A sell-out still has a way of shocking Caamp’s Evan Westfall.
“We don’t even know why it keeps happening,” the Caamp co-founder says. “It’s insane.”
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Certainly, it should come as no surprise—sell-outs have become the name of the game for the five-piece folk-rock band that currently find themselves experiencing what some might consider the pinnacle of their 12-year career thus far. And yet again, Caamp finds themselves with another sellout show in St. Louis coming up at Stifel Theatre on June 3. It’s a market that has long been one of their loudest and most loyal.
“One of our first shows outside of Ohio was in St. Louis,” Westfall says. “This guy reached out to see if we wanted to play at this birthday party, and we weren’t doing anything and we hadn’t toured before, so we were just like, ‘Yeah, let’s get in the car and drive out there and do it.’ And he’s still one of our good friends to this day. He showed us a great time in St. Louis.”
“That guy” has now become a close friend of the band.
“He would take us out, and he introduced us to the Blueberry Hill Duck Room and got us a show there,” Westfall says. He and co-founder Taylor Meier played the career-altering show back in 2017. “Some of our earliest shows out of state were in St. Louis. Not that we were playing to a shit-ton of people at that time, but we cut our teeth in a lot of ways in St. Louis.”
So to return to a market that has meant so much is gratifying for Westfall and Meier, especially as the band—which also includes bassist Matt Vinson, keyboardist Joseph Kavalec, and drummer Nicholas Falk—is experiencing an evolution of their own. The change is more than evident on their upcoming album, Copper Changes Color, out June 6.
“When we’re not playing with Caamp, we’re all making our own music, and we’re playing with different people, and we’re all listening to different stuff,” Westfall says. “And just with anything in life, your tastes grow. Maybe not necessarily grow, but you find different things you like and that you are inspired by. You get inspired by different bands and different artists and different things.”
To wit, Westfall says that, in many ways, he still “wants to be one of The Strokes.”
“At the end of the day, you still want to be what you hear and what you’re inspired by,” he says. “And I think that’s just what went and inspired many of the sounds on this album.”
The sounds on Copper Changes Color are some of their best yet. Nearly a decade on from their first viral hit, “Ohio,” the band is “just trying to have fun with it,” and that joy comes through on the new collection of songs.
Certainly, the lyrics on the new album point to a new chapter for Meier, who serves as the sole writer on each and every poignant track. “We all kind of share the same brain at this point,” Westfall says. “[Meier] is just like the human vessel for delivering the group’s message. So, we all are feeling similarly a lot of times.”
Some of the lyrics that even went and made Westfall tear up.
“There’s some vulnerable lyrics in a few of them, and I think it takes you back to when we were idiot kids running around together,” he says of tracks such as “Living & Dying & In Between,” which includes the luscious line: “I wanna live / I don’t wanna die / they can feel so much alike.” “It’s definitely emotional.”
So, too, is the process to find the songs on which Westfall’s are truly needed, and the ones where they are not. “When [Meier] brings in a song idea or a great chorus or something, it just inspires me to try to come up with the best banjo line or guitar line to go with it, and that’s all I’m really thinking about at the time,” Westfall says. “I just really want to do the song justice.”
And sometimes, that means that Westfall should stay quiet.
“There are songs like ‘Drive’ and ‘Living & Dying & In Between’ that there’s no banjo and no guitar on it,” the multi-instrumentalist says. “As much as I would’ve loved it to plug in a guitar, a lot of times it just isn’t what the song needs.”
Listening to their intuition continues to strengthen not only the band as a whole but the entirety of Copper Changes Color.
“We wanted something that was going to translate really well live, and we wanted to fall back in love with playing up on stage again,” Westfall says of the project created across New York, Texas, and Oregon studios. “And I think just about every song on this album is one that I’m super excited to translate to a live performance setting. Take, for example, the album’s first track, ‘Millions.’ I’m really excited to play that.”
His comments beg the question—was there a time when Caamp fell out of love with the life they were living on stage?
“I wouldn’t say we fell out of love with it, but there were just days that we just got a little too robotic,” Westfall says. “We just felt that we weren’t giving the best performances, and we felt really shitty about that. We felt like our fans deserved our best, and a few times we just felt like it was Groundhog Day. We were just doing what we could to get through the show, but we couldn’t give our best, and we felt terrible about that.”
And that’s when the band discussions began.
“We asked ourselves, what do we like about performing? We just kind of went back to the drawing board with it. And that’s where a lot of these songs came about—songs that we liked playing and songs where we wanted the crowd to be there jumping around with us.”
Limited resale tickets for Caamp’s June 3 performance at Stifel Theatre are available online via Ticketmaster.
