Coco Amino is a Chapel Hill-based pop rock band. Their first EP, "coco amino" was released in December. The band is set to play a show at the Cave in Chapel Hill on Sunday Jan. 21 with Estuarie and Jameson.
Staff writer Emilie Scheuerle spoke with members of Coco Amino about the upcoming show, the origins of the band and their influences.
The Daily Tar Heel: Tell me about Coco Amino. How did the band come to be?
Jon McClain: I moved back to this area about two and a half years ago and I wanted to do some sort of musical project. I went through some trial and error years with different styles and different people and that kind of thing. Finally, I just decided that I was going to get together a couple of old buddies and my brother to see what happens. We started having fun and it went from there.
DTH: How did you come up with the name?
JM: For awhile we had a Google doc and it was getting really intense, but at the time a couple of members Chad and Alex were really into the Whole 30-style diet, and one of them as a joke put coconut aminos as a band name and I shortened it as Coco Aminos and we just went with that. It’s a good reminder not to take things too seriously and just go with it.
DTH: According to your Facebook page, you are four "very stable geniuses who play quirky pop rock in a barn in Durham County." Tell me about that. Do you self-identify as one genre or a multitude of them?
Sean McClain: We are very, very, very smart. We have good brains. (Laughs). We plan on tweeting about (how smart we are) later. So as far as pop rock, it's just upbeat stuff. It’s quirky; we like to have different time signatures.
JM: We like to have the quirky part in there because the different time signatures make it a little more unpredictable. What I really wanted to do was have something familiar and accessible but also a little surprising. You can get into it but you don’t get to predict it.
