Catching Up With... Copeland

When Copeland was gearing up for the release of its fourth album (which dropped this week), You Are My Sunshine, the band decided to tackle the publicity angle Dark Knight-style. Frontman Aaron Marsh spearheaded the effort to pirate fan traffic in August's viral campaign phenomenon.

The sequence of events is a little confusing, but it would seem as though Copeland caught wind of the launch of a promotional, viral website for Fall Out Boy, hijacked the domain name (the mirror site added a 'U' to make it CitizensFourOurBetterment.com), and thus led droves of unsuspecting FOB fans into a cryptic, lyric-ridden rabbit hole. The maze of images and phrases finally dumped the reader onto YouAreMySunshineAlbum.com—revealing the title of the new Copeland album and its release date (Oct.14). The thing is, though, it took a minute for people to realize that this wasn't the release info of the anticipated Fall Out Boy record.

Confused? We were too—and you've been spared the details about an "accidental" connection with an FOB fansite, Peter Wentz's wife, the pamphlet, Copeland's phony professor, a backwards song on YouTube and a made-up nonprofit organization. (Take the abridged version. Trust us.)  Luckily we caught up with Marsh recently, and he cleared up a few things. We talked about his goals for the viral campaign, the "thesis" of You Are My Sunshine, his thoughts on the cultural standard that birthed the album and the "underbelly of love."

Paste: About the viral campaign: How did this all get started? Why Fall Out Boy?
Aaron Marsh: We had the idea to make this kind of ominous, online maze that would clue people in that we had a record. And the whole way people would get into the maze was by clicking, you know, being at a website, [when] they thought they were somewhere else—by making these kind of dummy sites, like a fake version of Absolute Punk or a fake version of, you know, whatever sites that might have Copeland fans at them. Then they would unknowingly be derailed into our little maze. And then the fact that it got tangled up with Fall Out Boy was really just kind of a circumstance. They launched their campaign, like, six hours before ours was about to go up, so we real quick threw together a dummy page of their viral site…. We really weren’t expecting it to take off as quickly as it did. We were kind of expecting it to be more of a slow-grow type of thing. But yeah, it wound up overnight kind of spiraling out of control.

Paste: And are you seeing the kind of results that you wanted from the viral scheme?
Marsh: We wanted it to be the kind of thing that, you know, people didn’t really immediately realize that it was hinting at a Copeland record. We wanted it to be more of a—a little bit more artistic and ominous. So, you know, it wasn’t—and I guess the point is to get the word out about the record, and it did that. So, that’s fine. Yeah, I suppose the end result was what we wanted, but it just kind of got there a different way.

Paste: And, if you’ll excuse the pun, was there any fall out afterward? From Fall Out Boy or its fans?
Marsh: I don’t really know about their fans. Probably any fan of Fall Out Boy who would get upset about something like that wouldn’t be a Copeland fan no matter what—just because our music isn’t really close to the same… So I wasn’t really too concerned that we’d, you know, piss off the Fall Out Boy diehards. But the band itself was not remotely upset by it. They were quite tickled actually.

Paste: The band's biography on your website says that the forthcoming album is a manifestation of your preoccupation with "the line between the lovely and the creepy," that this is your own, unique "metaphorical thesis" on the cultural standard of "You Are My Sunshine." What’s the thesis? What argument is the record making?
Marsh: If you think about the song “You Are My Sunshine,” it’s kind of very lovely and kind of childlike. Lots of people have said that the title of the record reminds them of their childhood or a lullaby. But as an adult, if you read the latter verses, or the third and fourth verses of the song, it’s actually really creepy and kind of has a pretty twisted view of love, especially coming from someone who’s obviously in love. We assume that the song was written earnestly. It’s actually pretty wounded-sounding and pretty dark, which is, you know, like, the complete opposite of how people think of the song. So I think the thing that struck me about it was the fact that something could be so lovely to so many people but have, like, this kind of darker layer. And I think that’s very true of love in general, that, you know, love is something that is, you know, very commonly—has a very positive connotation, probably almost always has a positive connotation, but definitely has, like, kind of a darker underbelly to it. As I’m sure everyone has experienced. Yeah, I think the metaphor would probably be more about love than society itself. Does that make sense?

Paste: Yeah, so while we’re talking about what kind of message the album is putting out there, what about a more personal message? I've pulled the following quote, also from your website: "When people think of us, they think 'very pretty soft rock,' but we've been slowly growing up and wanting to not just be pretty music." Is You Are My Sunshine trying to prove something to its listeners? Or non-listeners?
Marsh: No, I don’t think we’re trying to prove anything at all. I think it’s just more of, for us, like we have a need to branch out. And we have a need to make music that isn’t the same thing we’ve done on three records in a row. Not that the music on You Are My Sunshine isn’t pretty sounding, because it definitely is, but we wanted to not just be pretty. We wanted for it to have another layer. We wanted it to have—like, you know, if you isolate this lyric and think about this one part, you know, this could be interpreted as something much darker than the song really feels. Just stuff like that. We wanted nuances of it to not just be lovely. We wanted to, like, have depth, have some other colors, and, uh, not just sunshine, I guess.

Paste: And do you think you’ve achieved it, with this record?
Marsh: I think so. It’s fairly subtle. And if I’m the only person that sees the other layers, then that’s fine, because, like I said, this is more a personal goal than trying to prove something to our listeners, or non-listeners.