Written by Angela An and Cheryl Lee
LAUNDRY DAY, a New York city based American pop rock band, performed at Rice University for KTRU’s 33rd annual KTRU Outdoor Show. The high school friends (Sawyer Nunes (vocalist and drums), Jude Ciulla-Lupkin (vocalist), Henry Weingartner (guitarist), Henry Pearl (bassist)) turned four piece band have grown a mass cult following, and have garnered even more fans through their internet presence, who then discover their eclectic and unique sound, angsty lyrics, and even more vibrant personalities. LAUNDRY DAY dives into their musical sound and creative processes, favorite memories, and even gives us a tiny glance into their upcoming new album.
Q: What artists or bands do you individually look up to? Who are you inspired by?
Sawyer Nunes (SN): The first album I got was Jack Johnson, The Curious George Soundtrack. It’s really great, but I loved Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles growing up, and then I kind of got into hip-hop in high school.
Jude Ciulla-Lupkin (JC): When we were soundchecking, someone was holding a baby and they were like, “Do you guys know any Wiggle songs?” And I was like, “Yes.” Wiggles was my upbringing. I used to have action figures that I brought everywhere. At the time, I don’t think I knew I would be in a four piece band myself, but maybe it was meant to be. And then honestly, I recently rewatched High School Musical, which is another big inspiration. It reminded me how ingrained that is in my tastes and the music they reference in that, whether it’s like the musical theater influence, [and] honestly there’s a lot of R&B and hip-hop influence in that soundtrack and the production. As silly as it sounds, that’s in my blood a little bit.
Henry Weingartner (HW): My parents for some reason got invited to Sting’s birthday party one year, and he performed. The entire thing was three hours, and Sting would play two songs with different musicians. The best one to them was he played “Wrapped Around Your Finger” with Rufus Wayne, and from then on, my dad would play Want One a lot. When we got derailed coming here, on our flight from Dallas to Houston, I listened to the same Rufus Wayne song (“Go Or Go Ahead”) over and over again.
Henry Pearl (HP): For me, my dad played Bernardo in West Side Story, so there was that sort of theater element, but he also played a lot of like Police. My mom was super into Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Carly Simon, etc. In the car, I think the thing everyone agreed on was like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Coldplay.
Q: What is your creative process when it comes to songwriting?
JC: We’re actually working on our album right now…We were actually just in LA, which..as loyal to New York as we are, the whole music industry is out there. So we were just there for a couple of weeks. But basically, every day we went to a different studio with different producers and played them some of the demos that we’ve been working on, but then made a lot of stuff from scratch with all of these different people and got to collaborate more than we ever have. But really, everything starts with the four of us just kind of brainstorming what we wanna make and just throwing paint at the wall. We have a lot of unfinished songs that kind of then just leads you to the finished ideas. So right now, the album is coming along and we’re at the phase where we have sort of the full written songs that we really like, and now we’re taking a lot of time working with producers and trying to refine the songs and you know, making track lists and all these different things. This one’s different from all the other ones that we’ve done too, just because we’re being a lot more collaborative than we ever had, which is fun.
SN: I think that’s a good way to describe it. A big thing that we always talk about is that it’s not like traditional band set up, because I feel like most kids our age learned to produce before they learned how to be in a band. Obviously that’s not the case for everyone, but we had so much fun making music on the computer together with each other that actually playing it live and being in a live band was kind of an afterthought. So because we all learned how to produce before we learned how to be in a band together, we’ll all play like different instruments where we’ll all have ideas for different things.
HP: Yeah. I think that really speaks to our origin story a little bit which is so classic, which is just that Jude wrote a song for his girlfriend and they just recorded it, and it’s all just been about the studio, but then also being able to play shows, like I think Sawyer says this a lot, like the celebration of that.
JC: Yeah, so we kind of produce like we’re almost making a rap song, like we’re making a beat in the computer like a hip hop producer might do it. Sometimes it is but not a lot of the time we’re sitting around on a guitar writing out the song, like writing out the song. It kind of makes itself and then we write over it like as if we’re writing verses. We actually just worked with an artist that was really fun to work with, d4vd. We just did a session with him, and it was really cool because he just had so much energy and worked really quick and that’s how we like to work too. So we had already made a couple of beats for him and played them for him, and as soon as the first one started playing he was just humming along and came up with sh*t on the spot and that’s our vibe too.
Q: You have quite a different sound than other artists - you don’t really fit yourself into a mold of expectations when it comes to artistry. What came about deciding that and how do you see this artistic vision growing in the next few years?
JC: We just played the album for some of our friends for the first time, one of which is here with us and he was just telling me, “It’s just really cool to see it go to the next level.” It’s us being a little bit older, us being a little more wiser, and us having new influences. I think that’ll keep happening and that’s what keeps us going. We are very much fed by the new thing we discover, to want to make something new and make something we are inspired by. Everytime we make an album, we kind of have a list of albums that we’re sort of modeling after, and every time it’s different. And then you finish the album and you sort of get the resolution of having been inspired by those things, and so you get to move onto the next thing. We’re so in the weeds of what we’re doing right now that who knows, but in a few months when we’re done with this album, there’s going to be the next thing, and we’re gonna keep making these albums. Hopefully every album has a different story behind it and we don’t get to the point where they all start to sound the same.
SN: As you grow older, you’re going to sound different. When I go back and listen to our old music, our voices and just like, our choices sound so so different, so even if we were trying to do the same thing over the course of eight years, it would end up sounding probably pretty different. I think on top of that, each time we make an album, we’re trying to do something sonically different. So that combined with just growing up and getting a little bit older I think is what makes people kind of feel like this is so genre-bending or all over the place. Like, even if we were trying to make six bedroom pop albums, I feel like just by growing up, you’d sound a little different over time. That combined with also going in with the intention of like - we were really hip-hop influenced by this album, and now we wanna be more rock, or now we want to be blah blah blah - like our voices will sound different no matter what genre we choose, so there’s some of that element that goes into it, too. So not all of it is super intentional that we want to be completely off the wall, but I think we’re going into it maybe differently than most artists, and we’re always inspired by different things. Even if you’re trying to make the same thing, you can never really make the same thing twice, you know? So, I think we try to lean into that.
HP: I would just add that the story changes as well: who you are and what you want to say. And we get conceptual and make sh*t up all the time, but we like each album to represent where we were at.
Q: Sawyer is now on drums - has that changed any dynamics or synergy you have as a band? What was it like having that transition from rhythm guitar/keys to drums?
SN: Obviously, just to address the elephant in the room, losing a band member was really tough, especially since we had been with Etai since high school. So, the emotional part of it felt super weird, like, we had played with other drummers and our friends who were great as well. But it felt weird because it was like losing a part of yourself and like you knew the song so well. Listening to Etai do it over and over again that it felt like anyone who stepped in, like, I would have a million notes for them. So at first, it just made a lot of sense for me to do it because I could and also just because it made it easier, like traveling as a four piece compared to a five piece. Musically, the thing that I always have felt about it was when I was playing guitar and keys, I mean even just doing those two things, I would be running around kind of having all this 
energy and having to put down the guitar and go to the keys, and my energy on stage was just like jumping around and doing all this stuff. So like being behind the kit now, I feel like I’m way more grounded and my role, I just stay there and it’s like I’m putting all the energy into the floor rather than it all being super up in the air.
HW: Yeah. I mean the elephant in the room with the four of us after, you know, when we were faced with like with making a decision to who would play drums is like and it was a good elephant. It was that he's fucking great at it. And he's annoyingly good at it. And he's annoyingly good at like a lot of things. Whether or not he was playing keys or guitar, or drums, it's like, at least the energy between the four of us was there. And it was the energy that we had before Etai left. And then when he started playing, it was sort of like a no brainer, because he was fucking amazing.
JC: Yeah, it was shockingly easy and sort of sad, like he knew all the songs already. So, it was just easy to plug in, and every time we rehearsed with someone else, like, obviously they knew enough to play with us. But like we've been through so much together, and it was really strange to think of just popping someone into that. And so the fact that Sawyer was able to fill that role was like the biggest blessing ever.
SN: Like, there are a lot of times that I'll be singing back up during the show and like, I have to really focus on like, okay, I have to drum. I have to still be like super in front and in the pocket playing wise, but then like I have to be off the mic and not singing really loud. Like, it's easy when you're going really hard to wanna yell.
Q: You guys have been at this for a while. Do you have any favorite moments of your career so far?
JC: Definitely!
ALL: *general murmurs of thinking about their favorite memories*
JC: We reminisce probably a little too much.
HP: We have so many great memories.
HW: We have so many good stories among us.
SN: I think some of the favorites, not to call out any in particular, but I look back at all the moments where you think that it’s all crumbling, that you’re like “Oh, my God, how are we gonna move on from this?” And you do, so those are the moments where I think obviously we’ve had really cool touring experiences and got to play for some crazy crowds, but it’s always the moments that no one knows what the behind the scenes things were, like our car will break down, or [JC: run out of gas] Yeah, stuff like that where you have to walk a mile in the middle of Germany, being at a really scary gas station in the middle of the night.
JC: We talk about it all the time, like just writing a book someday, but really having a T.V. show some day where we can tell all these stories and recreate them. Honestly, to pander a little bit to us being in Texas right now, we have a lot of great Texas memories. Probably more than other places we’ve played in, maybe New York and L.A. I remember the first tour we ever went on, which is a great memory in itself, was our junior year of high school. We did a weekend where we played in Dallas and Austin, and the first time we ever played in Austin, we played at Stubs, and this family was there; this mom and her two daughters, and their friends. And we just bonded with them after the show, and they were so passionate, and they were as young as us. We just felt so much love.
HP: When we were on tour with the 1975, we had the best time with Matty and George. When we got back to the hotel, we were so excited that we had a water fight in the hotel. We were messing with the key cards, and this door was locked and then this one, and then you take a bucket and just pour it.
HW: I actually closed the connecting door to their room, literally the three of them didn’t have a key, and when I was in their room, I flipped their bed over. So we had to go downstairs and get the guy to take the door off the hinges. And then he went into the room, and then the bed was flipped over.
SN: I feel like whenever we do one of those things, like one of those crazy nights, it’s like someone is not having it. And that I remember, was me. Like I really wanted to go to bed. I remember when we got locked out, I remember how much of an a**h*le I was. [HP: The kind of duality of it is that, then like we clean it up.] But that’s why it’s funny. It’s like you’ll be on tour and you feel like you’re the coolest guy ever and you’re wearing an insane fit, and then you walk into a gas station in Missouri and you were like, “What are you doing?” There’s always this balance of feeling like we’re on top of the world, but also understanding the surroundings that we’re in [HW: incredibly humbled] Yeah, like you’re incredibly humbled just by existing sometimes in these different places, but that was a good story.
HW: I have a video of Henry Pearl, this is that same night, of Henry Pearl eating a bowl of cereal at the 1975 concert. Barefoot, they're playing, by the sound booth, and he’s eating a bowl of cereal. I was just so happy for him.
Q: You collabbed with a member of Brockhampton - Romil Hemnani - before for your album Homesick, and even got to talk to Matty Healy. Can you talk a little about this collaboration? Do you have anyone you want to collaborate with in the future or do you have anyone you are planning on collabing with?
JC: Yeah, I mean we've crossed paths a lot of random people, which is kind of one of our great joys of being in this group. Everyone's different and we learn a lot every time. Romil and some of the other Brockhampton guys were some of the first people we ever met in the industry, that were artists in the industry that were we could look up to. We learned a lot from them and and then, you know, years later we're like making a video with Ed Sheeran and it's like holy sh*t, like, this guy's so different and has had such a different career from them. And we were with Matty….everyone's had a different path, and everyone sees the world a different way. We've worked with this guy, Alexander23 and he has such a different perspective too. When he was our age, he was in a band, and he was on the road like us, playing colleges and doing this whole thing. So we pick up little tidbits from everybody.
SN: When we went on tour with the 1975, or the whole year before, that would have been our dream tour, you know, just to meet them or hang out with them. And then I feel like you also really want to collab or do something that feels either, you know, monetarily valuable or like it’ll push your career in a in a different way. But a lot of times, what has been even more valuable to us is just like learning how to, once you're in that room, just sitting and absorbing. I feel like it's easy to wanna, “we should make a song together” or oh, “we gotta do this”. I think we've learned a little bit that, if something is meant to be, it'll be, and you have to just kind of nurture the relationship and not force anything. Like if we got to meet, you know, Ed Sheeran, you wanna kind of be careful about how much you're asking of that person and also it could be hard because we wanna geek out like so crazy and want everybody to come and work on our stuff. But it's almost more, I don't know, it's almost more like universally telling when, something will happen and it won't go exactly what we planned or we won't get to make a song with Matty Healy, but he'll listen to one of our songs and be like, “you guys are great! Keep going!”
Q: Younger Than I Was Before had a very school boy image attached to it, especially with the matching uniforms. Is there something y’all are wanting to do for your next one?
JC: Definitely. We’re not going to give it away, so it kind of goes back to what we were saying before, like we want every album to have an identity, we look up to artists who do that so well. Every album’s an era, and we look up to that a lot, especially when we go then to play shows, like that was so cool to be able to wear the outfits. That’s where it all came from, we just wanted to wear matching outfits. For the album, we ended up not even doing our own tour, we just opened for someone, but even then because we had the costume and aesthetic around it, it felt like our thing - when we were on stage of course not during the whole night. So whatever and whenever that next thing comes, it will be just different and exciting, and people will come to the show and know how to dress and know what to expect from the vibe of the music and everything, and the opener, hopefully, aids all of that as well. We really want to curate things like that.
SN: The one thing I will say, which I think is not giving anything away, something that we think about is like, for the last album, the theme and the vibe was super, super specific, as opposed to like - when we were telling fans to come like wear ties and schoolboy uniforms - for some of our previous albums, we feel like there’s been a universal theme, but it all depends on like, sometimes you want to be really specific and for [Younger Than I Was Before] it was a concept album, and sometimes, like in We Switched Bodies, it was more of a bigger theme. So I can’t promise we’re going to wear matching outfits again, but sometimes it can just be like, we’ll watch great live sets. You'll be like “Oh that era” or like whatever that was, or like the feeling of that album, like sometimes that’s enough to hold it together. It also makes it more fun for us because it’s not like every time we play, we do the same thing, just different, or we wear matching outfits. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t, so it makes it more fun for us to switch it up in terms of how detail oriented we go.
Q: Is there a tentative release timeline?
ALL: Can we say it? We already kind of said it.
JC: It’s going to be a summer album. It’s going to be a High School Musical 2 kind of album.
A&C: brat summer, Laundry Day summer.
HP: We’ll never forget brat summer.
Q: Do the Henrys have nicknames to differentiate from each other? Do you call one Penry and the other Wenry?
SN: Originally it was HP and HW, but that wawa like the root that grew into all these names. It’s like “Dub” for W and then “Dubber” and then we call him like “Piss”... like “H Piss”. Henry's middle name is Samuel, but then we started calling him Samuel.
HW: His name is not Samuel.
HP: My middle name is Samuel (Sam-WELL). Depends on how you want to pronounce it. Did I make that decision myself? Yes.
SN: And then we started calling him Sam-WELL. And Sami.
HP: And also they have nicknames too, like Sawyer the other day responded to Nu-Nu.
After this interview, LAUNDRY DAY absolutely rocked the KTRU stage - performing their hit songs like “Jane,” “FRIENDS,” “Other Side of the World,” and closing with a cover of “Party in the USA.” The crowd danced, sang along, and celebrated the end of an outstanding KTRU Outdoor Show! Thank you to LAUNDRY DAY, Basma Bedawi and the rest of Outdoor Show Committee, and KTRU!