So stoked I had the opportunity to sit down with Cherub Thursday night, just hours before they performed at the Hangout Kickoff Party. It was easily one of the highlights of my weekend. If you were lucky, (1) you watched them rock out the show and (2) you caught the guys out at the festival throughout the weekend. In case you missed the guys all together, check out our interview!
Festival Squad: So I’m kind of nervous, this is like my first interview.
Jason: Yeah? I’m sure we’re probably one of the easiest people to interview. So we’ll break ya in real nice.
Jordan: Will it help you later if we say our names beforehand too?
FS: Yeah um…
Jordan: Ok Sweet
FS: Yeah that works too. Yeah man. All right guys. So I’m here today with Cherub at Hangout Music Festival. We’ve got the Nashville natives Jordan Kelly and Jason… Huber. Jason Huber?
Jason: HUBER. Yep. (the ‘u’ gives a you sound)
FS: The artists behind the electro pop duo known as Cherub. The fun-loving duo have come a long way since their days of “Doses & Mimosas” and “Freaky Me, Freaky You.” The songs off the album MoM & DaD helped launch their careers as they signed under the Columbia Records label in 2013. Their most recent album Bleed Gold, Piss Excellence was released in October 2016 and doesn’t disappoint. Cherub is here at Hangout to help start the party tonight as they’re performing the kickoff party, it’s May 18th. So yeah. Well thank y’all for taking the time to meet with us.
Jordan: Thanks for having us.
FS: Thank you. We’re huge fans of your music at Festival Squad, recently you posted your drunk interview. (The guys laugh immediately, Jason throws an excited “yes” in there. )
FS: I have to ask about it. Was it real? And who came up with the idea and were they real fan questions?
Jason: Man we got hammered.
Jordan: We got really really drunk
Jason: We killed a bottle and half of Jameson in an hour.
Jordan: Yeah it was definitely real.
Jason: Then drank some wine. I still didn’t spill any on those white pants. Which I feel pretty good about.
Jason & Jordan: All the questions. They I guess.. where did they come from? They came from like our management, some from the label, some from our friends (yeah), and then from each other. And I guess we didn’t source any like from any public sources or anything. Like we never asked people on Twitter to submit questions or anything.
Jordan: And yeah we just kind of we just kind of…
Jason: That’d be cool to do part two of it.
Jordan: Everyone does that also.
Jason: The whole concept was Jordan and I interviewing each other so we wrote questions for each other as well. We just go and it was really shot for shot. Question by question
FS: I was like is this for real? Like y’all are just killing this bottle.
Jordan: We chugged…And we had the bag over it so we didn’t really know how much was disappearing from the bottle you know. So before you knew it, it was gone.
Jason: Oh boy.
FS: Yea I saw I guess you threw up right (Jason)?
Jordan: Yeah we definitely, it would have been really awkward to try and act drunk but we were hammered. I don’t even remember the car ride home.
FS: That’s hilarious.
Jason: You didn’t say a single word on the car ride home.
Jordan: I bet, I was drunk.
Jason: On the car ride home I apparently was just like proclaiming our never ending love for our manager. Being like, Emily you have a baby and you’re here taking care of us. We love you so much. (Jordan: Yeah) You’re so awesome. (Jordan: Yeah she is awesome) She was just laughing at us getting a kick out of it. She’s great.
FS: Cool cool. Also long the lines of interviews. We caught the video of your dad’s reviewing your album Bleed Gold, Piss Excellence! We definitely got a good laugh out of it, especially when Brian knew more about it than Todd did. So how have your parents helped support you guys during your career. And whose idea was that interview? It was pretty awesome!
Jordan: That was both of our ideas and both of our parents have been super supportive. I mean. The first tour vehicle that we actually used was Jason’s Xterra. I mean his parents let us run that to the ground before we had enough money to rent a car.
Jason: Yea that was my high school car. And there have definitely been situations where we were stuck in you know, somewhere across the country like hey we need. We need to fix the car and get home. (Laughing) And they’ve helped us out for sure.
Jordan: Yeah so there’s been support on both sides. Like his family and my family for sure. And they’ve ya know they’ve just been like “Do your thing.” I mean they, there was never really any point in time even at the beginning where they were like, at least on my side of things there was like “You sure you want to do this?” You know like they just kind of rode it out and it ended up working out. And now everybody’s happy for us.
Jason: I mean one of the coolest things it’s… I mean Jordan’s mom got a Cherub tattoo.
Jordan: Yeah recently
Jason: Insane parental support! But like the most flattering thing to me is not only that our parents come out to our shows, but they actually invite their friends out to our shows. Like they’re that proud of us and they want to show other people what we do and stuff like that; and I think that is the most flattering part about it. But they actually want other people to know about their kids; ya know that’s cool.
Jordan: Yeah they’re proud of us.
Jason: We must be doing something OK. So yeah. Having that support is really awesome.
FS: That’s super cool. It was funny I think he mentioned the 20 piece nuggets line in one of your songs. And so I was just like I guess that’s from the time when y’all were surviving on nuggets maybe?
Jordan: It’s such a silly line but it’s so accurate.
FS: Heard, cool. Well Bleed Gold, Piss Excellence. Love the title how did y’all come up with it?
Jordan: Originally it was the song title for what we ended up calling VIP Party. Right?
Jason: No we called it Bleed Gold, Piss Excellence. (Starts laughing.)
Jordan: Oh yea sorry.
Jason: We originally were calling it VIP Party and then we decided to call it Bleed Gold, Piss Excellence.
Jordan: And then everybody liked it so much. They were like you should just name the whole album this. And we had a friend that did some artwork for it and it all just kind of made sense. We just ran with it.
Jason: I think she she was probably the strongest motivator for us going with that album title.
Jordan: Yeah agreed.
Jason: I mean it really got sold to us. You know we were going back and forth like I don’t know. Will we name it this? But then she was like, “What about this album cover?” And it’s like oh that looks amazing like that. Yeah I guess, I guess. Keep running with this ya know.
Brad: Guess who pooped? I found a good bathroom right over there.
Jordan: Oh nice.
Jason: Wait are you talking about you pooping or George pooping? (George is the cool dog)
Brad: Me
Jason: Oh, well congratulations Brad. I’m glad you pooped.
Brad: Yea it was nice.
FS: (Laughing) So sorry. I read there were loads of songs that y’all didn’t put on that last album. Will we see any of those on upcoming albums? Have y’all played any of those in live shows?
Jordan: Umm. There’s, there is a lot of stuff that we didn’t put on the album. We still haven’t even played the full album. Yeah there’s about two or three, actually like three songs that we haven’t actually played live yet from the album that we need to work into the set.
Jordan: Yeah. You know there’s definitely a couple that were cool they just didn’t fit the vibe of where the album as a whole was going.
Jason: And a lot of pieces of music in varying stages of completion. So some things that were loops and ideas that might get you know brought back into the picture later on. Some of it will maybe be left behind for awhile and on this last record we ended up bringing back a song from three years ago and that’s the last track on the record. So like who’s who knows what will end up happening to those pieces of music.
Jordan: We’re never just a trashing a song. It might sit in cyberspace for a while.
FS: In the archives somewhere?
Jordan: Yea somewhere and it sometimes finds its way back you know.
Jason: With that said, sometimes it’s hard to like go back and focus on things when you’re just very inspired. And recently we’ve been in the studio writing a lot. You know I don’t know what it’s going to be for and how we’re going to release it or when we’re going to release it. But it has been fun getting back into the studio at our house and writing a lot. So I don’t know. Lots of music out there.
FS: Yeah man I can only imagine. To the naked eye the songs look straight forward. “Doses & Mimosas”, “Disco Shit”, “Strip to This”, and “Three’s Company/Take Me Home”. Is there a rhyme and reason behind the titles of your songs? Are they different life occurrences y’all have experienced?
Jordan: They’re either like hypotheticals as far as like thinking about what the situation would be like and being in that situation. And then a lot of them are yeah, like life experiences you know things that actually happen and just…put into song format. But those are all interesting song choices because they all got their own like weird quirk to them ya know. I love all of the four references you made, those are great. We’re playing half of them tonight.
Jason: You know “Doses & Mimosas” was inspired by our first trip down here to the Hangout.
Jason: From a random guy in a liquor store.
Jordan: Yeah. Don’t know em, but he was nice.
FS: So I have an ear to enjoy a wide range of music myself. I can credit that to my older siblings and parents. Is their music y’all listened to growing up that holds influence on your output today? For example D.J. Premier on your latest song/video release a serious ode to old school DJ’ing and hip hop. How has that style of music influenced your sound?
Jordan: I mean I was. Production wise I was influenced by DJ Premier, I was saying Pete Rock earlier, Dilla all that kind of like stuff from the late 80’s mid 90’s late 90’s all of that just stuff coming out of the NPC’s. And we recently got a sp1200. I just love those drum sounds and I love just the swing that they put on those drums man and just the grittiness. So that was just a huge influence for me personally. It was so awesome working with DJ Premier. And that was a very hands on thing. It wasn’t like thru email or something in person. Really really cool.
I concluded the interview by asking the guys what they like to do outside all the festival/concert madness during their tours. They simply replied we become couch potatoes and smoke a lot.
We shared small talk outside the interview; they are both super cool and talented guys. Cherub will be on tour throughout the year, maybe at your local festival or city. You should check them out!!
