After Viral Success, This Denver Band Is Dropping a New Single

Jack Costanza, lead vocalist and principal songwriter of Fort Collins-based indie-rock band Co-Stanza, has a lot of happy memories from his time gigging in the Chicago scene. The grind of city life eventually led to the decision to move to Colorado, but Costanza spent his formative years less focused on being the “it” band in Chicago and more on having a good time. “I love that scene, because there’s 400 venues — there’s a bar on every street to play at,” says Costanza, “The Chicago scene can be really competitive. I have some friends who took it very seriously, and here’s my band, and we’re a bunch of goobers.”

Since relocating to Colorado in 2019, Costanza has taken the lessons he learned in Chicago and continued to hone his skills as a songwriter and performer, forming a band with bassist Simon Martin, drummer Seeder Whaley, and longtime producer, collaborator and guitarist Ryan S. Adams. In that time, he's been cranking out singles and EPs, crafting infectious dance pop brimming with a warm positivity that suits the post-pandemic music scene.

Costanza faces life with the same uplifting attitude he puts into his music. Blending a short-and-sweet style of pop songwriting with his love of hip-hop, he channels influences such as Frank Ocean, Band of Horses, Kid Cudi and the Beatles into a TikTok-friendly mix. That recipe resulted in his song “I Don’t Mind” going viral in 2020, racking up a whopping 3.9 million plays on Spotify.

“We released ‘I Don’t Mind' on March 15, 2020. It popped off a month and a half into lockdown, which was weird to watch,” recalls Costanza. He hopes to recapture that energy with upcoming single “Staying In,” his fourth single of 2023, which will be released on Wednesday, November 29. Looking back on where his appreciation of music began, Costanza credits his father and growing up in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, Illinois. “My dad is a music guy, but not a musician. He would build speakers and he built my guitars. He would host parties and record his friends singing karaoke and give it to them," he recalls. "Music was a big part of my household growing up."

With little to do in Naperville, Costanza and his friends would spend their time driving around and freestyling. Eventually, they wanted to get better at recording, which naturally progressed to playing garage shows. This ultimately led to the moment that would cement his love for performance forever. “It was backing tracks on an iPod and two mics kind of thing. The first show ever was in this dude’s garage for his Eagle Scout project,” laughs Costanza. “I felt so cool. It was goofy as hell, but it was like, ‘Man, of all the things I could have done on this Friday night in the suburbs, that was on a cloud.’”

After high school, he attended DePaul University, where he met Adams, who would go on to become his producer and eventually relocate to Colorado, too. At the time, a friend of Costanza's roommate loaned him a guitar, and the next stage of his musical journey began. “I got the guitar bug. It was the next time in my life where I was like, ‘I have some sort of bug,'” muses Costanza.

From there, he entered the Chicago scene with Co-Stanza. The lineup would change six times through Costanza’s college career, but he carried that upbeat attitude with him even after moving to Colorado and having to find new bandmates again. Once he formed the current lineup, he and his band were able to play one show before the COVID lockdown. “We came out of the pandemic excited to ride on the tails of 'I Don't Mind' doing well, and it’s kind of panned out for us," Costanza says. "We’ve found some local, house-showy kind of success."

For his day job, Costanza works as a high school teacher. Finding a balance between that work and music is something he has often struggled with, he admits. But looking to the future, he’s learning to be okay with not performing at his best in all aspects of his life.

“It’s difficult to navigate in a music world that moves so very fast," he says. "Something that I’ve been trying to lean into is to avoid burnout, which is hard with my job. I love teaching and I love music, and the hours become impossible; there’s just not enough. This feeling of compromise, of knowing I can’t do both at my peak — I’ve been really enjoying trying to be as okay with that as I can.”

"Staying In" releases on all streaming platforms Wednesday, November 29.