 DECEMBER 1999
ROCKBAND.COM
SPOTLIGHT
Calamine
In 1997 vocalist Julie
Stepanek put an ad in the Village Voice looking for a female bass
player. What did she get? Guitarist Dan Crane and the start of a new
indie pop band - now known as Calamine. She and Dan share the
songwriting and vocalist duties, Jack Campbell plays bass and Dave
Jargowsky is the drummer. Their songs are lush, pretty and pure-spun
pop. Get the CD and you'll see what we mean.
ROCKBAND.COM: Fresh faced indie pop. If I didn’t know you were actually from New York City I would have sworn you were from the sunshine culture of Southern California. You know, Blink 182, No Doubt, Sublime. Calamine would fit right in.
JULIE
STEPANEK:
Well, although we all now live in NYC, we all come from other places : Missouri (me), Colorado (Dan - guitarist), North Carolina (Jack - bass) and upstate New York (Dave - drummer). I think we arrived in the city with our personalities already formed.
ROCKBAND.COM: We usually ask about re-occurring themes in a band’s music and on this CD you seem to be remembering or reliving a lot of your childhood. It’s very sweet and yet deeply emotional. To quote one of your songs, is that all a “happy accident” or was it more calculated?
JULIE:
It wasn't calculated, I'm pretty much a free-form/free-association lyric writer. I just sing or write anything that comes into my head. But I'm not surprised that so much of what I write comes from earlier memories.
I'm a "cataloguer" -- always comparing what I'm thinking, feeling, seeing right now to some memory I have. You know, like, "Hey the color of the sky today is exactly like that time when I was hanging out at the park that day I pretended I was sick and skipped school." Or, "Wow, the lighting in this club reminds me of that Christmas Eve at my uncle's in Omaha." I thought everybody did this, but I've been told I can be pretty insane about it.
Every time I walk into a new situation I try to place it in some perspective, and that perspective is made up of all the different types of stuff I've already experienced. I spend a lot of time thinking "What does this remind me of?" I'm always thinking about my past if for no other reason than just to remember it and because I'm always thinking about my past it naturally comes out in my song writing.
Sometimes, however, writing a song about childhood is conscious. Trampoline was a conscious effort to write a song about a particular experience. When I was a kid my mom used to send me and my siblings out to the backyard after breakfast in the summer and she'd lock the door behind us.
If we wanted to come back in we had to knock on the door and ask her. She always claimed it was because she was mopping the floors and she didn't want us to track dirt through the house but really I think she just needed some peace and quiet. There are seven kids in my family, all close in age, and my poor mother was simply overwhelmed. It was a magical time in my life. I was the baby of the family and I would spend everyday running around with my brothers with absolutely no adult supervision.
Anyway, I decided I wanted to write a song about it. I had that first line written down in a journal for nearly a year before I ever wrote the song, and when I did finally write it I took that very particular memory, of being locked out, and tried to flesh out what I was doing at that point of my life.
All the stuff in it is based on real events: wrestling with my brothers, jumping on the
neighbor's trampoline, playing Ghost in the Graveyard. I'm proud of that song, and I think it represents a little bit of my life that is real and true that now it lives independently of me.
ROCKBAND.COM: Tell us about having two singers. How does it affect your music and who writes your songs?
JULIE:
It's great. Having more than one singer frees you up to experiment with ranges and harmonies and all sorts of stuff. It gives you more possibilities to work with, which sometimes can suck because there's so many choices it seems too daunting. But in the end it's really cool to have the opportunity to try things a bunch of different ways until it clicks.
While Dan and I generally sing the songs we write - I don't write songs for Dan to sing or vice versa - a song like Airplane was written by me, but the melody wasn't really strong and I didn't have any words. Dan had a melody in his head so we tried it and it was great. Since we contributed equally to the song we decided to both sing lead. We tried something we had never done before - a duet sung an octave apart - a technique we had seen one of our favorite bands, VPN, do - and it was great.
I also sometimes just love stepping back and singing backup. Sometimes I get tired of singing - it's fun to just stand there and play guitar once in a while.
ROCKBAND.COM: Great packaging on the CD, by the way! And your web site
at www.calamine.com is perfect for your
sound. Who does all your marketing?
JULIE:
We love our graphic designer, Hugh Rodman. When he started working on the CD he didn't know the band very well and the only thing he had to work with was a description Dan gave him: the melancholy side of summer camp. I had never really thought about Calamine in those terms, but hearing it I was like "Exactly! That totally captures alot of who we are as a band."
ROCKBAND.COM: What’s next for Calamine? What musical direction do you see yourself heading in?
JULIE:
Well, just working on new songs, playing shows, recording - the day to day stuff of being a band. We did a song for a new show that will air on Cartoon Network next season, SEALAB 2020. It was great fun and we're hoping to do some more stuff like that. I'm trying to convince the Cartoon Network guys to re-release Josie and the Pussycats, my very favorite cartoon. I'd love to write a song for Josie.
ROCKBAND.COM: And finally, is there anything else you want the world to know about you?
JULIE:
Yikes. Well, playing music and being in a band is great. I love the other members of Calamine, I love working with them as musicians and just hanging out with them as friends. We haven't done a lot of touring - playing New York City is hard enough -- but I'd love to tour with the guys, I'm sure it would suck and be absolutely fabulous all at the same time.
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