CG) Ok, switching gears, Obviously, both of you guys have some serious musical gifts. What's going on in the Cooper family? Where did it come from?
C: Well, thank you for that. For me, it isn’t so much about having any gifts as it is about being too stubborn to give up. Plus, I’m not more interested in or better at anything else, so my choices are slim. But our mom started us on piano very young, which always sets a nice foundation for anyone. Then I continued to be a band nerd all the way through high school and college. But now I have long hair which makes it cooler. Jesse was always in some pretty awesome bands, and I couldn’t help but follow his lead and play in bands myself.
J: I’ve always just been a huge fan of music and bands as far back as I can remember. Like Casey mentioned, our mother pushed us to learn piano at a very young age. Casey actually stuck with schooling in music, while I drifted more heavily towards playing in bands and relying on my ear to get me through.
CG) Where did you guys grow up? Did you start playing together at a young age?
C: We lived in the Sharon Woods area of Columbus originally, then Mt. Vernon for a couple years. I ended up with our mom in Hilliard through high school, and Jesse ended up with our dad at DeSales. We’d play my parties in high school when my mom was on business trips and Jesse was way older than everyone else, which was sweet. A lot of that was jams that went nowhere, but we thought it was cool. Plenty of E and A.
CG) Can you remember your first public gig together?
C: I joined Jesse’s band, Lucid’s Dream, for a couple different songs at South Heidelberg on keys and trumpet. But I’ll never forget our first “real” show because I was scared to death. Jesse’s band had a gig coming up and their bass player had just quit to go to some music festival for the weekend. So I was asked to fill in, and I really thought I hit the bigtime. I was 18. We had a couple rehearsals, and then the show at Little Brother’s. I remember forgetting the chord progression in the last song, and the guitarist had to shout them to me on stage. And there was a dude sitting in a chair in the middle of that huge room with nobody around him, reviewing us with pen and paper in hand.
CG) Many brother combos in music are notorious for being combative such as the Davies or Galleghers. Do you guys ever feel like beating the shit out of each other?
C: It never really escalates to anything like that for us. Sure we get on each others’ nerves, but we’ve been playing together and living together for so long that it’s sort of just white noise at this point. We sure do love to argue about things that really don’t matter, though.
J: Yeah, any arguments usually blow over within minutes. As Kansas would say, “Everything is dust in the wind.”
CG) How do you feel like All Burn differs from your previous work?
C: I think it’s our most complete album yet. A lot of our older material sounds a bit young now when I go back to it. So it’s paying off to get old I guess. But we had a clearer idea of what we wanted for this album than any other. The songs feel more complete, the fat is trimmed a little more, and the album as a whole moves more willfully than the others. And we wanted everything to be dreamier and loftier than anything else we’ve done. So that was a common thread we stuck to throughout the entire album.
J: I’ve never been so excited about anything we’ve done. Every song on All Burn captures a mood and is distinctly its own yet is a just a piece of the big picture. I’m a huge fan of the classic album format and I feel we finally got it right on this one.
CG) Which songs are your favorite to play live?
C: I’m really enjoying a lot of the newer material right now. The aggressive tunes like “To Battle An Island,” “Collector,” and “The Summit” are great for gritty bass and loud drums. But others, like “All Burn” and “Dark Matter” are refreshingly laid-back but not at all boring for me. I’m sure we’ll be sick of everything by the time this tour wraps up though.
-- Let's take a break and check out your latest video for the song "Transit"
