‘C’ is for Cookie

Jason NeSmith and Kay Stanton are in love. They don’t hold hands or engage in PDS, but they do the little things, like apologize when one is talking and the other interrupts. More importantly, they make music together.

“How are you doing?” Stanton asks NeSmith at Hot Corner Coffee, a popular college hangout in Athens. It seemed like a silly question to me. I mean, they live together and have been married for six years. Don’t they know how they feel already? I guess this is how soul mates act with each other.

Stanton hands me a comic book she made. It’s a limited-edition companion piece to The Optimist’s Club, the new album by the couple’s band, Casper & the Cookies.

In the comic, Stanton and NeSmith drive to Weehawken, N.J., to stay with friends. They frequently visit Manhattan, taking in the city’s sights and sounds, and share a quiet moment in Central Park while thinking of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. They take a boat to Liberty Island, where they kiss for the first time. “It was so cold it always hurt, but when you realize how good it can feel to kiss a friend, it’s easy to forget,” she writes. The tone is very intimate, akin to reading a private love letter. “I feel naked,” says Stanton, laughing. “It’s very autobiographical.”

Much like its comic book companion, The Optimist’s Club lies in a happy and love-struck haze. On “Kiss a Friend,” NeSmith sings, “Miles/We’ve got miles of love before us” in a gauzy, off-key voice as Stanton plays a triumphant, upbeat note on her trumpet. The music draws inspiration from Revolver-era Beatles and Robert Wyatt’s Soft Machine, and is unabashedly, unironically playful as it charts the couple’s tentative first steps into a love affair. One track, “Learn How to Disappear,” fantasizes falling off the face of the Earth.

NeSmith and Stanton, both 34, are longtime members of the local music scene. “Jason has more of a pop sensibility than I do. I come from more of a punk/experimental background,” says Stanton. They became friends as members of an Atlanta punk-folk group called Feyer Abend, one of several bands NeSmith played in at the time. Two years after making their fateful trip up north, the couple married in May 2000 and moved to Athens. “Everybody in Atlanta felt we were kind of weird. Our friends were like, ‘Oh, that was kind of interesting.’ You know, that kind of reaction,” says NeSmith. “We knew what we were doing would not be considered weird in Athens. It was pretty safe as far as what goes on here.”

“In Atlanta, it’s a lot more difficult for music to be a real big part of your life, because it’s expensive to live there,” adds Stanton. “Here, it’s cheaper to live. You don’t make nearly as much money, but the whole community is more open to people being in bands and being gone for extended amounts of time [on tour].”

“Everyone’s used to just working at a bar four nights a week and living off of nothing, so they can go on the road and make nothing and come back and still have a crappy job,” says NeSmith. “Whereas in Atlanta, you’ve got to make 25K just to afford to live.”

Just as he had in Atlanta, NeSmith played with several different bands, including Of Montreal, the late BP Helium, the Sunshine Fix, the 63 Crayons and the Dissertations. He nurtured a solo project that took on several names: Casper Fandango and the Knees, Casper Fandango and his Tiny Sick Tears, then finally Casper & the Cookies. “We like cookies,” says NeSmith. With the latter guise, it became a full-fledged band, as he recruited Stanton and a revolving cast of local musician friends. (The current lineup includes NeSmith, Stanton, drummer Joe Rowe and guitarist Jim Hicks.)

The couple say it took time to learn how to write collaboratively within a project originally designed by NeSmith. On Casper & the Cookies’ 2004 debut, Oh!, they wrote three songs together, including the ’60s-ish surf rocker “Bubblewing Park.” For The Optimist’s Club, Stanton added a Dadaist/Fluxus subtext in addition to its central love story. The album cover features a bright yellow “YES” sign, referencing one of Yoko Ono’s famous art installations. “DuChamp’s Camera” features a taped conversation Stanton and NeSmith had with a street character during their New York trip. Another cut is called “Neo Dada HeyDay.” “A lot of the songs have the Fluxus flavor,” says Stanton.

“Most of the bands I’ve been with in Athens are centered on one person. It’s their songs, and it’s their arrangement ideas, and nobody else has any real input,” says NeSmith. “I am still holding onto some of that, but I wanted to be more like Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo — one of those bands where the records are a little more varied because you have input from other songwriters.”

The Optimist’s Club fuses two complementary styles — Stanton’s raw art-punk sensibilities and NeSmith’s methodical pop background — into a record that reflects the couple and their relationship together. “The Optimist’s Club is a really good name for the record because it tries to look at things positively, but then also having that whole sense of dread under it,” says Stanton, laughing.

NeSmith starts laughing, too. “In order to become an optimist,” he says, “you have to become disillusioned with something.”