Coffee Zombie Collective is a six-member music group based in Santa Cruz. They've been together for about 15 years and are known for their Americana-style covers of songs by The White Stripes, Taylor Swift and just about everyone in between. But on their brand new album, There's a Ball of Fire in the Sky, they have as many original tunes as covers, including the title track.
Coffee Zombie Collective's founder and leader Nate Lieby wrote the song "There's a Ball of Fire in the Sky."
"It's a little apocalyptic," Lieby says, "but it's more of a 'hey, the world's ending, but let's get together and laugh for a little bit,' sort of feel on it, you know?"
Click the audio player at the top of this story to listen to the interview or see the highlights below.
On the band's popular cover of "Creep" by Radiohead
Nate Lieby: A lot of the early-on songs (we covered) were songs that I sort of just picked out that I would be like, 'wouldn't it be funny if I tried this on ukulele?' And ("Creep") is definitely one of those ones where it has giant, distorted guitar lines…and [we were] trying to figure out how to make it fit for our instrumentation.
On where the band's name comes from
NL: All the way back to when our kids were babies, and we were playing music and trying to raise kids and just, you know, never sleeping and then trying to keep some sort of social life going on outside. So it just basically kind of fell together. I think it was something I posted on Facebook, or something on Myspace where I was like, “oh, I’m a coffee zombie today," and someone's like, “you should call your band that!” And I was like, “yes, I should.” And the "collective" originally was because we would have a lot of people kind of coming in and out of the band and playing with us for certain stuff. But then it sort of coalesced into, like, a real tight-knit group. It's become less of a collective. We do have people that come in and sit in on occasion, but it's really been us six for, yeah, as long as I can remember.
Pete Novembre and Nate Lieby played a few songs during their visit to the KAZU studio.
The band will be performing at Moe's Alley in Santa Cruz on Friday March 21st.
