By the time Fort Collins–based dream-pop collective Candy Claws released Ceres & Calypso in the Deep Time in 2013, the band had stopped making music. The project, which consists of core members Ryan and K Hover (currently of Sound of Ceres) alongside Hank Bertholf, revolved around Ryan’s songwriting, but expanded into a sprawling collective because it seemed like a fun idea to tour with all their friends. The band hit the road after their breakthrough LP Hidden Lands in 2010, but quickly discovered that touring life was more enjoyable in theory than in practice.
So Ryan, K, Hank, and a number of collaborators packed up their instruments and drove back home to Colorado where they began prepping Ceres & Calypso, a spectacular burst of shoegaze guitars, massive drums, and hushed lyrics. Ceres was a less pressure-filled recording experience than Hidden Lands, Ryan tells me, which is perhaps why the band turned in their most impactful work to date, an album that quickly found a cult audience and has accrued such a wide following over the years that it’s necessitated a 10th anniversary deluxe edition. The band was so surprised by the album’s success that they hadn’t planned any album release shows, promotion, or tours around Ceres. In fact, Ryan and K were backpacking in Europe when the album was released, completely removed from the record’s reception.
The album captured a microcosm of an era, a specific moment in a specific scene. But what Candy Claws did on Ceres & Calypso remains powerfully relevant. To celebrate 10 years of the LP, we chatted with Ryan and K Hover about the band’s newly recorded single from the deluxe version of the record (“Distortion Spear”), expectations, and looking back on the album 10 years on.
Once Hidden Lands arrived, how quickly after did you begin working on Ceres?
Ryan Hover: When Hidden Lands came out, we toured a lot. We did South By a bunch. We took eight to 10 people on the road with us. It was ill-advised, but this was our first time really touring. We toured for a while, but got over it pretty quickly. It didn’t really fit the style of our music very well, I don’t think—playing this soft, delicate dream pop in a bunch of dive bars.
We all went back to our lives after maybe a couple years of doing that. With Hidden Lands, we put our whole heart and soul into that one, and it was our Pet Sounds. That’s what I was most obsessed with. Ceres felt like the pressure was off a little bit to make our definitive statement. It was more of an excuse to explore a more adventurous sound.
“Ceres & Calypso felt like the pressure was off a little bit to make our definitive statement. It was more of an excuse to explore a more adventurous sound.” — Ryan Hover
What were some of the sonic influences with the record?
Ryan: We wanted to capture three really distinct sounds on Ceres. One of them was the Starflyer 59 album Gold. That album had huge guitars, but really whispery vocals. It was a little more rock-influenced than most shoegaze, a little more riff-based. We wanted to do really huge guitars this time around. We were also listening to a lot of Blonde Redhead’s album 23, which also skirts shoegaze, though it’s really washy. The thing about that album is it felt like it had momentum—there’s not really a lull in each song. I was also listening to just the entire Beatles catalog on repeat during my drives to work. The album was mostly just made in my bedroom. Most of my bedroom was taken up by this drum set.
K Hover: It was funny. When we were recording that album in Ryan’s bedroom, he just slept on the floor. I remember I always thought that was so strange. He didn’t have a bed in his room. He had a tiny couch, but it was more like a loveseat, so it wasn’t even big enough to actually sleep on. He just slept on the floor in a sleeping bag every night. Not even just during the album recording—this is just how he lived.
Because Hidden Lands was a bit more high-stakes, you didn’t feel any pressure with Ceres. That’s interesting to me because the band had gotten pretty popular. I feel like maybe the opposite could have been the case, where there was even more pressure to make this new record.
K: That’s interesting that you say that because, during the whole time that Candy Claws was active, it never felt like it was popular whatsoever. Maybe the popularity has picked up within the last, maybe, five years. It really didn’t feel like anyone even knew about it until after the band went on hiatus.
Ryan: I think it had more popularity online. When we went out in the real world on tour, it felt like no one was coming to the shows. But the people that did come, it was very special meeting a lot of them. We still encounter people these days that say, “Oh, I saw you in a parking lot in 2009.”
“During the whole time that Candy Claws was active, it never felt like it was popular whatsoever... It really didn’t feel like anyone even knew about it until after the band went on hiatus.” — K Hover
The single you released alongside the reissue, is that from the Ceres era or is it new?
Ryan: It’s new, recorded over this past winter. The two of us have lived in New York for the past seven years. Hank has lived on the West Coast for a lot longer than that. So we haven’t seen each other in a long time. This past summer we went to a mutual friend’s wedding—who used to play bass in the group, actually, his name is Riley. So the two of us got to hang out with Hank for the first time in like a decade. The 10th anniversary of Ceres was coming up. I think the idea of making a new song arose naturally. Hank seemed into it. Hank actually started the song, wrote the guitar chords and the chord structure. And then we built off of that.
How hard was it to get in the zone, so to speak, of that era?
K: That was the original idea, though, to create a song that makes people question whether or not it was written recently or if it was written a long time ago. That was the challenge with this song—making something that really felt like it could have been a B-side a long time ago, that we just never released.
Ryan: We wanted to approach it with the same three sonic touchpoints as the album. This time, I think we got the guitars a little closer to Starflyer guitars. It’s not as compressed and smashed as Ceres and Calypso, because back then I didn’t know what I was doing as far as mixing and mastering [goes]. It was neat to make it again and revisit that more innocent, nature-inspired Candy Claws realm, or more of the heavy, philosophical sci-fi stuff that we’re doing with Sound of Ceres.
What’s it like talking about something created during such a different part of y’all’s lives?
K: It’s a nice, nostalgic feeling. Our lives are really different now than what they were. We were a big group of friends, like we were saying, that all lived in Fort Collins. A lot of us were going to school together. It was such a nice time that I look back on, even outside of the music portion of it. We’d hang out every day. I lived in a house with three of the other people in the band. And we just did everything together.
Ryan: Whenever we made an album, we just wanted it to feel special and different. One of our little rules was, if there was a way that we could do something different than a normal band would do it, we had to do it. That’s what makes it fun to listen back on this—there’s all these little quirky things about the record, all these little tricks and challenges that we set for ourselves.
“It was neat to revisit that more innocent, nature-inspired Candy Claws realm, or more of the heavy, philosophical sci-fi stuff that we’re doing with Sound of Ceres.” — Ryan Hover
What did the band do after the record came out?
K: By the time the record actually came out, the band was already dissolved because Hank had already moved away—I think other people had already moved away, too. Ryan and I were on a big backpacking trip in Europe. I didn’t even remember that the record came out the day it came out. We were just in another world doing our own thing. We didn’t do anything around it. There were no shows. It was a weird way to put out a record.
Ryan: Whenever we make records now, and people get obsessed over the release show and touring around it, in the back of my mind there’s Ceres and Calypso where we were backpacking somewhere in the hills of Scotland on release day. FL
