Image of 538st and CJSW Interviewer Emma Marshall (middle).
538st performed during Sled Island on Saturday, 6pm at Ship & Anchor.
TRANSCRIPT:
Emma (CJSW)
Could you guys introduce yourselves?
Jake Cooke
Hey, I’m Jake
Sam Cooke
And I’m Sam.
Emma (CJSW)
What are you guys looking forward to for performing Sled this year?
Jake Cooke
Looking forward to kind of experiencing Sled Island as a whole. It’s been a while since we’ve been hearing about it and wanting to play this festival. We hear that Calgary has an amazing audience, and there’s just great music listeners out here, so we’re excited to see what that’s all about? Yeah.
Sam Cooke
Yeah, excited to play The Ship. We’ve heard really cool things about the venue, and also the lineup that night is really exciting. The whole night being Ship Hop, you know, we feel we fit in really well, and gonna have a time to shine, and also experience other musicians doing the same genre as us.
Emma (CJSW)
How did it feel get getting chosen for Sled?
Sam Cooke
Super exciting. When we got that email back, it was big smiles all around. It was really cool moment.
Emma (CJSW)
Is there anything else you’re looking forward to doing in Calgary while you’re here?
Jake Cooke
We’ve got family here, so we’re getting to spend some time with family, which has been amazing, and just meeting up with other friends that live in Calgary. There’s a lot of our friends that have moved out from B.C. to Calgary, so that’s kind of a big piece of it. And we had a session with Dempsey Bolton yesterday, so that was awesome, just kind of doing some writing.
Emma (CJSW)
So you two are brothers. I’m wondering, how do you influence or push each other with the music you make.
Jake Cooke
We we definitely have slightly different influences and different opinions on a lot of things, that’s for sure. So I think we’re always just pushing one another to find the best idea or go after the highest quality thing, whatever we believe it is. Sometimes that’s a different thing. It’s a fairly dynamic thing. And that’s kind of a hard question to answer.
Emma (CJSW)
Do you want to speak to your difference in influences? Who influences each of you, and how does that like intersect?
Sam Cooke
That is a really fun question, because I think we’ve both grown up, you know, being brothers. We’ve always been together and listened to a lot of the same music. We’re definitely into neo-soul and alternative music. D’Angelo has been a cool influence over the last couple years, as far as our production things like that, and people like Benny sings even and some real alternative artists that I know Jake really likes, and him being my bigger brother, has also put me on to a lot of cool stuff, so it’s been fun to to work through that dynamic and and learn from each other. As far as inspiration goes for me, I obviously look to rappers and things in that way, and Jake handles the production and musicality more than me, which is seen a lot through our music, because he’s inspired by artists like Tom Misch and some really cool, you know, neo-soul, alternative artists. So, like he said, I think that push and pull of the two inspirations coming together really meets, and that’s where our music finds its sound.
Emma (CJSW)
I find that I see a lot of band mates that almost get into a brotherhood because of how close you have to be and how honest you have to be with one another. So it’s interesting to see as brothers already, you already had that groundwork laid out.
Sam Cooke
We definitely have some some tiffs and some arguments pretty often. But being brothers, we always have that chance to just apologize to each other and work through it and and that’s also where some beautiful music comes from.
Emma (CJSW)
Your actual band name, 538st is the address of your mother’s house. When you picked that name did you kind of debate on some other things beforehand?
Jake Cooke
We had formed 538st when Sam was just figuring out rapper names and whatever, and we didn’t really have a band name, but we had the idea, and we had started to put music together, and we were trying to come up with it. And one of the names Sam was kind of messing with was 538st, and that was an homage to our mom’s address. We spent probably multiple weeks just humming and hawing over stuff. And that was just like, ‘Okay, this is right in front of us. It just makes sense.’
Sam Cooke
This names made the most sense. Because us being family, our mom’s been such a big part of our life and such a big supporter. So at this point, I think a lot of what we do is for her, and just trying to pay her back in, in the way she’s supported us.
Emma (CJSW)
Does she comes out a lot?
Sam Cooke
We had an event last Tuesday. We threw a block party, we call it a street party, and it was amazing the way she was incorporated in the event, she cooked for everyone, and it was free food for everyone at the event, we had over 200 people just come to our front yard, essentially. And it was a really amazing moment. But… She’s a big part of what we do, in everything we do.
Emma (CJSW)
Is there any other hidden ways that family or relationships are incorporated into the work that you do, maybe that isn’t like as surface level that you can see right away?
Jake Cooke
There’s so many little nuances that Sam throws in that are talking about our little sister. We’ve got foster siblings, and they’ve become a huge part of our lives, and they’re still pretty young, like 14 and six, and they’ve been with us for six years. So there’s a lot of little things that Sam throws in that people wouldn’t catch, but are talking about her. She knows about these things, and we just wrote a song called Family, and that’s pretty much speaking to everything that goes on in that house.
Emma (CJSW)
It’s a form of storytelling, right? Speak to what matters to you. I bet it means so much to your siblings.
Sam Cooke
They sure do a lot for us. So they’re probably getting tired of it.
Jake Cooke
Our little six year old brother, is going around… I think he’s in kindergarten right now, and he’s going around his school bragging about us and it’s so funny.
Sam Cooke
We also come from a family of seven, our blood family, so I’m the youngest, and then Jake’s got a twin. So everyone plays a role, and it’s really cool and really fun.
Emma (CJSW)
Is your twin musical?
Jake Cooke
He is musical, but more just for fun, he’s hilarious. Every time he comes in the house, first thing he does, he sits at the piano and, just plays some old blues riff that our friend’s mom taught him 10 years ago. But he’s super ingrained with giving us critiques on how we sound, and sharing his own opinions on the things that we do and stuff like that.
Emma (CJSW)
So he’s involved either way. And can they be harsh on you too sometimes?
Sam Cooke
They’re probably the harshest.
Jake Cooke
The hardest thing is, when you send it to them and they just don’t respond, you hope that this is gonna be the one, but they don’t give it back or something, so you know you got to keep working a little bit.
Emma (CJSW)
You guys have been doing this since 2019.
Sam Cooke
We’re ready. We’re ready to start cashing in, start blowing up.
Emma (CJSW)
Can you tell me some of your goals when you started in 2019 and maybe how those shifted to now?
Sam Cooke
You mentioned, you mentioned social media and and your presence online. Can you tell me a little bit about your approach to your marketing when it comes to your social media presence? It’s been incredible, just like any endeavor, it’s been an incredible learning experience. We’ve had a lot of failures, countless failures. It started as a four piece, so we were all four equal parts with our other band members. And as those things go, everyone wants to have their equal opinions and things like that. And at the end of the day, it was me and me and Jake, who started the band. And we had a certain direction that we wanted to go. So all of us, we’re still best friends with those guys, all of us made a decision that it would be me and Jake going forward and now all of our band, which we have an amazing band behind us, and they’re all hired pieces, and they’re 538 or die and, it’s pretty awesome. So we’ve, we’ve experienced changes, like that band and also just the music genres we’ve followed, just listening to lots of different stuff together and bouncing off each other. As far as the business goes, it’s been striving for bigger and better every year and just trying to grow our fan base, and get better with marketing and social media and things like that. That’s kind of where it’s gone from is just having fun with with four friends to now being like, okay, these days, we want to make this a business. We want to make this our life, our full time thing and we do want to touch the world with our music. It’s all about having fun. We want to express the same emotion through our social media that we do at our shows, which is, you can be yourself. You don’t have to be timid, you don’t have to be scared, you can be silly all you want. But at the same time, it’s got some edge, because we’re hip hop artists. So social media, a big thing is just incorporating those values, like we talked about family and fun, and just being yourself and the fact that you’re part of the 538 family, no matter what, as long as you’re supporting, you’re following along. So we just really want to make our fans feel included in all of that. Is there one of you that kind of take the lead on that, do you guys do it together?
Jake Cooke
It’s one of those things we argue about. Social media is such a hard thing nowadays, especially when you’re trying to do it authentically, but then you’re also trying to do it in a way that you’re following the algorithm. And so our last year and a half, we’ve had a goal to hit 10k and the way we’ve approached that goal is come up with a concept and be consistent in that concept. And our mindset was like, ‘Okay, if we get better and better at this concept, it’s going to start to take off.’ And we noticed… We started this thing called Saturday sessions, where we would make a song every Saturday and we would edit it and we would video the whole session, and one day we would make a song, and by the next Friday, we would put that song out on Instagram, and release multiple videos and all the footage from the session. We did that for 10 weeks, and we saw awesome awareness, especially local awareness and and just people that already followed us being like, ‘Whoa, they’re doing something.’ But as far as breaking out, it hasn’t happened. I think the biggest thing is that we’re having a hard time with is we we feel like our content is good for, like, the authentic side of things, we’re actually doing the things that we don’t have to fight about when we make this and when we try and do things for engagement. If that’s the priority, then we tend to argue more about what is going to get engagement, rather than just doing what feels enjoyable and what we actually feel authentic in. So for us right now, the biggest challenge, and I don’t know if this is this is probably not your question-the biggest challenge is, do we want to succumb to having to spend money just to run ads and just investing all our money on ads to make our content that we believe in get seen? Or do we want to succumb to making all our videos for engagement sake, and we’ve made a few of those, and they were, our least favorite things to make, and they felt inauthentic and just kind of following the trend.
Emma (CJSW)
I think that that’s what a place like Sled Island is really good for. Maybe you can touch somewhere in Calgary and start opening that up a bit more.
Jake Cooke
It’s all kind of like it all kind of goes together in little pockets, but the the goal of 10k that’s kind of the one thing that we’re starting to think, okay, maybe we just have to spend on ads.
Emma (CJSW)
But your Instagram, your social media is entertaining.
Jake Cooke
All we do is we set up a camera and then we think of the wildest thing, like jumping over Sam while riding a bike inside of the studio. First thing that comes to mind, we just shoot it.
Emma (CJSW)
Okay, so you’ve worked with Rush, how did that happen?
Jake Cooke
That’s actually the name of our our friends film production company
Emma (CJSW)
Tell me about the work you do with them?
Sam Cooke
Kuipers Peak, so it was a pretty amazing experience. We we shot a video called Kuipers peak. That’s K, U, I, P, E, R, S. We took our whole entire band and 20 other people on top of a mountain top in Kelowna, BC, and we shot a live set, a three song live set, and it was just an incredible production. Everyone was just out there out of the good of their hearts and helping us make this image, this vision that we had come to life, and by the end of it, it was just an incredible experience that turned out really well. It really helped us, as far as engagement goes, things like that, and awareness around our hometown. Because, you know, people from Kelowna got to see that, and they’re like, ‘Whoa, that’s my city.’ And yeah, it was, it was just a really cool turning point. But as far as as Rush and all the people involved, they’ve just grown into such a cool community of filmmakers, and they now do YLW advertised. YLW’s is what they’re called. And as far as a filmmaking and production company, they are the best of the best, so shout out to them.
Emma (CJSW)
This is more of a fun question, and you might both have separate answers, but if you could share the stage with anybody, dead or alive, who would you want to perform with?
Sam Cooke
James Brown or Anderson Paak. I think Anderson Paak is well suited to our music, and he’s also been a big inspiration as far as our production. And I should have mentioned that earlier, but just the stuff he does is so cool and just really inspiring.
Jake Cooke
Anderson Paak and Free Nationals have been one of our biggest guiding lights, and a lot of music that they’re kind of inspired by, and then Tom Misch, those two probably.
Emma (CJSW)
Are there any artists you want to shout out?
Jake Cooke
RetroFile from Edmonton, they’re sick. Dempsey Bolton, big time, shout out to Dempsey Bolton.
Sam Cooke
Teon Gibbs is a really cool artist out of Vancouver, Kelowna as well, and he’s doing a cool event this year called For The Culture that we’ll be performing at this summer. So if you’re listening, get your tickets. Come see us. It’ll be lots of fun.
Jake Cooke
And Uncle Strut.
Emma (CJSW)
What are you guys up to after Sled?
Sam Cooke
We’ll be spending the next couple weeks in the Okanagan in Kelowna, B.C. our hometown, we now live in Vancouver, but we’re going home to play Canada Day. The city’s got us for Canada Day, so that’ll be fun to play for the whole city. We’ll be playing in Vernon, and that’s in the Okanagan as well, and that’s on the 25th and we’re actually getting ready for a big tour in August, which is our our biggest thing coming up, and that’s an event we call 538 and Friends, so it’s all incorporated with that. We’ll be taking what we call the bandwagon, and it’s a mobile studio and also a mobile stage where we’ve recorded a majority of our music. We’ll be taking that city to city, around the interior of B.C. to eight different cities and playing free shows in all the parks in those cities.
Emma (CJSW)
That’s such a cool idea. Did you guys construct this idea yourself? 100% us. Us and our manager, Harmony Tate. Shout Out Harmony. Couldn’t do anything without her. So the real goal is to-on top of this growth strategy that we’re currently incorporating, it’s just to increase our friend group. We don’t like to say fans, we like to say friends. So that’s why, 538 and Friends, and why we’re going city to city is just to make more friends.