Interviews: Getting a clue with Mel, Jon, and Drew of Heavenly Blue

Michigan-based Heavenly Blue have been wowing audiences across North America with their excellent style of screamo since their formation in 2022 and they haven’t looked back since. The seven-piece band has harnessed their incredible energy and channeled it into their upcoming debut album We Have The Answer which finds them sharpening their sound. We Have The Answer will be out everywhere on April 12 via Secret Voice. Heavenly Blue will be touring the US with Frail Body starting in March, playing Pug Fest 2 in Michigan in June, and playing New Friends Fest in Toronto in August.
Punknews editor Em Moore caught up with vocalist Mel Caren, bassist Jon Riley, and drummer Drew Coughlin over Zoom to talk about their upcoming album, the first full year of the band, playing New Friends Fest, getting banned from TikTok, and so much more. Read the interview below!

How would you describe the first full year of Heavenly Blue?

Drew: I have a bit of an interesting story with it, I just moved to Michigan from Maryland so I’ve only been in the state for less than a year. We did our first two shows in summer 2022 with ZBR Fest being the first one and a show in Detroit the night after being the second one. I wasn’t even moved yet. I traveled back home to Maryland to figure out a few other things but at that point, I knew I was going to move out here. Energetic for me because I’ve been taking in a lot more personally. It’s why I came out here. Heavenly Blue is a huge reason why I came out here in the first place. It’s been a lot of fun with everybody.
Mel: I’d say it’s been kind of a slow whirlwind. [laughs] I feel like it takes a lot of time for things to develop within our band but when they’re happening, they’re happening one after the other. Our first show being Zegema Beach Records Fest was a really crazy thing. On my end, I hadn’t ever performed screaming before so that felt really scary but it was a very supportive crowd. I think we’ve been set up for success in many ways from past projects and getting to know people in the scene. We try to be nice people. Jon is our marketing guy if you will, and he’s very good at making merch and everything like that. I think it’s taken us a long time to finish our first album but we’ve gotten a lot of really cool opportunities in that first year.
Drew: I think it’s also been a really awesome core group of people to be around for what was my first time actually touring. We had those first two shows in 2022 to really get the ball rolling and then we started doing runs pretty much a couple weeks after I moved in November. The first one was with Touche Amore for a couple of dates then with Frail Body and then a couple more with just us two bands. It’s progressed and progressed as the year has gone. It’s exhilarating. It’s really exciting.
Jon: I’ll add that we did two other tours in the first year. The second one, after the Frail Body and Touche couple of dates, was with this band called Blind Girls. They rule, they’re from Australia. Then Venus Twins and we love the Venus Twins so that was so fun! I don’t think we had any misses in terms of the relationships we built or the music that we’ve written or the opportunities we’ve had. I feel like it’s all been perfect. It’s just been so great. I couldn’t have asked for a better first year. Shoutout to Drew for moving! I love having Drew around because Drew’s just my buddy. We just hang out.
Drew: It’s a lot of fun! It’s a little alarming that it’s already winter here again.
[laughter]
Mel and Jon: It’s always winter in Michigan!
Drew: I still need to get used to that. [laughs]

In August 2023 you asked people to send you all of the media that they had about the band like photos, hate mail, reviews, and that kind of stuff. What has the response been like so far?

Jon: We got some awesome responses from people at shows. Some of them took the hate mail seriously, they sent us a DM like, “I don’t ever wanna see you guys again!” But it was a joke, they’re our friends now so it’s ok. We got some cool stuff. Someone took a video with a flip phone and we have the worst quality flip phone video in our email inbox. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it but we’re going to do something with that. We got some awesome photos from people. We tried to string those all together into about 48 pages of photos of the shows we’ve played, some lyrics that Mel and Juno wrote, and some little stories about our side quests because we’re constantly going on little side quests. It’s been good, the response has been great. We just finished the last page of that little media zine. We’ll probably print those off in the next couple months and then we’re going to send them to people as a, “Thank you for supporting us in the first year”. Mel and I collabed on the zine. We both do design stuff and it was fun collabing with Mel in another way too. I love to collab with them musically but graphic design is fun.
Mel: Working on the zine was really rewarding because not only was it just a little fun project but you get to relive a lot of these fun moments that we’ve had as a band. We tried to give some shoutouts to some of our homies that we’ve made throughout touring and stuff. Working with Jon is also really cool because even though I have a degree in graphic design, he’s the one who’s made the bulk - or maybe all - of our merch to this point and he’s really talented at that sort of thing. He has a really good way of giving you artistic feedback and stuff. Generally, he’s a good person to collab with because he’s very honest and straightforward.
Jon: Maybe to a fault.
Mel: [laughs]

How did everyone come together to form the band?

Jon: This is a long story. So the year was 2012…
[laughter]
Jon: There was a band that formed in Ann Arbor, Michigan called Youth Novel and it was four people who lived in the same dorm during the first year of college. That band kind of ramped up between 2013-2014 and then we added another guitarist named Maya - who is now the guitarist and one of the main songwriters for Heavenly Blue. That band kind of fizzled out. We graduated and moved away and we didn’t want to do the long-distance thing so that band went inactive. Then when the pandemic hit, Maya and I were talking like, “Let’s just finish all those recordings we did in 2015”. When we finished all of those recordings we got a lot of great feedback on that record and we were like, “We should just keep writing music!” I had kinda given up guitar music, I was making other types of music where guitar wasn’t the main instrument. I had to relearn bass guitar because I hadn’t played in five years. [laughs] We were initially going to do a split with another band and they were really eager to get it out but we didn’t have a vocalist at the time so Maya and I brainstormed like, “Who do we want to make music with?” The first person we thought of was our friend Nathan. Nathan is an honorary member of Heavenly Blue, he’s the second bassist. Whether or not he’s at a show, it doesn’t matter, he's the second bassist of the band. He hates it. He does not want to be in this band but he’s in the band, I promise you.
Nathan was the vocalist on the 2021 self-titled Youth Novel record. We brought him in to do vocals on this track that we had finished and then we saw a YouTube cover of a Youth Novel song by this guy [points to Drew]. Maybe I’m spoiling some people’s impression of that self-titled record but there’s no real drums on that record, it’s all programmed drums. People don’t know that but it’s true, it’s all programmed drums. So Drew was the first person to play any of those songs ever which to me was shocking because they were not designed for people to play. These are drums that are supposed to be superhuman so when we saw Drew playing those drums it was like, “You’re in the band!” I sent him a message on Facebook and I was like, “Hey, you’re in our band now!” and he was like, “Haha what?” I was like, “You’re in our band!” and then he joined Heavenly Blue. Then I convinced him to move here a year later so that’s how Drew got on board.
Drew: That’s very sped up. [laughs]
Jon: After that, we had a shell assembled of what Heavenly Blue was going to be but we wanted to fill out some more members. We asked our friend Mac - who Maya and I were in a band with between 2015-2016 - to join and he said yes. He is our second guitarist. He actually moved from Denmark to come back to Detroit and then he joined the band. Then I asked Kris who was in this emo band called Swordfish. They’re a 2016-2017 band and they’re a good band. Kris was pretty active in the scene when we were in Ann Arbor and he had wanted to move to Detroit so I was like, “Hey man, come join our band!” Then Kris joined our band. After we had all the instruments settled, Nathan was like, “Hey, I’m getting on a plane and I’m going to California and I’m never coming home” and we were like [sighs]. So the first split had a falling out because we didn’t have a vocalist.
That’s where our sweet lovely vocalists come into play. Maya and I were like, “Who do we know that’s around here who's a great vocalist?” My immediate thought was Juno because Juno has been in the scene forever and has played in so many bands. Then we thought of Mel but I didn’t know Mel didn’t live here. I didn’t know until I asked them and they were like, “I’m in New York” and I was like, “Well, I already asked you so you’re in the band now”. Then we had a seven-and-a-half-piece band with Nathan and that’s kind of how it all came together. We started to write remotely. Maya and me and Mac would get together and write some songs in person. Drew tracked drums at a studio in Baltimore. Mel was doing vocal takes on their phone. Juno was writing intermittently throughout this process. It was all pretty generative around the end of 2022.
Drew: One of my favourite things ever was at our very first show at ZBR Fest in 2022 when Mel and Juno had journals with stuff written in them on stage. It was just so awesome to see because it was completely winging it. [laughs]
Mel: We didn’t actually get to practice until the week before we played that first show and honestly I think there was a lot of miscommunication about what our setlist was actually going to look like so there was a lot of last minute stuff like, “What are my words??” [laughs]
Drew: It was so amazing just seeing them read out of this book while we were on stage and just shrieking. I was like, “Oh my god!” It was a very cool show.
Jon: Yeah. When we all got to play our first shows together we all were like, “This is something. This is really good”. I had that feeling. I played a lot of shows with Youth Novel and other bands and the chemistry, especially between the instruments was really good. Playing with Drew was like second nature to me once we started. It’s been really good. That’s the origin story.

How would you describe your songwriting process?

Jon: I think it’s kinda a unique thing because we don’t have a primary songwriter. Songs start all over the place. On the record that is coming out, Drew wrote songs start to finish on drums which I’ve never seen before. There’s three Drew songs on the record. I wrote a song start to finish on bass and Drew and I filled it in at a practice. The guitars came later. Maya sometimes will just write riffs and be like, “Alright, I’m going to program some drums under it”. Maya has some of the best demos ever, it sounds better than some people’s records. Then Kris and Mac both have songs that they’ve written on the record too. I think it’s a pretty even distribution of songwriters. We don’t have a songwriting process. It comes together organically when we start working on stuff.
Mel: I will say from a vocalist’s perspective, I don’t usually hear anything until it exists instrumentally. I’m not really bringing ideas forward until I have that framework. That usually just means they’re sending me a playlist with a bunch of songs and I’m like, “I guess we’re back to it!” [laughs]
Drew: I think it really helped me a couple of years ago when stuff was already written and when we were agreeing to write more even though it was remote because I was in Maryland and everyone else was in Michigan. I was brainstorming ideas and I would take a video on my phone in my practice space in Baltimore and then I would send it through Google Drive. Maya would MIDI out my drum videos note for note and program them. I’ve never seen anything like that happen and it really made the remote writing process much more accessible and much easier because she created that for herself and then that became the base. Then everything else started coming together with being able to lay down pre-pro guitar and bass. Then we would just swap files back and forth like, “This sounds good! I like how this sounds”. It was so much easier to change things too. It was a very cool process for a couple songs on the album to be hashed out that way.

What was the recording process like for the album?

Drew: I booked time at a studio in Baltimore called Magpie Cage back in 2021 and I did a lot of recording there. It was still very funny to me because I had not met anybody yet. I had an old band and we were making screamo music so I was still doing that. But I definitely was so down to take this on and I was like, “Yeah, let’s go!” There were already existing songs so I was just writing my own drums for those songs. Then there were the songs that we were just talking about where we were starting to write remotely in that interesting way. It had to be seven or eight songs. The song for Balladeers, Redefined was the very first thing I recorded at that Baltimore studio. After doing that all summer of 2021, I was like, “Holy smokes! This is the craziest thing I’ve ever done musically”. That’s what drew me to driving out to Detroit to introduce myself and meet everybody. That’s definitely a portion of the recording process on this record.
Jon: We actually record ourselves. The entire record we recorded in this space with the exception of the drums Drew recorded at Magpie Cage. So when the record comes out everything you hear is stuff we did here. We used a million different amps and a million different guitars. There’s so many different takes of everything. I swear to you I feel like I played the same bass part ten different times on ten different amps and ten different bass guitars. I think it worked out in the end because the record sounds huge. The record sounds enormous. It’s a very heavy record, it’s very dense. There’s a lot of harmonic content like distortion but it’s also got some great clarity mostly because of Drew’s drumming. Drew is such a tight drummer, it made recording so easy. With past bands, if your drummer is kind of not as tight as you’d like them to be, it’s hard to track the rest of the instruments in the way you want to but with Drew, he’s perfectly tight all the time which was good.
Mel: Writing lyrics was kind of a funny process because when you have two vocalists you want the themes in the song to be pretty cohesive. It was more about writing the lyrics on your own time but then I made a Google Drive to upload all the lyrics so we could compare. Other members are allowed to look at them and if they have feedback about something like, “This is really strong, I like this” or “This could be a little more developed of an idea” they can say it. I have to fly in for shows and stuff like that so we’ve done a couple songs at a time but we were finally able to hammer out the rest of this album this past summer. I left my job and I was touring and I was back in Michigan for a few months recording over that period. For everyone else who hadn’t had everything finished at that point, it gives them a little more inspiration to get into the studio as well. If there’s no vocals on the album and it’s a screamo album, it’s not done and you might not have that motivation.

Along with the album you are working on a split with Venus Twins. How did this come about?

We were on tour with Venus Twins and have you ever seen them?

I haven’t yet.

Jon: It’s so awesome watching them perform.
Drew: It’s very extreme.
Jon: Being on tour with them for ten days straight I think instilled in us an immediate, “We love this band! These people are great people on one hand but also their musicianship is next level”. We had talked a little bit about it on the last date like, “Hey, let’s do something together! We have a studio space, let’s just get together and jam for a couple days”. So they came out here in August 2023 and we recorded one song that is their song and one song that is our song and a collab song that the drummers wrote together. The drummers each have their own takes of that same song and then the instruments are going to come later. It’s going to be the same song with two separate guitar, bass, and vocal parts but the same drum part. It’s cool! I haven’t seen anyone do something like that. It was super cool watching it come together.
Drew: It was so hectic. Jake is awesome. It was a very special moment during those couple of hours in the space. It was one thing being on tour with them when we were out West back in June 2023 but it was totally next level being able to sit in front of them for hours and not just rehearse stuff but write stuff together. It was unmatched. I felt like we were butting heads back and forth at some points because we were both on that same wave of what we were writing and what we were playing and what we were thinking about with what the next part would be. It was a nice challenge and Jake is an extremely good drummer. It was great. We were so ready by the time it was time to actually record, we just laid it down and put the tracks on top of each other. It sounds nuts! [laughs] It’s essentially the same drum parts.
Jon: The songs are wild. [laughs] I’m excited. We don’t know where we’re going to release it yet, we’re trying to focus on the record right now.

Venus Twins also convinced Jon to start a TikTok that got banned so what happened there?

Drew: Oh man!
Jon: Gosh, you’re really opening a can of worms here, you’ve done your research. We were on tour with Venus Twins and they are convinced that the way you reach younger audiences is TikTok, they are thoroughly convinced. I was like, “Yeah, alright. I’ll make a personal TikTok and see if I even like this thing”. I’m 29 years old, I’m kind of a dad. I’m a boomer, I don’t know how technology works. That’s not true but I’m not on the younger people’s social medias, I don’t have a Snapchat. So I get on there and I make one post and it’s about this band that we played three dates with called Quiet Fear - a super good band. I took a video of Quiet Fear playing at the Skate Shop in LA and the caption was just like, “Screamo is alive and well in Los Angeles, California” and that was it! I don’t even know what happened. Someone, I think reported it. I don’t know, maybe Venus Twins didn’t report me but…
Mel: You’re conspiracy theorying!
Jon: [laughs] It just doesn’t make any sense. There was nothing offensive about this. I made one post, I got a single like from Venus Twins and the next day I was banned.
Mel: It was within hours, it wasn’t even a day. [laughs] What was your name on TikTok?
Drew: I was going to say, I have a feeling…
Jon: It was ScorpioDemon666.
[laughter]
Jon: But that’s not bad!
Drew: I remember talking about maybe that was the reason which is also hilarious.
Jon: There was no way that was the reason. ScorpioDemon666? People have wild names on TikTok that are not their astrological sign. So we got banned and I tried to make another account but I think it’s tied to my phone or something. I tried to log in and it was like, “You have been banned”. I was like, “I’m giving up!” So we don’t have a TikTok. Maybe we’ll make one if one of our songs gets popular.
Mel: We don’t want to make one! [laughs]
Jon: I don’t want to make one but if one of our songs blows up on TikTok, we’ll make Mel make one.
Mel: Noooo.
Jon: Because you’re cool. You could be a TikToker.
Mel: I’m the most social media-addicted member of our group but I’m trying not to be. That’s the problem with being in a band is this is how you promote yourself. [laughs] I’m trying to be healthy-brained.
Jon: Until you get on TikTok and then you’re going to be like, “This song is crazy!!”
Mel: Our song? [laughs]
Jon: Just fake singing over one of our songs. I can see it, it would take off.
Mel: I will say we really goof around a lot in Heavenly Blue. There’s a lot of different dynamics between the members but a fun little tidbit that I have is me and Kris, our guitarist, were discussing the whip and nae nae and adding some of that choreography to some of our songs. We were doing that for a Youth Novel song. [laughs] There might be some bearing behind that.
Jon: There may or may not be a music video coming for this next record that is just a dance-a-long. Haven’t seen a screamo band do that yet so…
Mel: The Macarena. [laughs]
Jon: The Macarena to a Heavenly Blue song?
Mel: You can do the Macarena to anything. Drew writes some crazy drum parts so I’m not sure.
Drew: I would try my very best to make all the dance moves if we were actually doing this. [laughs]
Mel: Thank you! He’s a great dancer.

We’ve reached the dance-off portion of the interview.

Jon: Drew would win! That’s what you don’t realize, Drew wins every time. He has one move that’s a showstopper. That’ll be our first TikTok.

The dance challenge.

Jon: Yeah it’ll be “Do the Cogo”.
[laughter]
Jon: Blind Girls, the Australians, add “o” onto the end of people’s names like, “Jono” but “Drewo” doesn’t sound good so they started calling him “Cogo” which is the first syllable of his last name. Australians are all bros. Every single Australian is a bro.
Mel: It’s awesome. It makes them really fun to tour with. [laughs]
Jon: It’s so much more fun to tour with bros than with non-bros.
Mel: Nerds?
Jon: The nerds. This is the high school bully portion of the interview.
[laughter]
Mel: Actually most of us are nerds, it’s mostly just Jon who’s a jock.
Jon: Well Drew’s my protégé. We’re going to the gym three days a week now.
Drew: [groans]

You played New Friends Fest in Toronto for the first time in 2023. What was this experience like?

Mel: It was amazing! In 2022 I met Sharni from Blind Girls and some other friends after New Friends when people were touring down and hanging out. Hearing how much fun everyone had and the community element, you don’t really experience that at many things. There’s also Zegema Beach Records Fest but there is something nice about how throughout the weekend of New Friends there’s a lot of organized activities. I think it brings people together. That was a really great experience. We’d never played a show outside of the States until then and I’d never seen Toronto until that point. It was very rewarding. We made new friends too. [laughs]
Drew: I had a great time. I had also never seen Toronto. I wish I was there for the entire fest, but I unfortunately wasn’t. But the day that we played was way too much fun. A couple of us drove in and actually started the drive home the same day. We started coming back to Michigan late into the night. It was a fantastic show, it went very well.
Jon: I would say it’s a very special fest for the social aspects and also because the people who organize it are such long-term staples of the scene. This is where I shout out everyone at New Friends and if I forget anyone, crucify me and nail me to the cross. Rohan is in the worst band in the world, Votive - I cannot stand that band - but is an awesome person. Respire’s good, it’s just Votive that’s not good. Vanessa was in this awesome band back in the day as well and has been in the scene forever. Then Egin is the best! Egin is such a treat.
Drew: Egin is so nice!
Jon: So nice. I think it really reflects in how the fest plays out because the people who do it are so wonderful, they’re just so great.
Drew: It was a little bit bigger than I was imagining. I didn’t have any expectations, I knew it was going to be wild to begin with but it was wild.
Jon: That venue’s awesome too. I hope they keep doing it at the Lithuanian House. I really did like that venue, it’s a good spot. I love Toronto. It wasn’t my first time in Toronto, I go there all the time. I love that city. If I could move there, boy would I.
Drew: It was very nice. I didn’t see much of it though.
Jon: That was the other thing, we played that show with two or three sick members. Juno was sick, [to Drew] you were sick.
Drew: I think we were just getting a little burnt out from stuff so some of us stayed back and rested the first day of the fest. We played the second day so we drove in on the day of and then we just wanted to get back home and keep resting if we could.

Do you have a favourite show you’ve played so far?

Mel: We had a really good show in Reno, Nevada.
Jon and Drew: That’s what I was gonna say!!
Mel: The kids really came out. We were in a house. When we do a lot of our touring along the East Coast or even into the Midwest, it seems a lot of the places we play are bars or established venues so playing a legit house show with a lot of people out who want to be there was amazing. The bands really blew us away, the local support. They took us out to the casino after and we did karaoke. Honestly, I got a sore throat from the smoking in there but it was just an amazing time overall.
Jon: Yeah, the show was awesome. It wasn’t a huge show, it was pretty small in terms of attendance, but the room was hyped. This was a living room. It was at this house called Urgent Care, it’s awesome. This is a shoutout to Reno, Nevada, everyone should play Reno. I hear they have a few established venues there as well for bigger bands that are coming through. The Urgent Care people are awesome. The band This Could Never Work is awesome. The other local band, this was their first show, they’re called Foilsick. They’re awesome. I can’t wait until they put out some recordings. Every single band was great. We also made some really good friends there. I would play Reno, Nevada on every tour we play in the future. I really like the people out there, they’re great.
Drew: I’m going to be a little softie for a second but I think a few of the shows that always stick out for me are some of the first ones we did in November 2022 with Frail Body and Touche Amore. It was two crazy shows. We did Ohio and Pittsburgh and we got to have Mac so we were the full seven people and it was all seven people in the band rocking out, having a good time. We got to play with Jeromes Dream right before heading out West here in Detroit. That was, I feel like, the only time this year [2023] that Mac was with us. Mac had not been with us since the Touche/Frail dates so all of us were up there rocking out and having a really good time. It’s nice. It doesn’t happen that often.
Mel: Yeah, it’s kind of hard to get seven people’s work schedules all in order. Mac was actually supposed to play New Friends this year as well with us but he wound up going to Japan for work that weekend. These things happen. It is a treat to have everybody. It seems like a lot of members but we all really do have a role to fulfill and we’re all thankful.

What’s next for Heavenly Blue?

Jon: As the marketing director, I will start this off.
Mel and Drew: [laughs]
Jon: We’re working on getting some tours set up. It depends on life stuff if we can get out and do it and how the record is received. Hopefully, people love the record and will throw money at us to just tour, that would be great. I would love it if people gave us money to make music.
Drew: I’m crossing my fingers and toes right now.
Jon: We have the Venus Twins split coming out soon. We’ll be releasing our album on Secret Voice. Jeremy Bolm is our screamo dad.
Mel: Shoutout to Jeremy Bolm! He’s one of the people that has supported us from the get-go and he really is like our dad. That’s how we look at him. [laughs]
Jon: He’s really quite a lovely person. Truly I don’t think there’s anyone else in DIY or in established music scenes who cares so much about making people feel like they’re supported. He’ll go out of his way to talk to you after shows. When we played shows with him, he spent a whole two hours after the last show we played just talking with us but also giving us advice. We were in LA and I needed to get my bass set up and I hit up Jeremy who lives in LA and we ended up talking to Clayton about it who was like, “I got a guy! Here you go”. It was super helpful. They’re really great people. We’re really excited to be working with Secret Voice on this. We had talked about releasing on some other labels and talked about shopping it around to some bigger places too but what feels right is working with people who believe in our music and who we really align with interpersonally.
This is a personal statement, I’m not going to speak for the band - I have no patience for “cool guy mentality” or people who are like, “We are an established touring band. We are an established label and we don’t have time to hear your stuff”. I don’t have time for that. I don’t want to be your friend, I don’t want to work with you. I really want to work with people personally who are passionate about what they do and want to help as much as I want to help. We’re all trying to come up together. That’s how this band works. We try to support every single band we play with on tour. We try to go out of our way to stay in touch after and follow up with what they’re doing because we’re trying to bring our friends up with us. Working with people who are more established than we are to help us come up feels like the logical thing. The more community-based aspect of music rather than the industrial aspect is how I like to think of this band because fuck the music industry!

According to your Instagram bio you have the answer, what is it?

Mel: You have to listen to the record to find out.
Jon: We Have the Answer is the name of our debut record. If you want to know what that means you’re going to have to listen real closely and think about everything that’s happening in the world and also think about everything that’s happening right now in music and then you’ll understand.
Drew: I’m going to side with Mel and say listen to the record when it comes out. I think it’s a pretty bold statement and it can be taken in a lot of cool different ways. I think the record is very bold and in your face and is throwing a foot down.
Mel: I like throwing the foot down. A two-step for mankind. [laughs]
Drew: We’re hardcore dancing, kind of.
Jon: Heavenly Blue, stomping to a city near you.

It works!

Jon: I’m telling you, everything rhymes with “ou”. Heavenly Blue, we’re the crew. Heavenly Blue, what are we gonna do?
[laughter]