We recently connected with Cal Stamp and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Cal, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
This solo record I’m about to release is the first time I’ve stepped forward as my own artist. It’s my first time playing my own songs and singing with my own voice. For the bulk of my career, I was a sideman attempting to leverage my skills and sensibilities to help realize and elevate the vision of a front man.
In those circumstances, you have to find a way to strike the right balance between your own creative needs and those of the group. I’m not sure I was always successful in that department.
Particularly as a writer, I have a tendency to over-impose my will. I have a pretty clear vision, and it can be tough for me to deviate from that. In the past, I think I’ve written and campaigned for songs that were good songs but maybe weren’t the right songs for that band and that moment.
That was not a concern this time around. I just followed my impulses wherever they wanted to go. That was the whole job.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Before this album, I was the guitarist and a principle songwriter for the alternative rock band Spirit Animal. I joined the band in the early 2010s. We signed to Wind Up Records in 2015 and moved to Atlantic Records in 2017. We toured all over the country, supporting bands like Third Eye Blind, Fitz & the Tantrums, Incubus, and The Cult. We released a full-length in 2018 called Born Yesterday — an ironic nod to the fact that we had been a band for nearly a decade before our major-label debut.
Atlantic dropped Spirit Animal a week after our record came out. We continued to tour, however, and re-released the album via The Orchard, changing the title to Reborn Yesterday. Things were more or less copacetic until March of 2020. The pandemic sort of blew our business apart, but it also gave me an opportunity to strike out on my own, which, if I’m being honest, has always been something I wanted.
Have you ever had to pivot?
I’d say this solo record is a pretty big pivot.
As COVID began to loosen its grip, I flew down to Nashville to work with producer Ryan Petersen on a batch of songs I’d been sitting on throughout the pandemic. Ryan let me sleep on an air mattress on the floor of his studio. We made the record in two weeks.
Ryan and I are both big Tom Petty fans. Whenever Petty was asked about his own musical influences, his answer was usually simple: the radio. Same for us, only we were drawing from the era of radio that Petty participated in rather than the one he grew up listening to — the era that gave us hits like “Jack & Diane,” “Born in the USA,” and “Boys of Summer.”
I started releasing singles from the album in the spring of 2022. It’s been really fun to watch these songs take on lives of their own. I got to perform them via livestream from Rolling Stone’s offices in New York. Apple Music has been very generous with their editorial playlisting. My third single, “Trapped in Paradise,” has seen some airplay on stations like DC101, and it even showed up on NOW That’s What I Call Music, Vol. 84 as part of their “What’s Next?” series
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
The goal is to always get better. To always be exploring and challenging myself and trying to expand my horizons as a writer and a performer and an artist. Bob Dylan says you should always be in the act of becoming — it’s when you feel like you’ve “arrived” someplace that you’re in trouble. 
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.calstampmusic.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/calstampmusic/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CalStampMusic
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/CalStampMusic
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/calstampmusic
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3AURty7KT8zN88eXkVAeg7?si=2W-Tll61SmWNF9wHUDsz9w
Image Credits
Photos by Anna Lee and Gaelen Smith