Camp Trash is a real band and I had the pleasure of interviewing them! Check out what the band had to say about their debut album, touring, and Halloween featuring photos from their show at The Saint in Asbury Park last weekend.
Hi! Thanks for taking the time to chat with My Life Backstage! Can you introduce yourself and what you do in the band?
My name is Keegan and I write/play lead guitar in the band Camp Trash. I’m transcribing for the band in the van.
You’re currently on tour with Future Teens and Rat Tally – how’s that been?
It’s been a fucking treat. Both bands are truly incredible, and we’re legitimate fans of both of them. We really believe that Rat Tally is going to be huge, and you probably won’t see them be the first band on a bill for very long. Also: they can party.
Our friend Brian Fallon came out to see us even though he couldn’t come to our show, brought his wife and kid along, and talked a lot of shit about Bruce Springsteen (He said, “The Boss? More like The Employee, am I right?” and we all shook our heads and said “No, Brian.”)
Weirdly, every time we play Boston, it’s the fucking greatest. They buy a ton of merch, they buy us beers, and the room is always full of people singing along. We love Boston.
Future Teens are totally dialed every night, and really delightful and funny from stage. It’s a huge bonus that every person in both bands are incredibly kind and sweet. Rat Tally can really hang: we closed down two bars with them after the Boston show the other night. We have had a great time hanging out with them, and we feel lucky to be a part of such a great lineup.
Your debut full length The Long Way, The Slow Way came out in July – what’s the response been like so far?
We’ve been really blown away by how kind and enthusiastic people have been. The band members are spread out all across the U.S., so it takes us longer to write and record things because we do so much remotely. It’s so dope to finally get to release songs you’ve been working on for a few years, and having some people sing along to these songs at shows is a really wild feeling.
What’s your favorite track on the album and why?
Bryan: “Poured Out,” because I like the way we frankensteined it together. It’s kind of a heavy song, but it’s got a cool structure. There’s three separate parts and I like that all of them hit.
Levi: “Feel Something.” It feels like the good part at the end of a movie after the bad stuff has happened.
Keegan: “Lake Erie Boys.” It was a song Bryan had started several years ago, and I loved it but we could just never find a way to structure the song in a way that made sense/felt like it did the song justice. I spent a lot of time working on it for the album because I knew I wanted to include it, and I really love the version we came up with.
Alex: “Enough Explaining” probably because it’s the most emotional song, and the guitar and drum dynamics really add to the tension.
Okay, I have to ask – what sparked the phrase ‘Camp Trash Is A Real Band And I’m In It’?
It’s a shirt our friend Jay (@listenupnerds on Twitter) designed for us when we were just getting started as a band. We really thought we would self-release Downtiming, so we teased music really early. But when we signed to Count Your Lucky Stars, that timeline got longer. People kept asking when we were going to release music, and we kept promising it would come eventually. It ended up being like, a yearlong rollout. Twitter people started joking that we were a fake band, and all we could do was tell them our band was real, we promise, and Jay took that idea and made a shirt out of it. We feel lucky to be here making music and to get to share it with people, and we believe that it truly is the support we have gotten from friends and fans that has made this possible for us, so we always want to emphasize that everyone who has shared our music or come to a show is a major part of the band, and we’re deeply grateful.
Since it’s October I want to end this on a fun note – what’s your favorite Halloween costume you’ve ever been?
Keegan: One time I went to a party dressed as my friend Jared.
Levi: I was a box once. I was 7 or so and didn’t have a Halloween costume and was really sad about it, so my dad cut holes in a cardboard box and taped a Febreze bottle and a toilet paper roll to it and I felt like I had the coolest costume in the neighborhood.
Bryan: I one time went as a loofah and went to a hardcore Halloween show where no one committed to wearing a costume. So imagine me, showing up to a hardcore show in October, where everyone is wearing regular cool guy clothes, and I’m dressed as a fucking loofah.
Alex: I was really into inline skating and the movie Brink so I said I was a professional inline skater and just wore my roller blades so I could go from house to house super fast.
Thanks again for chatting with us! Anything else you’d like to add?
The next record is going to be 55 songs long, all “weird” songs about each state and territory in the United States. It’s a scathing indictment of American colonialism and the failures of this country to not replicate the terror and violence of British colonialism. It will be recorded in a single day: July 4th, 2023. It will be released July 5th, 2023. This is not a joke.
To keep up with Camp Trash, you can follow them on Instagram and Twitter and don’t forget to stream The Long Way, The Slow Way wherever you listen to music.