Fall Down Laughing
The Story of Majical Cloudz

Otto maps the lights, tapping away at his computer with nails painted black as bulbs pulse, pan, boom, fade down, creep up, and oscillate on high. Welsh punches the air to the beat as if he’s conducting raw electricity. It’s just him up there: a man and his microphone. He warms up with the Canadian national anthem, hitting every note, before digging into a deep croon: “Someone died/ Gunshot right outside/ Your father/ He is dead.” As he delivers these lines from a radically sparse song called “Childhood’s End”, flashes of brightness syncopate around him. “When someone is trying to seduce you lyrically, it’s weird to have a crazy light show,” Welsh considers out loud.

There are only so many hours booked here, and the duo are powering through, racing the clock with a faltering computer. The day’s tension is heightened by the fact that, as Majical Cloudz rush to get ready for the upcoming shows, they are also attempting to mix an impressionistic new album for which they recorded booming organ and piano sounds at both Arcade Fire and Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s local studios. As practice wears on, the coffee goes cold, lunch is half-eaten. At some point, Otto stares into his screen, and I hear him murmur, “Don’t fuck up your tour.” It quickly becomes clear that, when it comes to arena-fit light shows, Otto and Welsh are essentially at a loss. “If you have any ideas, let us know,” Otto tells me. “You’d be as good as any of us.”

The album that vaulted Majical Cloudz to such perilous heights, 2013’s Impersonator, is made of synth poems hovering in negative space—crystalline pop songs about death that are really above love. Welsh’s words stand right in front of you, like text art at the fore of a white canvas, while Otto’s aural ambience humbly glows, soars, and contracts underneath. Blankness becomes a virtue, a source of command, not unlike the emptied mystics of fellow Montrealer Leonard Cohen. (Indeed, a track on the first handmade Majical Cloudz tape in 2010 featured a slowed-down Cohen sample and the apt title, “Leonard Codeine”.) Impersonator manages both a New Age spirit and the intense compositional minimalism of hardcore punk—an ethic of simplicity that Majical Cloudz share with Lorde. It is streamlined and yet complicated in the way that any self-determined path to clarity requires. “We thought, ‘How simple can we make it?’” Welsh says. “How can we take a person’s expectation of how a song is supposed to evolve and not do that?”

The evening before practice, I meet Welsh near dusk on a corner in Mile End, Montreal’s gentrifying creative hub. We end up at an empty park surrounded by the low hum of crickets. Those who know Welsh best mention his commitment, onstage and in the theater of life, to not breaking character, and until then I had never seen the singer wear anything but his monochrome uniform of black jeans and boots along with a white T-shirt—a James Dean look made more severe by a shaved head that accentuates his buggish eyes. But in the park he sports a long-sleeved black shirt and New Balance sneakers. Most striking of all, he has hair. Though exceedingly polite, his anxiety is palpable.

The 26-year-old says he has become more positive—almost an adult—over the last three years. He tells me how he quit drinking, qualifying the choice in his carefully rationalized way: “Alcohol puts up a wall between you and sensory stimuli, and I realized how unadjusted I was to living in reality without the comfort of that wall.” Welsh always speaks in logical declarative sentences, monotone and professorial. His ascetic sobriety is unsurprising considering the extreme clarity of his music and mission; in song and show, Majical Cloudz skip the party and go straight to the deep 2 a.m. conversation, where a moment of real connection is possible.

The power of vulnerability is the essence of Majical Cloudz. But vulnerability doesn’t come easy. “I’ve always dealt with revealing myself, and intimacy, and trusting people,” Welsh admits, and the idea of making such sensitive music was terrifying to him at the start of Impersonator. “It’s scary shedding those layers and saying, ‘This is who I am, this is how I feel,’” Welsh tells me. “I’m giving you so much ammunition to hurt me if you want to.”

But it was precisely that fear of being fully seen that also motivated him. He likens it to a fall exercise in a drama class—close your eyes, lean back slow, have faith that someone will catch you. “The outcome of that action is trust and acceptance,” Welsh says. “You can’t build trust if you never fall.”

This strategy plays out most vividly during Majical Cloudz’s austere live shows, which can be startling in their directness. The first time I saw Welsh and Otto play, I was sitting on the floor in a small room, looking up as Welsh locked eyes with various members of the audience for extended periods of time, heightening the mood to hypnotizing, uncanny levels. “Listen to this song,” he emoted, “I want you to know it’s how I feel.” Was this a band, or a conceptual performance of one? Either way, once you enter the domain of a Majical Cloudz show, you are frozen.

“He’s a real performer,” notes Welsh’s friend Claire Boucher, aka Grimes. “The first few times I saw him live, it seemed so insane that someone could command a stage at such a high level whilst performing for 10 or 20 people, with almost no musical experience at all. People would weep or faint during the shows.”

Welsh and Boucher met in 2007, at a first-year dorm party at Montreal’s McGill University. Welsh noticed one of Boucher’s peculiar drawings hanging on the wall and asked who made it. “Oh, that’s Claire—she’s weird,” a friend said. Welsh recalls thinking, “I should probably meet this person.”

The two became romantically involved, on-and-off, for three years. In 2008, they made an album together that “no one will ever hear because it’s so bad,” says Welsh. It was the beginning of a formative musical period—over the next couple of years, for fun and for therapy, Welsh used GarageBand to churn out eight charmingly homemade solo albums inspired by Daniel Johnston, Elliott Smith, and Atlas Sound, selling them as CD-Rs for $1 at house shows or just offering Mediafire links on Facebook. Boucher’s voice was laced through most of them, including one called Maximum Empathy. On Boucher’s own 2010 record, Halfaxa, there is a gorgeous, melancholy song called “Devon”, in which she sings, “You don’t love me anymore.” The two learned to write pop songs alongside each other.

“More than anyone but my parents, I feel that I owe my life to her,” Welsh says of Boucher now. “She’s the person with whom I shared the genesis of the dream of playing music, and her success inspired me to get moving with my life and to stop being afraid to try.”

Even just talking in the park, Welsh’s blunt openness can be insightful, embarrassing, funny, or all three. “For some reason, anything to do with bowels and shitting is incredibly shameful,” he tells me, explaining how his break-up with booze was primarily an attempt at curing digestive problems, which became incredibly severe. “It just seems like the least attractive thing in a human being, to be like, ‘I’m chronically constipated,’” he says, straight-faced. I can’t help but laugh at this; I’m not sure if he wants me to.

Welsh’s closest friends speak of his self-discipline and methodical work ethic, and how his intellectual interests range from religion, to politics, to World War II history. But the very first thing anyone who really knows Welsh will tell you is that he is extremely funny. His penchant for comedy reaches back to high school drama classes, where he learned the maxims of improv through quick-thinking games: how to work within a terrible situation, how to be spontaneous, how to impersonate. By the end of 11th grade, he dreamt of being a stand-up comedian.

At this point, Welsh’s sense of humor is dark, academic almost, with a penchant for teasing out absurdities. “Some people are funny because they’re goofy and there’s a lightness to them,” says friend Kyle Jukka. “Devon is not like that. He’s extremely precise with his humor.” For his part, Welsh likens his role as a performer to one of a clown. But he’s no sad Pagliacci; when I first saw him play, he compared himself to Bozo. For Welsh, being vulnerable and being a clown are different sides of the same coin, and this is paramount in how he pulls off his incredibly stark performance style, diffusing the self-serious energy with strange banter or unexpected shenanigans. “I’m interested in the serious side of what a clown does,” he says.

His unique sense of humor came out one evening in the summer of 2013, when Majical Cloudz’s tour route brought them to a sports bar in Edmonton. A number of the frontman’s cousins had decided to come to the show and—already anticipating an awful gig due to the not-so-ideal setting—the familial influx left Welsh stressed. So he decided to expel his nerves by playing the gig naked. “When I’m really nervous, I’ll do something that will make it even more nerve-racking, therefore defeating the nervousness,” he rationalizes.

So as he sang to a crowd of around 20 people, Welsh held onto the mic clad in nothing but underwear and boots (a self-imposed compromise) and stayed serious throughout (“cracking up would ruin it”). One of Welsh’s best and oldest friends, Neil Corcoran—a tall guy with long hair and a deadpan demeanor who is the subject of Majical Cloudz’s BFF anthem “What That Was”—was with them that night. “The strange thing was, when his family came over afterwards, they didn’t even mention it,” Corcoran says. “They didn’t even seem to notice.”

Perhaps the extended Welsh tribe had become accustomed to theatrics in the family. Welsh’s parents met in New York, on the set of a 1986 made-for-Canadian TV film starring Welsh’s father, Kenneth. (Welsh’s mother was a camera operator.) They split up when Welsh was four, and he moved with his mother from Canada to an ashram in Lake County, California, to join the religious community Adidam—a group rooted in Eastern philosophy and a divine guru worship tradition that has been labeled cultish. Even as a 6-year-old, Welsh felt some discomfort with the “fanatically devoted” Adidam movement. Looking back, he says, “I’ve never identified with putting a lot of faith in something that provides me with certainty that I don’t have to think through on my own.” After two years in California, he returned to his father’s home in the small rural town of Uxbridge, Ontario.

Though Kenneth Welsh is best known for his role as the villain Windom Earle on David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks”, he’s also had parts in films by Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen and, at 73, he’s still acting. His son acknowledges the profound influence of growing up with a father who was rewarded for the power of his personality, and the unconventional standard of success that came with it.

Welsh got his start performing onstage as a child at Shakespeare Nights, where he read with his dad. He went on to earn the Most Dramatic superlative at his high school senior prom thanks to his drama-class theatrics, as well as dancing and singing roles in Grease and West Side Story. But his father’s renown left him uncomfortable about pursuing acting on his own. Corcoran saw how his friend’s self-consciousness inhibited him back then: “In the small town we’re from, people would only identify him as being the son of this actor.” His father’s influence was undeniable, but Welsh would try to deny it all the same.

His teenage musical palette mostly involved nu-metal and hardcore acts like As I Lay Dying, It Dies Today, and Every Time I Die. He began attending unhinged hardcore shows at makeshift venues, where other people dressed the part—skinny jeans, keys clips, X-ed hands—while Welsh had a more suburban look. He was playing football at the time, primed for aggression. And in his loneliest college years, Welsh was a self-described “gym rat” who dreamt of joining cross-country. But he was eventually drawn back to the stage after starring in a production of Sam Shepard and Patti Smith’s Cowboy Mouth, a surrealist one-act play about a couple who transcendentally worship rock’n’roll.

Listening to high school tales from his friends, it sounds like Welsh was always destined to be nothing but a performer. There were those times when he would break up a monotonous lesson by reciting Shakespeare in an incessant clown voice. “People were just like, ‘Devon! It’s not funny! Would you shut the fuck up!’” Corcoran recalls, “That happened all the time.” Once, in the middle of a quiet English class, Welsh—who would go on to major in theater and religion in college—stood on his desk with a copy of the Bible, read some of it aloud, tore out a number of pages, and ate them. Somehow, the teacher didn’t care, but Welsh was punished after a girl ran out of the room crying.

That same unruly combination of sincerity and absurdity (and crying) now plays out in Welsh’s live performances. Dismayed that Majical Cloudz shows were quickly gaining a reputation of unrepentant dourness following the release of Impersonator, Welsh felt compelled to spike the mood. “The best emotional state I could be in at a show is one of pleasant bewilderment,” he says. “When I’m like, ‘Oh, I wasn’t expecting to feel this way,’ that’s good entertainment.”

Welsh, a devout scholar of expectation-exploding comedian Andy Kaufman, describes his onstage antics as “prankish,” and they range from singing behind curtains or speakers to making everyone come onstage and introduce themselves one-by-one. At a Portland show, he once held a push-up contest in between every song. “If he could sing upside down, hanging from the ceiling, I’m sure he would,” Corcoran says. “It’s genuinely him, but it borders on, like, ‘Is he joking? Is he really so weird?’”

I can’t help posing a similar question when it comes to Majical Cloudz’s confounding name. It turns out the moniker was originally dreamt up by another lifelong conspirator of Welsh’s, Matthew E. Duffy, an eccentric playwright, noise artist, and occasional Grimes dancer who wears Medieval-chic bell-sleeved shirts and acts like Kramer reborn as a Warhol superstar. When I ask Duffy about the unorthodox spelling of Majical Cloudz, his explanation is simple: “Well, I spell ‘magical’ that way.” Welsh adds that years of knotty emails from Duffy gave him an appreciation for the history of disorienting linguism: “Alternate spellings were sometimes used because language would be seen as having a power unto itself, and creating new versions of words frees them from past connotations and lets them gather entirely new meanings.”

The practice space where Majical Cloudz record is a tiny rear-house, cluttered with keyboards and tangled wires and tape decks. On top of the couch where Otto sometimes sleeps is a wooden panel, flipped upside down, painted with the words: “TRY HARDER.” One wall is lined with stuffed teddy bears—Otto’s childhood toys repurposed as DIY soundproofing, which, apparently, does not work well, as a note from a neighbor attests. The hand-written complaint (“we can feel the bass in our diaphragms—earplugs just don’t work”) is pinned to the wall with a knife. I look around. There are knives thrown into almost every wall in the space—the result of “an LSD activity,” according to Otto.

The pair first met at a party in 2009, where Otto was taken aback by Welsh’s nervous energy. “He had very strange aura to him,” Otto remembers. After Welsh left the party, another dude approached Otto. “You know that guy?” he asked, regarding Welsh. “He’s fucking crazy, totally unstable. Don’t talk to him.”

If Welsh is at the beating heart of Majical Cloudz, Otto is the vital blood. His musical approach is crucially abstract—a foundation set at Concordia University’s electro-acoustic music program, where he learned to sculpt sound. And while Welsh is the responsible one who packs a snack (dates) for band practice and has a self-imposed bedtime (midnight), Otto is patient, relaxed, zen (he recently took up mindfulness meditation using an app called Headspace). Welsh goes big-picture, whereas Otto sees the fine details. “I’m like a kite, and Devon is the string,” Otto says.

But that balance became strained during their first headlining tour in the fall of 2013. Both members’ dark sides came out. Otto turned into a depressed insomniac; Welsh became paranoid, sick, broken down. Otto remembers bottoming-out at a Niagara Falls IHOP, where he began bawling in the middle of the restaurant. “I went to the bathroom and got it together,” he says, “but then I came back, and Nickleback was playing, and I just started crying again.”

Throughout this tumultuous period, there was one song looping nonstop on the radio as they traversed North America’s endless highways. Neither of them knew who sang it, but they knew it by heart; according to Otto, Lorde’s “Royals” was “the soundtrack to us going insane.”

A few months later, in January 2014, Welsh was back in his small Montreal apartment feeling bummed and trying to write when he heard from Boucher, who wanted Majical Cloudz to open for her at a Grammys pre-party in Los Angeles. It was there that Welsh first met Lorde. “We were playing, and I looked up, and she was singing the words in the balcony,” Welsh recalls. “I was like, ‘What is happening to my life?’”

The first thing I notice are the uniforms: black dresses, black lips, tattoo chokers. Flower crowns and wavy hair. It’s the first week of September at Philadelphia’s Mann Center, at the first date of Lorde’s 2014 North American tour. The energy is young, optimistic. Upon entering the outdoor venue I’m given a faux baseball card with a cartoon of Lorde’s face on it. In tiny print on the back, it reads “with Majical Cloudz.”

As the sun sets, Welsh and Otto take the stage. Otto is on a riser, using an ironing board as a gear stand. Welsh, in his white T-shirt and shaved head, is pacing about the whole stage, howling and jumping; middle schoolers try to find their seats as he stands underneath a stark spotlight and sings about hospital gowns and death. But there are also many heads staring directly at the stage. Instagram video-bars crawl in front of me. Squeaky shrieks of approval hang in the air. “I have never heard such distant screams before,” Welsh says methodically. “This is possibly the best day of my whole life.”

There is a girl of elementary school age sitting next to me, eating an ice cream cone. At the end of the set, she offers her take to a friend: “Thank god he left. All his songs sounded like one song.” Everyone’s a critic.

Ten days later, I meet Majical Cloudz at an uptown Manhattan park as they take a breather between two NYC shows. At this point, Welsh and Otto estimate they have taken post-show fan selfies in the triple digits. They finally seem happy, reveling in the unusual atmosphere. “We can’t even help ourselves in being weird to these people,” Welsh says.

The pair are learning how to work with the experiential, synergistic energy of a huge crowd—making broad strokes and allowing excitement to snowball—and even if these are the biggest shows Majical Cloudz ever play, wisdom will carry forth. “If you make small drawings in a sketchbook and then make something that’s the size of an apartment building wall, you’ll go back to your sketchbook and see new possibilities that you didn’t see before,” says Welsh.

While most bands would simply take the Lorde tour slot as an opportunity to catapult towards higher reaches of fame, for Majical Cloudz it offered a chance to rethink everything. “A small part of me died at the end of the tour,” Welsh tells me in the months following their brush with arena stardom. “What I want to accomplish with art suddenly became vastly clear to me.”

In a sense, he saw truth in the masses of screaming teenagers and couldn’t look back; Welsh saw how Lorde’s unguarded fans wanted their enthusiasm to be validated, how his excitement and openness begot more of the same. It began to instill in him a sense of faith—that positivity and energy will be returned, that all crowds are capable of shedding their defenses when given the chance.

Reflecting on that first Philadelphia date, Otto says, “As a kid you’re told, ‘You can do anything!’ and you go through life half-believing that, like, ‘Probably not, I should be realistic.’ But at that moment it seemed like choosing the unrealistic thing and keeping the music weird actually worked.” I ask him if that show felt like the very peak for Majical Cloudz. While he agrees that it’s one of them, he also has another idea: “I think that’s possibly tomorrow.” Trusting the tour’s lessons, the pair decide to scrap most of the record they had spent 2014 working on, starting anew.

Welsh spent last winter holed up at a friend’s place in Detroit writing Majical Cloudz’s forthcoming album, Are You Alone?, which is due later this year. The answer to that titular question seems to be a resounding “no,” as the record’s theme once again involves maximum empathy, with Welsh dialing into what he calls “the electricity connecting humans.”

Pieces of last year’s relatively hi-fi studio experiments are woven into the record, but they do not dominate it. “After all the crazy shit we could get our hands on, we came back to the cheapo organ we’ve been using since day one,” says Otto. The pair have also enlisted indie muso par excellence Owen Pallett to add simple analog drums, viola, and piano. “I think Majical Cloudz are onto something strong and powerful and good and economical,” says Pallet, known for his sweeping string arrangements for Arcade Fire. “I didn’t want to add anything superfluous.”

The issue with the lost record was in over-thinking, trying to pin down an unattainable perfection. Instead, Welsh feels the lyrics for Are You Alone? contain hopeful premonitions. When the songwriter wonders about the life the album might have, he laughs, contemplating if art that “intends good things” might be able to make those things real.

One of the few songs on the record that was salvaged from those pre-Lorde sessions is named “Call on Me” and has a soft sway; when they would play it in those endless spaces on tour, it repeatedly provoked a glowing iPhone star-bed. It’s a song about believing in the power of friendship, about surviving together, about a bigger, inclusive love that’s not necessarily romantic. Welsh wrote it one night after spending time with his friends Corcoran and Duffy at his father’s home in Uxbridge, running around through the cornfields.

As the song peaks, he sings, “I’m your friend ‘til I lie in the ground.” The stark beauty reminds me of that moment after walking through a cemetery, when everything, even the air, feels more present and vivid. “I’m into thinking about things in the context of mortality,” says Welsh. “Maybe it’s morbid, but it’s funny to me. It’s an exciting aspect of life.”