Usual suspects

Lead guitarist Colin Willis, bassist Mike Leland, drummer Garrett LaDuke, and singer and guitar player Callum Burgener have released a demo, an album and an EP since they formed Common Mishap in the summer of 2015. Looking back, the bandmates think the demo and album were rushed, but that their latest musical work, the EP Flashes and Floods, captures the band’s sound—a pairing of high energy music with dismal lyrics.

According to Willis, everyone in the group is drawn to “downer stuff” when it comes to creating and playing music. Burgener said he now identifies as atheist, and a lot of his lyrical inspiration comes from no longer being religious.

“The song ‘Snakes for Sons’ is kind of that,” he said, “It kind of tells it from that viewpoint of someone who used to have that background. The lyric ‘Why have you forsaken me?’ is kind of like saying ‘I trusted you. I believed in this, and now I’m realizing it’s kind of a load of crap.'”

LaDuke also said that “Snakes for Sons” was written in under half an hour. Willis wrote the opening riff and intro, which starts out slowly. He said it’s the first song in the band’s history where everyone wrote their own parts rather than one of them writing stuff for everyone.

“Before we wrote this song, we kind of had the idea we wanted a more progressive song—where it’s not just verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge,” said Burgener. “We just wanted something where it evolves and … never revisits the same stuff. It just keeps building and building.”

Building not only momentum but also speed is key in the song. LaDuke said after the introduction, he doesn’t play the same drum beat twice and speeds up every four measures.

The song “Monsune” on Flashes and Floods is another Common Mishap song where the ending sounds nothing like the intro. It begins with single note picking and ends with a guitar solo Willis said he wrote in the studio. “I was feeling nervous about what I was writing for my guitar parts because I was feeling like it wasn’t that complex, but to be able to do something more complex like that and have a bunch of different melodies in one riff was really cool,” he said.

According to Leland, since working on their EP, the bandmates have become very particular about how they want their songs to sound. They spent just as much time recording five songs on Flashes and Floods as they did recording 11 songs on their album Aphasia at Dogwater Studios. Willis said the band has learned patience when it comes to songwriting and recording—and the songs they plan on creating in the future will be even more focused on writing structure, vocals and tone.

But the bandmates are still proud of their body of work to date. For LaDuke, some past songs have even come to take on new meaning over time.

“There are songs that we’ve written two to three years ago that connect more with me now than they did back then,” said Burgener, “It’s like you wrote it for yourself in the future.”