The music business is weird, to say the least. You might see an artist release a song that goes viral before releasing a follow-up that completely flops. A band can lose popularity the better their music gets. A songwriter can get discovered through a random video that they thought would never be seen. You just never know what can happen, which can be equal parts beautiful or scary. The members of jazz-pop band Coyote Theory are very aware of how unpredictable the music business can be. A few years after releasing their debut EP, Color, in 2011, Coyote Theory decided to disband. Even though they weren’t releasing music, Colby Carpinelli (lead vocals, piano), Jayson Lynn (drums, percussion), and Grayson Hendren (bass, guitar) remained friends. Years went by before they had the itch to create again in 2019. It was around this time, however, that their single “This Side of Paradise” from Color got very popular on TikTok by chance, prompting the band to re-release Color in 2020. After they did, “This Side of Paradise” gained over 600M global streams and over 2B uses on TikTok, knocking Cardi B’s “WAP” off the Spotify Global Viral Charts. It was clear that the world was still interested in Coyote Theory after all this time, which brings us to the release of their debut album, Still. The project showcases the band’s alternative sound, matching their alternative existence. We recently caught up with Jayson to learn more about Still and what it was like to be making music as a band again.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and time.
So, the album is called Still. I was reading that it’s based on the idea that you’re still making music and it still sounds this way… I think it’s a fitting name for your debut album, but were there any other names you were considering?
It’s such an odd one because we’ve considered album names over the course of a decade now. When we first thought about doing an album back in the day, we were running with the idea of Late Night. That was what ended up being our last EP before we originally disbanded back in 2013, 2014. So, when we got back together, we had this whole list of names that we were running through and thinking about, but Still came up almost as a joke because, as you mentioned, we were like, ‘Are we still able to do this? Does this still matter? Can we still play music? Can we still write songs?’ and we were like, ‘Why don’t we just name it Still?’
How was the process of putting the album together for you? Were there things you would change about it, was it a seamless sort of thing….?
No, not seamless at all. I don’t know if anybody’s being honest when they write music if anything is seamless. It was two-fold for us. The first thing was, when we got back together, we had certain songs that we never released, that we were demoing at the time that we originally disbanded. And so, there was a lot of advocating for older songs that never got to see the light of day. So, once that was out of the way, it was just a matter of remixing them or finding the project files and kind of reworking them to what we might want them to sound like today since they were older songs. “Not Falling in Love Tonight” is a great example on the record. It’s a song that we had way back in the day that I would argue took on a Backstreet Boys vibe. And when we looked on it with fresh eyes, there was a desire to strip it down to its core and have that more intimate song that’s on the album now.
But after that, it was this process of…we were doing this all at the same time as lockdowns were happening during Covid, like the height of it. And so, we had to learn how to, in a decentralized way, record together. So, record drum ideas, send them over to the other guys to put those to the project files, to put guitar, to put vocal stacks and everything else. It took us a really long time because none of us are native at doing that. Colby, our singer, is kind of the best at it and really took to it more so than myself, who plays drums. That was very much the struggle when it came to figuring out how to properly record something to sound good. It took us time to figure it out, and we finally did. ‘Would we go back to it?’ would be my next question, and the answer is no, absolutely not. We very much walked away from it saying it worked, we got songs out of it, but it wasn’t conducive to what the spirit of our band is, which is all getting together in a room and writing songs and seeing what comes out of that. Having it be more disjointed meant a lot of the songs were great, but they’re inspired more by one person or the other. So, totally different way of working. Not seamless, but fun nonetheless, and we’re really proud of the result we were able to get out of it.
What was your first impression when you heard the album all the way through?
For me personally, it was, ‘I can’t believe we have something done. Can I ship it? Can I send it out?’ Even as far as way back in the day, I’ve always been the person of the band who’s been like, ‘This is great, let’s put it out for everybody.’ So, when I heard it for the first time front to back, I was just so excited to be like, ‘Okay, let’s put a date on when we can send this out and let everybody listen to it.’ But I think more than anything for all three of us, when we thought about all these songs together, we got together and listened to it and talked through everything. You know how marketing and stuff is these days, you have to walk through every song and chit-chat about them. So, we did a lot of that. And for us, it was a good reminder that our musical taste and voice hasn’t changed as much as we were afraid it was going to. It was really inspiring to say, ‘Hey, you know, we’re actually not far away from where we were. We’re saying the same things, we’re thinking the same way, and not because we’re forcing it.’ We really wanted this to come out natural, and we found that the thread’s still there.
Are there any tracks on there that are your personal favorites, that you’re excited for everyone to listen to?
Yeah, absolutely. I would say “Maryland,” being my favorite. I think it’s still, to this day, one of the front and back best songs that the group of us have ever written or wrote together. I think just overall, that’s what I’m most excited for – it to have a new life. We kind of put that one out into the world as we were disbanding the first time, so it really never got the attention or heard by anybody. I would say the other one that I’m excited about is “Each Other’s Ghost,” and that’s just because that one has kind of a special place to me because I wrote that with my daughter just as like a fun, cute song. I brought it to the guys and they were like, ‘You know what, honestly, it’s not bad. Here, let’s play around with it and make it something better,’ and to their credit, the guys brought it to a different level. So, I’m really proud of that one too. But I think all of them, in some way or another, have a special place.
Were there any tracks that you were kind of stuck on that ended up making it onto the album?
I think “Taking Over the World” is a good example. “Taking Over the World” is a song that’s on the record that I think is most out of place in relation to the rest of the songs. And when you listen to the album, it’s kind of an obvious stand-out because it’s pushing at something that’s a little different than everything else we did. But at the same time, we’re all really, really proud of that song. So, it’s one of these things we wanted to include because it means a lot to us. But it definitely was one that we were back and forth of like, ‘Is it too different? Does it stand out too much at the take-off?’
Yeah, I do like the diversity that’s going on with the album. There’s a lot of songs I listen to that I could see a certain artist covering a song… So, I was wondering if there is any song that you hear on the album that you think, ‘Oh, I would like for this artist to cover this one day…’
Yeah, I would love to hear your answer on that, that’s actually fascinating to me. But yeah, for me, we’ve talked to some artists actually about potentially having them kind of revisit or do their own versions of some of these songs – nobody big or anything, it’s just people at our level or people we look to as fans of our own. I think we live in a really interesting time in music where you can do that really easily and there’s not a lot of red tape to get somebody else that’s really great in a different segment of music to jump in and do that. If it’s “pie in the sky” thinking though, for me, I would say I would love to hear somebody cover “Maryland,” just because I think it’s a movie song with the right person. It’s like if The Temper Trap grabbed onto it and messed it up a little bit, it would be amazing. Or thinking about a song like “Fingers Crossed,” if an interesting act like Young the Giant or Passion Pit took that apart and reconstructed it, that would be really interesting to me.
You guys have put out a lot of music videos so far for the singles. Are there any other videos coming out soon?
We’ll have a visualizer for “Taking Over the World” when the album comes out this month, and that’s it as far as the visuals. For us, the visuals have been interesting because we wanted something to come out with everything, but at the same time, we had to think about what do we still look like, what still matters in the realm of the band’s brand… Back when we were younger, it mattered a lot more to us that we were uniform. Back when we were coming up, bands like Fun. were on the radio, and they were all dressed in suits, and they had theme and branding. But this is a very different time for music, and so for us, when we were thinking about the visuals, we’ve just been trying a lot of different stuff. We’ve been finding fans who are interested in doing music videos for us and lifting them up and giving them a platform to make something with their own voice, just to see what feels right. So, we’ve had a lot of fun with the visuals, but I think after the “Taking Over the World” stuff comes out this month, we’re excited to see how we can go forward with visuals in a more uniform way.
So, you’re still in Orlando, but everyone was originally based there. Was there anything about Orlando specifically that influences the band’s sound or the music?
100%, actually, which is funny to think about. Yeah, when we were coming up in Orlando, Grayson and I went to local high schools together in the Osceola County area here. And so, we knew each other through local groups. Colby was a little farther out in north Orlando, and we found him through kind of an audition process and kind of through mutual friends. But what inspired us really is, the music scene when we were coming up was very much in-line with the bands that were coming up around here. So, Sleeping With Sirens had their members come up around Orlando. There’s a band called Broadway which is very similar to Sleeping With Sirens, who came up as well. A Day to Remember was out of Ocala up here, so there’s all these groups in this very particular post-hardcore scene, which influenced the rest of the area.
So, what happened was, you either played that music because everybody was trying to kind of coattail-ride, to some degree. I wouldn’t even say coattail ride, it’s more of like, when the door opens, everybody runs through it – you see the same thing happen with Fall Out Boy in Chicago, where you had Fall Out Boy followed by The Academy Is…, Plain White T’s, and all these people from the same high school and area. It was kind of the same thing for us here, and so I don’t know if it was some weird punk rebellion for us or something, but we were like, ‘We really don’t want to play that style of music, but we want to do music.’ We ended up at this like – we used to call it jazz-pop, jazz indie rock, like, we were very dead set on only playing jazz chords. We very much took this weird line in the sand back then, and that ended up informing our original EP Color, informing who we recorded with at the time, and a lot about the musical styling. I would say that would not have happened if we weren’t in this very particular Orlando music scene of 2009.
What else do you guys have going on for the year?
Yeah, so the album’s the big thing. That comes out on the 14th of March. After that, we are kind of full-steam ahead on shows and gigging. We’ve always looked at it as we want to get the music out there so we have something to talk about, we have something to show, but then we want to go back and play shows. So, like I said, we are very much a DIY band, even though we’ve had the luck we’ve had with streaming and stuff like that. We still are, at our core, managing ourselves and kind of operating this little entity all on our own, so we’ve been doing it in chunks. We’ll release the music, get that off of our plate, and then we’ll be 100% focused on playing some live shows. We’re hoping to start out small, just to get a taste of doing that again and making sure people want to come see us and put on the right type of show. So, we’re looking at this summer to play a couple showcase dates here and there. We’ll post those online, I don’t have any exact dates for those yet. And then, just kind of see that train move faster and faster and then relive the cycle again and have new music come out a little quicker and make the record cycle speed up a little bit more. It took us about four years to get Still together from inception, or the virality of our song to now. So, we wanna see that process speed up by a lot.
When was the last time you all performed together?
Oh my god, so the last technical time we, as a full band, performed… I wanna say… We opened for Twenty One Pilots back when they did a club tour, and that would’ve been 2013. I think we played once in 2014, just another headline club show in Orlando. Needless to say, that’s now been a decade.
Are you nervous to play together again?
No, not at all. It’s less nerves, it’s excitement. We’ve played together just in the settings of studios and rooms and stuff. We’re really excited to play live. We love it, we love the energy of it. We aren’t theatrical, we’re not old school Panic! at the Disco from back in the day, we’re not putting on huge shows or anything, we’re not an arena band… We know who we are live, and we still know that, so it’s fun because it gets to be this intimate thing. I think the most nerve-wracking thing for us as just a DIY band is, do people who listen to us online come out to shows? Having so many years removed, it’s a hustle when you do live shows, right? It’s a hustle when you’re a band and you’re gigging and selling tickets, and so you feel confident when you’re touring a lot and when you’re doing shows in different places. You start to get a confidence like, ‘Okay, I know we can sell 100 tickets in this city, and 150 in this city, and at home we’re always guaranteed 500 or whatever it is…’ When you’re ten years removed from that, even if that does exist still, it’s a little nerve-wracking.
Again, thanks so much for talking and going through all my questions. Is there anything else you want to add, or do you have any comments?
No, I think we covered it. I appreciate the time. As we go through this, our label always makes fun of us a little bit and says we’re…how do they phrase it…we are evolving into the role of an older brother as a band for a lot of people. But we love it because it kind of feels like where we’re at as people. We’re actively just here, we’re not hard to get a hold of, we’re always trying to talk to people online and stuff who are following the band because just as much as people like this little project, we really like the fact that we can communicate. We don’t want that to change, so I would say just if people are reading whatever you’re doing, we would love to have them follow along and join a conversation.
You can listen to Still here.
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