Candy Ambulance – An Xperience Interview

Candy Ambulance – An Xperience Interview – by Liam Sweeny.

You can’t cover a local scene without watching bands grow up. Candy Ambulance was one for me. I’ve seen them grow as a sound and as people. Caitlyn “Barbie” Barker fronts this band, which just got off a tour, and is setting upon the herculean task of putting together a new album. We welcome them.

RRX: You all have been around for 10 years. That’s a lot of time. What are some highlights that maybe you would think about now differently than you might have thought about them when they were happening?

CA: I definitely feel like right now there’s a return to some energy, and lots of live music, Like a rock band. I feel like people wanna go and hear an actual band. I feel like there’s a lot of energy at the shows now, which is super cool. And I think on a personal level, it’s that over 10 years, you don’t put that much effort into something, we weren’t just trying to plan on a couple of weekends every six months or whatever. We’ve put a lot of work into it. When we got a hotel in Ohio, I ended up getting my own hotel room because I was like, fuck, I just wanna practice to a metronome even though I had already been practicing for months leading up to this. I’m just taking it so seriously, and we like our gear. We have wireless guitars and we have in-ear monitors, so it’s a different kind of setup. Sometimes when you go to play a place that’s not used to that setup, the sound person gets a little freaked out and nervous, and so we have to kind of like take the reins. It just feels like we’ve had a very professional level with things that just make it different. It’s like if someone asks me, “Hey, you wanna rip shots and do some cocaine after the set?” I’m like, “absolutely not.” I wanna go get a bag of Cheetos from the vending machine of my hotel and watch Forensic Files like rock and roll.

RRX: What is coming up? You just finished the tour. Do you have something musical in the works as in an LP or something of that nature?

CA: Yeah, like I said, as we age, life changes, like the drummer got married, the bassist just bought a house. I’m doing f**k all of my life, but that’s probably how it’s always gonna be. We’ve been a little bit busy; we kind of all sort of dug in or tapped in a little bit more recently to the point where we are writing songs and we’re getting together and practicing, which is in itself work too because we all live far away. Our drummer lives in Brooklyn, Jesse lives in Schenectady, and I live in Troy. We’ve always remained dedicated to making sure that we get it done and we come up with the solutions to make it work. So it’s been really exciting, and the new stuff that we’re writing is really fun. And we’ve also been revisiting some of the stuff that we’ve recorded on albums that didn’t really get any traction. Rediscover them, because I think a lot of the time we just wanna get new material out, so we record stuff before we even know what it is yet, and then you play it live for a while and you’re like “Oh f**k this song has so much more potential” and we get it now. So there are a couple things that we’ve been reintroducing back into our sets, and you know, just tweaking a little bit, and they’ve been the ones that people have been coming up to us after and being like “Holy f**k that song is sick.”

RRX: Yeah, cause you don’t always think about the fact that something you’ve done in the past, you can reinterpret that, and then you just come up with so many more ideas.

CA: Yeah, that’s exactly how it feels. I think we just pressured ourselves into putting out content, and we didn’t focus on a lot of these. Sometimes I’ll look back and I’m just like, ‘Sh**, that was an excellent song that we really put not enough effort into,” and just like reimagining them. It’s been really fun.

RRX: I’ve seen you guys probably since you began. I don’t know, because we’ve been doing this for seven years now, so I remember us interviewing you a long time ago. How long have you guys been a band?

CA: 10 years.

RRX: 10 years. OK. So you’d already been a band for three years when we started out. When I first saw the name, I was like, “We have to interview them.” I just love that name. Tell me, how did that actually come about?

CA: I couldn’t accurately say because I was blacked out, I was drunk, when we decided this. But the story goes that we were coming up with band names, and we were at my apartment in Saratoga, and I had a big chalkboard on my fridge. So we’re just spitballing ideas. And I mumbled something, ‘cause again, blackout drunk. And John, the drummer, said, “Did you just say Candy Ambulance?” And again, I have no idea if that’s what I said, but I’m sure I just went with it, ‘cause, you know, ever the performer. I bet I was like, “Yeah, totally.” He had just gotten some poetry published, and that contained the phrase “candy ambulance,” and it just felt too weird and too coincidental to ignore. So we went with it.

RRX: What was Mile of Music like? How does it compare to other festivals?

CA: I can go into great depth about this. That’s a great question. It’s almost like a hopscotch. Have you ever been to one of those festivals, or an event where there’s music playing at every venue all the time from the morning till night? So there’s tons of music there. And you can go all day, pop into a bar. It’s all free, too. You just pop in places, check out bands, discover bands. The spirit of it is super fun.

But we’ve played it a few times, enough to have like a decent following. And so our very first set, the first night that we got there, we sold nearly all of our merch. We had two friends from New York (that play in Precious Metals) who had come to watch our show. And they saw this huge line by the merch table while we were playing, because usually we’re DIY, we don’t have anybody specifically selling merch. I just do it right after the set. But they like, they locked in, they jumped on that merch table, and when I got done, when I took my guitar off, my friend Brandon comes up to me and he’s like, “Here’s $400 cash. I got a bunch in the Venmo for you. Like, we sold almost all your shit.” I was just like, ‘What? Oh, that.” And that was just the cash sales. We had a ton in the Venmo and the PayPal and Square. So that was Night One.

And then we have a custom guitar pedal that we haven’t even rolled out yet. We just finished doing the promo for it. But I happen to have them in the car with us. So I just started talking about it a little bit at the sets, and at the music store, somebody had recognised us. I sold two of those, and that’s not a tiny price tag for sure. You know, it was wild, but people were just like, “Sure, yeah, I’ll take one,” like that.

Yeah, it was just really special, and it’s cool too.

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