PropertyOfZack had the lovely opportunity to chat with Cacie, Brad, and Jess of Now, Now (formally Every Children) just a few weeks ago. The girls and boy and I discussed their new EP, signing to No Sleep Records, their 2011 full-length, and future touring plans. The band is a PropertyOfZack staple, so go pick up the EP and enjoy the interview!

For the record, could you state your name and role in Now, Now?
Cacie: I’m Cacie and I play guitar and sometimes keyboard and then sing.
Jess: I’m Jess and I play guitar and sometimes sing.
Brad: [Laughs] So descriptive. My name’s Brad and I drum and sometimes I do other things like programming and keyboards. Blah, blah, blah.
 
Starting right there, how long has the name shortening been an idea and what finally brought it into play?
Cacie: Since like early this year. No, probably like two years we’ve been thinking about it, but it doesn’t really make that much of a difference because people will still call us Now, Now Every Children and that’s what we started as so that’s like our family given full name opposed to your nickname.
Brad: People usually call us Now, Now anyways and with this EP we’re kind of trying to start over in a way and that was maybe a part of it.
Cacie: Whenever we’d be playing shows to people that we didn’t know, we’d say our band name and be like, “Hey, we’re Now, Now Every Children” and people would be like, “What? You’re who? Why?”
Jess: “That doesn’t make grammatical sense!”
Cacie: We’d read reviews of it not being grammatically correct, which isn’t like a big deal, but it’s really annoying because it has nothing to do with anything.
 
The name shortening came soon after the release of your Neighbors EP. The EP was only available for a short time for reasons we’ll get into soon, but how has the response been to it?
Cacie: When we did the pre-order, of the ones that we made, it was pretty nuts.
Brad: We only had a certain amount. I didn’t think they’d go right away…
Jess: But all of them went in like eight minutes and that was way fast.
Cacie: It was crazy.
 
From Cars to Neighbors there’s no doubt that it still sounds like Now, Now, but there is definitely a noticeable change. Can you talk about the advancement to the new sound?
Cacie: Well, we’ve had another member, like another writing member, and I feel like that probably has something to do with more guitars in all the songs. Jess?
Jess: Yeah.
Brad: [Laughs]. I think it’s just kind of a natural thing. We’ve been doing for a while now, not as long as other bands, but long enough where we kind of know the direction we want to move into. Everyone’s laughing at me because I’m trying to sound like I know what I’m talking about.
Jess: He’s leaning into the phone so much. We were talking about this earlier today: Cars was their first record and they were just a little more timid in how they were going to sound because it was the first thing they did, but now they’ve been around at least a tiny block so it’s not like they’re new to this anymore.
Brad: Cars, like Jess said, was our first thing ever that we were trying to do, like legit, and me and Cacie were like scared little kids, not really knowing what we were doing, and also we did it really, really fast.
Cacie: The whole thing, I think, happened in like eight days.
Brad: Maybe it’s that short for other bands, but we don’t work that fast.
 
Neighbors was released independently at first. How was releasing it without a label and can you discuss what happened with Afternoon Records?
Cacie: We thought it’d be nice to do something that we had complete control over because when you’re on a label, a smaller label, you can sometimes do whatever you want, but for this we got to do whatever we wanted, like no one else was involved in anyway, so it was just really nice to not have anyone else’s input. Especially when we don’t really want it. The cool thing about the EP is that every little thing about it is just entirely the band. There’s nothing else about this EP that did not come from us. There was no say in anything was going to be done besides from what we wanted to do.
Brad: Even when it was picked up by No Sleep, nothing changed about it. It’d just good to have that support also and not have them be pushing it their way.
 
No Sleep contacted you guys the day before the release and had interest to put it out. How did that all come about?
Jess: Well, I, Jess, just so you know who’s talking [Laughs], before I had become an official part of Now, Now, I was just touring with the band and playing guitar parts and stuff and I had been wanting to do something on the side. I had a friend in a band who knew Chase who works at No Sleep Records and kind of said, “Hey, my friend Jess does some cool guitar stuff, you should check her out” and then I’d been talking to Chase for like a year about that stuff, but nothing really came of it because we were doing Now, Now. Then he called me the day before the EP came out and was like, “Hey, how’s it going?” And I was like, “Good, I haven’t written anything, if you’re wondering.” And he was like, “What about Now, Now stuff, what are you guys doing?” And I said that we were releasing an EP, but by ourselves and he was like, “Oh, want to release it with No Sleep?” and we were like, “Okay.”
Brad: Well, it wasn’t really just like, “Okay.” We had some reservations about it because we had just come off of Afternoon Records and the EP was kind of just something that we wanted to do by ourselves, so I think at first it sounded really awesome, but we weren’t quite sure if we wanted to do it.
Cacie: It ended up working out though.
 
Its never been quite clear, is this a one time distributing deal, or is the band officially on the No Sleep roster?
Cacie: We’re officially on the roster, but I think right now we’re just releasing the EP with them. The deal we got was just for the EP, but I think that still makes us a part of their roster.
POZ: For your next full-length, could that be independent of on No Sleep?
Cacie: We have no idea what’s going on with that.
Jess: We’re talking to other labels right now about releasing a full-length. There’s no one for sure, but we’re working with different labels right now.
 
Just the other night Cacie tweeted about some new songs. How far along into a full-length in terms of writing are you guys?
Cacie: Interesting question.
Jess: It’s at least half done.
Cacie: Yeah, it’s about half. Half completely done, but then the other half is partially done. We have all of the songs that we want to do.
Jess: We have a clear outline for the record.
Cacie: Yeah, there are like five that are completely done and then we’ve got seven that are mostly done.
 
Is it in the same vein in terms of sound to Neighbors?
Jess: I’d say it’s in the same vein as Neighbors if we had a year of time to write Nieghbors. The record right now just feels really more developed, but like along the same line as Neighbors.
Cacie: Yeah, I would agree with that.
Brad: I think the way that we write songs is being more realized by ourselves and they’re just more solid.
Cacie: Also, we’re just way, way more picky now with what we’re writing as opposed to before where we were like, “Oh cool, this sounds cool.” We’re just feeling the stress of making this one count.
 
When do you hope to have it released by?
Cacie: We’re aiming to have it released by early summer.
Brad: I think like May.
Jess: Maybe early June.
Brad: I think the plan is to go in and record it in January at the latest.
 
And like you said, you guys are shopping around with all different labels?
Full band: Yep.
 
Now, Now has announced a few tour dates, in particular Motion City Soundtrack’s Popsickle Festival. How stoked are you guys to get playing again?
Cacie: That show is going to be awesome, but also, we’re definitely stressed because we haven’t played in a while and we’re trying to play some new stuff. It’s going to be awesome though, but we’re freaking out about it at the same time.
 
Should we be on the lookout for a more complete tour any time soon?
Cacie: We’ve been on the phone with our manager Chase. We were on the phone him maybe a half hour ago talking about tours.
POZ: All support?
Cacie: Yeah, mostly support tours, because we’ve never had a really solid US tour. We haven’t gone to the west coast yet either. We need to be way more established before headlining tours.
 
Thanks so much for your time, is there anything else you’d like to add?
Cacie: We can never think of anything when this happens.
Brad: I feel not very cool when we get asked that and I can’t think of anything. Just that we’re excited for announcing shit that’s going on with us soon.