Songs for Grown Ups and Mukiss team up, shake ‘Bad Habits’

John Umland of Songs for Grown Ups and Caeleigh Featherstone of Mukiss first crossed paths roughly 12 years ago when their former bands – Tin Armor and WV White, respectively – played a handful of shows together across Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Featherstone said memories of these gigs are deeply etched in her mind, describing the string of dates as a formative experience that offered a revealing first glimpse into the realities of life on the road for an independent band. Among these memories, Featherstone recalled a sign posted outside of the music venue in Pittsburgh, which read, “Shitty, drunk bands play upstairs,” which is precisely where the two Columbus groups performed together on that particular evening.

“You guys were more experienced than us. You knew what was going on. You had sleeping bags,” Featherstone said to Umland during a late October interview. “It was really fun for me, because it was my first experience with DIY touring, because WV White wasn’t really in that world.”

Now, more than a dozen years later, the two have collaborated on original music for the first time, with Umland’s nascent solo project, Songs for Grown Ups, joining Featherstone and her band Mukiss to record “Bad Ideas,” which debuted with a Philip Kim-created video released today (Friday, Nov. 1). Plans for the joint musical venture first hatched almost exactly a year ago, with sessions taking place over a pair of days in late fall 2023 at Secret Studio and in Featherstone’s home. Both Umland and Featherstone described the vibe during recording as loose and playful – a feel that bleeds over into the jaunty, piano-led tune, which is at once sweet, sincere and playful.

“My goal with the Songs for Grown Ups stuff, specifically, has been to let any collaboration be what it is or what it becomes through working on it together,” said Umland, who reached out to Featherstone and her Mukiss bandmates, believing his sparser demo would benefit from a full-band arrangement. “So, I had some idea of what the song could be, but going into the collaboration, the thinking was definitely that anyone can make it, change it, pull it in any direction. And we just kept playing with it until we liked what we had, which was an incredibly fun process.”

“It was just so organic, which I think came from everyone knowing each other a long time, and making music with one another a long time,” said Featherstone, who produced the sessions, which also included her Mukiss mates Andy Cook, Jessi Bream and Matt Climer.

The collaboration was slow to originate owing in part to the more insular approach the two musicians have both traditionally adopted. “We’re both similarly introverted and enjoy working privately,” Featherstone said. 

Since launching Songs for Grown Ups last year, however, Umland has attempted to expand on his formerly closed-off world, with the project emerging as a pressure-free space in which he has allowed himself to more freely follow his creative muse. “This experience has reconfirmed in me that this is a great way to approach this project, and any time I can collaborate with other people, let them have a voice in it, and make it a big, shared thing, that’s the right way to do it,” he said. “I love the way ‘Bad Habits’ turned out, and it doesn’t in any way feel like something that came out of me, even though I was involved in the process, and I can still hear all of that. It just feels like a thing that was created that I was one part of.”

While the relationship between Umland and Featherstone has remained a constant in the years since the two first briefly toured together, both musicians said that they have changed radically as people. Umland, for one, said he spent too much of his time in Tin Armor consumed by a desire to strike it big, worrying about the quality of the shows and ensuring the songs were always tightly rehearsed, which sometimes clouded the spirit that first compelled him to make music.

“My perspective on the world has changed so dramatically. Really, my perspective on everything has changed so much since then,” Umland said. “I wish I had been more present and enjoyed all of it a lot more at the time. We were just shitty bands playing upstairs. And instead of embracing that, I feel like I put a lot of pressure on myself, and that took away some of the fun. So, in that sense, I feel like I’m in a much better place with the whole creative process. And I’m glad I still have people like Caeleigh, who are brilliant and awesome and willing to fool around and have fun with this kind of project.”