Navigating Coming-of-Age Clarity with Courier Club

Banding together in Philadelphia in 2018, Courier Club is a band that always achieves what they are set out to do. All of their songs show off the extremely talented musicians while the lyrics find their way to stick to the listener and let them build the soundtrack to their life one note at a time. Courier Club is the talents of Timothy Waldron (vocals, guitar), Ryan Conway (guitar), Michael Silverglade (bass), and Jack Kessler (drums). As a group, they created a nostalgic post-punk sound with their 2020 EP Drive Like Your Kids Live Here, and now the band drops their newest single “Where Do I Run?” featuring a more romantic sound that was written during unknown and unexpected times. Courier Club dropped their music video for the song, featuring the band’s escapist, on-route mentality, into the countryside. Unpublished sat down with Courier Club to chat all about what “Where Do I Run?” means to them, their on-the-road-like journey of a music video, and how they have become more grounded as a band moving into a new era of music. One of the most beautifully shot music videos I believe I’ve seen in a long time, it follows the bandmates interacting with each other within their brotherly bond while the scenic backdrop features jaw-dropping landscapes of greenery and waterfalls. A scene that makes you feel everything all at once!

[UNPUBLISHED]: Can you walk us through the meaning behind your upcoming single “Where Do I Run”?

[CC - TIMOTHY]: Lyrically, the whole mood of the song revolves around that feeling of doubt and more so about the middle part of a relationship. There’s a lot of songs written about falling in love and falling out of love but there’s not a lot of stuff on that middle ground. It’s just about navigating that rollercoaster itself. I like to say it’s like the stuff that happens after the movie ends. We’re feeling out those feelings of doubt. Thinking about what they are, do they have weight to them? Are they real? Or are they just a natural thing that’s always going to be there? And not letting that doubt get to you, it’s just part of the relationship.

[UNPUBLISHED]: What does your writing process usually look like?

[CC - MICHAEL]: This one started with a bassline that I was demoing out and then Tim added a guitar part to it, and some scratch vocals. We then showed all the other guys at our practice and we kind of rebuilt the whole thing together.

[CC - RYAN]: Yeah, Jack laid down the drum part and took it in a different direction and then the lead line just came really naturally. It’s always a good sign whenever everything flows together naturally, the right parts locked in intuitively and that definitely happened here. This is one of the fastest songs we wrote right? Like I would say top five in terms of efficiency when writing.

[TIMOTHY]: Yeah, one of the fastest songs we wrote but one of the longest to get the mix right? It came together so quickly that we didn’t really know what we wanted it to sound like when recorded.

[RYAN]: Sometimes one of us will have a pretty full vision and we’ll bring it together so everyone can add their stuff to it. But for this one, it was equally collaborative as we were all writing in the room together.

[UNPUBLISHED]: The music video for “Where Do I Run” offers a very intimate experience following your band on this on-the-road-like journey. Can you walk us through the making of the video and how it came to be?

[TIMOTHY]: Yeah, we honestly just wanted to have a trip together, and filming this was a good excuse for us to go on a little vacation. Our buddy Ben came along and we just filmed a bunch of stuff to scrap together.

[RYAN]: We were talking about doing a thing with goats. That was how this all started.

[TIMOTHY]:  Yeah, it was pretty much that we wanted to go hang out with some goats, and unfortunately there was only one.

[RYAN]: We didn’t want to go all out for this music video, especially after the last one. Where that one was super produced and for this one, we just wanted to flip it.

[UNPUBLISHED]: Was there a specific moment or setting in the video that you enjoyed filming the most?

[TIMOTHY]: There was one where we got up really early in the morning so we could film in the pre-dawn hours of the morning in the mountains and for some of the driving shots. I was holding onto  Ben, as he was hanging out of the sunroof. Also, just running around the farm and finding animals because it was a free-roaming farm. So you would just walk up on a family of ducks or horses, so running around and capturing that stuff was a good time. Also, we were trying to get a shot of us swimming, so we were trying to find a watering hole. We actually dropped the film while setting up!

[MICHAEL]: We shot it all on film and had the camera set up on the ledge. I think he fumbled his bag and a roll of film and fell off, luckily it didn’t go into the water but hit the rocks, but still was usable!

[UNPUBLISHED]: In the beginning, you’re away from technology, away from the city and you are back in the presence of nature with a song that accompanies this feeling so well. You’re going back to the roots of a home that you may not have even been to yet. Is this type of connection reflective behind the lyrics that you wrote for the song?

[RYAN]: When Tim was writing the lyrics it certainly fit the vibe of the song. It was still Covid times, everything was off and broken. We were definitely in this mode of not sure where things are going to go from here, but we still want to write this even though we were not sure what the outcome was going to be. This song was a little bit of a departure from the vibe that we had been on and how we were feeling while writing it correlates with the layers of the template together. The whole thing is just about not knowing what comes next.

[TIMOTHY]: Usually I write the lyrics at the end of the process but this time we knew it was going to be valuable to have them done when we wrote the song. Also, there’s that cliche of a band running off into the woods together that I think always happens so they can find themselves again. I feel like as much of a cliche that is, we wanted to try that.

[UNPUBLISHED]: What’s one thing you hope listeners take away from the song?

[TIMOTHY]: I hope they do the same thing you did. Just it being a soundtrack for a part of their lives. If you can paint your own picture of it and use it as a tool to navigate something in your life or just have it on in the background.

[RYAN]: I feel like that’s always the goal. Can it be meaningful to you in some way? It doesn’t have to be the same thing for you as it may be for someone else.

[UNPUBLISHED]: How do you feel you have evolved as artists from your 2020 EP Drive Like Your Kids Live Here?

[RYAN]: We’re more grounded. I know for me, it’s going to be about the writing process and getting more comfortable with understanding your own personal writing and how that works with everybody. We had a short weird phase where we lost track of the vibe a little bit where too much stimulus threw us off our center, but right now I feel pretty confident. Even from day one, we were always able to hit that vibe, but I think around the EP period, we actually lost our grounding with that a little bit. I feel like we’re back to it with a little more wisdom and experience. 

[TIMOTHY]: I feel like right before the pandemic also we had all of these plans and got caught up in the ‘machine’ - that sounds super serious - but you know, the content calendar was planned out and going from that to complete nothingness. We were just like ‘what does this look like now’?

[RYAN]: I feel a little less outcome-dependent than we were back then. I’m going to speak for myself but, I feel more comfortable now if we’re going to make something. If we think it’s cool, it’s cool and that’s enough. If it sticks, it sticks; we’re not going into it expecting to hit certain results - it’s more about us being happy with what we made. If the song carries the weight for other people that it does for us, great. If we’re happy with it and feel like we got something there - and that translates to other people, then theoretically that should lead to things going okay for us.

[UNPUBLISHED]: Who are your musical inspirations?

[RYAN]: I feel like this is part again to what I was saying before about being grounded with our writing. All those influences that we have had over time have just mashed into the subconscious and at this point, are just blowing through. I was a huge Beatles fan when I was a kid and Tim liked The Killers, so there are those groundwork artists that give a foundation that you build upon.

[TIMOTHY]: One weird thing during the pandemic was I did a lot of work, during my day job in graphic design, and I couldn’t listen to music because it would be distracting. So, I would only listen to ambient music. I got recently into Steve Reich, that should be the one name you get from this!

[RYAN]: Yeah, when this gets published I want that to be the one influence - Steve Reich.

[TIMOTHY]: My whole little rant right there was just a name drop.

[UNPUBLISHED]:  If you could take credit for any song produced, what would it be?

[TIMOTHY]: The first one is just my business decision: “You’ll Be In My Heart” by Phil Collins from the Tarzan Soundtrack. Then I think “All My Friends” by LCD Soundtrack, but the smart man in me would do the Tarzan soundtrack.

[MICHAEL]: Maybe “Blue Monday” by New Order because it was the best selling single at the time it came out but also lost a lot of money for every copy sold because they went with a really fancy sleeve for the vinyl record.

[RYAN]: For a business decision I would have to go with the Disney boot-up song or the Star Wars theme. And for vibes, “Day in the Life” by The Beatles.

Check out Courier Club on Instagram here and listen to “Where Do I Run?”!