Q&A: Sports is So Back. Well, They Never Actually Went Anywhere.
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY EMMI SHOCKLEY ☆
IT’S BEEN OVER THREE YEARS SINCE THE OKLAHOMA-BASED ALT-POP DUO SPORTS RELEASED THEIR LAST FULL-LENGTH ALBUM, GET A GOOD LOOK — During the interim, the band went a bit quiet, and uncertainty crept into their devoted fan base. Speculations swirled. Did they break up? Is it the end of the Sports era?
Luckily for us, Cale Chronister and Christian Theriot, the two long-time best friends behind Sports, are far from finished. And that gap in album releases was anything but a break. In the past few years, Chronister and Theriot have toured the last record, built out a new studio space on their home turf in Tulsa, Oklahoma, released a single just last year with Gus Dapperton (the endlessly catchy “Thank You For Leaving”), and all the while, they were writing the music that is soon to become the next chapter of Sports.
Now, with nearly two decades of collaboration under their belts and an amassed cult-following behind them, Sports returns with their infectious, danceable new single “If You Want Me.” This track and accompanying video offer the first glimpse into a bold new era of their career, while maintaining that signature, dreamy, Sports groove.
Please allow Sports to reintroduce themselves.
LUNA: For any readers who may be new to Sports, can you describe your sound in three words?
CHRONISTER: I’m gonna start with the word fun. And … this is actually harder than I thought.
THERIOT: Fresh!
CHRONISTER: Basically just like, what's a good grocery store name? Fun and Fresh? Super Fresh? Organic.
LUNA: So we got fun, fresh, organic. Crunchy produce.
CHRONISTER: Yeah. Sorry. I've always been really bad at describing our music. I get nervous anytime I have to describe it.
LUNA: I’m sorry to make you do it.
THERIOT: Some people say “nostalgic.” Sometimes that word can rub me the wrong way. But I also feel like it can be a good thing, to make people feel nostalgic. I'm kind of changing my mind on that word.
CHRONISTER: Usually when people say it's nostalgic, I'm like, “Oh, they're comparing us to the ‘80s again, because we use synths.” I just find that kind of boring. But I do think the songs have a nostalgic feeling for whatever reason.
THERIOT: We’ve been put in the category of “Dream Pop” whatever that actually means. I guess it means dreamy. Or nostalgic.
CHRONISTER: Christian, would your nephew put us in the “aesthetic” category?
THERIOT: Yeah. My nephew, who’s fifteen, was listening to this playlist, and he said, “I’m listening to Aesthetic Music.” I was like, “What does that mean? Aesthetic is not, like, a genre.” Then he listed artists like Alex G and The Cranberries. So it sounds cool.
CHRONISTER: He wears our merch. So he’s cool.
LUNA: You guys do have really good merch.
THERIOT: The name helps.
LUNA: I've been checking out your internet presence, and your fans are really excited right now. There's a lot of enthusiasm around this new single.
CHRONISTER: Yeah, that's how it seems. We've even seen people say, “I thought you guys broke up.” Which I understand, because we haven't really been engaging with our audience for years. But I mean, we did put a song out about a year ago with Gus [Dapperton].
LUNA: Yeah, I guess this single is something of a second return. What was the collaboration like on “Thank You For Leaving” with Gus Dapperton?
CHRONISTER: It was the best experience.
THERIOT: He DM'd us and said, “Hey, I’ve been a huge fan of yours.” Which is crazy because we’re mutuals. We’re fans of his, too. And he said we should work on something together. He happened to be on tour and passing through. I think he’d just played a festival in Austin, and our studio is in Tulsa. So he’s like, “Hey, I've got a day off. If you guys want to work, let's work together.” And we made it happen. We've never done that before. Like, really collabed with anybody. I don't know if it always goes like that. I feel like we got spoiled. It was so much fun.
CHRONISTER: I think we just happened to be really compatible. Even just hanging out with him. We have the same sense of humor. It was really easy.
LUNA: So the song came together in one day in Tulsa?
THERIOT: Two hours.
CHRONISTER: Gus’s sister [Ruby Amadelle] was there, too. She was a part of writing this song. And singing on it, too.
THERIOT: Then we shot the music video for it in New York, and it was kind of the same thing how it came together. It's all one take, and it's us running behind the camera and then switching. We shot that at double speed. So if you were to see the actual video, we look like fools, just running around, but when you slow it down, we look so cool.
LUNA: In which park did you shoot?
CHRONISTER: The Botanical Gardens by Prospect Park.
LUNA: Can you tell me the story behind “If You Want Me”?
CHRONISTER: Christian sent me a demo, and it was just an instrumental. I really loved it, and I had immediate vocal melody ideas. So we had that one, and we were excited about it while we were building our studio. I remember that was the first one we worked on there. It was the first one we completed on our own, because this was our first time self-producing. “If You Want Me” was kind of a proof of concept. You know, can we self-produce this? Can we take it to the finish line by ourselves? And we did. Took us a minute to figure it out. But, we did.
LUNA: Cale, you were the lead lyricist on this, right? Where were the lyrics coming from?
CHRONISTER: To be honest, the way I write lyrics isn't super intentional. I'm not writing a diary about my life necessarily. I sing the idea before there are lyrics. So I was just singing gibberish with the vocal melody I had first. I almost always have the melody first. Then I kind of just let the song build itself. In the moment, I'm not trying too hard to make it autobiographical. I think that's an egotistical mistake I've made in the past, to try and make sure the songs are about my life and my life alone. Instead, I just like letting it come out of the subconscious. And this one ended up becoming a story. For the chorus, I was trying to make it this kind of, mature-sounding love, because the rest of it sounded so immature. When the verses say, “Don't be so dramatic,” it sounds like I’m talking about fighting. So I wanted to resolve it in the chorus and say, “I want to let you be you, and I want to be me. Then that way, we can actually love each other.” And I like to keep it open-ended for people, too, because I know that people don't hear our songs and think about me in my life. When they hear a Sports song, they paste it onto their own life. So I like leaving room for that. I don't want it to be too much about me. I'm kind of boring, to be honest.
LUNA: The music video for “If You Want Me” is really sick. I like it a lot. Talk me through the process of conceptualizing the visuals for this release.
CHRONISTER: We have to give a lot of flowers to Haley Appel. She's been our creative director through all of this, and she also did all the photography. We approached her with a mood board. We knew we wanted to do a lot of black and white stuff, and we had a bunch of references, but we didn't have it all connected yet. She helped us build the world. She calls it our Visual Bible. Then she found this [music video] director, Nikki Milan Houston, who came up with the script and everything for the video.
THERIOT: We've always tried to stay away from any sort of true sports imagery, because we don't want people to think of sports when they think of us. Like, in the normal sense of the word. But this time, we leaned into it a bit. That's why you see the referee and the cheerleader. We wanted to lean more into the sports thing in a tongue-in-cheek way.
LUNA: As you enter into this next chapter of Sports, what’s been inspiring you most?
THERIOT: I think having our own studio has been a huge part of it. [Writing and recording] just became our nine-to-five. We'd wake up in the morning, we'd go to the studio, and we'd work every single day. And we were just doing it ourselves. We had time to explore and try some new things. And if we don’t like something one day, that's okay. We'll come back tomorrow and we'll try it again.
LUNA: What stands out to me is just how long you guys have been working together. I read that you started collaborating when you were about 13?
CHRONISTER AND THERIOT: Yeah.
LUNA: How many years of collaboration are we on with this new single? This new chapter?
CHRONISTER: If I answer that, I have to reveal my age. That’s fine.
THERIOT: I was in eighth grade, you were in seventh grade, so…?
CHRONISTER: Almost twenty years. It’ll be twenty years next year.
LUNA: When y’all were in middle school and starting to make music, who did you want to be? Who were you referencing?
CHRONISTER: Radiohead was definitely the longest tenure. But that was during high school. Middle school was a little more emo than that. When was the Copeland phase? Was that middle school?
THERIOT: It was around that era.
CHRONISTER: I think we liked Copeland and Coldplay and bands like that, and then we discovered Radiohead. We were obsessed with Radiohead. And I gotta throw the band Phoenix in there, too. Phoenix was a huge favorite of ours for a long time. Can you just make sure you say that we were only into Copeland and Coldplay when we were in middle school? We got cooler in high school.
THERIOT: Then we started to go to shows. And I remember, I have this note somewhere in a box saved. I think I was a freshman, and I wrote this note about my dream. It said, “I’m sitting in English class right now. My dream is to be in a band and tour, and I'm excited about later this afternoon because we have band practice.” Which is crazy, because we did all that stuff. I've done my dream.
CHRONISTER: Careful what you wish for!
LUNA: What should fans be on the lookout for?
THERIOT: This is a new chapter for us, and it almost feels like we're just getting started. We have a new team and we’re self-producing. We have a lot of things coming. The whole rollout is there. I think… buckle up.
CHRONISTER: And we have not broken up.
