Career Day - Sound In The Signals Interview
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| 📸 Daniel Rosendale |
I recently had the opportunity to interview Career Day. We discussed their new song “Rumors of My Wellness”, lyrical inspiration, their upcoming EP, the importance of physical releases, and more. Check it out below.
First, thanks for the interview.
Thanks for giving us the opportunity! You were one of the first places to take to us for the album so it’s a pleasure for you to be one of the first interviews we’re doing for this cycle.
You recently released your new song “Rumors of My Wellness”. Have you been pleased with the response it’s received so far?
It’s been really encouraging to see that the song lyrically has been resonant and musically has been taken as a leveling up on the writing side. We hadn’t put anything out since Where We’ve Always Been 2 years ago, so there was a bit of nervous-but-hopeful anticipation in taking the first step of this new chapter. We’ve felt heartened to see the song and hook grab people, and the reaction in the northeast shows we played with Cinema Stare the weekend after just further reaffirmed everything we poured into the song.
Can you tell me about writing the song? What was your lyrical inspiration?
This was the first song that came together in this writing cycle, the first seedlings of it starting in Spring 2023, then sharpened/focused on at the end of the year. At the beginning of 2023, I decided to take a break from drinking. It wasn’t like there was an inflammatory inciting event or that I was a particularly heavy drinker, but I just had found myself at the end of 2022 feeling very physically, mentally, and emotionally run down. I was feeling anxious, antisocial, directionless, and at times hopeless. I was no longer finding a calming numbness in the post-work drink or 2, and it felt like removing that from the equation, while starting on prescribed medication, would be a worthwhile potential catalyst for a turnaround.
For the first couple weeks, I found myself quickly feeling lighter, clearer, more present. The thing about clarity is that you become more sensitive and cognizant of fears, traumas, and pains you had been suppressing. Soon enough, I was finding myself in the same headspace of self-doubt, self-loathing, and depression. I came to find that the drinking was not an integral factor in my struggles, which was helpful in understanding my relationship with substances, but dispiriting in feeling not particularly closer to inner peace.
“Rumors of My Wellness” is about the pained realization that you’re always more than one good or bad habit away from actualizing “doing better” in any lasting way. It feels like “wellness culture” gets hyped up and portrayed as this glowingly empowering thing, but I just don’t find that relatable. Of course, it is good and right to pursue a healthier life, but there’s a big gap between making a change and feeling changed, and it is deeply frustrating not knowing what will close that gap for you.
You have a new EP coming out at the end of September. What can you tell me about it so far?
Knowing that our follow up to our debut album was going to, for both financial and pragmatic reasons, be an EP rather than an LP forced us to focus our writing into trying to be as expansive as we could within a very succinct release. An EP does not afford much space as an album to build overarching themes, so instead we felt encouraged to just make something that felt urgently cathartic.
Between the album dropping in August 2022 and the end of Fall 2023, we were focused on just being heard and really playing shows as often as we could. We felt like we had started to forge an identity and establish some momentum, and after our self-booked Midwest tour summer 2023, it felt like it was time to spill some new guts. But we also had to navigate a limited window of time, with not being done with shows until mid-November 2023, the holidays around the bend, and my wedding fast approaching in May.
We set aside 3-4 sessions to write in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas to see what we could really come away with, and in the first one came away with the 4 songs that ended up on the EP. With the exception of “Rumors,” the others were ideas that we maybe had just futzed around with briefly at a practice once or twice in the fall, but I think the intention and motivation really made us all lock-in very quickly. We decided that we would just sharpen those 4 songs rather than trying for more, because we felt those songs matched what we were trying to project and it would be better to ground ourselves in sharpening rather than writing for the sake of quantity.
Knowing that I was going to have to personally navigate my time and focus for music around prioritizing everything wedding-related, it made me proactively check in with myself and envision what I wanted to sing about for the foreseeable future. The headspace as marriage approaches is simultaneously acutely emotional and obsessively foresighted, and that gave a lot to work with lyrically, to say the least. Whereas the album was very much about a commentary on our sociopolitical reality of state violence and cultural cruelty, the EP feels a bit more introspective as to who you chose to be and how you move forward in such a world.
Is there a song that you’re the most excited for people to hear? Why?
“Excited” probably wouldn’t be the way I would convey my feeling, but I am eager to have the closing track “One Bad Day” exist in the world. The song is motivated by and in parts draws from the discourse that spurred around Jordan Neely, a street performer experiencing homelessness, being choked to death by Daniel Penny, a 24 year old US Marine, on a subway car during a Monday commute. It was alarming to see so many quickly-formed comfortably expressed dehumanizing the rationalizations and even lionizations of the killing. So much of that tragedy to me just speaks to our rush to find demarcating lines of who we should dignify the humanity in, which ultimately alienates us from those whose struggles and desperation are a much closer possibility than any comfortable, long-standing upward mobility for any of us in this cold, cruel system. The song really captures the anguish that is felt in really sitting with all of that.
Did you try anything new with your songwriting or recording this time around?
I feel that our influences are more or less the same, but using that aforementioned fixed window of time on 4 songs, as opposed to 10, let us really refine the details and dynamics of everything to try and make sure everything felt as anthemic and urgent as we wanted them to. I spent a lot of time taking the lyrics, which were forged out of nights spent looping iPhone recordings until 3 am, and really tirelessly working out the vocal melodies and delivery. Probably spent a half dozen training sessions with my vocal coach Bee Asaro to really make sure every syllable and inflection was delivered as best and as evocative as possible. I had throat surgery from a vocal hemorrhage early summer 2022, so I really wanted to feel confident and comfortable going in.
We recorded with Joe Rom of Innerlove at his Hilda Music Co. recording studio, over the course of 4 days, ending on St. Patrick’s Day. We never recorded in that short a window of time, and I think having to do so fit that theme of urgency that we were trying to project. Going in there was a degree of concern just with making sure we nailed it, but the mix of being well prepared and the calming, chill environment that Joe fostered made it run smoother than we ever expected. By the last day, we were just putting little touches and came out of it feeling already proud of what we’d done.
Can we expect a physical release for the album such as CDs, cassettes, or vinyl? How important is it to the band to have physical releases?
We will have CDs and tapes, for sure. We’d love to have vinyl, but the economics of pressing vinyl, especially for an EP, and especially for an independent band is just not feasible when having to factor in touring expenses and general living expenses. We’re glad to have physical releases, because we worked really hard with artist Dan Buksa for the cover art and feel it projects and enhances the experience of the music. It’s also very crucial to have at the merch table on the road and it’s nice to feel someone literally taking your music home with them.
Thanks for taking the time to answer the questions. Do you have anything else that you would like to add?
We’re gonna be touring down the East Coast to Fest, starting on 10/18 in Brooklyn, and capping off at Vecino’s on the Sunday of Fest, so if you’re gonna be near any of our stops and especially at Fest, please come through. Playing Fest is a real bucket list thing for us, and playing it was a goal of this band during the pandemic when we decided we wanted to really try and push things whenever the world opens back up. We also have a Midwest run in the works for November, and are hoping to have a very busy 2025, so if you’re feeling what we do, spreading the word means everything.
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