A Cautionary Tale

Photographs By Andrew Doan

Taylor Sandoval from the San Diego psych rock band Chorduroy opens up about falling off of a roof while filming, recording the band’s album “Voice of Reason” with Thee Oh Sees, and the music video for “WIzard’s Glass”.

San Diego, USA

What is the Chorduroy origin story?

My dad briefly had an indie rock band in the 90s and I was pretty inspired by that and decided to take up the name Chorduroy when I started a band in 2019. Our band officially started when my friend Caleb asked if their band Mother Grundy could play a show at our house in the college area. I was just starting to write some songs with my roommate at the time and we told him “Yeah, you can play here if we can open” - so we finished up a handful of songs, learned a couple covers and yeah, I’d say that was the official start of the band.

How does Chorduroy stand out from the other bands in San Diego?

Well, besides being the prettiest little group you’ve ever seen, I think we have a unique sound that you don’t see in San Diego that often. We fuse a lot of genres and really lean into raw, heavy, and psychy sounds. We try to catch people off guard, from the songs, to our videos, to the live shows.

How would you describe your sound and style in 3 words?

Raw, heavy, and “out there”… is that 4 technically? Haha.

You are sharing the video to your single, "Wizard's Glass". What is the song about? How does the video represent the song?

I haven’t really thought about it too much since I want people to get their own meaning out of it, but I guess it’s sort of a cautionary tale. Like, maybe you don’t need to see what’s behind the door… and if you do open the door, I hope you’re ready.

What was the process behind making the video?

We worked with our friend Andy in making the video. He was really nice for filming and editing for us. He had an idea to have sort of like a 70s aesthetic where you’re playing in front of a live studio audience, which is where the rotating people on the casting couch come from. As far as the plot, we wanted to kind of tie up the story of “Alien Man” - he was causing mayhem in the last two music videos and in this story everything catches up to him… we probably won’t be seeing him again. Being on set was fun. We filmed everything at our house so we were just hanging out and drinking beers through the whole thing.

What were some fun moments and challenges you faced while making the video?

The craziest part and challenge was trying to film the scene of Alien Man falling off the roof after he gets shot. We had to stack a bunch of mattresses and pillows in order to break the fall and it was really sketchy trying to fall off backwards without looking as well. It took probably 10 takes to get the right shot. Also in the last take I almost over shot the landing which could’ve been really bad ha ha. Another fun moment was painting ourselves blue- it took a bit of convincing to get the other band members on board, but I thought it would be something funny to make us stand out. We also have some elderly folks in the video (and no those aren’t our grandparents). I actually walked up our street a couple blocks where I knew some old people lived and asked them if they wanted to be in a music video. They were super nice and I think they had a lot of fun.

"Wizard's Glass" is off your new album, "Voice of Reason". What is the album about?

The album is about questioning what’s going on in the world; we think it’s pretty crazy out there and maybe people should take harder looks at things. Or don’t. Fuck it. c’est la vie.

How does "Voice of Reason" show your growth and evolution as a band?

This album is us really finding our sound. In the early days of Chorduroy we made more poppy indie Surf rock/punk, but we’ve matured since then and really figured out the type of music we like playing and this is it.

You recorded the album Thee Oh Sees studio. What was that experience like?

It was a pretty crazy experience. After trying to record ourselves unsuccessfully for a while, we decided to go straight to the source of where some of our favorite albums have came from and we’re really glad we did. Eric Bauer handles engineering, and production if you want him to, while John Dwyer runs the business side of things. Both of them were a pleasure to work with. Bauer is full of stories and it was cool to pick his brain on things and have his wealth of knowledge behind our project. We all learned that, in an environment like this, recording is super fun and we’re really excited to get back at it.

What's next for Chorduroy?

Album number two dropping next month! Just kidding ha ha we have to record it first. But we do have a shit ton of new songs in the works that we’re excited to track. In the meantime, we’re just grindin! We’ll be recording another video or two for some songs off of the album soon. We also have a bunch of fun shows coming up; and want to branch more into Los Angeles and beyond. We want to sell all the all the vinyls we have stocked up (link in our bio ), and hopefully plan a tour soon. Overall, really excited for the future, I have a lot of fun ideas that I want to execute; I think it’s gonna be a good ride.