Cursive bassist makes Columbia his home
Matt Maginn balances his band, his job and his family.
Published June 11, 2008
As the door opens, the first audible sound in Matt Maginn’s two-story home is the energetic barking of two dogs. It’s not the friendly hello of the 33-year-old Cursive bassist that reaches you first, but that of Alyosha, an 8-year-old gift from Conor Oberst.
Alyosha, pedigree unknown, found her way into Maginn’s life after being rescued by the Bright Eyes front man in an alley shortly before he moved into a house with Maginn and his wife, Roslyn Fraser.
“I got a call from those two, they were hanging out and they were like, ‘Um, you got a dog now,’” Maginn says. “(Conor) lived with us for about a year and then when we got married, he always traveled anyway so he wasn’t able to keep up with the dog. So he kinda just gave her to us as a wedding present. He named her after Alyosha from — shoot, some Russian novel.”
Stories like this one can be found all over Maginn’s home where he works on the day-to-day business of Team Love Records. He wakes up early, responds to e-mails (occasionally getting a bit behind) and plays with Aly and Indiana, who according to his Wikipedia entry are not his two sociable mutts but rather his wife and daughter.
“That’s Roslyn’s fault,” Maginn says, laughing. “She did it as a joke, like three or four years ago. It was before Happy Hollow and as soon as I did any press for that record, they started asking and I was like, ‘Wow.’”
Maginn makes his way around his basement office and workroom, passing the lone bass case resting against its wall as he jokingly shows off his “very fancy” desk, comprised of a door from Lowe’s and two supporting cabinets. He does a double take at the realization that his wife’s newly purchased used Vespa, on which he has yet to take a joyride, has only 73 miles on it.
“I haven’t really been around long enough to start dicking around with things,” he says. “That’s my one problem: I travel so much that I don’t have enough time to just fool around, which I really miss.”
Maginn’s Columbia home is a clear combination of his transition between musician and family man. Framed Cursive concert posters appear throughout, and a season of “Arrested Development” sits atop the living room’s big screen TV. The expansive backyard, reached through the door in the pale yellow kitchen, has plenty of room for Aly and Indy to run wild.
After living in Omaha, Neb., all his life, Maginn moved to Columbia last August when Fraser was accepted into the PhD program in sociology at MU. Dressed in a green t-shirt tucked into olive pants with a black belt, Maginn discusses his youth with genuine gratitude for all the opportunities music has afforded him.
“I thought I would (move) my whole high school life and younger life,” Maginn says. “Then I started touring with the band right after college. I stayed in Omaha for music and then probably would have moved after college, but we were touring enough that I kind of got that desire out through that travel rather than having to move.”
His old friends are what keep Maginn balanced. Growing up in and around bands in Omaha, he has been able to surround himself with people who understand and accept his many responsibilities, and, for a man as spread out as Maginn, this kind of balance is everything.
His work with Team Love calls for, unsurprisingly, the chance to put to use the various skills he’s learned with Cursive and Saddle Creek Records. When he’s not designing one-sheets or album art for the label, he’s negotiating contracts and paying the bills.
“It’s like any small business,” Maginn says, sitting at his kitchen table. His hand gestures are reflected in the glass of the china cabinet behind him, and his black-framed glasses have a reflection of their own. “You kinda just do all small parts. I really like being able to do all kinds of things rather than just like three or four responsibilities. Both ways work, I think I’m just happier with sort of mixing it up.”
The stability of Maginn’s married life gave the constantly traveling musician from the Midwest a grounding he can appreciate for its formality and tradition.
“There’s a lot of like, tradition in the Midwest people still follow,” Maginn says. “It’s kinda like this old world and new world meeting. I definitely fall for a lot of the old world stuff, so that’s what I did - I got on a knee, took a knee.”
Besides playing the Curiosa Tour with Cursive in 2004, Maginn remains most proud of marrying seven years ago.
“Not to be a sap, but I was pretty proud when I was getting married standing on top of that stage - not stage, altar - you know, looking down, being like, ‘Holy shit,’” he says, grinning and twisting his wedding band. “It was like the end of ‘Star Wars.’”
Cursive remains a very fluid element in Maginn’s life. With members involved in other enterprises — Maginn’s label work, vocalist/guitarist Tim Kasher’s screenwriting — they have been able to remain detached enough from the band to remain interested in continuing when it comes time to record new work.
“Every year I can survive doing it I still kinda feel lucky,” Maginn says. “I see eventually having to get a real job, as I would say. But we’ll see. It’s more of do your best job and make the best of it while you can, really. It’s not like we’re planning on things falling apart. I guess it’s more to not take things for granted or presume that your music is still relevant unless you work hard at it.”
And with Cursive halfway through recording its sixth album, the situation is a steady one for the group of musicians, all of them close to the same age and at a similar place in life.
“Everybody’s goals and values are the same now,” Maginn says. “We don’t want to kill ourselves on the road right now, but we want to make good choices and make sure we’re getting out there at the right times and doing the right thing. But if one of the guys tells me that’s too much tour to do, they’re just not up for it or tired of it, then I understand.”
The self-produced and self-financed album, written since last September in spurts in part due to Maginn’s move and Kasher’s relocation to L.A., was an attempt to create what Maginn calls a “rock record” with a slower, heavier touch that Maginn says, with some hesitation, reminds him of the band’s first album, Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes. Maginn grins as he mentions the unexpected appearance of flute and soprano sax on the album.
“We’re really trying to smash the barriers of what’s acceptable,” he says.
Even more surprising is the decision to take a step back from the band’s involvement with Saddle Creek and reexamine what will help the band most in the future.
“We sort of came to a realization that Cursive had been making decisions on what we hoped was a communal benefit, and you know, realizing now that we have to make the decisions that are best for the people in the band or the band itself as an entity -— getting the best treatment and the best promotion,” Maginn says. “It’s not that we’re leaving Saddle Creek. We may end up there. We’re just no longer going to default and make it easy on everybody, make it Saddle Creek, Saddle Creek, Saddle Creek.”
Reinvigorated with two new members (multi-instrumentalist Nate Lepine and drummer Cornbread Compton) and a distance that keeps the members from seeing each other every week but forces the songs to be that much tighter, Cursive seems far from over, and Maginn couldn’t be happier with the results.
Still, if everything were to go wrong — Team Love tanks, Cursive fires him, Bright Eyes won’t hire him — the bearded bassist, who actually holds a degree in environmental science and not falconry as Wikipedia claims, lives in a network where he’ll always have a back-up plan.
“The only reason it works is because I’m with someone like Roslyn who’s really cool and has her own things that keep her busy and take her out of town,” Maginn says. “Like the guys at the label, Conor is one of them, so he knows what it’s like to kind of balance a couple things. I’m just with a lot of people that sort of get it, you know? There’s more value in what you get done than what hours you’re pushing.”