INTERVIEW: MAGIC! Talks Song Meanings On 'Primary Colours' | Track By Track

Experiencing fame and recognition from your debut single has its pros and cons. For MAGIC!, the pop/reggae foursome from Toronto, Canada, the out of the gate success of their first single "Rude" meant an overwhelming amount of popularity from the pop landscape. Fast forward almost three years later and the group is back with several accolades, experience and their sophomore effort, Primary Colours.

Band members Nasri (vocals/guitar), Mark Pellizzer (guitar/vocals), Ben Spivak (bass/backup vocals) and Alex Tanas (drums/backup vocals) released the album on July 1st via Sony Music Entertainment and it features lead single “Lay You Down Easy” featuring Sean Paul (which peaked at the no. 1 spot on the Billboard Reggae Digital Songs chart) along with the follow-up single, “Red Dress." But what also came with the collection is a sense of self as the band took a rationale and eager approach at letting listeners know there's more to them than just "Rude."

Days after the release of the LP, MAGIC! stopped by iHeartRadio HQ for an exclusive interview about the set, which finds the band balancing the pop sensibility of their debut single, but simultaneously treading waters true to their essence. "That's why we put out the album before we have a hit," Nasri told us. "It's so that we could have it out there, have it build, have it marinate, and then the songs will come up on their own. They'll be popular as a unit. That was a decision we made. We could have waited. We could have waited 'til January, waited 'til a single built up. We're like, 'No, forget it.'"

To read about the each of the songs on Primary Colours, take a look at our latest installment of Track By Track.

Track 1: "Have It All”

Nasri: "I remember I went for a run. I started humming. I was like, 'What is that? That sounds cool.' I came by the studio and I was humming this melody. What is this melody? Adam Messenger was there who produced our album and writes with us and stuff, and he was like, 'I kind of like that.' It just hit me. Nobody knows what's going to happen. We all could keep predicting things and saying, 'I'm going to love you forever and this is that' but we don't know. This concept in my head was that it's a mystery, or destiny. Like a caveman and technology. A caveman would never have known that you'd have an iPhone one day. You know what I'm saying? I think you just have to go through it. 'Have It All' ended up being this really groovy song with a sophisticated, open concept about letting go and just being who you are. One day you'll have it all if the love still remains between two people."

Mark: "Musically, that song was one that we went a little bit more ... 'Sophisticated,' perhaps, is the wrong word but we were drawing from world music and we had a syncopated drum pattern. It's almost reminiscent of traditional Brazilian music."

Alex: "It's kind of a different style beat."

Mark: "Exactly. I know we were saying we were trying to make a pop album and that's true in many ways, but we did want to include other contrasting influences that also had some depth and credibility."

Alex: "Somebody said it sounds like Lionel Richie and I like that. That's true."

Track 2: "Lay You Down Easy" featuring Sean Paul

Alex: "That song had a really long life. It started off as a song called 'Let You Down Easy,' and it was much different. It was more of a raw kind of thing. We were on the road with Maroon 5 in Europe. That's where it really took a turn. We were messing around with 'Let You Down Easy.' Then it became 'Lay You Down Easy.' We were struggling with the lyric. It just became more of a guy and girl-thing. We did the song up. We thought this would be perfect for a feature. We were wondering who's the perfect person. Then Sean Paul [happened]. It all just kind of happened after that. It's crazy because we have demos of that song that sound way different from back in the day. Now it's kind of a whole new thing."

Track 3: “Gloria"

Nasri: "'Gloria is my favorite song on the album because it's got all those elements that I love in a fictional song, which is the fun, the musical energy, the great arrangements, the harmonies. It's about this two-timing girl named Gloria and a guy who's too weak to get away from her curves. It's really fun and we're going to shoot a video for it. It's kind of 'Sex all day!' If you listen to it more, you'll immediately kind of loosen up and it's got some wacky lyrics."

Track 4: "Red Dress”

Nasri: "'Red Dress' is about a classic concept. It's been going on since the dawn of time that a guy waits for a girl to get ready, forever, and then once she looks great, he want to take her clothes off. I've been calling it that phase of Billy Joel when he was doing that kind of heart and soul stuff. Billy Joel reggae. 'Red Dress' is just classic. It feels good. The production was really great. If you just start singing "Red Dress," it's effortless to sing. The melodies are really easy, and I thought that we really nailed another classic recording.

"Red Dress" was an idea that I had started with a friend of ours named Hayley Gene Penner, [who] is a very talented songwriter, and it was just sitting in the computer and it was this whole other thing. I was like, 'Oh, this is really good.' I played it for Alex and was like, 'What do you think?' We re-worked it and re-worked the verses and then everybody started adding their parts. It just became this whole other reggae-infused MAGIC! song."

Track 5: "No Regrets"

Nasri: "'No Regrets' is the most personal song that I've ever written. It's not overly-revealing. I don't want to get into too much detail yet about my life in that way, but it's showing very, very much. Every lyric is real. Every lyric is honest. It was just coming out of me that day. It's a song about a guy saying that the world isn't over and we still have another chance, but we have to let go of what happened before. We're acting like children and we're immature, and this is stuff that I was going through. [It's stuff] that we're all going through. I didn't know if I wanted to put this on the album, but people really are effected by it in a positive way, and I hope that people are seeing a broken side of me. It is what it is. I have to now open up my life a little bit to the fans and to people because that's a big part of this, too. Welcome into my destruction."

Track 6: "Dance Monkey"

Nasri: "'Dance Monkey' is straight fire, bro."

Ben: "We were writing a lot of songs that I felt like the chords were changing really quickly, so I just wanted to hang onto a chord for a minute. 'Dance Monkey' does that. I showed it to Nasri and he already had this idea of 'Dance, monkey, dance,' so we started putting it together and finding melodies and piecing it. Then Mark took it and he actually came up with the baseline, and just came up with the groove, and came together."

Nasri: "There are certain songs that you know are not your singles, so now you have the creative license to have a different type of fun ... a looseness to it. You don't care. It's not going to play on the radio. You're just like, 'Yeah, this is for people.' We have the extended outro to it. We have horns. It's musical and it's fun and it's interesting. It's about feeling like a dancing monkey."

Mark: "'Dancing Monkey' is us feeling like performing 'Rude,' one singular song, over and over again, but we don't mean it in a way that's negative. It's supposed to be tongue-in-cheek and metaphorical as opposed to [something] we're upset about. It is addressing that, "OK, we know you as this one thing, so monkey, just get out there and do your thing, over and over."

Track 7: "No Sleep"

Nasri: "It's funny. I did have a baby boy. His name is Noah and he's the little light of my life. The day of his birth I started singing, 'I get no sleep.' If anybody's a father or mother, you know it's absolutely tiring. The baby is out-of-control. It's still until now, really. You don't sleep much for the first year of their life. This song came out of me that night of the birth. [It's] kind of this sarcastic song. It's 4:00 in the morning. I can't sleep because the dog keeps snoring. It's all real. That's what was happening. It's my song for my son."

Track 8: "I Need You"

Mark: "That was a song that we were considering maybe putting on the first album, but then it didn't really fit in stylistically. We had too many ballads. That was the main thing, but it worked for this album. It kind of came together naturally."

Nasri: "It's my brother's favorite song. My older brother loves the song. It's so funny when you're older brother's like, 'I love this ballad you wrote.'"

Track 9: "Primary Colours”

Nasri: "'Primary Colours' is, again, a personal song. It's about being in a relationship and you forget that when you get together [that] you're supposed to just be harmonic together. You don't always have to push and push and push. Sometimes you just have to accept me for where I am right now, or be with who you loved from the beginning. Yeah, we're always changing, but certain things don't change. A lot of things don't change. Your taste in food doesn't change. Not drastically. People lose that in relationships, and they get complicated and overly-complicated, and you forget that there's the simple jokes that she always loved. She still likes to hold your hand, and still likes to simply be loved by you. That's what that song is about. It says 'Your fuchsia is confusion, and your teal is unclear, and your aqua is a hard one to read. All these weird colors. Could we just go back to the blue, yellow, and red and then re-blend together who we are now?' It's a little deeper and a little slightly confusing, but it's real. It's exactly what somebody like myself goes through immediately because I over-complicate things. My mind never stops as a songwriter. I can't turn it off. I can't turn off everyone around me. If I start to hear something, it's going to turn into a song. Sometimes I forget to just be present in the moment and be like, 'Oh, all you really wanted was just to look in each other's eyes.' Simple thing!"

Track 10: "The Way God Made Me”

Nasri: "Oh snap. We got, mainly, that straight reggae fire. I'll be honest, I was high. We did 'The Way God Made Me' in California, where it's legal."

Nasri: "I think people don't really don't know about MAGIC!. I was an R&B writer for Chris Brown and all these people. We're urban cats. We're not these pop-y guys, but we're diverse enough to do both. We can go and make a straight R&B album if we wanted to, but we see that pop music really touches people and we're enjoying that right now. When we do something like that creatively, it's not far-fetched for us to be more urban or edgy. It's normal. It's normal because that's who we already were. What we don't want to happen is for people to think that 'Rude' is our limitation. It's not even at all. It's just a song that you seem to like, which is awesome, but we have so many angles that we could take. Primary Colours will ultimately lead into secondary colors, and will lead into all the colors that we can show you, and more."

Photos: Rachel Kaplan for iHeartRadio