No Longer 'Nobody We Could Name': Live and Local with Magpie!

Local musician Magpie stopped by Live & Local last week, following the release of his debut album “Nobody We Could Name.”

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“Nobody We Could Name” is a confident, stellar, and genre-spanning album, with tracks that range from acoustic indie to rapid-fire hip-hop. It would be a remarkable debut from any artist, but this one’s especially impressive: “Magpie” is Owen Russell, a rising junior at Carrboro High School. He’s only 16 years old.

“I live in a very musical household, so I’ve been around music as long as I can remember,” Russell says.

Written and recorded over the last two years, the album is comprised of ten songs, each inspired by someone in Russell’s life – though ironically, he says, it’s also driven by a running theme of change: the people who are most important in your life today could drift out of your life entirely later on.

“Since I’ve been working on it, I’ve learned so much,” Russell says, “(and) I feel like now I really know that music is something that I love to do, and this album has really made me realize that.”

Follow Magpie and listen to “Nobody We Could Name” on Spotify.

Russell is a multi-instrumentalist – on top of singing and rapping, he also plays piano, guitar, drums, and even trumpet – and he brings that varied approach to his songwriting, which is not bound by any particular genre.

“For me, the purpose of the song comes first, the meaning of the song comes first,” he says. “It would feel more strange, honestly, to limit myself in genre, as opposed to having all of these different mediums that I can work within. I think you can create a more broad and diverse musical landscape if you’re not limiting yourself in that way.”

Consequently, Russell names a wide variety of artists as important influences, from Kendrick Lamar to Beyonce to Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. (“My dad is also a huge inspiration,” he adds: “I was three years old and he was singing songs that he’d written to me.”) So it’s fitting that his next project – already in the works – is even more ambitious, and even more genre-bending, than his first one.

“I don’t want to give away too much, but it’s a narrative concept album, inspired by an Italian opera,” he says. “I love the multi-genre stuff, so I’m trying to bring in elements of the opera into hip-hop.”

Owen Russell of Magpie stopped by Live & Local last week to discuss the album and play three tracks: “What Is Your Mind Telling You,” “For A Moment Or Two,” and “Descent of a Masked Man.” Listen:

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No Longer ‘Nobody We Could Name’: Live and Local with Magpie!

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