Otis
Alright, this is Otis Gordon from 88.5 WHPK. Who am I here with?

Connor
Connor McCampbell

Emily
Emily DiFranco

LB
And LB Flett

Connor
All from TC Superstar

Otis
First question: What makes a TC Superstar?

Connor
Energy, friends

Otis
So are you guys all TC Superstars?

Connor
Yes, yeah, definitely.

Otis
Does TC Superstar stand for Toyota Corolla Superstar?

Connor
We had the song TC Superstar and the whole album before we had the band name. We had a Rolling Stones kind of thing you know, it's like oh, you need to put this music out you need to start playing shows. What's your name?

Otis
Oh, but you had that song?

Connor
Yeah, we had the whole first album done before we ever played a show. Yeah, we didn't even have a name at that point.

Otis
Where was your first show?

Connor
Eden Co-op in West Campus at University of Texas at Austin.

Otis
You guys are all from Austin?

Emily
We all went to UT.

Otis
Oh shit. What is the music scene in Austin like?

Connor
Fantastic

LB
Very robust.

Connor
Everybody and their mother has a band.

Otis
Are there like local venues that everyone plays at?

Connor
Yeah, and a lot of good house shows and DIY spots that pop up.

Otis
Awesome. Super. Yeah, we're both from LA. We've always wanted to go to Austin. You guys have like the big river.

Emily
Red River... Oh, Lake Austin.

Connor
But it looks like a river. It's a lake. It's really really skinny though. If you didn't know that there was a lot more of it hidden, you'd be like, this is a river.

Otis
How would you describe your music to the general audience?

Connor
Dancey

Emily
Dance-pop. 80s, 70s inspired

Connor
DIY. We never worked in a studio or anything like that.

Otis
Where do you guys record?

Connor
My house.

Otis
Where in your house?

Connor
It's been different for different records. Uh, bedrooms, living rooms, garage, and what used to be LB's bedroom.

Otis
Which one was the most recent album recorded in?

Connor
The instruments were almost all done in my garage and then the vocals and stuff we finished up in your room after you moved out right? Something like that.

Emily
I mean we recorded the background vocals for Be Like You in the garage.

Connor
Oh yeah. The studio moves around throughout the year depending on you know the temperature.

Otis
What do you mean temperature?

Connor
Well, there are times a year you can work in the garage and there are times a year you do not want to be working in the garage. In this summer it's miserable. Like 105 degrees.

Otis
Oh, alright. What do you guys do outside of making music? What are your hobbies? And projects?

LB
I'm a teacher. So I teach dance to young children. That's my main thing besides performing.

Connor
Yeah, I work at a Guitar Center

Otis
Guitar Center is like the best dude, I hate those pretentious ass guitar stores. But Guitar Center, everything is equal, you know what I mean? People are there for like 10 hours plus just jamming.

Connor
People are there for 10 hours plus jamming, I can attest.

Otis
You guys are the dancers, right? Okay, I got some questions for y'all. You guys were killing it tonight... how do you guys not get tired as the dancers?

LB
Well, we're tired.

Emily
You just keep going.

Otis
What is your regimen?

Emily
Before every show I try to balance on one leg. So when I get on stage, I stand on one leg and I figure out where my balance is. And I stand on the other, just so that like if I feel off balance while we're dancing, I'm like, okay, well, I've already been to this place before.

Otis
Oh, that's a great philosophy.

Emily
Yeah. So that way, it's not like "oh no, I'm off balance." It's like a second off balance and then you can just settle on the other foot. It'll be alright.

Connor
And we stretch, stretch for sure.

Otis
And you guys like work together with a choreographer?

LB
We all choreograph.
Otis
How do you decide everything? What's the choreography process?

LB
It's different all the time. Sometimes there's one person doing an entire song. There's some songs that all four dancers have collaborated on. There's some songs that two of us have done? Yeah, we just like mix and match a lot.

Emily
Whoever is inspired by the song. It's like if I love a song and I want to do it then we're like, yeah, go for it.

Otis
What was your favorite dance move of the night?

Connor
I like when you all do the lifts for Waste My Time and Acceptance.

Otis
How many shows did you do on this tour?

Emily
I think this is our 11th.

Otis
And how was it?

Emily
Good, good tour.

LB
It's been a great tour.

Connor
Yeah, it gets better and better every time.

Otis
Every show gets better?

Connor
Yeah, every show, every tour. Every time you go back on the road, you know, you meet some people that saw you last time, you get to meet some new people. It feels like summer camp. A little more intense.

Otis
Okay. So this album was inspired a lot by consumerism, TV culture, and stuff like that. Who came up with that concept? And what was that influenced by, especially in light of the pandemic and all that?

Connor
We all worked on the concept together for this record, and did some kind of lyric workshops and that kind of stuff as a group. And as you know, we break off into partners and work on individual songs, that kind of stuff. That was definitely inspired by being at home and being on your phone too much and watching TV while you can't go out and see your friends, and using entertainment as a balm for depression. And just questioning, you know, why do we do that? How does it make us feel? And what are the messages we're consuming all the time? And is that how I want to be living my life? Based on an image of livelihood that someone gives to me through media?

Otis
Cool, okay, you guys have this song, Frank Lloyd Wright. So near our WHPK station, we actually have a Frank Lloyd Wright building called the Robie House.

Connor
Oh wow, yeah we're familiar.

Otis
So, let's see, how does architecture influence your music and emotion? And why did you write this song? Do you feel like spaces influence your music?

Connor
Oh, yeah, I gotta steal David Burns ideas for that. He writes about different spaces. Like, in a cathedral, you make stuff that has long suspensions and dissonance and then release because you have long reverbs. Like, you don't hear polyrhythmic percussion in cathedrals, it would just sound like mud. So I think just the way people listen to music now is responsible for a lot of what we do. We like stuff that makes people dance, so something with a strong beat is gonna feel good in the club, it'll feel good in your headphones, or feel good in your car when you're driving around. I think the architecture of those spaces is very influential in how we decide the kind of stuff we want to play. In terms of the song, I remember on a couple of our tours, we've toured some Frank Lloyd Wright houses and projects. And it was just interesting to me to think about the architecture that we prioritize, you know, like, nobody is touring public housing projects and being like, wow, this is beautiful to look at. They spend so much time and attention on the design and this is historically significant. Like we choose, even even within Frank Lloyd Wright's work, people don't really look at his Usonian home so much, you know. They look at the Guggenheim Museum that has a huge wealthy endowment. Yeah. So that song was just kind of trying to play with that idea of what architecture we value and why we value it, you know, as an extension of media and culture.

Otis
Super cool. Let's see. What are your non-musical influences?

LB
Non-musical? We get a lot of inspiration from House dance. Which came out of Chicago. And I like voguing, lots of social dances as well as like, contemporary concert dance. I don't know, I love Pina Bausch, too.

Emily
For me, it's mostly just like lived experience and where you're at at that specific moment. So it's not like I'm pulling from anything in particular, I'm pulling from who I am or where I'm at in that specific moment. And I think in our lifetime especially we try our best to be honest, so every set is just kind of like a representation of where you're at in that specific moment.

Connor
We also pull out of visual imagery. When we're working on an album, we usually make a lot of aesthetic boards and that kind of stuff.

Otis
What kind of images?

Connor
Well, even like the artists we saw today, Barbara Kruger. It was super cool. It was awesome. For the last record, with Julio, our designer who's at Yale in New Haven right now, we put together a board and reference to a lot of her stuff and the way she did type setting. It was a little serendipitous to come into town and be like, well, of course, we have to go to this, it's what we were influenced by for the last record. And her cultural commentary is also very in line with a lot of the stuff we want to make art about.

LB
And who was that photographer? Our album art is very inspired by this specific photograph by a specific photographer. You could say it's a rip off.

Connor
There is a famous photograph of a old man playing golf in a living room. Yeah, the carpet is fake grass, and he's just like swinging a club in front of the TV and it's extremely suburbian and also very surreal at the same time.

Otis
So are you guys inspired by 1950s imagery, like about consumerism?

Connor
A lot of 70s art and stuff and a lot of 70s dance music. Which I think helps it feel timeless in a way to reference things in the past and then recontextualize them or you know, try to put a new message with a sound or an image that somebody has heard or seen before.

Otis
Word. So where are you guys off to next?

Emily
St. Louis, Kansas City, and then back home.

Connor
Long ass drive.

Otis
Yeah, yeah. I have some questions about gear and stuff. I was gonna ask what kind of synths and guitars do you use?

Connor
So in this record we used a lot of CP keyboard sounds, Yamaha CP from the 70s. I used a Korg Prologue for most of the synths to replicate a lot of the all analog, you know, little grittier stuff. And then we used all wind drum samples for the drums because I wanted a late 70s feel. Like if you're making a dance pop album in 1978, like, using all the same tools, how could you make something that sounds like it could have also been made in 2021? So that was a lot of fun to work on. And we used a couple of DX sounds from 80s and 90s R&B, too, and that kind of stuff.

Otis
So there must have been a lot of listening research involved?

Connor
Yes, but I don't really like to listen to stuff while I'm making a record necessarily. But stuff that I've heard in the past, yeah. That's my favorite part of producing, you just learn as much music history as you can and anytime you have a project, you're like, I'm gonna pull this, this, and this and, you know, make a new soup out of these sounds and see if it's palatable.

Otis
It sure was. It sounded great.

Connor
Thank you.

Otis
What kind of guitar were you using?

Connor
Honestly, it doesn't even matter. We don't use the same guitars as we used on the records. I tour with a Squire Jaguar because I'm not sentimental about it so if it gets fucked up, it gets fucked up. Every time I take a guitar on the road, the temperature changes mess up the frets a little bit. And then we played through jazz choruses because it's the closest you can get to like a wind in kind of sound, which I like, like a lot of it Nile Rodgers straight into the board kind of thing.

Otis
Alright, great, that was sick. Thank you so much for giving us time to talk to you.

Connor
Yeah. Thanks for chatting with us.

LB
Thanks for hanging out on Thursday night.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai