Roll of the Dice is a short interview format with a variable amount of questions. A Pair of dice is rolled and the total, between 2 and 12, is the amount of questions we can ask. All questions are given to the interviewee(s) at once, and no follow-ups are allowed. The interview may be lightly edited for content and clarity.
Philly nostalgia-core trio Carly Cosgrove released one of the best and most highly-praised records of 2022, See You In Chemistry. 2023 sees the band getting ready to hit the road with The Wonder Years and Hot Mulligan. Before that Spring tour, guitarist/vocalist Lucas Naylor was able to sit down and answer some of TGEFM’s questions on the future of Carly Cosgrove and the pressures of a killer album and world gone bananas in our latest Roll of the Dice interview.
Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Congrats on the release of the See You In Chemistry, not looking to kiss too much ass, but it definitely in the top 3 of my 2022 AOTY list. What can you tell us about the formation of the band and songwriting process on these tracks?
First off, thank you for the love! We all met playing shows with our other projects around Philly. We all started jamming in the summer of 2018, played our first show in November of the same year, and put out an EP in fall of 2019. We only really started writing our album See You In Chemsitry over FaceTime during the pandemic. A lot of that record came about from sharing riffs and ideas, via phone recordings. We eventually got together and had a few socially distanced practices here and there, but ramped up writing before going into the studio in June 2021.
What stood out most to you with this recording compared to your previous trips to the studio?
See you in Chemistry was the first time that we went to a professional studio of that caliber to record any of our music so it all really stood out. It was amazing getting to work with Joe Reinhart and get an inside look on his process. He put a lot of effort into making sure this album came out the way we all wanted. He offered us a lot of insight to not only *what* we were playing but *how* we were playing it and made us view how we recorded and played together in a whole different way.
You’re hitting the road this Spring with The Wonder Years and Hot Mulligan. How did that come together and what can we expect from your live show?
We were lucky enough to get an opening slot on an 8 show run with Dan’s (Dan Campbell) project Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties in summer of last year, so after we got familiar Dan reached out and offered us this tour as well! We are super stoked to go out on the road with him again, and to meet everyone in the touring party as well! We may have a new song in the setlist, but we can’t tell you much more about that!
Carly Cosgrove has been garnering a lot of (well-deserved) hype as one of the “next big things” in our scene. How is that high standard playing into the writing and/touring process? Does the high bar you’ve set for yourselves affect your creativity?
While there is a lot of (mostly healthy) external pressure to write better music and go on more involved tours, I (Lucas) would like to think that at the end of the day, we still work to make art that we’re proud of before anyone else. I think that we trust our own tastes and musical decisions, so the desire that we have to make good art comes from making the art that we want to listen to. A lot of the early Carly songs came from that philosophy. Ultimately I think we just wanna make things we like to listen to and like to play, and we’re incredibly grateful that it resonates with people regardless.
What affect, if any, have the cultural and political landscapes of the last few years had on your music?
Personally, the landscape has made me (Lucas) look more and more inward. I think that over the past few years, it has become apparent that the way things *looked* to the layperson during say, the Obama administration, were not the way things *were*. I think that the past six years or so revealed a lot in regard to how fragile and how hostile an ecosystem America has become (and arguably always been), and it’s gotten harder and harder to ignore. It also seems like such an impossible hurdle for any one person to surmount. The only thing I could think to do was to reflect inward on myself. How was I embodying my own personal values? What were they? How do I conduct myself in a way that reflects those values? What makes it challenging to stand by them? The only meaningful change I feel like I can make right now is in the small community of people I directly interact with. I wanna do right by them. No matter what. These questions informed a lot of the lyrical content on the record in addition to the general themes of personal growth, but they tend to go hand in hand.
One of our obligatory questions in these interviews also tends to be the one I have found most important on a personal level. Who are some bands on your radar that TGEFM readers may not know about, but you think they should check out?
Check out Elephant Jake, Stand and Wave, and Broke Body
What’s next for Carly Cosgrove?
Hopefully playing more shows in new places for the rest of 2023!
Was there anything I missed that you’d like to share or dive deeper into with our readers?
If any of yous reading this are coming out to the Wonder Years tour, we’ll see you there!
Bad Dad (occasionally called Ed) has been on the periphery of the punk and punk-adjacent scene for over twenty years. While many contributors to this site have musical experience and talent, Ed’s musical claim to fame comes from his time in arguably the most punk rock Blockbuster Video district in NJ where he worked alongside members of Blanks 77, Best Hit TV and Brian Fallon. He is more than just an awful father to his 2 daughters, he is also a dreadful husband, a subpar writer, a terrible dresser and has a severe deficiency in all things talent… but hey, at least he’s self-aware, amirite?
Check out the pathetic attempts at photography on his insta at https://www.instagram.com/bad_dad_photography/
