when, and what it kind of looks like in your mind. So I think that being first a visual person, that must influence the way that he goes about music. More than that I think he’s just a person, like all of us in this band, that needs to express himself. And he’d kind of like — if he has a set of paints in front of him he’ll do whatever he can to get what he wants across, and if he has an instrument in front of him it’s kind of the same thing. I’d say he kind of goes about both the same way, but I don’t know if one influences the other.

Dive: How has all the positive press and critical attention the band’s gotten in the last few years changed your life and the trajectory of your career?

MB: From the beginning, it’s been pretty intertwined with — the band didn’t really have a chance to have a trajectory without any attention on them. It was pretty immediate that a bunch of people in New York started to pick up on those recordings and television and radio. It got around the city pretty quickly, and people like Ed [Droste] from Grizzly Bear made an effort to champion it and get it noticed. That was a huge part of why we needed to get our lives together pretty quickly and just — it influenced, I think it, there’s a good thing creatively about it, because it stopped us from thinking too much about what we wanted to be. And answering the questions you were asking about what we sound like — all of us by nature are really spontaneous musicians and pretty restless, so the way that we go about making music together and the reason this band works so well is that we all appreciate that about each other. Any time we get together to write songs or jam together, it’s always something new. The fact that people were behind us and willing to lift us up and get us noticed to begin with, and the fact that Department of Eagles invited us to do some shows, that that snowball started really early, it ended up helping to keep this band together. Not that that’s become the motivation, but because things happened so fast it allowed us to play the way that we want to play, which is without thinking too much.

Dive: What do you hope people feel when they listen to the new record?

MB: I guess I would hope that when people listen to it that they take a breath and really, really let it take them where it goes, because that record has a lot of twists and turns in it. It’s not a monochromatic record, one idea carried through from start to finish. It’s a real kind of wide spectrum, but there’s a real strong core to it. I think that if people listen a little bit more impatiently, kind of wanting to get the hook really quickly, they might miss a lot of what ‘s going on. To us at least we’re really proud of it and it feels like a really deep experience. Now I listen to it as a listener, and I have really deep experiences with it each time I listen to it. There’s a lot to delve into, so I would just hope that people have enough time to let it take them wherever they can go with it.

Dive: Have you played in North Carolina before? Do you have any memories from past shows here?

MB: We’ve played in North Carolina a bunch of times. It’s great there, it’s a really warm environment. We’re really happy when we pull up to Carrboro. It’s a really nice feeling there. We’ve played at — I played with Luke at the Cat’s Cradle under the name Luke Temple, with Tim Cash, and we played at the Cat’s Cradle with Grizzly Bear as Here We Go Magic. And then we played a couple of times at Local 506. If anybody comes to our show, then they should expect to have a fun time, and we’ll hang out in the back yard, in the little backyard place.