Exposed Vocals just caught an exclusive interview with ‘Magazine Gap’

Exposed Vocals: So tell us your story. Where did you all grow up? What made you decide to become artists?

Magazine Gap – James and Alex grew up in Hong Kong, but moved to London as teenagers. Cookie is a born and bred Londoner. For James, it was being first inspired by the songs of Bob Dylan mixed with great exposure to wide range of music. For Alex, it was a natural gravitation to a profession that requires creativity and making a living from a passion. For Cookie, it was growing up surrounded by creative and successful musicians in the family and it was natural to embrace it for life.

Exposed Vocals: How did you come up with that name? What was your inspiration behind it?

Magazine Gap – It’s a main road in Hong Kong that runs up from an area called the Mid-Levels to the Peak, so seemed like a fun name to use given where Alex and James grew up.

Exposed Vocals: What do you think about online music sharing? Do you ever give your music away for free? Why?

Magazine Gap – Sharing music is critical to do and fun, though not immediately rewarding in a financial sense! Downside is having to cut through all the noise, but there are always ways. Yes, we’ve given a lot of material away – our World Tour EP (six songs from shows across Europe, America and Asia) is free to anyone who joins our mailing list. And last year we gave away one of our singles, Body Language.

Exposed Vocals: Since everyone was a start-up once, can you give any smaller or local bands or artists looking to get gigs and airplay some tips?

Magazine Gap – Only put out the best quality material you can; people will connect with great songs, but also strong production, and that’s critical to establishing quality-control for your product and brand.

Exposed Vocals: Where do you usually gather song writing inspiration? What is your usual song writing process?

Magazine Gap – At the moment the three of us get together and play around with lots of ideas (licks, grooves, melodies, chord progressions) until we hit upon something different and exciting that we haven’t done before. Our starting point has to be challenging ourselves to raise our game ever more and not repeat what we’ve done already. No point writing the same song again! Then we spend a long time on carefully building up the track (verses, choruses, middle 8, intro, outro, length, bpm, dynamics etc). Lyrics come last and can often take longer! We are not a band that writes a song in 15 minutes!

Exposed Vocals: Do you have a band website? What online platforms do you use to share your music?

Magazine Gap – Yes, www.magazinegap.com is our own website. We are also across social media, including Facebook, YouTube, SoundCloud, Twitter and Instagram.

Exposed Vocals: If you were given half a million dollars and a year off, what would you do? How would you spend it?

Magazine Gap – Good question! We would write and record another album, we’d travel the world performing, we’d make music videos for all our tracks, and we’d put a serious marketing campaign behind what we do. In essence, we would cover all the ground we could!

Exposed Vocals: How do you find ways to promote your music? What works best for you?

Magazine Gap – Having poured so much into both the writing and recording of songs, we then put a huge amount of time into music videos (aside from the concept and the filming, the editing on them alone takes weeks if not months). As such, we particularly like YouTube. More recently, we’ve enjoyed posting on Instagram; that’s a very cool platform. Otherwise, Facebook remains the most interactive site for us.

Exposed Vocals: So, what’s next? Any new upcoming projects that you want to talk about?

Magazine Gap – We are currently finishing off the album. We have nine songs already completed (fully mastered – two of which are yet to be unveiled), so will be recording and releasing the final songs later this year. Might be another EP released in the meantime to contrast our pop-soul-funk release “Calling Card EP” in November 2016.

Exposed Vocals: If you weren’t making music, what would you be doing?

Magazine Gap – Another interesting question! Brian would likely be a house builder and interior designer, James a theatre / film director and Alex a graphic novelist.

Exposed Vocals: How do you juggle the rest of your responsibilities while trying to stay ahead in your music life?

Magazine Gap – Discipline; it’s the only way. Finding specific times of the day and of the week to focus exclusively on writing and working on social media.

Exposed Vocals: What should fans look forward to in 2017?

Magazine Gap – We’ve just released a new single, In Two Minds, and will be following that up with another single in a few months. Plus the rest of the album still to be unveiled!