Release and Growth: An Interview with Hippo Campus
“Everything is essential. The ups and downs. What I knew, what I didn’t know. Both are a part of the equation.”
“It’s all growth,” Nathan Stocker, one of the lead vocalists of Hippo Campus, tells me over the phone. “Growing up kind of sucks, we wish it wasn’t happening, but then realizing at the end of the day that it’s necessary.”
Hippocampus has been making music since 2013, when they were in high school. Now six years, and a few albums later, they are full fledged adults touring the country playing sold out shows. Their latest release, Demos II, was an effort to, “Get all the kids out of the house, show them outside,” Nathan states. When it comes to these past six years, Nathan concluded that, “Everything is essential. The ups and downs. What I knew, what I didn’t know. Both are a part of the equation..” For Nathan, doing what he does and what the band set out to do is to provide therapy. Yet, sometimes the goal is not met, “It ends up being a battle with yourself. Where you’re just… trying to get everything out but it doesn’t seem like it’s being received and it comes right back to you… You’re feeling everything you didn’t want to feel at once.” Looking back at this demo release he concludes that, “The purpose of [it] was to get all of those songs off our chest. So that when we go back into the studio, we have a clean slate,” To have a, “quest for the creative progress, [again].” In regards to this creative process, Nathan stated that, “You can’t write about anything other than what’s already happened.”
Currently, Hippo Campus is on tour around the United States with hopes of taking a much needed break after. When it comes to the shows, Nathan said he “hopes that our fans would approach the show with the same mindset we have when [we] approach shows.” When it comes to his fans he says not to expect anything from anybody and to “invest in your circles.” Reflecting back on his time in the music industry some advice he has for other musicians is to, “Maybe say ‘no’ more. The music industry is a weird f*cking machine, so you gotta be careful. Be more careful of who you trust.” Nathan hopes, “that they keep learning the same way I am… [To maintain] a sense of wonder about music because it gets really hard to not look at [the music industry] as monotonous, systematic machine that chews you up and spits you out.”
Overall, it seems as though Hippo Campus will continue to grow and have a large impact on the Indie genre. As for Nathan, for the time being he’ll keep reaching toward the goal of therapy while on the stage knowing that it, “is an effort to collect ourselves.”
Interview and article by Natalie Schmidt.