Peach Pit Stay Fresh

Neil Smith couldn’t articulate what drew him to the magpies right away, but as black and blue feathers surged over the Australian sky—where his project Peach Pit was completing a leg of their 2023 tour—he felt struck with inspiration. “I just wrote ‘magpie’ in my phone and thought, ‘That would be a cool song title,’” the vocalist explains. “That’s usually how it works for me.” Smith didn’t learn the folkloric significance of the bird until he returned home to Vancouver and stumbled upon an old nursery rhyme, “One for Sorrow.” As the poem goes, spotting one magpie in the sky is a horrible harbinger, two bring joy and three means a baby girl is on the way. The list goes on, each numeric denomination indicating a different outcome, proving to the songwriter that seeing these animals wasn’t just a random discovery—they were a sign. “I liked the fact that the birds weren’t necessarily good or bad,” he says. “They could mean different things, different omens.”

Similar to its namesake mascot, Peach Pit’s fourth album Magpie is an assortment of wavering dispositions—ranging from sweet revels in romance to anxious, predictive what-could-have-beens. Throughout the band’s discography, Smith has crafted auto-fictional characters based on people he’s encountered, but he wanted to break away from that narrative this time around—creating the out-of-control Magpie, who embarks on a dark, dead-end path Smith feels his life would have gone down had he not gotten sober.

Smith, who is 31 now, was 25 when he decided to quit drinking—a choice he regards as the “best thing that’s ever happened” to him. Magpie’s loud surge of a title track relinquishes the corruptive behaviors he feels he would have indulged in if he didn’t stop. It’s told by a version of himself he’s thankful doesn’t exist—one that frequents strip clubs during boozy benders, chasing a high that will never come. “We ain’t gonna get you outta here,” Magpie hears the bartenders saying, for the only person who can save this theoretical caricature is himself. “It’s completely free, because you don’t have anything that’s keeping you in some sort of a cage as far as what you’re writing about,” Smith says, regarding the creation of Magpie. “It also can be difficult, because when you don’t have real guidelines it’s more challenging.”

Smith is drawn to writing about the things that catch his eye, hence his immediate musical attraction to the magpie flock. He brings up “Shampoo Bottles” from Peach Pit’s second album You and Your Friends as an earlier example, a song he wrote while looking into the bathroom at the shampoo bottles his ex-girlfriend left behind. “I was just writing about what was in front of me,” he admits. “I tried a bit harder to escape that habit, writing these basically true stories and turning them into songs, because I wanted to have songs on the record that were conjured up out of an abstract idea.”

The songs off Magpie have the same light and breezy feel of early Peach Pit records, tapping into the band’s everlasting groove and easygoing, indie spirit. Smith’s reverberating and tender voice still possesses a captivating, innocent longing, which stitches together the more heart-worn and bubbly tracks like “Am I Your Girl.” But this time, there’s a quiet thread of maturity that trails throughout the album, one that came naturally as the band grew up. Songs like “Little Dive” mark a stray from young, unfiltered hedonism and shift the lens to thinking about the long term effects of it all. “Maybe for a moment you could notice how you feel just dandy,” Smith sings, acknowledging the draw of temporary pleasures, but doesn’t bite. “Let it rock, or just crash it away.” “There’s less breakup songs on this album than we’ve had in the past,” he reflects. “Now that we’re getting a little bit older and more mature in our relationships, those kinds of songs aren’t there as much.”

Smith doesn’t deny that there’s still some romance tunes present in Peach Pit’s rolodex; he is getting married next year, which was a huge musical influence in itself, but he found that these love songs have a different ring to them. “They’re less about heartbreak and more about finding that sort of love that feels constant,” he explains. During the songwriting process, Smith found himself listening to the Beatles and their members’ solo discographies, along with Leonard Cohen—artists who are staples in his music taste, as he admits that he is in an eternal classic rock phase. He also is really into the Philly indie-psych band SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE; he references how “1/500” off of their latest album, YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING, was on his “On Repeat” playlist this month. There are subdued allusions to psych-rock textures on Magpie, heard in the unraveling jam-ending of “St. Mark’s Funny Feeling” and mirroring Smith’s desire to turn the album’s sound into a blend of all the band likes to listen to.

While they didn’t necessarily inspire the album sonically, sharing a bill with folk rockers Big Thief last year at Omaha’s Maha Festival taught Smith about the type of live show he wants to incorporate with the band moving forward. “It just felt really special,” he recalls. “When I saw them, it felt like they were just five musicians who were really connected, playing music together. Every time we play shows now, I think about what it was like to see them play like that, because I want to try to be in the moment more when we’re on stage, focusing on believing in our music.”

With Magpie, Smith wanted to write songs that would be exciting to play live, something he longed for while writing music during the pandemic. From 2 to 3, the Peach Pit album that came out in 2022, was written and recorded during the Zoom era; Smith penned the songs on his couch alone, and the album was engineered remotely by Robbie Lackritz, from his basement studio in Toronto. The band reconvened in Vancouver, and Lackritz ran a nifty program called Audio Movers so he could seamlessly tinker with the tracks from across the country. The band found that this method worked well enough, and they wanted to continue with this remote recording process post-pandemic when approaching Magpie. Something Smith did want to approach differently was the overall tempo and feel of the project. “I would say that the COVID experience impacted us in the way that we wrote a lot of down tempo, slow jams,” he says. “When we went away on tour, we realized that we missed playing a heavier rock set. There’s lots of songs that I think are going to be really cool for the purpose of a live show.”

Magpie is chock full of crisp and riffy moments that are bound to pop into color on stage, from the melodious drum-taps of “Wax & Wane” to the folky-yet-peppy undertones of “Outta Here.” Still, the album is enchanting in the way that it warps at times, inducing a profound darkness as Smith battles through struggles with communication and what it means to have an identity without love. “What good is anyone, honey, without being yours?” he asks on “St. Mark’s Funny Feeling,” his journey manifesting in iPhone screens, pale wind gusts and pregnant pauses. He allows himself to branch out further in the notes he hits; there’s a new surge of life that courses through them, as he breaches against the isolation.

During a Reddit AMA two years ago, a user asked Smith to describe the meaning of “Peach Pit,” one of the band’s breakout tracks from their very first EP. In short, he called the image of the rotting fruit “a metaphor for how things have changed over time.” Looking back on where the band was at that time, a unit of twenty-something roommates-slash-best-friends doing music as a sort of hobby, Smith miraculously still feels like nothing—fundamentally-speaking—has changed. Among aging, life shifts and serious romances surging and falling away, Peach Pit will never rot or brown, even as it’s stood against the oxidation of time—remaining as ripe as it was when first grown. “Our secret sauce that we have is that we’re just friends playing music together,” Smith reasons. “When people come to our shows, I hope they can tell that we’re just having a good time.”