Shock Treatment: Let's start off by telling me who all are in Astrologer at this very moment as we speak?
Andrew: Starting with the tough questions! This one is always hard to answer… people pretty much view Astrologer as my project because I’m the songwriter, or Candy and I, since we are sort of a duo! That said, at any given time, we have several other people I would consider members of the group in some fashion. Wyatt Blair, Don Bolles, Joel Tyler Wall, Blake Garmon, and Nick Florence have all been involved with us both live and in our recorded output intermittently since we began.
Shock Treatment: What is the Astrologer conception story? How did you guys meet and decide to play music together?
Andrew: I started Astrologer after my last band broke up. I played one show under that name in 2020 with two of my friends in Phoenix, Andrew Jemsek and Eddie Horn. Then, the pandemic happened, and it changed the trajectory of the entire project. I moved to the woods and kept writing by myself. Wyatt Blair would check in with me now and again (we are friends,) and invited me to go to LA and record an album for his label, lolipop records. Nick came onboard shortly after; Candy and Don after that, Blake and Joel after that!
As far as how we met and came to play music together, it was all rather serendipitous. Wyatt, Nick, and I had known each other for several years and had worked together on a band before Astrologer in the 2010’s. Nick and I knew Blake from his own band, DOMS, who we had played with many times. I met Don around 2017 and we became friends when he came to DJ a show I did in Phoenix. He stayed at my house for a week and broke up with his girlfriend (who was with him) during that week. I guess that made our meeting a bit more memorable… Candy and I met at the haunted Hotel Monte Vista in Flagstaff and hit it off immediately, we’ve been together ever since!
Andrew: Yes, it is by design, in fact! A fellow named Jon Mills who has a magazine called Shindig! recently included our song “Ball & Chain” on a playlist, accompanied by an article about “The New Pop Explosion.” He said that the new bands he’s been hearing the last few years are less beholden to genre rules, so he sees it as a sort-of throughline of us and our contemporaries. The other bands, some of them are pals of ours like Uni Boys, Billy Tibbals, Josephine Network. Its nice to be included, and I really like the name “The New Pop Explosion.” It reminds me of The Paisley Underground, or something.
Anyway, I think ourselves and our contemporaries share an eclectic taste, and in my case, it would be difficult to separate myself from styles I love to write, just because they don’t have a sameness that other bands and albums might. I listen to a lot of pop and rock music, especially old music. I discern the things I really love and want to emulate to an extent, and do it. I don’t think too much about it when I write, the ideas come into their own as they are written. I just don’t make a point to resist if a song seems like it should be a style that doesn’t fall neatly into a predetermined category.
Shock Treatment: The band is currently based in Phoenix, my home town! How do the crowds treat you guys when you play live? Do the Phoenicians seem pretty receptive to the sweet sweet sounds of Astrologer?
Andrew: Yes, I’m a fourth generation Phoenician! Very proud of where I come from.
Now, about the crowds… I have never been the type to pack houses for shows. We have done all right, but generally, I come from the bedroom. I am sort of a perennial outsider, and I don’t love to perform. Performing requires going out on a regular basis and being in loud, crowded places. It drives me to drink… I like recording best, to be honest.
Not to say people never like us when they see us. We have gone through many incarnations live; for the Astrologer Fleetwood Sprawl shows we mostly played as a 3 piece with backing tracks, since the nature of that album was lo-fi and recorded in our friend’s living room. Once a lady came up to us after one of those shows and cried and said I have a beautiful voice. I think about that a lot!
Shock Treatment: Astrologer has a new LP coming out June 1st titled Maiden America on Lollipop Records. This will be the follow up to 2024’s Fleetwood Sprawl. What can people expect from this new record and how do you feel it differs from the last LP?
Andrew: Well, the last one was a kind of love letter to My Phoenix, so to speak. The cover has all Phoenix artifacts and figures on it… Candy and Blake and I recorded that album mostly in his living room at our apartment complex, the Fleetwood. At one point, pretty much everyone in the band lived there. The album was really a double album, it was an hour long. A sprawling mess! But it was a beautiful time and some of my best songs are on that album. I think lolipop is going to release a truncated LP version of it this year, we’ll see!
Maiden America is sort of a middle point, I suppose. Our first EPs (Legerdemain L & R) and our first album, Eternal Friday, were almost schizophrenic with the genre jumping, mostly because we recorded them during the pandemic and the mindset was: who knows if we will ever make another album, what if everyone dies, etc? Astrologer Fleetwood Sprawl was a direct response to Eternal Friday and its more polished, studio approach. Eternal was a pop record, Sprawl was a bedroom record, and Maiden America is a balance of the two.
We recorded Maiden with Don Bolles and Joel Tyler Wall at their respective spaces, and the idea was to make it just sound like how we are, which, I suppose, at heart, is a garage band. I cut the songs that were too wildly different than the rest and made a simple, straightforward, 30 minute album. It has the cohesion of a band just playing in the garage together; it is the most true-to-life sounding of our albums, so far.
Andrew: Wyatt IS an incredibly nice guy, and ultimately, the reason Astrologer has been fortunate enough to make several albums!
I was told about Wyatt, of all people, by Paul Collins of The Nerves and The Beat. I was in Brooklyn in 2016 recording an EP and was introduced to Paul when he came to the studio to appear on a cover my last band did of “Walking Out on Love.” We got to chatting and eventually, he just asked point blank, “Do you know Wyatt Blair?” I told him I didn’t, and he said, when you get back home, you should look him up. You would probably get along. So I did, and we do!
Shock Treatment: And speaking of newness, you also have a comp coming out called Cavalcade of Stars Volume One on your new label Candyland Record Company. Tell me a bit about this mysterious new compilation and the decision to start your own label?
Andrew: I started Candyland Record Company this year because I saw a void to be filled, notably in Phoenix, but generally everywhere. Like I said before, I came from the bedroom. I grew up recording on a four track tape machine, and a lot of my favorite music is decidedly not radio music, to put it simply. I love the character and imperfection of bedroom music, it is a big part of who I am as an artist and as a listener.
Phoenix has always had a weirdness to it, though I feel like my brand of weirdness that I love and grew up on is noticeably underrepresented. I view myself as a bit of a torch-bearer for the eccentric Phoenix I grew up with. From Wallace & Ladmo, Mike Condello, Hub Kapp, Alice Cooper, Don Bolles, the Meat Puppets, JFA, Jr Chemists, Sun City Girls, on down the line through the stuff I actually grew up around like all the Modified & Trunk Space bands like Colorstore, Ryan Avery, Father’s Day, Treasure Mammal, any number of Andrew Jemsek bands, etc. In recent years I see a lot more bullshit, sad to say. I want the Candyland label and what we stand for to continue the tradition of Phoenix weirdos. And for the readers out there, feel free to take my opinions with a boulder of salt; I am a 40 year old white nerd, after all.
As for the compilation, our first release, it’s called the Cavalcade of Stars Volume One, and it has a ton of great demos, bedroom music, and generally lo-fi recording, half of which is made by Phoenician artists, and the other half by other excellent artists from elsewhere! Famous Phoenician Don Bolles included a song from his first Phoenix punk band, Kray-Zee Homicide, from 1977. That song, “Bionic Girl,” has never seen release! We have some excellent other Phoenix artists like Harrison Hufman, Jaime & the Gnomes, Serene Dominic, and even my own bedroom project, Comfort Corps. The non-Phoenician artists include the wonderful Jad Fair, Prefab Messiahs, Alley Girl, Billy Tibbals… I could go on, but then I’d reach 16 artists and then, well, I couldn’t go on. I implore you to look up anything you can find from these artists; they’re all great, and so are their inclusions on the compilation!
I am hoping to release the LP this summer, so keep an eye out!
Shock Treatment: So I want to get back to the subject of the city of Phoenix itself again. I’ve been noticing a lot of touring bands will now skip over AZ and go north from TX and right into CO then straight west to UT and then over to NV or north to ID and then the west coast. Have you seen this happening? Why do you think Phoenix, the 5th largest city in the FUCKING country is getting the shaft again? Why does Phoenix continue to lack a strong music culture similar to cities its size like Chicago, L.A., New York and Philadelphia?
Andrew: Here’s my hot take/unpopular opinion. And I say this with a great deal of respect and love for my hometown: it is a difficult town for bands who are from here, let alone the bands coming from somewhere else who don’t have a leg up with the right promoters. I have brought/helped several great bands from other cities get shows in Phoenix and Tucson; no surprise, the Phoenix shows were sparsely attended, Tucson always had a bunch of people. I don’t mean to say that Phoenix doesn’t have music fans, it just depends what kind of music, and I’d be willing to guess that the music you and I love and want to see probably doesn’t pack the Crescent, so they have to play small bar shows which don’t always pay enough. That is the state of affairs for all bands nowadays. Even the ones doing well aren’t really doing so hot unless they are above a certain level, financially speaking. It doesn’t always make sense to hit a city where people don’t show up for you. That said, I do wish more stuff I want to see would come through!
Shock Treatment: What does the band have in store for the rest of 2026?
Andrew: We are releasing Maiden America on my 40th birthday, June 1, the first Candyland comp sometime after that, and I’ve been told that a video show we worked on in 2025 should be seeing release around the same time. But that’s another story.
We don’t have any plans to play shows right now. Candy and I just had a son so that is our main priority for now. My little bedroom project, Comfort Corps, is something I am excited about doing; Candy is doing a HI-NRG type thing called Hi-Value… Blake has his band DOMS and his home project Drakkar Noir (also on the comp.) Everyone is feeling happy to do their own thing for the moment, and we still get to hang out and work on things together around the Candyland label!
Shock Treatment: Where can people go to listen to your music, buy your records and follow the band?
Andrew: We are on all the streaming services! You can buy our new record through myself or lolipop, it will be available June 1 and is up for preorder now! Our back catalog you can typically find through me or our Hello Merch store, as wel
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