MUSIC

Exclusive Interview: COIN Talks New Video for "Crash My Car"

We spoke to COIN's lead singer Chase Lawrence about his band's brilliant new single and life in quarantine.

COIN - Crash My Car

via YouTube.com

COIN just released their new video for "Crash My Car," an electrifying track that feels designed to fill stadiums. It's a love letter to music, to fans, and to all the bonds that unite them.

Of course, it's been released in the time of self-isolation, when stadiums are closed and musicians have been relegated to their homes. We were supposed to interview the band and premier the video live at our Popdust office, but due to the current circumstances, the conversation took a very different path. From our respective homes, we spoke to lead vocalist and synth player, Chase Lawrence, about being present, about creating music during disaster, and of course, about the stars of the new music video: the fans.

The "Crash My Car" video is a tribute to COIN's dedicated fans. It stars some of their top Nashville-based supporters, each as much a part of the performance as any of the band's actual members. In a way, the video feels like a shoutout to all music fans, a reminder that the euphoria we feel in the audience is also being felt by performers, a reminder that in the end, music is a celebration of connection. It's a love letter to art in general, a reminder that no matter how irrational creation may seem, sometimes you just have to let go and let your heart take the reins.

Watch the video below, and read on to discover the story behind the music.

COIN - Crash My Car [Sound & Mind Sessions]www.youtube.com


POPDUST: How are you?

CHASE LAWRENCE: I mean, as good as any of us can be in this situation, I guess!

Are you at home?

I'm at my parents' house in West Virginia. We were on tour, but we reached a point where we started thinking it was irresponsible to keep gathering people.

So we just paused. Now I'm hanging out with my parents and sister and niece and nephew, and it's great. I'm making the most of it. It's weird times, but happy days.

Can you tell me a little bit about your new music video for "Crash My Car"? It's so euphoric—like a little energy burst, a nice change in the midst of a lot of staying at home. What was the inspiration, and how was making it with the fans?

There's this symbiotic relationship between the fans and the music we make. We feel like the music is just as much theirs as it is ours. Without them, it would be this indulgent journal, but the fans take it and they give it a whole new meaning.

We were wondering how to best represent these people's voices, and we thought, why not actually represent them? So we sent an email out to a hundred people in Nashville. We asked them all to wear a monochromatic color, and they all showed up. I knew a lot of them because they've been to so many shows over the years, and we've developed such close relationships and friendships with these people who come to so many shows and wait outside the venues.

There's nothing like the relationship between the music fan and the bands they love.

Again, it's symbiotic. It was so cool to hear their voices so clearly, equally loud or louder than ours.

"Crash My Car" is such an earworm of a song, and it sounds so electric, like it must've been fun to make. What's it like when you guys are writing and making your music?

It keeps changing. Every time we think we have the process down, we realize we could improve. It's so spontaneous. There's this tightrope of figuring out what's too candid and too perfect and of finding this balance between passion and perfection.

For "Crash My Car," we were playing a festival in Atlanta, and we'd just come off a weird trip to LA. There were these crazy fires, and the clouds were literally dark, and it was a really sad, dark week. A lot was canceled because of the fires, and everyone was affected by the weather more than we'd admit. We were in between albums, and we were wondering—do we even want to do this anymore? Is this what we're meant to do? We had a good run, but maybe we should just quit… There was so much uncertainty. So we decided to just take things one day at a time.

That night we played this show in front of 15,000 people, and the crowd was singing back every word. It was the most surreal experience, seeing everything we've worked for come to fruition in a 45-minute window. We came off the stage electrified, and the next morning we went into the studio and decided to write something louder than anything we'd written before. That song came out in just a few hours. It was a combination of extreme uncertainty and pseudo-sadness combined with this euphoria, and we got this silver lining of a song.

That seems relevant now. I feel like music can sometimes remind you what's really important even if you're doubting it.

When we pressed pause on this tour and came home, I was like, what am I going to do? I'm not just going to go live on the Internet and just post things. So I just buckled down and started writing.

We've fully written, collectively and collaboratively, another album's worth of songs. I think the darkest times produce the most honest songs.

Has being home changed what you've been writing about?

I feel like these songs, sonically, are more R&B-sounding. There's some hip-hop and some gospel and sample-infused things. Maybe I'm nostalgically connecting to who I was in high school. I grew up in churchland, so I think that's why I've been thinking about gospel; I feel like I'm reopening this envelope that's been closed for years. I don't know, but I want to explore every angle.

I'm excited to see what comes out of it.

Honestly, me too. I'm just as uncertain as you are.

Lack of certainty seems like a theme of this era. So your last album was Dreamland, and I'm curious about the title. What inspired it?

I had come home, where I am now, after being gone for a very long time. My cousin was married, my sister moved, and I couldn't believe that my friend had a baby… and all these life changes happened. I'd been removed from the conversations about this whole sequence of events, and someone said, "You must be living in dreamland!" The next week I was flying somewhere, and this woman was reading a pamphlet called "Dreamland." I started wondering—what does this word mean to me?

I realized I've spent so much time over the past few years—and I think we're all guilty of this—almost... living above myself, trying to figure out the best way to tell the story. I was hovering above where I was, trying to strategize how to tell people where I am.

The idea of being present became very important to me, because I realized I'd been looking up, trying to figure out what the next move was without realizing that there was a beautiful view all around me.

So when I made the album, Dreamland, I was trying to be more present.

How's that working out?

In this time specifically, there's never been a better time to practice being present, because there's really nowhere else to go. I guess some people could choose escapism, but reality is facing us harder than ever. There's less and less to do for many people, so now's the time to focus on putting one foot in front of the other, and maybe staring at a tree... It sounds stupid, but I've learned so much just looking around and seeing the intricacy and the beauty in the normal things and all around. Even washing a dish can be so satisfying, if you make it purposeful and meaningful.

Right now, we're just sitting, and that's enough. You don't have to be sitting and thinking about what you're gonna watch later or what you did yesterday. You're just sitting. And that's enough for me.

Sounds so different from the rockstar life you must've been wrapped up in, jet-setting from one place to the other.

I'm kind of privileged to even have the opportunity to do this; some people have to really think about what they're going to do and what their next steps are going to be. But right now, regret isn't really possible, because the past is gone and worrying about the future—well, there's never been a better time to practice being present, because nothing has ever been more out of our control.

How's the rest of the band faring?

The band's great. Ryan the drummer lives in LA, but he came home from tour and was like, why would I stay in Los Angeles where I just have friends, no family? He packed up his car and went back to Cleveland to his parents. It's a crazy time to be away from family.

Joe lives in New York, so flying home wasn't really an option. He decided to stay put in Nashville, and it just happened that his girlfriend was there, so they're doing great. We're writing a ton together by proxy, sending voice memos back and forth, focusing on making a deluxe version of Dreamland and putting out as much new music as possible. We're taking advantage of this time, these hard times and happy days, taking it one step at a time.

COIN - Into My Arms (Official Video)www.youtube.com


How did you all meet?

I met Joe, the guitarist, on the first day of college in Nashville. I sat down, and he was right beside me. After two weeks of classes, I hadn't said a word to him, and I have no idea why, but I asked him if he wanted to write a song together. He came to my dorm room, and we wrote one dumb song and it didn't really work out, but as he was walking out the door I showed him a song I was working on and he helped me tweak it. We kept meeting over and over, and then he was like, I know this drummer, Ryan. It was just kismet. For us, the stars literally aligned. None of us were trying to start a band, but this is what we're doing all these years later. Things like that make you realize there's a purpose in whatever we're doing.

Anything else you want to add?

We're just making a lot of music and we're excited to share it, that's all.

Like I said, I hope that people can let go, because there's truly nowhere else you can be than right here.

Follow COIN on Spotify, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Music Features

Interview: Dayglow Makes Sugary DIY Earworms—Just Don't Call It Bedroom Pop

Sloan Struble of Dayglow talks to Popdust about growing up in small-town Texas, selling out a tour that got canceled, and the viral success of his single "Can I Call You Tonight?"

Dayglow - Can I Call You Tonight? (Official Video)

Things haven't really gone according to plan lately for Sloan Struble.

The 20-year-old singer-songwriter-producer is calling me from Aledo, Texas, a 5,000-person town just west of Fort Worth. Not too long ago, Struble was an advertising student at the University of Texas at Austin. After his song "Can I Call You Tonight?" went viral, he left school to pursue his indie-pop project, Dayglow, full-time. But things took an unfortunate turn when—as with just about every active artist you can think of right now—Dayglow's sold-out tour scheduled to begin this spring was canceled due to the worldwide health concerns. So Struble packed his things and headed to his childhood home, the same place where he self-recorded his debut album, Fuzzybrain, which is out now.

"I'll definitely look back at this past year and think, what the heck happened?" Struble tells me with palpable disbelief, referring to both the current pandemic (which prevented this interview from happening in-person) and his rapid rise to indie notoriety. To Struble, a job in advertising was a tolerable back-up plan—maybe he'd make commercials or music videos—but after his cousin showed him the magic of GarageBand when he was ten years old, a career in music was his main goal.

"I've always definitely wanted to do this," Struble says. "But it felt really out of reach. So I felt like once it was really obvious that I was not going to do advertising and be a musician instead, that's when I would do it."

Dayglow - Can I Call You Tonight? (Official Video)www.youtube.com


With mentions in a handful of local blogs, a shoutout from Gen-Z tastemaker Emma Chamberlain, and an album reissue on innovative record label AWAL, a path in music was undeniable for Struble. Below, he tells Popdust about those revelatory moments, how Fuzzybrain came together, and the future of Dayglow.

Obviously, Austin is known for its music scene. How did living there shape the way you make music?

I actually moved to Austin about a year and a half ago for school at UT. There's really not much of an artistic scene here [in Aledo]. It's kind of, like, Friday Night Lights-ish, where football is the thing that everybody does. So I kind of felt creatively isolated while I was growing up. I spent most of my time just seeing what people were doing with music via the Internet, and not really from anybody who was actually around me, which would have been the case in Austin.

Which artists in particular inspired you while making Fuzzybrain?

I was really trying to lean into, like, 2009 to 2011 big indie pop names. I thought that was a great era that went by really quick. Phoenix, I still love a lot, but I was really into Phoenix while making the record. Passion Pit a little bit, too.

Tell me about how "Can I Call You Tonight?" started going viral.

I was going to be an advertising student in school, so I can't help but think about advertising and marketing tying in with music, because that definitely is a part of being an artist, for better or worse. I was very careful in the way that I presented it, but I didn't do too much in terms of promoting it. I just kind of had faith that if I just let it go and the timing was right, then it would kind of just fit into that pocket of YouTube and Spotify. I emailed a couple of small blogs. There was one in particular called Honey Punch, who is awesome—it's run by two sisters. I sent them an email, and I was like, "Hey, I have this song, I feel like you might like it." And they posted about it. At the time, I didn't have any related artists on Spotify, but because they wrote about it at the right time, all of my related artists afterwards were COIN and other big indie names right now. I think all of that somehow got it into the algorithm—it sounds kind of like the matrix when I'm like, it's in this algorithm!—but yeah, I feel really, really blessed. I mean, I don't want to discredit my hard work because obviously I spent a lot of time working on it, but I also feel really lucky that it just worked, you know?

So what was the timeline of all of this?

I think I put "Can I Call You Tonight?" out on Spotify in late January 2018, and then I made the music video a couple months later. And then those, hand-in-hand, started growing. It's been seriously pretty mind-blowing, because it blows up more each day. It's reacting a lot stronger now than it did initially, and it's almost two years old. So it's pretty cool that it's still growing and seems like it still has a lot of room to grow, which is really exciting.

Dayglow - Listerine (Official Video)www.youtube.com


You'd be on tour right now if it weren't for everything going on, and I know a lot of independent artists are taking a huge hit because of it. How are you coping, and how can fans help their favorite artists in lieu of tours?

I really, really love playing shows, and I think a very big part of why I want to do music is so I can be on stage and perform. But thankfully for me, most of the money I'm making right now is from streaming. Touring is new for me, so personally, I'm not necessarily taking a huge financial hit, but I know a lot of other people are, and my bandmates are. I think it's been pretty encouraging how the first question everyone's asking is "how can we help you?" I think that's pretty awesome that everybody's concerned about artists, and that makes me feel good. But buying merch [helps]. People are probably listening to a lot more music now that they have the time at home, so just keep listening to music. Hopefully this ends soon, and I can go on tour again, so come to those shows!

You originally self-released Fuzzybrain and recorded and performed everything yourself. Why did you go that route?

Since a very young age, I always thought it'd be really cool to be in a band, but I didn't grow up in a place where a lot of people had that same idea. I was making music on GarageBand, and I kind of reached the point where I had used all of the loops GarageBand had available. So I was like, "If I want to make music, I have to know how to play these other instruments," because I didn't really know anybody else that wanted to. So I taught myself the bare minimum of each instrument, and over time, I've just gotten better at each of them. But yeah, it just came from a very personal passion. It's just something I love to do and I love being in creative control.

You get associated with a lot of "bedroom pop" artists, which of course is a very literal descriptor in your case. I remember around the time that Clairo's first EP came out, she said she felt limited by the "bedroom pop" label. How do you feel about that term?

It's hard to address, because bedroom pop is a very specific sound, I think. And I just really don't sound like it, in my opinion. I know I'm young and making music in my bedroom, but I definitely don't think I associate with the bedroom pop scene. It totally makes sense why I've been placed in it, but I think recently, people have kind of realized that I don't really fit into that. I still want people to know I'm really creatively involved in DIY, but I also feel like bedroom pop a lot of times is made to be played in a bedroom, you know? It's mood music, or for when you're chilling out—I want my songs to be festival songs. But that's interesting that Clairo said that. And now she's playing shows with MGMT and Tame Impala! I'm so jealous.

That's a good segue into my next question, because you have a song seemingly about wanting to run the world ("Run the World!!!"). Is there any truth in that?

[Laughs] It's very sarcastic. I mean, I think I'm a fairly levelheaded and humble person when people get to know me. I obviously put that song out without knowing so many people were gonna hear it. It's a song that I knew people close to me were going to hear and immediately laugh. But now it's strange, because people who have no idea who I am hear it, and I'm like, "Do they actually think I think that?" But I think it's always fun to be ironic and sarcastic with music because I want to be optimistic and show people that I'm having fun with what I'm doing. But in order for the optimism to not be ignorant, I think you have to address things like [narcissism and pessimism]. I think it's fun to poke fun at things without being mean.

How have you been adjusting to people who don't know you listening to your music, and making assumptions of you based on your art?

It's really strange, if I'm being honest. I think it's incredible that more people are listening, but nothing can really prepare you for it. At the end of the day, I'm just a person, but it's a really weird thing when most of the people who know who you are only view you as an artist. It's taken me a while to view myself as a person who makes art. It's an incredible opportunity, but it's definitely a weird transition.

Where do you see your career headed?

I have no idea. That's the thing—I wish I could get my mind to think of something [regarding the future], but everything so far has just blown my mind so much that I can't set goals. I want things to keep going the way they are. I hope people are still listening and I'm still making things that I'm proud of. And I guess that's all I can try to do.

What's been your favorite memory over the past year or so?

Everything's so wild right now. I mean, I guess the most iconic thing is that I had a completely sold out tour that didn't exist. It's kind of funny, but obviously terrible. But I played Austin City Limits last fall, which was the biggest click of, like, "This is crazy!" That was a really big moment for me.

Dayglow - Hot Rod (Official Video)www.youtube.com