cootie catcher is a Toronto-based four-piece composed of Nolan Jakupovski (vocals, guitar), Sophia Chavez (vocals, synth, DJ controller), Anita Fowl (vocals, bass), and drummer Joseph Shemoun. The band’s co-vocalists, who also share songwriting duties, have known each other since high school, when they debuted a very formative version of cootie catcher at a talent show they almost seemed to have forgotten. It was really born as a recording project for Jakupovski and Chavez during the pandemic, with Chavez and another childhood friend joining when live shows were on the table. Shemoun stepped in as a touring drummer before becoming a permanent member, tasked with translating and often necessarily adjusting Jakupovski’s beats for the sake of playability. The restless rhythms in cootie catcher’s music – often characterized as “laptop twee,” though the title of a new song, ‘Puzzle Pop’, does a better job of encapsulating it – reflect their overall creative pace. Their exuberant, untamable new album, Something We All Got, arrives just a year after their last, Shy at first – it’s no surprise its distinct lyrical perspectives collide at the vulnerability of repeatedly putting yourself out there, expecting more than you’re bound to get. SWAG, though, deserves all the attention it can get.
We caught up with cootie catcher for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about the origins of the band, high school talent shows, feeding off each other’s writing, and more.
Do you remember having conversations about working together on music before forming cootie catcher?
Nolan Jakupovski: We just started writing a bunch. Aside from Joseph, we’ve all known each other for a very long time. We all knew we could be in a band, but we never really put it together until cootie catcher started. I think we were just bored, didn’t have a lot going on at the time. I was in a bunch of bands around COVID and wasn’t doing anything.
Anita Fowl: We were just always together through lockdown, and it just kind of happened. I have memories of us playing around with stuff in the basement on whatever gear you had — you did have some drums in there. There was a brief phase where Nolan was trying to teach me drums. That was fun.
NJ: I guess I played drums on a few cootie catcher songs. I forgot about that.
AF: It was just us using whatever we had down there in the parents’ basement.
Were you jamming at that point, or were you bringing songs to the table?
NJ: Definitely songs. Truth be told, we never really jam out that much. We discuss the song structures. [laughs]
AF: I don’t have a big musical background, so a lot of cootie catcher was me learning stuff. I remember I would have ideas for songs in my head, just melodies, and I would bring them to Nolan and be like, “What note is this?”
NJ: Yeah, that’s so strange to start with. There were a few songs at first that started with just a melody.
AF: Just singing. ‘starved 4 combo’ was like that. It was like reverse engineering.
Nolan, you mentioned you played in bands before. Was there something that made you feel like this could go in a different direction?
NJ: Yeah, because it wasn’t very serious. It was just for fun. Those early songs are definitely more naively put together than nowadays.
Even now, I sense an aversion to self-seriousness in your music, even as it takes itself seriously.
NJ: Yeah, we take having fun seriously. We take streamlining songs seriously. There’s not many moments where there’s not someone singing or something that’s not moving the song forward.
Was there a moment when that streamlining became more important to you?
NJ: Probably when we started playing live and I realized that a lot of the beats were impossible to play. They’re not on a grid, for example. I had to actually sit down and make this playable.
You said you’ve known each other for a long time. Were you in school together?
NJ: Yeah, high school. Our first drummer was also from school, and Joseph tagged along a few years ago.
You identify as an outsider in the first song of the new album, ‘Loiter for the Love of It’, and I think that’s often a self-perception that dates back to those years. And you tend to gravitate to the same kind of people.
NJ: Yeah, I think we all were a little bit.
AF: [laughs] Yeah.
NJ: I was definitely friends with the weird kids.
Joseph Shemoun: I was a big nerd in high school.
NJ: We would have been friends, for sure. We would have been playing Pokémon.
Sophia Chavez: Me and Anita were art kids. We did some talent shows.
NJ: I was in a talent show.
AF: Oh yeah, you did one too. Sophia and I have known each other since grade 10. Music was a big thing that we bonded over. Now I’m going too much into lore, but Nolan was in a grade below, and I remember we knew he was in a band, and we were like, “Oh my god, someone in our school is in a band?” [laughs] We didn’t know anyone in a band.
NJ: We were the only one that at least played shows. We’re from Mississauga and we’d play shows in Toronto, so it was as legit as a high school band could’ve been.
JS: That’d be very cool if you’re in high school, for sure.
Does every school there have a talent show?
NJ: Every school does that, I feel like.
JS: I don’t know if we had that, but we had a battle of the bands.
NJ: That’s even crazier. That implies multiple bands.
JS: I remember there was one band that I liked that played a cover of ‘Working Man’ by Rush. My mind was blown.
NJ: Somewhere in grade 8 there’s me playing Stone Temple Pilots at a talent show. I know there’s one of Sophia playing Mac DeMarco?
JS: What song?
SC: Uhhh…
AF: It was ‘Let My Baby Stay’.
SC: Actually, I remember us three played in a band. Do you guys remember that?
AF: I think about that all the time.
SC: Me, Anita, and Nolan played one time for a talent show. It was called Carmelchella.
AF: Or was it Carmchella? Like Coachella, but our high school was Mount Carmel.
NJ: That was very nearly cootie catcher.
SC: It was. [laughs] We never actually talked about this in years.
AF: I recently was going through old photos, and I have some photos from that.
SC: Oh my god, I need that.
AF: I’ll send it. I didn’t know if you wanted to see.
NJ: It’s still the same microKORG, isn’t it?
SC: It is.
AF: We did ‘Chamber of Reflection’ for sure.
JS: Nice. I would have loved that.
That’s deep lore right there.
JS: It is. I never even heard that one.
What excited you the most going into the new record? What was that transitional period like?
NJ: The process for this record, the last record, and the next one, to be honest, has been pretty similar.
AF: I feel like with Shy at first to SWAG, the new record has even more of an amalgamation of our current lineup. That’s what made me excited for it, because it really does feel like us as a band.
NJ: We were writing this one while the last one was wrapping up. ‘Quarter Note Rock’, for example, could technically have been on Shy at first, it was around that time. Shy at first only came out this time a year ago, and we do pretty much have an album’s worth of new demos right now. We never stop. It’s just too fun.
Do you conceptualize or structure an album as a whole the same way you said you do for songs?
NJ: We don’t really do that. If it’s a good collection of songs, I think it’s a good collection of songs.
AF: I guess we’re not super conceptual in that way.
NJ: We’re not gonna drop a concept album.
AF: I love when other bands do that stuff, but for us, because it’s three different songwriters – I think naturally, multiple themes carry across all three of our works.
NJ: There’s always consistency.
Did your approach to bringing together the different perspectives change at all?
AF: I was just excited about having more voices on the album. Sophia has more songs.
SC: I think in Shy at first, I only shared songs with people, but in the new album, I have my own songs, which is cool.
AF: It’s cheesy, but I get inspired by what both of you guys write – I guess we feed off each other. It’s unspoken. I don’t think I changed my approach, but subconsciously, I’m hearing them write about stuff, and I’m like, “Me too.” [laughs]
NJ: There’s maybe more overlap in the verses. There’s probably more back-and-forth interaction with each other. Like on ‘Wrong Choice’ and ‘Pirouette’, there’s call-and-response.
Beyond the vocals, there’s also moments where the electronic beats and the drums overlap in a similar call-and-response way.
AF: I love that part in ‘Halifax’.
NJ: It was funny when we were first practicing how to do that. Whenever we would start, I was like, “So, there’s gonna be a space here, and it’s gonna go [emulates beat], and then you’re gonna have to answer that.” That’s a good example. I do like when they talk to each other like that.
Now that the album is about to be released, are you more conscious of the ways in which the songs are in conversation with each other thematically? ‘Rhymes with rest’ and ‘Take me for granted’ are both about commitment, for example, but there’s a tension between having and wanting it.
AF: It’s really interesting to hear someone say there’s a relationship between those songs, because there’s definitely–
SC: To be honest, I don’t even know the lyrics of ‘Rhymes with rest’. I can’t hear them.
AF: [laughs] Real. That’s another one that we haven’t played live much and we’re learning to. I feel like the overlap, if I’m thinking of the Venn diagram, is probably being vulnerable and asking for something. Laying it on the table.
‘Gingham Dress’ is both one of the most enjoyable songs on the album and one that sounds challenging to play – even vocally, there’s an added difficulty to it. What was it like getting it right?
SC: It’s interesting, because that song was hard to sing in the beginning, but it is the only song where I only sing and don’t play anything else because it is so hard. ‘Gingham Dress’ is like much of Something We All Got, but it’s different from other stuff we’ve written before in that sense; there isn’t any synth or DJ controller. It is angrier.
NJ: It’s a hard one to play, yeah. The drums, the bass.
AF: It’s the most “rock band.”
SC: That’s what I mean, yeah.
JS: That’s definitely the one I enjoy playing the most. I think the drums are really fun to play on that song. That, and ‘Pirouette’ and ‘Quarter Note Rock’.
AF: All the songs where it hits hard.
NJ: Yeah, we do think about how they’ll be live a lot more when we’re in the writing process. I guess that’s a big change. We kind of imagine: Will people dance to this?
JS: There’s more high energy. Even recording that, I feel like it was pretty fresh for everyone, so it was a bit difficult.
NJ: The turnover is quite quick. We try to at least play things a few times before we record them. On Shy at first there were songs we didn’t even play before recording them, but I think on this one we did practice all of them.
Joseph, what’s your approach to finding the right rhythm for a song, taking into account how all the other elements work together?
JS: I think it all starts with Nolan’s beat, playing around that. Usually, it’s just mimicking the snare and kick pattern as much as possible, adding more own flair and fills in, some cymbal work.
NJ: Not all of them have kicks and snares, though. And there’s definitely been times where we’ve brought something to practice, and I went and changed the beat according to that. In the chorus of ‘Rhymes with rest’, for example, in the chorus there’s a bar of three, and that was a change after the fact. I felt it always in four, and when we were playing it, Joseph kept making it a bar of three, and it felt really natural. So now this is the most prog part on the album.
JS: 3/4 is the best. I also feel like, a lot of the time, I play a little extra, and I have to remind myself not to go too crazy.
NJ: It’s crazy enough.
Tell me about getting Nate Amos to mix the album. It made sense to me as a fan of his work in Water from Your Eyes and This Is Lorelei that he would get the balance of electronic and acoustic instrumentation.
NJ: He was on a list of names of people we felt would understand the electronic and acoustic mix-wise. He really stood out because of his production more so than his songwriting.
AF: His songs are really different from ours.
NJ: Especially if you listen to Lily Koningsberg’s album that he recorded [CRY MFER], I was like, “How do I make the album sound like this?”
AF: Even though it does sound very different, I really liked what was the latest This Is Lorelei album at the time, Box for Buddy, Box for Star. I noticed there was a mix of electronic and acoustic.
NJ: We definitely asked him at the right time. I feel like he spiked in popularity as he was making our thing.
AF: We kind of got lucky. We asked him in person because he came to play in Toronto, and we cold approached him–
NJ: We were asked to open for them – we didn’t, but we went anyway. We asked him if he’d be into mixing, and he was like, “Yeah, of course.”
AF: When he sent it, we were like, “Yeah, that’s it.” We had heard some other mixes, but it was very clear he gets it.
I remember him telling me how busy he is when he was promoting that This Is Lorelei record, just trying to make time to balance those projects.
NJ: I actually can’t imagine how busy that guy is.
AF: I feel winded a lot, and we’re not even–
JS: Overwhelmed.
AF: For sure, sometimes.
Do you remember hearing the mix for the first time? Were you all together?
AF: We definitely would have been too excited to wait to be all together. We didn’t have a lot of notes, I remember.
NJ: A lot of people would do different things with the electronic and acoustic drums, and he definitely knows how to balance them. He balanced them the best right off the bat.
With the tour coming up, what’s something that excites you about spending that time together?
SC: We’ve already spent so much time together that we already know our dynamics. It’s definitely gonna be the coziest because we’re gonna have a nice van. Our friend John is driving us. It’s like we’re going on a road trip. We’re gonna eat all the fast food.
JS: Well, I don’t know about that.
SC: Uhh, we are. [laughter] Whether you like it or not.
NJ: I’m excited to poop in all the disgusting bathrooms.
JS: Oh, I’m not excited for that.
NJ: There’s definitely a lot of shows I’m specifically excited for. I’m excited to do SXSW for the first time.
JS: It’s going to be really fun.
NJ: Even if we weren’t playing, none of us have been to a lot of these cities.
JS: I’m also excited to see the difference from day one to the end in terms of playing. Montreal vs. the Toronto show at the end.
NJ: We’re gonna be changed people by that show.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
cootie catcher’s Something We All Got is out now via Carpark.
