ifitbeyourwill Podcast #181 • Magic Castles

On this episode of ifitbeyourwill Podcast Jason Edmonds of Magic Castles joins us for a conversation that begins in a basement record collection filled with psychedelic treasures and winds its way to Realized, the band's latest album. Along the way, we talk about the enduring pull of 60s psych, building a musical universe outside the spotlight, recording in Minnesota, and why Magic Castles continue to make music that feels less like a collection of songs and more like a place to disappear into. A thoughtful, cosmic conversation with one of modern psych's most quietly compelling voices.

Transcript

welcome back to another episode of if it be your will podcast today we're going down a nice dreamy trippy road together and we have this beautiful magic castles that's going to accompany us as we go through
going down a nice dreamy trippy road together and we have this beautiful magic castles that's going to accompany us as we go through I have Jason Edmonds from the Magic Castles band is his band. And he's coming in from the Twin Cities down in the USA. Hello. Hey. And Magic Castles is, if you haven't heard them, you should have. Now you do. Super dreamlike psychedelic music. I mean, it has this blend of old and new kind of merged together and it's a great record to listen to from top to finish. Even those late nights, tonight were Friday night, so I'm going to throw this on after this podcast late and just trip out to it because it really can do that for you. Jason, thanks so much. I know that we're busy people and... I know you're a busy man, so thanks for carving out a little bit of time to talk about your amazing band. Oh, and a record that just came out, Realized, came out April 24th of this year. Outstanding record. Go and check it out. It's on Bandcamp. We even have LPs, and they're orange, guys. Neon orange.

SPEAKER_01
So check it out. Jason, it's a point that you're here. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00
I like to start these off a little bit, Jason, with kind of a hop down memory lane a little bit to kind of situate where music started for you. What are some of those early recollections or salient moments that kind of solidified music as something that was going to be something you would do? Well,

SPEAKER_01
yeah, I mean, I definitely like my dad's record collection.

SPEAKER_00
um was a big influence on me and and he didn't have them out they were like down in the basement you know in in this box and you'd have to dig around you know you're like looking for something else and you come across this box of old records and and he had a lot of psychedelic records in there and so it just kind of gravitated towards the album art um i remember dream steel wheels album art

SPEAKER_01
big influence on me and and he didn't have them out they were like down in the basement you know in in this box and you'd have to dig around you know you're like looking for something else and you come

SPEAKER_00
know you're

SPEAKER_01
across this box of old records and and he had a lot of psychedelic records in there and so it just kind of gravitated towards the album art um i remember dream steel wheels album art it's pretty wild psychedelic and he had santana too some of those are pretty weird uh cool you know interesting designs and stuff so yeah the rolling stones their satanic majesty's request i remember pulling that out and it had the holographic cover uh and and when and And he still had a turntable, so we would ask, like, can we listen to some of these and listen to those?

SPEAKER_00
of these and listen to those?

SPEAKER_01
But, yeah, maybe it was, like, junior high somewhere. I discovered Pink Floyd. My older brother showed me The Wall. But we had, like, limited TV time. My mom wanted to watch, like, Anne of Green Gables or something. And so we had to like fast forward through most of the movie, but we, but, but I remember the, the animation sequences in, in the wall really blew my mind. And I was just like, you know, you can't, that was my introduction to Pink Floyd. And, and I, and I was like maybe 12 or 10, 10 or 12. Right. And like, I was at Pomida, which is a little, kind of like a Kmart. I don't know if you have them where you are, but sort of like what is now Walmart, but back in the 80s or whatever. I bought a cassette and it was Pink Floyd relics. And so that starts out with like all the Sid Barrett era. And I was expecting it to be like the wall because I just saw the wall. Anyway, Pink Floyd and the Beatles and their... Their weird music they made is definitely a big influence on me when I was a kid, for sure. And kind of before grunge happened, you know. Great.

SPEAKER_00
Super good foundation for, I mean, you get this music that you create. Jason, when did instruments come into the mix? When did you start to?

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I was in band. I played saxophone. I didn't actually play all through high school. I started playing after high school when I was in college.

SPEAKER_00
playing after high school when

SPEAKER_01
I was in college. So like a teenager, late teenager, 18, 19 years old, and started playing. By that point, I was like heavily in the Spaceman 3 and spiritualized and spectrum and low and minimal music and had friends in college that were big music collectors. And so we would go to their... I remember being in their dorm room and making mixtapes or tapes, dubbing every Stereolab album they had. And every time you go back, there's another new one that you're like, wait, what? How many albums does Stereolab actually have? Endless, endless. Right. And that was all happening kind of before I even really took off with playing music. So I was a big music fan. and just was immersed in it and of course it was like a dream of mine to do it like i eventually i just loved it so much that i wanted to be the one up there doing it yeah and then and then you know i started playing piano and keyboards first because i didn't really know anything about guitar until i so i'm self -taught completely yeah long story short i had no no formal training at all um but I can play pretty fluidly now with guitar or piano. I'm a little bit better of a piano player just because I've been playing longer.

SPEAKER_00
Okay. But yeah. Did it come natural to you playing guitar? Or was it a struggle to get what you wanted to do down? I'm not a shredder because I didn't do that.

SPEAKER_01
you wanted to do down? I'm not a shredder because I didn't do that. I didn't grow up that way. So I didn't learn all the Kurt Hammond dive bombs.

SPEAKER_00
learn all the Kurt Hammond dive

SPEAKER_01
bombs. or you know what i mean i didn't i just didn't i wasn't a big metal head although i did go through a phase where i was i you know whatever but but i didn't learn guitar that way and i actually learned i i started like writing songs as soon as i started figuring out how to learn guitar and so but i had a i had a roommate who taught me how to change the strings and how to tune it and i had i bought

SPEAKER_01
it's kind of hard you know and you just build the calluses and i fell in love with guitar really though it's like when i started um learning and i had kind of a sense of piano and scales and a bit of music theory that i had learned just on the fly with piano and and once you start to understand how that works with guitar it made guitar so fascinating and that I got way into it and taught myself how to, I had a chord book, literally just taught myself the chords with the, the, you know, and I would get melodies in my head and, and sing them. What I, what I started writing songs and I didn't really know how to play. It's so weird that it's out, but this was, I was pretty young still, but I would, um, sing the note into guitar tuning pedal. with like I'd plug a microphone that I got at a garage sale like straight into the pedal sing into it it would tell me what note it was you know so like that's a G or whatever and then I'd be like look in my chord book and be like ah that's a G and then like yeah I mean this is how I very we're talking about the very beginning that's amazing I love that but then you just practice until you just you know what I mean have it all yeah yeah And like,

SPEAKER_00
like, yeah, I mean, but getting your ear tuned to like what a G sounds like and an E sounds like and a B minor and like, it's cool that you're using your voice to, you know, when you were first starting to find that stuff out. I mean, pretty fascinating.

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, kind of because I didn't know any other way to really, what is this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Because I didn't have a piano at that time that was in tune or whatever.

SPEAKER_00
in tune or whatever. And Jason, how? How did you come to the sound of Magic Castles? Like, what was it that you were aiming for when you started writing songs that were going to be under that name?

SPEAKER_01
Well, yeah, so I was in, ended up being in a band for a while that was kind of a 90s sort of minimalistic, moody, you know, kind of based on the music I kind of described, you know, kind of shoegazy, I guess, a little bit. But nobody really in the band wanted to sing. And so, and I had,

SPEAKER_00
yeah, so basically I kind of like quit that band and took my stuff home and just started recording songs on a four -track cassette.

SPEAKER_01
I kind of like quit that band and took my stuff home and just started recording songs on a four -track cassette. And it was really folky beginning because, partially because it was like mostly acoustic guitar on a four -track at home, you know, it was like definitely.

SPEAKER_01
And I wanted to do like kind of psych folk stuff that I felt was lacking from the Twin Cities music scene at the time. It was like early 2000s. And, you know, I wasn't,

SPEAKER_01
I don't know, there just wasn't a lot of that in town. And I wanted to do more like chill, folky stuff. But then it like kind of turns more rock and roll almost immediately. As I put a band together, but I had first recorded a bunch of songs on a four track cassette and played them for some friends. And they were like, you know, this, these are like good songs. Like we should play them. I'll, I'll drum like,

SPEAKER_00
and they, and they, and I was like, really you would. And they're like, yeah.

SPEAKER_01
I'm like, cool. Like here's a tambourine. And like, you know what I mean? Right. And so like we, that's, it just kind of felt, I went on a camping trip to Lake of the woods. you know on the border and uh with an old friend from high school who i used to play music with who who became the first magic house's bass player and so it was like just kind of like randomly like oh yeah well i've wrote these songs i'm kind of like thinking about playing them with the with as a band live you know and so it kind of started that like that and and just has grown from there and were the songs always like

SPEAKER_00
were the songs always like So you've put out two full -length records, right? You put one out in 2025 also called The Lore of Mystic Horror.

SPEAKER_01
That's the first record reissued. Okay. So that originally was 2008. Okay. A TDR that I made, the very first record. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00
So, like, there's, I mean, you've been doing Magic Castles for a while now. It's not like, this is not just, like, coming on people's radar now. You've been a part of the comic for a while. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, a little bit of a burnout maybe. No, I've been around for a while, for sure. And just kind of like operating on a total DIY level. Like I've never had any... Well, I mean, Anton Newcomb from Brian Jones on Massacre came across the music in 2010 -ish and emailed me out of the blue and we started releasing records on his label. But even with him, I never had a contract with him. And no big backing in terms of, you know, big support. I mean, they were obviously huge backers for me, though, in terms of getting the music out there. Absolutely. So yeah,

SPEAKER_00
he kind of got me my big break, I suppose. That's Fuzz Club, right? That's his label, right?

SPEAKER_01
No, no, no. His label is A Recordings. Okay. Like A for Anton. Okay. And I released... like four albums on that label from so it was like the first one was in 2012 we did a compilation of the early stuff so yeah by the time anton came across me i'd already done three albums like on my own and so then and i thought like when he first messaged me i was like so do you want to reissue lore of mystic or the one that just came up you know and he was like actually i want to do like some songs off all three and and i was like okay and like which ones and he's like i don't know you pick and and i didn't i don't know if i picked the right songs it was hard you know because there's like okay there's three albums which songs do you want on it and we ended up doing a double double lp and it did okay you know and and so then we did we did another one in 2014 and another was in 2015.

SPEAKER_00
2014 and another was in 2015.

SPEAKER_01
And then Sunrain in 2021 or 20. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00
So there was a bit of a gap there between Starflower and Sunrain. Still an extensive catalog that you have, Jason, that you've been crafting on your own. Well, I won't say on your own, but doing it yourself to a large extent, right?

SPEAKER_01
Yeah. I mean, and I have with the community of musicians here that I work with, you know, and engineers. but yeah, like a small group of people in, in, I'm the, it doesn't happen unless I like get out of bed and being a shit or whatever.

SPEAKER_00
Right. But there, but there, yeah, but there are a lot of people involved that I,

SPEAKER_01
involved that I, you know, I'm, I'm collaborating with the Neil Weir, the engineer has done the last like bunch of albums. And so it's, I, I try and keep it to the same. It's all the same people kind of the whole time. Same. 20 of us who wrote our game. 12 of them. I mean, there's different band members that have come and gone. So that's obviously a huge change.

SPEAKER_00
Jason, what's it like to be doing this? You know, like you are the one that has to get out of bed to make this magic happen. Magic castles happen, I'll say. What's that process like for you? Like, do you like the process of going through a... you have a collection of songs that you build over time. You go into the studio, you get meticulous about it, recording this and that. And then all this promo stuff and then shows. And like, how do you, and you work full time, right? Like it's like, and I'm a father. I have children. There you go. And on and on and on. Like, and your dedication to your music has been, you know, consistent throughout the years. How do you keep going when it's like always on your shoulders?

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely gets to be kind of just a way of life or a routine or something, you know? I have a studio that I share with friends. More stuff is recorded, and there's a bunch of maps all over the room, so we call it the map room. And, you know, my friend Zach is a sound engineer and has the place completely outfitted with... microphones and and and um so i can go in and open up a pro tools template and hit record and move from station to station i'll put a drum track down and play the bass part to it and then play the guitar part to it and and i just hang out in there by myself and do this and this is my like good time but

SPEAKER_01
I'm very introverted in that way, you know? And sometimes we'll record, you know, and I'm also in a band with the other guys in the space. So, like, I have a completely different band than I play with them. So I just love playing music and instead of, but I don't know hardly anything about, like, current movies because I never watch movies. So I have my blind spots, you know, it's like, I'm always in the studio doing that stuff, doing music stuff. But then I'm like, I haven't seen any horror movie in the last 10 years. I feel like, and I'm like so clueless when people are talking about directors and movies and I don't know. Yeah. So, but it's a different story when you talk about music. Cause I mean,

SPEAKER_00
it's a different story when you talk about music. Cause I mean, I'm sure you write music quite often.

SPEAKER_01
yeah yeah yeah for sure and i've in in just all my life i've been waiting to that and and and i just i i have a piano at home and i sit down and play piano and i'm at home and and so it might i just i don't know you know there are times when i go and i just bang my head on the desk and i'm like what am i doing you know and and it's it's okay to be like that too to have but yeah in general i tend to work in like batches of songs so i'll have like 10 songs i'm working on or something all kind of simultaneously and then and then i'll go through periods where like i don't have an idea and it gets kind of scary where you're like uh don't feel inspired right now or something you know but it comes through yeah totally and

SPEAKER_00
totally and Let's talk about the latest release. So Realize came out just in April. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01
How do you... This one's on Fuzz Club.

SPEAKER_00
one's on Fuzz Club. Fuzz Club. Okay. Yeah. There we go. So that's where it was, my reference was coming from. How do you see this? Like, how do you feel about this record now that it's been out for a while? And are people receiving it the way that you had hoped?

SPEAKER_01
Yeah. I mean, I'm excited to have it out. it feels really good to finish a big project like this i had fun with i had to do like visualizers for the singles and i hired a really old friend of mine to make music videos for the singles and he he chopped up like public domain but film that's in the public domain into like a new kind of video collage for the songs and and

SPEAKER_00
had fun with i had to do like visualizers for the singles and i

SPEAKER_01
hired a really old friend of mine to make music videos for the singles and he he chopped up like public domain but film that's in the public domain into like a new kind of video collage for the songs and and Yeah, and it was fun to see that. And so it's kind of a fun process as it happens. And, you know, I feel kind of mystified by the whole process myself of just like kind of watching it happen as much as everyone else. And also being in the center of it. But I think as far as reception, people have said they really like it and that the vinyl looks gorgeous. Jake. My friend Jake Luck did the album art and it sounds really good and looks good. So I, I'm, I'm pleased. Cool.

SPEAKER_00
And what is the, the, so you released it and like, what is the rest of this year? Look out for a magic castles. Like what, is there anything that you can tell us about touring wise or new stuff down the pipe or anything like that? I mean,

SPEAKER_01
I I'm open to it, but. Right now, I don't have anything scheduled for a tour the rest of this year. And the way things are with, like, the economy and everything,

SPEAKER_00
everything, it's just absolutely bonkers.

SPEAKER_01
just absolutely bonkers. But you never know. You never know. You have to keep, you know, stay limber. Absolutely. You never know.

SPEAKER_00
never know. Maybe gas prices will plummet. Who knows? Right. I mean, right now, it's pretty bad. Yeah. I mean, going on the road touring is just not, you're making no money. You're probably losing money doing it, right? Well, it's just that there's not as much cash involved as there used to be.

SPEAKER_01
not as much cash involved as there used to be. It's more, it's kind of like, I feel like it is like a credit card game now or something,

SPEAKER_00
like a credit card game now or something, you know,

SPEAKER_01
as long as you got credit cards, you can be just fine. But it's like without those, it's kind of a challenge. So it's just like getting your ducks in a row and being able to do it. Right now, like, you know, I don't have a U .S. booking agent to help me with that. And even if I did, I'm not sure if I could get people to come out in a room, you know. I'm playing Cincinnati on a Tuesday.

SPEAKER_01
When I can do that, I'll know. It's like, okay, I'm playing in the rooms full.

SPEAKER_00
yeah it's so i don't know or enjoyable right yeah for sure i mean it's your friends yeah totally totally and you never know you know what times the way they are it's you know it's dicey out there so everybody has to deal with that too you know and it's just a part of the process of like we have great turnouts and rough turnouts depending on what's going on and what day it is you know how long if we've ever been there before it's like yeah yeah yeah

SPEAKER_01
for sure i mean it's your friends yeah totally totally and you never know you know what times the way they are it's you know it's dicey out there so everybody has to deal with that too you know and it's just a part of the process of like we have great turnouts and rough turnouts depending on what's going on and what day it is you know how long if we've ever been there before it's like yeah

SPEAKER_00
yeah Is the recording going forward though? You're continuously writing, you're continuously going back to your, the map room too.

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I have, well, I have, I have been, and this is, you know, finally this, this album's out now. And so I can kind of move on and which feels good. I'm still kind of getting used to the idea that I can like let this one go, you know? And, and, and I'm so happy that Fuzz Club. took us on and, um, it got delayed for a minute with, um, trying to find a new home for it. Um, and so that worked out with great. Oh yeah. They've been great. They're really great. Cool. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00
Cool. Yeah. Well, it's a great record people. I'm going to just say that I want you guys to go and get it. You can get it on band camp, listen to it a couple of times and just purchase the thing. Um, the record looks amazing. And trust me, you'll love this record if you like all of those references that Jason gave at the start. They're all in there, speckled. And more. And more. So please go and check this record out. And if you see Magic Castles playing anywhere, go and check it out too. Buy a tea. Get an LP. Support these artists. Because that's how they can make this music. Through support that we can give to them.

SPEAKER_01
Jason, this has been fascinating.

SPEAKER_00
It's been such a great chat with you. I feel like we could just chat on for hours and hours. Yeah. I want to respect our time. I wish you all the best with the albums to come. This record, though, just enjoy it for a while because it's quite a record to listen to from head to toe. So I recommend that people go out there and listen to it. And all the best on the next adventure. Thank you so much, Chris. It's a real pleasure. Thanks. Yeah. Nice. Thank you,

SPEAKER_01
Thank you,

SPEAKER_00
Jason.