It’s a really brave step for an artist to call an album ‘Badly Written Songs’ but that exactly what ROSS HILLARD/MAGIC NUMBER has done! Magic Number? That’s the musical alter ego of producer/bassist Hillard who’s known for his down-tempo work with people like Louie Vega, DJ Spen, Kerri Chandler, Lay-Far and Atjazz.
The ‘Badly Written Songs’ LP has been flagged up by a couple of singles – ‘Good Morning Sunshine’ which featured wistful vocals from Sophia Marshall and ‘Loving You’ again with Ms Marshal at the mic. Both those cuts delivered a quaint, naïve charm and that’s the calling card for the whole album – nothing too frantic here but enough to set feet tapping and heads nodding!
It goes without saying that the LP title, ‘Badly Written Songs’ is, of course, tongue-in-cheek! Each song is carefully structured and delivered with high end production values. Hillard is, you may know, a respected sound engineer and music producer. On the album’s title, Ross explains : “The title is a tongue-in-cheek reference to how transient electronic music can be. Thus, writing songs in this genre might not have been the most sensible and sustainable idea. But we all love house music, so we put everything into it, hoping that people don’t discard it too soon. And if they do, we just have to remember that we undertook a great journey in producing it”.
MAGIC NUMBER; ‘Badly Written Songs’ out now via Atjazz Record Company
