Leading up to the release of their new single and music video, “Hourglass,” the four members of the the electronic group Waxcat sat down for an interview with Hunter Craighill of Nuance. Based in Denver, the group has started to take off in the deep electronic community around the area. However, the band has its sights set higher than just the Denver electronic scene.
The Band:
Jake Myers: Vocals
Nick Nord: Guitar
Chris Comisar: Producer
Jobe Smetana Wagner: Drums
What was the creative process going into Hourglass?
Well, it’s a little bit different every time, but with this one in particular, Chris had started the backing track and had a pretty complete structure before we even heard it. From there, it was just filling in guitar parts and writing in lyrics where they needed to be. We had a lot of lyrics already written too, but we had a lot of nit picky structure based and mixing based changes, but it was pretty much together when Chris brought it to us.
Generally speaking, would you say lyrics come first or is it different every time?
“Yeah, I’d say generally speaking it is pretty evenly balanced in terms of what part of the song we start with. Sometimes Chris will have like a full beat to start with, or I’ll have a guitar riff or someone will have a chorus written that we can build off of. It’s really just whatever gets the rest of us inspired, but usually the lyrics are kind of the last stamp on the music.
Photo courtesy of Waxcat Instagram
Yall made your festival debut at Highground last year, tell me about how that experience was.
So at Highground, we actually just did kind of a DJ set since half of us were unavailable. It was sweet though, we got to play with several artists that we had been listening to for a while, and that was a really reassuring moment. It was kind of a smaller crowd, we were on a side stage so it was more of like a wavy set, but the extracurriculars to that were super cool.
You mentioned playing with some of the artists you have been listening to, who all have you gotten to meet and hang out with now that you’re breaking into this scene a little more?
Tom Odell was huge for me. Before we moved out here and I was in school, Tom Odell came to the school and asked my band to open for him, so that was a super cool full circle moment because I had been listening to him since highschool. But other than that, Haywire, Jeff Porter, CloZee, Inzo, just a lot of people that are part of this kind of renaissance happening here in Denver with Electronic music. That was really cool because we just kind of picked Denver arbitrarily and just lucked out with the amount of people who have really chosen to come here for the electronic music. There’s just a lot of room for growth here as opposed to somewhere like LA where everything is supersaturated.
Tell me about the experience shooting your music video for Hourglass
It was kind of unexpected in a way with how quickly it happened. We had the idea going for a while, we just didn’t know how it was going to happen. Like we had a vague recording, but we didn’t have it planned out section by section. Mario helped out a lot with filling in the bits and pieces. It was also super cool with this song, we kind of wrote it knowing we were going to make a video. Well, we had most of the song written before we knew, but once we started kind of making decisions based on the video, that just made it so fun.
Anything else you would like to share and let your audience know?
People should definitely look out for a followup within a couple weeks of the “Hourglass” release. There’s gonna be like a B-side part two type of track, but then we also have a few that are like a completely different vibe coming up. I really think it’s the best music we have made so far as a band. It took a little while to really align our influences and our styles as a band, but now it really feels like it’s coming together and we’re making the music we really want to.