The band will perform at the Bishop tonight to celebrate the release of its sophomore album, “Endtimes Forever.” The Cowboys, a fellow local band, are the ?opening act.
The origin of Cooked Books can be traced back to a Craigslist advertisement with the title “garage/psych/loud,” or at least that’s the story vocalist and guitarist David Bower said keeps showing up in all of the biographies ?written about the band.
“I was almost going to complain the other day because it keeps coming up,” ?he said.
Guitarist and backing vocalist Joe Crawford said he posted the ad after moving to Bloomington after working as a newspaper reporter in New Mexico.
He said he didn’t know anybody in the city when he moved to Bloomington and had moved “just to do something weird.” When Crawford posted the ad, he said he never expected it to be successful.
It was mostly by chance that Bower happened upon the ad, he said. While working at a local restaurant he made a habit of browsing Craigslist ads looking for people to join various bands he thought were funny. He printed the ads he found and posted them around the server area to make everyone laugh.
“There was one of a guy posing by his Camaro, but he had Photoshopped lightning in his eyes and was in a classic rock band,” Bower said.
It surprised Bower to find an ad he found interesting, he said, and he asked himself if he was the type of person to respond to an online ad. ?Apparently, he was.
After Bower and Crawford started working on music together, they decided to start incorporating others. Bower said he knew drummer Ben Lumsdaine from playing at the Pine Room Tavern in Nashville, Ind., and he had known bass guitarist and backup vocalist Cathleen Paquet socially. He said they made some calls, got together and started playing, despite being total strangers.
“There’s still a kind of aesthetic tension because we weren’t all best buds hanging out and listening to the same records for years before we started the band, so it has forced us to collaborate and compromise and seek out common ground,” ?Crawford said.
The common ground of the band members’ varying interests is often difficult to find, Bower said, but overall their sound has stayed fairly true to what Crawford was looking for when he posted the Craigslist ad. This diversity in taste combined with a democratic writing style is why Paquet said it frequently takes them some time to get things done.
When the band writes, Paquet said, Bower and Crawford often bring various pieces of songs they’ve been working on, and the whole band works together to flesh the ?fragments into full songs.
“Everybody has significant input in that, which I think is really fun,” Bower said, “It’s a lot more fun to do that than to be some sort of taskmaster and tell everybody what to do. I think that the result is a lot more interesting and unique and would be very difficult to replicate in a different setting.”
Bower wrote most of the lyrics on the new album. A lot of the lyrics are stories told by people living in the same house who Bower said share a cynical, apocalyptic outlook, and this idea serves as a loose theme running through the album. The name of the album, “Endtimes Forever,” is part of the last song’s title, he said, and partly stems from his characters’ negative views of the world.
“I was just playing around with the idea of little ?storytelling vignettes and narratives from a lot of different perspectives,” Bower said, “Different people, different types of people.”
He said he doesn’t consider his idea to be a real theme or expect most listeners to get it, but some might get a vague impression.
Cults and conspiracy theories are a few things Bower said he thinks the band members have a common guilty pleasure for, and those darker places might be responsible for some of the themes.
“When I say we all like it, I probably mean I like it a lot and these guys sort of humor me,” he said. “But it’s something that’s probably on my mind more than it should be.”
Indianapolis and Cleveland-based record label Jurassic Pop Records signed the band for the release of its album. Paquet said she’s not used to having a record label handle all of the band’s logistics.
The band recorded the album in April 2014 at Magnetic South, a local analog recording studio housed in owner John Dawson’s basement. They were interested in using the vintage equipment at the studio, Bower said. He also said Dawson brought a unique style they hadn’t experienced before to the recording process. They recorded all the songs live with minimal overdubbing.
“I think even with the last album being recorded in a more polished studio setting, I feel like we’ve always strived for our recorded sound to reflect just what we sound like as a band,” Paquet said.
