Magic Pie frontman Eiríkur Hauksson told Prog about being a metalhead in a prog world, writing songs at bus stops, feeling the heat on Cruise To The Edge and the band’s 2025 concept album, Maestro
Writer’s block – is there any condition more dreadful to a creative soul? The very anathema of the muses that bestow inspiration, that fearsome struggle to bring art into the world plays a key role in Maestro, the new album from Norway’s Magic Pie. The record is bookended by the two-part Opus Imperfectus, the story of a composer struggling to find the perfect ending to complete their masterpiece. The subject seems apposite when Magic Pie’s fans endured a six-year dry spell between 2019’s Fragments Of The 5th Element and the arrival of Maestro.
“This was far too long,” says Icelandic-born frontman Eiríkur Hauksson. “That was never intended. I think it started with Covid. Many bands used that period to go into the studio and work on stuff. Hail to them. We somehow just fell apart.”
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It wasn’t quite as bad as all that. Certainly, changes were afoot, with drummer Martin Utby joining the fold while guitarist Kim Stenberg set about composing the music, leaving the lyrics in Hauksson’s hands.
“Usually he has the main line of the chorus and he says, ‘I just can’t get it out of my head. This line has to be the punchline, can you please write around it,’ and I do that,” says Hauksson. “This time, Maestro, the title of the album, was my idea. This crazy composer who can’t find his last chord, it’s all mine.”
In Opus Imperfectus, Hauksson imagines a composer commissioned to write a symphony in celebration of his country’s reigning monarchs, but he can’t get over the finish line.
“I decided immediately, this guy does this masterpiece, he’s not happy with the ending, but he has to give it away because the king and queen have a deadline for a concert on December 4,” he explains.
The tale is told from the perspective of the composer’s young assistant, watching his master grapple with the symphony that he can’t finish, but Hauksson wanted the ending of Opus Imperfectus to be ambivalent about the hapless Maestro’s final fate.
“He’s so ashamed of himself, not being able to complete this masterpiece, that he disappears. I didn’t want to tell the listener if he took his own life or he disappears on some island or he got sick and died. That’s up to the listener to decide, so it’s an open story.”
The frontman himself is no stranger to the formidable obstacle of writer’s block, picking out Introversion from 2015’s King For A Day as his own Sisyphean slog.
“That one never came to me. I was going mad about it,” he says. “I was about to say to Kim, ‘You have to get somebody else to do this. I can’t find any melody for a certain part of the song.’ I had the demo on CD, I was driving to rehearsal, listening to it. Sometimes when you’re sitting behind the wheel, things happen. I listened to this part, ‘Wow, it’s there!’ Found a bus stop, drove in, found a pen, and wrote something that fit the melody. Magic! So it can be real hard and it can come quickly. You never know.”
Unlike the Maestro character, Kim Stenberg has been blessed with ideas in abundance, so another long gap between albums looks most unlikely.
“Kim has written music for three albums and Martin has already played drums on number seven and number eight,” says Hauksson. “So, if Karisma [their record label] allows us, number seven will be released in 2026. Kim has written the music, they’ve done some bass, some guitars, Erling [Henanger] our keyboard player is going to start on the keyboards, then it’s up to me. I’ll use the summer and maybe sometime in the autumn. I’m telling you, Magic Pie fans, it’s not going to be six years.’
If Stenberg has his way, the next release will be a concept album with the working title Short Stories.
“It might be six or seven short stories around a theme,” says Hauksson, who picks out Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar as a high-water mark for a concept album. “The lyrics are absolutely brilliant,” he says. “I imagine Tim Rice spent a lot of time on the album. Serious business, singing about Jesus Christ. That’s an example of great work. So good luck, Eiríkur Hauksson! But we’re not going to sing about Jesus Christ, I can promise you that. That’s too hot an issue!”
Musically, Maestro finds Magic Pie inhabiting the space between prog and classic hard rock and metal. It’s a sound born from the disparate influences that Stenberg and Hauksson each bring to the table.
“We’ve had some good reviews on the album and many talk about Deep Purple,” says Hauksson. “We never try to sound like anybody but what I think is the key to the Magic Pie sound is that all the guys in the band are really into progressive rock. I’ve never been there. I’m a metalhead. If I want to get in the mood, Painkiller by Judas Priest is going to send me out the door smiling. I love Kim’s music; it’s easy for me to write to his melodies. But my main influence being from metal with a little slash of David Bowie and The Beatles is what I hope makes us different in some way from many other prog bands.”
When Prog talks to Hauksson, Magic Pie have just returned from Cruise To The Edge. For a singer versed in metal, it was a voyage of musical discovery. His bandmates were raving about the other bands on the bill. “I was hearing them for the first time,” he says. Magic Pie played twice on the Cruise.
“Our first concert was when the boat was still in Miami. We were in the Stardust Theatre, which is the big indoor space, over a thousand seats. That was a great gig. We had such a warm welcome.”
Their next performance was on Sunday in the afternoon, but Hauksson spent all of Saturday and Sunday morning knocked out by a bug.
“I had a fever and I was completely out of it,” he says. “I don’t even remember that day. I got this massive flu or something and the guys were coming running: ‘Try this, try this.’ It was a tough gig. The sun was shining straight on the pool stage, I think it was 50˚C on that stage, and we were gasping for air. We weren’t quite happy with the gig, but afterwards, lots of people came to us, ‘Fantastic! Lovely!’ so we must have done a proper job even though we felt we were melting away.”
High temperatures – both internal and external – notwithstanding, there’s nowhere Hauksson feels more at home than onstage.
“I tend to say that there’s no song I’ve done in a studio that I, on a good day, won’t do better live,” he muses. “I love everything about playing live, so personally, I’m far happier doing live gigs than being in the studio. Kim is a perfectionist and when I go to the studio, there is always this voice in the back of my head saying, ‘Well, he’ll probably want you to do it again and again and again.’ So you can get kind of lazy.”
But the buzz of live performance offers a frisson of a very different nature. “You go to the front of the stage, you have the audience, you’re only going to do it one time, so the energy is there, the good nerves are there, I just love it.
“I could spend all my life doing live concerts. I’m so much more comfortable. It was my destiny to stand on a stage.”