Stepping Forward: An Interview with August Hotel
Photo by Cassie Scott
Formed in 2016, August Hotel, the five-piece band from Chicago, radiate surges of indie-pop infused with indie—rock, perfected and polished with synthesizers bursting with freshness and fluidity, paired with poetic lyrics and hypnotizing melodies. Led by Jo Padilla on vocals, with Ryan Lammers on guitar, Dean Sinclair on drums, Cale Singleton on bass, and Craig Schwartz, Jr on the keys, the group captures a sound draped in nostalgia and emboldened by playful vitality.
Before August Hotel hit the stage at Beat Kitchen on February 7th, we were able to speak with them about their latest single, “Disaster and Delight”... as well as their upcoming EP, the DIY scene, and the importance of promoting inclusivity.
August Hotel were scheduled to play a benefit show for The Trevor Project on International Transgender Day of Visibility on March 27th 2020, alongside She/Her/Hers, Boye, and Hospital Bracelet. However, the show has been canceled in response to COVID-19. The bands plan to hold a livestream soon that will still benefit the Trevor Project. Be sure to check August Hotel’s social media for updates regarding rescheduling.
Anaïs Turiello: Would you all like to start out by introducing yourselves and saying your role in the band?
Dean Sinclair: I’m Dean and I play the drums.
Ryan Lammers: I’m Ryan and I play the guitar.
Cale Singleton: I’m Cale and I play bass.
Craig Schwartz, Jr: I’m Craig and I play the keys.
Jo Padilla: I’m Jo and I sing.
AT: Perfect! So, my first question was how did you all meet and when?
RL: Dean and I have been playing together since 2006. We started playing in middle school and we had a band before this. Then, we had a band that eventually turned into this [August Hotel]. But being as we are now, 2016 is when we officially formed. I knew Cale from high school; Craig and Dean knew each other from high school and we found Jo on Facebook.
AT: How did finding them [Jo] on Facebook unfold?
CS: Musician groups.
JP: Yeah, I was in a musician group and I posted some very low-quality videos of me singing LCD Soundsystem and Depeche Mode.
DS: So, those groups can work, actually.
JP: It’s not just for memes!
AT: What about the band name itself? How did it come about?
CS: We got it from The Great Gatsby. Here’s the thing—we wanted to be cool and get our name from literature, so we skimmed through Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein-
RL: We kind of just pulled from whatever books were sitting around at the time I think.
CS: Yeah, and one of them was The Great Gatsby and I forgot what it is but, in one of the chapters, he talks about being in-
RL: It’s when they’re in the hotel and it’s super hot and they’re just drunk or whatever.
CSJ: And the word ‘August’ was nearby.
CS: The word ‘August’ was on the other page next to it and we put them together. We made a list of eight or nine names and we sent it to our friends and asked which they liked the most and consistently, August Hotel was the favorite.
DS: Yeah and “Butthole Surfers” were already taken so…
AT: So, you all have been together officially since 2016. How do you think you’ve evolved as both individual artists/musicians and also just as a whole?
CS: I feel like we started by writing songs that we thought we should put out—like pop stuff and just a fast-paced sort of thing. I feel like now, as we’re going into our new EP and continuing to write subsequent songs after its release, we’re starting to experiment with different sounds. We’re using backing tracks and things live, so I would say we’re expanding our sort of sonic palette, both in the recording and live aspect. So, it’s not just pop songs all the way through and we can get more experimental and play with more sounds.
RL: I feel like it’s gotten a little more mature and a little more complex, which I think makes sense because we have gotten older and we’ve been playing together longer. I think we’ve always meshed really well when we play but the longer you play together, the more that happens. So, I feel like now we’re just getting to a point where we can play off of each other more and be more comfortable trying things that we weren’t in the past.
AT: You mentioned songwriting earlier. It is sort of the same thing in terms of just playing off of each other? Or just what does that process look like?
CS: I feel like our process has changed recently because we used to kind of go into practice and Ryan would have a riff and he would play it over and over, then I would add a bass line, then Craig would do some synth stuff and Dean would add a beat.
RL: It was very “jam it out at practice” kind of writing.
CS: Yeah, and now we’ve been getting more into recording and more into studio stuff so we can put songs fully together in the studio and then bring them to practice and figure them out in a live context.
RL: Like writing into a computer sort of. It’s kind of changed from messing with some things live to having little loops and things that we can mess with on the computer. You get that grid to move stuff around. I sort of like that visual of writing a song. At least for me personally, it’s easier to wrap my head around a song when I can see it all laid out than when we’re just in practice and it’s still being formed and you don’t really know what’s what.
DS: You have to imagine how it sounds and it doesn’t help when everyone else is imagining something different too.
RL: It’s easier to put something concrete in a computer than it is just jamming.
AT: Could you also talk about songwriting in terms of just lyrics and how that process ties into it all?
RL: We’re all over the place because it’s not just one of us who writes the lyrics all the time.
CS: I sing all of my stuff off the top of my head just out of laziness so I don’t have to figure out a melody. Then, I just go from there and have a chord progression and everything after that. So, everything kind of happens all at once for me.
DS: When I write the songs, I do it on the piano and I normally have the music prior to the lyrics. Whatever I want to be writing about, I feel like I have an idea of what I’m trying to get towards in at least a feeling sense. So, that’s what inspires the piano playing and then whatever words come from that. Then, I send it over to them in a group message—like a piano recording or something. We all kind of do it differently.
JP: For me, in terms of lyrics and songwriting, I think that pretty much any point that someone is trying to convey is all about storytelling—whether that’s through art or that’s through politics, or whether that’s through human connectedness in any sort of way. So, when I’m writing, I’m trying to communicate something through telling a story. It might be a personal experience, it might be somewhat tangentially related to an experience, or it might be escapist in some way. I see a lot of these things as “do nothing without a purpose” and I think that really bleeds through to our songwriting.
AT: Wow, very well-stated. My next question was about the Chicago music scene. Since you are all from the Chicago area, could you talk about how the music scene here has helped you evolve as a band or just your experience as a band within the scene?
DS: We wouldn’t be playing at a sold-out show tonight without it. That’s for certain.
RL: It’s been kind of an interesting progression there because we all grew up in the suburbs, so a lot of the earlier DIY stuff was out there. Then, once we started playing in the city, I think initially there wasn’t so much as a sense of community but I think over the past year or two, we’ve ended up getting in touch with the same bands and getting in touch with more people and it’s starting to feel like there’s this really tight-knit sense of community. I also think a lot of music adjacent—like Chicago Soundcheck, who is sponsoring the show tonight, has also helped grow the community and there’s now a lot more of a network between the artists than there used to be about two or three years ago. It’s been really great; we’ve gotten to put together some really phenomenal shows.
CS: It’s just really nice to be a part of a music scene that has a sense of community. Before, at times, it would sort of feel like a competition every night. It felt like a battle of the bands every night basically when we were all just trying to play a show. We would be all chill and cool in the beginning but by the end of the show, no one was talking to each other or looking at each other. No one would be like, “Hey good show, man!” So, it was really hard to kind of feel that sense of it but I feel like with bands like Ember Oceans and Capital Soirée, we kind of have that initial unit that built sort of a community for us and now we’re meeting all these bands that are super cool and everyone hypes each other up before and after our set.
DS: You overlap fanbases ideally. I’m very happy to be a part of this whole thing.
RL: This show was kind of born out of wanting to do more of that because about exactly a year ago, around the end of January 2019, we did a show with Ember Oceans, Friday Pilots Club, and Capital Soireé that we put together after about a year or two of playing with these bands individually. We knew each other all very well by then and wondered why we had never done a show together. We kind of wanted to do a thing that was like a showcase for all of us and didn’t really have a hierarchy or a headliner. We just wanted to do it and it was extremely successful and all of the bands loved it and over the course of the next year, we got to know more groups. We got to know Weekend Run Club and Violet Crime better and we keep expanding and try to keep building a sense of community.
DS: Yeah, you can’t just play with the same groups all of the time too, as much as we want to. So, that way when you do it, it is an event.
CS: This is the second show that the bands have kind of put together themselves, of just local bands, and it’s the second time in a row that we’ve put something on like this and it’s sold out.
AT: That’s impressive! Do you have any other favorite local bands that you’re influenced by?
RL: Ember Oceans.
CS: Yeah, the homies!
DS: I saw a band like a year ago—they’re called Old Sol, and they put on one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. It was the downstairs of SubT and this guy’s lyrics were just incredible; I should probably reach out to them or something. Also, one of my favorite drummers in another band is a group called Tiny Kingdoms who just put out music as well, and he’s a phenomenal player.
CS: I love everything that Beach Bunny has ever put out and they’re blowing up right now. They’re killing it and are just doing so much—they’re signed and everything. I remember that she [Lili Trifilio] opened for us at Space [in Evanston] years ago. She was by herself and I just remember watching her set and in every song that she had, the writing was just insane. I instantly had the song memorized because they were so catchy and the writing was unbelievably poignant. Yeah, I’ve tried to write like her ever since and I can’t do it—she’s amazing.
AT: What about influences in general? I believe you all have been compared to The 1975 amongst others...I’m definitely missing some but The 1975 is my favorite band so that one stuck out to me.
RL: I feel like we’re sort of all over the place. If you ask each of us, we would cite a million different things. But if you ask someone who listens to us, it depends on the age of the person you ask. If you ask people around our age [20s], you get a lot of people saying a lot of The 1975, Walk the Moon, Coin, and Bad Suns. And if you ask older adults, you get The Cure, Talking Heads, Simple Minds—a bunch of that 80s kind of stuff. I think we, personally, cite all of that pretty much.
AT: Aside from outside comparisons what would your own influences be?
CS: My influences are all over the place—I love Green Day. They have a huge influence on me, Billie Joe specifically. The 1975 also—the way that they make just messes of albums work. “I Like It When You Sleep [for You Are So Beautiful yet So Unaware of It]” is a fucking mess but it’s beautiful and it works perfectly. Somehow, they just make it work and I think that that level of artistic experimentation and that level of not caring can be summed up in something I read somewhere that said, “It takes a lot of care to make something sound or look carefree.” I feel like they do that with every album. If you look at it from a bass perspective its like, oh, they just didn’t give a shit and tried a bunch of different things but they care so much that it makes it look that way. So, I think their level of experimentation and how many genres they bend is just so inspiring.
RL: So much thought goes into everything—not even just the music, but the images and the videos and the stage show. I’ve always been extremely impressed and influenced by every aspect of what they do. It’s super cool.
AT: I could talk about them for hours, so I’m going to hold back. Are there any bands that any of you grew up on that you found to shape your experience as musician today?
DS: I guess my first stuff was like classic rock, then as I got older, I went heavier and heavier. So, my parents got me a Nirvana CD when I was in the 5th grade. From there, I walked into a Hot Topic and saw an Iron Maiden t-shirt and was like, “This is my life now.” I was really into a lot of heavier music for a while, until the first time in high school when I heard “What You Know” by Two Door Cinema Club and it instantly altered my perspective on things. I didn’t know a guitar could be played like that. Right now, I’m very interested in finding bands from the 80’s that I wasn’t necessarily exposed to. I feel like a lot of the production from some of those 80’s pop records, like what a snare drum can sound like, is what's really influencing me and how I’m at least trying to tune my drums, even just for the groups I play with—this one especially.
JP: I grew up hearing a lot of MoTown. So, a lot of Smokey Robinson, Temptations, Marvin Gaye. Those are still huge influences of mine but some that kind of really changed me and kind of got me to seek out my own music was hearing London Calling by The Clash. I don’t listen to them as much as I used to but they’re still seminal massive influence for me. For now and for the past few years, I’d say that for songwriting and lyrics and melody, I think Björk and Jamila Woods would probably be two people who I think about a lot, in terms of how to articulate expression for Björk and for how to put that idea of ways to place a story into a song and have it be personal, with someone like Jamila Woods.
RL: My favorite band growing up is The Who. Pete Townsend was a major influence on my guitar playing all throughout the early stages of being a guitarist, which I think is now sort of weird because I think a lot of that has stuck with me, even though a lot of the stuff we’re playing doesn’t really call for that style of guitar playing. Now, a lot of my influences are like, Adam Hann from The 1975 or Eli [Maiman] from Walk the Moon, who have a lot more of a tight, clean, and very precise style of playing. So, I’ve definitely noticed that the way my own guitar playing is sort of this weird hybrid between the two, which has been sort of interesting because I’ve been trying to navigate how to use that in terms of what we’re writing.
AT: On March 27th, you all are playing a show on International Transgender Day of Visibility as a benefit for The Trevor Project, which I think is really special and incredibly important. So, would any of you like to talk about what that means to you or why you find it critical to share that kind of safe space as well as supporting organizations such as The Trevor Project?
JP: It’s something that’s very deeply personal to me in supporting organizations that will fight for transgender and queer liberation like The Trevor Project, and more locally in Chicago, with Brave Space Alliance, which is an organization that I love dearly as well. It’s so important to have this and to make spaces because for a lot of people, especially for transgender and gender nonconforming youth, things are better than they used to be, but not for everyone in the slightest. When you look at murder statistics of black transgender women and such, it’s not across the board that rising water is raising all ships. So, it’s important to support these organizations that have a committment to queer people of color and people of color with diabilities, etc. It’s extremely important and I’m very glad that we will be doing that.
AT: Beautifully said.
CS: I was really upset when I found out that I couldn’t play the show because I have another commitment that night. It’s something that I am really passionate as well, being a musical theatre actor, because I’ve been around queer youth and black queer youth my entire life, and it’s a really beautiful thing that they do. It’s a really great show and I’m really happy that we’re doing it—it’s wonderful.
RL: There are few shows that I’ve wanted to say yes to as fast.
CS: Oh, yeah. The second we got that email, I was like, “We have to do that!”
AT: Was it The Trevor Project that reached out to you or how did it come about?
DS: I don’t know if they have much to do with it other than we’re just giving the profits to them. Out of Context Productions is the one putting it together.
RL: Yeah, they do a monthly benefit show.
DS: Apparently, all of last year, Weekend Run Club, who we’re playing with tonight for their album release show, had a donation box at every show for the organization [The Trevor Project] and were able to raise a significant amount of money just by having something on the table. But, I really looking forward to the show! We haven’t played with any of the bands on the lineup before and I wouldn’t be exposed to this organization or know anything about it really without music. Music has absolutely shown me a lot of different things.
AT: It’s incredible that you all are supporting something like this! For some closing remarks, would any of you like to talk a little bit about the newest single “Disaster and Delight”? Is it setting the tone for future music?
CS: Actually, not really.
AT: Is there anything new in the works though?
RL: We have a new EP coming out in spring. We’re playing the whole thing tonight. It’s kind of all over the place but there’s definitely a sense of cohesion to it. It’s [Disaster and Delight] probably the most pop-sounding piece on the EP but that’s not to say that the rest of the EP isn’t pop-sounding, it just is in a different way. I feel like it covers a lot of ground and is a nice showcase of our various influences and the different things that we like and different ways that we’ve been exploring or conveying our sound and what we want to do.
DS: I think “Disaster and Delight” serves as a good transition from our first EP to our second. It was also initially recorded during those first EP sessions. So, it is still very much from that era, but how we produced it and did additional recording on it makes it, what I think, to be a good transition piece.
RL: I think the whole new EP will still feel like August Hotel but it’s different, and I think you’ll hear it as a step forward. It feels more mature. It also feels good to be putting new stuff out because it’s been a minute.