“Twin Peaks” is an ABC television drama created by Mark Frost and David Lynch. It follows an investigation lead by FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper into the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer in the town of Twin Peaks. Its pilot episode was first broadcast on April 8, 1990.
The dudes of Twin Peaks are in no way affiliated with the aforementioned television series, though homecoming and murder are pretty rock ‘n’ roll. The four kids from the north side of Chicago chose the name because it sounded cool, and sounding cool is, in fact, what they do best.
Twin Peaks meshes British Invasion with early punk, smooth psychedelia with garage rock, to form an addicting sound that flows through your ears, into your bones and out through your groovin’, headbangin’ dance moves.
Cadien Lake James (vocals, guitar), Clay Frankel (vocals, guitar), Jack Dolan (vocals, bass) and Connor Brodner grew up near each other on the north side of Chicago and started playing together at the early ages of prepubescence.
They released their first album, Sunken, in 2013 and played house shows and bars like crazy before graduation. All four members started college in the fall but quickly dropped out to head back mid-East and sell their souls to rock ’n’ roll. They’ve been touring heavily for the past year, did the festival loop this summer and released their next album Wild Onion on August 5th.
I caught up with Frankel a few weeks ago while they were on a rest from touring. After I had a quick bitch fit about my messed up promo album download, provided by Perfect Pitch PR (it’s my phone’s fault but I wanted to yell at someone anyways), he was surprisingly as gentlemanly as they come (“they” being 20-year-old rock stars).
We talked Chicago, college, the Beach Boys and all things rock in anticipation of the dudes’ upcoming Madison show.
Catch Twin Peaks this Friday, Sept. 26 at The Frequency, with special guests NE-HI, The Liqs and VARSITY. You won’t regret it, I promise.
Mary Sullivan: Let’s start off with a quick run-down of Twin Peaks—where you’re from, how you met, influences, likes/dislikes, what you’re all about, etc.
Clay Frankel: Oh man that sounds hard. We’re all from Chicago and we’re all 20 years old. We all met at different stages of our young lives in the city, some from when we were little kids and others in high school, so we all more or less grew up together and got to know each other through music.
When we started playing together we all really liked the Black Lips’ style and a lot of Chicago bands like White Mystery and The Funs who all played really heavy, loud rock ‘n’ roll, so we all decided to get to work and rock out a bit. Did I miss something? I don’t know, we’re just four friends trying to make it in this world, ya know?!
MS: You’ve been on kind of a mini break since the album release [Wild Onion], what have you been up to?
CF: Well we did a little 10-day tour out east after Wild Onion dropped with a Chicago band called The Lemons, then we did our very first band flight out to Los Angeles for the FYF Festival and we’ve been in Chicago for a while before we hit the road again. Right now we’re just kinda hanging out, working on new stuff and playing some shows around here.
MS: So I know the week you come to Madison you’re hitting up some Big Ten campuses— do you ever have any regrets about skipping college to live the dream?
CF: Yeah I mean playing at colleges is definitely pretty strange especially because we’re all college-aged and we play for these kids and their like “nah I can’t come out tonight I got homework” or whatever, but no I don’t regret dropping out of school. I don’t think everyone should do it or anything, a lot of people love school—I particularly didn’t—but for what we wanted to do I think we made the right choice. Are you in college? What is it that you’re studying, if you don’t mind my asking?
MS: Business
CF: Business! My brother and my sister both studied economics so you know when this rock ‘n’ roll thing crashes and burns hopefully they can help me out with some money, ya know what I’m sayin’?
MS: Have you noticed or been affected by a change in your amount of publicity or “fame” since all of the hype on Wild Onion?
CF: Yeah I’ve noticed it. I don’t pay too much attention to that sort of thing but yeah I’ll be wandering around in Chicago and some kid will just be like, this just happened to me the other day actually, I was walking around and this kid was like “Hey, yeah, Twin Peaks!” So that’s pretty cool.
I went to a Mac DeMarco show recently with Cadien and a lot of people were looking at us and coming up to us. I guess that’s pretty obvious at a Mac DeMarco show people would maybe know our music and come up to us. So yeah, we notice it but it hasn’t changed me or us much at all. It’s kinda whatever.
MS: Speaking of the album, every song is really unique and catchy in their own way. I know three of you each do your own writing, what does that process look like?
CF: Well we all approach it different, me Jack and Cadien all write songs and we all have our own way of doing it but we usually write on our own then bring the songs to the band and work on them together and play around with them.
For me, I usually write the words for but sometimes I’ll write some music first and think of the lyrics later. But yeah I used to just write chords and throw whatever lyrics I had into them later, but lately I’ve been able to just write some lyrics down and actually hear the melodies in my head while I’m going.
MS: And then whoever writes it sings it?
CF: Yeah, that’s always how we’ve done it and I think we’re gonna stick with it.
MS: Were all of the songs on Wild Onion written post-Sunken or did you dig some up from the vaults?
CF: Well, we wrote Sunken in high school and it took a while for that album to come out so we had quite a bit of time and a crap ton of songs, like thirty or so, but then we just kept on writing songs so we just went with most of the newer stuff that we had written and put it down on Wild Onion.
So yeah it was pretty much all stuff that we had just been writing, a few of the songs we wrote like a few days before recording them so it’s pretty quick turnover with our songs (laughs).
MS: Your two albums are pretty different in terms of the obvious length difference on Wild Onion, along with its cleaned-up sound compared to Sunken. Did you guys have themes in mind when making the records or do you just attribute the change to your overall growth as a band?
CF: Well, Sunken was both a necessity of how we recorded it because we didn’t have that great of equipment and stuff but it was also a style that we looked at for our music, like we knew how we wanted it to sound when it came out.
You know it wasn’t gonna sound like The Beach Boys or anything, it was gonna sound pretty lo-fi so we just kind of catered to that but we liked it.
This time we had some better gear and a little money from our label for some more equipment so we just looked at what we had and tried to make that sound work for us. We didn’t want it to sound really polished or anything because that’s not how we play, and we all really love the style of 60s music which is often pretty lo-fi.
Speaking of The Beach Boys, I’ve been listening to this record of theirs, ya know [Beach Boys’ Party?] Well that’s literally just a party setting and the whole time there’s bottles crashing and people laughing and screaming at each other and it’s really fun to listen to so I think we wanted something kinda like that where it sounds like a “happening”, something that sounds like somewhere you’d wanna be. So if somebody messed up a guitar part like two minutes into the song, most of the time we just kept it and that’s the way it stayed.
MS: Kind of like a preview of a live show?
CF: Yeah, you know I mean there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not in our live shows. Our live shows will sound really, really different but we at least feel like the mood is still there.
MS: Do me a favor and describe your live show in one sentence for the eager fans of Madison.
CF: Hmm… it’s gonna be like it’s everyone’s birthday party.
