Chilling Out With Connie Cunningham and the Creeps

By Sean Maldjian, Contributor

Meet Connie Cunningham and the Creeps

In our latest interview, we had the pleasure of chatting with Connie Cunningham and the Creeps, a project with a killer story behind it. The brainchild of musician Nick Kinsey, the songs were written using an optigan, a toy keyboard from the 70s. We chatted with Nick about the character of Connie Cunningham, how the Hudson Valley community influenced the sound of the album, and what to expect from the future of the project. Plus, find out why Nick would choose a third ear over a third eye!

Would You Rather...

have a third eye that sees through walls or a third ear that hears thoughts?

Definitely a third ear that hears thoughts. As painful as it might be to hear others thoughts I really do think that is the hidden invisible universe all around us.

Some questions with Connie Cunningham and the Creeps

Hi thanks for taking the time to put this together with us. This project has a killer story behind it. Background on how it all started?

Basically I bought an optigan in 2018, a keyboard that was distributed for the consumer market in the 70s by toy company Mattel. It plays LP a sized optical discs and creates all kinds of noise and has these auto-accompaniment parts that vary from disc to disc. Basically I just started writing songs with it, almost ad a joke because they sounded so silly but they just kept coming.

What is objectively the best pet to have? Why?

Hmmm, not sure if I can enter the cat vs dog debate. I’ve had both and they each offer their own set of perks!

Can you tell us more about the character of Connie Cunningham and how they came to be? How did they influence the songwriting process?

As the songs started to amass I knew this record couldn’t be released under my own name. I was singing in a new strange way and the whole vibe of the record started to veer toward this lost like of archival feeling. So I made up a story about a failed session musician who recorded this stuff in his house and hid it away in his attic. I had just moved in to this old farmhouse down the road from where I grew up and the old couple that used to live here were named the Cunningham’s so I kept coming back to that name. Creating this fictional backdrop helped me fully enter the character and shed any sense that this record needed to be an actual expression of myself or designed for the contemporary musical market place. Funnily enough escaping the need to make a sort of non-fiction document, the need to express myself, allowed me to actually write about some of the deeper personal things that have been going on in my life even though I didn’t fully realize it at the time.

How do you get out of a creative funk?

I think just fully committing to this very specific sonic aesthetic made things a lot easier for me. At times it felt like a color-by-numbers situation. Just follow the story: what would Connie do?

Can you tell us about the process of putting together this compilation of rare recordings, and how did you choose which songs to include?

I wrote a lot of songs during that period and several of them shared this feeling of departure and separation so I chose those ones for the first release.

What's the most bizarre thing that's ever happened to you at a music festival?

lol. Having to literally chase down the promoter in a golf cart to get the band paid.

Many of the collaborators on this album are from the Hudson Valley community. Can you talk about the importance of community in the creative process and how it influenced the sound of the album?

Josh Kaufman, his wife Annie Nero and our friend Cassandra Jenkins really brought this album to life. It was otherwise a mostly solitary experience and bringing them and others in completely elevated the sound and also gave me the confidence to finish this pretty strange collection of music. Collaboration is really why I got into music in the first place. It’s amazing how other people’s ears can transform one’s understanding of their own music. I love musical friends deeply and feel like assembling comparable groups of musicians is one of my greatest strengths as a producer and musician in general. I think people really respond to the humanity of musical interactions in real-time and that that is something missing in a lot of people’s music in this era where so many people are making records alone in their bedroom.

Where is your favorite venue in NYC to see a show?

Bowery Ballroom will always be a magical place.

The album is titled "Vol. 1," suggesting there may be a follow-up in the works. Can you give us any hints about what we can expect from "Vol. 2" and where it might take the sound?

I’ve long thought it would cool to make a Connie record for each decade. I hear vol. 1 as an early 60s record and thinking Vol. 2 will be more of a 70s thing. Whereas vol. 1 is pretty focused around the theme of flight and departure I think vol. 2 will be about returning, or longing to return. The outsider 80s vibe (think McCartney II) will be fun if I can keep it up.