Julian Calendar

“In my early twenties, I had a hard drive full of musical and lyrical ideas I wanted to turn into songs,” Julian Calendar explains. “I didn’t want to be in a band or play live.” She hit on the idea of a group who could write, perform, and record her material. “I was looking for new ways to collaborate and subvert the traditional idea of a band. Most acts are about image and style, so I purposefully chose people older than me for the band.” Julian assembled the group while living in Charlotte, N.C. “There’s an amazing music scene there,” she says. “Everything fell together quickly.” She recruited multi-instrumentalists Jeremy Fisher and Scott Thompson, pairing them with two non-musicians as vocalists. Hannah Hundley, selected for her cinema background and novelist Jeff Jackson (whose work has been praised by Don DeLillo and NPR), chosen to provide the lyrics. They are the public face of the band. Over the years, Julian has alternated members around the core lineup to keep the project fresh, recently adding multi-instrumentalist Sean Robinson.
The band purposefully zigzags between styles. Earlier albums range across post-punk, disco, noise, new wave, and folk. The music of late draws from Drum n Bass breakbeats to string arrangements. “Everybody listens to different genres,” Julian says. “Why should a band be bound by a single style?” “Every musical possibility is on the table,” she says. “We want to serve the song, not build a fucking brand.”