In Conversation with Sports: Iced coffees, inside jokes & indie chaos.

How are you guys doing today? 

Christian Good. I’m at a Starbucks in Utica, so it's kinda nice. 

Cale: Dude, underrated Starbucks. That's where we used to go in high school. 

What's your Starbucks order? 

Christian: I'm still taking advantage of the ice drinks because it's still hot here. But the caveat is, it's an iced blonde espresso with pumpkin cold foam. So, it's just a little sweet on the top. 

I bet they groan when they hear your order. 

Christian: Yeah. I was just watching them make the drinks – there’s so many combinations... It's a lot. 

Cale: I used to work at Starbucks. I've actually worked there twice and both times I quit in a non-honourable way.

What does non-honourable look like? 

Cale: I didn't do my two weeks’ notice. The first time I had shingles and that got me out of work when I worked at Old Foods. And then, fast forward a couple of years, I'm at Starbucks and I kinda had like a couple like bumps on my back... I didn't get diagnosed, but I just told Starbucks, "Hey, I'm quitting, and I have shingles so I can't do my two weeks." It was kind of a fib. 

I feel that's more honourable. I was picturing you throwing a drink at them. 

Cale: I feel like that would have been honourable. That would have been true to myself but what I did was kind of like... a b*tch ass move? 

We can go back to Starbucks, I'm not closing it off. The first question I had was on your guys' aesthetic. It really stands out, with it being mostly like black and white. Besides it being supposedly more flattering, what's your reasoning for this aesthetic choice?

Cale: I didn't actually know that it's slimming. I want to go revisit and see. Well, while Christian and I were making the record, we concluded it was going to be a self-titled album. Black and white to me goes along with the self-titled, kind of raw, not a lot of detail outside of just the subject vibe. I don't know…there's some thread there that I thought made sense, you know, for it to be black and white with a self-titled album and for the branding to be mostly us. 

Christian: We didn't want it to come across as old looking. When we worked with our creative director, Haley, she started introducing some colours, one of them being the magenta colour and this red colour. With the album being self-titled and our band being called Sports, it usually leans pretty masculine. Even in the past, we've avoided all sports references, because we didn't want anybody to associate the word sports with actual sports. 

Also, this is the first record that Cale and I have self-produced. So it's just us two, kind of how we used to make music when we were kids when we would come to this Starbucks here. It's been kind of tricky too, to stand out on social media. You think colour would stand out more, but to me, when I see the black and white, it's just a bit more striking. And every photo we get back in black and white, we look really good. 

If you don't mind me saying, ‘Nice 2 Meet Myself (Bang Bang Bang)’ sounds super liberating and I'm sure it's very expansive live. But lyrically it reflects an internal battle similar to Hey Ya by Outkast. What was the thought process behind that? Did you intend to have that contrast?

Cale: Yeah, I feel it does sound liberating sonically, but yeah, when you listen to it, it's really a frustration with how hard it is to be human and have all these like self-constraints. Even in general, people have a global consciousness and realisation of like, ‘oh, I'm the one doing that to myself, I'm the one keeping me from doing what I want’. That can be peacemaking to make other people happy and that's keeping me from doing what I actually want or whether it's like something you picked up from one of your parents or whatever. It sounds so easy to not care what people think, but it's another thing to actually not care. I was thinking about how frustrating it is to not be free, you know what I mean? 

Christian: Yeah, there is something that helps with all that too -  getting older! 

Cale: Christian, and I are both in our 30s. I feel like we both said like, the best part about being in your 30s is there is a pressure drop. It's natural, I guess. 

It's weird, I was having this exact discussion with my friend last night over dinner, it's so weird you say that. Hopefully the 30s brings that.

Christian: Yeah, you like what you like, and it doesn't mean you're going to be stuck in your ways. But at the same time, you don't really care. And I think one of the biggest things I've learned getting older is not trying to change somebody, that's who they are. Once you are who you are, I can't change that. That's actually been the most freeing thing ever, getting older is like having friends and family members knowing that I'll never be able to change them. I just accept them for who they are, you know?

Accept the things you cannot change. Change the things you can, something like that?

Christian: Exactly, yes.

Out of interest as I'm in my LCD Soundsystem era, did they inspire ‘Nice 2 Meet Myself (Bang Bang Bang)’  at all?

Christian: Oh, for sure. Spot on. 

Cale: You're not wrong. There's even some specific sounds in there that we're like, oh, that's kind of like James Murphy. So yeah, we're huge fans. 

Did your musical upbringing in Oklahoma influence your style and your sound as much?

Christian: Cale and I have actually been talking about that a little bit more as we just almost reminisce because we just hit our 10-year anniversary for our first record.

Where I grew up, I graduated with 90 people in my class. It's like a small town. It's just crazy that we are doing what we're doing. And that's where we came from. We made it out. What helped is there weren't many people doing this, if any. Maybe it was just Cale and I. We gravitated towards each other. We also wonder what things would look like had we grown up in a big city like New York or LA. 

Cale: Unfortunately we aren’t benefiting from any sort of nepotism. We’re just from a small town in Oklahoma that, you know, nobody's ever heard of. And when we go back and visit that town, we're just like, ‘What the f*ck? How did we do it? How did we get anyone to care?’ It's kind of insane. So yeah, we're proud of that. We were the only people we knew trying to record music on a laptop. Like back in 2007 or whatever. We were black sheep, I guess. That really played a role in:

1.        Us thinking, “oh, we can actually do this” - because we just saw that we stood out from everyone else we knew. 

2.        And two, I guess there's a little bit of humility that probably comes with being in a town like that. Most people don't really care about cool indie bands. It probably made us work harder or something. I don't know. 

There's also nothing really to do besides play music.

Christian:  Unless we were playing sports, which we did play sports growing up, but there was a point where I looked in the mirror and realized I am not a football player. 

There's still time. What did your parents play you growing up? I'm always interested because, for me, it's heavily influenced my music taste. 

Christian: Actually with all the Oasis revival… It's funny, I remember watching the world premiere of Champagne Supernova on MTV. I remember my mom telling me that they're brothers and they've always been fighting. And I never realized, like, how much of a rock star they were until I watched that documentary Super Sonic. I realised ‘oh my God, they're freaking rock stars’. I remember they [my parents] had this CD. It was the Beatles' wide album, but it was a double CD. I used to love just because you had to unravel it. But yeah, my parents listened to Fleetwood Mac and The Beatles. My dad still has pretty good music taste and it kind of blows me away. The other day I was driving, and he called me to ask if I listened to the new Blood Orange record? And I'm like, I cannot believe it! That's crazy. 

Cale: If my dad asked me that, I would actually be speechless. I'd be like, who told you to say that? Yeah, it's not fair. It's quite the opposite for me. I don't know what my parents would say if I asked them who their favourite artist is. They wouldn't have an answer. They're not really music lovers at all. I grew up very sheltered as a kid with Christian music. That was all I was allowed to listen to. So, I always got these watered-down versions of the Christian version of Limp Bizkit or whatever. It was either that or country music radio, just constantly on in the car. I've now grown to love the 90s, 2000s country music. Now that I'm older, it's very nostalgic. Damn, the songwriting is insanely good. I don't know how I started getting into different types of music. I think one Christmas I got a Walkman CD player, portable. That's when I started becoming obsessed with music because I had all these, albeit terrible Christian versions of actual artists. I loved it and eventually somehow broke into cool music whenever my sister started driving or something, she started showing me different music. I don't know what happened. It was just a shift. The internet, I guess. Something exposed me. Maybe it was Christian. 

On a completely different note, you must have a robust friendship to stand all of these years working together. Does it ever take on a sort of sibling role and has your relationship drastically changed over time?

Cale: I was thinking about this this morning. It's better than a sibling role. It is something else because we've known each other almost 20 years now. Sometimes siblings are super close and everything's great, but it's kind of better because it's actually a choice to be together. It's a different type of family that can be better than family relationships. But yeah, we don't really treat each other like siblings necessarily, I don't think. I think that's a good thing. But it feels like family at the same time, if that makes sense.

Christian: My brother used to be in the band and he ended up leaving to start his own project, which I always say was one of the greatest things that could have happened because instead of us being in this business relationship/creative relationship, and he's my brother…now he's just my brother, which is I think is great. But that being said, having someone who's a family member or your brother, you know how to push their buttons. I'm never trying to push Cale's buttons.

It keeps things calm in the studio, not throwing those Starbucks drinks at each other. You need to make that effort to be like “I want to like you and I want to know you”. It's not just automatically there.

Christian: It's funny that you brought that up, too, because this morning we were going over some new press images and our manager was like, you guys look like your brothers. 

Cale: Really, I just got the same haircut as Christian. And we're already the same height and everything. 

Christian: The wind was blowing our hair the same way. Yeah, for some reason my hair was super curly that day. Kind of like yours. 

You're just morphing into each other after all this time. 

Christian:  Yeah, it's like when owners look like their dog 

On a separate note, what was the reason that you chose to self-produce and how has that shift been from you?

Christian: The biggest thing that allowed us to even do that was we got our own studio space to make the records. In the past we'd have to book dates in the studio. We ended up treating it like a nine to five. We'd get there in the morning and work all day and then some days we'd get something. It was okay if we didn't get anything that day because we'll be back tomorrow, no problem. Also we had worked with Chad Copeland from the very beginning. It just felt like time to jump out of the nest and do it ourselves. 

Cale: Trying something new after we've already made four records and been doing it for ten years, it's fun to challenge yourself and build. It's a confidence booster to be able to do it at all.

Christian: One of the craziest parts is like, how do we know when a song is done? Usually we have a producer who's like, "Yeah, it's done." Setting fake deadlines and management helping us set some real deadlines is helpful. 

Speaking on the production side of things, what is a song you wish you produced?

Cale: Kids with Guns by Gorillaz. I would say Dare over Kids with Guns just because I love the chorus. 

Christian: A record that made me really upset when I first heard it, especially knowing that he self-produced it and mixed it, was Tame Impala's record "Currents." I was just like; ‘how did he do this?’. This is insane. 

Cale: I feel there's two answers that I could have, one that's more production minded and one that's more just like a beautiful song. Because if it's just a song, I'd be reaching back to Motown or something. To something that's undeniably bigger than any human. You know what I mean? You've Lost That Loving Feeling or something? Every time I hear that I'm like, OK, like how did this happen? This is too perfect of a song. 

You've obviously released albums and EPs. Do you have a favourite form you prefer to write and release to the world?

Cale: I think we're album people. 

Christian: At heart we are album people, but at the same time, just the way the music industry has shifted. I would like to keep putting out music as fast as I can, not just to overload it, but more just because it's what I love to do. But at the same time, I feel like there's always going to be a point where it's like you realize you're making something and you're like, oh, we're making an album right now.

Cale: Our first couple records were eight songs. I really like that. It's a perfect amount. It's not an EP, it's not quite an album, but it kind of is. It can work as an album. I feel that amount of songs is so much easier to tell a story.

Final question. So I hear you write in Brighton occasionally…

Christian: Our next single that's coming out! Yeah, we got some offers from free studio time. It actually was the night before the Super Bowl. We ended up watching it and staying up to like three a.m. because of the time difference. And then we had to get up early to go to the studio. But it's where we made Keep Falling In Love. 

What’s a little piece of the UK you have taken with you since being here?

Christian: I keep saying this, but my favourite thing about the UK is the lighting. All the lighting is always warm and inviting and cozy. Here in America, there's a lot of LEDs.

Cale: Because London used to be gas lit like everywhere, they've replaced it to match that vibe. New York's probably gonna be the closest to London in lighting.

Christian: Another thing, maybe because it was so cold. I didn't see a single bug. There were no bugs.

Spiders??

 Christian: I didn't even see a spider. We did see some foxes in the neighbourhood at night. But yeah, not a single bug. 

Was that a positive experience?

Christian: It was more just like, we're not used to that. We have squirrels and rabbits here. Occasionally I'll see a fox, but not in the city. 

Thank you so much. This was the easiest interview ever.