Chaz Costello is a man who wears many hats. Best known either as the bassist of Choir Boy or the frontman of his band Sculpture Club, a list of all of the other bands that he’s an active member of would be too long to list. Someone who’s used to the stresses and joys of relentless touring, Chaz will be playing the Bay Area in the coming months in both Sculpture Club (August) and Choir Boy (September). I talked to him about constantly being on the road, the journey that led him to discovering post-punk music, being a songwriter for different bands, and more.
Tyler King: I wanted to say thank you for agreeing to do this! Sorry that it’s taken so long.
Chaz Costello: I’m sorry too, but I’m glad that we finally got it figured out!
TK: What prompted the move to Dallas? That seems like a pretty big jump for you.
CC: Yeah, it’s been a pretty cultural cultural shift for sure. My partner Melody, who I’m in the band Fossil Arms with, her work got relocated out here. She’s a product developer for this beauty company and they wanted to keep her so we moved out here. And on that subject, with Choir Boy Adam’s been in Cleveland for a few years and Michael and Jeff are both in Los Angeles, so we were all split up already. I was the last person left in Salt Lake City and I was like already doing the band from everywhere, so I figured that Texas shouldn’t be much different. And at that point I hadn’t gotten Sculpture Club super back on its feet again, so it just seemed a good time as any.
TK: It seems like you’ve settled in pretty well!
CC: Yeah, I think as best as we can. Dallas is a kind of a strange place music scene-wise. There are a couple post-punk bands and goth bands and synth bands but not as much as other places. I think people out here generally are more into rock and metal and stuff like that, which is cool and there’s some really great bands out here, but I feel like Sculpture Club itself kind of falls into a strange middle ground with all of that stuff. So then to come to a place where the scene is smaller it was a little hard to find our footing, but now that we have we’re settling in pretty well.
TK: When I first started going to Dallas as a musician myself and got into the post-punk scene out there, which would have been early 2019, as far as post-punk and goth bands go, there were a lot more like Sub-Sahara and Aztec Death, and it seemed like the pandemic just derailed so many of them.
CC: Yeah, that see that’s what I’ve been told as well. There’s only a select few left but I think with the pandemic a lot of people moved away to different places.
TK: I know a lot of people who used the lockdown during the pandemic to work on music. Despite it being a very difficult situation culturally and socially there was kind of an icing on the cake for some creative people to work on new projects. Was that something that you were able to take advantage of?
CC: Yeah, definitely. I think Worth, the second Sculpture Club album, I wrote a lot of that during the initial lockdown. There were probably two or three songs that I had already on the backburner and then lockdown hit and that’s when I wrote a good amount of songs like “Gifts Of Light,” “Just One More,” and “Shed To Salt,” and went in and recorded all of that. And then after I had recorded all of that, I started demoing out almost all the stuff that became the most recent album, which is self-titled. It was mostly Sculpture Club stuff because for Choir Boy the beginning of the pandemic is when Adam moved, and then shortly after that everybody else went their way. So we were trying to find our footing and we put out our second album, Gathering Swans, in March 2020 and so all of our tour plans, everything that we had planned, it was maybe over a year’s worth of touring, it all got cancelled. We had just made the album and put it out and we were in tour mode and then it all got taken away and then everybody kind of moved away and then by the time touring came back we were backloaded for basically three years worth of touring, so it was just like “go go go go go” trying to get that album out there. So that was the Choir Boy experience with the pandemic in a sense.
TK: I was supposed to be doing a a Midwest tour that was supposed to start on March 20th or something like that, which was going to start in Minneapolis. And two days before I was going to get on the plane to fly out there I had to cancel the whole thing.
CC: Yeah, those early days were a trip. We were all hoping against hope that it would be over in a couple of weeks. Choir Boy was supposed to go tour Europe for a month and a half that we had to cancel, and then a full US tour and it just all fell apart.
TK: You were talking about using the time during the pandemic to demo the songs from Worth, and I’m wondering if your songwriting process tends to change album-to-album as far as Sculpture Club goes or is it fairly consistent?
CC: I think it’s for the most part it’s fairly consistent. I learn new little tricks here and there that I’m always trying to incorporate. I think, like anybody, you kind of find the new inspiration and that kind of influences it. But I feel like I always write songs. It’s messy but it’s always kind of the same way where it usually starts on the bass, or I’ll have a really simple riff or there will be a song that I just want to rip off entirely [laughs].
TK: Was bass your first instrument?
CC: Yeah, it was. It’s my “home instrument.” I don’t know what the right term is, but it was the first one that I learned. I love playing bass, it’s still one of my favorite things to do. Usually when people ask what instrument I play I usually just say, “I’m a bass player.” I could say that I play guitar in this band or sing in this other band, but I like to think of myself as a bass player. It’s an undervalued thing!
TK: I think so too.
CC: When you start playing there’s a weird physicality to it, which might sound pompous, but especially with post-punk music it’s always really fast paced and your arms cramp up so fast and your fingers get so tired. My god, dude!
TK: The first tour I did I was playing bass in Rosegarden Funeral Party, and they had this new song out at the time called “Once In A While,” so that was the big song that they were touring behind. And that was the song where the bass is just non-stop and so every time we got to that song in the setlist I’d be like, “Fuck, these next four minutes are going to suck.”
CC: Right, yeah, that’s what “Complainer” is for me when it comes to playing shows in Choir Boy! I wrote the song and originally I was going to use it for Sculpture Club and then it became a Choir Boy song, and I’m happy it did but it’s like… It’s just fast tempo and it’s all sixteenth notes and then to give myself a rest I have the most pompous Andy Rourke bassline that I could think of. We usually play that song towards the towards the end, and now it’s to the point where our sets are almost an hour long, which doesn’t sound like much but for a bunch of punks who are used to playing twenty-five minutes max it’s difficult sometimes! So we’ll play “Complainer” and then we’ll get to the end of the song and there’s been times where I’m picking and my hand just seizes up! I’m playing and it feels like my bones are popping out a little bit, but I’m just halfway through the song!
TK: You said that “Complainer” was almost used for Sculpture Club but used for Choir Boy. How how early on in the process do you realize if a song is for Sculpture Club or Human Leather or Choir Boy?
CC: Sometimes sonically you can tell pretty pretty right away. For the most part Choir Boy and Sculpture Club don’t sound much alike. So there’s some songs where it’s like, “This is obviously for this band.” But when wrote “Complainer,” Sculpture Club has a song called “Blooming” and I was like, “Oh, I’d like to write another riff and another song like that.” And I just kind of threw it together and I was like, “Oh this is cool.” But there was no thought behind releasing it, I just wrote it for fun. And then usually what happens is I’ll write music all all day, just write a ton of stuff and have demos that are just a bunch of dates as far as I can see. Then a band that I’m in will be like, “Oh hey we’re thinking about putting something together,” and I’ll just offer up everything I have and be like, “Hey, pick whatever.”
That’s kind of what happened with Human Leather. Adam mostly recorded the first Choir Boy album and I played some bass parts and some other stuff on it and then we did the Sunday Light 7″ single. I had already done the first Sculpture Club album and then some Fossil Arms stuff and I had this big library of stuff, and Adam had some leftover stuff as well. He wanted to get better at of mixing and producing and so we were just like, “Here’s a bunch of leftovers we didn’t use on any of our band stuff,” and then he mixed it all together and we took turns singing and coming up with stuff. So that album was all leftovers.
So sometimes there’s a really clear thing, sometimes I just offer up a bunch of stuff, and sometimes like for, sorry to keep going back to “Complainer,” but with that one I was like, “Oh hey Adam check out this thing that I wrote. I’m pretty excited about it.” And then he was like, “Oh will you send that to me?” And I did and then a couple days later he’s like, “Check this out, I added vocals.” And then I was like, “Oh cool, it’s a Choir Boy song! Great!”
TK: You can keep going back to that song, it’s one of my favorite Choir Boy songs.
CC: Thank you! I’m really proud of it. I’m glad it went the way that it went because Adam has a very… some of the stuff he thinks of, I’m like, “Wow, how did you hear that? I never heard that!” But yeah, sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it’s not, sometimes it doesn’t even work at all. I can bring something to the band and tell them, “Here’s a song I thought you guys would like that I wrote specifically for Choir Boy, I think this would work.” And we tinker with it and we’re like, “I think this is actually nothing!”
TK: What was the timeline like? First of all, how did Sculpture Club start? What is the timeline of going from Sculpture Club to working with Adam on Choir Boy?
CC: Sculpture Club started with me and my friend Madison. I played bass and she played drums in this garage rock band. It was like a real real party rock garage rock band, it was super fun and we had decided we wanted to do something where we try to tour and try to put out albums. And we started a two-piece of guitar and drums and we called it Jawwzz with two W’s and two Z’s! I was really into Wavves at the time. [laughs] So we put out a tape with that name and did some touring and then I started writing some songs that needed a bass because I was just playing guitar and singing, it that kind of thing. And we found a bass player named Chris Copelan. I had started writing more post-punk style songs, and had all these ideas and we started recording A Place To Stand, and I remember the night that this happened! We were at a show in Salt Lake at Diabolical Records and our friends were playing and we were standing outside, and I was really tentative about bringing up a name change for the band. But we all have a Jawwzz tattoo, we all have shark tattoos! And I was like, “Oh my god, how am I going to bring this up.” And then all of a sudden Madison brought it up! She was like, “Hey I was thinking about changing the band name.” And then all three of us were like, “Oh my god I was thinking the same thing. We need a totally new band.” So we changed the band name and put out A Place To Stand and that was in 2016.
I had known Adam a little bit because of where Jawwzz had recorded our first stuff. It was in a recording studio in Provo with our friend Bret, who played in a bunch of Adam’s bands, and Adam was doing this band called Bat Manors at the time, which I really loved. We played a show together, or we were at a show, and I told him, “I love your band if you ever want me to play bass, I’d love to play bass.” And then there were some personnel changes and then I came into that band and started playing bass and that was right at the time that he was working on Passive With Desire. So it was a similar type of situation where he had these songs, a lot of them were already recorded and I threw down some bass on it and then he decided to change the name of that band to Choir Boy and we put out that record, which I think was also in 2016. At that point we had just been friends from playing shows together and being in the scene and it’s all history from there!
TK: You talk about how at that time you were trying to make a conscious effort of going into more of a direction of post-punk and jangle pop. What what was your first exposure to that kind of music? Is that a kind of music that you grew up on, or is that something that you discovered on your own?
CC: Yeah it was more something I discovered. I had known the hits but my parents were rockers. They were really hair metal, I still love hair metal a lot and it’s weird how much that kind of stuff informs some of the stuff I do on guitar. But new wave wasn’t their vibe! So when I was a teenager, classic story: moved around a lot trying to fit in and find my people. I came to it from the hardcore emo and punk side of things where I was a major scene kid on MySpace. And I was getting really into John Hughes movies and loving those types of soundtracks. And then I remember I found New Order’s Technique on cassette at a garage sale, and then I started finding Modern English tapes at garage sales or at thrift stores and then my cousin introduced me to The Smiths and Morrissey and obviously it was all downhill from there!
TK: The rest is history!
CC: Yeah, the rest is history! But it was a slow thing and then I started making friends and starting bands in high school and the people I would play music with would start feeding me different music, so I moved away from the punk and hardcore stuff into dance-punk and no wave and that era of stuff. And that is just a step away from from know post-punk. So I kind of found it on my own with some help from my friends but it definitely wasn’t anything that was around the house growing up.
TK: My situation is similar in that for dad the world revolved around Guns n’ Roses. I remember when I was 17 I went through a really hardcore Korn phase for a year and they came out with their MTV Unplugged album that has Robert Smith on it. I knew The Cure’s hits, and I remember being like, “Oh great, the ‘Friday I’m In Love’ band,” and they do a version of “In Between Days” on it and Robert Smith starts singing and immediately I was like, “Fuck Korn, I have to find out who this guy is.”
CC: Yeah I had a similar thing about The Cure. I watched The Cure Icon special that they did in 2003 on MTV it had Blink-182, AFI, Deftones, and I was watching it because of AFI and Blink-182 and I knew The Cure in a similar way as you: “Oh yeah, the ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ band.” And then I watched it and I was like, “Oh my god.” At the time I was working at a Domino’s in Arizona and there was a super mall goth kid that I worked with and he burned me a CD of The Cure’s Join The Dots rarities compilation and gave it to me, and I was like, “Oh man, thank you so much!” But yeah, I think one of the first CDs my dad gave me was Krokus. My parents grew up in Southern California in the 80s, and my dad was like a party Sunset Strip dude and got me into bands like Iron Maiden, who was a big band for me. I got super into Kiss, who was another huge one for me when I was a kid. That’s the kind of stuff we were listening to in the house.
TK: I wanted to talk specifically about a couple of songs on the self-titled Sculpture Club record. I’ve been listening to it a ton over the last couple of days, and the two songs that really jump out to me are “Drive Too Fast,” which is probably my favorite Sculpture Club song at this point…
CC: Oh, thank you! I pitched that to Choir Boy. We were working on stuff and I was like, “Oh check it out, I have this crazy riff and I have this vocal melody.” I kind of wrote that vocal melody thinking I can’t sing this like, this is something for Adam. And I pitched it to them pretty fully formed, and they were like, “Oh, this is awesome, you should keep it!”
TK: That’s probably my favorite Sculpture Club song. The other song is “Used Too.” What was the development of that one like?
CC: Oh yeah, that was an early demo that I wrote for for the. Do you know Adam Green from The Moldy Peaches? After The Moldy Peaches he did a bunch of solo stuff and it’s all very kind of bizarre, and when I wrote that chord progression, it sounded a little bit like Morrissey but it really reminded me of Adam Green. So I thought I would try to write this weird little ditty that’s not trying to be clever or anything and at the end I thought to do a big guitar thing, that’s the hair metal influence I mentioned earlier! So it’s a mix of Adam Green and Big Country, that kind of guitar stuff.” I had originally written that chord progression and I rgoufgr, “Oh this kind of sounds like those two things.” As far as the lyrics go, I have complex, well not complex anymore, but very not great relationship with my immediate family and those lyrics just came out. I was like, “Oh this is it, I guess.”
But that was one of the first sings like “Cursed Or Hexed” that was recorded separately from the album and they were recorded pretty soon after I finished Worth. I had this whole plan for over the pandemic, I was going to do a series of split seven inches where I would do the A-side and then one of my friend’s bands would do the B-side. It was going to be this huge collection and each cover would be like a piece of a puzzle so you have to have all of them to create this big artwork and it totally just fell flat. I recorded two songs and I was like, “Oh my god I’m so tired.” But I’m really proud of that song. We don’t play it so much live. We did on the first tour but we don’t play it so much anymore.
TK: Bring it back, bring it back!
CC: Like I said earlier, Sculpture Club kind of falls in this weird in between of being post-punk and it’s a little goth but it’s also very jangly but it can be kind of indie at times and so depending on who we’re touring with, I have enough of a plethora of songs where I can be like, “Okay let’s tailor a a cool setlist to like make sure that it flows and the vibe matches well.” And so far “Used Too” hasn’t made it into any of the recent cuts.
TK: My wife is the person who introduced me to Choir Boy, which is how I discovered Sculpture Club and Human Leather and that whole tapestry of interconnected bands. And every time that I’ve seen Choir Boy since Gathering Swans came out, y’all don’t play “Toxic Eye!” What’s up with that?
CC: It’s a great question. We have tried and tried to crack that one. So that was a song that we didn’t write in the room as a band. I think mostly Adam and Michael wrote that song together and it was kind of written on the computer for the most part. And believe me, we’ve tried! Every time we get together we’re always like, “Let’s try to play ‘Toxic Eye,'” but something about it just always falls flat and we can’t quite figure out what it is that doesn’t seem right. We’re always bringing it up. I’m sad that we don’t play it either, and people ask us about it all the time. It’s kind of crazy because it was one of the singles from the album.
TK: So you have this West Coast tour coming up with Sculpture Club in August as well as a few dates on the West Coast with Choir Boy in September. How do you approach being on the road in different projects in such a short amount of time?
CC: A wing and a prayer! [laughs] It’s like you were saying, you’ve done double duty and I think just coming from the DIY scene I’m very used to playing in a lot of bands at once. Even touring when I was filling in on SRSQ’s band we did a run with Choir Boy, so I was doing SRSQ and then Choir Boy back-to-back. It’s exhausting but luckily with this the Sculpture Club shows end in the middle of August and then there’ four or five shows with Provoker at the beginning of September, so there’s enough of a break to relax. Right now since I have a Dallas lineup of Sculpture Club we practice pretty often and we’ll go out to San Antonio and Houston every few months and play shows regionally, but with Choir Boy usually what I’ll do is a month before we play shows, I’ll try to put together my dream setlist of songs that we want to play and I’ll just run them non-stop, yeah just to get my chops back up, so to speak. And with Choir Boy it’s not necessarily easier, it’s just different. Since we’re all in different places we all have to be like, “These are the songs we’re going to play, these are the ones we’re going to learn.” So everybody comes very prepared and we can just lock back in pretty fast. But it’s also muscle memory with those songs.
TK: With all of these various bands and projects you’ve been in over the years, I have to ask: will there ever be another Bears On Parade album?
CC: Whoa, curveball! Nobody knows about that band! Honestly, maybe? Originally I started that, or made those tapes and that record, as a pressure release valve. I had this loop pedal, I had some synths, I just wanted to drone out and pretend that I’m in Mount Eerie. It was a “don’t think about it” type thing. And maybe I do another kind of droney release in me somewhere. I haven’t thought about it in a long time, honestly!
Sculpture Club play The Knockout in San Francisco on August 5th. Buy tickets here
Choir Boy plays Harlow’s in Sacramento on September 12th. Buy tickets here
