This "Dreamy" Rock Band is Proud of its Ohio Roots

Maya Meade

photos provided by Cardboard Sailors

Max Pelletier, a super senior at Ohio University and lead singer of Cardboard Sailors, had dreams of making “dreamy” rock music and sharing it with the world after he wrote a simple tune that he recorded on his phone in April 2018. Starting a band was always something he had hoped for, but it didn’t become a reality until fall of 2019.

Max met senior guitarist Ted Wharton, in a fraternity on campus three years ago. Together they recruited sophomore bassist Collin Spens, sophomore vocalist Kaycie Wissman and sophomore drummer Ethan Hamilton., completing the band..

 “(Ted and I) were just talking about how we wanted to start a band or something,” Pelletier says. “And then we got back to school and we decided we were going to do it the old fashioned way and put up flyers for people. We did the whole audition thing for a lot of people.”

Ted and Max started playing music together during the summer of 2019, having very little previous band experience. Ted had only ever performed in a cover band in high school, making the start of Cardboard Sailors very experimental. Having little to no experience in producing music, the band put in hours of time and effort to learn what resources they could use to make their music sound the way they wanted it to.

Their first EP, “Dreams or Something,” came out in January. Receiving positive feedback from friends and family encouraged Cardboard Sailors to keep sharing music and shortly after releasing the EP, the band released a single titled “Not for Me.”

“‘Not for Me’ was a song we worked on for a while,” Pelletier says. “We had all these parts. Colin felt like he put his best part into it, I felt like I put my best part into it. When we recorded it, it took us a lot longer compared to the first EP. Everything was mastered a lot better and everything just got a lot more serious because we got to thinking, ‘Is this the best thing for this music?’”

“Not for Me” quickly reached 1,743 listeners on the music streaming platform Spotify, reinforcing the positive feelings they had had about the song as they were writing it.

 “It is by far our best song, and that’s not me saying it just to stroke my ego because I made it,” Spens says. “I think it was definitely a song where we realized all of our strong suits and we managed to come together as a band and understood each other at a much higher level.”

He knew the single was going to be good when he heard the combination of Ethan’s drums with his guitar playing. Spens calls it “a match made in heaven,” because everyone brought something to the table and everyone was proud of the end result.

“The feedback from other people was amazing,” Pelletier says. “It was my zero to 100 moment.” Messages from strangers on social media and being put on Spotify playlists boosted the band’s confidence and brought them together in ways that they had never imagined.

 “I feel like we kind of hit a stride and everything kind of fell together ... we had the guitar part and then we laid down the drums and it just felt right,” Hamilton says. “Writing some songs is an uphill battle and we want to make something work but it’s just hours and hours of rehearsal to figure out what works. But this had already come together pretty quickly and we were all really happy with how it happened and then getting the feedback that we didn’t get as much with our EP was really cool.”

Just a few months into the start of their music career as Cardboard Sailors, everything changed. As COVID-19 spread around the world, Cardboard Sailors’ career as a local band quickly slowed. The DIY band went from frequent gigs in Athens and Columbus to crowdless performances in the garages of their hometowns.

Despite the global pandemic, Cardboard Sailors has still managed to accrue a growing fanbase with an appreciation for their music. Throughout quarantine, the band has managed to work on music and meets about once a week to talk about what each member has been working on. They have plans to release another EP within the year. In June, the band played a socially distanced concert  in Coldwater Lake, Michigan, where they offered drive-in seating (golf cart style) or screening via live stream.

With hopes of eventually expanding beyond the Athens city limits and the Ohio border, Cardboard Sailors still has progress to make. The band has performances planned for Cincinnati, Columbus and Pittsburgh with goals of more to come in the future.

 “I want to be an Ohio band,” Pelletier says.  “Like, everyone will know us across Ohio; if any kind of big bands ever come to the Ohio area they could be like, ‘Hey, ‘Cardboard Sailors’ come play with us.’”