Q&A: A Tale of Two Friends in a Dysfunctional Zoom Band, Phone Kid Pursues Their Dreams
KNOWN TO FANS AND AMBIVALENT LISTENERS ALIKE — as Phone Kid, Clay Cantrell and Cormac Liotta comprise this dynamic duo. But with all jokes aside, these friends came together to create a truly unique sound. While the lyricism and song titles as well as general aesthetic indicate an eccentric sense of humor, having the opportunity to speak to Cantrell and Liotta over Zoom made it clear that this project is truly an authentic extension of themselves.
This “Zoom” band met through mutual friends, bonding over a shared love of the soft-serve ice cream machine in the Western Washington University dining hall. Their first release, “Timothee Chalamet,” was put out in 2021, inexplicably gaining traction in Germany. Their most recent release, their debut EP, I’m Right, You’re Evil, contains six tracks, with the two stand out tracks “Eat My Shortz” and “HitHerUp!” already having garnered a joint 2,000 streams. “HitHerUp!” also features a verse from mongleaux, an artist the duo became fans of after listening to his cover of a Nine Inch Nails track.
With inspirations spanning from The Beatles to “shitty SoundCloud rap,” Phone Kid has created music stemming from a wide range of influences but more than anything has accomplished a feat exemplifying what it’s like to pursue your dreams with your friends. Both members of the group aspire to “both work at soulless digital marketing agencies during the day and live [their] rock star dreams during the night.”
For a truly goofy and slightly absurd listen, tune in to Phone Kid and read down below to learn more about this eccentric pair as they tell us about their inspirations, origin stories, and aspirations, all while showing how they fit together as they speak both together and over each other throughout our chat.
LUNA: Could you just talk a little bit about how you know each other?
LIOTTA: We met freshman year. Clay likes to visit Bellingham a lot, so he was around quite a bit. And I remember, before he came up, Nolan and Jake — our friends — could not stop talking about Clay, like, “Clay's coming up in two weeks, you’ve got to meet him.” And then, like, on the first night we met and have hung out since.
CANTRELL: Yeah, I remember that. We went over to Nolan's apartment, and you were just rattling off ideas of shit — like schemes that we should do.
LUNA: So how did that lead into you guys making music together?
CANTRELL: I mean, we both made a bunch of music in high school. And Cormac — he's a classically trained jazz musician.
LIOTTA: I played bass for the high school and middle school jazz bands that I was in. And I started on piano when I was younger.
CANTRELL: Yeah. And I've always been horrible at production. So we were a perfect duo.
LIOTTA: I remember a period of time where I was pestering Clay a lot, because I was like, “This guy makes such cool stuff. I gotta make a song with you, it will be so cool.” And then it kind of just evolved from that.
LUNA: How did it evolve? What does your songwriting process look like?
CANTRELL: Yeah, we do a lot of stuff over Zoom. We're kind of a Zoom band. I mean, I come up to Bellingham like every three months, and we try to get some studio time.
LIOTTA: We mix on Zoom. We make music in person. At least it's sort of the system we've been setting up.
CANTRELL: At least, recently, we've been trying to do this thing where we send things back and forth over text. Like just MP3s and instrumentals and vocals and stuff, and it works horribly, it's a horrible system, but that's what we do.
LIOTTA: Yeah, we try and plan a bunch of stuff over text, and that's not how you do things. Really.
CANTRELL: Yeah, I'm like, completely unresponsive. I've no place to record at my house.
LIOTTA: So it's a lot of me sending Clay guitar line ideas, and Clay's like, “That one's cool.”
CANTRELL: Cormac sends riffs. And then I send shitty iPhone vocals.
LIOTTA: It's usually a back-facing camera pointing out really close to whatever he's sitting next to. And you just hear in the background Clay singing.
CANTRELL: Yeah. I use a lot of mobile GarageBand. So do it all off my phone for the demos. Yeah. It's actually amazing that we have any music out there at all.
LUNA: I'm not stopping you. Please continue. I'm feeling so inspired.
LIOTTA: Well, we made “Timothy Chalamet” first. And that was just because one day you [Cantrell] came over and we made it in, like, two hours. And we were really stoked on it. And then in that two weeks we filmed the music video and finished the song up, and then just nothing for a year. And I was like, “That was a good song. We should try and do that more.” And, like, met up every day for like two weeks.
CANTRELL: And pumped out, like, four songs in that period.
LIOTTA: So that's the bulk of the music that is out right now — just made in very short amounts of time.
LUNA: Where did your name come from?
LIOTTA: We were gonna be Content Phone. I kept accidentally calling us Phone Kid because, like, Content Phone was such a stupid throwaway name. And I kept forgetting because it was that stupid of a name. I kept being like, “We’re gonna make a Phone Kid song.” And then we were just like, “Wait,, that's just a better name.” And Content Phone comes from my roommate, Ezra, [who] had an extra phone that we mounted to the wall in our living room with Velcro, and it truly couldn’t do anything, and the home button didn't work. But you could connect it to the lights on the ceiling and next to our Chromecast. So it was our content, phone — Content Phone. Unlike other phones, which are completely unrelated to content.
LUNA: Can you talk a little bit about any inspiration you have for your sound? Outside of the clear jazz influence.
LIOTTA: I’m so glad that shines through.
LUNA: I mean, I heard it and was like, “He was definitely in a middle school jazz band.”
CANTRELL: Well, we both listened to a lot of Weezer growing up. A lot of shitty pop punk from the mid 2000s.
LIOTTA: Yeah, I feel like we listen to such similar music and such different music. And where we came together is kind of the music, if that makes sense.
CANTRELL: So I'm contributing some, like, Little Peep. Yeah, like shitty SoundCloud-inspired music.
LIOTTA: And then I wanna be like The Beatles. I think that Weezer's Blue Album is, like, a top five album of all time. I also like Elliott Smith and stuff, but then, I don't know, since I do the production I'm always trying to make Clay’s music, but I can't not also make the music that I make by doing that. So it ends up kind of being both.
LUNA: Going back to names a little bit, you guys have some pretty hilarious track titles. How do you go about naming your songs?
LIOTTA: Um, not a lot of thought.
CANTRELL: Yeah, I'd say that. Like, I think we were trying to be obnoxious with the titles on this album. At some point we thought [of] a bad idea of making them all ... commands, like, “Drive My Car.”
LIOTTA: We kind of want to think of a bit for each song, like for the whole album. So like one was commands. One was just different celebrity names because we had “Timothy Chalamet” already out.
CANTRELL: So, yeah, the good thing about the “Timothy Chalamet” song is that because it's called “Timothy Chalamet,” we get a lot of random people. Yeah, random people adding it to their Timothy Chalamet playlists and random shit like that. We thought we could just name every song after a famous person and then maybe random people would put it on their playlist.
LIOTTA: Apparently “Timothy Chalamet” is huge in Germany.
CANTRELL: Yeah, we have a lot of plays in Germany.
LIOTTA: That was all over Germany — like a couple in each town every few days. It's just funny.
LUNA: I love that feature on Spotify honestly, seeing your top cities.
LIOTTA: Should I pull it up right now?
CANTRELL: We can see our demographics — we're pretty much a band for 18 to 24 year old girls. 63% female, top locations are the United States, and then it's Germany, then the UK, then Australia, then Mexico, and France.
LIOTTA: We've got a couple of streams in Nepal. Pretty hype.
CANTRELL: 25% of our streams are international. That's pretty cool.
LUNA: You guys definitely have an aesthetic, and I’m wondering what’s influenced that?
CANTRELL: I would call this style “ignorant boy.”
LIOTTA: I was talking to my friend in art school and she described it as “novice.” I hope it looks like we have no idea what we're doing.
LUNA: If you guys could play any festival in the world — any setup — what's your dream?
LIOTTA: What's Tyler's one? Camp Flog Gnaw. That’s my pick.
CANTRELL: My pick is what … was that? It was, like, [the] Vans World Tour. What was it called
LUNA: The Warped Tour?
CANTREL: Yeah! Like a Warped Tour Revival.
LIOTTA: Or the Weezer, Fall Out Boy, Imagine Dragons or something like that — if they would have taken us to open for them in a couple places.
LUNA: I don’t think it was Imagine Dragons?
LIOTTA: No, no it wasn’t — it was something better.
LUNA: Green Day?
LIOTTA: That is actually a huge inspiration for my music — I listened to so much Green Day when I was younger. Didn’t you listen to so much Green Day?
CANTRELL: I listened to so much Green Day when I was younger. Green Day is awesome.
LUNA: Do you guys have any advice for someone who might be interested in making music with a friend and wants to get started?
LIOTTA: Have fun with it. And name your song after a celebrity.
CANTRELL: I would say just try to crank some songs out from start to finish without being too concerned with them being shitty.
LIOTTA: They will get good.
CANTRELL: Like, if you get too wrapped up in making your music sound good — especially in the beginning — it just takes all the fun out of it. As long as you're having fun making shitty music with your friends, that's all you could ask for.
LIOTTA: Exactly.
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