Chaz Cardigan 'Holograma' + Interview
☆ By SOPHIE GRAGG ☆
RADIATING GOOD ENERGY, GOOD INTENTIONS AND A SENSE OF AUTHENTICITY LIKE NO OTHER - Chaz Cardigan effortlessly gives his music his all. Cardigan’s new album Holograma reflects a time of change in the artist’s life: changing perspectives, changing thoughts and the plethora of changes your mid-twenties bring. With a stronger sense of himself, Cardigan brings a new level of confidence in the record while still tapping into his foundation. Inspired by soundscapes of his youth, Holograma gives the listener that sense of warmth and nostalgia through tracks like “Loosing Touch” and “Middle Of The Road”. Reflecting on the variety of viewpoints Cardigan was able to understand growing up in Kentucky, his sense of curiosity and an open mind allows for a sense of growth in his sound. Each track lush with production, Cardigan’s emotive vocals still manage to take center stage with each track.
In a press conference hosted by 1824 of Universal Music Group, we had the pleasure of learning more about the making of Holograma, Cardigan’s thoughts on COVID and the election and more. Get cozy with Holograma and read below to get a deeper understanding of the world of Chaz Cardigan.
*Questions have been edited for brevity and clarity, and do no reflect the specific outlet that asked the question.
1824: If there were to be a zombie apocalypse tomorrow and one song from Holograma could grant listers immunity, which song would you feel would be the best fit to get the job done?
CARDIGAN: “Change Your Mind”. I've in fact thought about this exact question while writing that song. So that's dope. I think “Change Your Mind” is both the most fun and has the most amount of tension and release. The whole EP is pretty much about like flipping perspectives, right? It's all about like context for things changing and recontextualizing your ideas and your perspectives on things and “Change Your Mind” is just a super fun song, but I don't know something about it just screams like “Yeah this is a good zombie apocalypse song”.
Y'all remember that fallout boy video for “A Little less sixteen Candles, A Little More Touch Me”? Where it's this like really big, upbeat pop song, but they're vampire hunters? That's exactly what “Change Your Mind” is for me.
1824: Your lyrics in “Room” are very descriptive and captivating, and they really make the listener feel like they're in this room with you experiencing all of your emotions that you're vocalizing. What does this song mean to you and how do you feel reliving these memories that you've captured in it?
CARDIGAN: It makes me feel warm. The song is about the bedroom of the first person I was in love with, you know, and whatever that means when you're in high school. It was the first time I was really feeling these emotions and just this huge swell of like, “Oh my God, a person feels this much emotion for me and I feel this much emotion for them.” And, you know, giving these like totemic things to it, the map of Ecuador, this old ID card laying on the dresser, the pattern on your sheets and stuff like that.
So it's special to me in that way, especially because so much of Holograma was written as my life was just totally changing. I had signed my record deal. I was going back and forth a lot more to LA. I was traveling a lot more. I was in my first serious relationship, like an adult relationship. And all of my relationship dynamics were changing with my family, with my friends, with my team members.
And so many of the songs on Holograma were trying to capture that shifting of narratives, that shifting of perspectives and in writing “Room”, it unlocked this thing for me that I, I just realized. “Oh, my gosh. I have never really been as invested as a real, in a relationship since that first one, because I'm always chasing that initial high. I'm always chasing that first feeling. I'm always chasing that like first buzz of being in love” and in writing it, I was able to let that go. That was a pretty toxic trait that I carried around for way too much of my adult life, probably. So it makes me feel warm to listen to, it just feels like reliving it but maybe not staying stuck in the past. You know what I mean? That there's a healthy distance in the nostalgia.
1824: The artwork for Holograma is extremely vibrant and is really mesmerizing, how did you come exactly to deciding on that trippy looking depiction of your face that you used?
CARDIGAN: Well, it's a combo of different things. I knew going into just describing the EP to my team that I wanted to play with these iridescent colors. I wanted to play with like, sort of colors shifting and shimmering. When I think of the songs on Holograma, I sort of think of every color on the rainbow and this like chroma key spectrum.
Like I said, it's all about ideas shifting perspectives. Changing. When I think of that, I think of holograms. And I think of, you know, how, when you look at a spiderweb just right in the sunlight, it reflects back a rainbow at you, but only for a second. So we really focused in on that, on the single artworks for everything's wrong, middle of the road and room.
What I wanted to do on the EP cover was to focus solely on an image, but still keep it just a psychedelic and still keep it this like distorted melting thing. But like, you can still tell it to me. I think it's really just all about shifting it's all about things becoming new things.
1824: This is kinda more of like a big picture question, but with everything going on with COVID, we're seeing so many things change. What positive impacts you think that COVID could have on the music industry?
CARDIGAN: This is a great question. I really hope that what we take from this year going forward is that music is honestly such a young industry. I think it's easy for all of us to get caught up in the minutia of working in it all the time. But the industry, as we know, it has only existed for about 60 years.
Like, it's not this storied thing with these archetypes that are, you know, 50 years old and that's the newest incarnation of them. So what I hope we learn when we go back is that we are allowed to do things differently, and that may be the way that, you know, finance bylaws and royalty collection, the way that those laws were written in the forties and fifties and sixties is maybe out of date. A lot of that comes down to the politicians we vote in this election cycle and who does what with, you know, the music modernization act and yada yada.
I hope too that, you know, maybe we find a new, healthier imagination of touring. I love playing shows. That's the one thing I can't wait to get back to is playing shows. But at the same time, maybe it's not good for the human body to wake up in a different city 300 days a year. And you know, you see these horror stories of Johnny Cash or Ray Charles going on tour for five, six years. And then they come back and their kids are grown up and their kids and families have grown up in these houses they were able to afford, but they weren't there to see those moments. I think that maybe there's a more humane and holistic way to approach touring specifically. And I don't know what that is, but we're all clamoring for ways to market, market market, market all the time. And we have to, we're trying to get the word out, but it's easier than ever for people to discover music. It's easier than ever for people to consume music and to see live performances and maybe what COVID will do is pivot us to a place where VR and VR integrated live streaming is more accessible, more commonly for people, and maybe artists don't have to lose 10 years off of their body being on the road all the time.
1824: Growing up in Kentucky, how you feel it shaped you as an artist and the music you're making?
CARDIGAN: I grew up in a town that was culturally pretty Midwestern. I would say that where I grew up encouraged me to ask questions. I feel like a lot of my understanding of the world came from TV and watching movies and seeing these cool things you can do in cities and these cool things you could do at the beach or in the mountains, and I had none of that, But what have was a really diverse town, predominantly white, but a third of my town was middle Eastern and there was actually a huge Muslim population where I grew up.
So around the time I started questioning religion and getting critical of like bigger ideas, there were just as many viewpoints on Islam for me to draw from, as there were viewpoints on Christianity. It was it predominantly Republican, sure, nut there were enough independents and Democrats in my town that when I started again getting critical of big picture ideas, I always knew that there were more than one side, sometimes more than two sides to an issue as far as policy goes.
That really encouraged me to always stay curious to ask questions and be okay saying, “I don't know about that one. Have we thought about a different answer? Does anyone have a different idea on this thing? Does it have to be X, Y, or Z?” And to know that, you know, there were more opportunities somewhere else, but that didn't make the place I grew up bad. I think it's given me, I think it gave me a lot of humility in that way, knowing that I don't have answers most of the time to most things.
1824: Shifting back to music and everything, just as a whole, how would you compare the feel of Holograma to your past work?
CARDIGAN: I think it's much more sure of itself. On Vulnerability, I had gained more confidence than on my first record already, but I was still dipping in a little bit over here trying this thing sonically. It’s still very much a throw paint at the wall record and Holograma sure there's paint to be thrown, but I feel like the backbone is more defined. I feel like there's more consistency. I feel like I really know what I'm doing now with this version of myself as I'm alive at 25. I feel like I know what I'm doing for now and that'll shift on the next go round, but I don't feel like I need to prove myself to me anymore.
1824: Where did you draw a lot of the influences for this record?
CARDIGAN: I think I really made songs that I wish I'd heard as a teenager, whatever that meant. I hear a lot of influence from like minivan rock bands that I would have heard around the early 200s, like Third Eye Blind, the GooGoo Dolls. Also some, you know, some touch points from my high school experience, I think there's some Land Del Ray moments in there. There's definitely some Killers influence, but I would say overall music that makes me feel young like these light, hooky pop songs with like swimmy, sometimes nasty guitars in them. That's really what I was going.
1824: What life experience of yours has kind of shaped who you are as an artist the most?
CARDIGAN: Moving to Nashville when I was 17 and I had mentors here at the time that I moved and I'd been coming to Nashville every day from the time I was about 13 on. All through high school I would go to school and then I would drive to Nashville with my dad every day. I would go to writer's rounds or I'd study songwriting or all the things that have really shaped me now. But moving, I mean, that's just the real pressure test. I worked every dead-end job you can think of ended up sleeping in my car for a bit. At the time there just, wasn't a scene here for what I was doing. It's pretty much exactly what I'm doing now, but alternative music was very different at the time and there wasn't a pop infrastructure in the town. There really only was Country world and Christian music world. And I very much existed outside of those paradigms. I made most of my money making music for rappers or a few local pop artists and I was playing bass in this really grungy rock band for a few years. Great, great moments but I think having to really fight to make what I'm making now and learning how to make that stuff while also not going to college and not having the benefit of, you know, meeting peers that “Oh, Hey, my dad does this thing” or like, “Oh, do you want it to go to this show?” I would, I would say moving to Nashville shaped me the most in that way.
1824: What’s the end goal for yourself as a musician?
CARDIGAN: Ultimately, there's nothing bigger for me than playing live to as many people as possible and just sharing a feeling like that. It's the communal experience for me. It's the sharing of a moment, and anything else I can say is really just an offshoot of that.
1824: How do you find creating a brand for yourself when you're working on your own music, that talks about vulnerable and authentic things? How do you think that influences the trajectory of where you want your career to go?
CARDIGAN: This is a great question. I hope that being as transparent as possible personally means that the music connects in a more personal way for people. That's the goal. Right? I mean, I personally don't know that I ever want to be like a Harry styles size figure. I feel like I love the intimacy and the personal connection afforded to me, by the way that people connect with writing music because of how transparent it is.
1824: Why was it so important for you to be a producer of your own music and what is it like to take on that role?
CARDIGAN: I don’t think I ever thought about it too much. As a kid I was really drawn to creators like Stevie wonder and Prince and Michael Jackson and Beck. In my mind, I think the idea stuck with me that if I want to put out music, if I want to make music, especially growing up in a town where there was no music scene and my only options were to record my own music, I just thought I have to know how to produce. I have to know how to play as many instruments as possible and write songs and sing as well as I can and write as well as I can and produce these, otherwise I'm probably never going to have music out in the world.
I think it just felt like a natural continuity of what I was already doing. I started learning to produce when I was about 12. So in a lot of ways, my relationship with producing isn't separate from my relationship with writing. As I've gotten older and especially now getting to the place where, “Okay, well, there's a song on the radio” and “More people are coming to the shows”, I am a little bit more comfortable delegating production to other people because I know that other people are better than me. Holograma features the least amount of songs I've produced on my own. I have a hand in all of them and I'm usually playing all the instruments on them, but the only song on Holograma I produced on my own was “Jesus Christ I'm Lonely”, which I was adamant about doing, because it's the most personal one on there for me and I felt like I'm going to delegate in all these other ways, but that one is special and I need to really hold onto that one. Not for ego sake, just more for making sure that it was as personal as it needed to be.
1824: As an openly queer musician in a not so heavily populated queer soundspace, do you find it more freeing or restricted to be a trailblazer?
CARDIGAN: Trailblazer?! Michael Stipe is the real trailblazer. David Bowie is the real trailblazer I’m, you know, standing on the shoulders of giants.
It is liberating to not have to be pigeonholed in so much as like, “Oh, it's a queer creator making electronic music”. There's nothing wrong with that either, nut I do feel like so much of the expectation is that there's a queer artist, it’s going to end up being this like very pop oriented electronic thing, no matter how alternative it is. A lot of the alternative edge I find in a lot of queer projects is that they are just queer in the first place and that makes them alternative by default. I personally don't like that sonic palette. That doesn't mean it's not good, Ii just doesn't feel natural for me to use that. It feels more natural for me to go for guitars and drums and pianos and live bass and to keep kind of pushing in that direction.It just feels more human for me.
I would say it's liberating to live in the alternative space as a queer person for that reason, it just, it just feels more expressive, more human for me personally.
1824: What is your vision for Holograma? How do you hope that take it?
CARDIGAN: COVID really just complicates everything doesn't it? Because in any other world, I would have said my vision is to play a great show with these songs and to share some really great moments with people through these songs.
So I would say that's still my vision. To share really special moments with people through these songs, whoever finds them, however they find them. I just really hope the songs are helpful in some way, and that they let people feel their feelings.
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