FM Berlin’s Corey Hachey shows off his ability to spin straw into gold when a random encounter on a Toronto streetcar became the inspiration behind the band’s latest single “Good Magic.”
Pablo Picasso once said, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” You must be prepared to receive the message of your muse, to have honed your skills to recognize and interpret it, and generally have your nose to handy to a grindstone when the moment comes. Fortunately for Hachey, when lightning struck, it seems that he’s had enough practice from being on the road to capture it on the long drive from Moncton, New Brunswick to Toronto, Ontario.
“I was on my way to Toronto and the chorus hit me before I even left town,” says Hachey. “The chorus melody and scratch lyrics just sort of came to me, while diving, and I continued to work on it over the fourteen-hour drive.”
FM Berlin are no strangers to alternative pop hits. It’s their bread and butter, and the chorus for “Good Magic” has Top 40 written all over it with its upbeat mantra-like quality. It certainly a magical quality about it that harkens back to ’90s billboard champions like The Verve.
The meat of the single, however, required just a little more finagling. Everything came together Hachey, when the song consolidated all of its loose ends in a chance encounter on the TTC.
“After a few days in the city, I found myself taking a streetcar from Bloor to Richmond, and on said streetcar there happened to be a couple sitting near me who had found themselves in the throws of a lovers quarrel – to put it mildly,” says Hachey.
“In that moment, the idea for the song was handed to me like a boon from the heavens. I kept thinking to myself, is there a way that these two, extremely inebriated, hopeless romantics could ever reconcile? And that was pretty well it, I had everything that I needed to finish the song.”
While Hachey notes that not every lyric in the song is derived directly from the experience, the event did set off a cascade of explosions in his brain that resonated with what came out. “Good Magic” is decidedly more positive than the real deal; an exciting recognition of possibility that comes through the silver lining of a struggle, unified through glorious anthem rock beats and blissful overdubs.
“In the song, the two people meet on a streetcar and in reality, the people I witnessed were fighting,” says Hachey. It was just the inspiration… the imagination fills in the rest.”
FM Berlin recorded and mixed “Good Magic” with recording engineer David Henriquez, and the single is now being featured in the latest promotional trailer for the second season of the television series Wedding Planners.