Foto-© Dave Hamblett
Mit der Gerechtigkeit ist es in der Popmusik so eine Sache. Oder anders gesagt: Es gibt sie eigentlich nicht – denn sonst müsste das Projekt The Magic Lantern von Jamie Doe längst viel größere Bekanntheit erlangt haben im unübersichtlichen Feld des Indie-Folk und Singer-Songwriter-Pop. Die kürzlich erschienene Platte To Everything A Season (unsere Review gibt es hier!) sei “hauchfeiner Spitzen-Stoff, an dem Doe nach To The Islands (2018) und A Reckoning Bell (2021) zum dritten Mal auf Albumlänge webt”, hieß es an dieser Stelle in einer Review über das “wundervolle Indie-Pianopop-Folkjazz-Kleinod”.
“I have released five albums and a number of EPs of original songs as The Magic Lantern”, erzählt Jamie Doe im Interview. “I have toured the UK, Europe and Australia with acts as diverse as folk singer This is The Kit, Sam Lee, and Alabaster Deplume. In addition to writing and recording I also teach music, which I love. I am Professor of Music at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and teaches on the songwriting faculty at the Institute for Contemporary Music Performance.”
Bleibt zu hoffen, dass der in Australien geborene und in Großbritannien aufgewachsene Doe aka The Magic Lantern – nach diversen Lobeshymnen, etwa vom Vocal-Jazz-Topstar Jamie Cullum – nun aus der Kult-Nische heraustritt. Wir sind jedenfalls durch To Everything A Season (VÖ: 11. Oktober 2024, La Buissonne/Bandcamp) neugierig geworden und haben Jamie gebeten, sich und seine neuen Songs mal genauer vorzustellen.
Hi Jamie, our readers may not know you too well – so please introduce your start as a singer-songwriter to us.
I was born in Australia but moved to the UK at 12 where I finished school in Birmingham and met my oldest friend Fred Thomas. We have worked together ever since and he just produced my new album. I learnt the piano as a child and was obsessed with jazz from a young age, trying to pick out melodies and sounds. I got an electric guitar as teenager and went through a brief phase of attempting to be Jimi Hendrix before starting to write songs on a classical guitar when I went to Universtity in Bristol, a very musical city, where i studied Philosophy. It was there that I got really hooked on songwriting as well as took up the stage name of The Magic Lantern.
What are your songs about in general?
My songs have always been largely autobiographical – write what you know that say! – and early on I wrote them mainly to perform. They felt like they only existed in the moment of being shared, mostly live, around kitchen tables, at parties, little festival stages and the back rooms of sundry pubs around the UK. This intensely social musical environment made me feel that I was writing for other people, but the source material just happened to come from me. As I’ve grown as a songwriter I realised how much of that was a conceit, that I had been writing for myself all along, but the sharing was a justifying act, a way granting myself permission to spend all this time in a room on my own with guitar. I write songs to help me understand the world and my place in it. The process is confronting and revelatory. I share songs now and do my best to make a life doing it, because I know that songwriting has a powerful social function. Writing songs helps me and if they work, they help other people too.
Und hier sind nun zehn dieser sehr schönen Songs – und was Jamie Doe aka The Magic Lantern dem Hörer damit sagen will:
1. Trembling
The lyric for ‘Trembling’ is simple. The lyrical form is AABAAB, where the A’s tell the story and the B’s describe the feeling. I was trying to find a way to sum up the enormity of watching my wife give birth to our daughter Cora and the wild, untethered and hazy emotions of those early days; of awe and wonder, fear and fragility. I had the initial idea for the song a while ago but with the chords broken between the hands rather than played all together. I couldn’t decide on the meter and whether it should be in 3 of 4. Either way, breaking the chords gave it a ‘sad Pixar movie soundtrack’ feeling so I reworked it. The revelation was playing the chords together and putting it 7 – taking the best aspects of the 3 and 4 feel and combining them. I really like the rhythmic contrast in the song between the verses and choruses. This was the first song we recorded in the studio, it was 11am, we’d just set up and never played it as a band before and the music just fell off the page. We did three takes in half an hour and went for a coffee – we were off to a good start!
2. Two in One
‘Two in One’ is a love song for my wife and acknowledges my deep fear of how much more likely is we never met. It confronts the overwhelming reality of just how improbable it is we meet the right person at the right time. The musical arrangement is all about call and response, using the horns to answer the vocal phrases in the verses and then adding depth and colour in a more textural way in the chorus. I’m really in love with the horn section sound, but not being a brass player I have so much to learn about blending and voicing the ensemble chords. In particular the flugelhorn was a new instrument to write for and I hadn’t appreciated its tonal similarities to the trombone. Initially, I expected to use lots of different mutes to change the sound between sections. But after an initial rehearsal, the horn players offered some simplifications that made it all better.
3. Loops
‘Loops’ is the most honestly personal song I have written and is the emotional heart of the album, describing the central event that inspired the record. The song describes the intense and surreal experience of taking my infant daughter to meet my dying father in a dementia nursing home when she was three weeks old, exactly he took me to meet his father when he was dying and I was three weeks old. In their cathartic meeting one loop closed but I felt another loop open. I wrote it holding my tiny newborn daughter in the crook of my arm and playing piano with the other which is why the part is so simple. I cried writing it, I cried recording it and I cried listening to it back in the studio.
4. Hear Me
I’ve never written a song like ‘Hear Me’ before. It feels like a triumph of content over form. It has unusual structure, being built on a looping four bar piano pattern. The tonality is ambiguous and the walking paced crotchet rhythm builds a slowly brooding tension as the ensemble interject to support, double or decorate some element of the piano chords. The vocal contrasts this by emphasising rhythm rather than lyricism as its main feature. There are a lot of syllables to fit in even at this pace so it was quite hard to record, but I got it after a few takes. The B section provides this huge release, and is so much more satisfying for how long it has been delayed. The song is about becoming a father in the midst of losing my own and trying to hold on to a sense of connection with him and through him his father and on. In difficult moments I remind myself that I am his son, and that makes me feel very proud. He was a great man.
5. Data Points
‘Data Points’ sticks out thematically on this album as being the only song that looks directly outward at the world for inspiration rather than inward at my family. That was partly the reason for putting it in the middle of the record, that it could provide a contrast and a pivot point between the more intensely personal songs. It is a protest song of sorts against the overwhelming influence that a handful of social media and tech companies have on our lives and their deeply damaging effect on society and our sense of self worth. I imagined hundreds of people singing the chorus back to me at gigs ‘I’m not a data point, and I’m not for sale!’ The final arrangement completely ditched the chords for the first verse in favour of this hazy horn drone. I can’t wait to play this one live.
6. Love’s A Tailor
This is one of the first songs I’ve written that is largely from someone else’s perspective and written in their voice – so the first person. The song is about my wife’s experience with post natal depression after our daughter was born. I was inspired by songwriters like Randy Newman who often write first person songs in the narrative voice of other people – sometimes with quite challenging views which feels brave in our current climate that privileges reaction more than reflection. But I was very conscious of the responsibility of telling Rhia’s story, particularly something so personal. I asked her permission and we spoke a lot about individual lyrics to make sure she was comfortable. Musically, similar to ‘Hear Me’, there are a lot of syllables to fit in during the verses and it is very hard to sing. More practice needed before we go on tour! The chorus though is one of my favourites on the album.
7. Home
This is another song that I have written from Rhia’s perspective and using the first person. ‘Home’ is a song about the messiness of real lives lived and loved across borders. It is about the paradox of being homesick but loving where you are, of embracing the impossibility of being in two places at the same time and accepting the consequences. It is the only song I wrote on the guitar for this whole album. My songwriting has been moving more and more towards the piano over the past few years so it was nice to have one guitar influenced song make it in. I had the idea to arrange it for the three horns but getting it to groove was a challenge. It wasn’t until just before the recording that it came together. Fred had this great idea to flip the drum beat around, removing the accent from the one, which gave it at an off kilter quality. I love the contrast between the chord stabs in the verses and the legato almost chorale like choruses.
8. Sweetheart
‘Sweetheart’ is the most quietly devastating track on the record, even more so than ‘Loops’ in a way. I knew when I wrote it that it had to be recorded stripped back to voice and piano, any other instrumentation would distract. The song describes one of the hardest conversation I have ever had with my wife, that should I get dementia like my Dad, that I would rather die than put her through what we have just been through with him. The song follows the contours of the conversation and centers on the realisation that I could never do it, with full understanding of what that might mean. Ultimately, it is a love song of the purest, most real and shocking kind. Love as it confronts reality. I’m very proud of it.
9. Joy Is A Choice
This is the thematic closer to the album. The threads of joy at the birth of my daughter and the grief of losing my father weave together here, starting off as something almost elegaic and finishing with this uplifting ending, the very final sounds of which are Cora’s burbling voice. I was very attached the piano voicings I wrote for this one and the first horn arrangement stuck to those exactly, but in the studio we added a fourth voice which brought some unexpected colours out that I loved. I really like how the energy of the arrangement develops through the song. The emotional turn in the song happens when I recount this memory I have of my brother and I jumping on my Dad’s back when we would swim underwater. So much of my work has been about memory and the losing of it that I realise how selective my memories of him have become, unreliable even, and yet what we remember makes us who we are.
10. Epilogue
In an album that is full of loops and cycles, musical and lyrical, this an instrumental epilogue that re-contextualises the chords from the first track ‘Trembling’. Fred just started playing the chords on his beautiful Hoffner hollow body bass and they spoke so beautifully we started improvising on it. We didn’t plan to finish the album like this, but it came from a place of joy in the studio and when I was able to sit back and listen to everything, it felt like the closing statement I’d been looking for. It is my favourite song to listen to on the record.
