Born out of a bedroom psych-folk project by singer-guitarist Luke Temple, Here We Go Magic has bloomed into a buzzworthy indie rock act with two albums under its belt. Street caught up with drummer Peter Hale after the band’s show at the Pitchfork Music festival. Street: So Luke Temple recorded the Here We Go Magic debut alone on his four-track. How do you think recording with a full band altered the creative process on the second album? Peter Hale: First of all, there were five of us doing it. [Laughs.] We just lived in a house in upstate New York and just kind of let the album come out of our own experience there rather than thinking about it in terms of ‘lets go make a record.’ So that’s actually really similar [to the first album], but other than that, playing together, working out parts together and stuff is obviously different than someone coming home after a day at work and laying something down on his tape machine, you know? Street: Did you record the second album digitally? PH: No, we actually borrowed a TASCAM quarter-inch eight-track from a friend and used Luke’s four-track to supplement that. So, like, probably ninety percent of the record was done on an eight-track or a four-track. We have to use Pro Tools to bounce things down and then bounce them back to tape. But pretty much everything that gets recorded gets recorded to tape, except for a few of the backing vocals, just for expediency. Something you want to do a million times, like singing a vocal take over and over again, sometimes you can actually destroy the tape doing that. So we opted to do that on the computer a little bit, but then that’s all bounced back to tape. But all the instruments were recorded to tape on that record. Street: OK, cool. So I saw you guys live at Pitchfork the other day and it was a great show. PH: Thank you. Street: I noticed you used scarves to deaden the snare and floor tom during your live show. Can you explain why you used that effect? PH: I guess there’s a sort of double reason for that. One is that it just kind of flattens the sound in a way that makes it…I find just more appealing sounding. And another reason is that when you get into a situation where you’re playing lots of shows in different sized venues, you can be in control of the sound of the drums a lot more, and the sound guy doesn’t have to figure out how to EQ it…you know, when you get to a place like Pitchfork, you’ve got like a fifteen minute changeover. You’re not gonna get a proper soundcheck…so it’s one way to like, kind of, just take a lot of the guesswork out of it. I didn’t know that when I stared doing it. I just started doing it because I thought it sounded a lot like Captain Beefheart [laughs]. Street: Did you deaden the drums in the same way on the album? Or is that just a… PH: Yeah, yeah. The recording’s the same, yeah. Street: How did you approach arranging the songs from the debut album to play live? PH: [ . . . ] People just started to play what they imagined was the song, like someone singing a song they only know part of the lyrics to, you know? Because even Luke doesn’t even know what some of that stuff is anymore, because it was just was so fast when he made it. So a lot of it was just trying to make something sound like that first record, and the stuff we play live is definitely the more ‘song’ songs from the record. I think its regrettable that people sort of distinguish between what they call the songs and what they call the ambience. And definitely, we don’t play any ambient tracks. We play “Tunnelvision,” we play “Fangela,” we play “Only Pieces” and those definitely have strong melodies and pretty decipherable rhythmic things happening. So it’s just kind of honoring the integrity of the song, and we were excited about it in the first place. Street: One last question. When the band whispers in the background of “Collector,” what are you all saying? I’ve been wondering about that for the past several months. PH: [Laughs] Well, I guess I can tell you this. It’s a combination of “If you see something shiny, pick it up.” And we all say it in different patterns. Some people just say “Pick it up, shiny, pick it up.” Some people say the whole phrase, and then other people alternate with “If you see something shiny,” “If you see something shiny pick it,” “If you see something shiny pick it up.” And that’s how you get everything to start swirling. Like when we recorded that on the record, Luke and I did doubles of that with each other that were just, like, as many combinations of that phrase that we could come up with. In different harmonies. And then the girls [Keyboardist Kristina Lieberson and bassist Jennifer Turner] do their version of that. And then Mike [guitarist Michael Bloch] does his. And then that’s how we do it at the show.

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