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SALT LAKE CITY — Coral Bones is a band without a genre, but it is far from feeling lost — it embraces the freedom.
Without shoe-horning themselves into a certain type of music, the members of Coral Bones are able to write music from the heart and full of emotion, that emulates music they like while maintaining a wholly unique sound. With electronic overtones, bluesy undertones and an overall upbeat feeling, this quartet will get your toes tapping. Check out their new single, Queensway, on YouTube.
KSL: What's your "origin story?" How long have you been playing music, what inspired you to create a band, etc?
Christopher Bennion: I started writing songs when I was 15. I'd started listening to a wider variety of music at that age rather than The Beatles/Grateful Dead/Blues/Classical CD collection of my parents', and it gave me an intense desire to create music of my own. I've been recording and producing songs as long as I've been writing them, so I've been playing each individual part, singing each harmony, for years. I've played plenty of solo shows, but never been able to represent the songs I'd created at home. That lack of fullness, and also the lack of collaboration and friendship I love about music now prompted me to form Coral Bones.
KSL: Give me the 1,000-foot view of your sound and style:
Bennion: The first songs I wrote were all so vastly different from each other with a few electronic songs I programmed on the family computer and a lot of acoustic songs hap-handedly along the lines of Bob Dylan. I feel like I wrote songs that Bob Dylan would have written if he were hit in the head with a sledgehammer. I never got rid of that desire to write songs that were completely different from each other stylistically and emotionally, and the variety of production tools I learned to use from that make Coral Bones an interesting mix. We play melancholy pop like The Cure, and we love our synths. We spend hours and hours on our synths, if that says anything.
KSL: What inspires you? Who are your musical influences?
Bennion: Landon and I met through a mutual friend, Drew Danburry, who was preparing for an album release show and recruited both of us for his band. I mentioned to the band that I was looking for a bassist, and Landon offered to step in. I'd played briefly in a band with Matt, our drummer, in high school, and I loved his sound. He had heard we were drummerless and came to us, and it's been turning out fantastically. Unfortunately though, he won't be with us for much longer, as he's serving a mission for the LDS Church this year.
Playing a sold-out finals show, having two different judges come up to me claiming to have given us a perfect score, seeing people being affected by our songs in the same way I was affected writing them, it all cemented in my mind that I'll do this forever.
–Christopher Bennion
We do have two new members, however, who are both good friends of mine. Niels Christensen (guitar) and I have been something like brothers through high school, and have been writing songs together for six years now. Emily Brown (keys/vox) and I met on a study abroad through London, and she helped me through a very difficult time. She's a phenomenal songwriter and I produced her latest album.
KSL: What inspires you? Who are your musical influences?
Bennion: I'd say my three biggest influences are The National, Passion Pit and Miike Snow, and hopefully some of that bleeds through into our style. However, I draw influence from just about everywhere, and the hardest part is deciding which parts are cohesive to Coral Bones. I'm inspired by emotional potency wherever I find it. If anything makes me extremely happy or adversely sad, or makes the people I care about happy or sad, it finds its way into a Coral Bones song.
KSL: What do you tell yourself before a performance?
Bennion: I don't know if I ever have much of an internal dialogue going. I'm mostly just trying to cut down the thoughts racing through my head to about an even dozen. If I can focus on the song until the end of it then it's a success. Hah. I love performing, and all I need to do is think about how much I enjoyed my last stint on the stage and I'm completely ready. I mainly have to remind myself not to reserve how I'm feeling. The stage is my greatest source of catharsis, and if I can get all my anger and sadness out on stage in a performance setting rather than allow it to harm the people I love, I'll do it.
KSL: What is your five-year-plan with your music?
Bennion: We'll be going on our first tour of the Western States this August, and honestly I'd be completely content if five years from now we're on the road eight months of the year. Provo's our first love, but we all need to travel to stay alive. We plan to write a new record this year, which will hopefully be released by next year, and in the meantime continue to plug Youthemism everywhere we go. If we can reach a creative agreement with a label, we will follow that, but if I can't produce our own records I'll be an unhappy dude, so it's DIY for as long as we can manage.
KSL: What has been the most exciting thing to happen in your career to date?
Bennion: Definitely our tie with Mimi Knowles at Velour's 2013 Winter Battle of the Bands. I'd always had hope that I could make a career out of music, but until then it hadn't been much more than hope. Playing a sold-out finals show, having two different judges come up to me claiming to have given us a perfect score, seeing people being affected by our songs in the same way I was affected writing them, it all cemented in my mind that I'll do this forever. I'm pretty happy about that experience.
KSL: Who have you most enjoyed collaborating with, and who is your dream collaboration?
Bennion: I've really enjoyed collaborating with Spencer Ludwig of Capital Cities, who I met at Sundance last year, and who is one of the happiest and most genuine people I've ever met. He and I are currently working on a track for his solo project, which is an interesting mix of nu-disco with a trumpet lead.
If I could choose one group to collaborate with, it would be Bloodshy & Avant of Miike Snow. They're fantastic producers and I owe them a lot for the Miike Snow tracks I've been listening to over the years. Just to meet them would be a dream.
