The four members of COIN are outside Barista Parlor Golden Sound in the Gulch, where the line stretches out the door. Their New York-based management reps had assured me this location, which is a mere two years old, is the Nashville band’s favorite local coffee shop. With the looming presence of another Gulch skyscraper being erected nearby, we all have a good laugh at this.
“Two months ago it wasn’t even there,” says guitarist Joe Memmel.
If you want to visit a real COIN coffee shrine, swing by the McDonald’s on Murfreesboro Pike, where “real-ass people go,” according to drummer Ryan Winnen. Instead we drive over to Eighth and Roast, another coffeehouse the band says they come to sometimes. We split a community table with a crew of students, their laptops and textbooks open.
Founded in 2012, COIN came about shortly after Memmel and frontman Chase Lawrence sat next to each other on the first day of a music theory class at Belmont University.
“I asked the guy on my right [if he writes music], and he said no,” says Lawrence. “And then I was like, process of elimination, who else is left?”
The pair picked up Winnen fresh off getting canned from a merch company — something to do with not shipping orders fast enough, Winnen says. Zachary Dyke, on bass, didn’t even play the instrument at the time. He was a videographer commissioned in the summer of 2013 to make the band’s first promo clip. He ended up in COIN when fate intervened in the form of a midday jam session that ensued as an escape from the day’s triple-digit temperatures.
Around the table, the band laughs at a lonely Lawrence’s anecdote of getting rejected from his first co-write attempt. They laugh at Winnen’s ignoble packing job and their unreleased first music video. After signing in 2014 to Columbia imprint Startime International, a pet project of Columbia A&R rep Isaac Green, the band toured extensively, promoting their 2015 self-titled full-length debut. As a result, they have a fraternal comfort around each other: easy laughter, tag-teamed sentences. And though you’d be hard-pressed to find a previous interview with them all together, they handle it like pros, giving roundtable right of way from one person to another as each speaks.
Lawrence, 25, is a natural-born frontman: loquacious and boyish, the artiste with a curly mop of blond hair and a lean, narrow jawline. Memmel, 23, is grounded, his long hair pulled up and smashed under a knit cap. Winnen, also 23, is somehow the adult in the room, with a puppeteer’s control of the conversation — he’s the guy who’s good with parents. And then there’s Dyke, 24, the brainiac: a producer-turned-band-member who is last to speak, but does so with an incisive depth beyond his years.
Commercially (and creatively, they now say), the band’s Startime debut was a collective disappointment. Looking back, Lawrence admits that much of the record was contrived — a young band paying homage to its idols while trying to focus-group a product that would sell.
“I was like, ‘What is working right now on the internet? What is popular?’ ” he recalls. “I just copied that formula, and it didn’t work for us. It wasn’t real.”
Recorded in East Nashville with “over the shoulder” producer Jay Joyce — who has given a rock-guitar edge to Brothers Osborne, Keith Urban and Carrie Underwood — it was nevertheless exactly what a young band needed at the time. If they had questions, Joyce had answers. The problem was the product, they believe. While blending zeitgeisty indie-rock inclinations and ’80s-nodding synths seemed original in the band’s early days — at least to them — by 2015 the scene was an oversaturated glut of like-minded fusion acts. Walk the Moon, Bleachers and countless more were competing with similar sounds, and COIN’s got lost in the fight for a narrow market share.
“It’s hard to be a new band in 2016,” Winnen explains. “Overthink the sounds, and overthink, ‘Well, this person put out this kind of song, and they’re in our world. Do we sound like them? Is it something that people are going to like?’
“I don’t dislike [the COIN album],” he continues. “It was honest to where we were. But I don’t think that we were self-aware or musically aware of what this thing was going to be yet.”
So now COIN is refocusing. They’re going back to go forward, looking to their first EP, the self-released Saturdays, which was recorded in an unheated garage in the dead of winter 2012. It was a sound and songwriting style Lawrence calls “dumb” — as in, something intuitive and without the second-guessing cerebral assembly of their commercially ambitious debut. Now the band is taking more ownership of the music, and asking themselves better questions in hopes of finding better answers.
“For the first time in a long time with this band,” Lawrence says, “I’m comfortable with doing what comes naturally.”
COIN cites The Cure as a longtime influence, and lately the band’s been jonesing on more guitar-driven music. Memmel and Winnen are gorging on blue-collar classic rockers Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Arctic Monkeys and The Cars are also in heavy rotation. The guitars are coming up, they say, even as Lawrence, who’s seemingly never met a synthesizer he didn’t like, is experimenting more with actual pianos.
With this infusion of new influences and textures comes a flurry of new recordings, the lead of which is orphan track “Talk Too Much,” released in May. As of this writing, it alternates with Glass Animals’ “Life Itself” as the top-requested song on SiriusXM’s Alt Nation station, with three weeks in the pole position. The band’s sophomore LP, tentatively titled How Will You Know If You Never Try?, is slated for a spring release. The band recorded it at Nashville’s Sound Emporium, as well as studios in New York and L.A.
But beyond the sound and the recording process itself, the subject matter is changing. COIN, a band formed by college students, has graduated, and with that comes the post-grad quarter-life crisis. They refer to it as the fear of turning 25, which might inspire eye-rolls from older adults. But when probed, Lawrence, Dyke, Winnen and Memmel say they are wrestling with mortality while striving for success.
“Your perception of ‘making it’ or ‘success,’ it just changes, the closer you get, to what you thought it was,” Dyke offers.
“It’s a moving goal,” Lawrence adds.
Memmel: “There’s never a ceiling on the success thing. It always keeps on unfolding.”
“Ultimately, all that we really, really want is stability,” Winnen concludes. “Everything feels fragile right now, like it could be stripped away very quickly.”
Even as these sentiments are coming out in their music, there are other, more concrete examples of COIN’s boys becoming men. Early next year, both Dyke and Winnen will move to Los Angeles. Memmel, going his own way, recently purchased a home in East Nashville. Lawrence is in a relationship with a girl he believes is the one.
“It just seems like progress for us,” Dyke says. “That feels like progress to me, the fact that I’m craving something that will push me harder.”
As Nashville continues to grow, it feels smaller and smaller. They miss the anonymity they once had, and each longs for diverse relationships outside of music: fashion, film, architecture, whatever. As adults, they need something more, and each member is looking for it in a different way.
We’re wrapping up as two Belmont students at the other end of the table recognize them. Turns out they’re starting a band, they say: We Are Not Antelopes. “Math rock,” one explains.
Lawrence launches in, asking them about influences and offering tidbits of advice on guerilla marketing. Memmel is encouraging, relating the band’s own history at Belmont. And as half of the group prepares to leave the city as their second full-length wraps, the circle is closed. The next great Nashville band may just have formed at Belmont, and it’s their time, because COIN is moving on.
