Thailand-Based Canadian Rocker MAGER BOOBOO Tackles Herd Mentality On New Single “Monkey See Donkey Do”
Mager BooBoo, the solo project of Canadian expat artist Robert Bachtell Eastland, releases “Monkey See Donkey Do” out now, the second single from his upcoming debut album, Oops!. Where lead single “Dumb” turned everyday clumsiness into an anthem, “Monkey See Donkey Do” aims its animal metaphors at something bigger, the question of how much of who we are is actually our own. “Who are we really,” Eastland asks, “slaves to the system, or little sparks of being following what we’ve always been taught?”
The song wraps that question in a barnyard chant built for shouting along. “I’ve got a body, you’ve got a body, we all got a body, and a beating heart,” Eastland sings before the hook takes over: “Hey monkey be a donkey, just like your momma taught you, just like your daddy did.” Between the “hee haws” and the call and response energy, “Monkey See Donkey Do” turns conformity into something you can dance to rather than lecture about.
The song continues the sound Eastland has coined “Heavy Irony,” heavy for its layered harmonic vocals, crunchy guitars and thudding, self programmed drum tracks, irony for lyrics that needle at modern life without ever losing their sense of humour. Eastland leans on animal imagery throughout his songwriting as a reminder that, conditioning and social order aside, humans remain biological creatures tied to the world around them, a thread that runs directly from “Dumb” into this new single.
“Dumb” has already found an enthusiastic international audience since its July 22 release, drawing comparisons to the Pixies, Arctic Monkeys, Nirvana, and The Strokes from outlets across Brazil, Costa Rica, Peru, Italy and the United States. Among the strongest reactions came from Alan Cross of Corus Radio’s A Journal of Musical Things, who said the song’s chorus would run through his head all day and personally invited Eastland to send a video and short bio for wider feature consideration, a strong signal for a project still building its audience one listener at a time.
Behind Mager BooBoo is a musician who spent decades away from songwriting before coming back to it. Eastland, 64, began playing guitar and writing songs at 14, built a career in musical theatre, radio and television, including writing and performing for the CBC affiliated children’s show ‘Cowboy Who?’ in Pembroke, Ontario, and years fronting the band 101 alongside his brother Tom. He has 51 songs registered with SOCAN and has had music played on Canadian radio.
However, he set music aside for over 20 years to pursue a career in teaching. Only recently, he took up writing music again, taught himself modern production from scratch, and learned how to navigate Logic Pro on a Mac Studio to build Mager BooBoo. He now lives in Thailand, where he teaches English full time at a university and records in whatever time is left over.
Eastland performs every element of Mager BooBoo himself, crediting a cast of characters on the recordings, General Disorder on backing vocals, Colonel O’Korn on guitars, Private Parts on bass and Count Sequence on drums, all fittingly tongue in cheek names for a project built entirely around one person’s sense of humour.
With “Dumb” already turning heads internationally and “Monkey See Donkey Do” out now, Mager BooBoo’s debut album, ‘Oops!,’ is shaping up as a genuinely funny, fully self-made introduction to an artist who waited decades to make exactly the record he wanted to make.
Hi, Robert! Good to meet you! Care to introduce yourself to the readers for those not familiar with your music?
It’s good to meet you, too! I started playing guitar at 14 years old and found that I naturally came up with original riffs simply because I couldn’t copy other people’s licks very well. I treated this as an advantage; instead of copying or covering songs, I just wrote my own. By 16, I had already begun to write complete songs, but due to my eclectic musical tastes, I could not settle on a sound, or genre, that was consistent. I wrote everything from sad ballads to folk anthems as a solo singer/songwriter. It wasn’t until I joined a band in high school that I found my love for rock music. I began listening to punk and new wave and started writing heavier tunes. The hook for my song Dumb came to me around then.
I studied theatre at the University of Ottawa and contributed music to most of the shows I was in. I met the founding members of the Salt ‘n’ Pepper Theatre Company (Educational Children’s Theatre) who hired me as an actor, then later became the producer and musical director. As the producer, I approached CHRO TV to pitch an off-the-wall children’s TV show idea that we had. We brought on Jeff Green who was at that time working for CHEZ 106 as a DJ and radio play writer and producer. He joined us as a co-creator and director of our ultimately award-winning quasi-children’s TV show “Cowboy Who?”. I was as one of the lead actors, co-writer, and composer. That show included a music video which is the origin story of Mager BooBoo (more later).
Fast forward about five years – I joined my brother, Tom Eastland, and formed the band 101, which blended my altrock-leaning and his Canadiana/folk style. Our first album, “Thanksgiving Day” was totally acoustic, recorded live-off-the-floor by Canadian folk music legend Willie P. Bennett, a friend, hero to, and neighbor of Tom’s. Willie had sat in on some of our sessions and liked our work enough to invite us into his home studio for one day of recording, which was literally Canadian Thanksgiving Day, thus the name of the album. Some of those songs got played on CBC Radio and various university radio stations. We also played gigs at the Peterborough Folk festival and local bars as a folk/rock band, but I very much wanted to lean into a more powerful rock sound, so our next album “Fully Bugged” was arranged and recorded with a full drum kit, electric guitars, and bass. This contrast in our two styles is eventually what broke up the band; I wanted to continue in the altrock direction, and my brother wanted to lean back into his folk roots. Our last studio session resulted in 5 or 6 early Mager BooBoo songs that remain unpublished and half of an album for my brother.
Skip ahead another 5 years – I had completely given up on my musical aspirations. Frankly, I was sick of having to compete in the “star” system of music labels in that era, with less than 1% of the recorded bands making a living, so I bought a one-way ticket to Thailand, left my guitars and amp with my brother, and gave up music to pursue English teaching. I ended up loving my new career and thought I would never look back to music. I pretty much dropped music (with a couple of small exceptions) and focused on becoming a better English teacher for over 20 years.
It was my dear wife who finally encouraged me to get back into making music. She had heard 101’s albums and loved some of the songs. She believed in me so much and encouraged me to get back to writing songs and wanted me to write a song for her. For years I denied it until I finally caved and began writing again. I honestly thought that I had lost the creative spark, but it turns out that the pot was just simmering on the back burner, and when I finally opened the lid, I found more delicious soup than I had ever tasted. I really liked what I was writing and got excited about creating music again. So, we have her to thank for the newest incarnation of Mager BooBoo.
“Monkey See Donkey Do” asks whether we’re really our own people or just following what we’ve always been taught. What actually got you thinking about that question, was there a specific moment that sparked it?
That’s a good question, and the answer is quite odd. I mentioned before that my wife asked me to write a song for her, so I wanted to find something that was uniquely hers to build a song on. For those romantic types, don’t worry, I have a love song for her, too, but you’ll have to wait for the second album to hear that one. I planned for the first album to be a series of bangers, so I had to find something about her to write an energetic rock song to. It ended up being her cute animal names from her email handle monkily donkily that triggered the idea for this song. At some point, that pairing of animal nicknames just clicked into the phrase ‘monkey see monkey do’, and from there it all began to fall into place. The substitution of the second ‘monkey’ for ‘donkey’ added depth to the meaning of the saying in a very profound way. The monkey part of us tends to copy others, sure, but we also have the donkey inside of us that has to do all the hard work in life. In this song, I am trying to highlight the struggle between the curious and playful monkey side of us that just wants to play all day, and the donkey side of us that knows we have a responsibility to work hard in order just to make a living. At the end, I try to give the listener some relief from this continual battle inside us with the final phrase. ‘Monkey see, donkey don’t’ which reminds the audience that we don’t have to do everything we are taught or think that we are supposed to do to contribute to society. I then follow that with another lyrical clue for how to escape this trap with ‘oo, oo, oo, oo, heeeeee!’, hinting that we can stop doing what we are doing even if we are in the middle of doing it. It’s never too late to change.
You’ve coined this sound “Heavy Irony,” heavy in the guitars and vocals, ironic in the lyrics. How did you land on that description, and does every song need both halves to actually qualify as Mager BooBoo?
The phrase Heavy Irony came to me during a rehearsal with the band 101. We were still trying to land on a genre or label for who we were and what kind of music we played, and I came up with heavy irony as a play on words for heavy metal. We didn’t use it at the time because we were nothing like a metal band and didn’t want to give the impression that we were. It’s been sitting in the back of my mind for 30 years, and frankly, I’m quite surprised that no one else has used it. So, I decided it was time for me to claim my genre and get my brand of satire out there. I am certainly not the only artist that makes this kind of music, so I am happy to share the genre name with others. There are other aspects of my music and production that are relatively unique that aren’t specifically heavy or ironic, though. For example, I use 5 separate tracks of harmonies using my own voice. I wanted to coin something like hashtag #Voxxxmaxxxing because I use multiple harmonic vocals with only me singing them, but in the end I thought one unique hashtag would be enough to start with.
Regarding your follow up question, does it need to be both heavy and ironic to qualify as a Mager BooBoo song, no, not really. I don’t want to paint myself into too small a corner. For me, the lyrics don’t have to be ironic, but I will mostly keep the same heavy arrangement, with strong drum and bass lines as well as crunchy guitars for most of my songs. I have several songs coming up whose lyrics are not ironic at all. One of them is deep and mythical; another is happy and descriptive, leaning into poetic imagery instead of irony. I may even include one track per album that is neither heavy nor ironic, just to keep things interesting.
Animal imagery runs straight through both “Dumb” and this new single. What keeps pulling you back to that well, and is there an animal you haven’t used yet that you’re saving for later?
Ah, another excellent question! I am deeply fond of the natural world, and every poet and songwriter loves metaphor, so the answer to your first question is because there is so much material available to us. There are so many animals on Earth, each with their own little idiosyncrasies, and they often parallel the behavior of humans. I also like insects, and used insect imagery with some 101 songs. Our second album was called “Fully Bugged”, had bee-themed cover art, and had at least two songs that had bug themes. I guess you could say that I am now in my ‘animal phase’ and have recently written many songs with animals in them. To answer your follow up question, yes I do have a specific animal locked and loaded for my fourth song, which is due to drop sometime in October. It features lizards and addresses the lizard brain impulses of humans. I am finalizing the mix now. After that, I have at least one more song with several different types of birds in it. Gotta try to cover all the bases, you know.
You wrote and performed for a CBC-affiliated kids’ show and fronted a band with your brother Tom, decades before any of this. Does any of that early work show up in how you write now, even in a project built on irony and barnyard chants?
Yes, very much so. As I said earlier, our CBC-affiliated kids’ show called ‘Cowboy Who?’ has the first official appearance of both Mager BooBoo and Heavy Irony in its infancy. I made a song with a music video as part of the show. The song is called 2 Kinds of Green and is heavily ironic rock music. I used a fake band name and producer because it was presented as thought it was a real MV. The artist name I chose was Major BuBu. I have always liked the sound of that name and wanted to “reclaim” it, but I changed the spelling for several reasons. Unfortunately, the audio production on that track is absolutely horrible. I used a 4 –track cassette recorder, which was top-of-the-line home studio equipment for the time, an early model Roland drum machine, and recorded one track of vocals with a 70s-era lavalier mic with absolutely no vocal production or effects. I really want to redo that song, but it’s too similar to my next release for this album. Maybe I’ll rerecord it for the second album. Regarding the irony and barn-yard chants, my brother and I started experimenting with that kind of music on “Fully Bugged”, so there’s a lot of my past musical career that can be found in my current work. I have worn many different monkey suits, but the monkey donkey inside is still the same, just older and hopefully wiser.