How Writer's Block, Aussie Birds & Catholic Guilt Informed Peach Pit's 'Magpie'

Peach Pit are a band name synonymous with many of us who experienced coming of age in the late 2010s: puppy love soundtracked by the band’s self-titled first EP, and growing pains from said love solidified with singles like Shampoo Bottles and Tommy’s Party.

The band, comprised of frontman Neil Smith and rounded out with longtime friends and collaborators Chris Vanderkooy, Peter Wilson, and Mikey Pascuzzi, are now creating art in their new era of life, looking back on the formative years of your 20s and all the naive decisions we’d all rather forget.

What Peach Pit have been up to

Having launched their fourth album, Magpie, in October 2024, the band have been travelling the world once more and Zoom with The Music from their current tour stay in West Canada. The Vancouverians have spent the day in what they describe as ‘hot tub boats’, indulging in a bit of fun before they make the ambitious trek cross-country to Montreal.

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“So we'll drive across Canada in February, which is not a thing I would recommend people to do. It’s really fucking cold; it's like negative 30 in Winnipeg right now,” Smith says, joined by Vanderkooy, who grimaces alongside him at the thought.

Magpie

For those Australians who did a double take reading this Canadian four-piece’s new LP name - you’re absolutely correct in your assumptions: Peach Pit’s new release is indeed named after our own native bird, but the sentiment behind the title isn’t exactly black and white.

Smith, who took a fondness for the phonetics of the Aussie bird’s name, has turned the feathered friend into an alter-ego to describe the psychological destruction of bad habits we form and how some of us don’t make it out of our twenties unscathed.

While the Magpie in this project was taken from seeing Melbourne’s magpies, Smith does admit there are magpies back home as well.

“Well, we don't really [have them] where we live in BC. We don't really have magpies as much as we do on the West Coast. There, you find them in the middle of Canada, for sure.

“But, I was driving down the street, saw a bunch of magpies in Australia, Googled what they were, and then I just thought, honestly, I just thought Magpie seemed like a cool song idea, like, just the names, the title.”

Smith was also inspired by the old superstition of magpies as an omen of good or bad luck, depending on the number you encounter, and took the interpretation into the space of Vancouver’s Downtown East Side.

“Where we live, in Vancouver, we have a really big problem of drug addiction. A lot of people from Canada congregate in Vancouver because it's the only place where you can survive outside all year round. Not really that feasible, obviously, but like, everywhere else in Canada, you will die [being exposed to the Winter cold].”

“I just got to thinking about how easily you can go from being a young person who starts using drugs and drinking for fun - maybe as a way to cope with stuff, and then how your path can go totally awry. And you’re 20 years down the road, living on the streets… Maybe it's a very extreme example, but I have other friends who were in the same shoes as me and my family, my other family members too.”

Smith has been engaging with alcohol sobriety for a number of years now but expressed that the character of Magpie served as a sort of alternate ‘what if’.

“I think people forget that if you have your shit together and you're not a drug addict, and you have a job and stuff - I think a lot of people's gut reaction is to look at those people and think, like ‘they're totally different. Like, that could never happen to me,’ which is just really not the case.

“I don't really know why I started thinking about that, but yeah, it's just something that whenever I see reminders of that sort of thing happening, which is very often in Vancouver, that's where my mind goes. I wrote this song about this character that I called Magpie, who was just stuck in this rut in life and unable to get out of it.”

Vanderkooy added, “Us being young with people that we knew and partying with them, and those people end up partying a little bit more, and stuff happens.”

**The Making of Magpie & Writer’s Block**

To accompany the making of their latest LP, the band recently released a mini-documentary made by longtime collaborator Lester Lyons-Hookham. The doco, which is available to watch on YouTube, delves into the less-than-sparkling reality of actually being in the studio and smashing out a project. The band wanted to show off the rawness of their songwriting, being inspired by the recently released Get Back Beatles doco.

“It's really cool if you're a big fan because you get to see them in a way that nobody has ever seen before - very fly on the wall. You're in the room with them the whole time, to the point of watching them write these famous songs,” Smith said of Get Back.

“Like, Paul McCartney's trying to write Get Back, for example, and he's working on the words, and we already know the words, so you can fill in the blanks in your head. And he's struggling over these rhymes he's trying to write. And it's just that part, to me, is really cool.”

Smith and Vanderkooy are equally big nerds of The Beatles, with the latter giving praise to the Peter Jackson directed doco: “It’s also, like, really wonderfully boring, where it's just what it's like to be in the studio. For us, you see the similarities, and it almost makes you go, ‘Obviously, they’re The Beatles, and it's insane, but it's not like they had this extra secret process.’ It makes you realise that it's just… it's hard work.”

It is hard work. Peach Pit’s own documentary features a turbulent and vulnerable 34 minutes, including unconventional writing prompts, member tiffs, and even tense instances of Smith joking about going solo.

The band took an abstract approach to creating their fourth LP, deciding to go into the studio as a blank slate and come up with everything whilst there. Bound by creative block and label deadlines, we see a side of the band that is outside of the happy-go-lucky meme-ified personas and into the thick of the gut-wrenching lyrics behind Peach Pit’s discography.

“We wasted a lot of time in the studio and a lot of our own money, too, because we had to pay for stuff, and we didn't really have anything - a good product - at the end of the sessions. And so we had to timidly put our tail between our legs and go talk to our manager and our record label and be like, ‘Hey guys, I'm sorry we said we'd have a record done, but we totally don't, like, we need to book more time,”’ Smith admits.

“Which is, like… maybe a painful experience because nobody likes to fail. It always hurts to look at yourself in the mirror and know that you didn't succeed. But at the same time, we learned a lot because what we did was we booked another chunk of time about six months later, and we just worked our asses off writing a ton of songs for this record.

“And because of all of that, we learned a lot about how we make records best, how we write songs the best, what process works well for us. And, yeah, it was an interesting learning experience for us, and every single record we've had has had its own growing pains to it. So hopefully, by record five, which was the next one, we'll have it perfectly dialled. We’ll know what to do.”

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Catholic Guilt: Every Little Thing & St. Mark’s Funny Feeling

While focusing on heavy issues such as addiction and heartbreak, Peach Pit reach further into their inner consciousness to go as deep as religious trauma. Smith, who enjoys exploring different perspectives in songs, admitted in a Reddit AMA that the lead single of the album was written in the shoes of the devil himself, despite a candied sheen suggesting admiration. Every Little Thing represents Peach Pit’s infamous style of major chords with crushing lyricism.

“I had this idea for a song where it was me sat down at the end of my life, I'm sat on a bar stool, and the devil is the bartender, and he's serving me a drink and talking about how he’s had his eye on me ever since I was young. I think that one comes from a place like… it’s kind of a fun song, and I just liked the perspective of it when I was writing it, but it sort of comes from a place of growing up Christian…”

Smith explains, “Growing up Christian and not being a Christian anymore, and how my perspective has changed from my early 20s to now being in my early 30s, and maybe leaving some of that baggage behind as I get older.

“I don't know if anyone can relate to this who, like, doesn't grow up with the idea of hell as being something that you're going to end up at if you're not good, and so, nowadays, I'm not a practising Christian. I'm not a religious person, but I still am afraid of going to hell. Ha ha.”

Smith revealed that he grew up Catholic in North Vancouver and, like many Catholics, still holds a sense of confessional guilt in his mind for the sins of a human life.

“Even if you don’t believe it logically, for whatever reason. And I respect all people's beliefs, but for me, if I don't believe in it, [it] still sits at the back of my mind. Every time there's turbulence on the aeroplane, I'm like, ‘Fuck! I’m going to hell!’”

Vanderkooy, who met Smith as a kid, grew up in a Protestant background. He says, “I don’t know what it is, what the details are, but everyone I know who walked away from the Protestant church does not have this hell complex, and all Catholics that I know have it.”

Smith admits there are a few songs on the album that carry a religious undertone to them. St Mark’s Funny Feeling is another to incorporate emotionally-driven alter-egos.

“That’s a very similar song to Every Little Thing. In that way, I just wanted to talk about my perspective and how my life has changed since becoming an adult and making my own decisions for myself with regard to what I believe. St Mark's Funny Feeling is just, like… sometimes our songs have nonsensical lyrics.

“With St Mark’s, I wanted to write a song about a guy called Saint Mark. It's not even Saint Mark in the Bible or anything, necessarily. It's maybe my alter ego or something. It’s all about how it feels to go from believing in Jesus and eventually, over time, losing that belief. That’s really what that song is about. For me, from the age of 20 to the age of 30, [it’s about] how my perspective has changed.

“There is some community that gets lost when you leave a religion because a lot of identity can get tied into that. That is a good part of it - the community that you grow up in has a lot of good stuff about it.”

“No More Shoeys”

With their Magpie tour set to hit Australia this month, Peach Pit are looking forward to returning Down Under and having time to spend being tourists.

“We have time off a bit because it's such a huge time difference that we have to come a bit early to get acclimatised to it. Otherwise, we're just a wreck. We're coming to Perth first; we've never been to Perth. Excited about that, [and going to] Sydney. Love Sydney. It's so beautiful,” Smith says.

“Melbourne was probably our favourite. The food there was unbelievable, like the coffee culture. And there were a lot of cool things we got to see,” Vanderkooy recalled.

When asked if there was anything they’d want their Australian fans to keep in mind for their second time down under, the duo synced their answers in real-time:

“No more shoeys.”

“It was funny; we did one every single show [and] everyone took a turn to do it. Then we were playing at a music festival just north of Sydney (Yours & Owls 2023), and we went. We’re big Earl Sweatshirt fans, and we watched his set.

“It was on university grounds that it was taking place. We saw Earl Sweatshirt, like, in the middle of our tour, and they were trying to get him to do a shoey, and he was just like, ‘Nooo, you guys are fucked up. I’m not doing that.’ Chris was in awe that the option to turn down a Shoey was even on the table.

“But yeah, we were just watching him and being like… I didn’t know you could have that kind of self-respect, but that’s so impressive. You know, because when you’re on stage, you’re trying to keep the party going, and it’s like kind of a buzzkill.”

Turning down a shoey has previously been tricky for the four-piece, with Smith getting real:

“We’re sluts for the crowd. We’ll do anything for the limelight, you know?”

Peach Pit will tour Australia this February and March. You can find tickets on the Frontier Touring website.