Interview: Noah Kohll & Corey Madden (Color Green)

Photo by Stephanie Pia

Currently based in LA, Noah Kohll (guitars/vocals) and Corey Madden (guitars/vocals) met in New York City where both were living in pre-pandemic times and delivering coffee. With mutual musical interests, the two began working on songs blending elements of classic rock artists they grew up listening to as teenagers with the Southern Rock charms of the Allman Brothers and The Band with trippy, meandering, late ’60s inspired psychedelia. With Kohll filling in on bass for a Young Guv tour, he wound up hunkering down in Taos, New Mexico when the world shut down in 2020 and Madden eventually joined him as Color Green began taking shape, first as a recording project and then evolving into a full band. While Kohll and Madden’s project yielded a 2020 self-titled EP and a 2022 full length, also self-titked, the band’s newest album, and first for New West Records, Fool’s Parade, is the effort of four artists – Kyla Perlmutter (bass/vocals) and Corey Rose (drums/vocals) joining for the recording and lending their skills and experience to open new dimensions for Color Green.

On the eve of Fool’s Parade’s release, Kohll and Madden join me from sunny LA to share how Color Green’s sound took shape, the pivotal roles Perlmutter and Rose play in the band, the obscure inspiration for the album cover, and how ’60s and ’70s music inspires what the band winds up creating.

I know you’ve been involved in a number of different projects and bands, you’ve toured and put out records. Would you say that your musical interests are always evolving or is Color Green the band that you were destined for but it just took some time to get here?

COREY: Color Green was definitely not common territory for me but once it started, it opened up a door for me, for music in general. So, I don’t know that I was destined for this band but one of the first shows I ever saw was the Allman Brothers so maybe it was deep down and I didn’t even know it until I was in my mid-20s

NOAH: We’ve always kind of played in louder bands or bands that are less dynamic. When we got together back in 2018, finding out that you can be dynamic and quiet and enter that space as much as you can also enter that really loud and explosive space and being able to have both of those things in a group is so rewarding. It attacks all sides of human emotion, you know. It’s interesting when you ask the question if it’s ever evolving or if it’s the place where we are supposed to be because I feel like the project is ever evolving.

Does that mean five years down the road we’re going to get a noisy, loud, Color Green album?

NOAH: You’re going to get a (Lou Reed) Metal Machine!

A friend of mine saw you play 3 shows at SXSW this year and he said each show was different. He saw you at a punk rock showcase, he saw you at the New West Records showcase, and then he saw you at a day party.

NOAH: I think the third one was the next day at like 1pm at The White Horse.

Are there different sets, different energies based on what bands you’re playing with and the style of music they play?

COREY: It’s a conversation between all four of us where it’s like, “What feels like the right vibe of each show?” That’s just the energy of the band in general. Or it could be, “If this is the complete vibe, let’s try to do the exact opposite.” I feel like every show is different. SXSW is so chaotic that it seems like there’s a lot to play with in the sense of how this band works. There’s so many shows and we love to switch the set up. Each show should have its own thing.

Given that you’ve played in all different kinds of bands in the past, you’re probably as comfortable playing on a punk bill as you are playing on a Southern Rock bill.

NOAH: I feel like the stage is comfortable. We’ve been doing it for so long that the stage just kind of feels a little bit like home in some weird way. And I think also we are all huge music fans and we love music so much. When we go on tour with these different types of acts or play different shows, the bands rub off on us a little bit and vice versa. The nowness of what’s going on around us really affects what’s coming out of us.

The other thing my friend said is that Corey is a wild drummer who plays like Animal from The Muppet Show.

NOAH: She’s like Mitch Mitchell (Jimi Hendrix Experience)!

Are Kyla and Corey new to the band?

NOAH: Kyla has been in the band since 2020 or 2021.

COREY: She probably joined a few months after the last record was finished.

NOAH: It’s funny how the band started because of the pandemic. Our EP was put out during the pandemic, our first record was recorded in the pandemic, so we were a recording project before we were even a band. We had to figure it out after the fact which is kind of interesting. With both of them [Corey and Kyla], we all got into a room together and it felt like this is what the band was. We’re really grateful for both of them.

With those two joining Color Green after it went from being a recording project with the two of you to being a real band, did they bring something different that you guys weren’t doing together or was it more of a mind meld where you were all on the same wavelength?

COREY: Anyone that you trust, or that you want to be playing with, they’re always going to bring their own thing to it. They definitely have their own things that they bring that are special and are just as important as either of us. It’s helpful when it’s not just two people. It was really nice up front when it was just me and Noah making all the choices but there’s something about playing with other people and having other people’s input that makes music what it is to me. It gets kind of boring when it’s just kind of one melded mind. It’s nice when it’s four melded minds.

NOAH: Corey Rose brings a lot. She boosted the dynamic range of the band. She’s an amazing drummer and she has a lot of dynamic control and range. And I consider Kyla to be an anchor. She’s somebody that if I feel that I’m floating too far away from the ship or something, I can look towards her, listen towards her and she pulls it back in a little bit. Having those two things as a rhythm section provides a lot of safety. They’re very reliable.

COREY: It’s safety and it’s also destruction, which is awesome. It’s like the full dynamic. We can be really safe and then it’s like looking around and being like, “Let’s fucking take this to hell and back,” which is fun for me.

Aesthetically, you have a ’60s/‘70s thing going on, from band photos to the album cover to videos. How much of that is “playing the part” and how much of that is what you’re like in your day-to-day life?

NOAH: We’re self-aware. We’ve had a lot of conversations about what the aesthetic is and stuff. I think we’re always trying to have this sort of “timeless” aspect where we’re not necessarily trying to emit a ’60s or ’70s vibe. We very much want to be, and are, a band from 2024. But at the same time, we wear our influences on our sleeve to a certain degree and being inspired by art that we feel like we’re moved by kind of puts us in a place. I always like to think that it can be malleable. I want to think of us not as a throwback band, but more of a new version of rock and roll music. That has come up from people who’ve talked to us after shows. There was even one moment where someone said that we sounded like Explosions in the Sky. I don’t listen to that band, but I’ve heard some interesting references that are not pointed towards the ’60s or ’70s.

COREY: All four of us are huge fans of music and I feel like it starts at the ’60s and ’70s and even earlier stuff, but also ’80s stuff is amazing, ’90s stuff too. Every decade has amazing stuff. For me, it feels like with the ’60s/‘70s cosplay thing, we’re all aware that it’s not the total vibe of this band even though we love all that stuff.

Are you more likely to listen to vinyl and watch an old movie or more likely to stream something on Spotify and watch whatever is new on Netflix?

COREY: Honestly, straight up, I’m right down the middle. It depends on how I woke up that morning. When I go home from work today, I could go either way.

NOAH: I just watched the new Mad Max movie last night but two days ago I watched a Fellini movie. You’ve got to eat up everything you can. I fucking love listening to records and I think they sound amazing and me and all of our bonehead friends love talking about it. But also, I’m streaming stuff on Spotify all the time, unfortunately.

I love digging around used record bins and trying to find albums from the ’70s by bands I’ve never heard of. If there’s a band with long hair and mustaches on the front or back cover, and the album is a buck or two, I’m buying it. Looking at the Fool’s Parade album cover, that’s something that if I’m flipping through the bin, I’m picking it up.

NOAH: I’m the same way. I’m down to leak a little bit of what our album cover inspo was. There’s this band called After Tea that put out a record in either the late ’60s or early ’70s that we saw the cover and we were like, “That’s sick.” We kind of pulled from that a little bit. And then there were all these concepts lyrically in the record that kind of dealt with these misfortunes of luck or how we perceive luck as this certain mystical thing.

COREY: If you’re buying music, or anything, it’s the age-old tale – you want a cover or something people see and they say, “I don’t what the fuck this is but I want it.” I’m the same way.

NOAH: if you want to get nerdy, if you see a record that is a dollar bin record that came out in like 1973 on RCA, it’s probably good. It’s like this thing where if you look at the date and look at the label, you’re just like, “Well, this probably has a couple of heaters on it,” which is funny too, because the inspiration for the first EP cover was the idea of finding your dad’s records in an attic. We’re record nerds.

I’ve been seeking out bands that have a comic, spacey, psychedelic, Southern Rock vibe and I think you nail that on Fool’s Parade. It sounds like a really cool mixtape to me – I hear Allman Brothers-style Southern Rock, I hear some Grateful Dead, I hear some Spiritualized, I hear some Brian Wilson, maybe even some Monkees. Is that by intention? Is that because you don’t want to be pigeonholed?

COREY: Yeah, I think there’s definitely some intention to that, but there’s also room for it to take its own mold. The idea that was floating around for the album was that the first side should be a come up and the second side a come down, and it ultimately ended up coming out that way. I think the record kind of moves with what you’re saying. Yours is more detailed. In my head, it’s like an 11pm to 4am record. At 11pm, let’s crank a million drinks and then by the end of the night, you’re like, “Oh shit, I got to get home now.”

NOAH: But then it ends with the beautiful sunrise with the song “Hazel Eyes.”

The last album was a little opposite. It’s a little spacier to start off with but the second half is a little more Southern Rock/Americana sounding.

COREY: I don’t think it really had much thought behind it. I think we were just like, “Let’s make a fucking record.”

NOAH: Also, Fool’s Parade was intended and made to be listened to from start to finish. Every song melds into each other. That was very intentional. It’s something I want to continue exploring to a certain degree. I mean, the greatest album of all time, Dark Side of the Moon, is kind of like that. I always have fun listening to that record.

So it sounds like you were very intentional about sequencing.

NOAH: We are intentional about sequencing and also how Side A started and how Side B started. Side B is the total come down. But since Side B ends with that overarching light of “Hazel Eyes,” you could listen from Side B to Side A if you wanted to.

Where did the start of your music discovery happen? Was it parents? Siblings? And do you remember hearing something that you considered to be “yours,” something that you discovered completely on your own and then you became the influencer by telling others about it?

NOAH: I owe it to my parents and my friends for showing me stuff at a young age. I can’t think of anything that felt like it was mine except when I started going to local shows in Omaha and seeing these local bands like David Nance where I was like, “These are my bands. These are my people.” Specifically with Nance, he’s doing all this cool stuff and I’m like, “I was there way back in the day seeing him in sweaty basements and stuff like that.”

COREY: My brother was taking me to shows as a kid, like basement shows and stuff. There was nothing that I considered my own when I was super young, maybe when I was in my mid-teenage years and discovering Sleep and Electric Wizard and bands like that. I was already like 14 to 15 by then. Sabbath was the band I went apeshit for.

NOAH: I have this memory of being at a family friend’s house. They cooked dinner and then they put on the CSNY record and my mom looked at me and she was like, “We’re not a CSNY house, we’re a Black Sabbath house.” It was crazy. I was like, “That’s cool.” I love both of them so much now.

You guys have lived in New York and Los Angeles. Noah, you mentioned you’re from Omaha. Is there some place that feels the most comfortable from a personal perspective and also from a music perspective?

COREY: When I was living in New York, I couldn’t fathom the way I feel about living in LA now. And now, I can’t truly fathom living in New York. Whenever I’m immersed in something for a long time, I feel like that is it until you’re onto the next thing. When I first moved here to LA, I was probably going to shows three fucking nights a week forever. It was cool to get into that.

NOAH: I’ve always felt like an outsider. I think it has to attest to my cultural lineage. But LA feels to me, at the moment, the most comfortable in terms of where I’m at and what I’m doing and the musicianship here. I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied with where I’m at.

Earlier this year, you toured with Hiss Golden Messenger. Were you playing stuff from Fool’s Parade? Back in the day, it felt like bands waited until an album was out before starting a tour just so people would have had time to spend with the music. But, when you’re opening a tour, chances are that there aren’t a ton of people who are familiar with your stuff so they probably wouldn’t be able to tell a new song from an old song anyway.

COREY: We consider that a chance to work on stuff. There’s a pretty good chance on the next run we do, we’ll be playing some stuff that might not even be on the next record. It’s just whatever feels right. There’s always an element to not catering to what feels like the normal structure for the crowd. We’re going to do what we feel is right no matter what, because that’s the point of it.

NOAH: I think it’s good to test out new stuff on the road before you even record it. We actually have never done that before.

What can you tell me about the “Ball and Key” video?

NOAH: We spent a day together as a band just filming stuff. And we went up to this certain spot up on the 2 that Mr. Corey Madden knew about and kind of just started spitballing ideas out there. It’s really free form. I didn’t really know what the narrative was going to be. Watching it after it was finished, it’s kind of like the good parts of Requiem for a Dream vibe that’s a little psychedelic. Overall, it just kind of showcases some of the band’s character and our personality a little bit. It’s a serious track. I mean, we’re playful and fun, but it’s interesting. We are playful and fun and goofy and all that shit. But the music always tends to have a really heavy undertone to it.

Even at your young ages, it seems like you’re both lifers and in it for the long haul. Have you ever been sleeping on a stranger’s floor after a show or been eating a gas station burrito, and you’ve thought, “Maybe I’ll hang it up someday soon”?

COREY: I don’t think there’s a way that I could not be playing music in whatever form it is. It’s the only thing that gives me that feeling that probably everyone in the world is searching for. Talking to people who are so removed, like a family member or somebody, who does something else, they’re like, “It’s crazy that you know that this is the thing.” I’ve talked to people who are way older than me who are like, “I just work my job.” They’re like, “You’re lucky that you found this thing that you truly love and you get that feeling out of it.” I don’t think there’s a world where I could ever not.

NOAH: I spiral. I think we all spiral to a certain degree. But it’s funny because when I do spiral and I try to think about other things that I can do or I should do, I’m just like, “Yeah, but this is all I know.” At a certain point, it’s like I’ve spent so much time doing this, I might as well continue pushing on.