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The band Astrologer's new album is about Phoenix nostalgia — and advocating for the city's future

Andrew Cameron Cline (left) and Candy Caballero-Cline perform in Astrologer.
Alex Veselinovic
Andrew Cameron Cline (left) and Candy Caballero-Cline perform in Astrologer.

Growing up in Phoenix in the 1980s and '90s, there are some figures you’d be familiar with: Wallace and Ladmo, the stars of the offbeat kids show on Channel 5, or Tex Earnhardt, the cowboy-hat-wearing auto dealership owner of countless TV commercials.

Those are some of the folks that Andrew Cameron Cline was thinking about as he wrote the 17-songs on the latest double album from Phoenix band Astrologer. You’ll even hear some of their old advertisements mixed into the album.

Cline is a fourth-generation Arizonan and lead singer of the band, which also includes his wife, Candy Caballero-Cline. The pair recorded the album on four-track tapes in their downtown Phoenix apartment complex, the Fleetwood, with their bandmates and neighbors.

It’s called “Astrologer Fleetwood Sprawl,” and they have called it a love letter to the Phoenix Andy grew up in and that Candy’s learning to love. Cline and Caballero-Cline joined The Show to talk about it.

Full conversation

ANDREW CAMERON CLINE: This whole album is like a series of happy accidents. We set out to demo a record and then thought to ourselves that the demo sounds really good. And then that started kind of dredging up memories of learning how to record and learning how to write songs, just so I could learn to record them on a 4-track. It took me back to that time of sitting in my room and remembering a lot of the Phoenix that I remember where maybe we weren’t as urban, I guess, I’m not sure it wasn’t as developed.

It was still sort of, you had to have a car to go anywhere, and everything was several miles away. But there was a lot of personality. And it started feeling like, wow. How can we sort of elucidate this feeling that I have of nostalgia for my childhood and then Candy started — Why don’t you explain?

CANDY CABALLERO-CLINE: I was thinking right now, it’s kind of cheesy, but I feel like since I’ve met you, and the fact that you’re from the city, you’ve taught me a lot about the history of Phoenix, and it brings up my own memories of, like, I’m from Los Angeles, and there is a lot of parallels. And it’s weird because people from Phoenix, especially artists and musicians, they always felt the need to compare themselves to things that are happening over there. And as I moved here, I realized that we have the same history, and it’s always being erased, and it’s always like, you’re kind of reaching for something that’s always just out of reach

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. I wanted to ask you about that because I’ve interviewed a lot of bands over the years. There are a lot of bands from Phoenix who don’t want to admit they’re from Phoenix, who want to pretend they’re from LA or something like that. This is so interesting to me because it’s so outrightly about Phoenix, and about this place and kind of owning it.

CANDY: Yeah, I feel like it’s kind of a shame too, because people are like, they’re not admitting their own, your own history, your own heritage, like you’re just kind of erasing that, just like it’s happening all the time in the city.

ANDREW: I think that people in their sort of race to become known as credible to Los Angeles — who, by the way, they they don’t really care about what we’re doing in the first place, because they’re obsessed with being the forefront of what’s cool. But that’s what makes us cool, is that we’re not LA.

GILGER: So let’s talk about those advertisements, Candy. This was your idea to put them in, right? These are old kind of deep-cut ads from Phoenix from a long time ago. And they’re sort of spliced in, within songs, between songs. It almost sounds like they’re part of the landscape.

CANDY: Yeah, I thought of it more of like a sound collage, and kind of like a way to bridge the gap.

ANDREW: It helps with the cohesion of the album, especially if you listen to — 17 songs is a long record by any stretch. But I remember when we were trying to think about the sequence and how do you put this much stuff and they sound so wildly different, and Candy used the sort of tool of using these commercials in a way to make it feel like an album and also not allow it to become a slog.

GILGER: Talk about where you found these ads. Like, these are really not the even the ones that I remember from childhood. These are a little more obscure.

ANDREW: I spend so much time on YouTube, just deep digging everything and anything. And it was, it was sort of just like, “Oh, I wonder if, I wonder where I can find some Tex Earnhardt commercials. I wonder where I can find this and that,” and some of that stuff was there. You know, it has like 100 views, and it was posted like 15 years ago. But it’s there.

CANDY: Bless the people on YouTube that archive the most obscure things.

ANDREW: Yeah, indeed.

Andrew Cameron Cline and Candy Caballero-Cline in KJZZ's studios.
Amber Victoria Singer/KJZZ
Andrew Cameron Cline and Candy Caballero-Cline in KJZZ's studios.

GILGER: So it’s interesting because it’s nostalgic for you on two levels then, it sounds like. It’s nostalgic for you on this level of revisiting your childhood, but also it’s nostalgic in remembering this year you spent making this music.

ANDREW: Yeah, it was a unique time….

I think also, now that it’s finished and now we’re about a year out from that, it is like immediately nostalgic, because I think of Candy and Blake and Nick, our other guitarist, and Julian. Julian sings backup on —

GILGER: Your son?

ANDREW: Yeah.

GILGER: Wow, that’s awesome.

ANDREW: He sings back up on a couple things, I think of the enduring impact of a few of the songs, like “Heart of mine.” …

“Lighthouse” comes to mind….

There are songs that I consider probably some of the best that I’ve ever written, and they’re sort of mixed in with things that aren’t the best thing I’ve ever written. Vut it’s like, it’s endearing. It feels real.

GILGER: Yeah.

CANDY: That year went by so quickly, and things changed so quickly, too. And just like, I feel like even our apartment complex may or may not exist in a couple years. So it’s kind of like that documentation is really important for the sake of it.

ANDREW: God bless the Fleetwood.

CANDY: Yeah.

GILGER: So I want to end with a couple of questions for each of you about what this means, how it affected your view of Phoenix. I want to start with you, Candy, because you’re not from here. You’ve lived here for some years, but not your whole life or four generations like Andrew here. But what did this process of making this album with him and in this place and about this place teach you or make you feel about Phoenix?

CANDY: Oh my gosh, so many things, but I feel like I’m constantly uncovering different layers and learning and having a lot of pride for this city. I feel like it’s an underdog city.=, and we need people to advocate for it, and we need more artists to live in this city and like to lift each other up.

GILGER: Yeah. What about you, Andrew, what does this album in the process of making it made you think and feel about Phoenix?

ANDREW: The last couple years have been a real sort of learning experience, because the album as we made it became this sort of homage to not only to nostalgia itself, but to the Phoenix that I miss and the figures of Phoenix like Wallace and Ladmo and Tex Earnhardt and many others, don’t get me started.

Beth and Bill. Beth is still around.

GILGER: She is, yeah.

ANDREW: It was something that kind of made me feel a little bit melancholic about Phoenix, because I was like, “Wow, are we losing all of this? Are we losing all of these things that I really love?” And to some extent we are. But since we finished this album and it came out and we’ve had such a great response from people, now there’s a flourishing of ideas.

So that’s how I feel about it. I’m proud to be from here. I’m proud of specific things from here that I don’t want to be lost to the Sands of Time. And that’s pretty much what we’re here to do.

GILGER: So now you’re looking forward?

ANDREW: Absolutely.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Lauren Gilger, host of KJZZ's The Show, is an award-winning journalist whose work has impacted communities large and small, exposing injustices and giving a voice to the voiceless and marginalized.
Amber Victoria Singer is a producer for KJZZ's The Show. Singer is a graduate of the Water Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

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