The Zenith City’s got a friend in Mages

Move over, Wilco, there’s another honorary Duluth band on the horizon.

Even though Mages is only a couple of years old, the organically inclined Minnesota/Wisconsin group has already played a number of shows up here in our beloved city — including one with the Sub Pop-signed Retribution Gospel Choir.

“We just love Duluth; I guess that’s our tie to Duluth,” joked the group’s polite-as-can-be female voice, Amy O’Connor. “We love to make the trek and play up there.”

The singer/guitarist, who calls the Eau Claire area home, said our area’s “appetite for music” is what initially drew the group — whose other members operate in and around the Twin Cities — to Duluth.

Mages co-founder Tyler Martin concurred.

“Duluth is such a great town, and Mages have always had a good time there,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Everyone is so consistently wonderful. We hope to make it a bit of a second home.”

But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s take a look at how this group came to be: Approximately 358 miles away in Beaver Bay, Wis., Amy and her brother John Paul (Jack) O’Connor befriended Tyler Martin.

Tyler and John Paul, who is two years older than his sister, started writing music and playing together as teenagers. They would later record under two names, Nsp (or North Star Poets) and Wordsworth, and bid farewell to America’s Dairyland in favor of Saint Paul’s McNally Smith College of Music.

Amy, who graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, slowly began working with Nsp.

“I just started throwing harmonies on top of songs that I had heard, and that transitioned into hopping up onstage if I was at a show, which transitioned into me being at every show,” she said. “They had already written the album and I kind of tagged onto that.”

That second Nsp album, which would become Mages’ self-titled debut following a name change, also features the talents of drummer Rob Goswitz and bassist Scott Barden.

“He plays an upright bass, which adds quite a bit to the sound,” Amy noted.

The younger O’Connor, who lovingly refers to her bandmates as “the boys,” continued by saying that the new lineup is currently recording a vinyl-only EP.

“Now that we’re recording new stuff, it’s more of a group effort,” she said. “It’s more of a collaboration because we’re all putting our ideas into it from the get-go, rather than coming into written songs.”

Despite all the new players, the material put out by Nsp and Wordsworth isn’t necessarily gone for good. Amy said the group is revisiting some of the older tracks that “didn’t go too much past being recorded.” In fact, the new Mages EP will feature a rendition of Nsp’s “Serotonin Sails.”

“The song is just completely different,” she said. “I mean, it’s the same structure, it’s the same song, but if you listen to the Nsp version and what we’re going to release as Mages, the sound is very fleshed out.

“There’s just a lot more going on in the sound, which I think has been a theme, obviously, since the band grew.”

But, given the group’s hodgepodge nature (Amy’s words), how well do they work together under pressure? Perhaps to find out for themselves, the five members of Mages descended upon Amy’s alma mater for its 24 Hour Project, held recently at Riverside Theatre.

It is an intense, dive-in-or-go-home flurry of creativity, where themes are handed out one night and, by the next night, participants are expected to have something to perform.

“So, Friday to Saturday, we all got together and wrote a piece together,” Amy explained, “and it turned out really well. I think that was a shot in the arm for us, to think that we could get together in such a short amount of time, communicate effectively with each other, feel open to share ideas with each other and really create something to be proud of.

“… We’re still kind of growing as the outfit that we are now, and seeing what that means for us. That was huge for us, to know that we could pull something together as a group in that short amount of time.”

All this and, lest you forget, Amy and Jack are siblings.

“It’s like working with a brother,” she joked. “It’s fun. It really is. We’ve always written music together, and played music together, ever since we were very, very little kids. It just continues to follow that vein.”

Despite the occasional “sibling spat,” Amy credits Mages’ from-the-get-go cohesiveness to the fact that music runs through each member’s blood.

“Through our entire lives, the common thread is that we’ve all always been involved with music, in one way or another,” Amy said. “The boys were in high school band, and I was in high school choir. And, as children, we were all involved in music and had very musical households.”

The O’Connors, in particular, seemed destined to make music professionally.

“My mom played guitar and sang, and my dad is very, very into music as well,” Amy said. “There was always music playing at our house. It was always something that was presented as maybe a favored hobby.

“We benefited from that certainly … and we did a lot of singing, and [our mother] encouraged us to write music as well.”

NEWS TO USE
Mages will return to Duluth with a free show (or two) July 23 at Fitger’s Brewhouse. Can’t wait that long? The group has a number of Eau Claire dates at www.magesmusic.com.

Tags: arts and entertainment, eau claire, amy oconnor, north star poets, tyler martin, beaver dam, 24 hour project, pizza luce, beaners central, retribution gospel choir, budge a and e, duluth, budgeteer, music, mages, organic, nsp, wordsworth, music, wisconsin, uwec, brewhouse