Cardboard Club: Show Love
Perhaps a walk-in closet is a rather peculiar place to play and record music, however for Cardboard Club it’s a place of inspiration for honeyed bedroom pop songs. The band comprises of lyricist and vocalist Christian Banner, composer and producer Taylor Terrill, bassist Ricky Casanova, and guitarist Capp Nicolll. Recently, Salt Lily Magazine had the opportunity to sit down with the quartet to discuss their new EP Show Love/Take Your Shot as well as their journey as a band.
How did you guys start playing together
Ricky: Christian and I met each other when we were 12. We were really young. He [Christian] had learned how to play guitar and said “Hey, Ricky you’re going to learn how to play guitar too.” He actually taught me how to play guitar and we started jamming together in Junior High. Through that, we also met our buddy Taylor Terrill in our choir class. We said “Hey, we need a bass player for our band.”
Taylor: My cousin has a bass.
Ricky: It really came down to that. Like ‘you have a bass welcome to the band’. We bonded a lot over time about the music we liked.
Who are some of your musical influences?
Taylor: As far as instrumentation I would say a lot of our influences are some of the alternative stuff like The Strokes mixed with Gorillaz. We always try to put a pop twist on our songs just to make it kind of like fun to listen to
Christian: When I first started writing lyrics I was inspired by Alex Trimble from Two Door Cinema Club. I kind of focused on his style of writing and Bombay Bicycle Club, and Foster the People. There’s a lot of people that I kind of conglomerate my lyrics with, but I think overtime they kind evolved into their own thing.
What is your writing process like?
Christian: I think of a topic that I want to write about and after I think of the topic I then spend a little bit of every day trying to work on the lyrics. If nothing good comes up I look at it the next day or if something good does come I try to write it down. It takes a bit for me to finish a song. I can’t just sit down and write a whole song. It takes me like a week or two weeks or even a month. It just depends on how deep I’m trying to get into the lyrics. It’s mainly me and Taylor who come up with the songs. He usually does everything with the instruments. He then sends it to me and I give my opinion about it and we just exchange different ideas with it. At that point, he takes over and finishes the rest of it and gives it to me.
What do you want your audience to take away from your music?
Christian: I think for a while a lot of my songs had a lot of the same premise to them. A lot of them were like “follow your dreams and become your own independent person.” I kind of write my lyrics about random problems or issues that I’m having. Sometimes some songs are about a random issue that’s been a thing for a while. We’re working on an EP now and this is the first time I’m trying to connect all of the songs together. Whereas the songs I wrote beforehand are more like their own separate things and their own separate issues.
On your Spotify it says that you guys record in a walk in closet. How accurate is that?
Everyone: It’s extremely accurate
Christian: We’ve tried studios before ,but we never really liked them. The experience is not really fun for us. We don’t have any padding or anything on it, we just use the clothes as a buffer for the sounds.
Taylor: So all the instruments and stuff are just directly into the Interface, so pretty much only the vocals get recorded in the closet. For drummers and synthesizers I use the plug-ins from my audio workstation.
How has your sound changed since you first started playing?
Capp: Before I joined the band, I used to go to school with Ricky’s younger sister and they went through a couple of phases, but you can tell they went from a high school band to a more poppy fun band. Then they went through another transformation and I think that’s where we’re kind of at now. We’re definitely more and more finding our song. I think we’re there if not super close.
Ricky: I think the technology we kind of had contributed. When we first started that band it really was like who has a guitar, who has a drum set? Let’s just try to make something of it.
Taylor: At first, it was kind of limited. We were trying to recreate the more analog sound in the digital format, but then you kind of see how many options you have and it opens up new ideas for what kind of sounds you can make. I think that just keeps going forward. With the EP I’ve been using samples. I think a couple of years ago I would have been scared of that. Our goal is just to find our own unique sound.
How would you describe your sound?
Christian: We don’t really like the word genre that much, because it’s kind of weird to us to put your music in a certain area. We kind of realized that we are kind of alternative because alternative is a really big genre. I kind of describe it as pop with guitars. Mainly because I don’t like saying rock. People have a bias with rock. If they think rock they think of super heavy drums. I like to use the word pop instead because it’s lighter. Our songs are more bright for the most part.
Where does your band name come from?
Taylor: The club part of it mostly a reference to Two Door Cinema Club and Bombay Bicycle Club which were the bands that we kind of became friends over. In high school our main hobby was playing Yugio and that’s where cardboard comes from.
Where do you see yourself in the next five years.
Taylor: It’s kind of hard to say because I would say this phase of the band is kind of different than what we’ve done before. I feel like we are a lot more independent than we used to be. We used to be ‘Oh, we need to take this recording and have them mix it for us’ or we need someone to help us get gigs or whatever. Now we’re kind of like let’s do all this ourselves now. That’s where I started to learn how to mix. Hopefully, I would like to make a career out of this. I think it would be fun to travel around and play music. That’s the dream, but we could do it like every couple of months we release a song or two and kind of just keep getting better.
Ricky: I think that’s the thing we just enjoy playing music and enjoy making songs. We’ve been doing this so long. We always want to be playing music together or be a band. It’s fun. It keeps us busy. It’s just something to always work towards.
Check out Cardboard Club play live on Salt Lily Presents on August 14th at 7pm on our Facebook and Instagram page. You can also find more of Cardboard Club’s music on their Spotify.
