Looking for your new favorite band? Look no further than one of our current favorites, Calling All Captains! Calling All Captains has just released their new EP, (e)motion sickness and we knew when we first heard it that we needed to talk to the band all about it! We got to chat with Calling All Captains, and covered everything from the EP to the tour, to the roots of the group!
Listen to (e)motion sickness here!
Welcome to The Honey POP! Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us! To start us off how would you describe who Calling All Captains are and what kind of music you guys make?
We’re a group of 4 long-time friends who were all crazy enough to pursue our music dreams. We met through our local music scene over the years and eventually, we all came together when our previous bands gave up and we still had some fight left in us. We all have very different music tastes, but together we make alternative rock music that falls somewhere within the subgenres of pop punk, emo, and post-hardcore.
(e)motion sickness is the name of the upcoming EP, can you tell us a bit about where the inspiration for the name came from and how you think it draws parallels to the tracks on the record?
We were trying to figure out what to name the EP and shooting ideas back and forth in the group chat, and I think it was Connor who dropped that one and it immediately clicked with all of us. The EP has a lot of personal, heavily emotional lyrics across different themes, and I remember Luc asking us at one point if we ever get so emotional about something that it makes us physically ill haha so when Connor dropped the name we all knew that had to be it.
‘wallflower’ is the first track you’ve released off the record, what was it about ‘wallflower’ specifically that made you guys want to have it be the first taste of the EP fans would get?
It’s the first song on the EP and it has a great come-back vibe to it after not releasing music for a while. We knew we wanted to release the first song at the start of summer, and ‘wallflower’ just had the most upbeat, summertime vibes to it. When we went into the studio we actually had a different idea about what the front runner would be, but as things progressed we all quickly agreed that was going to be the one.
‘wallflower’ is lyrically quite a heavy track, when being so vulnerable through music how do those writing sessions go? Do they happen as a group? Does one person come with a mostly finished track and share it with the group?
We’ve never really had a set writing process. Each song comes together in a different way, and we like to allow them to flow as organically as possible. With ‘wallflower,’ Luc, and Connor had put together a rough demo of the song that they brought to the group, and we all loved it instantly. The intro lyrics were exactly as they are now on the song and the rest of it had some ‘placeholder’ lyrics throughout that we later fine-tuned together as a group, but for the most part, it was largely written together by Luc and Connor.
Creating music within a group is always something that has fascinated us, as music can be such a personal thing, what do you guys find are both the hardest and most seamless parts of creating together?
The hardest part is letting go of what you thought a song was going to be so that it could become the best possible version of what it could be. When you create art from nothing it’s almost impossible not to get emotionally attached to it! We’ve had lots of heated debates in the studio about what should change in a song or how it should develop, and sometimes the hardest part is getting the group to come together on one unified vision. Each person has their ideas and sometimes you have to compromise in places you don’t want to just so the project can move forward. Luckily, we’ve learned how to get better at that over the years haha. To answer the other half of the question, the most seamless part is when we hit that flow state and everyone is feeling it and catches the vibe instantly and the song just blooms effortlessly. Not all of them happen like that, but when they do we know we’ve got something special.
You guys are about to head back on tour in August! What can fans expect from these shows? Will the EP be played in full?
Yeah, we’re STOKED to be touring across Canada and the US again! This tour will be a new experience for us and our fans. We will be playing a mix of some older songs and the new EP in its entirety, which includes the acoustic track ‘One More Day.’ We’ve never had a full acoustic song in the setlist before, so this will be the first tour EVER where we slow it down a bit with an acoustic song.
You guys have blended different genres throughout your music in a way that makes every song feel new and exciting, why has it been important to not box yourselves in genre-wise?
When we started the band that was always part of the vision. I remember hearing A Day to Remember for the first time and thinking “DAMN this band goes hard!”, and then hearing another song from them and going “wait, I know that voice, this is the same band!?”, and then another, and another, and I loved that diversity in their music. I think some bands can become kind of like actors that play the same role in different movies. Don’t get me wrong, they are great at what they do, but it becomes kind of predictable at some point. I don’t think anyone is quite sure exactly what genre we should be labeled as, and we intend to keep it that way.
With your next EP about to drop, if you had to look back on Nothing Grows Here, what would you say is the biggest area of growth you can see in yourselves as artists from then to now?
Oh man, that’s tough to say! When we came out with NGH we had just moved Luc from drums to vocals and brought our current drummer, Tim, into the group. He wasn’t part of the writing process yet, and Luc was new to the leading vocalist role, so everything was changing already. Not to mention we only had a couple of songs to play, we had a very minimal social media presence, we didn’t have in-ears yet, we had no big opportunities yet, and we had 1/10 of the fans we do now. Every part of the band has grown like crazy, but if I had to pick one, I would say our live performance. Luc really stepped into the role of lead singer and worked so hard to make that big leap from the back of the stage to the frontman. We are really, really proud of him and all the work he put in to make that growth happen.
We spoke a bit about tour earlier, and you guys actually just got done doing a stint of shows, did you play any of the new record at those shows? If so, were there any songs in particular that you saw strong fan reactions to?
Yeah we did a smaller tour here in our backyard in western Canada and played 2 or sometimes 3 new songs from the EP each night so we could see which ones the fans were vibing with. I think ‘wallflower’ had the best overall reaction, but it was different at every show! Some nights ‘skin & bones’ or ‘be cool’ had the best reaction. So there wasn’t a super clear consensus on which new song the fans liked the most, we just knew they liked them all 🙂
Once again thank you so much for talking with us! Before we let you go, we always like to ask, what’s next? What is the rest of 2024 laying out to look like for Calling All Captains?
Hey anytime, thanks for having us! We’re going on a big tour this fall across Canada & USA to play our (e)motion sickness EP for our fans, and then we plan to get back in the studio and see how fast we can crank out another album.
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