Q&A with Clockwork Kids

Clockwork Kids, a “neo-psychedeic” rock band, was started in 2012 and is made up of five UNC-Chapel Hill students and alums. Reporter Tess Boyle sat down with band members Justin Ellis, Jeff DeLuca and Patrick Carney in preparation for their August 29th show. The event, beginning at 8 p.m., will be the final Locally Grown concert and will feature Clockwork Kids as well as Virgins Family Band and Morning Brigade.

Diversions: How was Clockwork kids started and how were you involved in music before the band?

Justin Ellis: Clockwork Kids was founded in 2012 to honor a date that I’d booked with my old band and I didn’t want to lose the show because it was a really cool opportunity so I asked a bunch of my friends to join and it was just going to be a temporary little thing but we picked up a lot of steam really quickly so by summertime, three months later, the rest of the band as it is now joined and it’s been a fairly serious endeavor since then. This is my third or fourth band but it’s the first one where I’m the lead singer in and where I’m also writing most of the songs. So I asked a bunch of my friends to join and it was just going to be a temporary little thing, but we picked up a lot of steam really quickly.

Patrick Carney: When Clockwork Kids started out, aside from Justin, it was actually a completely different group of people and then over the course of the spring and summer of 2012, Jeff joined, I joined and my brother [Mike] who’s currently the guitarist joined and our other guitarist Chris [Petto] joined.

Jeff DeLuca: I came up here from Florida and I had a couple of bands back in high school but it really took me awhile when I came to UNC to find a musical niche and actually Clockwork Kids was the first band that I’ve been in since I’ve been in Chapel Hill — the first time that I’ve been in a group where people are writing music together.

Dive: Where does the name Clockwork Kids come from?

JE: Oh Jesus, it’s based off of the little automaton character in The Invention of Hugo Cabret which is the book behind the movie “Hugo.”

Dive: Are you all, besides Jeff, from North Carolina?

JE: I’ve lived in North Carolina since I was seven but I was born in England and I have dual citizenship with England and Canada.

PC: I’ve lived in Chapel Hill for the past ten years so his story’s more interesting than mine but, for me, it’s interesting to be able to see from my perspective starting out here as a high school student and then being in bands in high school and stuff and watching the music scene here in Chapel Hill sort of evolve over the past ten years. That’s been interesting for me.

Dive: Did you play shows here in high school?

PC: Yeah when I was in high school I was in a couple bands that we played places like the Cat’s Cradle and Battle of the Bands type of events. It’s funny actually Justin was in a band in Raleigh with his friends and I was in a band with my schoolmates in Chapel Hill and we both played the same Battle of the Bands. This was in like 2007. And then when we met and hung out a bit I think I looked at his Facebook pictures and said, “Wait a minute, you were in this band from like five years ago.” We actually go way back.

JE: Apparently so.

Dive: Most of you aren’t students anymore but what was it like being in a band at the same time as having schoolwork to do? How did you balance the two?

JE: Honestly being mostly students in a band has been I guess tantamount to our success this past year because we’ve had this huge amazing network of people to you know count on to be at our shows and help get the word out. I guess that’s why our three bands — us, Morning Brigade and Virgins Family Band were asked to play this big show Thursday because we all have this certain amount of stock with the local student body.

JD: As some of us have moved into the “towny” stage of our lives that’s really only expanded our reach because we still have our friends who are still on campus but we’re also starting to make connections to friends outside the University.

PC: Outside the state and outside the country too.

JD: Yeah and I think that’s one of the cool things about this dynamic that these three bands in particular have brought to the town of Chapel Hill and the community of Chapel Hill and Carrboro is our ability to reach into the university and the town and really become kind of fully integrated with the experience that people have in Chapel Hill and Carrboro and I think that’s something new and exciting that we bring to the table.

PC: To kind of go off what you were saying, I was just thinking about this the other day, obviously UNC as an institution is usually discussed in academic terms most of the time. It’s a great university it has excellent academic programs. But I think the success of these three groups and what this show means and proves that UNC students are more than just academically successful there is you know a UNC community that are not only interested in work in the classroom. Students are really making things happen.

Dive: Your album is called The Swain Sessions and was recorded in Swain Hall, what was the recording process like?

JE: I was in the advanced project class in the Media Productions course at UNC and basically it’s a class where students can use University resources and make a thirty-minute project. And most students do a short movie or something like that but I really wanted to do a live music video kind of thing so what we did is, over the course of three days, we set up five cameras and like 17 microphones and basically in three takes or less recorded each song as if we were playing a live show. But we could control all of the factors of it, including no audience. And it was going to be just a video project but the takes ended up turning out so well that we decided to release the audio as its own thing as well as a video component. So that worked out very nicely.

PC: Yeah actually everything you hear on the record has a video component on YouTube so it’s not only an album; it also has a short film.

JE: Yeah. It’s actually called a video EP

Dive: Your album title was inspired by UNC’s campus, how else has the campus inspired your music?

JE: Some of the lyrics I write when I’m angry are about the politics on the UNC campus or the state at large. I won’t really delve much more into that, though.

PC: What’s important is that this is a place where that kind of political discourse happens and can inspire those kinds of lyrics. I would say the culture of the band is shaped by the university environment. When we do shows that are primarily for students we want to put a lot of effort into that and make it a really fun experience because there’s lots of things that people can do here on Friday, Saturday nights in Chapel Hill. It’s a college campus. It’s a college town. You can do whatever so you know we put a lot of effort into getting people out and making it a really fun experience for everyone.

JD: Yeah I would say the way the campus that most inspires us is the people and you know the relationships we’ve really built around campus and the fan base that we have that’s how that mostly reaches in directly from the campus and really inspires us and influences us in our music.

Dive: Your musical influences are R.E.M. and Radiohead, how do you describe the music that you make?

PC: Honestly I just default to saying it’s rock music and you can kind of decide.. there’s a lot of stuff going on. Because it’s a very collaborative band, we all have different influences we all bring those to the table in everything that we play. It kind of comes out as this amalgamation of a lot of different influences that the individual band members have.

JD: Yeah I think that’s something almost understand in this band is how different our musical backgrounds are. We have a ton in common but we love lots of different kinds of music. That’s one of the fun challenges of this band—bringing all of those backgrounds and musical influences together and I think that’s why we’ve been so successful in creating a unique sound.

JE: I feel like if The National and Cream were in a supernova you’d kind of get where we’re getting at but not really. That’s the best I can do. Various press outlets have described us as neo-psychedelic or detouring indie modernism down ’60s avenues so it’s a lot of old and new mashed together is what we’ve been hearing from people which we’re very okay with.

Dive: You’ve toured all over North Carolina. How has that experience been?

JE: Well we toured all of North Carolina last winter

PC: But we’ve done more since then.

JE: Yeah. We just came back from a tour from Montreal and back.

PC: Yeah we’ve done some international stuff now..

JE: The road’s been very good to us every time we’ve done it. Luckily because I have a lot of family everywhere and Jeff has a lot of political connections all over so we have the ability to stay with friends almost anywhere we go so our tour budget’s have been lucrative because we don’t have to spend money on multiple vehicles or hotels or anything because we have a lot of people we can rely on.

PC: It’s tough but ultimately the goal is it was successful commercially and it means something to take your music somewhere completely different and being able to get a really positive response from people and make friends and fans in totally different places. Places that don’t even speak the same primary language as you.

Dive: So the band’s future is looking bright?

PC: Hopefully, yes. I think that’s something we wanted to put to the test by going on this tour.

JE: We wanted to see if we could do it and now that we know we can do it we want to try and do a tour of the Southeast over winter break and we’re working on some new material, recording some new material. All three of us live together so we have, what’s the word?

PC: Convenient. The house has become this musical incubator.

JD: I mean I’ve only lived there for like two weeks and I’m already like practicing more regularly than I have in like years.

PC: It puts you in this space where you can like hear each other’s musical ideas. Like he’ll be playing guitar or he’ll be playing bass and you’ll hear it and think “that’s a cool idea.”

JD: And it kind of holds you accountable. You’ll hear one person practicing and think, “Oh, I should probably be practicing too.”

JE: The nice thing is that our fourth roommate is Gabe [Reynolds] who’s the keyboarder for Morning Brigade so he’s kind of like our critic in the house and he’ll help point us in the right direction and vice versa. It’s definitely a lot of fun.

Dive: Chapel Hill seems to be a good place for you artistically.
Do you plan to stay in Chapel Hill or is it up in the air?

JE: For the next year at least we’ll be in Chapel Hill. Beyond that, Patrick and Chris who plays guitar in the band are both seniors this year so it really depends on whether we plan to stay in Chapel Hill or all go forward but I do think that all of us want this band to work so it’s an issue of where we go rather than

PC: We don’t know what the future holds in terms of where we’ll be. I mean Chapel Hill has been an excellent place to start out. Really really great. There’s already a pre-established but also growing music scene here, especially on the campus.

JE: There’s definitely argues for and against staying in Chapel Hill versus going to a bigger city like N.Y.C. or L.A.

PC: We’ll just have to see what happens