  The success of galactic archaeology and the reconstruction of the formation
history of our galaxy critically relies on precise ages for large populations
of stars. For evolved stars in the red clump and red giant branch, the carbon
to nitrogen ratio ([C/N]) has recently been identified as a powerful diagnostic
of mass and age that can be applied to stellar samples from spectroscopic
surveys such as SDSS/APOGEE. Here, we show that at least 10\% of red clump
stars and %$\approx 10\%$ of red giant branch stars deviate from the standard
relationship between [C/N] and mass. {We use the APOGEE-\kepler\ (APOKASC)
overlap sample to show that binary interactions are %the majority contributors
to these responsible for the majority of these outliers and that stars with
%any indicators of current or previous binarity should be excluded from
galactic archaeology analyses that rely on [C/N] abundances to infer stellar
masses. We also show that the %standard DR14 APOGEE analysis overestimates the
surface gravities for even moderately rotating giants (vsini$>2$ km/s)}
