Friday Pilots Club: The 312 Noise Interview

As the weather in Chicago warms up, so is the overall trajectory of Friday Pilots Club, one of the Windy City's finest up and coming bands. The quintet (vocalist Caleb Hiltunen, bassist Drew Polivick, guitarists Sean Burke and James Kourafas, and drummer Eric Doar) are on the verge of releasing their debut full-length album Nowhere on May 9. I've had the pleasure of previewing the album and I cannot stress enough just how good it is. We're not even at the halfway point of 2024, but it's definitely in the driver's seat for my favorite album of the year (and in case you're wondering who would round out the top 3 for context, I'd say that Waxhatachee's Tiger's Blood and Neck Deep's self titled release immediately spring to mind).

Fresh off an appearance at Shaky Knees festival in Atlanta, the band is just days away from their album release show at Chicago's Bottom Lounge. A few weeks beforehand, I was able to catch up with Caleb and Eric during a short break from rehearsals in their van to talk about recording the new album, respectfully stealing from other musicians, and predatory music industry practices.

Rich: Let's talk about the new album Nowhere. I've had a preview link to it for the last two months and a major problem in my life is that I can't listen to it in my car or anywhere that isn't at my desk. So if I'm frustrated waiting for the official release of the album, I can't imagine how you feel. How long has the album actually been finished for?

Caleb: Last week we got the final masters for the album. But as far as the songs themselves go, I'm gonna call it November is maybe is when we kind of had like the final form of the songs. But some of these songs are two and a half years old, you know? So I've gotten to the point with the album where it's like, I've stopped listening to the singles and and I'm back on to listening to some of the deeper cuts. But I'm so excited. I yeah, I'm just ready for people to hear it.

Eric: I know our goal when we set out to record, we went to remote Georgia, got a cabin in the middle of nowhere. And that was in August 2023, but we left with a lot of work to do still.

Caleb: We all live in different spots too. So we would get on Discord and use like a plugin that they have and we'd be able to listen to everything at the exact same time which was really cool. A lot of this album got done on Discord, which is kind of nuts.

Rich: What song off Nowhere are you most excited to play live?

Eric: That's a good question. We're actually running through that right now in rehearsal. And we haven't gotten to to all of them yet, but I would probably say 'We Don't Wanna Talk'. It's a really fun one to play as a drummer, just laying back. It's a fun riff song.

Caleb: That's a hard question. I think 'Out of My Body' what I'm the most excited to play.

Rich: As a total music outsider, I always assume the process for an extremely talented band is "record an album, release an album, tour, make money". But you all did not have the easiest start to your professional recording careers. Can you open up about the difficult position the band had to fight through at the outset of your recording experience?

Caleb: We got signed off of a prize deal for a contest a radio station was hosting that we didn't really understand. And part of that was us being young and naive. Part of that was that it was purposely set up this way. You enter these Battle of the Bands and you're like, "Oh, we're gonna win some money. We're gonna whatever." Not until we were flying out when we had made it past the initial stages did we realize that a record deal was part of it. So long story short, we end up kind of being forced into this deal. We were scared. We were young. We were like...we knew that it was not a good deal. But we were just like, "I guess we have to do this." I don't think that every label operates this way, but this one that we were on in particular was very, very controlling when it came to things that they should not have been, especially around our creativity and songwriting. There was no interfacing between us and them. It was just kind of like, "You guys are going to do this" you know? At one point we were trying to get reimbursed for our first tour and long story short, we were kind of forced to record an 80's covers EP and release that to get paid for the thing.

When we finally got off the label in 2021, we were scared because we were broke. We felt like they made it seem constantly like it was us, like "Well, we threw everything at the wall and you guys aren't the biggest band in the world, so what the heck? You know, this is your fault." We were younger and that got to us. And luckily, you know, we pulled it together. The five of us, we reignited this band as a five piece where we're all making decisions. We released 'For the Wicked', went on tour and honestly the people around this band really brought us back to where we are now and we're really happy with our situation. We have a great distributor system that gives us so much freedom to go do what we want and, and gives us the financial backing to be able to do it. Our current manager Leah, I would trust with my life. And when we say no to something, she has no problem going out and being like "They said 'no', so let's rethink this."

Rich: As a band, you've pointed to your song 'Vampire Disco' as the "perfect synthesis of your sound". When in the songwriting process do you realize that you've got a song on your hands that really represents your bad perfectly? Are you ever like "Whoa, we might have something really great here"?

Eric: That one, we were all in a room and wrote it together. Drew brought in a little instrumental loop, and then we kind of just hashed it all out together. And I think when we got to Georgia and started tracking it and started putting in all of the parts - when I lay down the drums and then Sean's guitar - I was like, "This is great! This is a sound!" It's funny because initially I had thought "There's no way this goes on the album." I didn't like the song at first and I've grown to love it. I think it was tracking out in Georgia.

Caleb: I think that at any point where you start to ask yourself "Is this a pop song?" then it's become a Friday Pilots Club song, when it rides that line. But I also think it changes every single time that we write a song. Like with 'Vampire Disco', it felt poppy from the beginning. But with a song like 'Nowhere', it was really when we added the instrumentation and when we were doing these crazy things that were like, "Whoever is not here in this session with us is probably going to hate this." And then somebody walks in and they're like, "I like it! What if we did this with it?" And so it really changes when it becomes an FPC song in my mind. But sometimes it's from the get go, sometimes it's not until you get the master back.

Rich: Tell me about the 'Vampire Disco' music video. It's campy as hell and fits the song perfectly.

Eric: We wanted to do something cool and put money behind one because we really hadn't done a cool music video before. It might have been Drew and James who had the initial concepts. And then we worked with a a director and videographer, Rawtani (Houston) who really spearheaded it in terms of putting it together. He saw the vision and almost immediately came back with the the idea of all the scenes and stuff. He really brought it to life. But I think it was maybe Drew and James' initial concepts, and then Rawtani really took it home.

Caleb: Yeah, he really did. We he's a Nashville guy, too. We filmed it in Nashville. This weird little Airbnb that was inside of a trailer, and it had all these sculptures around. It was strange. It was freezing cold. But we we really like the way it came out. It's very cool, very fun.

Rich: The thing I love about 'Nowhere' is that it just grabs your attention immediately with these squealing guitars and heavily distorted vocals. It almost demands your attention. What's the process behind choosing which song is going to lead off your debut album?

Eric: At the end of the day, it's five of us and there's a lot of compromises. We all had ideas about the order. We had a whiteboard and we were like, "Okay, everyone write down their potential tracklist order" and just a lot of debate. I think leading off with 'Nowhere' was, for sure intentional. We just want to, like you said, just grab some people's attention and it's weird and it's random and kind of a perfect setup for what we were going for, just creating something wacky and fun. that, like, we all gravitated towards just making crazy sounds and whatnot.

Rich: Do you have a standard tiebreaker when it comes to resolving these kinds of things when there might be a deadlock?

Eric: That's the great thing about having five people in a band is that there's always going to be a majority.

Caleb: That's another great thing about this band in particular is that some people feel very strongly about things. And it's fine as long as we communicate. Like if somebody was like "Look, I really want to do the track listing. I have a really good idea. Let me put it by you," I'm usually going to be the one who's going to be like, "Yeah, it's great. Sounds good." But then like, drew feels very strongly about fonts. And so Drew's the font guy. But for track listing, Shawn did the final amendment to it, and we were all like, "Yeah, that totally makes sense. Let's go with it."

Eric: The final thing I'll add is there is a flow to it. It's like a puzzle piece, you know what I mean? I think it's like the perfect mix of telling a story and bringing people through a nice little journey. And ending off with 'Favorite Part', I'm super stoked about because that's such a bittersweet song. And it means a lot to to us. 

Rich: On Nowhere, you have more straightforward pop songs like 'We Don't Wanna Talk' and 'Out of My Body'. Then there's something like 'Nosedive' with a harder kind of rock edge. 'Ultraviolet' has that sort of HEALTH sound, almost industrial but with a softer feeling vocal.

Caleb: Like Deftones.

Rich: Exactly! When you have so many different styles of song under the same FPC umbrella, does the writing/recording process look different depending on the mood of the song?

Caleb: It definitely comes together differently every single time. But one thing that's really cool about this album is that there there are four producers in this band. On top of that, if you look in the album footnotes, the people that we wrote with or the the producers that were involved with it is a super varied list. Like Sean Silverman is the guy from The Technicolors and from Beach Weather and we started 'Ultraviolet' with him and that sort of vibe was just a production thing. He doesn't make any music that sounds like that, but I think it's that the Friday Pilots Club production aspect being a part of the songwriting that worked there. I'm not trying to toot our own horn here, but I haven't met a lot of people that consider production a part of songwriting. And I'm not talking about, like, just big noises and risers and stuff like that. I'm talking about like the actual sonics affecting what we're saying in the song. And that is a big part of Friday Pilots Club.

Rich: I kept a list of bands that popped into my head as I listened to Nowhere. Not that you necessarily sound like all these bands, but just sort of the feel or vibe I got along the way. Franz Ferdinand. Arctic Monkeys. Black Keys. Maybe not exactly U2 on a song like 'Favorite Part', but that same kind of arena-sized sound that U2 gets. Some of the vocals have this raw, Jeff Buckley feel. Do you bring your inspirations into the studio with you when writing and recording?

Caleb: I only can speak for myself here, but when it comes to vocal tones...I don't know if I'm cool now, but I was definitely not cool in high school until I found The Strokes and Arctic Monkeys. There's this swagger to those guys' voices. And then the rawness of Jeff Buckley...you know you're not listening to "perfection" in someone like Amy Winehouse's voice. But like, the rawness of her voice in some parts is what's realistic and makes the believability just so heightened. Jeff Buckley is one of those guys that you listen to 'Lover Come Over' and you're like "This guy is so beautifully emoting sadness and regret and guilt and everything" and I've always been attracted to that. There's a song off of the deluxe version of of Grace, and it's called 'Forget Her', and I was always was drawn to that song because of his vocal performance in that. I'm always thinking of influences, especially there's a part I think needs a little bit more of a smoky kind of Alex Turner thing going on, like the verses of 'Ultraviolet' and stuff like that. And I would often think to myself, "What is the little musical tag that that Alex Turner would do here?" Because he's not going to do a Mariah Carey run, but like, he's going to put something interesting and his tone is going to be this certain way. He's going to let this amount of breath into his voice. And I'm always, always thinking about that. Drew I can definitely say that is thinking about that when he's thinking about production, too. Like the guitars on the second half of the first chorus of 'Ultraviolet' we were sitting there thinking "What would the Deftones do? Got it. Okay. It's this massive wall of sound."

Eric: Yeah for sure. Always definitely thinking of players that I admire. Like for 'Coffin', that's kind of an outlier of a more chill song on the album. Laid back in the pocket and you know, during that I was thinking of Aaron Sterling, who is a big influence of mine. Great great drummer, record maker. Especially when you're needing inspiration. For a lot of recording, when we were figuring out the production or songwriting, having Spotify pulled up and getting into the mood of something you may be going for is a huge thing. So we definitely did that with this album.

Caleb: I think a great artist is a clever but respectful thief, and that is what we have we've gotten better at over the years.

Rich: Who was the first band you can remember being your favorite band?

Caleb: Oh, The Strokes, easy. I did not listen to any other band but The Strokes for a long time after I first heard them.

Eric: I always get crap for this, but I think mine was Umphrey's McGee, which is a jam band from Chicago. I just grew up with a lot of the jam bands, and at the time I was like, "Wow, I gotta learn how to play this stuff," you know? I'm trying to think of the other dudes...I know Sean was Red Hot Chili Peppers. Drew might be Slipknot. I'm trying to think of James...maybe Phoenix or something along that vein. All of us come from such different musical backgrounds all comes together to something unique, you know? 

Rich: So you've got Shaky Knees coming up in Atlanta on May 4th. Album release show Bottom Lounge, May 10th. After that pretty extensive European tour. What are you looking forward to the most going around Europe?

Eric: I think London we're really looking forward to. And you know, just generally traveling Europe together. Some of us haven't even been out of the country before, and we're just excited to explore the world. And what a crazy thing that we're allowed to do.

(We are then approached by Drew who pokes his head into the van window)

Eric: Oh, hey, look who it is. Yeah, we found a Drew!

Drew: Sorry. I don't want to interrupt.

Eric: No. You're good. He was asking us what we're most excited for in Europe.

Drew: Food. Food? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah.

Rich: After that, kind of a big gap in your schedule. Can we expect maybe a summer or fall tour in the US? You got any festivals coming up that haven't been announced yet?

Caleb: There's going to be a US and Canada tour in the fall, which we're super excited about. It's going to be the longest we've ever been away from home, which is a little nerve wracking. Yeah, we're just getting excited about that. And, you know, finding cool people to take out on the road with us. And yeah, we're just so excited, man.