Imaginary guns don’t kill people, imaginary people kill people — Toronto trio Magneta Lane opens for Sloan at The Gateway this weekend
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Somewhere between Vienna, Virginia and Boston, Massachusetts, it’s dreary and raining. Lulled by her surroundings, Magneta Lane’s singer-guitarist, Lexi Valentine, is seconds from dozing off in the back of the band’s tour van. Until I call. A little dazed, she answers.
“I’m here. I’m awake,” she assures. Snapping herself back from the edge of slumber, her voice evens, returning to its usual inviting tones for a chat. While rain rolls down her window and small towns roll by, we talk rock ’n’ roll.
It’s an auspicious time for the Toronto trio, as Magneta Lane’s sophomore LP, Gambling With God, has finally found its way into the world on Last Gang Records — three years after its debut, a year and a half after the band started recording it and around six months after the last track was put to bed. “I don’t think we’ve ever taken so much time to actually sit and look at our music and say, ‘What do we actually want to do with this?’” Valentine says. And though the title may seem a wee bit cocky for mere mortals, it actually stems from that lengthy process of self-reflection.
“While we were saying ‘Gambling With God,’ we weren’t necessarily saying, like, the white bearded guy up in the sky,” she clarifies. “You kind of figure out, as time goes on, that you can’t get anything in return until you actually start gambling on certain things in life. At that time there were a lot of decisions that had to be made, whether it was personal decisions or what we were going to do with the direction of the album. While we were in the process of writing, it was like we were gambling with all these choices.”
Band members settled on switching labels, taking some time for themselves to balance out the work-life scales and, when it came to the actual business of music, they focused on production. They took what they had learned from previous slam-bam recording experiences into the studio, where producer John Drew helped them create a solid rock album. Fronted by the messy rumble of guitars and backed by the hazy crash of cymbals, Valentine’s deep drone is cradled in the honesty of Magneta Lane’s straightforward three-piece garage style. It suits the band — not only sonically but morally as well.
“My name comes from the Greek, meaning the ‘thunder of mankind,’” Valentine explains. “I think that’s the kind of approach I take to people — even if I don’t know them. If I ever see someone taking advantage of them it really evokes this feeling of me having to defend that person if they can’t stick up for themselves. So, because of that, I find that in a lot of lyrics I feel like I’m almost lecturing somebody about something — I’m almost telling somebody off because of that person that I saw going through that didn’t have a chance to fight for themselves.”
“The other thing is that I’m super picky about lyrics,” she continues. “My grandfather, he was a writer and he published a bunch of poetry books. The way that he used to blend words together and the imagery that he used to use… I looked at that and thought ‘You know what? If he can do this, I guess being part of the family, you have to live up to something.’ I obsess over lyrics. Even when I’m listening on the radio, I’ll be like ‘Did that guy say this? He shouldn’t have said that!’ I’m a super lyric nerd.”
Before I say goodbye and Valentine drifts back into the rainfall, it seems like the super lyric nerd deserves the last word. She pauses. “I just want people to know that we mean it and that’s it.”
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