Don't Pigeonhole Luke Temple from Here We Go Magic

He's breaking away from Brooklyn and going country

By Dana Raidt
Published: August 12th, 2010 | 12:00pm

Lumping musicians into geographically based genres is usually done more out of convenience than it is out of any sort of truth. Especially in a place as large and as diverse as New York City, is it ever accurate (or fair) to make assumptions based on a zip code? With a new “buzz” band appearing out of Brooklyn’s ether nearly every week—and many fading just as fast—it’s easy to perceive the borough as a musical vacuum where art is simply rehashed and recycled until every band sounds the same. But listen closely to some of Brooklyn’s bands (or those of any city’s so-called scene) and distilling it with simple groupings suddenly seems futile, like trying to pinpoint “western hemisphere food” or “European art.”

“If you get some attention and you happen to be from Brooklyn, then it’s a very convenient thing for people to talk about,” explains Here We Go Magic front man Luke Temple. “You all of a sudden fit into the ‘Brooklyn sound’ and people make [comparisons] with other Brooklyn bands. But if that same band was from Alaska, they would start talking about the ‘Alaskan sound’.”

Temple is on a seemingly never-ending tour, having just completed dates with White Rabbits in the United States and with the New Pornographers in Europe, not to mention the 2010 Pitchfork, Sasquatch, Glastonbury (which he says “ruled”), and South by Southwest music festivals. Coming up is even more time on the road as the band will tour the States, the UK, and France in August and September—some of the dates alongside Dr. Dog. As if that wasn’t enough, Here We Go Magic was signed to the Secretly Canadian label and released its second full-length, Pigeons, this spring. Pigeons didn’t just mark a shift in record labels, either. Formerly a solo project, Here We Go Magic became a quintet with the addition of four musicians who had been accompanying Temple live. The band recorded Pigeons together, and the record has been celebrated for successfully maintaining the intimacy of Temple’s previous Here We Go Magic recordings—while the added members have taken the music’s layered lushness to a new level.

“[Here We Go Magic’s] music is not a solo affair,” says Temple. “[On Pigeons], I still wrote the songs, but I left it up to the band to flush them out.”

Temple is also a visual artist (he’s responsible for the artwork on all his albums) who released an EP and two LPs under his own name while working as a painter, before adopting the Here We Go Magic moniker. He says he does have plans for a solo album to be released on Western Vinyl, the label that released Here We Go Magic’s debut.

“It will be nothing like [Here We Go Magic],” he says. “It’s more of a country thing.” So maybe it’s fitting when Temple names his dream musical collaborator: Neil Young.

While Temple isn’t crazy about the “Brooklyn sound” qualifier, there is one broad label used to describe Here We Go Magic’s swirling electronic elements and sometimes-muddled vocals that he is okay with: psychedelic.

“I think that if you were to get technical about music terms, then we are not a true psych band,” he explains. But, “anything can become psychedelic if you stare at it long enough.”

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