The members of CAPYAC had their own ideas for this interview’s headline. “New song dissolves body,” suggested Eric Peana. “New song disintegrates your bones,” offered Obie Puckett. “A strange substance is leaking from the Chicago Bean, and experts think it might be connected to this new single by CAPYAC,” pitched Delwin Campbell.
The trio’s headline ideas sound a lot like their music: surrealist, silly, and visceral in equal measure. That includes the group’s latest single “Sexy in my Bodyyy,” an ode to feeling, well, sexy in your body. Its self-confident lyrics are punctuated with the phrase “hot dog,” an interjection we can all agree should get a lot more use. CAPYAC, thankfully, is leading the charge.
INTO sat down with the members of CAPYAC to learn about the story behind their latest song, their onstage antics (from summoning Satan to recruiting cupcake-tossing clowns), and taking pride in being consistently inconsistent.
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Hey, CAPYAC! Let’s talk about your new single, “Sexy in my Bodyyy.” The lyrics are confident, bizarre, deliciously unserious — all that good stuff. How did you come up with the song?
OBIE PUCKETT: It was extremely stream-of-consciousness. We were all laying around in Delwin’s lair of music gear. And I remember it was a really hot day in Berlin, and he was playing the beat, and he was like, “Everybody needs to write song lyrics to this right now.”
DELWIN CAMPBELL: That’s what I said?
OBIE: Pretty much! I was laying on the couch, and I was wiggling, and this really sassy voice just blurted out of me, and Delwin was like, “That. Keep going with that.” It was like, ultra attitude, big exaggerated confidence coming out of nowhere. Very drag-esque. And we went for it. It kind of just fell out. Once I had the hot dog line, we all kind of chimed in with lyrics to support the hot dog.
Everything in service of the hot dog. Is that what y’all’s writing process normally looks like, especially as you’re working on your next album?
ERIC PEANA: It’s kind of all over the place. I feel like we try to do as many strategies as we can. Some of the songs were like, Obie and I started when we were back in LA and just brought it to Delwin, and then Delwin works his magic. Some of the songs, it’s Delwin and I plugging away in a room and just uncovering something. I feel like one of the songs was something that I had made, and then we had sent to our friend who’s a poet who made up a poem over it.
OBIE: Like Eric said, it’s a combination of one of them squirreling away and laying an egg and then presenting it to the others — but then sometimes we all lay eggs together.
DELWIN: In terms of how we usually write music, there really isn’t one single way. The only thing we haven’t tried is consistency.
That philosophy definitely comes through in your music. Your sound is super eclectic and a fun mix of genres — how did you land on your musical style?
DELWIN: I mean, it is just a combination of our three individual tastes kind of working together. I think all of us are excited about every song that we put out, and so it’s sort of like a three-way Venn diagram where like, there’s all of this music that we each listen to and are influenced by and make, and ultimately, the only stuff that comes out as this band is the stuff in the center of that Venn diagram.
ERIC: I feel like we’ve always been interested in consistency. We’ve always, like, flirted with consistency as a concept, and then at the end of the day, we just end up doing whatever we want.
OBIE: What feels good on the day, and that is different every day. We’re obsessed with the journey.
DELWIN: I also have a sort of anti-authoritarian streak, so if anyone tells me to do something, I’ll just try to do the opposite.
“The only thing we haven’t tried is consistency.”
– Delwin Campbell
I’ve also heard that things can get pretty wild at your concerts. What can fans expect from a live CAPYAC performance?
ERIC: Well, there was that Halloween show where we tried to open a portal to hell.
OBIE: “Tried”? We succeeded, baby!
DELWIN: Yeah, Satan was there. Okay, so the answer to this question is that you can’t expect anything. But what is useful is what’s happened in the past, which is the sort of druid-led procession of a giant egg to medieval flute music, the portal to hell that we opened successfully and brought Satan onto stage, the fashion show we did with a real fish. Oh, we did a country music show, where all of the other bands were country and then we played. We did a show with a string quartet. We did sort of a formal soiree, but everyone was in insect costumes. Any other notable ones that I’m missing? Those are the big hits, for sure.
OBIE: You might get something that you can then put in your mouth.
DELWIN: Yeah, free food has been a recurring theme. When we played Austin City Limits Festival, we baked pancakes on stage and threw them into the audience. We had a griddle set up.
OBIE: The first time that I saw CAPYAC play, the very first time, was, I think, the most unhinged food element you’ve ever had and you’ve never done again, which is that you threw just full cupcakes into the crowd. You didn’t pass them out; you just tossed them into the crowd.
ERIC: Well, what’s fun about that specific show was that I had met those two people at the creek the day before. We were hiking, and they were like, “Oh, you guys are playing a CAPYAC show?” And I was like, “Yeah, we’re looking for some performers. We need some people to be clowns.” And they were like, “Great.” And that’s literally all I told them. And then they show up in full clown outfits with cupcakes. Like, no direction. And I was like, “Cool, yeah, just come out during this song.” That’s all that we said to them, you know? And I don’t remember them throwing it, but there’s definitely some YouTube videos of that somewhere.
DELWIN: We lose control a lot. There’s sort of a relinquishing of control.
OBIE: We let go and let God.
DELWIN: Yeah, there’s a lot of that. A lot of faith. I would say our practice is built on faith, if you take anything from all that.
Faith in what, exactly?
DELWIN: That’s a harder question to answer, and I refuse to.
OBIE: Faith in what? In ourselves.
DELWIN: I mean, that’s what improv is. It’s trusting your own self that you’re going to catch yourself when you fall.
“We go straight to the amygdala, and it’s pure emotion. There’s no higher-order thinking. There’s no human thoughts. We’re at the animal level.”
– Delwin Campbell
I love that y’all embrace the chaos — and I guess I should’ve expected that, based on all your other answers. I was also wondering what y’all hope fans can take away from your music; when someone listens to a song like “Sexy in my Bodyyy,” what do you want them to walk away thinking?
OBIE: Ideally, no thoughts.
DELWIN: Pure bliss. When I hear the best song I’ve heard that day, the result is a lack of thought. It’s sort of like your frontal lobe is disengaged, and we bypass that. We go straight to the amygdala, and it’s pure emotion. There’s no higher-order thinking. There’s no human thoughts. We’re at the animal level. You know what I mean? It should have the same effect on a lizard.
ERIC: Well said!
DELWIN: Or it should turn you into a lizard who has plenty of food.
ERIC: For me, the word is “embodied.” Like, I listened to a great song yesterday, and I was just like, “Ugh.” I kind of get a little mischievous, I feel like. That’s the energy that happens for me. And walking down stairs becomes very elaborate. Do you know what I mean?
DELWIN: None of this is thinking. This is all post-thought reactions.
OBIE: Lizard brain.
DELWIN: I think we saw on tour that a lot of people’s minds were opened, which is sort of a goal of mine personally in making music. I don’t have any interest in making music that doesn’t expand your worldview in some way: either your worldview or your taste or the aesthetic possibilities of your mind.
So that is a concrete goal, I guess, but you never know if that’s what you’re achieving. But on tour, we did have some people come up to us afterwards and say some profound things, that they had some profound changes in them during our show.
OBIE: It was either that or they came up and they were like, “What’s that hot dog song?” ♦
That hot dog song, aka “Sexy in my Bodyyy,” is now streaming on all platforms. Check out the music video below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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