The kids are alright
Calpurnia wasn’t supposed to be serious, but hey, stranger things have happened Calpurnia is a teenaged quartet from Vancouver comprised of Ayla Tesler-Mabe, left, Malcolm Craig, Finn Wolfhard and Jack Anderson.
Calpurnia is not the Finn Wolfhard Show, by any means, so of course the
Stranger Things star is doing press with the entire band to hype the release of its debut EP, Scout.
Discerning who’s who within the teenage quartet over the phone is an absolute nightmare, though — Calpurnia’s sole female member, 17-year-old lead guitarist and co-vocalist Ayla Tesler-Mabe, jokes going in that her voice “sounds very similar to everyone else’s voices” and she’s totally right — so advance apologies to any and all parties who might be misidentified in the piece that follows. I’m only human.
In any case, Calpurnia is a gang of friends, first and foremost, so it makes sense that singer/guitarist Wolfhard, Tesler-Mabe, bassist Jack Anderson and drummer Malcolm Craig are in the habit of finishing each other’s sentences and cracking each other up with well-worn inside jokes — and generally sounding like a single hive mind.
What Calpurnia doesn’t sound like is the logical musical creation of two 15year-olds and two 17-year-olds jamming together in 2018. On the summery Scout, the four Van- couverites mostly evoke acts their Boomer-age grandparents grew up listening to: the Beatles, the Band, Let It
Bleed- era Rolling Stones, and Dylan at his scrappiest. Also brought to mind is Lou Reed — whose circuitous guitar stylings you can hear in ramblin’ tunes such as “City Boy,” but who also inspired the not-terribly-Lou-like single “Louie” — with the odd nod here and there to the soft-psych jangle of Big Star on the “young” end of the influences list.
CALPURNIA continued on E4
“We all just listen to music that we enjoy, and luckily we kind of all enjoy the same broad spectrum. And a lot of it is quite older — you know, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s,” Anderson, 17, says. “I’m not saying that today’s music is bad. There’s a lot of really good stuff coming out today, but I think we all enjoy the sound of older times.”
“I think what’s amazing about the chemistry of this group is we’ve never really sat down and defined what we wanted to sound like,” adds Wolfhard,15. “It just came together naturally and organically from the coming together of all our different styles and influences. It is what it is, and as our style evolves, I would like to think that we won’t lose that natural, organic sound that we have where it’s just, like, ‘Oh, this is what we sound like.’ ”
Calpurnia has not been overly thought out, which, given the promising pop calibre of the six tunes on Scout, bodes well for the future. They’re only just figuring themselves out.
Wolfhard met Craig during a video shoot for Toronto pop-punk crew PUP’s “Guilt Trip” single in 2014, and the two started playing music together, soon after roping in Tesler-Mabe and Anderson — who have known each other since Grade 2 — through friendly connections and a shared love of Chicago indie-rockers Twin Peaks, whose frontman Cadien Lake James eventually wound up producing the new EP.
Their first gig was on a lark for a charity event, but by the end of last summer, Calpurnia had a bunch of original songs ready to go and realized they were actually a band.
“We just started jamming together and hanging out and I really enjoyed their company,” Tesler-Mabe says. “These guys are all the first people I’ve ever jammed with, pretty much. And now we’re in a band together.”
Having a frontman with a prominent role in two-going-on-three seasons of the Netflix sci-fi phenomenon Stranger Things and last year’s smash-hit cinematic adaptation of Stephen King’s It hasn’t hurt Calpurnia’s visibility, but the band is keeping it low-key and signed to small Toronto indie imprint Royal Mountain Records (Alvvays, U.S. Girls, Mac DeMarco) for Scout rather than going the major-label route that might have presented itself due to Wolfhard’s growing stardom.
He’d certainly prefer to keep that side of his life out of it as much as possible.
“We would like to think that the more we go out and do our thing and just write songs and show that we just genuinely love playing in a band together and love writing music, people will see that it’s not some sort of ploy,” he says.
“It’s all genuine. We just love what we’re doing.”
“It’s not Stranger Things, the band,” offers Anderson.
“Yeah, I’ve been playing with these guys since way before Stranger Things was a thing,” Wolfhard says.
Work on the coming Stranger Things season and other obligations such as, you know, high-school graduation — “I finish school on the day the record comes out, so that’s kinda cool,” crows Anderson — will keep Calpurnia’s touring obligations in support of Scout scant and “scattered,” as Wolfhard puts it, for now.
The band will play a couple of Canadian dates this summer, however, hitting Montreal’s Osheaga festival on Aug. 4, and the Royal Mountain Music Festival at Hamilton’s Raspberry Farm on Sept. 2.
After that, who knows? The band already has a ton of songs in the works for a full-length and, being of a certain youthful vintage, literally the rest of the band’s lives to figure out where they can take Calpurnia.
“I’ve said this before, but I guess our musical tastes are like a four-way Venn diagram where they all kind of intersect a lot in the middle, but then we all have our outside influences,” Anderson says. “Like, Ayla’s really into jazz, Malcolm and Finn really like punk, I really like prog. So certain influences come into it — the rhythm guitar from punk you can kinda hear on some of our tracks, the Mellotron from prog you can hear on some of our tracks and some of the progressions we have are kinda jazz-influenced. So it’s really cool being able to pull from such a broad spectrum of musical ideas.”
So can we expect Calpurnia’s “difficult second album” to be a prog opus?
The suggestion meets with whoops of laughter down the line and protestation, probably not for the first time, from Anderson: “What? I love prog!”
“Also a little bit of nu-metal in there,” Wolfhard says.
“Hexagonal Snowflakes will be the name of the prog record. I think that’s a good prog name,” Anderson concludes. “And it’s called Hexagonal Snowflakes because it’s a six-LP record.”