Limbo Baby embraces the chaotic and self-reflective nature of a night out on debut ep ‘The Camaraderie of Last Call’ — Interview
BY AMBER BINTLIFF
photo credit: Erik Diehl
After three years of hard-work, Limbo Baby has finally welcomed their debut EP The Camaraderie of Last Call into the world. The five-track EP sees the New York City alt-rockers explore the intimacy of the final moments during a night out, pulling inspiration from their personal journey together as both a band and group of close friends.
Each song leans into the authentic and chaotic energy that fuels Limbo Baby’s identity. From the moody opening notes of “Don’t Rush” to the cinematic closing stretch of “Texas,” The Camaraderie of Last Call serves as a compelling debut that reflects on heartbreak, perseverance and long-lasting friendships.
Hannah (vocals), Anthony (bass), Jared (guitar), and Ben (drums) sat down with Televised Magazine to talk about the process of making The Camaraderie of Last Call, how they keep live audiences on their toes, hidden easter eggs within some of the songs and more.
Your debut EP, The Camaraderie of Last Call, released earlier this month. Congratulations! Can you talk about the meaning behind the EP’s title and how that ties into its five tracks?
Hannah: We've been writing the EP for a really long time. It includes songs that we wrote as early as three years ago. Especially for me, it feels like a moment that captures our relationship as a band, but also where we all were in our lives for the past three years.
When we first got together as a group, we spent a lot of time going out and the title feels very reminiscent of that. Who are the people who you're hanging with last at the bar? Who are the people who are sticking it out until that last moment? Beyond that, it was also just a silly thing that Jared said once.
Since you said the songs were in the works for three years, how does it feel now that this project is finally out in the world?
Hannah: Like a weight lifted.
Jared: I feel like for [“Texas”], Hannah was writing the lyrics forever. I remember going on a walk with her and she was shooting out random lines to try. [Hannah] had an epiphany randomly while on the subway train or something. Sometimes I feel like it comes together randomly. Then she would come to practice and be like, “guys, I hate ‘Texas.’ I'm rewriting the whole thing.” It took a while, but we eventually got there.
To go back to the point of the whole EP, like Hannah said, we started ideating these songs pretty much three years ago. This EP almost represents our journey as a band too because we started writing some of these songs with our old bass player, Eddie. He remains a good friend of ours, but he left our band and we were uncertain whether we were going to continue for a while.
We weren't very active for a span of a month and even after that, we were just me, Ben, and Hannah for a while and we were figuring out what to do. Thankfully we already knew Anthony.
When Eddie left our band, we had a show booked months in advance and Anthony offered to fill in on bass for that show. So we were like, “okay, we can play this show and figure out what we want to do.”Obviously Anthony ended up joining, but the journey of having these songs that we wrote over the course of such a long period of time represents how we persevered as a band.
We are such good friends and we wanted to keep this going. Now that it's finally done after all these years of ideating, recording and rewriting, it feels good to be able to see our finished product that we're proud of.
What was the most memorable part of the process creating this EP, especially since it’s your first one?
Ben: We went on this trip where we all went to this Airbnb upstate in Hancock, New York in January. We found this Airbnb that was literally a former schoolhouse that this guy bought and renovated into a music studio in a huge destination spot.
We spent a weekend there with our friend EriK, who's also like the informal band photographer. He took a bunch of pictures of us and all the pictures on our Spotify are mostly from that trip, Including the EP cover.
The trip was so much fun, but it was super cold and we didn't have any heat. We had to keep fires going on these pellet stoves. We cooked chicken cutlets and hung out and played a bunch of music. We said we were gonna write, which we did a little bit, but we just hung out the entire time.
To me, that was like the personification of our EP. We were all just hanging out on this trip and we had an amazing time.
The Camaraderie of Last Call ep cover, photo credit: Erik Diehl
That's so sweet. I love that! I wanna dive into one of the songs from The Camaraderie of Last Call which is personally my favorite, “Barefoot Cactus Bar.” Can you talk about the meaning and inspiration behind this one?
Hannah: That's our favorite too! I shouldn't speak for everyone right now because I know that our opinions change, but for a while that was everyone's favorite for sure. It was so much fun to make. The idea of the Barefoot Cactus Bar, as a place, is a metaphor for dating in New York, so bare with me. When you go out with your friends to a bar and you put yourself out there for other people, it is the equivalent of stepping on a cactus with their bare feet. It's like something that you willingly do once or twice a week.
The inspiration for it came out of this conversation we were having. Something that we do a lot, we just bit until the bit is like beating a dead horse. We were joking about a bar made of cacti that you walk around barefoot in. So the idea was literally that random, but then we were able to find a way to connect it so that it meant something to us.
Jared: We were playing a show at Heaven Can Wait, which is a venue in the East Village that actually no longer exists unfortunately, but we were waiting for sound check and there was a fake palm tree in the room. We were like, “what the hell is this? There should be a bar with real palm trees and sand. Maybe it's a desert actually with cacti, scorpions and other desert items.” It was just a stupid thing. Honestly, that's kind of inspiration for a lot of what we do as a band.
That's so fun. Listen, I love a good bit, so I appreciate that a lot. I know you said that it was the band's collective favorite at one time, but I'm gonna ask anyway just in case anybody has changed their opinion. What is your personal favorite track from the EP and why?
Jared: I do think I still like “Barefoot Cactus Bar” the best because it feels so strange even beyond the lyrical sense. How we composed it was almost a mirror opposite of what we usually do. Philosophically with a song where we'll have more tame verses, we then bring up the energy in the chorus.
In [“Barefoot Cactus Bar”], we changed that a little bit. We had this driving verse then the chorus is really bare, just a baseline with the kick, and then we have this really elaborate instrumental part that’s all tied together at the end.So I think the creativity of the arrangement is something that appeals to me for sure. It just hits.
Hannah: I could just echo that. Honestly, I think that's exactly why it's my favorite too. I've never heard anything like it.
Anthony: I feel like my favorite changes a lot, but overall I like the vibe of “Barefoot Cactus Bar.” It's just a very fun song. Whenever I listen to it or whenever we play it, it just has some special spice to it.
Ben: Yeah, I completely agree. Like Jared said, the bare bones-ness of some of the rhythm was really fun to explore and play around with. In terms of our goofiness as a band, the intro part is somewhat improvised and we have a lot of fun with it. When we recorded it, Anthony and Hannah went off the rails.
This is a little Easter egg, but in the intro, there's somebody dialing in a phone number to call the Barefoot Cactus Bar and I personally just love that. Hannah and Anthony built that out, but that's one of my favorite parts. I think they used a real number. Would one of you guys like to say what the number is that you dialed in?
Anthony: This is when we were driving to Hancock for that vacation I was talking about. Ben had told all of us that he had a $500 Applebee's gift card. Hannah and Jared knew this before, but essentially [Ben’s] grandmother was in this phone scam situation where someone tried to scam her of money and wanted her to spend $2,000 on Applebee's gift cards.
The scammers just gave up, but her bank gave her the money back and she was just left with these Applebee's gift cards. I think she gave them out to her grandkids and when we were driving to the Airbnb, we routed to an Applebee's along the way so we could have a pit stop. We show up and we like to get this big ass table. It's the five of us and we're all like, “Let's get this, and this.” He even still barely made a dent in the gift card.
That’s like unlimited half-apps.
Anthony: Yeah! So as an homage to that trip and that epic story, we decided to use the sounds when you dialed that Applebee's as that number for the Barefoot Cactus Bar. That song is just full of Easter eggs. There's a combination of all of us screaming at one point. There's one where Jared does a really good boat horn impression. There's a cow mooing in there. So I feel like the essence of the song is just elevated by the amount of fun that we have and the amount of fun that song allows us to have.
Honestly, that is probably in the top five stories that a band has ever told me. You guys recently played an EP release show on March 11th. What was that like for you guys?
Hannah: It was just so much fun. A lot of our audience was people who we love very much and it felt like we were all celebrating it together. We also got to play with Hipsy Gap and Tyler Miller, who are friends of ours, which was also really awesome. Nublu is such a great venue. It's been a while since we've played, so we were all really excited to get back on stage.
Ben: I will also say, I think it was a unique playing experience. The way that the stage is set up is there's stairs that go up to this upper level, and then the stage is parallel to those stairs, if you will. So people can watch right next to you as the drummer. There were people standing literally to the right of me because there's a little hallway there.
On the other side, there's people who were walking up the steps right next to [Jared.] You can also go up to the top level and look down at us. It's a really cool layout. That was my first time there and I had a blast.
The Camaraderie of Last Call ep release show, photo credit: Alex Tiktinsky
What is your favorite part of getting to perform live in front of an audience?
Jared: I think this sounds stupid because it's literally performance, but being performative and able to put on a little bit of a different personality for a night. We like to do things that keep our audience on our toes.
We've been playing a lot of the songs on the EP for a while since a lot of them have been around at least in partially completed form. We've tried to get creative with ways that we can surprise our audience, especially when they're friends of ours who have come to a lot of our shows.
So I think coming up with new creative ways to surprise people is another fun thing that always gets a reaction out of the audience. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we just really love performing and playing together. It's always such an enjoyable time.
Ben: I love the improvisational part of performing. You can be completely in the moment and express yourself. If I do something or Anthony or Jared does something that we don't expect or is out of nowhere, then it's like “Oh wow, he did that. That's so cool.” It's like an inside language between us.
Somebody has to talk about the mashup cover that we did, we call it Clairamore. We mashed up two songs, one by Clairo and then the second by Paramore. We did the first half of one song and then the second half was like a Paramore song. I think it was Anthony's idea to mash it together actually and it was super fun. To Jared's point about surprising people, I think that really hit the nail on the head.
Anthony: It’s like adding our own Limbo Baby sound to covers. We like to baby-fy songs, especially ones that are a lot calmer and add a rock flare to them. We decided to do “Bags” by Clairo and with the way that Ben was playing the drums, I was like, “This sounds like that one Paramore song: ‘That's What You Get.’”
We switched from “Bags” to “That’s What You Get” at that instrumental point, which surprised the audience as much as us the first time that we did it. For some reason, it just worked so well.
That is so sick, especially because you would never think to put those two songs together either. Moving on a bit, how has your experience as artists in the NYC DIY scene influenced your art and growth as musicians?
Jared: It's just been really interesting because we've been around as a band for a long time now. Our initial formation was almost exactly four years ago and Anthony joined around a year and a half ago, so we've been together for a while. I think a lot of bands that play New York City come and go. You'll see new ones start up and then they'll disband, so it's been cool to see how that environment changes.
So much of it, too, is based on the connections you have with your friends who play in other acts. For example, at our EP release show, Anthony plays guitar for Tyler Miller who played on the bill with us. And then Hipsy Gap is fronted by Mackenzie and she used to often sing backing vocals for this other band I'm in called Doolittle.
We've had shows where we'll just play with a random band on a bill that we didn't really build and we end up really liking them and then we’ll be able to play with them again. So it's just cool how you can develop musical relationships in so many different ways.
How would you describe Limbo Baby’s sound to someone who's never heard of your music before?
Hannah: We struggle with this.
Anthony: I feel like because I joined later and I wasn't a part of that initial sound, the biggest thing that really caught my ears was that everyone is doing something very definitive and intentional. That's one of the biggest things that I really liked about the sound of Limbo Baby.
Jared is playing something completely different from what the bass is playing. What Ben is playing doesn't really follow those rhythms or anything and whatever Hannah is singing is just perfectly placed in the realm of the three instruments. It's just very additive.
Even live, before I was in the band and Eddie was still in the band, I was just so impressed about how it was just such a big sound from four people. One of the coolest things about this band is that we all really try to bring our individuality and intentionality. The intention is there and that really helps create this unique sound in this rock-indie-I don't know.
Hannah: We're going with alt-rock these days.
I think that's the beauty of alternative music. It’s such an umbrella term and you can really just do what you want, so I feel like that was a really awesome way to put it. Before we wrap up, is there anything else that you guys would like to share today?
Hannah: Follow us and stream our EP! We don't have any shows planned at the moment, but when we do, we always post it pretty widely. Keep an eye out because the next EP is gonna take less than three years!
