Carpool

Sometimes, it’s good to take a step back and remember why you started doing something in the first place. That’s what Carpool decided to with My Life In Subtitles, the four-piece’s second full-length (and first for SideOneDummy). As such, the majority of these songs were written by the band’s two mainstays, Chris ‘Stoph’ Colasanto and Tommy Eckerson, who formed Carpool in Rochester, NY in 2018. The result is that the band—now completed by drummer Alec Westover and bassist Torri Ross—have made a record that both harks back to the purity of its beginnings but which also evolves their sound at the same time. After a period in which bandmembers came and went, it’s a streamlining of intentions, a chance to regroup, re-find and reassert their identity once again. 
“We wanted to bring it back to the band's roots,” says Colasanto, “and the original concept of why we started doing it—just me and Tommy writing songs together. It felt like we had so many members of the band at one point that there were too many cooks in the kitchen almost. This is more genuine and authentic.”
“I think a big thing, too,” adds Eckerson, “was that the house Stoph was living in while we were recording the album, and leading up to it when we were rehearsing for that, had an upright piano in it. So Stoph sat down with the piano—which is where the piano intro and some of the softer dynamics came to fruition. We were really making an effort to have dynamics on the album where there are low lows and high highs in terms of the instrumentation and the themes.”