Carolina Liar - Interview - June 2009
By: Sian Norris
"We arrived here on Monday," Chad Wolf, lead singer and guitarist of America's newest big export, Carolina Liar tells me. "The sun was shining, everyone was on holiday, flowers everywhere, it really felt like springtime. It wasn't what we expected at all! It's been a crazy welcome to the UK, the song is playing everywhere, it's just a huge opportunity for us to be over here."
This enthusiasm and sense of a wonderful freshness to everything characterises my chat with Wolf, a man whose excitement for life is palpable even through the phone. Carolina Liar have exploded with what feels like a great suddenness on the scene, their debut single Show Me What I'm Looking For (released 1st June) has hit the Radio 1 A list and is expected to go top 5.
The band are made up of Wolf, Johan Carlsson, Jim Almgren Gandara, Rickard Goransson, Max Grahn and Erik Haager, and produced by pop music legend, Max Martin - the hitmaker behind tunes from Pink, Britney Spears and Katy Perry. Wolf hails from South Carolina, but met his bandmates after the opportunity arose to head over to Sweden to record the songs that were to form debut album Coming to Terms.
"I wrote the song Coming to Terms when I was living in L.A," Wolf explains. "I was on the edge of being homeless, and ended up moving into this compound after meeting a Swedish songwriter. Max [Martin] heard the song, and was excited about hearing some more, so I followed it up with 'Show Me What I'm Looking For' and 'I'm Not Over'."
One thing led to another and Wolf found himself on a plane to Stockholm, on his way to a recording studio to start creating the album. Once there he met the other musicians that became Carolina Liar, and the band was formed. Wolf had always envisaged it being a Swedish - American project, so to have found bandmates that came from all over Sweden presented a fantastic opportunity.
"It's like a Cinderella Story," he laughs. "I'm always telling stories."
This ability to weave a tale resulted in finding the name Carolina Liar.
"This producer was once listening to me tell stories, and laughed, saying I was such a liar. He asked me where I was from, and I said South Carolina, so he replied - there you go, Carolina Liar!" Wolf laughs as he finishes the story. "So, we Google-d it, checked it was clean, and we got the name!"
Carolina Liar's album has a rich sound - with rocky guitars and vocals, smooth synths that speak of an exciting range of influences. Opening track 'I'm Not Over' is a pure slice of guitar and synth pop, a catchy and explosive chorus, with a contrasting understated verse that slowly builds you up. I'm interested to see what Wolf sees as his musical influences:
"Ah man," he laughs. "So many! I listen to everything!" Wolf laughs a lot, in a charmingly Southern and unpretentious way. He just seems to beam enthusiasm for his music and the world he is living in. You can't help but want to get involved.
"I was really young when I got into music, my parents bought me a drum kit when I was four, then I was playing the trombone before I started learning the guitar in sixth grade. My mom and dad didn't play, but my great grandfather, who I never met, was apparently a virtuoso musician, and my grandmother played organ and piano at church, and we all sang in the church choir.
"I guess my early influences came from my sister - she was 8 or 9 years older than me, and she was at college, listening to the Smiths, Depeche Mode, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Cure - all these British bands..."
I cheer!
"She was so cool, whatever she listened to I listened to. So, I was this 10 year old kid with all these other kids thinking I was weird for listening to bands who wore lipstick...!"
"Currently I've been listening to a lot of Thin Lizzy, and I love the new Phoenix record, they're so talented. And the MGMT and new Kings of Leon records - we drove across the 'States eight times last year and we must have played those albums every day."
You can hear the eighties pop influences there in the songs, but with so many different sounds and feelings coming through on the album I wanted to get a feel for how their creative process worked, where they discovered their sound.
"Working with Max [Martin] was a really cool experience, and he gave us access to loads of different instruments, then we met one of the guys from the Cardigans, and he had loads of instruments too, so we just started experimenting! We didn't know how half of them worked, so we approached each instrument differently, learning to see what happened."
Such experimentation resulted in the use of a tiny Wurlitzer organ on 'I'm Not Over' and an interesting session with some Russian synths. This organic approach to creating music has created a pop rock record that avoids being formulaic whilst being instantly catchy.
"There are always parts of the song we know we want," Wolf explains. "Notes, lyrics, for example. But phonics wise - it was really experimental. We wanted to have fun, and sonically everything we wrote was so collaborative, there was no ego it was just us, working together."
The lyrics to the songs tell stories - "every one is based on something true". They explore emotional events and emotions themselves, through the medium of Wolf's own life and experiences. He gives the example of 'California Bound' - the memory of a conversation he had with a friend the night before he moved to L.A, something which he had kept to himself up until that point.
"We needed some inspiration to write a road song, a song about travelling and moving on. I knew straight away what that story was, dug up my notebook and the song was written."
This sense of collaboration and desire to work together seems to imbue Wolf's outlook on the music he makes , and the industry itself. Like his laugh, his experience of travelling with his music is one of openness and friendliness, being excited about discovering what's out there, learning about new music and experiencing new things.
"It's been hard work, but the hard work has paid off. It's the best thing in the world to see the world through playing music, you meet so many people who love music and who you have common ground with. I am even happy when people tell me they don't like my music - it doesn't bother me at all as then you can have a conversation about what music they do like, and you discover so much new music that way! Criticism is a way to find new roads."
We have a free acoustic version of Carolina Liar's 'I'm Not Over' available for download - just head HERE.
Artists in this article: Carolina Liar