Peach Cooler: lots of love for the local scene

Hanging with the Koehler kids Ask Peach Cooler’s singer Paige Koehler what memories she treasures most about her band’s video shoots, and she’ll tell you: chicken, both actual and ersatz. “When we shot [the video for] ‘When I Was,’” she remembers, “we bought a bunch of plastic food to have on the table, and then an actual roast chicken.” Drummer Hunter Bragg ended up chaotically eating a chicken leg that was thrown at him during the food fight scene. “Also, the villain of the video was our good friend Nolan, who was the best sport about being the bad guy. He would ad lib lines during the fighting scene. One shot, he looks me in the eyes and says, ‘No, you don’t understand, I don’t need a job, I invested in Bitcoin.’ Which made it really hard for me to not die laughing, when the scene was supposed to be tense and negative.”

The band, whose Got a Lot to Say EP appeared early this summer, is not, in point of fact, named after what happens when you down one or more peach coolers and then try to say the name “Paige Koehler.” But that’s not too far off. “I wish it were something more fun, but it’s really just a play on my name. We had our second show together booked at Music Box and even the tickets that were sold at that time had ‘Paige Koehler Band’ on them. Then we came up with Peach Cooler a week before the show and told the crowd, surprise, we are actually Peach Cooler and we’re gonna be here for a while.”

Koehler released a solo EP, Sorry I’m Late, back in 2020, but then drummer Bragg, bassist Luke Henning, and lead guitarist Quinn Pochekailo found her. “All of us met through mutual friends in the music scene, which is arguably the best thing about the San Diego music scene. We’re not territorial about collaborating with different musicians for different projects. Most players in town have multiple projects that they’re involved with, so when you need a fill in or a new bandmate, they’re usually just one degree of separation away. You’ll likely run into those people at the next local show you go to.”

The four tunes on the new EP cover a fair ground of emotional shading. “These songs were actually from before the band had officially started. I’d written and recorded them in my closet during quarantine, and the tone of them is a bit more vulnerable and sultry than the usual sun-soaked Peach sound.” She took the demos to producer/musician James Bishop and her former guitarist, Jesse Orlando, “who poured their special sauce onto them.” Before recording, the singer told Bishop she wanted the whole recording experience to feel “like kids playing in a treehouse.”

At that time, Bishop lived in a Christian commune north of San Diego, and had “a quirky home studio with just enough quirk, and a ton of random instruments we could play around with. For example, each song has a toy piano on it. We also used a slightly out-of-tune classical guitar and put a hairband underneath the strings and fretboard, to get a weird plucky/muted sound you hear in the main riff for ‘Got a Lot to Say.’ A big part of the writing on this project was from Jesse Orlando, who came in and laid down some of the catchiest riffs you hear on the EP, like the ending guitar riff of ‘When I Was,’ not to mention the boomy Chinese tom-tom you hear in ‘Headstrong.’”

They shot two videos, “Got a Lot to Say” and “When I Was.” Koehler co-directed with Michael Wolfe. “We shot the ‘Got a Lot to Say’ video at this suspension bridge in Mission Hills. The rest of the shots were around the streets of OB and Point Loma, where most of us live and stomp around, so it was a fun neighborhood shoot for most of us.”

Koehler leaves me with one final story from recording up north. “James asked if we wanted to take a break and watch the sunset to reset our brains after hours in the studio. He then whips out a 4x4 and drives us up these rolling green mountains, and at the top of the mountain, there’s a trampoline. So we jumped and played like kids and howled at the mountains around us to hear our own voices echo. Coming out of quarantine to a moment and experience like that.”