Captain Kidd

Captain Kidd, who calls Columbus home, have been traveling around Ohio and the Midwest playing festivals like Brite Winter Fest in Cleveland, club shows in Chicago and opening shows for Afroman.

The Indie pop/dance-alternative band began from the ashes of vocalist and guitar player Nathan, guitar player Eric and bass player Andrew’s last project, adding Nick on the drums and vocals, Stew on synth and vocals and Pat on synth. The boys are from the Cleveland/Canton area with Pat from Boston.

They had performed in front of thousands of people leading up to #12Fest on April 12, 2014, with roughly 22,000 people in attendance. We chatted with them about their band and their newest music video “Freaky Love”:

HCOU: So your band was one of the opener’s at #12Fest this past weekend, how’d you land that gig? What was it like?

CK: We did unspeakable things to land this gig—such bone-chillingly depraved stuff that we’ve actually repressed the entire month leading up to the show. But, the promoting company that puts on #FEST heard “Freaky Love” and thought we’d be a good fit to complement the main acts.

#12Fest was surreal. It’s one thing to play a show for a couple hundred of your friends and regular fans, but it’s an entirely different feeling to be playing in front of thousands of strangers.

A big highlight for us was Bongzilla—basically just a beer bong with six tubes—something we initially only considered a stage prop but turned into a great way to meet and interact with a bunch of the people we’d played in front of.

HCOU: What genre of music do you guys create? Is there a special process?

CK: We think we’d definitely classify ourselves in general as a dance band, though we have a hard time labeling ourselves with any particular subgenre. 

A lot of bands we get compared to tend to fall under the indie-dance label so we’d say that’s probably our best guess.

Most of our new song material comes to us during waves of inspiration, and we’re constantly refining the way we turn that material into a complete song.  We tend to start with some sort of a melody first and then add an interesting rhythm under it.  Everything else from there tends to fall into place in no certain order, and the songs often evolve on their own.

HCOU: Why’d you choose this genre and develop the name ‘Captain Kidd’?

CK: We wanted to pursue a more dance-oriented direction because we felt that getting people to move was one of our biggest strengths as songwriters, and we really wanted to focus on that and develop a more concrete sound for our music. 

Coming up for the name in our band was a huge pain because our last project’s name—“Dyslexic Turtles”—was legitimately awful.  We drafted up probably a couple hundred potential band names, but for the longest time nothing really worked until “Captain Kidd and the Great White Mako” somehow shortened itself to “Captain Kidd” and stuck.

This particular night Eric and Nathan were at the Steak and Shake in Mansfield on their way back to Ohio State.

HCOU: Do you think performing at #12Fest will open doors to other opportunities?

CK: Definitely.  #12Fest is a great opportunity for the opening artists because it gives them such a large platform to present their music.  We think for us in particular, being on the bill allowed us to demonstrate that we can complement a variety of styles of music and that our music works really well for that type of venue and crowd.

Not only are all the boys super attractive, they’re super talented. Here’s the premiere of their new video “Freaky Love.” Cue the #boyband #fangirl tweets.

Follow Captain Kidd on Twitter @CapnKidd, Facebook, and email bookings to captainkiddbooking@gmail.com!

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