Before their very first show ever in New York at Bowery Ballroom, I spent some time with a few of the Cuckoo Chaos gents; mainly guitarist (one of the three guitarists in the band) Jackson Milgaten and drummer Dave Mead. We climbed into their tour van that had just barely made it to New York after breaking down in Utah, and Dave promptly offered me some trail mix. “Dave is a connoisseur of trail mix,” Jackson explained. These guys made me laugh. Hard. From what I can tell, they have many talents, but when they come together there’s infinite room for exponential growth.

Kelly Knapp: You guys have been getting a lot of buzz for your single “Jesus Flag American Fish.” Do you want to talk a little bit about the backstory behind that song?

Jackson Milgaten: Scott actually wrote it about a girl, kind of like when you’re into somebody but maybe they’re not into you, and then maybe after that opportunity passes you’re into them, you realize. It’s about general adolescent pining love.

Speaking of Scott, right then he conveniently stuck his head into the van.

Scott Wheeler: You didn’t see my glasses in there, did you?

JM: Hey what is Jesus Flag about?

SW: The song? Oh…I don’t know.

JM: Yeah you do.

SW: It’s about…I was stuck in this tumultuous relationship that just had the same cyclical happenings going. It’s about this girl who always liked me, and she’s a pretty girl but I just wasn’t, you know. I wished I would wake up and see her for who she is, but I didn’t notice her there because I’m just lonely myself. That’s kind of all it really is.

JM: Our song titles don’t really have any relation to what the lyrics are actually about. It’s just kind of a reference to how Christianity and American pride have been so closely intermingled.

KK: What made you choose that song as a single?

JM: I think we just felt like our friends, and the people at the label, and our management all collectively picked that as their favorite song, so we just went with that. I don’t think we really cared what the single was. Most of the songs on the record, I would have been fine with them being the single. It just seemed like it was a popular vote.

Dave Mead: That was a surprise to me.

KK: Really? Did you want something else?

DM: Maybe I’m a man of strange wants. I don’t know, I thought that another song that I love – which may actually reveal itself to be the second single – was going to be the first single. However, I am comfortable with the flow of the ocean.

JM: I think that song represents what we do.

DM: I think it has a lot. It has the most.

JM: Yeah. It’s like a five minute plus jam. There’s lots of parts, lots of vocal harmonies, and there’s lots of polyrhythmic stuff and lots of guitar solos. It just kind of encompasses everything we do in one song.

KK: And your debut album, Women, comes out in July. Are you excited about that?

JM: Yeeeaah.

DM: I am so excited.

JM: We’ve been a band for like, two years, and we just kinda…we were really in no rush, because we really wanted to hone what we were doing and really figure it out before we took it to a public forum, so we spent a lot of time messing with the lineup and just figuring out what we were going to sound like in the first year of shows that we played. It was like every song was almost like a different genre, and then as we just kept writing, it seemed like the majority of the stuff was going in a certain direction, and eventually we just ditched a lot of those other songs. It was a real natural process that the band just turned into what it is now on it’s own, and we just followed that course. It’s really fluid. I feel like we’re almost not in control of it. I guess Scott writes the core idea and brings it to practice, and we all kind of just put the pieces in around it, so maybe he has some idea of what he wants to do. But even with him, he’s so open to what we’re all doing. He’ll bring something into practice and we’ll kind of change it so much that it’s not even recognizable as what he initially brought it in as. It’s just a really organic process.

KK: Have you guys already been touring extensively?

DM: No, this is the farthest. By far.

KK: You’re from San Diego.

JM: Yeah. We toured the southwest a couple times.

DM: We went to SXSW.

JM: Yeah, the most recent tour we did a week and a half from L.A. down to Austin and back.

KK: How was SXSW?

JM: It was awesome. SXSW is just like a crazy party. It’s overwhelming. You’re just inundated with (music) everywhere you go. I think if you’re just open to going with the flow there, that’s the best way to do it.

KK: I’m getting the feeling that this band is all about going with the flow.

JM: Yeah, it definitely is.

DM: You have to be happy with everything. Anything that can happen, you have to figure out a way to be happy with it. Our van broke on the way here, and we had to drive from Utah to here in 48 straight hours without stopping. And that just ended a few hours ago. But now I feel great. I think we all feel really good.

KK: Now you’re about to play a show! Do you guys have any pre-show rituals to pump you up? Or do you prefer to mellow out?

DM: I practice eastern medicine. I go to school for holistic medicine, and I lead everybody in meditation and Qigong. That helps me, and then the more people you have doing that with you, it builds. It’s like exponential growth.

JM: It’s mainly a breathing exercise, so it helps everybody get on the same page before the show.

DM: Slash, before anything. You can do it before anything, and that which you do will be better.

JM: It helps you focus.

DM: Sometimes we do that, and sometimes we just get really drunk.

KK: Yeah, because you describe yourselves as like, tropical hipster dance, but you’re actually really Zen dudes?

JM: Dave is really into that stuff. He’s in training to be a holistic health practitioner, and he’s going to school for that right now and he’s basically like the resident shaman of the band. I don’t think any of the rest of us are too overly spiritual, but because Dave’s so into it, we’re all like, ok. It seems to work really well for him, and we just let him take us there.

DM: The van is always filled with herbs and burning plants.

JM: Yeah, like when we stop for gas and stuff, Dave will run off into a field and pick herbs and bring them back and feed them to us. Like out of people’s front yards and stuff. It’s a trip, man.

KK: Well I guess that’s one way to stay sane on a 48-hour van ride.

DM: It works! It totally works. If you eat plants, you absorb their energy. If you cover yourself in lavender you will not be depressed. Totally works!

KK: I believe it.

DM: Do you want a Tea Tree toothpick?

KK: Haha! Sure.

JM: You can probably already tell we’re not a super serious bunch. We take what we do really seriously, and we work really hard at it. We practice a ridiculous amount; like 6-hour practices 3 times a week. We take what we do seriously, but we don’t take ourselves very seriously. We just feel like we’re just here to channel aural waves to the audience, basically. We’re like receptors.

KK: What’s your favorite thing about playing live?

JM: I think it’s amazing to have a group of people all doing these different little parts that individually sound stupid, or they don’t make any sense, but when you put them all together, it’s like this beautiful whole. When I’m playing with these guys, I feel more like where I’m supposed to be in life than in anywhere else.

DM: Yeah, seriously. When we play a good show it makes me feel like my life is in the right place, or that I’m on a good path. I think if you can constantly feel like you’re on the right path, then you feel good.

KK: That’s a pretty good answer.

DM: I really like getting a lot of exercise too, so drumming, for me is really exerting. I don’t know how some drummers don’t sweat.

KK: I can see where that would be really therapeutic.

DM: Dear god, yeah. That’s a big part of it for me.

KK: Do you guys remember the first song you ever wrote together? Have you used it, or did you throw it out at some point?

DM: Scott brought Jesus Flag. And then we spent 10 hours (on it). These songs are really hard; they’re really complex.

KK: You write really intricate compositions?

JM: Yeah, we think about them a lot.

DM: All the parts working together – they’re tough. Really tough. If somebody wanted to leave and then we had to replace them, it would be months. Months and months and months of work.

JM: Yeah, it would take a long time to get somebody acclimated to what we’re doing.

DM: From start to finish, writing a song takes hours. Like 15-20 hours. More than that, actually.

KK: Have you guys studied music intensively? How long have you been playing?

JM: We’ve all been playing since we were very young. All of us have a minimal amount of formal training. I played the saxophone in an orchestra setting for a lot of my childhood and adolescence, and I took a decent about of music theory in college, but none of us are really formally trained.

DM: And I like that.

JM: Yeah, I think that it leaves us really open to just trying whatever. I have a lot of friends who are really formally trained, and I think that it puts them in this box, where they’re playing by the rules, and then the stuff that they end up playing sounds really generic or recycled, because they’re doing anything original or creative, because they’re not stepping outside the box.

KK: And that’s something you guys strive to do, or it just seeps in?

DM: Well, we don’t have a choice about how it comes out…yeah. But sometimes I’ll be playing a show, and I’ll get so tired because I don’t have this traditional background. Some drummers can just play for hours and then they’ll be bone dry. Because I didn’t learn how to do this tradition, I’m just in fifth gear the whole time, and sometimes I get really really, like dangerously tired.

JM: It’s a learning experience for all of us. I’ve been playing bass a lot longer than I’ve been playing guitar. When I started playing guitar in this band, and that was a total learning experience too, and I feel like in the time I’ve been doing that, I’ve gotten so much better at it. It just kind of all happened as it’s come together.

KK: Closing remarks or anything else you want your fans to know?

JM: Hope you enjoy the show! I think our main message is just do what you love, and really do it. Do the best that you can and do the hell out of it, and don’t have any pretension about it. We try to be an anti-pretentious band. I know that there’s a certain kind of standard in indie rock, to look as cool as you can and act in this way this is sort of subdued or reserved. We just want ourselves and everyone else to just act as they feel and just be true, be true to themselves.

Cuckoo Chaos is currently on the west coast portion of their tour with Anna Calvi. Their debut album Women will be released in July, so look out for that, but in the meantime you can keep up with the chaos on Twitter, and like them on Facebook.