Bright melodies, bittersweet lyrics, and emotional honesty define Crashmore’s standout debut single.
Toronto and Ottawa-based duo Crashmore release “I Do the Most,” the bright and bittersweet single from their debut EP ‘Hung Up’. Made by lifelong friends Devin Calow and Michael Sheppard, the song captures everything the band does best, wrapping aching, self aware lyrics inside an irresistible indie pop rock hook that pulls you in before you notice where it lands.
“I Do the Most” plays like a portrait of one-sided devotion in the social media age, the quiet ache of caring more than the other person ever will. “And I’m so tired of feeling alone, but I still smile when your name lights my phone,” Calow sings, before delivering the line that gives the song its title and its sting, “still watch all your stories and like all your posts, baby you just sit there while I do the most.” There is real wit in the writing too, a knowing humour that turns heartbreak into something you can dance to, as Calow admits with a wink, “I’m so sorry for being so damn funny, but now it’s plain to see that this joke was on me.”
That balance of levity and melancholy sits at the centre of who Crashmore are.
“We make indie pop rock for an anxious generation,” the band explains. “On the surface it’s masking as a good time but dig a little deeper into the lyrics and you can see the anxiety and sadness.”
It is a sound built for an era of curated feeds and quiet loneliness, songs that smile on the outside while telling the truth underneath.
The friendship behind the music runs deep, and unusually Canadian in its origins. Calow and Sheppard met as eight-year-olds at the Whitby Curling Club, bonding over the sport before they ever picked up instruments. They reunited in the music room at Henry Street High School and have been making music together ever since, two kids from Whitby who grew up playing together and became adults doing the very same thing.
‘Hung Up’ traces its roots to a singular moment in time. Calow began writing the EP the very day the world shut down in 2020, alone in his parents’ backyard shed with only his guitar, channelling fresh heartache into five happy sounding sad songs. Once he sensed the ideas were worth chasing, he brought them to Sheppard to build out.
“I bring the lyrics and the melodies and Shep’s wonderful musical mind does the rest,” Calow says.
On the recordings, Sheppard plays every instrument except the trumpet, a one-man band giving these bedroom sketches their full-bodied life.
For Calow, performing the songs is its own kind of time travel.
“I turn into someone else when I’m singing these songs,” he says. “They are like a time capsule, a snapshot of my feelings and heart forever having their strings pulled.”
That sense of preserved feeling runs across the whole EP, from the restless reinvention of “Toronto” to the raw undertow of “Deep Down Inside,” each track pairing a buoyant surface with a deeper current of doubt and longing.
With “I Do the Most,” Crashmore introduce themselves as sharp, funny and emotionally honest songwriters, the kind who understand that the catchiest melodies often carry the heaviest hearts.
Hi, Devin and Michael! Good to meet you! Care to introduce yourself to the readers for those not familiar with your music?
Devin: Hey nice to meet you as well! I’d describe our music as two pals just having fun and being loud on microphones. We like to bring energy into our music because we have that dynamic outside of music.
Michael: Devin and I have long been interested in a number of genres, having shared our musical inspirations over the years, we’ve spent many days recording in our friend’s studios and with many different iterations of a band. Only recently did we decide to go it alone and self record at my place in Ottawa with all the gear we’ve accumulated so far. With Devin’s initial concepts and my own instrumental interpretations, I like to think we’ve crafted our own sound with a gritty yet polished approach to indie pop/alt rock.
“You describe your music as ‘indie pop rock for an anxious generation.’ What does that phrase actually mean to you, and what parts of your own lives are you trying to capture with it?”
Devin: We started writing this project I kid you not the week before COVID. I wrote our first song “I Do the Most” on my guitar and was heading to Ottawa to hang out with Michael to work on the idea. 2 days later I’m driving home and there’s an immediate order to stay inside and away from the public. I think whether we all realized or not we all became a little more secluded and anxious during that time and for me it turned into my music. I basically wrote lyrics that were the direct feelings of anxiety and heartache caught in my brain as a snapshot at that time.
Michael: For me it’s having an earnest attitude that doesn’t shy away from putting raw emotions on full display. Embracing the complexities of life and broadcasting real moments through the medium of music, knowing how universal these experiences are, it feels so important to be authentic in a world of art saturated with insincerity.
“‘I Do the Most’ is about caring more than the other person does. Was there a specific moment or relationship that inspired it, or is it more of a collection of experiences?”
Devin: Like I said earlier this was a relationship that ended just before COVID locked us all away and paused the world. Not the best timing to have something fresh in your mind and no way to really move forward I’ll say it. All I could do was look at their stories on my phone and think about how great they used to make me feel and now how bad they made me feel. I compare these songs to photographs. Time may have distanced yourself from the moment in the photo but they capture that feeling frozen in time. Like a reflection of that memory when you’re scrolling deep in your phone’s camera roll and see a certain picture. This particular song speaks to that and the idea that I was giving all I had to that person and I don’t even think they realized how little they were giving back until it was over.
“Social media is almost a third character in this song. Do you think platforms like Instagram and TikTok have changed the way heartbreak feels compared to ten or twenty years ago?”
Devin: I mean absolutely right? It’s like waking up to a newspaper headline or sports highlights of the best moments of that person’s life. They share the best bits and make us think “look how awesome and perfect their life is”. We don’t get to see the sad parts or the embarrassing silly things life throws at people so of course we begin to worry and internalize our own anxious thoughts into bigger and bigger things. Or at least maybe that’s just me hahah
“You’ve been friends since you were eight years old, meeting at a curling club before becoming bandmates. How has growing up together changed the way you write and challenge each other creatively?”
Michael: In typical Canadian fashion, we’ve played hockey together, curled together, and spent countless hours in the high school music room together. It’s only natural that we’ve become best friends over the years and such a connection makes bouncing ideas off each other incredibly easy. Any creative difference seldom becomes a challenge, and having a partner that approaches songwriting from a different angle other than my own is always refreshing and helps keep things exciting. Whether it’s the rhythm of Devin’s guitar playing, his way of structuring progressions, or the way he writes his melodies, I’m often recalibrating my own process, and I am often learning how to play and record outside of my own comfort zone.
Devin: I think the energy we have when we’re around each other keeps the ideas going. We’re still those two hyper kids being told to settle down in the back of the music room. We also have no trouble giving each other feedback or trying out ideas because the collaboration process began in Little Rocks at the Whitby Curling Club nearly 20 years ago when we were little.