Interview with Hayley and the Crushers: ‘I’ve always gravitated towards punk bands that put on a show’

One part punk-pop, one part sunny surf and a big dose of poolside glitter trash, Southern California’s Hayley and the Crushers are riding high on the success of ‘She Drives’, the second single from their album scheduled for release next spring.

The band comprises frontwoman and guitarist Hayler Crusher Cain, her husband and bass player Dr. Reid Cain Esq., whom she met in 2012 when she joined his country band, Red Eye Junction. Crusher Cain then went on to play in a punk band, Magazine Dirty. Her current band also includes drummer “Action” Ben Cabreana: ‘I started the Crushers as a lot of the songs in our punk band were being sung by our lead singer, a guy, and I wanted to write and sing my own songs,’ she said. She jokes that they’ve had ‘an army of drummers’. ‘Ben Cabreana is our current drummer, he’s a skateboarder, surfer and show off!,’ she laughed. ‘Our Crusher drummers are Crushers for life, it’s very cool. I don’t want kids, so I collect drummers rather than kids!’

Last month, they released their single ‘She Drives’, a deceptively upbeat mid-summer joyride of breezy, retro pop: ‘I wrote ‘She Drives’ in the bathtub, after getting a stressed-out call from a friend who had just had a massive fight with her partner,’ she said. ‘This friend of mine is known to drive like a bat out of hell on a normal day but after this particular fight, she drove and just kept driving, eventually ending up in Malibu. I was inspired by the idea that we can’t outrun our worst feelings, but it sure is human nature to try.’

The duality of the upbeat melody paired with darker, more complex lyrics, gives the track an edge: ‘There’s a dark side to many women’s stories and songs – like Lesley Gore songs. That’s a tradition we want to continue, it’s more real. We try to laugh at the situation and make it sparkly.’ In their video for ‘She Drives’, she wears a fantastic, 60’s style mini-dress and I ask her if she bought it locally. ‘Ìt was made by my talented friend, Leslie Gengo, in Los Angeles. She made one for me and one for her. We used to go to punk shows together. I sent her a picture of an air stewardess. It’s hard to know what to wear, so I like to have a uniform when I play. It’s the first time anyone has made anything for me but I love it, I hope Leslie will make other outfits for me.’

‘We thought let’s write a song that moms and their kids will like in the style of 80’s and 60’s pop‘

Ultimately, she is trying to tap into a broad audience: ‘This is our least punk song (laughs) but we thought let’s write a song that moms and their kids will like in the style of 80’s and 60’s pop, with lots of layers. We’ve got a glockenspiel in it, we’ve layered in the drums. That extra layer you hear is my husband hitting the desk! It gives an affected tom (drum) sound, like those ballads where something is swelling and orchestrated and feels like the freedom of the open road.’

However, their next as-of-yet unnamed single will herald a return to their punkier roots: ‘It will represent more of our punk edge and remind our friends that we’re still a punk band,’ she said. They will also be featured  on If You Gotta Go-Go, Go-Go Now, a 24-track collection of Go-Go’s tribute covers out this autumn. ‘We’re covering ‘Lust To Love’, Kathy Valentine (a member of the Go-Gos) and The Baby Shakes are also doing covers.’ Norwegian pop punk band The Yum Yums are covering ‘Unforgiven’.

‘She Drives’ marks a follow up to the band’s single in June, ‘Cul-de-Sac’, which was inspired by COVID lockdown, with imagery lifted from Ira Levin’s 1972 novel The Stepford Wives and featuring dark guitars, wormy hooks and the band’s soaring candy-coated vocals locked and loaded. ‘I live on a cul-de-sac, so the song was inspired by the concept of being trapped in a place that is sunny, California is a great metaphor for that,’ she said. ‘The lifestyle can be confining, the idea of women – and others – feeling trapped. I think a lot of people can relate to that. During lockdown, me and my husband would walk to the orange tree in our cul-de-sac and pick two oranges and roll these stupid oranges home every night!,’ she laughed. I say I can actually understand the appeal of doing this, just to get out of the house and forge a connection to your environment outside and she agrees that it was surprisingly therapeutic.

Typically, she and her husband collaborate on songs: ‘Our songwriting process isn’t too crazy. I keep a notebook with song ideas and little bits of lyrics,’ she said. ‘Usually, one of us will write the musical riffs and the other will write the lyrics and vocal melody. It is always a better result when we collaborate and share the job, trading off on verse or chorus. I prefer the songs written this way because you end up doing something that you didn’t think you would. Dr. Cain is very good about writing guitar or bass ideas and sending them to me to listen to. From there, I will start to flesh out the lyrics, vocal melody, backing vocals, and I’ll start humming and adding to them to a GarageBand track. Other times, I will pick up the guitar and write the whole song very quickly. Then he adds his crazy bass lines on top of that. With ‘She Drives’, that was the case. The song came on quick, in one fluid motion. I hummed it into my phone and then when I picked up the guitar, it all came out!’

‘I’ve always gravitated towards punk bands that put on a show‘

Her love of retro cool has had a big influence on their stage presence: ‘I love drag queens, my husband loves wrestling – they crank it up to 11 like Spinal Tap – that’s what we’ve done as a band, to have the command of the stage and guitar and give them a fucking show! I’ve always gravitated towards punk bands that put on a show or bands that impressed me like Vice Squad, Motörhead, Anti-Nowhere League, those old school bands. I remember seeing The Damned when I was 14, I snuck out of the house with my boyfriend. I drove his Subaru with a stick shift, even though I didn’t know how to drive with a stick shift! Dave (Dave Vanian, their lead singer) was wearing a pure full-on vampire outfit, they brought theatrics to it, they had so much vitality, energy and sass, there’s no time limit to that.’

Crusher Cain is also a massive fan of Joan Jett: ‘I saw her at a local mid-state fair, it was a free show, in the early 2000’s. It was a super hot day but she comes out in leather pants, bleached blonde hair and sang ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’. I was only 12 but it hit me in the heart. She’s a woman who held onto her dream and didn’t let it go. she produced bands like The Germs, too.’ She’s also a big fan of Dolly Parton, who she describes as having ‘a beautiful mind and the beautiful everything else’. The sparkle Gretsch guitar that Crusher Cain plays is a cheap knock off of the guitar that Billy Zoom from LA rock band X plays.

Hayley and the Crushers are signed to LA’s Kitten Robot Records, as is another band I recently interviewed, garage beach fuzz rockers, Velvet Starlings: ‘We’re playing a show with them and Josie Cotton (the 80’s New Wave icon) on November 9 in Los Angeles. When I first heard The Velvet Starlings, I was inspired by how young they are – and how good!,’ she said.

On their EP, ‘Fun Sized’ – a reference to small-sized sweets, although Crusher Cain is also only 5’3″ – which came out in February 2020, they have a track ‘Angelyne’ about the LA legend of the same name. Angelyne is a singer, actress, personality and model who came to prominence in 1984 after the appearance of a series of iconic billboards in and around LA, but about whom surprisingly little is really known. ‘I won a competition to drive her pink corvette but I’m notoriously car-sick,’ Crusher Cain confessed. ‘I threw up afterwards and she watched it! She’s her own living theatre piece, she’s an enigma, she’s fascinating, such a weirdo. I had chickens at the time and we talked about chickens and Joan Jett but I left with more questions than answers. Right before our song came out, someone (The Hollywood Reporter) broke her age (70) and where she’s from (Poland). My dad remembers her billboards from the 80’s, he says she was the wet dream of every little boy (laughs).’ I mention that another LA pop punk band, Kill My Coquette, has a new song ‘LA’s Gonna Tear You Apart’ which also references Angelyne and that their lead singer, Natalie Sperl, plays Angelyne in the accompanying video. ‘Ooooooh, I have to see that, it sounds fantastic,’ she said. (I send her the link afterwards and she loves it.)

Based in San Luis Obispo, a city in California’s Central Coast region, Crusher Cain describes it as being more famous for its wineries than its music scene: ‘The punk music scene doesn’t really exist, there’s country music and reggae – what we call the “white wine and flip flops” culture,’ she joked. ‘There are a lot of white, retired people. It’s a fun place to come to, though. Anyway, Seattle and Portland have adopted us because we’re just as weird there as everyone else but living here is like being an only child in a small town, the only way they can do their own thing is to use their imagination. Living in San Luis Obispo is like being the loner kid playing with trash in a can.’

‘It’s a great place to incubate ideas‘

She grew up a couple of hundred miles south of San Luis Obispo in Redondo Beach: ‘We formed an all-girl punk band,’ she grinned. ‘We played shows in surrounding areas that weren’t very privileged economically but we’d play shows in people’s back yards where their grandmother would take a dollar at the door. By the time I was 21, I was partied out, I didn’t finish high school, so coming to a place that was rural and boring in my 20’s was the best thing I ever did, I needed that to reset my life. It’s a great place to incubate ideas. We just came off a 30 day, ten state van trip and we see it as the place to come back to. Something draws you back, it’s like you don’t have a choice.’

We get chatting about a music friend of mine, Dave Smith, who is a huge fan of hers and who has a photo of her as his header on Twitter: ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen my picture as someone’s header, it’s very cool,’ she exclaimed, sounding genuinely pleased. I say that I think she might be his dream woman and she grins: ‘Your friend seems like a very kind man, I send letters to people I admire all the time, I really like doing it, why not reach out to people?’ It turns out that she loves to read music biographies and memoirs and also interviews musicians herself for BUST magazine, as well as writing articles about wine, travel and tourism. ‘I read Kathy Valentine’s memoir about the Go-Gos (All I Ever Wanted. )Her story is incredible, people need to read this book. She grew up in Texas, she had this crazy upbringing. Genya Raven is another really interesting musician, I interviewed her for BUST. She was in the first all-girl band in the 60’s, Goldie & the Gingerbreads. She was Goldie, she borrowed a lot from soul music. She fled the Holocaust in Poland and came to America. She’d go on stage with no shirt on, she’s the most interesting woman you’ve never heard of. Now (in her 80’s), she’s a DJ and played unsigned bands. She produced ‘Young, Loud & Snotty’ by Dead Boys (a Cleveland, Ohio punk band in the 70’s). Their song ‘Sonic Reducer’ is the best punk song ever!’ She’s also a big fan of Fastbacks, a Seattle, Washington, punk rock band from the 70’s: ‘They were contemporaries of The Muffs, extremely power pop, there were so many different elements to their music.’

She’s also discovered a number of great musicians since COVID struck, including former lead singer of The Shanghais and LA-based power pop singer, Natalie Sweet: ‘We spent half of 2020 Zooming and doing songs with her and our mutual friend Jamie Radu from the Montreal band Pale Lips, they are both amazing and so nice,’ she said.

If she could tour with anyone, she has a brilliantly eclectic line up: ‘I’d say Blondie and Trixie Mattel, she’s the poor man’s Dolly Parton, she’s drag queen country,’ she laughed. ‘And The Ramones, they’re soooo good. I have to say Loretta Lynn, she’s my number one voice, her lyrics were ahead of her time and there’s a real vulnerability in her voice.’