Last Friday, I got the unique chance to see something magical: the WILD staging before the doors opened. The couches were still inflated, the grass was spotless, the Porta Potties were all in a row and the new EST medics still looked young and full of hope. I was led across the grass, down three levels into Duncker Hall, past four suspicious B&D officers and finally into the classroom in which the two members of Magic Man, Alex Caplow and Sam Lee, were eating chips and drawing on the chalkboard. As we awkwardly settled into the classroom desks for the interview, the two 25-year-old musicians looked indistinguishable from the boys that sit across from you in Chemistry lecture.

Ariel Vasser | Student Life

Magic Man, the only opener for this year’s fall WILD concert, performs on stage at Brookings Quadrangle. The band was formed by Alex Caplow and Sam Lee in France in 2009.

Student Life: So, how has the band dynamic changed since the departure of three of your band members this summer?

Sam Lee: The totalitarian dictatorship has finally taken over!

(Both of them laugh while Alex slaps Sam on the shoulder.)

Alex Caplow: No, but to be honest a lot of people ask us that. Like, “Oh, what’s the band gonna be like now that it’s a different lineup?” But the truth is, especially in the past few months, we’ve been in this writing mode, which is very similar to how we wrote the last album—just Sam and I—so it hasn’t felt too different yet. We definitely miss seeing our buddies everyday, they became our best friends—

Sam: They WERE our best friends, now they’re dead to us!

Alex: But we’re really excited to see them move on with new projects!

Sam: I think, to be honest, the band—the sort of core element—is Alex and I. We started the band and wrote all the songs, and that’s the process that works for us. We come up with the songs, come up with the arrangements and then bring in other people to help us record them and play them live. The band is obviously incredibly important and we really value the live shows—it’s one of our favorite parts of being in music. We obviously never want to go back to the first show we did which was just the two of us and a laptop.

Alex: Oh it was bad, really bad.

Sam: But in terms of the band dynamic, we’re very excited about moving forward; we love playing with new people. It’s always great to find new musicians, but obviously we miss everyone.

Alex: New musicians, new instincts, new ideas…It’s gonna be a new adventure!

Sam: Stay tuned!

SL: Speaking of, the rumors are that you are writing your third album—any validity to that?

Sam: They are not rumors, we can confirm for the first time, the exclusive here with…studs?

SL: Student Life?

Sam: Student Life! Yes, we are writing the third record. No title yet, but we have a lot of songs written, more songs already than we wrote for the other two albums combined. But we’re still writing—obviously everyone wants the next album to be incredibly special. We’re trying to capitalize on what we learned with such a rigorous touring schedule and take some of the new music we’ve been into and put all these forces together, while keeping some of that…classic Magic Man sound while evolving and maturing and making more money and also being really commercially viable while maintaining artistic integrity… (Alex laughs) But yeah, we’re excited. We’re writing the third album.

SL: Any thoughts on the band name now that it’s just two of you again? Are we going to start hearing from Magic Men soon?

Alex: Which one of us should explain?

Sam: Got it. So Magic Man was born in France, summer of 2009. Alex and I have been friends since preschool. But we went to separate colleges so we were cruelly separated for the first time since the beginning of our love story. The bromance was torn apart and then beautifully reunited in the south of France. Alex’s mother is French, so he went there a lot, and I was studying French so it seemed like a perfect opportunity: I get to practice my French, Alex got to…hang out. (A shrug and smirk from Alex) So, we traveled around the south of France and volunteered on organic farms through this program called WWOOF [World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms]. One of the farms was hosting a circus festival, which they told us about beforehand, but we thought, “Oh, it will be just like a field with a juggler in the corner and maybe a farmer’s market.” It was actually like a full-fledged circus with three or four huge tents. We were confused and very out of place—not a lot of farming took place on that one. We met this one guy, who was the stereotypical kid from the movies that shows the new guys around, like, “Here are the jugglers. Here are the fire breathers—don’t wanna mess with them!”

Alex: Which is exactly how he talked, but in French.

Sam: He was quite a character, very charming, and was basically our first friend. He was an amateur magician—not very good but very enthusiastic—and he called himself “the Magic Man” in a very charming French accent. (Alex demonstrates the accent) Just like that. And when we started writing songs, he was one of the first people we showed them to, and when we started trying to come up with band names, he just seemed appropriate.

SL: Does the France trip explain “Paris” then?

Alex: With “Paris,” it was definitely about my abroad experience living there for six months in college and the relationships I had there, falling in love with the city and then having to cut things off and leave when it was time to come back to the States. It was very disorienting, adjusting to this new Euro lifestyle and then having to switch back to your old life. So that’s what that song is about…letting go and moving on.

SL: So, why are so many of your songs named after locations?

Alex: Basically, what those places mean to us, whether they are an experience we had there or a person we know from there.

SL: What about “Catherine” then? Your only song named after a woman…

Alex: (laughing) Catherine inspired Catherine…

Sam: She’s his…pet cat!

Alex: Yes, she’s my pet cat and she’s a…very special cat. I’ll leave it at that—next question please!

SL: Well, speaking of inspirations then, what were you guys inspired by during “Beyond the Waves”?

Sam: I feel like, for me, I always go back to the first stuff I was listening to when I was first playing in bands in high school. Which was a lot of Postal Service, Arcade Fire and The Killers, for sure. It’s one of those things that when you start your first real band, you get frozen in that time. We try to listen to a lot of different stuff, but those influences are sort of at the core, because it’s where we grew up together, playing in other people’s garages.

SL: Before you go on tonight, what do you think of Wash. U.?

Alex: Your campus is beautiful. We go to a lot of schools, but this one in particular, with the open quad, the setup we’re about to play…I’m so excited. Hopefully people will show up! I think they will? I feel so lucky to get to hang out at colleges like this and get to keep one foot in—

Sam: The best years of our lives!

SL: Any good stories from those years?

Sam: Well I once surreptitiously climbed to the roof of the tallest building on our campus and there was like a big pole, like a 40-foot-tall pole, with a blinking light on the top. Presumably to warn airplanes that there’s a building there? I think at that point you have big problems already. So my buddies and I, one night, decided to climb up the pole and touch the light, which was the highest point on campus. It was really stupid. But we did it. Touched the light.

Alex: We used to climb stuff all the time in high school, too, trying to get to rooftops, trespassing—you know, bad boy stuff…in good-boy suburbia.

Sam: Good bad boys? Bad good boys?

After a final laugh at each other, Magic Man began getting ready to hit the stage as we headed back up through the maze to Brookings Quadrangle.

By the time the duo had finished its electric set, the couches had deflated like pumpkins after Halloween after most of the WILD attendees had made their way to the stage to participate in a little of the magic.