During high school in the early 2000s, Fort Collins’ Ryan Hover came across a sound that changed his opinion on music.
“I started getting into the stuff (a music collective which includes iconic indie acts like , and ) and I started realizing that one of the most interesting challenges is making pop music thatap still artistic, thatap not mindless,” Hover said.
About 10 years later, Hover formed the Fort Collins dream-pop act with his now-wife Karen Hover. As Candy Claws, Ryan and Karen Hover released a handful of records based on the idea of making pop music more artistic. With 2013’s “Ceres & Calypso in the Deep Time Forever” and 2010’s “Hidden Lands” — released on Twosyllable records — the band received a modest amount of national acclaim, national press and had harnessed an atmospheric sound thatap a rare anomaly in pop music.
By mid-2014, though, the band had taken a brief hiatus from performing live and was searching for a new project and new inspiration.
It was the perfect time to get the email from Ben Phelan.
For the better part of a year, Phelan, a multi-instrumentalist for Apples in Stereo, had become a super fan of Candy Claws, listening to “Ceres & Calypso” continuously, he said.
“As you’re growing up and discovering your love of music, there are all kinds of musical discoveries that change your perspective. You have these experiences on a weekly basis sometimes. It happens less and less as you get older, but that Candy Claws record totally did that for me,” Phelan said. “It makes you optimistic about music all over again.”
So, he did something that he’d never done before: In June of 2014, he reached out to Ryan and Karen via email to tell them how he’d connected with the music.
“I said, ‘I don’t know if you guys need any help. I’d love to contribute, I love the band,’ ” Phelan said. “There was something about how high quality the music was, how creative, innovative, stirring and marvelous it was, that if there was anything I could do by virtue of having this slightly higher level of exposure through Apples, I need to do something to help.”
After corresponding for the next few months, Ryan, Karen and Phelan had decided to collaborate on a new project called , which will make its live debut at the Oriental Theater in Denver on March 7.
By November of 2014, Phelan had shown Candy Claws to his bandmates Robert Schneider and John Ferguson, who eagerly hopped onto the project.
The inclusion of Schneider in the project marked a serendipitous moment in the origin story of Sound of Ceres. The Apples in Stereo members were attracted to Candy Claws’ music before even making the connection that the band is from Colorado, the same state where Schneider formed Apples in the early ‘90s and recorded seminal albums for Neutral Milk Hotel and Olivia Tremor Control.
“It was like the music itself was so overwhelmingly good, all of these insularly connections weren’t even occurring to us,” Phelan said. “Once you notice the Colorado thing, then you’re like ‘of course.’”
“I think you can hear a lot of Elephant 6 influences in Candy Claws’ music, and (Schneider) heard it and that made him excited,” Phelan said.
By late 2014, Karen and Ryan and Apples in Stereo were in full swing writing and recording material for Sound of Ceres. They correspond primarily remotely, sending back and forth recordings via email and spending long hours chatting on the phone.
“It was kind of crazy at first, kind of surreal,” Karen Hover said. “Ryan has been listening to Apples in Stereo for over 10 years, so that was incredible for him. Just in the last few months we’ve become really good friends with them. It doesn’t really feel like these famous people in this famous band. They’ll just call us out of the blue to talk.”
Over the months, Sound of Ceres has developed into a project that balances the harmonic exploration of Candy Claws with the ever-accessible vintage-pop of Apples in Stereo.
“We both make pop music, which is one of my favorite things to do,” Ryan Hover said. “We just have different brands of it. We tend toward the more dreamy pop side of things and they tend toward the more retro pop side of things. We make their stuff dreamier and they make our stuff a little brighter and more straightforward.”
For Candy Claws, this pop sound was created specifically for the studio. On their earlier project, the live product was an afterthought for Ryan and Karen Hover, who focused on creating a complete album before anything else. They attribute this strategy to how they got so much national attention early into their career: “We actually sent labels a finished product that they didn’t have to spend any money on,” Ryan Hover said.
With Sound of Ceres, Ryan said he wants to make more of a lifestyle out of the project, taking the music on tour.
Itap not the easiest strategy, given that Apples in Stereo members are busy with other projects and touring with Neutral Milk Hotel, but they’ll do what they can when they can.
And for the time being, Sound of Ceres’ focus is on perfecting its recordings for the yet-untitled full-length album due out in late summer or early fall, playing a handful of shows at SXSW and shopping its material around to labels.
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