- What band do you wanna fight?

- Other than you guys?

(laughs) ♪ Driver's seat, turn the key yeah, I wanna get in ♪ ♪ Old ford escort 1987 - We chose Shady Cove.

They've been friends of ours since way back.

- It's got this spacey, like, sort of cosmic quality and it also has just got some good pop sensibility.

There's good hooks and yeah, just good songwriting.

♪ The scenery will never change ♪ ♪ And the way that you feel stepping out on the stage ♪ - Shady Cove started when we were living in Vernonia, Oregon.

Right at the beginning of the pandemic and we moved out there.

We were living in the the woods basically.

And so we had nothing else to do but write and record music.

- Could you drink the water?

(laughs) - Nope.

We could not drink the water.

- And you didn't have cell phones either out here?

- Not for the first month.

- Pretty immersed.

- Yep.

- In the whole project.

- All we would do is just walk around in the woods and then write music for like almost a whole year.

- I feel like that's was always kinda like the dream you know, like to get away from everything and like focus.

♪ Hiding in between the feeling ♪ ♪ Hiding in between the feeling ♪ ♪ And the place where I'd last seen it ♪ ♪ And the place where I'd last seen it ♪ ♪ Midnight feels like we're not leaving ♪ ♪ Made it home... - So we had this two bedroom-unit attached to someone else's garage on eight acres in Vernonia and we recorded the album with two microphones and a laptop.

We finished it at Jackpot in Portland with Larry Crane.

When things did sort of start going back to normal a little bit, and we moved back.

- I do feel really proud of the record we put out and having recorded everything ourselves for the first time.

Since we wrote and recorded everything in lockdown and in isolation, we were forced to figure out how to make everything sound the best.

Like that's when we started working with drum machines and getting more into synths and using all the tools that we could come up with from home.

And I think that totally changed our songwriting too.

- Mhm.

- I'm like proud of that progression of not just like standing in a room and playing along with each other but building up.

Each song is kind of like building up a world.

- We are recording now.

It's like we're trying to hold on whatever we can hold on to from that time, that feeling of just being like, "This is just us.

This is just the music.

That's all it is."

♪ The secrets that you never heard ♪ ♪ And the words in my head singing to empty rooms ♪ - Our label folded at the exact moment that our album was released a few months ago.

So that felt pretty bad.

- When you put out an album, you've been working on it for like years and so if it gets lost 'cause it doesn't have support, then it's like years of your work just feels like no one has heard it.

- That's like the most crucial time to have people's attention drawn to you.

And if that doesn't get pulled off successfully, if you can't tour on it, and promote singles, or do a music video, I feel like that's really the make or break time because a month after the albums comes out, it's old news.

- This was the first time we have played in Minneapolis as Shady Cove.

It was appropriate to do it with Night Moves because I mean the band is still so new but they took us out all over the country and for them to bring us home to play was just...

It was right.

(rumbling synths) - Before a show I'm always so nervous and I'm like, "Why do I do this to myself?"

- Oh definitely.

Yeah.

Like the last like 15 minutes before like even showing up to the venue, I'm like, 'why?'

- Why do I put myself through this stress?

- Yeah!

Why do I do this?

- It's not worth it!

And then like immediately playing it's like, "This is the best" and it's so strange to have that experience over and over and over again.

It's like my brain and my body can't learn that it's good or something.

- Yeah.

I don't know.

- It's very weird.

Maybe I just like the ride of brain chemicals.

- Yeah.

(laughs) - The ups and downs.

- The highs and the low-lows.

- Yeah, it's definitely a ride.

♪ Waiting for summer days (whimsical music) ♪ Waiting for summer days