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h Magazine March 08

I'm posting this just in case we want to read this article later or whatever.

Deep in the maze-like brambles off of Laurel Canyon sits a nondescript house, and in front of it is a bevy of cars of all makes and models. Within this unlikely façade is a gathering of bearded Bohemians in the midst of recording the final tracks for the first album by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, a band eleven souls strong. The band itself is freshly birthed, but its leader and voice, Alex Ebert, has been around for quite some time as the frontman for Ima Robot. His musical journey has led him here, to a rootsier organic sound that promises to be a decided departure from the digital synth of Ima Robot. Upon entry into the basement studio, the gents are found in the clutter of a nearby storage room circled around a massive organ, which turns out to be a recent purchase for a hundred bucks off of glorious Craigslist.

The beat-pumping organ has programming and moog capabilities and more switches and buttons than the Millennium Falcon. More than a half dozen hands are tapping away at different keys and levers, creating a magical piece of musical wonderment that I doubt will ever be heard beyond this garage. Alex is in the midst of the grooving chaps, his beard grown long and a straw hat adorning his head. A flowing Russian hippie shirt hangs from his slender form, and he seems to have found a new contentment somewhere deep within. He looks up and nods his head, “Man, I’d love to record a whole album on this thing! It’s amazing.” And it really is.

Soon the musical improv calms down and the chaps spread out though the house, playing guitars and tuning instruments, toying with the mix board, tossing back some beers in the kitchen, and merely hanging out as the best of friends might on a weekend evening. But according to Alex, this has been going on every night for the past six months, “We take a couple days off here and there, but I look forward to coming over here every single day. I’ll come over early just to hang, and we mostly just hang out. We barely record. Six out of eight hours we’ll just be laughing and bullshitting.”

We grab some beers from the kitchen as music and laughter echo through the house, and it seems like the perfect realm to create some golden tracks. I ask Alex where this all began for him, not just this new amalgamation, but music in general. “My first recording was at the age of seven, I got really into rap, and I was basically only into hip hop save for one Huey Lewis and the News cassette (laughs). Run DMC was huge for me. I memorized everything off Raising Hell. In 5th grade, I got turned onto N.W.A. and started my own hardcore rap group (laughs) called Ka-Bang! It was violent, totally violent. It was basically me and these two guys and one of those keyboards that makes a beat. My name was Alley Cat Ebert, A.C.E, that was my name because my mom called me Alley Cat. Even that had some irony in it, it sounded kinda hard, but when you broke it down it was really a softy name.”

At the same time, Alex was delving into the world of instrument tinkering. “Piano was my first instrument. My piano teacher thought I was a girl for an entire year, I have no idea why, but I was so embarrassed I never corrected him. He would refer to me, 'She’s doing very well,' and my mom never even corrected him either (laughs). Then there was the sax.” Alex also took a lot of musical inspiration from his dad. “He’s one of the most musically savvy people I know, he was really into classical and Patsy Cline and Paul Simon’s Graceland. All of that left a big impression on me. He was also really into Vangelis, and I love Vangelis. He’s done all those scores for movies (Chariots of Fire, Blade Runner) but he also put out these albums like Oceanic and Antartica and they’re all theme based albums, really over-the-top dramatic synthesized classical music. When I was a kid we’d go on these long road trips for a month in the summer, up the West Coast into Calgary then down through Wyoming and Montana and Colorado, stopping everywhere in this big van he’d had specially made for road trips. To take showers, my dad had this amazing trick, he’d roll up to motels at noon, check-out time, and he’d wait for the people to leave and a lot of times the doors would be left open, and we’d all go in and take showers (laughs) and then bounce. But being in the van amongst this amazing scenery listening to that kind of music, watching these gigantic mountains pass by with the music enhancing the experience that much more, it was borderline traumatic, but a euphoric experience I had with music early on that really affected me. Like, I learned about death, no one had told me the whole thing about death, but my dad was playing music and I just kind of had a realization about it. I’ve had a big relationship with music in terms of information. It was about how the music was making me feel at that moment, which is probably why I ended up becoming a singer and writing songs."

Even so, Alex abandoned music for a period of time from age 16 until he came back from college, having decided to focus on filmmaking for a period of time. But his sabbatical was short lived. “When I came back from college in ‘97, I got a hold of a friend and I had this idea to sing over hip hop beats, but with acoustic guitar and more organic elements. I was so embarrassed of my voice; I’m still real self conscious about it. Lately, I think my voice has really changed into something that I can really feel in a real way, only in the last month or two. I don’t know if there’s a whole transformation taking place, but there’s something going on definitely. I think it’s the whole Edward Sharpe thing, this whole sea change that’s really affected my insides.”

After years fronting local favorite and nationwide sensation Ima Robot, Alex felt as if he’d strayed from an inner truth. “I had lost contact with my instincts for about three years, which is pretty bad. Dealing with major labels with Ima Robot really left a bad taste in my mouth and I sorta associated Ima Robot with that bad time and I had to take some sort of conscious action and write songs in a way that wasn’t for someone else, a label or a radio station. After feeling kind of like a fucking…well, a robot basically (laughs), I decided to remember back to when I was younger and the things that I wanted as a kid, my ideals, and I had to follow that blindly and hope that it was right. It entailed me moving into a tiny studio right next to the Vista Theater and writing, and living within very meager means, simplifying everything extremely, using my bicycle and not surrounding myself with any form of luxury. The studio was really hot, there were ants everywhere, broken windows, a blow up mattress, but it was the best fucking thing. I was listening to Donovan in heavy rotation, really heavy. I listened to Ariel Pink a lot. The transformation of that summer two years ago was the start of my big renaissance, my finally coming out of everything, my realizing myself for the first time in a way that was instinctual and matured and capable. That’s where Edward Sharpe began.”
Although Alex is still working with Ima Robot, he’s taken his recent revelations into that realm as well, “I called everyone together and said we need to really shake ourselves and come out upside down and write songs in a different way, organically, in the moment. It can be electronic, it can be all beat machines, and it is, but what we we’re doing now is fucking amazing, like back when we started out, so I think that’s where Ima Robot is headed.”
In terms of how he picks which songs belong with which band, Alex offers this, “I would say that Edward Sharpe’s more personal. It’s about emancipation from negative clutches whereas Ima Robot is often about illuminating them as opposed to getting away, it’s more like the first step, showing it for what it is.”

Many often wonder how a band name comes about, and here you will find your answer. “I was writing a novel, it was really bulky and it spun totally out of control, which is probably the problem with not having an outline at first (laughs). The character Edward Sharpe gets these jolts sent down to him from above, these twitches, and when I start talking about them I start getting them (cue twitch). I based the character on me because since I’ve been a kid I have these weird twitches. I’ve tried to find out what they are, but no one seems to know. They always come at really special moments, when the feeling is just right, I just start twitching. My whole back shoots up and my neck ends up shooting to the side (laughs). The novel involved three Edward Sharpes, all three sent down to save the world but each one keeps falling in love and blowing it. Magnetic Zeros was an element within the novel and involves a weird type of mathematics I came up with where zero can have a magnetic pull and shift the values of other numbers depending on how strong its absolute value is, kind of like a black hole of sorts. But I’m not really sure what the application is (laughs).”

Alex sits stoic, pulling on the fur draped from his chin as I ask him how he goes about writing songs for Ed Sharpe. “It’s different for all of them. I write them alone and then bring the song or a part of it into the guys, and then we write the rest. Sometimes we write them all together like the one we’re going to record tonight we more or less wrote together sitting right here at this table. And normally the music comes first, the lyrics can take awhile. What I like to do a lot is scat, just make up words, it’s just to get the melody out so that the words aren’t getting in the way. And then I write words that fit precisely into the cadence of that babble. Sometimes the subjects of songs take weeks to reveal themselves to me and the song will just stay with babble for two months and I won’t have come up with anything (laughs). And then everyone gets attached to the babble and they start to really like it and question if anything should be sung in its place. Happens every time.”

There are rumblings from below as the band preps downstairs, preparing to try to lay one to tape this very evening. “This song’s really personal, we wrote it before a good friend of ours died. I didn’t really have lyrics and then that happened and it was really obvious what the song should be about. It’s called “Om Nashi Me.” Apparently it’s Sanskrit, I didn’t know that when I was singing it, but these people told me it’s Sanskrit for ‘Oh Infinite Nakedness.’”
And as the boys enter the studio to jam it out, the instruments start up and the mix board lights up. There’s no digital recording for Ed Sharpe, they’re keeping it real by recording it straight to analogue tape. As Alex grabs his microphone, he confides. “When you’re recording it, you’re hyper aware about how well everyone’s gelling together. When you’ve got a lot of people going and a lot of different elements that could fuck up individually, and everyone’s all locked in and in Zen mode, it’s really just an exhilarating feeling. You’re like, ‘Oh my God, this is really good, I hope we can keep going! Is this going to continue?’ For me, that’s what I’m thinking when I’m singing (laughs). And the anticipation gets higher as you get towards the end of the song because you’ve just done three quarters perfect, and if you fuck up here or there just a little bit, it’s tape, so you’ve got to do the whole thing over again. It’s a blast though. We’ve gone like four days on one song.” And I wonder if this somehow kills the freshness of the song, “No, actually, we discover new things each time.”

Alex smiles and heads off into the studio, and the recording begins. The jam is immediate soul candy as Alex rattles his maracas and stomps about. The piano rumbles and the infectious guitars fall in, and it all seems too heavenly to be true. Apparently, even in this town, a man can discover his soul again.

Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros' first album is tentatively slated for a July release.