Today we’d like to introduce you to Magnus Timbre.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
When I was a wee lad living in Tulsa, Oklahoma I was amazed by Guitar Hero. Obviously, being a child means your hand-eye coordination is poor but it led to my parents getting my sister and I guitar lessons. I had this tiny Jay Jr. Stratocaster and Ibanez amp ready to rock the bedroom but they had me playing nursery rhymes, which wasn’t very rock n’ roll.
I wasn’t satisfied with the experience so I gave up and went back to playing Guitar Hero and Rock Band, my parents always nagged me about how good I was at the game and that I should start playing the real guitar again. High school starts and finally (and by finally I mean after being grounded for a whole summer for not having any hobbies) I picked up the guitar again and managed to start playing for the worship band at a church my family had only been to once at that point. I’ve distanced myself from religion as an adult but like many musicians I know we have roots playing in youth bands, the youth pastor was an amazing mentor and role model so I had a head start when it came to organizing sets with a band.
In 2015 my family moved to Texas, it was my senior year of high school and I was being placed in classes with freshmen, sophomores, juniors, AND seniors because I was missing a ton of core classes that weren’t required in Oklahoma. I didn’t have much for friends outside of playing for another church nearby until I started college at the University of Texas at San Antonio. While I was working on my B.S. in Computer Science I played with a couple of bands and started to learn bass plus how to sing properly, I played with Black Fang Elixer as lead guitar and Academy Of Giants as bassist and vocalist.
Those acts were far more garage than the band, the bandmates were a bit too old to realize the utility of social media for marketing and networking and I played less than five shows combined during those years. In 2018, I started to mess around with Audacity and the Rocksmith instrument-to-USB cable for some basic recordings, which grew to record over free drum tracks and then composing my own drums with a drum machine, and eventually, I was churning out full-band compositions all on my own. I spent a lot of time prototyping my brand and artist name.
I started with ‘Tsarist’ cause tsar just sounds cool, moved on to some others like ‘ill Jared, ‘DJ Lappish Lire’ (an anagram of my legal name), ‘Bad Boy Kawaii’, but none of them ever felt “right”, you know? All this time I was grinding away at my performance and production capabilities, posting demos to SoundCloud and maybe sharing them to my local Craigslist for some plays or critiques. Finally, in 2019, I was working with Izzéo and Loto for a Halloween EP, I was ready to test out M.T. HED as my stage name but never had a proper idea for what the M.T. would stand for.
The time came for our EP to go live, I told my collaborators what to publish my name as on major platforms since I didn’t have anything outside of SoundCloud and shared my roadblock on what M.T. should mean. Loto immediately proposed, as you probably already guessed, “Magnus Timbre” aka great sound. It sounded like a proper name and I immediately knew that was the name I’m taking to the top. Life went on, I experimented with a few EP ideas as my first release but nothing felt like a proper debut. Then 2020 happened, what else was I to do but use my new amassed free time to work on an EP? So, I took an old demo, ‘Slow Burn Suicide’, and re-recorded it, and it was fire! I did the same thing with ‘Depression & The B-Sides’ (originally ‘Neurotic’) and ‘Strange’, before I knew it the rest of the ‘Melancholy & Hopefulness’ EP came to life.
The last decision to make before I could officially put my music out to the world was WHEN to release it. I knew I had to give the singles and EP time before releasing to market them properly, so I started scouring the calendar looking for a proper date when suddenly I found it. Friday, November 13th, 2020. I was born on a 13th, so I decided my gimmick would be to only release music on a 13th, and what could be better than Friday the 13th?? It’s almost all history from there on out… I came across somebody I met in pop-punk band years back in an audio production class, his name is Panama. I reach out to him and before I know it I’m playing bass and singing with this amazing group of guys in a band called Exit Gate.
Once we got our setlist down we started playing shows, meeting awesome local musicians, I even got the chance to open at a house show with my solo material! Then Panama brings us some news, the producer from a studio we practice at wanted to use us as guinea pigs for his new equipment! We got an EP recorded for relatively cheap and that’s gonna hit the scene hopefully before the end of this year. At one point we had a show booked at The Rock Box when I got a last-minute message from Dirty Motel asking if I knew a local bassist, so of course, I volunteered myself!
The day of the show I ended up learning their entire set and I rocked the house twice that night, and they’ve continued to invite me back to shows whenever they have one in San Antonio. I also have another single of mine, ‘A Solvable Problem’, releasing on November 13th, which is also the anniversary of my EP of course.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I definitely wouldn’t call it smooth. For the latter half of my life, I’ve been struggling with depression, anxiety, and who knows what else until I see a psychiatrist soon. On one hand, it makes living itself a struggle, lacking the motivation and energy to put me out there, make friends, create amazing art, just be my best self.
On the other hand…that strife is a driver for my music and what I write about. A song like ‘Depression & The B-Sides’ is one I wrote in high school with a ukulele, and bringing back that sorrow from the past made me realize how far I’ve come since then. I certainly don’t have it easy, but I know I’ve become a happier, more fulfilled individual because of the road I’ve traveled.
There has also been a pandemic, which is still affecting everyone. Everything went online and even if I could find live shows, it would have been both dangerous and irresponsible of me to perform in those conditions. The last shows I played with Exit Gate were before the current spike in cases and after the vaccine became publicly available.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
What do I do? It’s kind of a what don’t I do situation. I enjoy this endeavor so much because I’m in control of every aspect of it, it’s pure unadulterated Magnus Timbre material and I can’t get that kind of freedom in any band, that’d be unfair to me and my bandmates.
For all my songs I compose and perform every aspect (the drums and synths are always digital because I don’t own the hardware for either), with marketing/social media I create most of the content myself (I thoroughly appreciate all the art and photos I get from collaborators), and with distribution/a label, I have Pretty & Petty Records which extends to every collaborative project I release and potentially more local artists in the future to help build our local scene. I often refer to myself as a Certified Thembo and Human Shitpost.
You can’t go wrong with getting dumb and wacky online in this post-irony age of media, and the odder I am the more unique the outcome. I identify as non-binary too, I honestly am tired of gender norms and being treated differently because I was born male. I want to experiment with fashion and expression, I want to be treated like a human, not just a man, and I want to be an icon for those seeking to break those limitations.
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
Somehow everybody asks if Magnus is my real name… oh I wish! I just never found my legal name appealing. On a more interesting note, I could consider myself some sort of modern nihilist monk. Freedom from universal meaning or a higher purpose is what gives me this absurd purpose to exist and create magnificent art.
I’ve come to terms with my mortality and fended off the existential dread, I’m here and now, I was nothing before and I’ll be nothing after, the only way I’ll have an afterlife is if I create an existence that exceeds my life as an average person and becomes a legend, like Robert Johnson or Freddie Mercury.
Contact Info:
- Email: magnustimbremgmt@gmail.com
- Website: https://linktr.ee/magnustimbre
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/magnustimbre/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/magnustimbre
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/magnustimbre
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq4UOX1SfuwyPKgM0zhTrxQ
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/magnustimbre
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2evKRhmnLjsShbJVtsTgQj?si=HwNPcWZhSGy-8fCwKpPrFA
Image Credits
Danielle Scott
