Self-proclaimed 'hippy' Chad Wolf and friends

“Music is my first love and it always will be. It will never talk about me behind my back and it’ll always be there for me.”

So says Chad Wolf, lead singer of Carolina Liar, a band that, despite the name, is five sixths Swedish. It might be easy to dismiss that statement as a line to dish out to journalists, but friendly, self-proclaimed “hippy” Chad really isn’t lying when he says music makes him happy.

Chad, along with bandmates Johan Carlsson, Jim Algres Gandara, Rickard Göransson, Max Grahn and Erick Hääger, are in the UK promoting their album Coming To Terms, which has already spawned the anthemic hit single ‘Show Me What I’m Looking For’. Over the course of a long weekend they have squeezed in a tour of the UK and Ireland, with appearances at Oxegen Festival (Ireland), Wakestock (Wales) and T in the Park (Scotland), and a gig at London’s legendary Barfly Club.

“The British and Irish audiences are so much more enthusiastic, they have a different sense of passion to American fans. At Oxegen we started setting up, and there were about 100 people in the tent and we were happy with that, but then we realised that more people were coming in. People were just rolling into the tent and it got up to full capacity. They were sitting on shoulders, crowd surfing, throwing necklaces at the stage, singing along. It was the loudest thing I’ve ever heard: like a jet engine being turned on. Something like that really moves you, it leaves you shell-shocked for a day or two. It’s like magic mushrooms that last 48 hours! It was magical – you dream of things like that.”

It was certainly something the young Chad Wolfinbargar would have had trouble imagining. Born in 1976 and raised in the strict Pentecostal faith in South Carolina, he was 13 when he decided his future lay in music. “I listened to everything as a kid. There was a lot of British stuff – The Smiths, Depeche Mode – but also the slicker American stuff like Earth, Wind and Fire, 70s disco, and songwriters like Elton John and Bruce Springsteen. I even took Duran Duran’s ‘A View To A Kill’ into school for show and tell, trying to tell the kids what they should be listening to!” These days he can be found listening to MGMT, Thin Lizzie and even Lady Gaga. “I have eclectic tastes,” he acknowledges with a laugh.

Chad headed to LA aged 20, determined to make his music dream come true. “I’m still paying off debts from that time!” Chad jokes good-naturedly. He started off as a session musician by day and did the coffee house circuit by night. “I remember the first time I got paid for making music – it was a cheque for $75 and I almost started crying I was so happy. I couldn’t believe I was getting paid for playing the same thing over and over on the guitar all day!”

But it wasn’t until he met Swedish producer and songwriter Max Martin that Carolina Liar began to come together. Martin invited Chad to Sweden, and soon he began to write the songs that would form Coming To Terms. “Travelling really inspires my writing. It makes you look at your own life and realise you’ve been wrong about some things. Europeans are light years ahead in terms of a sense of self. They’re influenced by so many cultures. America’s so big that it’s too easy not to be influenced. In Europe you adjust to different lives, you change your opinion, you’re always exposed to new cultures and stories and I find that very inspiring.”

Carolina Liar – Show Me What You’re Looking For

Writing the songs was one thing, but launching the band in two continents was quite another. They were helped along the way when their music was featured in hit shows including Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill and The Hills. “It amazes me that songs with such dark lyrics get used on teen shows like that. I laughed my ass off when I saw ‘Show Me What I’m Looking For’ on The Hills. There’s this privileged girl riding around LA and it has nothing to do with the song at all!”

But the harmless publicity has brought them some critical backlash. “This guy said we were ‘eating our own entrails’. At least he has an honest opinion! I don’t mind bad reviews, you can’t really listen to them in this business. People are always telling me ‘you need to shave your beard, clean yourself up’. But I’m really just a dirty hippy!”

Chad is genuinely amused by any criticism levelled at his appearance. After all, he is a true musician, in the business for the love of the art rather than any desire to be a rock god. “If you start going for the celebrity lifestyle it will bite you hard in the ass. It destroys your soul,” he says.

You get the impression that Chad could create, perform and talk about music forever and never get bored. In the past he has sacrificed areas of his personal life for the sake of his music career, ending relationships when he feels they’re taking his attention away from music. He fully admits to using a lot of these experiences as inspiration in his songwriting, but there’s far more to the process than simply pouring over his past break-ups.

“My songs all come from real stories. They’re all co-written, so I’ll write the stories and we’ll bring in a co-writer to nail it down. ‘Something To Die For’ was co-written by Peter Svensson from The Cardigans. It took us two weeks to write the song, line-by-line, wanting to make sure that the lyrics were really something we could believe in years later. I always wonder how The Who feel now singing that line ‘I hope I die before I get old’.”

These days, Carolina Liar are compared most often to The Fray and The Script, a comparison that Chad doesn’t mind at all. “We love everything about those guys, they make honest, great music. But I think we’re a little bit dirtier than them, we’re raunchy guys. We wear it on our sleeves!”

After 13 years of striving to achieve his goals, Chad shows no sign of taking anything for granted. He’s working harder than ever, and plans to hit the studio as soon as he’s back in LA. But on the rare occasions that he gets to smell the roses, Chad is hugely grateful for the success the band has experienced. “It’s a fantastic gypsy life. You come to realise what really matters: being happy, writing music and being with the people you love.”

And with philosophies like that, you can’t help but wish Carolina Liar all the success in the world.

Coming to Terms is available now on Atlantic Records. The next single, ‘I’m Not Over’, is due to be released in the UK in September

By Abigail Chandler