OC punks The Jack Knives are back! Fresh off the success of last year’s Into The Night full-length, the foursome have got another full-length in the can and ready for your earholes. It’s called Negative Spaces, and it’s due out on Fumie Records on November 6, 2026. We know, we know, that’s an awful long […]
Fresh off the success of last year’s Into The Night full-length, the foursome have got another full-length in the can and ready for your earholes. It’s called Negative Spaces, and it’s due out on Fumie Records on November 6, 2026. We know, we know, that’s an awful long time to wait. But don’t worry…the band have announced not one but TWO new songs to whet your appetite!
The two new tracks, “La Sirena” and “Late Nights In London,” are available tomorrow as a double A-Side single. Both tracks – and the whole of Negative Spaces – were recorded at the iconic Little Eden studio in the iconic Asbury Park by the iconic Pete Steinkopf and were mastered by the iconic Jason Livermore at the iconic Blasting Room in Fort Collins, Colorado! Here’s what vocalist/guitarist Si Short has to say about the new Jack Knives material:
“These songs really feel like the beginning of a new era for us. There’s still all the energy and grit people expect from the Jack Knives, but we pushed ourselves further as songwriters and storytellers on this record.”
Check out the “La Sirena” video down below and stay tuned for more on Negative Spaces!
Dan Cummings, frontman of Massachusetts street-punks Already Dead, has started putting out solo, acoustic, working-class folk punk material…and Dying Scene is stoked to get to show you what he’s up to! This coming Friday, Cummings will release his acoustic cover of “Which Side Are You On?” In keeping with long-running folk traditions, he’s updated the […]
Dan Cummings, frontman of Massachusetts street-punks Already Dead, has started putting out solo, acoustic, working-class folk punk material…and Dying Scene is stoked to get to show you what he’s up to!
This coming Friday, Cummings will release his acoustic cover of “Which Side Are You On?” In keeping with long-running folk traditions, he’s updated the lyrics to be reflective of the current sociopolitical climate. The video was directed and edited by Roberto Terrones Jr of Boston-based Berto Media. Check it out below and check out Dan’s Bandcamp while you’re at it!
While Dave Hause has certainly not been a stranger to playing shows in and around the Boston area for the last several decades, it had been a while since he and his revved-up band The Mermaid had played a big revved-up rock-and-roll show in the greater Boston area. Four-plus years, in fact, since the Mermaid […]
While Dave Hause has certainly not been a stranger to playing shows in and around the Boston area for the last several decades, it had been a while since he and his revved-up band The Mermaid had played a big revved-up rock-and-roll show in the greater Boston area. Four-plus years, in fact, since the Mermaid had played alongside Joe Gittleman’s Avoid One Thing at Sinclair in Cambridge. Sure, there were a couple years of Sing Us Home festival warm-ups at Faces in Malden, but the makeshift stage at the rear of a brewery in a repurposed bank is wonderful but a different feel than the Sinclair, a well-lit, tremendous-sounding yet unassuming industrial/subway style authentic rock and roll club. It’s big enough that a band has a chance to stretch their collective wings and really soar (see past coverage of barn-burning shows from Weakened Friends and The Hold Steady, for example) but intimate enough to allow for the symbiotic energy between artist and audience to transcend into something truly magical. And that’s exactly what happened last Saturday night when Dave Hause and the Mermaid made their triumphant return to the Harvard Square spot.
When we chatted with Hause about his latest record last year, he made frequent mention of the realization that the Mermaid, as currently assembled, was the best band that he’s ever been in, and that there was a desire to capitalize on how tight the band was and how fired up he was to be out in front. I can say emphatically that the Dave Hause and The Mermaid set last Saturday night at Sinclair was the best and most cathartic live musical set I’ve seen in that – or any – room in quite a long time. Years, really. Yes, I am fully aware of the hyperbolic nature of that statement, but to quote the great Brian Fallon during stage banter about pizza or dogs or Jersey (I forget)…”it’s not a lie if it’s true!” Hause and company – brother and longtime running mate Tim Hause on guitar, Kevin Conroy on drums, Luke Preston on bass, Mark Masefield on keys (and accordion!) and, for this year’s run of Mermaid shows, Matt “Mattsimum Waves” Wilson on guitar to fill out the sound – burst on stage and immediately ripped into “Cellmates” from the most recent record, a charged-up singalong rocker about spending time in the trenches with your comrades, as and making it out the other side. The song is a perfect encapsulation the crowd at-large, the rankers and rotters who’ve been along with Hause for the fifteen years of his solo career or the two-plus decades since The Loved Ones burst on the scene, a sort of post-script to the early-thirties eye-opening crises of Devour.
Speaking of which, while the Dave Hause…And The Mermaid record was the focal point for this show, the set did contain tracks from each of Hause’s seven full-length solo records. “Autism Vaccine Blues,” a personal favorite track from a desert island record for yours truly, was second in the set, a song that’s as cathartic with a full, six-piece band as it was the first time I heard Hause perform it solo, on Flogging Molly’s Green 17 tour in 2013. I know that I’ve used the word ‘cathartic’ a few times already and that’s probably poor form, but the reality is that’s the overwhelming feeling I had for the duration of the sixteen-song main set and two-song encore. The sort of poignant emotional release that comes with gathering with a few hundred friends and kindred spirits and hollering together about past loves and past lives and the cold realities that the world we’ve inherited is a far cry from the one we were sold. Even the less traditionally charged up rock songs, like “Rumspringa” from the Mermaid record or “Surfboard” from Blood Harmony took on arm-in-arm singalong vibes. (The former, for what it’s worth, featured an accordion-clad Masefield stage diving, while the latter featured an appearance on steel drum by Rhode Island’s Aaron Abramson Cote.) By the time main-set closers “Look Alive” and encores “With You” and “We Could Be Kings” rolled around, the lines between band and crowd had long-since been blurred in favor of one big, sweaty, celebratory mass.
Apes Of The State provided direct support on this little run in the Northeast after an appearance earlier in the month at the Hause brothers’ Sing Us Home festival. Appearing as a four-piece on this run sans guitarist/mandolinist Dan Ebersole, the Lancaster-PA folk punks – April Hartman on guitar and vocals, Mollie Swartz on violin and kazoo yes really, Ian Cornele on drums and Moth Rogers on bass – were met with a rousing singalong chorus of their own from the crowd, particularly on tracks like “They Can’t Kill Us All” and “Sober Intentions” and had won over the bulk of those who weren’t previously familiar by the time “What Am I Doing With My Life?” rolled around.
The local opener spot was occupied by RooFTops on this occasion. With roots that extend deep into the Boston punk and hardcore communities for many years, RooFTops has been doing the solo acoustic thing for a decade-and-a-half now. But this isn’t your parents’ acoustic folk balladeer; RooFTops is throat-shredding, anti-war, working-class punk rock to the bone (with a fun Descendents cover for added measure)!
Check out more photos from the evening’s festivities below!
The almighty Flatliners concluded Cold World release week with a pair of shows at the iconic Middle East (downstairs) in Cambridge’s Central Square. The first night was a sold-out ripper that found the Flats sandwiched between Signals Midwest and local(ish) heroes A Wilhelm Scream. With Signals on their way to Australia for a ten-day run […]
The almighty Flatliners concludedCold World release week with a pair of shows at the iconic Middle East (downstairs) in Cambridge’s Central Square. The first night was a sold-out ripper that found the Flats sandwiched between Signals Midwest and local(ish) heroes A Wilhelm Scream. With Signals on their way to Australia for a ten-day run post-show, the second show featured iconic local support from Rebuilder. And because that show was also Mother’s Day, it was also an all-ages matinee show. But this was no acoustic mimosa brunch – it was an amped-up, circle-pit inspiring barn-burner of a holiday set.
Rebuilder kicked things off at the stroke of 1:00pm. The band – whom I’ve seen close to two-dozen times – wasted no time setting things off. Playing as a keyboardless four-piece and with familiar face Harley Cox (Choke Up, Sadlands) filling in for Brandon Phillips on drums for the occasion, Rebuilder ripped through a set that pulled from the last dozen years of their discography, from 2015’s Rock And Roll In America, through 2017’s Sounds From The Massachusetts Turnpike EP and 2023’s wonderful Local Support. Particularly when playing as a four-piece, the band have a fairly unique stage setup, with dueling vocalists/guitarists Sal Medrano and Craig Stanton at stage right and left respectively, leaving ample space for bassist Daniel Carswell to endlessly prowl the center of the stage with occasionally reckless abandon.
The Flatliners occupied the middle spot on the bill, the figurative home fries in the Mother’s Day brunch of a lineup. The Canadian quartet wasted no time blowing the proverbial roof off the dimly-lit basement confines that are downstairs at the Middle East. “Performative Hours” kicked things off, setting a frenetic bar that was quickly matched by “Eulogy” and “Good, You?,” the first single from Cold World. The Cold World tracks – which also included “And They’re Off,” “Pulpit” and “Inner Peace,” fit seamlessly into the set that pulled from all points in the band’s genre-bending career. It feels a bit lucky that the Flats circa 2026 are anchored in punk rock ethos, meaning that we still get the privilege of watching them in sweaty basement all-ages matinee settings, as their massive guitar hooks and fiery rhythms could easily scale up to much larger outdoor sheds this time of year.
And with that, the main course – the omelet station in the Mother’s Day brunch – none other than New Bedford’s A Wilhelm Scream. While The Flatliners and A Wilhlem Scream have been long-time buds and road dogs together, these two shows somehow marked the first occasion on which they’ve shared the same Boston-area stage. AWS matched the Flats’ energy level and ratcheted it into the stratosphere, setting the tone with “I Wipe My Ass With Showbiz” and “5 to 9,” the one-two punch that kicks off the band’s 2007 release Career Suicide. The quintet put out a new record of their own recently, and sprinkled a healthy dose of tracks from Cheap Heat across their headlining set. “Let It Ride” was a particular highlight. And while this show was obviously an early-afternoon Mother’s Day matinee, energetic A Wilhelm Scream frontman Nuno Pereira’s son Brixton was front and center for the band’s set and their frequent interplay was like watching a multi-generational mirror. The kids, it seems, are alright after all.
Check out more shots from the afternoon’s festivities below!
As incredible as it might sound, 2026 marks the twentieth anniversary of The Hold Steady’s Boys And Girls In America. It not only marked the band’s third full-length in three years (remember when bands did that? Ah, relative youth…), but as their first release through then-new label home Vagrant Records, it served as a step-up […]
As incredible as it might sound, 2026 marks the twentieth anniversary of The Hold Steady’s Boys And Girls In America. It not only marked the band’s third full-length in three years (remember when bands did that? Ah, relative youth…), but as their first release through then-new label home Vagrant Records, it served as a step-up in both production and exposure to a wider audience. We’ll have more on the legacy of the album itself when the actual release anniversary date rolls around in October, but for now, we join the band in their own celebration!
As part of a year-long run of shows honoring the BAGIA anniversary, The Hold Steady announced a four-night stay at the Sinclair, a venue nestled in the general Harvard Square area in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn is rather publicly a graduate of a fellow Beanpot school, Boston College. And while The Sinclair didn’t exist during Finn’s showgoing years on the Heights, there’s something that feels very Hold Steadian (Steadyian?) about the venue and the surrounding area. The venue itself soudns great and is well lit and has an unassuming industrial/subway air about it that is authentic in ways that newer gastropub microbreweries can only dream about. The jangly brick-lined sidewalks and narrow, paved-over pre-Revolutionary cowpaths have long been a way station for a wide cross-section of society; for generations it’s been home to the stereotypical “haves” for sure, but also counter-culture revolutionaries and wayward souls and well-read gutterpunks and upper-middle-class kids from suburbia in search of something close enough to ‘danger’ but also close enough to the subway to be able to return to their safe, suburban homes before the streetlights came on long traveled far and wide and populated The Pit (R.I.P.) and The Garage (also R.I.P.) and the bookstores and coffeeshops and back alleys.
Anyway, as per usual, I digress. On this evening, the first of those four celebratory evenings, The Hold Steady wasted no time in getting on with the business of celebrating, serving as their own opener and playing Boys And Girls In America front-to-back. (Editor’s note: nights two and three featured Jimmy Montague and Happy Little Clouds, respectively, while night four was a stripped-down, storytellers THS set). As proof of the album’s cultural staying power, especially within the Unified Scene, the overwhelming majority of Boys And Girls In America has long been regularly featured in the band’s live sets. Still, it is a different sort of experience hearing the album basically start to finish, in order, the same way so many of us first experienced at the initial needle drop or, I’m sure in most cases, the first time we put the disc in the aftermarket stereo in our 2001 Mazda Protege, a small handful of years before that car literally rusted away into nothing. But I digress again. Longtime Boston-area scene vets Ryan Walsh (Hallelujah The Hills) and Ezra Furman joined the crew for the boy and girl parts originally made famous by Dave Pirner and Elizabeth Elmore on “Chillout Tent,” which is undoubtedly the least-performed song from the BAGIA oeuvre for perhaps obvious reasons. I say “basically start to finish” because the band did insert a bit of a pre-planned audible, sliding BAGIA-era B-side “For Boston” in between “Chillout Tent” and album-closer “Southtown Girls.” It was an appropriate homage to Finn’s former home (not only did he spend his college years in the area, but he was born at the now-defunct St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in nearby Brighton).
The band took a normal opener-to-headliner-sized break of fifteen minutes between sets before returning to the stage for the main set. As interesting as it is to hear a set of exclusively Boys And Girls… tracks, it’s almost more compelling to see a full, headliner-length set that includes zero Boys And Girls… tracks because ten of the album’s eleven tracks have been set staples for so many years. The main set kicked off with “Multidude Of Casualties” from the band’s sophomore release, 2005’s Separation Sunday. The eighteen songs that followed were a pretty representative cross-section of the entirety of the band’s catalog, from Almost Killed Me‘s “Killer Parties” to the as-yet-unreleased “Dream Down By The Water.” Heaven Is Whenever bonus track “Ascension Blues” was a fun highlight from the lesser-played song archive, as was Teeth Dreams‘ “The Only Thing.” I have a soft-spot for that record and feel like it doesn’t always get the appreciation it deserves. Of course Mosh Pit Josh joined for the hardcore-style breakdown at the latter half of “Stay Positive.”
To look at the band is to see a crew of a half-dozen different guys from seemingly different scenes – from Nicolay’s frequent suits and bolwer hats to Selvidge’s 70s cocksure swagger to Finn’s English professor – who’ve felt the same gravity to create iconic, rock-and-roll music. The band has had a few different lineups over the years and each has its own merits, but I genuinely believe that the full-Voltron lineup that for the last decade has found Finn and (essentially) original members Tad Kubler (stage left guitar), Galen Povlika (bass) and Bobby Drake (drums) joined by both Steve Selvidge (stage right guitar) and the inimitable Franz Nicolay (keys, harmonica, accordion when the time is right) is the best lineup in a live setting. It might seem difficult for each of the members to carve their own space into the live sound, but The Hold Steady seem to pull it off effortlessly. Kubler and Selvidge trade massive hooks and frequently double or counter-melody each others leads, creating a swirling wall of guitars that Nicolay weaves his textures into and out of. Povlika and Drake, for my money, might be one of the more underrated rhythm sections in modern American rock, serving as the structural foundation for songs that are built with a lot of layers in a way that is understated without being simple and basic. And Finn…well, Finn is Finn. Equal parts poet and preacher and post-grad lecturer, more storytelling peer than bombastic prototypical frontman, Finn’s got an accessible, everyman quality that makes him instantly relatable to the scene as ‘one of us,’ while at the same time having a tremendously Springsteenian ability to create characters and carve stories that make him transcendent; not simply ‘one of us,’ but ‘the one of us who could actually do this and tell our stories and unify our scene.’
Finn routinely brings shows to a close by pointing out that there is so much joy in what the band does night in and night out. While the music is very much modern American rock-and-roll, there is an old hardcore show vibe of unity and that we’re all in this together in their live show, with the audience playing just as big a part in the vibe as the band. We might all be from different scenes and different crews and different area codes (my little corner of the pit had folks from a neighboring suburb and New Hampshire and Vermont and St. Louis and New Jersey and Seattle) but we are ALL the Hold Steady. Stay positive, and check out more photos from Night One below (and stay tuned for more of a look back at Boys And Girls at Twenty this fall)!
A few Fridays ago – April 3rd to be precise – Tacoma-based street punks Noi!se released their latest full-length record. Entitled Fate Of The Union, it was a noteworthy release for multiple reasons. Not only was it the band’s third full-length record on Pirates Press and their first such release in close to a decade […]
A few Fridays ago – April 3rd to be precise – Tacoma-based street punks Noi!se released their latest full-length record. Entitled Fate Of The Union, it was a noteworthy release for multiple reasons. Not only was it the band’s third full-length record on Pirates Press and their first such release in close to a decade (its immediate predecessor, The Real Enemy, dropped back in August 2016), but it is very much a release that could easily never have happened. We caught up with the band’s longtime frontman Matt Henson for an extensive and wide-ranging peek behind the curtain at all that went into not only making Fate Of The Union a reality, but about what it takes to maintain Noi!se’s status as a vital voice and a musical force to be reckoned with in the punk and hardcore communities in a continually changing landscape.
Noi!se circa 2026: Henson, Miller, Parker, Dirkes and Williams
Astute liner note readers and band promo photo viewers will no doubt notice that the Noi!se lineup circa 2026 looks markedly different than it has in years past. Perhaps most notably, a couple of years back, longtime guitarist/co-vocalist Nate Leinfelder decided to hang up his proverbial spurs and move on from the band. Given Leinfelder’s unique skills as a songwriter, vocalist, and guitar player, it represented a seismic shift in the Noi!se camp. “In 2023, Nate was like ‘hey, I’m done’” Henson explains. Leinfelder, a tattoo artist by day, not only wanted to spend more time justifiably focused on his family, but given that Noi!se’s status as a band made up of guys with day jobs meant that most band activities are relegated to nights and weekends; prime hours for a tattooer. “Band trips are done on the weekend, and that’s when he does most of his business. It’s a very different dynamic than for the rest of us who had weekday jobs.”
For his own part, Henson was mired in a bit of a creative funk during that time. “I’d stopped being able to write songs at a certain point,” says Henson. “It was around 2019. It seemed like everything I was writing was the same and I started getting really disenchanted.” And so, with Leinfelder announcing his departure, it initially seemed like that might be the end of the proverbial road for Noi!se. “I was like, “OK, well, that’s that.” It was Leinfelder himself who played a part in convincing Henson to keep the ship afloat. “We talked for a while, and he really convinced me that what the band represents is bigger. It has a positive impact, and it’s something I have put a lot of personal effort and energy into. He thought I had to keep doing it.”
If the band were to keep going, however, that invited the question of how exactly that all would work. Not only had Leinfelder and his creative forces departed, so to did guitarist Jesse O’Donnell, who relocated to Arizona. To fill the two vacant guitar player spots, Noi!se thankfully didn’t even have to look beyond their own history. Justin Miller, the band’s original guitar player, returned to Tacoma after fulfilling his obligations to the US Army and, by extension, returned to his axe-wielding duties in Noi!se. To fill the second guitar role, Noi!se turned to … their own drummer? “Kenny (Dirkes) wanted to play guitar in Noi!se before he was in the band,” says Henson, semi-joking that Dirkes “is one of those irritating people that can pick up an instrument and instantly play it better than you can.” Thus, the two-headed guitar attack would remain in place with Dirkes moving from the drum throne to the front of the stage. That left the pesky issue of finding a new drummer, however. Luckily, the band was still able to look within their own history book to find Dirkes’ replacement, albeit in a bit of an obscure footnote of said history book.
Enter: Mike Parker of fellow Tacoma punks Hilltop Rats. “Funny story,” Henson explains. “At Punk Rock Bowling in 2016, we played a pool party. Kenny’s kick drum pedal broke. Parker was there, and Parker knew all the songs, so Parker played kick drum – just kick drum – for the whole set with a little hammer-looking thing.” So when it came time to fill Dirkes’ role atop the drum throne, Parker seemed a logical fit. “He called and we talked about how much he had wanted to be in Noi!se for a long time, and how it would really be a shame if the band stopped. So that provided a solution as to how we could keep things going.” There was still one more change to bring the Noi!se lineup up to its present status. Due to some nagging wrist injuries, Henson was forced to retire the “bass player” portion of his job title in the band, meaning that he’d focus just on lead vocal duties. To fill his role in the rhythm section, the crew didn’t need to search very far either, as Parker’s fellow Hilltop Rat Aaron Williams stepped in to assume the bass playing position.
Giving up bass playing duties and reworking an entirely new band roster are far from the only major life changes that Henson has had to navigate over the last handful of years. Halloween 2023 marked the end of Henson’s two-plus decade career in the United States Army, as he retired as a Sergeant Major after 24 years, 1 month and three days of service. He’s since started a ‘civilian’ job with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the counter-WMD arm of the United States Department of Defense. Here’s the very-long-story-short version of what that means: “Specifically after the advent of the nuclear warhead, it became possible for people to weaponize radiological material,” explains Henson. “So when the Soviet Union fell, all of this radiological material was all over the world and it was unsecured. Our agency’s job is to go typically at the behest of other countries to either work with their counter-WMD forces or to straight-up take radiological sources out of their country.” Not your typical nine-to-five desk job by any stretch, it’s a job that has Henson away from his family – which collectively relocated to North Carolina – frequently, albeit not for as long at any one stretch as his military career did. “There is much more of a family buy-in dynamic where everybody has a say in when and where I go.”
To know Henson is to know that family has long been the core around which the bulk of his life has rotated. He and his wife Stephanie – whom he frequently refers to as “Super Mom” through the course of our conversation – have a fifteen-year-old son Liam and a ten-year-old daughter Faris. The former was the subject of the 2024 standalone Noi!se track “Liam,” the heart-on-your-sleeve burner of a song above that finds Henson processing the emotions that came along with not just becoming a father in word, but learning how to become a dad in deed as well. The younger Henson, for her part, presents not only as very much a quintessential ‘daddy’s girl’ but also seems destined to follow in her father’s footsteps as a performer. Ever the proud parent and family man, Henson is no stranger to sharing those exploits on social media. He does so in a way that’s authentic, rather than performative, and gives thought to what and how he shares, explaining “I want to be as positive as I can on social media, but I also don’t want to paint this picture that everything’s perfect and everything’s great.” The Henson household, like all households, is not always full of gumdrops and lollipops. “It’s absolutely not perfect all the time, but I think it’s important to understand that things can be a total piece of shit, but at the same time, you can try and find what positivity exists in that circumstance.” And if you’ve been a follower of Henson over the last handful of years, you know that in addition to family stuff (and Faris stuff specifically) and band stuff, there’s been a new topic added to the mix that has been intensely revealing of the good, the bad, and the occasionally ugly: sobriety.
For Henson, sobriety is a journey started just over 1000 days ago; July 19, 2023 if you’re keeping score at home. However, in reality, the journey started internally well before that. “I knew I needed to get sober for years,” he says. “Deep down, I knew it probably a year prior to actually quitting drinking. I knew 100 percent that I was an alcoholic. I had to stop drinking, I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t figure out how to get there.” The ultimate catalyst to pulling the proverbial Band-Aid off started in a bit of an atypical fashion, although judging by what you’ve read thus far, that is probably to be expected. He’d already been giving increasing credence to the idea of quitting in the months between deciding to retire from his nearly quarter-century career in the US Army and that career actually winding down. Then came an intervention from an unlikely – and unrelated – source. “I went to the hospital with an infection,” Henson explains. “Not alcohol related, but a very, very severe infection in my arm.” As he’d already been weighing the idea of quitting drinking at that point, spending three days in the hospital seemed as good a time as any to actually pull the trigger on the idea. “I was like, ‘Well, the hard part’s done. I’ve been sober for three days now, so let’s operationalize this.”
When Henson returned home from the hospital on day four, he made the decision to capitalize on that unexpected head start without getting too far ahead of himself. Henson has long maintained an active social media presence, featuring exploits and highlights from his career, his band and, most importantly, his family. When it came to sobriety, little would change in that regard. “I made a decision that I’d give myself thirty days to make sure that I could do it,” he explains, adding that “once I realized I could, I was going to use my platform and hold myself accountable.” Henson also used friends and family and social media – yes, even TikTok. “In a time where you don’t see positivity and humanity as a whole, there are some elements on TikTok where you really do. There’s so much positive parenting advice and so much general support for people who may feel isolated and who are looking to better themselves.” That all helped Henson work through some of the travails of early recovery. “A huge, huge resource was sobriety videos, where you’re examining addiction and recovery in different venues,” he reports. “I decided when I got sober that 12-Step was not for me. Nothing against it, but it’s not something I wanted to do. I’m a big proponent of coming to things on your own accord and on your own terms. As odd as it may sound because of my former profession, but I don’t like being told what to do.”
The positive results of Henson’s recovery journey to date have been many and varied, and they appear best when closest to home. “Just being a husband and a father, you can be passionate and you can do the best you can, but you’re doing it with one hand tied behind your back if you have a problem with alcohol. And for me, I was a very functional alcoholic.” In fact, some folks who knew Henson primarily through the band and especially through that aforementioned social media presence might not have been aware that he had struggled with alcohol at all. Unlike some folks who maintain a visible online presence, Henson’s feed and his lyrics were not filled with visible and frequent debaucherous alcohol-related behavior. In hindsight, that may have helped his drinking continue longer than perhaps it should have. “I could point to the fact that ‘I’ve never gotten in trouble, and I always pay my bills, and I’m not abusive’…but that is such a low bar to set,” he points out. “When you’re an alcoholic, it’s a very easy copout where you’re constantly preparing your next argument for why you don’t need to quit. And the more you do that, the more it illustrates your need for stopping.”
As you might imagine, it hasn’t all been rainbows and butterflies since getting sober. But closing in on three years of continuous sobriety has meant that Henson has learned more than a few tricks of the trade to help stay on the right path. “I’ve conditioned my brain so that any time I think of drinking, I equate it with the worst parts of drinking…of which there are fucking tons.” It also means that he’s been able to transfer some of the same skills that afforded him a successful career in the military. “I’m now trying to weaponize all of the things that I used to be scared of, to include just sitting still and appreciating the fact that I’m here for my family.” But that doesn’t mean he ‘sits still’ for very long. After all, there’s kid stuff and life stuff and new job stuff to keep him busy. And surely there are the inevitable thoughts that maybe it’ll be okay to return to drinking; that maybe it wasn’t THAT bad? “Every once in a while, I’m like, ‘man, it must be cool to be able to drink like a normal person,” he reports, adding again semi-jokingly that “almost immediately after that, I’m like ‘but you can’t do that! It would be really cool to be able to swim across the Atlantic Ocean too, but I can’t do that either!”
Henson has been very forthcoming about his sobriety journey through all of the usual social media channels. While he maybe doesn’t walk the same Twelve Step-related path that some others walk, he’s very mindful about the idea of fellowship and helping out those who might be in the same or similar situations. “The best thing to do is look around you and see who and what you can positively impact,” reports Henson. “If you can do that, it’s going to make you feel more empowered. It’s going to make you feel better, and you’re also helping someone else.” Sometimes, that comes by way of connecting with people he comes across in his travels. Sometimes that means conversing in a direct message on Facebook or Instagram. And sometimes, that comes through music.
When it came time to write and record a new album, there was no way that Henson’s newfound sobriety wasn’t going to be reflected in the new material. Noi!se has done a good job of mixing macro and micro level subject matter into their street punk anthems, combining songs about the world we collectively live in with songs about the fear and doubt and insecurity and anxiety and depression that can come from living in such a world. But writing new material didn’t come easily; not at first, anyway. “I’d be really hard on myself,” Henson explains. “We’d have a deadline and I would put off writing lyrics because I was scared of it. And then I’d drink to lower the inhibitions.” The Fate Of The Union sessions would mark not only the first time writing and recording a full-length with the new lineup, but the first time that Henson would approach writing a new record without alcohol involved in the process.
Speaking of the process, and of the previously-mentioned writer’s block that Henson had been experiencing for a few years. Time – and sobriety – have a funny way of working things out. “About a year ago, everything turned back on and I was writing song after song after song after song,” Henson reports, adding “five of the ten songs on Fate Of The Union I wrote within six weeks of us recording.” The new lineup and the Henson family relocating to North Carolina meant another change in the way the band operated. “It started with me on acoustic whistling. I’d whistle the vocal progression and play the chord progression and send it to the guys. The guys will demo it and send it back, then I’ll take that recording on one phone, play it on my car stereo and sing the vocal progression into the other phone and send it back,” he explains. “We got that mechanism down, and that is how we did the bulk of Fate Of The Union.” (Editor’s note: And if you’re wondering, yes, the proverbial faucet is still on. Just because Fate Of The Union is completed doesn’t mean the creative streak he’s been on has wound down; in fact, Henson was trading ideas for a new song with the band moments before our call.)
“There was a lot of pressure (on this one) and I’m not one to do things half-assed, unless the laundry or dishes,” he jokes. The inclusion of Williams on bass meant that when they got to the studio, Henson could focus solely on his vocals. “Parker is great and Justin and Jenny are both such gifted guitar players,” says Henson, adding “and it’s such a gift to be able to have like a real, legit bass player in here. And if everybody is going to be a master of their craft, I need to do the same thing and really work on my vocals.” What that meant was more than just focusing on singing as well as he could, but really focusing on his health. “I would come into the studio and warm up and stay hydrated and make sure I ate. That was all new stuff to me. I never used to warm up (before a vocal session), I would just drink a bunch of beer.” Going into this record, Henson and crew approached the process from the standpoint that it had to be good, because everyone involved was an expert in their respective crafts, and so the outcome should match the input. “I feel like with all of these tools, we had to make the best record we possibly could,” he explains. “And that means everything. That means the art, that means the lyrics, that means the vocals, because if these guys are so good at their instruments, I needed to be as good with mine.” The result of all those efforts was, well, was Fate Of The Union. It’s a raw album and an intense album and a personal album in ways that Henson and crew have only scratched the surface of previously.
Case in point, the song “You Versus You,” perhaps the most personal song in Henson’s Noi!se catalog. Henson explains it as a “hard-hitting and deeply personal message about the struggle to overcome self-destructive habits.” “When Nate was in the band, he’s such a good lyricist and such a good poet that it always kind of kept me on my game,” Henson remarks. “But I think these are the best lyrics I’ve ever written,” he affirms. The band, separately and collectively, put their all into the making of Fate Of The Union. “As a consequence, this record has all the heart and soul and blood, sweat and tears that we wanted to put into it,” he reports, adding “I think we all left the studio pleasantly surprised about it. A lot of work went into this record. I probably had less to do with this record than any other Noi!se record – take that for what it is!”
The album’s ten songs – nine originals plus a reworked version of “Idle Action,” pull no punches, shining a light on the social issues and injustices that have, unfortunately, become hot-button political topics in recent years. Topics like inclusivity and standing up for marginalized people and not staying silent in the face of racist and borderline fascist dog whistles. “I really do think that there is a moral decision involved with letting it be known that there are things that you absolutely will not tolerate,” Henson states emphatically. It’s the type of leadership that Henson has always found important across all facets of his life, from the military to the homestead to the office to the band and its place in the punk rock community. “A band that refuses to address injustice or social issues is telling you exactly who they are,” he remarks. “Someone on our page or on Instagram will say ‘you guys are really making a mistake closing off half your fans,’ and I always have to say, first off, our fans know us; we’re definitely not ostracizing half our fans. Guaranteed. We’re ostracizing someone we didn’t want as a fan in the first place.”
Henson and his Noi!se comrades will play a handful of dates later this year in support of Fate Of The Union, including their first Los Angeles show at the LA Punk Invasion in September and the first Chicago show in thirteen years at the Shoot The Moon Fest at Reggie’s on May 9th. Both shows – festivals, really – feature a wide array of new and classic punk rock and hardcore bands, worlds that Noi!se themselves straddle expertly. Henson and crew remain inspired by the classic bands that we all grew up on and perhaps more inspired by the up-and-coming bands revitalizing the scene and eliminating some of the gatekeeping that is sometimes present in underground communities. “I’m a big proponent of inclusivity,” believes Henson. “We’re all getting older. We’re not going to grow out of the music, but we’re definitely going to grow out of the scene. What happens to it after we’re gone is going to be a result of what we did with it while we were here.” Henson – like yours truly – is closer to 50 than 40. But playing shows like he did recently where Noi!se was joined by his daughter Faris for the Scars We Hide-era classic “Pawn In The Game” continues to breathe life into his performing lungs. “I remember my first punk show when I was 14 or 15, and a dude grabbed me and took me around the pit,” he states. “I’ll never forget that, because I was so scared going to my first show. I didn’t know what to do, and it was just so welcoming and kind. That’s what kept me coming back.”
For more on Henson’s journey and especially more on the band’s view of the fate of our union as it stands in these incredibly polarizing and chaotic times…buy the record!
We’re officially one month out from the release of beloved Canadian punks The Flatliners new record, Cold World. Due out May 8th on new label home Equal Vision Records, the album is not only their first full-length since 2022’s New Ruin (Fat Wreck Chords) but their seventh studio full-length in twenty-four years as a band. […]
We’re officially one month out from the release of beloved Canadian punks The Flatliners new record, Cold World. Due out May 8th on new label home Equal Vision Records, the album is not only their first full-length since 2022’s New Ruin (Fat Wreck Chords) but their seventh studio full-length in twenty-four years as a band. And while there’s certainly more to come about the latter fact a year from now for what should be obvious reasons, suffice it to say that the hours spent writing music and toiling in tour vans and the years and years of playing shows of all shapes and sizes have produced a band that is firing on all cylinders musically and creatively. Cold World is yet another raw and powerful record that comes out of the proverbial gate swinging right from the first notes that form the opening salvo of “Stolen Valour.” A spiritual follow-up to its predecessor, New Ruin, Cold World is a dozen tracks that deal with grief and loss and the raw nerves exposed to a world that has crumbled around us.
From a songwriting perspective on Cold World, the band stuck to the formula that’s been working well for them for the last decade, particularly since Covid. Cresswell writes the lion’s share of the music and melodies, trying to present as close to a fully fleshed-out idea to his longtime bandmates before it’s time to hit the studio. “I don’t like wasting people’s time,” he explains. “I don’t want to waste my friends’, my bandmates’ time. I don’t want to waste my own time. I don’t want to waste our lovely engineer friend Matt Snell’s time.” While the ideas may largely take root from Cresswell’s mind, he’s well aware that the fleshed-out reference tracks he sends to the rest of his crew won’t sound the same once put through the full Flatliner filter. “It does get to the point where I’m sending them ideas to listen to. There’s MIDI drums in there that Paul will severely improve upon. There’s a very simple bass line in the song that Jon will like make a meal out of and make so great. There is a lot of guitar ideas that Scott and I will go through together and he’ll come up with something better. You know, he’ll come up with a way that he plays it that makes it sound like he’s playing it because he is on the record. Things like that. Everyone touches it before we get into the studio to record it.”
The one outlier in the band’s recent song writing and recording pattern was, interestingly, 2013’s Dead Language. A bit of a transitional record, the album you know and love as Dead Language was finalized almost by accident. “Back in 2011, we went in to make demos of what would become Dead Language,” Cresswell explains. “We took those live, off the floor demos…and showed our buddy George, who used to be our tour manager and sound tech in Europe. He said ‘I think you’ve already made your record!” There was a moment on this record that almost mirrored that Dead Language process, albeit late in the game and only for one song. It’s a track that was “a bit of a question mark coming into the studio, but we thought ‘you know what? Let’s throw it on the pile of songs,” he continues. “The last day we had some extra time, so we’re like ‘okay, let’s get in the room together and really tinker with this song. We hadn’t done it that way in like ten years.”
The result of that throwback-style session was “Misanthropy & Me.” Released as a standalone single back in December 2025, “Misanthropy & Me” serves as a link between New Ruin and Cold World, as the latter is the musical and thematic follow-up to the former. “There’s a theme with record, and it goes kind of deep,” Cresswell explains. New Ruin was an angry and thematically dark record, albeit in a different way than, say, Dead Language. Its arrows were pointed toward the past generations that sold ours a bill of goods, dismantling the systems that helped propped them up and leaving the younger generations to deal with the mess. “Cold World is a spiritual sequel to New Ruin,” explains Cresswell, adding “that’s something we’ve never done before. He continues: “with New Ruin, there was a lot to be angry about in the world, and a lot of that was written in the years leading up to and then including the beginning of COVID and everything. So there was a lot to be angry about in the world. And it just so happens that it’s gotten worse.”
Grief and loss and the sad reality of the world we live in are recurring themes on Cold World. Look no further than lead singles “Good, You?” and “Inner Peace” for clear examples. A particular high note on the record is the powerful “Whyte Light.” The riff-heavy uptempo rocker is an old to a fallen friend, Ben Sir. (Astute listeners will note that the Cresswell-penned “Side Of The Road” from Hot Water Musics latest full-length, Vows, is about the same friend.) Sir played in the Edmonton band Worst Days Down, and was also part of a bar there called The Buckingham. He was a long-time friend and spiritual light for Cresswell and crew. “He was a great friend of the band, one of my best friends on the planet,” he explains. “He was just kind of gone out of nowhere, so it’s just brutal; absolutely brutal.” Repeated several times late in “Whyte Light” is the line “I am me because I knew you,” which is about the most pure and genuinely positive thing you can say about another person. “I really do mean I am me because I knew him,” states Cresswell. “I think that’s the case with the people we carry with us, whether they’re still with us or not. They do make us a bit of who we are. We learned so much from him over the years, and the fact that he’s gone doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t feel real. I feel like he’s just been on the road for a while and I just haven’t seen him.”
Sonically, Cold World is very much a spiritual follow-up to New Ruin as well. It’s very much still a Flatliners record, but it’s also got enough twists and turns to keep things fun and exciting. Maybe not twists as far outside the norm as a song like Inviting Light’s “Chameleon Skin,” perhaps, but still some ideas that were wide-ranging enough that even Cresswell was surprised they made the cut list. Take a song like “Pulpit,” which features double-tracked vocals – one spoken, one shouted – over a musical bed largely focused on the Jon Darbey/Paul Ramirez bass and drums tag-team. “I sent it to the guys to see what they thought. I thought it was cool, but I was like, that song’s never fucking coming out. No one’s going to like that one. I loved it, but no one else is going to like it. It’s too weird. And then all the guys were like, ‘that one’s fucking cool!.”
Because the band have worked together for so long and operate on an almost telepathic level lately, there’s inherently a sense of trust in working through songs that might be outside the traditional norm, which, in turn, resets what the traditional norm is. “We’re aware of the moves we’ve made before,” says Cresswell. “Because we wrote a song like “Chameleon Skin” and put a record like Inviting Light out, we are now free to do whatever the fuck we want. And that’s beautiful, because we walked through the fire together.” Cresswell is frequently quick to gush about his bandmates; to bestow the virtues of their lifelong bond and connections, both musical and otherwise. There are “childhood, deep roots baked in the genetic makeup of this band,” Cresswell explains. The story has been told in other places (like previous DS interviews) but he and guitarist Scott Brigham met in kindergarten; he and five-string bass virtuoso Darbey met a couple years later, and they collectively met Ramirez around 11 or 12 at summer camp.
As such, they were friends well before ever becoming a band; even before learning to play instruments. “Scott and I started taking guitar lessons at the same time back in ‘98 because we wanted to play guitar, and we wanted to play in a band together. Same with Jon, but he got to calling playing guitar too late. Scott and I had already called it, so he got to play bass.” It’s a lifelong connection that exists and, after almost a quarter century together, seems to be as strong now as ever. “We love each other. We’re like brothers. These are my oldest, greatest friends,” Cresswell states emphatically. “Everyone has a bit of a life outside of the band now too, so this band is something that is our lifeblood, and something that always moves us forward together as friends, but it’s also there for us to return to. And each of us are there for each of us to return to as friends as well. It’s exciting when we get to do it.”
Cold World is out May 8th on Equal Vision Records in the States and Dine Alone in Canada. Pre-orders are still available; you should get it. There are also a bunch of tour dates that find the Flats appearing alongside the likes of Samiam and A Wilhelm Scream and Dave Hause and more. Full details here. Check out our full chat below.
*The interview below has been edited and condensed for content and clarity. Yes, really. *
Dying Scene (Jay Stone): So I don’t know what to talk about first, whether it’s the new record or 24 years with the same group of four guys. I know that this is a frequent topic of conversation and I know that what that actually means is that next year is 25 years and that you all turn 40. But do you talk internally about how special that is, even a little bit? I tried to run through the list of bands that have been together 24 years with the same four guys and I didn’t get anywhere. I mean, I guess theoretically Hot Water, right?
Chris Cresswell: Yeah, totally. I mean, it was the same around the 20th anniversary a few years ago and it is now with the 25th anniversary coming up next year. Just the nature of being in a band, you’re always planning stuff far in advance, you know what I mean? You kind of start as a band in our position to celebrate that 25th anniversary or at least to talk about it in these terms way before it arrives. You start to have those sentimental conversations before it’s even at your doorstep. We don’t talk about it a lot because I think it’s funny…because this has always been our experience with this band, you know what I mean? It is cool, but for us, we think like, “yeah, it’s our band. It’s cool.It’s always been the four of us because we’ve never had another version of it. This is the only version of it we’ve ever known.” So when those milestones are approaching and have arrived at the doorstep, we do talk a lot about it. I mean, we love each other. We’re like brothers. These are my oldest, greatest friends. I met Scott the first day of kindergarten. I met Jon in grade two and we ended up finding out that we live on the same street, so then we walked to school every single day together for the rest of our time in school until I moved away. And then we met Paul. Scott and I met Paul at a summer camp when we were 11 or 12 years old. So this is childhood, deep roots, baked in the genetic makeup of this band. And it does come up, but when it does, we’re in just as much awe as fans of the band may be about it, but then there’s always something else to do, so we’ve got to move on. This life doesn’t leave you a lot of time to process.
That’s certainly true. And I wonder if it would have ended up the same if you weren’t friends before the band started. You all knew each other ahead of time and then started a band; you didn’t meet each other through the process of trying to start a band. So I wonder if that is a different dynamic.
Yeah, I think so. You know, we all have friends from school days that you miss getting to hang out with all the time. You maybe get to see them at a wedding or whatever, or you bump into them somewhere if you still all live in the same town or something like that. There are these people from our past that each of us would love to spend more time with. And the way you do that is you start a band with some of those people! (*both laugh*) And then you are unified for life. I do think about that sometimes. I wonder where we’d all be as people, as friends, if the band wasn’t there for us and if we weren’t there for each other in the band. But it is true what you said, that going back, we did start the band because we were already friends. Scott and I started taking guitar lessons at the same time back in ‘98 because we wanted to play guitar, obviously, but we wanted to play in a band together. That’s why we started taking lessons. Same with Jon. Jon just got to calling playing guitar, as kids do, too late. And I had already called it and Scott had already called it. (*both laugh*)
Yeah, I know how that goes.
It was literally how he became the bass player for this band. But now…
What a phenomenal bass player.
Yeah man! Much to his chagrin, he became the bass player, but years after that, he’s one of the best.
That’s the reason I bought my first bass in ninth grade. Because there was another kid who had a guitar and another kid who had a guitar, and you can’t have three guitar players. We weren’t going to be Skynyrd. We were going to be a punk rock band.
Now there are bands, so many bands with three guitar players. It’s cool. I like it. Fuck it. Just go for it.
Absolutely now, but when was I in ninth grade? 32 years ago? You were Skynyrd or The Band, or I guess Pearl Jam, because Eddie played guitar, too.
That’s right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For us, it would be this brief era in the Tragically Hip’s existence, where Gord Downie, the singer of the Tragically Hip, who typically just sang, but there was a brief era where he also played guitar on stage and sang. That would be one of the first bands, like homegrown Canadian bands, who are like a big deal to us, who we’d see like, fuck it, three guitar players.
Massive deal in Canada. I remember when I was in college, when moved to Boston, we had Much Music, and they always had specials on like Tragically Hip and Our Lady Peace and bands like that. And I learned that Our Lady Peace, I dig. I don’t get The Hip. You could tell that they were massive. And I feel bad even saying that I didn’t get them because…
There’s such lore around that band. They’re one of my favorites, truly. But I got to admit that when I was a teenager in school, in high school, especially like when I was “really punk,” you know what I mean?
Oh, totally.
The punkest version of myself was when I was 14 and I just discovered it. I didn’t really care for them mostly because they were all over Much Music. They’re all over the radio. They’re ubiquitous. So it was just this thing like…it was one song I just didn’t really actually give a chance to at first. And it was everywhere, so I didn’t like it. You know what I mean? That wasn’t for me, but…
That’s why I didn’t like Nirvana. I was “too punk” to like Nirvana. Like an asshole. (*both laugh*)
Well, we’re all assholes when we’re young. (*both laugh*) But then the band gets our start and we get our first van and we get the Tragically Hip’s greatest hits double-disc CD, Yer Favourites. Y-E-R. F-A-V-O-U-R-I-T-E-S. (*both laugh*) And it was a double-disc CD. It was fucking long, but every drive we had was long then, so we would just throw it on and so quickly all of us were just kind of like getting a full-blown education on how many different things a band could do while still sounding like themselves.
That is a really good segue into this record. Because this is such a Flatliners record but it’s not like the last couple records, and obviously it’s certainly not like the early Flats records. You continue to add different wrinkles to it. And so I wonder in that process of writing songs for this band in particular, do you guys talk about where you can push those boundaries? Like what you can do and still make it a Flatliners song? I don’t think there’s anything on this record that doesn’t sound like a Flats song. I mean, “Chameleon Skin,” I think from a previous record, is like the outlier there, but still, that’s you guys. Do you talk about like where can we go stylistically? Or is it just kind of like all what you’re feeling at the time when you’re writing?
Yeah, there’s no conversation about where we could go with it. It just ends up being where we go. Truly, it’s really fun. We trust each other completely and we trust ourselves at this point completely, you know? I think that comes from kind of walking through a bit of the fire we lit for ourselves with some twists and turns over the years. Inviting Light is a particular one, where when that came out, it confused a lot of people. It honestly kind of crept up on us in certain elements, how different it became, you know? But when you’re so close to making something, you don’t truly see it for how different it is when you stack it up against the record that came before and the record that came before that one. You just know what you’ve been working on for a year or six months or a month or whatever it is. When that record came out, it definitely turned some heads, but the funniest thing is now we will meet Inviting Light haters at shows. And they are self-professed former Inviting Light haters. Former…that have now gone on to understand that record more or just enjoy it a lot more. Some people tell us it’s their favorite one, which is cool. I don’t know, we just took some chances we didn’t really realize we were taking, to be honest, because…
So it wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision to like turn left there.
No. No, man, it was just us writing songs that we wanted to write and what was coming out of us at that time. And same with the next record, with New Ruin, there was a lot to be angry about in the world, and a lot of that was written in the years leading up to and then including the beginning of COVID and everything. So there was a lot to be angry about in the world. And it just so happens that it’s gotten worse. So that is how we get into…
Just amazing, isn’t it?
Yeah, yeah, Jesus Christ. Didn’t know there were enough coals to fucking, you know, throw on the burning pile of shit that we call the planet. (*both laugh*) So musically, the conversation almost never happens. Sometimes when we’re jamming stuff and we can run the gamut. Say we’re writing a setlist. We can run the gamut of our whole catalog and we can play some old stuff from Destroy To Create. We can still fucking nail those songs. It’s fun, you know what I mean? We don’t do a lot of them live anymore, but we did just do this big anniversary for the 20th a couple of years ago for that record, which was super fun. And we don’t look back too often, but when we do, we’re reminded that we have a few tricks up our sleeve in terms of all the genre tourism, I guess, under the punk umbrella we’ve done. Under the rock umbrella, maybe too. But we’re aware, I think, of what we are capable of. That sounds so cocky and I don’t mean it to be. We’re just aware of the moves we’ve made before, you know? Because we’ve made those moves, because we wrote a song like “Chameleon Skin” and put a record like Inviting Light out, we are now free to do whatever the fuck we want. And it is beautiful, dude. It’s beautiful now because we walked through that fire, like I was saying before. In the moment back then, it was a little tricky to navigate, you know what I mean? I mean, we didn’t want to put a record out that confused half of our fans.
But that is a conscious decision that some bands make, obviously.
That’s true, that’s true. We kind of stumbled into it, but that is something some bands do plan.
Face To Face, when they recorded Ignorance is Bliss, which is a record that I loved from day one, and they don’t believe me when I say that, because so many people didn’t like it. Like with Inviting Light, they have since grown to love and appreciate it, but that wasn’t the case when that record came out. They wanted to make a grown-up, “we all grow beards and wear flannel, and there’s a piano and strings” record.
Well, because they’re incredible songwriters, and they’re a great band. And at the end of the day, every band that gets pushed into a genre, like a specific genre’s corner, they probably have more in them than just that one genre that fans of the band just use to describe what the band sounds like. You know what I mean? A lot of it is just this nomenclature of how to bring people together. That’s great, music is a great unifier. At the same time, putting people into corners like that when maybe they just want to be a band can be a bit divisive sometimes. You know what I mean? It shouldn’t be, because it’s just fucking music. But every once in a while, it can feel like that. And I think also, people are different every day, especially in certain eras of their life. There’s these big transformations that happen in the way we think, and in what we do, and how we feel. And those feelings are pretty much what all these bands and songwriters are expressing in musical form. So it’s pretty complicated. It gets pretty tangled, you know what I mean? So we’ve found, by stumbling into all these scenarios over the years, and just kind of doing whatever we’d like to do, is that let’s just kind of be ourselves. It’s going to be a little different every time, because we’re a little different every time. But I’m glad to hear that this one sounds like us to you, because I think it does too.
Yeah. Yeah. It’s so good. I made a mistake. Usually in the lead-up to an interview like this, I try to listen to an album two or three times, maybe. And then that’s it. Because I want to get it but then just kind of leave it alone, and see what resonated with me. And then listen to it again, like the day before, just to make sure what had previously resonated, if I have the time to do that. I’ve probably listened to Cold World 40, 45, 50 times.
Yeah, really? You’re going to hate it by the time it comes out. (*both laugh*)
I was out for a run the other day, and I had it on. And I realized what a goof I was, because I was somehow like as I was running, I was kind of like playing half air drums, half air guitar at one point. Because there’s so many big, heavy riffs that complement each other. It’s like, oh, Paul is fucking crushing here. But also the guitars are really fucking cool. I’m not going to play air bass when I run…
Yeah, and with the fifth string, you’re going to go a little higher. (*both laugh*) Yeah, that’s wonderful to hear, man. I got to say, everyone killed it on this record. It was beautiful to see it all come together. And it’s interesting to hear you say that it all sounds like us, because there’s one song in particular on this record that I remember kind of finishing a demo of, to share with the guys. And I was like, “wow, that song is never coming out, ever. Because I think it’s the weirdest flat song that’s ever been written, in a cool way.” And that song…
Are you going to make me guess?
Well, I’ll tell you. Actually, I am curious what you think. I did the demo. I sent it to the guys to see what they thought. And then from that point in the process, however many weeks, months later, we all get in a room and kind of jam it through and everyone touches it and makes sure it sounds like us, you know? So I sent the guys a demo, and I was like, “that song’s never fucking coming out. No one’s going to like that one. I love it, but no one else is going to like it. It’s too weird.” And then all the guys were like, “that one’s fucking cool!” Like, interesting. Okay, great. And then, you know, we always end up with a couple extra ideas for the record, then you whittle it down to the songs you’re going to record. So I’m like, that song’s not going to make that part of the cut. And then we whittle it down to what songs we recorded are going to go on the record…
So is it “Pulpit” or is it “Gush”?
It is “Pulpit,” yeah!
Well, so “Gush” in my notes, I was like, this could maybe be a Hot Water song. But “Pulpit”… “Pulpit’s” such a cool song. I love the double-tracked vocals, like the spoken word and the scream. That’s really cool. It’s a really cool effect.
Thanks, man. That was the one that blew my mind completely. And then all the guys were very behind it, which then made me feel a lot better about it. It comes from our love of Rocket from the Crypt, you know what I mean? I love Idles. Even like The Streets and stuff like that. Just having a bit of a different approach vocally, and having all that happen just over bass and drums for a lot of the song. I just was fucking around, man. I think that’s how – not just me, but us as a band – I think that’s how we have gotten to the point of truly feeling liberated and just free in our own musical skin. The way we put these ideas together is like in solitude, you know what I mean? Whether it’s one of us on our own – myself – making a demo and sending to the rest of the guys or just in our jam space, together. It’s not a huge deep dark secret, but we’re not sharing the process with our fans along the way, so we’re free to do what we want to do and want to try.
Yeah, it does seem like when the new Flats record comes out, it’s not like we saw those little videos along the way that you were recording. It’s like, “oh, here’s the pre-order!”
Yeah, yeah. It’s ready for you. I don’t want to waste your time, you know what I mean? I don’t want to waste anybody’s time. I also know that sometimes you’re in the studio a year before that record comes out. To me, that’s such a waste of people’s energy and excitement on something. You’re going to have to then remind them, you know, nine months later, 10 months later, like, “hey, by the way, remember that thing we posted last year when we were in the studio? It’s finally coming out. Cool, right?” Fuck that. Just hit them when it’s time.
How much time was this record written over? Like, how cohesive was the writing process? I know in the past, like Inviting Light was sort of two chunks, maybe a year apart. Was that the case here too? Or were they closer together?
With New Ruin and Cold World both, we’ve gotten out of the habit of recording in two big sessions about a year apart. We did that for Cavalcade. We did that for Dead Language. We did that for Inviting Light, all for different reasons, the biggest of which is our touring schedule. The last couple of years have been quieter for us. We toured wherever we could go on New Ruin. It was like right out of COVID and stuff. So there was a whole new playbook on what we could do and where we could go and stuff like that. And then around the time we were winding down from touring that, you know, there’s already some songs for Cold World being worked on for sure. So like there is always overlap between like the record we’re out touring and then the record we’re like actively working on behind the scenes. I would say that for Cold World, two years writing maybe? And that’s like sometimes a song is written and then four months later, a few more are written. There’s never any true method to the madness. Then we just banged it all out in one go in 36 days in the studio.
Oh, wow! Like bass and drums first as usual. You didn’t all record live, did you?
No, no, we haven’t done that since Dead Language. And we did the totally live recordings on Dead Language kind of accidentally. Back in 2011, I guess this was, we went in to make demos of what would become Dead Language. And it quite literally became Dead Language because we took those demos live off the floor demos, no click, nothing. I did the vocals later and we did a couple guitar dubs later. But we took those demos on the road and showed our buddy George, who used to be our tour manager and sound tech in Europe for years and years. Great, great dude. Great friend of the band. Have you seen Some Kind of Monster?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So remember that scene of Lars’s dad and he’s like, basically like, like ruining his day just being like, “I’d say delete it.” Like a very wise European man.We had that with George, but like the flip in the sense of like, he was very positive about it, but it was this very, very powerful moment when we’re showing him our demos, he said, “I think you’ve already made your record.” (*both laugh*) A lot of what you hear in Dead Language was intended to be demos, so that was all live. But since then, we’ve tracked everything from the ground up, but we always do Paul and Jon together. Always.
I feel like you can tell.
They link up so well together.
Yeah. Yeah. Did you have all the big guitar riffs and whatever fleshed out ahead of time? Or was that stuff worked out in the studio too? How close to what you went into the studio with is the finished product, I guess?
Ninety percent. Ninety percent. That’s usually the MO in my mind, at least is 90 percent prepared, 10 percent magic. Like, again, I don’t like wasting people’s time in the studio. I don’t want to waste my friends’, my bandmates’ time. I don’t want to waste my own time. I don’t want to waste our lovely engineer friend, Matt Snell’s time, who we work on everything with now. He’s so great. There’s more people involved than just that. I think us as a band, we want to know going in what we’re doing. There are a few guitar riffs that we kind of put together in the moment in the studio, which was cool because you gotta leave the door a little open for that stuff. It’s not a lot of fun if you’re just going in with a checklist, you know? A lot of people want to romanticize making a record and think that it’s like this crazy party, where there’s people everywhere and friends hanging out. And our buddies come in and can visit and stuff like that from time to time, which is always lovely. But they’re usually there for like an hour or two and they’re like, “I’m getting out of here. It’s kind of boring. “
Yeah, right, right. How many times do I have to hear you play that one particular riff?
Truly what it is, is you’re sitting in a chair or you’re standing in a room doing the same thing a handful of times until you get it right. You know, cool. We got it. Then we move on. So there was one song that came to the table very late and that was what became “Misanthropy & Me,” the single we put out before we announced Cold World. That song came together very last-minute writing-wise. It was still a bit of a question mark, but we thought, you know what, let’s throw it on the pile of songs we’re going to record. If we have time at the end of the bass and drum session, let’s lay down bass and drums for it, which we did. The last day we had some extra time. So we’re like, “OK, let’s get in the room together and let’s really tinker with this song.” We hadn’t done it that way in like 10 years, just because of all the traveling, all the touring, the fact that all of us have a life outside of this band now. Band practice or getting together to jam is pretty tough, so we do it when we’re writing a set for a tour and want to get it tight or when we’re doing pre-production for a record. So this was fun. We got in the studio and on the last day, bass and drums, all four of us in a room fleshed out the final arrangement for this song. I already had all the other lyrics, and we had all the other music for the record done already. So then I knew what the record was about. There’s a theme with this record and it goes kind of deep. So I then knew like, “OK, I can write about this whole theme of the record and kind of make this song like a bit of like a thesis statement song”, which each of our records kind of have; the last few records, at least. And then, (“Misanthropy & Me”) didn’t make the record. So we’re like, “shit, we still really like this song.” And it became this perfect bridging point between New Ruin and Cold World because these two records are connected. Cold World is like a spiritual sequel to New Ruin, something we’ve never done before. I think each of our records and all of our fans would agree that everything has been different each time, almost to the point of alienating people. (*both laugh*) It feels like we’ve hit a stride now with what we do and who we are and what we want to share of ourselves and what we can find musically in ourselves. It’ll always evolve a little bit. But yeah, this record, Cold World, is like the continuation of the whole New Ruin “world” that we built. “Misanthropy And Me,” is the perfect bridging point between New Ruin and Cold World. So we’re like,” well, fuck, it’s kind of perfect that it didn’t make the record because it can live on its own as a little moment in between.” So now people hopefully will go through the lyrics and try to dig through what all that means. But it’s all there.
I did spend a lot of time trying to dig through the lyrics. My growing up period was opening a record, opening a CD, unfolding a tape and using a magnifying glass because the tapes were too small. And sitting down and listening to it in full as a whole product and trying to read the liner notes. I still try to do that. Granted they’re PDFs that I have to print out…
I know, now it’s not as fun. Now you’ve got to go to Staples and buy ink first.
Right! (*both laugh*) Why won’t it print? Why won’t it print? What the F…
You’ve got to get a second job to afford the ink.
Yeah, misanthropy and my printer… (*both laugh*) You come out swinging again on this record. “Stolen Valour” is such a cool song; the way it builds at the beginning, that sort of big frantic guitar and then the gang chorus and then the drums kind of build up. But then I also realized that’s kind of a thing. That’s been a thing for a while. Each record starts off with kind of a big moment. I feel like since Cavalcade, at least anyway. Is that a goal when you’re sequencing a record or even when you’re writing a song? That you need a song to kick the record off and it has to punch you in the face to set the tone?
It’s definitely a goal when sequencing the record. And I think “Stolen Valour” could only have opened the record. There were brief talks about it maybe appearing elsewhere. We do that whole process as a band. We’re a very democratic outfit. We truly are. That’s probably one of the reasons that it’s still the four of us. I would hear the arguments being made for that song to go elsewhere and I just think never made sense to me. Luckily, being a democratic outfit, the majority of the band felt the same way. We’re like, “it’s got to start with that song.” It just fits. When writing music, the opener kind of reveals itself, to me at least, over the course of the whole writing of the record. The final song of a record typically is something that I think about. This record’s a little different because there were a couple ideas for which one was written as the closer. And that feeling just didn’t translate in how the song ended up, which is okay. But typically on New Ruin, “Under A Dying Sun” was written as the album closer. Way back on The Great Awake – “KHTDR” – you can’t put a seven-minute song halfway through the record; that’s the closer. There’ve been certain instances over the years where we’re like, “that’s the closer.” And then once we know that in the writing process, then we can maybe expand and be like, “well, if it’s the closer, let’s have a big fucking jam at the end of it or something, a little punctuation on the album itself.” With this album, some of those moves, we were just kind of feeling what was presented to us in the end by our own doing. And the sequencing for this one, I think it’s a fun. It’s a pretty wild ride, I want to say. I have a biased opinion, of course. But yeah, anyways, a song like “Stolen Valour” could have only gone first, I think.
Yeah, but I also feel like “Mammals “could have only gone first. I feel like “Performative Hours” could have only gone first, the way that song starts out. So that has also become a thing, which has become a thing that I look forward to. Like right when I hit the little triangle button, where does this one start? I enjoy that.
We do put a lot of thought in a lot of stuff, man. I mean, I think it’s partially probably because we don’t put records out every two years, you know? Respect to bands that are doing that. It’s a true feat to do that. I hope fans of those bands realize that band is working their ass off to get you not only a new record every two years, but to tour it as well. Takes a lot of energy. With us, we kind of let it come to us a little more. And in recent years, just like I said earlier, everyone has a bit of a life outside of the band too. So this band is something that is our lifeblood and something that always moves us forward together as friends. But also it’s there for us to return to. And each of us are there for each of us to return to as well as friends. So it’s exciting when we get to do it. And because sometimes that means that there are four years between records, a lot of that has been very well thought out and toiled over. We fucking love this shit, man. I mean, it’s fun.
You can’t not do it, right? Do most things still sort of start with you writing or does everybody bring things or do you like flesh out an idea and then send it to the guys for feedback? And how has that changed over 24 years of doing this?
I mean, I got to say the last couple – Cold World and New Ruin in particular – have been the records where we’ve found the newest version of our process. I’m sure and I hope that it will continue to evolve. You know, I mean, way back in the day, we were always together, right? If we were on tour, we were always together and we were working on stuff all the time. We’re talking about songs in the van. I’m showing everyone lyrics that I’m writing down on actual physical paper. Or we’d be at soundcheck and we’d work on a riff. We were just always together. And when we weren’t on the road, we were always together. We were jamming every week. We lived and breathed this thing 24/7. As life changes and we all grow older, the process evolves. And this last little bit, I’m afforded a really special opportunity by three very supportive and understanding friends to kind of go full rabbit hole on a vision I may have for a song, meaning I’ll put a demo together if I have an idea that’s got everything in there that I can think of. It’s got the vocal. I usually wait till the lyrics are done to to record it. I want to give the guys the best first impression I can with this idea that has been bouncing around in my brain for the last however long, you know what I mean?
How precious are you about those things? Because of your long-term friendship and how democratic it is, how open to them being like, “no, let’s change this in a song,” are you?
I think I’m probably not as open to it as the other guys would like (*both laugh*). But truly,that does happen all the time. You know what I mean? This is a new kind of process, mostly born out of the simple fact that we can’t always get together to like jam a song for four hours and then like next week, do it again and again. They know that my mind is always occupied with music. All of theirs are as well. I have the means, I suppose, to stay up till four in the morning and put an idea together. (*both laugh*) I mean, I can’t rest until it’s done. They also know that about me. I think they’re just like “let the dog off the leash and watch him run!” But it does get to the point where I’m sending them ideas to listen to. There’s MIDI drums in there that Paul will severely improve upon. There’s a very simple bass line in the song that Jon will like make a meal out of and make it so great. There is a lot of guitar ideas that Scott and I will go through together and he’ll come up with something better; he’ll come up with a way that he plays it that makes it sound like he’s playing it because he is on the record. Things like that. There’s a lot of that. Everyone touches it before we get into the studio to record it. And all the guys come with great recommendations in this new part of the process, all the time of like, “hey, man, we’ve been all just listening to this demo for months. That part’s too long. Or this part over here. That’s like two seconds. That’s really catchy to us.” So we do always kind of stamp it as a band, you know what I mean? I gotta say, it’s been a very great use of our time. We’ve been able to write two records that way. And then to do the pre-production before we get in the studio and make sure everyone touches it and then make these records together. I mean, we’re stoked. I would love though, if the process evolved again, or maybe devolved into us going back in the room and jamming. I would love that. You know what I mean? I hope we can get back to that one day. But in the meantime, this has been working. They’re very supportive friends and bandmates, and they know that there’s a vision there that might be starting with one person, but it’s only completed when the four of us do it. That’s when it becomes ours.
On this record, the songs are very much Flatliners songs. With people who are in multiple projects, and where you might have three, technically, if you’re doing your own thing too, I try to think, “okay, would this song have worked as Cresswell solo? Would this song have passed muster with Hot Water,” etc, etc. And in these all, by and large feel like Flatliners songs. Will you borrow an idea from yourself for a project like this, if that makes sense? Like, if you know, you’ve been twiddling around on something that theoretically could be on a solo record, but will you say “it’s actually going to work better if Paul and Jon and Scott play on it, or if I throw it to the Hot Water gauntlet and see what they do with it.” Do you borrow from yourself much?
Yeah, I do. I do. Any writer doing it for so long, you kind of come up with, not signature moves, but you kind of come up with some special feelings that you want to maybe revisit. There are certain musical moves that I think are better suited for Flats. And then I have a very intimate knowledge of like, “yeah, we could fucking nail that one together.” Whereas there are different moves I could make now with my involvement with Hot Water. That band operates in so many ways similarly and so many ways much differently when putting like songs together that it’s such a hard question to answer. But I really think that now I just have such a more intimate understanding of how Hot Water operates with writing songs and my involvement in that. And Ihave 24 years of experience now with Flats, so it’s almost telekinetic. You know what I mean? There’s so much like that is spoken and there’s so much more that is not; it’s just understood, which is pretty cool. Now I just go with my gut, man. Truly. Like it kind of just hits me now in the moment, like “that’s a Flat song,” or “oh, I’ll save that for a Hot Water thing.”
Like while you’re just sitting on the couch behind you with a guitar or whatever and playing a riff, and then you start to chase the riff, you can kind of tell quickly which hole that’s going to go in?
Totally. It’s similar as to why this demo process has become such an integral part of the band’s writing process with Flats lately. Once I have that initial idea of the chord structure or riff or something, or a vocal thing, my mind instantly kind of like pictures what else could be there. So that’s either a groove that Paul would play or it’s a groove that George would play, and those are much different grooves. Paul is a massive follower of George; he’s been a fan of his drumming forever, you know what I mean? There are these similarities, but there are such unique, different players as well that now, lucky for me, I get intimate knowledge of what it feels like to play with both of those fucking great drummers. So I trust my gut in that moment because my gut feeling is me kind of like racing a bit into the future, looking as much down the road as I can being like, “how would this song go with like George playing drums or Paul playing drums or Jason playing bass, Jon playing bass, Chuck or Wollard playing the other guitar, Scott playing the guitar.” It’s it’s hard.
Or just you, right? Or just you on an acoustic or on the Strat or whatever.
Yeah, there’s no good fucking nice way to answer this question because it’s just instinctual at this point, I feel like, which I’m happy about.
I don’t always like to go too in-depth on songs because I am one of those people that thinks listeners should sort of create their own vision of what was going on in a song and make a song their own, right? But “Whyte Light.” Holy crap. That song hit me right in the stomach. What a great song and what a beautiful song. And there’s a line in there…“I am me because I knew you.” That is such a beautiful line. That’s such a beautiful and I think powerful sentiment to have for somebody; that you are who you are because of the connection that you had with this other person. That actually like stopped me from what I was doing to focus and listen to that song and got in my own head.
That’s very nice of you to say. Yeah, that song is very special. That song is written for a friend, Ben Sir, who passed a few years ago. He’s a great friend of the band, one of my best friends on the planet. And he was just kind of gone out of nowhere, you know? It’s just brutal. Absolutely brutal. There’s a lot of grief on this record, and a lot of that has to do with us losing friends. Ben was such a special guy. For people who may not know, he has a band, Worst Days Down from Edmonton, who are fantastic and friends of ours. He’s just a special guy. I just learned so much about…the world around me, how to treat each other, how to give back to this community, this musical community that has given us so much. (I learned so much) about myself, you know? I really do mean I am me because I knew him, you know? I think that’s the case with the people we carry with us, whether they’re still with us or not, like the people we choose to spend our time with, you know what I mean? Like they do make us a bit of who we are. We all as people affect each other in very profound ways. And it’s good and bad, I suppose.
Totally. Yeah.
And for Ben, it was just…man that guy is just fucking one of a kind. And it’s kind of hard talking about it still.
I can tell. That’s who “Side Of The Road” was written about, too?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Same friend. Same guy. He just had such an impact on me in my life and the rest of the guys, too. I mean, fuck, like I said, we’ve learned so much from him over the years. And the fact that he’s gone doesn’t make sense. It still doesn’t feel real. I feel like he’s just been on the road for a while and I haven’t seen him. That’s kind of how I want to think of him for now.
But I think that sentiment is about the most genuine and beautiful thing you can say about somebody’s memory. If you’re assuming you’re talking about it in a positive way, that I am the way that I am in all the good ways just because I was in your orbit. It’s such a genuinely beautiful and pure thing to have, to hold about somebody else.
Yeah, man. So Whyte Ave in Edmonton is this strip of restaurants and bars and stuff. And he was a part of a bar in Edmonton that’s still there called The Buckingham. It’s on Whyte Ave. So that’s why it’s W-H-Y-T-E.
Figured it was a Canadian thing.
Right. Fucking guys always putting different vowels in there. Got a fucking fetish for vowels. (*both laugh*) I mean, he’s an absolute beauty, man. I spent so many amazing hours of my life in vans with him and having some of the greatest conversations I’ve ever had with him. And we spent a lot of time on his balcony in Edmonton. We’d be like coming home from a show. We’d always stay with him. He had this tiny apartment. The whole band would stay over, sleep on the floor, snoring each other’s faces up close and personal, just like just the good old days kind of shit. And it could be middle of summer or fucking middle of winter and 30 below, and the night would usually end with Ben and I, at least Ben and I, maybe a couple of the other guys too, just ripping darts the whole time. And we’d just be talking. I just miss having him around, man. I miss those conversations. That song was one of many he touched on this record for sure. And yeah, on Vows too. I think he’ll be in everything we do, man. I think he’ll be with us forever in that way. You know what I mean? You can’t do better than him.
Is it harder to write songs that are that personal about loss than it is to write sort of bigger picture macro, “the world is a steaming pile of shit” songs?
(*laughs*) A little bit. Yeah. I think it’s just because you want it to be the perfect memoriam for your friend. You know what I mean? Every word to me lyrically in every song matters. Nothing drives me crazier than hearing a new song from a band I like, or just any band, and you can tell the lyrics are so lazy. I fucking hate it so much. I’m not out here stating that I’m the fucking GOAT in this shit at all. Not by far. But I like to put the effort in and when I feel like I’m witnessing someone not putting the effort in, it really bothers me, because like, why are you doing this?
Or just flipping through the rhyming dictionary.
Yeah. But with this kind of song, it’s so special and so delicate and so so raw. Every word really fucking matters, you know what I mean? They’re hard to write for that reason and also because there’s this almost finality, or this kind of solidification of what you’ve been processing once you finish that song, which I know isn’t true, but just in the way you navigate your feelings around a huge subject like this massive loss in your life, there’s a bit of a punctuation mark to it, to the thought. I don’t want it to be that way, but iit just feels like that sometimes in the moment. So those are the songs that I’ll kind of toil over a little more because I want it to be absolutely perfect for him to hear wherever he’s at, you know?
Yeah, and I guess that that does sort of put a pin on that person and make it real that they’re not just on tour again, or it’s just that you’ve been two ships passing in the night and having kind of like now it’s like real and there’s a different feeling behind that.
Yeah. 100%.
Are you nervous to play that in songs like that live because of the feeling that it evokes?
Yeah, always. I mean, it was the same with “Eulogy,” honestly, when we wrote that years ago. The unfortunate thing is we’re not really new to this, right? I mean, no one is.
The longer you live, the more you have to get used to this shit.
It’s just like these kind of topics… it’s not often with our band that I’m writing lyrics about the things that rock, you know what I mean? (*both laugh*) Things that make me stoked. That’s not interesting to me at all to write about. So, yeah, I am. I always do get a little nervous about playing those songs because you’re just going to stew in your own misery, and kind of dig up old bones and all these things. But that version of it, to me, is only in the beginning. Then what I think has happened in the past with songs like this is this really does help process these feelings to a healthy place, because you’re sharing these feelings with other people. It’s very important. It’s a very important thing to do. Share your feelings!
Listen up, fellas! (*both laugh*)
This is true because there’s no way you’re the only one who’s ever felt this way. There are eight billion people on the planet and more people were here before and there’ll be more people later. I think sorrow and misery can be these really isolating feelings for everyone, myself included. And it’s hard. It’s hard to talk about them. But in the end, you know that someone else has gone through something similar to what you’re going through. Maybe not the exact same thing, you know, but there’s going to be someone out there who can at least lighten the load a little bit, you know? So playing these kind of songs live…excavating the soul of the song, which I think is the version that exists on the album, then giving that song life on the road is, I think, where it happens because you just play it so many times and you add little bits and pieces here and there to the performance live every night. That’s where the life of the song happens. And I think through the life of a song like this is where processing some feelings can really happen. It can be very therapeutic, man. But none of that is easy. You’ve definitely got to kind of crawl through the Shawshank shit tunnel first to get to the euphoric moment in the rain.
Right! And I feel like it’s going to set you up for conversations…and I’m sure you’ve had them already, about people explaining to you who their person is, right? Like because obviously I didn’t know him. I assumed that I knew who the song was about when I heard it because of what I know of your history. But even just a line like that makes me go, “OK, I know who that’s about for me. I know five, 10, 15, whatever people have sort of molded me in that way.” So that’s good. That opens you up to be like a merch table therapist with people.
It’s a bit of a raw nerve scenario sometimes. It’s nothing new because it’s like the blessing and not the curse, but the other side of a song like “Eulogy” having been such a huge song for our band for all these years now is that exact scenario where we meet lovely people after the show who have wonderful things to say about how that song got them through the fucking worst time of their life. That sentiment is beautiful, and that’s something that should be shared. It’s just heavy sometimes. So don’t stop. I don’t want people to stop sharing those, you know what I mean? Like that’s like that’s what that song is there for. The music is there to help. It helped us. And it will continue to. But it can be heavy. But what isn’t these days?
It’s a cold world. (*both laugh*)
It is, dude. It is!.
I’m really excited for people to hear this record. I think that people that have been with you along the way are going to dig it. I know you have mentioned before with Inviting Light that people kind of scratch their heads a little bit about it. This record is a Flats record. It’s different enough, but I don’t think people are going to scratch their heads about it.
Even if they do, man, I appreciate that. I think even if people scratch their heads, like I said, I think we’ve made enough twists and turns over the years that I think people would maybe scratch their head more if it sounded exactly like the record before it at this point. I hope that people riding with us long enough know that we’re just always finding new parts of ourselves to kind of express. It’s a bit of a guessing game sometimes, but it just feels great to have another one ready for everyone to hear, man. It’s always a bit of a funny period of time these couple of months, when you first start sharing songs because the majority of the record is like your little secret that no one else knows yet. They know it’s coming, but they don’t know what it’s like. And the day it comes out, it’s everyone’s. And it’s a pretty profound feeling as a musician, maybe more so because we don’t really share a lot of the process along the way. So it’s just kind of an all at once, it was ours and now it’s everyone’s. It’s there to be shared, man. It’s just such a fucking funny way to live, dude; to make all these songs in solitude and in secret and then out of nowhere that all changes.
Well, and the record also comes out at the end of that East Coast run. So I would imagine that most people that will be at those shows haven’t heard any of these songs. And that’s not very common, I feel like nowadays. You’re going to be working, I would assume, maybe half the record or whatever into the set that people are kind of not really know what they’re in for. I know that’s got to be cool in this day.
It’s kind of cool. About a year ago, we had some shows in Canada and we were just about to record the record, so we had done a bunch of jamming and kind of tightened up a bunch of songs. We played “Inner Peace,” the song that came out last week, a bunch of times last year. We played it almost every show we played last year. But it was fun because aside from the video they filmed at the show, there’s nothing else for them to go back and listen to. That might be the only time anyone’s ever gone back to actually watch the video that they took the night before, aside from putting it on Instagram was like, “oh, this is the only version of the song that exists right now. That’s cool.” I know it’s not something bands do too often anymore, but I also know we’re not the only ones doing it. And it’s just kind of just letting the overthinking roll off your back at a time like, “let’s just play it. We like it. It rocks. Let’s do it.” And it’s exciting to see people in the crowd when we would introduce the song, but kind of barely introduce it because we weren’t making a huge spectacle. \We would just kind of say “check this one out” and then like bust into the new song. And we’d see these fans that know every word of every other song look around like “what is this?” That’s a cool feeling, man.
It’s been a long time since Dropkick Murphys established themselves as the premier flag bearers not just for Celtic Punk but for the Boston punk and hardcore scenes at large. For three decades and counting (yes, really) the band have been road dogs, endlessly spreading their pro-Union and increasingly vocal anti-fascist messages far and wide. […]
It’s been a long time since Dropkick Murphys established themselves as the premier flag bearers not just for Celtic Punk but for the Boston punk and hardcore scenes at large. For three decades and counting (yes, really) the band have been road dogs, endlessly spreading their pro-Union and increasingly vocal anti-fascist messages far and wide. The band’s annual run of hometown St. Patrick’s Day shows have a tendency to feel more than a little bit like a homecoming reunion, the ample crowds filled with names and faces that might have greyed and put on a few as the years have gone by, but who still gather together to revel arm in arm in celebration of the working-class punk rock icons. In certain markets, there is a segment of the showgoing population that seems to have been weeded out over the last decade or so with Ken Casey and crew’s unabashed focus on just where they stand on many of the hottest of hot-button sociopolitical issues, and the shows and the crowds have benefited from this mightily.
The 2026 version of the Dropkicks’ St. Paddy’s shows perhaps exemplify this better than any other installment from years past, as the lineups were culled from generations of Boston street punk royalty. With the band’s recent tourmates and local hardcore upstarts Haywire serving as the kickoff act for the first three nights at the cavernous – and sold out – MGM Fenway, the remainder of the lineups composed a veritable Who’s Who of the last three decades in the Boston area scene and comprised a handful of bands that haven’t played out on more than a decade. Friday the 13th featured Showcase Showdown (?!?) and Vigilantes, Saturday the 14th featured fellow tourmates The Aggrolites, Tuesday the 17th saw appearances from the Dropkicks’ Pogues-punk predecessors Big Bad Bollocks (?!?), Reducers S.F. and the almighty New Darkbuster (also ?!?). The Sunday evening show was no slouch either, featuring performances by longtime scene vets The Ducky Boys and The Unseen.
Haywire were first out of the chute and they took the stage with a vengeance, ripping into a verse of the Thin Lizzy classic “The Boys Are Back In Town” before kicking in to their self-titled introductory track “Haywire.” Haywire have taken both the Boston scene and the larger hardcore scene by storm over the last couple of years, and with good reason. The band is a force, centered around the constant ball of frenetic energy that is frontman Austin Sparkman. The band blistered through their ten song set with plenty of time to spare in their half-hour set which even allowed Sparkman ample time to extoll the virtues of sobriety and checking in on one’s own mental health. Rarely was he in one place for more than mere moments, unless it was atop the box inside the barricade at stage center where he could meet the constant barrage of crowd-surfers head-on. Dropkick Murphys ringleader Ken Casey joined the Haywire crew on stage for a rendition of “New England Forever,” a track that appears on the bands’ split EP that was released for this run of shows.
The Ducky Boys were up next. The band hold a special place in my cold, hardened heart, as they played the only show I was ever able to attend at the iconic and long-since departed Boston venue The Rathskeller – better known as “The Rat.” While the band have remained fairly active in a variety of other projects in the Boston area like Mark Lind and the Unloved or personal favorite The Warning Shots, it had been a minute since the Ducky Boys took the stage together. Due in part to the volume of songs in their catalog and the limited time they had on stage, the band opted for more of a medley approach to their set; seven songs – including “Scars” and “Boston USA” were played in full while eleven others appeared as snippets or abbreviated versions. It was a fun way to cram a lot of material into thirty minutes, although there are certainly longtime Ducky Boys fans who would have preferred more of all of the above!
The Unseen occupied the direct support spot on this bill. Another band who have been mostly quiet for quite some time now, although yours truly had seen them much more recently than the Ducky Boys; a 2013 opening spot on the Street Dogs then-annual Wreck The Halls bill as memory serves. The band’s snarly version of street punk is just as full of piss-and-vinegar as ever, perhaps an indication that things haven’t improved for the working class in the last quarter-century. Highlights included a ferocious version of “Weapons Of Mass Deception,” “Scream Out,” and “Are We Dead Yet?” – the latter of which featured an appearance by former Unseen/Pinkerton Thugs band member Paul Russo.
Which brings us to the main event. In somewhat atypical fashion, the band burst on stage and ripped into the bagpipe-heavy “Deeds Not Words,” a track from 2011’s Going Out In Style that had disappeared from setlists for the better part of a decade prior to the recent For The People…In The Pit run with Haywire. Not only are Ken Casey and crew – Matt Kelly on drums, James Lynch on guitar, Tim Brennan on a bunch of instruments, Jeff DaRosa on a bunch of other instruments, Kevin Rheault on bass and Campbell Webster on pipes – celebrating their thirty years as a band this year, but they also put out their most vital and furious record in a decade, For The People, last year. As such, the setlist for this evening was pretty representative of both bookends of their career, as five songs from For The People and four from their debut full-length Do Or Die (“Never Alone”! “Get Up”!) were featured prominently.
This being the third of four hometown holiday weekend shows, there were of course some unique and special moments. Pinkerton Thugs/The Unseen’s Paul Russo returned to the stage for a cover of the former band’s “One Day.” The Dropkicks later dusted off their uptempo cover of the Clash classic “Guns Of Brixton,” a frequent staple in the band’s earlier years, as Strummer and Co. have long been guiding lights for the Murphys’ brand of socially conscious punk rock. Austin from Haywire returned Casey’s previous favor, joining the band on stage for “Citezen I.C.E.,” a reworked and updated version of their 2005 track “Citizen C.I.A.” while the rest of Sparkman’s Haywire bandmights joined the whole crew for a cover of Haywire’s “Always By My Side” to close out the main set.
This particular show was also “Red Bandana Night,” in honor of Welles Crowther, the former Boston College lacrosse player who died a hero in the World Trade Center’s South Tower on 9/11. The band presented Crowther’s mother with a $10,000 check to the Welles Crowther Charitable Trust, which raises money for social and emotional learning programs from kindergarten through undergrad. As an added touch, Crowther’s alma mater, Boston College, sent the Screaming Eagle Marching Band out for the occasion to join the Dropkicks for the now iconic “Shipping Up To Boston,” their take on a Woody Guthrie’s words that helped shoot the band into the cultural stratosphere two decades ago (and which has since been adopted by the Screaming Eagle Band at home games on the Heights. It’s enough to make even the most callous of Northeastern University fans (read as: me) smile in appreciation.
Flip through more images from a glorious evening at the galleries below, and stay tuned for more coverage from the Dropkicks thirtieth anniversary!
2026 is shaping up to be quite a busy year for Nicole Laurenne. By some metrics, it might be her busiest one yet. Laurenne’s primary band, the campy, gothy garage-punk four-piece The Darts, are due to put out their latest record, Halloween Love Songs, on March 3rd. It marks the band’s seventh studio full-length in […]
Photo of Nicole Laurenne by Jessica Calvo
2026 is shaping up to be quite a busy year for Nicole Laurenne. By some metrics, it might be her busiest one yet. Laurenne’s primary band, the campy, gothy garage-punk four-piece The Darts, are due to put out their latest record, Halloween Love Songs, on March 3rd. It marks the band’s seventh studio full-length in less than ten years (to go along with a few EPs as well…and yes, plans for number eight are already well underway). Meanwhile, Laurenne’s jazzy, loungey neo-soul side project Black Viiolet just put out a brand new full-length, Dark Blue, earlier this month. Most of the months of March and April and May and June and definitely July and into August and a little of September and then basically October through December will be dedicated to the life of a road dog, as both bands will make an exhausting slate of appearances across the US and across Europe (especially France!) and Australia and Japan for the balance of the coming year.
And yet by other metrics, this is the ‘easy street’ portion of Laurenne’s life. This is what retirement looks like after close to three decades in the legal field, the lion’s share of which was spent as a municipal court judge in Gilbert, Arizona, during the time that that community was in the throes of becoming the fastest-growing municipality in the United States. Close to two decades of her time in the robe was also spent as a touring musician. Not full-time one, mind you, but about as full-time as you could get given the success of her early project, The Love Me Nots. Oh, and she was also a mom to twin daughters. The fact that Laurenne was a judge – a fact that she initially wanted to keep secret when starting smaller bands in Phoenix before quickly getting her cover blown at an early Love Me Nots gig twenty years ago that just so happened to be attended by a staffer from the Phoenix News Times – has been talked about in many places over the years. And while the “what” of the story is certainly fascinating, the “how” and the “why” are endlessly compelling.
We caught up with Laurenne from her newfound home in the Pacific Northwest – Tacoma, to be precise – in order to talk primarily about Halloween Love Songs. Centered on the theme that ‘every day can be Halloween,’ the album features a retooled version of the Darts lineup (Becca Davidson on guitar, Lindsay Scarey on bass and the return of Rikki Styxx behind the drumkit) and may just represent the band’s most fun and campy and best-sounding record to date. As a matter of course, the conversation steered into the deep musical curiosity that’s been a constant thread in her life. With varied and wide ranging experinces venturing from her younger years as a classically trained pianist to becoming a member of the University of Michigan and an opera accompanist and part of a jazz trio to her first pop bands and her time in The Love Me Nots and now taking the reins out in front of both The Darts and Black Viiolet, Laurenne’s musical journey, while at times chaotic, has been in many ways a true stabilizing outlet.
And so we of course discuss the kitschy fun sound and process that resulted in Halloween Love Songs and the build-up to what’s going to be an exciting and exhuasting year of touring. And we spend a lot of time putting this current period into it’s right contextual place, discussing the long and winding and fascinating journey from growing up in Chicago as the child of two incredibly gifted but not musically inclined – or musically interested, for that matter – parents, her start as a classically-trained musician her journey to Michigan for undergrad and Arizona for law school and somehow sorta backing into a career as a judge in a trailer court and then starting and maintaining a series of increasingly successful bands while still serving as a full-time judge AND a mom to twin daughters. It’s a super fun chat and we think you’ll dig it. You can order Black Viiolet’s Dark Blue now and still pre-order Halloween Love Songs, and here’s where you can catch both bands on tour in the coming months (like Medford, MA, in April!)
***The conversation below has been condensed for content and clarity. Yes, really.***
Dying Scene (Jay Stone): Nice to meet you! This is really cool. Where are you now? You’re in Seattle right?
Nicole Laurenne (The Darts): I’m actually technically in Tacoma.
What beautiful country. As a 90s alternative kid, I had been wanting to go to Seattle for 35 years or whatever it was, until we finally went last year to visit some friends. I could have stayed (forever).
Oh my God, that’s exactly what I thought! When I was able to finally move where I wanted, my first choice was France and that fell apart because of some tax reasons. I was living in the desert in Phoenix for so long and I just hated the desert so much. I hated the weather. I grew up in Chicago, so desert stuff was not me. When it was finally time to move, I was like, you know, I’ve always loved the Seattle scene. Every time I tour here, I have a great time. It’s beautiful. There’s rain. There’s beaches. There’s cliffs. It’s beautiful.
The people seem great. Like not just in the scene, but certainly the people in the scene.
It’s super not competitive or backstabby like a lot of cities I’ve been in. It’s like very community focused. Really unique place, if you ask me.
And so how long were you in Arizona for? Was that like law school and then like your whole professional career?
Yeah, you get stuck. Because, you know, wherever you go to law school, you kind of make all your contacts. I actually not only made my professional contacts, but I got married and everything just snowballed into Arizona. And it was not what I intended at all, but that’s where it was. So, yeah, I was there, let’s see…from 1990 when I started law school until 2022. (*both laugh*)
You were in in Phoenix? Or the greater Phoenix area?
I was in Phoenix. I was living in downtown Phoenix for most of that time. And then towards the end, my job was on the outskirts in Gilbert, which is one of the suburbs. So I moved out there at the very end just for a year or two. And then that was it.
And then Pacific Northwest. That’s really… that’s three real polar opposites; Chicago to Phoenix Arizona to Tacoma.
Although, you know, this feels to me a little more like the Chicago that I knew when I was growing up. It’s smaller here, but I don’t know…it just feels like culturally very diverse, musically and otherwise, you know? Super cosmopolitan. There’s people from all over the world here. It’s really unique; it’s very artsy in its own way, but it’s also got that whole Google, Amazon, Microsoft thing.
Yeah, that is a little strange.
There’s like this giant tech bro scene, but there’s also this huge cultural scene going on simultaneously. And they live side by side and they even enmesh sometimes. I don’t know…it works here!
Let’s talk about the new record (Halloween Love Songs)! The new record is really, really fun. They’re all really, really fun. But the new record is really, really fun. Also…you write an awful lot. (*both laugh*)
I do!
Has that always been the thing or has that started more since retirement, too?
No, no, no. I mean, I was in The Love Me Nots before The Darts. Maybe because I started late in life in this whole rock scene, but I always feel like I want to put out a record a year. That’s been my goal from the beginning. So when you think like that, I mean, I’ve pretty much done it, except for when I missed a year in Covid, and that was only because nobody was putting out records.
Who can blame you, right!
I had the songs! I’ve always written songs. Even when I was studying classical piano as a kid and everything, I was always writing stuff. It just comes out of me. It’s my therapy. It’s what I do. It’s my favorite thing to do, and so I’m always doing it. I have just loads of lyrics stored away and loads of riffs stored away and partial songs and a million things, so when it comes time to put a record together, I just kind of pull it from all my ideas and start assembling and editing and creating something new.
How long did it take you to write this record? Is this all stuff that was written new for this or is it all like do you have so many ideas that they’ve just been percolating for years?
I got the idea to write a Halloween themed record in Summer 2024, when I was doing an interview with Rock & Folk in Paris. The journalist and I were like, “there just aren’t enough Halloween theme songs. We can’t just have ‘Monster Mash,’ there has to be more!”
Yeah, there’s that “This Is Halloween” song, and then that’s it! (*both laugh*)
Yeah! I walked away from that interview like “I should really get on this.” And from that day, I started thinking about these songs and they all quickly wrote themselves. The real cherry on top was when I had to revamp the lineup for touring. Lindsay Scarey, who’s also from Seattle, is my new bassist. When she came on board, she didn’t even know I was writing a Halloween-themed record, but she’s also a great songwriter. She wrote in her last band, too. And she said, ‘I have a song idea. Maybe you can do something with it.’ It was called “Phantom Creep.” And I was like, “oh, my God, this fits in perfectly with my band!” And so I revamped the song. And then we decided we wanted to have a song that had a dance that goes with it that everybody could do. And so she worked on the dance. And I don’t know. So, yeah, that song came together in about a second. (*both laugh*) But yeah, all this stuff was written since Summer 2024. So less than a year.
I mean, it’s in your normal wheelhouse, except that it’s all like sort of specifically Halloween theme songs. I can imagine that that’s a fun process. Like once that once that snowball starts going at the top of the mountain…
Oh my God! Writing a record with a theme is really fun because immediately you start with a concept like, ‘oh, I’m going to write a song about zombies’ and it’s going to be about how you hate your day job because you feel like a zombie there. And now I’m going to write a song about vampires, but they’re going to be in love and I’m going to write about that, you know? And so every song quickly had a story when you started thinking about monsters. They are very kitschy, which is also very easy to write because it’s thematic, you know? As I started writing these songs, I realized that there were those monstery, kitschy songs that are Halloween-ish, but there’s also this, you know, late night, knock down all the mailboxes, light everything on fire side of Halloween.
Yeah, the mischief night stuff.
Yeah, right! The darker part of it, the bonfire in the middle of the night kind of thing. And there were songs I was writing that fit into that theme, even though they might not be Halloween songs like the song we’re releasing tomorrow is called “Apocalypse.” And that came to mind, not at all about Halloween. I saw the Apocalypse Tapestry in France. I don’t know if you know about this. It’s from medieval times.
I don’t. But where is it? We’re going to France this summer!
Oh I’m so glad! That’s awesome. Well, the tapestry is in Angers. And Angers is also cool because it’s where the the people put together the Levitation festival in France. It’s a really big music city. But there’s a big castle there. And on display inside the castle is the Apocalypse Tapestry. It was made by women back in medieval times. And it is so huge! It goes around the walls of this entire giant room. And they’ve restored it. It’s in perfect shape. It’s really colorful. It’s two tapestries. The top tapestry tells you the gods’ perspective on the apocalypse. They actually are planning it. And they’re trying to, you know, take out the bad guys and start fresh. And they’re all happy. And then the bottom is all the death and destruction and the kings going down and all this stuff that’s happening to the humans. It’s the coolest thing. And I walked out of there like, “oh, my God, I’m writing a song about apocalypse! This is great!” And part of it is the gods’ perspective, which is like, “yay, let’s start over. This is a mess.” And the other part of it… you know, royalty was big back then. And there was a lot in the bottom tapestry of kings and queens being destroyed by the gods. And as I was walking out, I wrote the line “There’s no kings.” I wrote that line. It just stuck out to me. I put it in the song in 2024. It was out in the demo. And then we recorded the record. And then all of a sudden…
It becomes a movement!
Yeah, right! Right! This is perfect! It’s perfect! Everybody understands it!
Right! Wow. I’ll have to look into how far that is from the city and how to get there. That would be cool to see.
There’s a train that goes out there. I think it takes about an hour and a half. Black Viiolet also recorded in near Angers in the Loire Valley. That’s where we did our recording for this last record with at Black Box Studio, which is where Dry Cleaning and The Kills and all these bands recorded. It’s an amazing place. I’d always wanted to go. It was a dream. And so, yeah, my half my band took a train from the Paris airport out there.
So why France? I mean, is it just a country that you’ve fallen in love with? Obviously, it seems like the bands do well there.
There’s really one big reason, but it led to two reasons. Back in the day, I just wanted to tour Europe and the Love Me Nots weren’t really anything yet. I just whipped out a credit card and I was like, “I’m just booking shows. I don’t care if anybody shows up. I’m going to once in my life tour Europe!” And we went and we played in Paris among other places and a record label guy wrote to me an hour or two before the show and said, “hey, I’m from this label in the south of France and I want to come see your show. Is that OK?” And I’m like,”hell yeah, that’s OK!” (*laughs*) He ended up signing us that night to a great label called Bad Reputation. It doesn’t exist anymore, but that signing led to the biggest tours, the front page of Rolling Stone, a million things came from that night of that signing. And so when The Darts started, we already had this super solid French thing. The French people have always liked my music for some reason. They always responded well to it, so when The Darts came along, it was like those fans just sort of hopped on board. And in the meantime, since we had fans there, one of the people we knew through the grapevine was this agent in Bordeaux. Actually, outside of Bordeaux in the vineyards. Ludo from Adrenalin Fix Records. He took on The Darts booking for international things, and he’s like my brother now. I mean, he’s been booking us and managing us ever since. And I think when your agent is in France, you end up going to France a lot because that’s where all the contacts are. But also France is really unique musically because the government…some of the governments in other countries in Europe do this, too…but in France, they give you a grant, if you can show that you’ve worked in the arts a certain number of hours per year, it’s called intermittence. If you can prove that that you’ve done these hours, you get money from the government to do the arts.
Imagine that!
It’s insane! And so they have venues, beautiful venues. You can’t even get your head around how beautiful these venues are. Huge stages, lights, production, hospitality you can’t even fathom. And all these people doing stage work because they want their hours. They don’t even have to make any money necessarily, but they’re under contract. So you have the farmer and this guy and that guy all running the lights. And you’ll have this dude making dinner, bringing it. And, you know, this guy booking the show. And it’s like the most amazing experience because their hearts are so in it and they’ve learned how to do everything perfectly. And they just like to host bands. This is throughout the entire country. It’s so unique. Some of the best, best venues I’ve ever played are these community run venues.
How much touring could you do as an active judge? Like how much time did how much time did you spend…
Not as much as I wanted!
Yeah, right!
You know, when The Love Me Nots thing started, I had been a judge only for, I don’t know, five years or six years or something like that. I didn’t have a lot of the vacation time stored up yet. I had little kids. My twins were still young. I needed time with them. It was rough. And The Love Me Nots were getting these huge offers from everywhere to do big festivals and all this stuff. Luckily, I mean, I was making money…everyone joked that I was only a judge to pay for the music but it was kind of true. (*both laugh*)
There’s nothing wrong with that.
I mean, it’s what I really wanted to do from day one. And I was able to do it this way. I would save up all my personal time that I had available. If you looked at our tour schedule, you could figure out that we toured on these long weekends where I had to build an extra day or two. And then I would tack on my ten days of the vacation on top of that. And then I would do these long weekends where I would take a sick day or a vacation day or whatever they would let me do throughout the whole year. And when you put the tour poster together, it looked like a whole bunch of dates all over the world. But when you break it down, it was like long weekend, long weekend, long weekend, Thanksgiving, you know? (*laughs*) We made it work. We had to really pick and choose to make the money. We didn’t break even because we had to tour like that, but it was worth it to me. And it was great. And the band was incredible. And when The Darts started touring, same thing. I made it work. My PT hours were increasing because with the government, the longer you’re there, the more you get. And my kids were older. I never really used a sick day unless I was dying or things like that. I had a bout with breast cancer. I had a lot of things also happen where I needed FMLA leave and all these things. It was a lot going on. But when you need to do it, you do it. And I needed to do this or lose my mind in my life. It was like a dream every time we headed out. And there were many, many times my flight from Paris would land at 630 a.m. at the Phoenix airport, and I would literally Uber with all my luggage to court. (*both laugh*) With my eyeliner still on, you know, and then throw on my robe, go do court and then go home and sleep for the 12 hours. Every tour was like that because I had to milk every bit that I could. And I took both jobs really seriously. So it was a lot.
On paper, that sounds like it’s crazy, right? And if you talk to average Joe then they say, “you must be nuts to do that,” except that I’m sure at some point, like you said, sort of before, it’s a necessity to you. Like you have to do it.
I mean, it’s a matter of my own mental health to be able to do what I love. I think that’s true of most people. If you’re not doing something in your life that just gets you super charged up, then what are you doing? What’s it all for? I’m fine with sitting on the bench doing a hundred guilty plea proceedings a day, or a six-day-long jury trial or whatever, and listening to the same DUI testimony over and over and over. I’m fine with that, if I know the reward is coming, you know? And to me, it’s not about the paycheck, the reward was the tour or the recording or the press interview or even just the dumb little things that I just love so much. So it was worth every second of it. Then when it came time to be able to retire, luckily I was with the government from the hour I started working (*both laugh*) so retirement came early. I made my points. And the minute that happened…I mean, my pension kicked in at noon on September 29th and by 3 p.m. I was on a plane to Europe! (*laughs*)
That’s amazing. That’s awesome. You said kind of from the beginning that this was always sort of the thing you wanted to do. Obviously, the law pays the bills, but when did that really become a thing where you were determined to be a professional musician too? Like, was it pre-law school? I guest spoke in my kid’s justice and criminology class today, and I talked about like the decisions you make to pay the bills and the decisions you make to keep the creative and the the mental health side like going for you, which is why I got into the whole punk rock thing. But I knew I was never going to make money doing it. But like, I can’t ever not do it. Is that kind of the same sort of mentality?
Pretty much. My mother’s from India. She’s very driven. She’s a physicist. And my dad, who died a couple of years ago, was also a very high-level scientist.
You couldn’t just tell them “I’m going to be a punk rocker!”
Not only that, they did not and still don’t really get music. It’s not part of their world. I hate to say it this way, but they really don’t see the value in it. And they don’t love it. They don’t get it. And so to them, when I started gravitating as a tiny child to the little piano that they had, they were like, “oh, that’s cute.” And I think my mom, when I started getting really into it and started competing in classical piano competitions as a kid, she’s really competitive, so she got it in that side of it. “Oh, it’s fun to bring the trophies home!” But she didn’t understand why I wanted to be the drum major of my marching band or play the piccolo or write goofy little songs in between my Beethoven stuff, you know? And so when it came time to go to college, she actually drove me to the University of Michigan for an audition for the music school for a scholarship. I had already played an audition with the Chicago Symphony. I’d done a lot of really big things, so I thought I was a shoo-in. And they offered me a partial scholarship! But in the end, my mom was like, “you can’t do music. That makes no sense. Why would we pay for tuition and have you go to this great school when you’re going to study music? If you’re going to do that, I won’t even send you to college.” The only other thing I really liked was deviant psychology. (*both laugh*) I took as many psychology classes as I could, and you asked me about undergrad and all that. I really didn’t have the time to keep my classical chops up because that takes hours. But I was still paying some of the bills by accompanying the opera students at the music school. People don’t realize this, but opera students need a piano player for all their lessons and rehearsing and everything because they need the music. They would hire pianists, so for five bucks an hour or whatever, I would go in and play all weekend with the opera students. And then for the first time ever in my life, somebody asked me to play in a rock band. It was one of my marching band cohorts. I was like, “you know, I write these crazy little pop songs, but I don’t really know anything about playing pop music.” And we started a little band…
This is at Michigan?
This is at Michigan. And I’m still in touch with both of them, actually. They both come to my shows.
That’s awesome.
They’re amazing people. But we started this crappy little band that played like at the Flint Michigan Festival of the Trees. You know, things like that. (*both laugh*)
Yes!!
Yeah!! Great, great, great shows like that. But it was my first dabble into pop music, and it was really intoxicating. It was really fun.
Were you out front, too?
I was playing keyboards and singing! And I didn’t really know how to sing, but I was kind of just faking it and having a good time with it and whatever. There were no stakes involved.
It’s the Flint Michigan Festival of the Trees. I’m sure you were just fine. (*both laugh*)
It was the Flint, Michigan, and the trees were pretty and the guys were cool, so there. And they’re still my friends, so it was worth it. (*both laugh*) So after I graduated from Michigan, I was like, “okay, music!” And my mom was like, “no, grad school!”
“We’ve talked about this!” (*both laugh*)
I’m like, “grad school? What am I gonna do? I don’t like anything!” And she was like, “well, you like this weird psychology. How about law?” And I’m like, okay, I could probably do criminal law. I could see, you know, there’s a lot of injustice. Actually, I did my undergrad psychology thesis on women’s prisons outside of Detroit. I spent a lot of time there. I saw a lot and I was like, there’s so much I saw, I could be a public defender and probably feel like I was helping people and would feel like I could handle this job. So that was my goal. I went to law school, got a full ride at U of A down in Tucson. That’s how I ended up in the desert. And never intended to go there, but there I was. And while I was in law school, even less time now for music. Now I can’t even accompany the opera students anymore because then even that takes practice. So my law school roommate happened to be a really good singer. And we started talking and she was like, “we should do a jazz combo. We could play in the resorts here and make bank and only do it on the weekends.” And I’m like, “Jazz? Jazz must be easy compared to classical. So yeah, let’s do it!” We found an upright bass player and I played piano and she sang. And I learned for the first time in my life, all these jazz standards. And I wasn’t really good at improvising, but you could give me sheet music and I could improvise off of that, because I have a classical brain. I could make that work. And so we played in all the resorts, like the nice resorts outside of Tucson. Made a ton of money, played Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday brunch. And celebrities would come in and stay at the resorts. It was really fun! And I learned a whole lot about jazz for the first time. And so that was law school. Graduated from law school and now I’m a lawyer. I’m a prosecutor, which I didn’t want to be, but it was the only job available in a court that’s literally in a trailer (*laughs*) in the desert outside of Phoenix. It was the only job I could get because I did so badly in law school. (*both laugh*)
Oh no!!
And this tiny little trailer court was right near where they put the Intel headquarters and it blew up! And so this tiny town became like, literally the fastest growing town in the nation! And the judge, who wasn’t even a law-trained judge, he was an appointed judge, but he was a teacher back in the past. And he was like, “oh my God, I need another judge! Like now! And we can’t pay you anything because we’re still in a trailer! Do you want the job? Because nobody else wants this crappy job!” And I’m like, “I’ll take it!” I’d never get a chance to be a judge again. I’m like, “this is amazing!”
So you’re like fresh out of law school, essentially?
I was five years out.
That’s nuts.
And I was working in this trailer, seeing the same judge every day, day in and day out. We would just do cases every day. There’s no way in a million years I would ever become a judge, except for happenstance and this weird situation. And it stuck. The town grew. Pretty soon we had a courthouse. We had all these judges. I was teaching ethics courses for judges. By the way, I was teaching ethics courses because I had to juggle this punk rock life. And they thought that was fascinating. And so all the ethics courses were hiring me to do that. It was funny. And in the meantime, I have even less time for music. So even the jazz fell by the wayside and now I’m playing rock and punk rock and covers and screaming into a microphone and playing three chords because it’s easy.
And you don’t really have to practice!
I did not have to practice at all. And I mean, I loved practicing, but I didn’t have the time. And then I was pregnant and it was a whole long story there, but I was pregnant by somebody I was in this cover band with. And he was also a lawyer and we got married because we were pregnant and we raised twins. And then we started a band that was all originals. For the first time ever, I’m playing in a band where I’m playing my own originals around Phoenix. It was called Blue Fur. It was named after all the blue Muppets.
Oh, funny.
And we just played. We were all lawyers in the band pretty much because that’s who we hung out with. There’s a lot of great musicians who are lawyers, by the way. I think the songs I was writing edged towards this Blondie kind of new wave sound. And it took off! And we started playing everywhere. We started playing constantly. They weren’t big shows, but we were playing all the time, all around the Arizona area. And the best part was I was writing songs and I was singing and I was learning how to sing. I was learning what worked and what didn’t work. And we built a little recording studio and I was learning what worked and didn’t work there. And I learned so much. And finally, one day at one of our little shows where there were two people in the audience, a guy walked up to me and said, “hey, I want to start a band and I want you to front it.” And I’m like, “oh yeah, right. Who are you?” I look him up and he’s Michael Johnny Walker, who was like, for Arizona standards, a pretty famous guitar player.
Yeah, right, right. Phenomenal guitar player.
Phenomenal guitar player! And we started The Love Me Nots together. And that’s how that all took off. And for the first time in my life, I had a job that could pay for a great band that could tour everywhere. I could write all my own songs. He was helping to write too, obviously. I got divorced, I married him. We toured everywhere, we did everything. It was like this crazy, crazy life. It was a double life, for sure. I would go to court and I kid you not, one morning, I was talking to some defendant on a little shoplifting thing or whatever. And he goes, “judge, can we go off the record?” And I’m like, “yeah.” He goes, “homie, I was at your show last night! That freaking ruled!” I’m like, “oh my God, now I gotta recuse myself!” (*both laugh*)
I have seen that written up. I forget where, in doing research for this, I have seen a news story from somewhere in Maricopa or whatever that references that. That’s amazing.
Yeah, it happens. I tried to keep it underground. I tried to not let people know. When The Love Me Nots first broke, at our very first live show ever, there happened to be nobody there except a reporter from the Phoenix New Times who loved it and put us on the cover of the New Times the next week. Big picture. And I didn’t want my court, or especially the lawyers appearing in front of me to know that I was in this rock band. I wanted to keep it really separate if I could, but I didn’t expect my bands to really go anywhere either. And sure enough, the presiding judge walks in with a copy of it, puts it on my desk and says, “the city council’s gonna have a problem with this.” And I’m like, “why?” He goes,”look at your outfit. You’re wearing a go-go dress, a mini dress and go-go boots. Is this the kind of dignified thing they wanna portray when people come before you as a judge?” And I said, “well, two thoughts on that. First of all, my mom made that dress. It’s very 60s and it was very popular in the 60s. And I feel it would be very dignified if you were in the 60s. And secondly, if I was an Olympic swimmer, I would be on the cover in a swimsuit with my gold medal and you wouldn’t have any problem with that. This is just a different field. And it’s the same kind of success in my mind.” And he kind of (*shrugged*) and he kind of took the thing and walked away and never heard another word. And 10 years later, the court is retweeting my band tweets and saying, ‘we’re not your grandfather’s court!” (*both laugh*) We understood each other, things changed, but we all had to learn how to do it.
Who looks at it weirder, the judges and the people inside the courthouse that you are this secret punk rocker or the punk rock people who are like, “wait, you’re a judge? How does that work?”
Punk rockers definitely. It catches them way more off guard because like I was saying, a lot of lawyers are musicians. They play in bands. A lot of them are frustrated musicians and they wish they, like me, followed that path instead. And lawyers, I think, tend to be, for the most part, pretty educated, pretty cultured in some ways. And they’ve had a lot of exposure to all styles of music and they’re collectors. I don’t know, they’re very intense people. And if they’re musicians, they’re very intense about it. So they’re not technically surprised. They’re stoked and they’re a little maybe like, “how do you make this work? Because we wish we were doing that too!” But they’re not necessarily surprised. I think for the punk rock community, it was a double-edged sword. In a way, they’re impressed. In a way, they’re freaking terrified because the law is right there! You know what goes on in the bathrooms and you know what goes on all over the punk rock community. It is very anti, and to be an authority figure in an anti-authority environment is a little scary for everybody. And I think once they heard the music and they got to know me, the Phoenix scene very quickly came around and everybody was cool with it. In fact, over the years, I’ve looked over contracts for fellow musicians. I’ve referred them to lawyers when they need help. There’s a whole symbiotic relationship between law and punk that actually is there. (*both laugh*) You just don’t see it. So yeah, it’s still a surprise to me that I somehow made it work and made it to retirement without anything exploding. Thank God.
And now you can be on the road! Looking at the tour flyers, both for The Darts and for Black Viiolet, you are making up for lost time.
I really am.
And why not? You deserve to!
First of all, there’s nothing else I want to do. And as long as there’s people that want to listen, I’ll go and I’ll figure it out. I have great agents on both continents and they’re making it work. And even like today, for some reason, Black Viiolet couldn’t find a show in Columbus in April. We were having so much trouble. It’s Record Store Day. A lot of the venues are closed. There’s a lot of reasons. But we were having trouble, trouble, trouble. And I thought, you know what? The band’s just not good enough. We’re just not big enough yet. We’re just getting started. And then like today, I find out that he was able to book like one of the coolest clubs in Columbus. They finally came through for Black Viiolet! And so as long as people want it, oh my God, that’s cherry on top. I never take that for granted. You write a song and somebody actually wants to hear it? That’s still unfathomable to me because of all the time it took to get here. Maybe my parents got that in my head a little bit. Like who would ever want to listen to music? But people are listening and they’re buying and our pre-orders sold out in a day, in an hour!
I saw, that’s amazing!
Crazy stuff is happening. And it’s so cool. I don’t take it for granted. In fact, I just want to do it as much as I possibly can until I drop dead.
Til the wheels fall off, right?
Yeah, that’s fine. If I drop dead doing this, then I win. (*laughs*)
Do you think that if you had stayed with the Beethoven side or whatever, like the classical piano, that your mom especially would have gotten it at some level? But then when you get into rock and roll and then when you get into like, horror, goth, punk and whatever, she’s like, ‘what the fuck?’
Oh, yes she is. Yeah, I mean, a lot of interviewers ask me, ‘what’s the first concert you ever went to?’ And I have to say it was the Boston Pops at the Chicago Public Library when I was five.
Oh, hell yeah!
And that was what my mom took us to because it was great, it was free, it was at the library. It was classical, but it was fun classical. And yeah, to say that your daughter is a musician with the Chicago Symphony or playing at the Met this weekend, that’s something that her world and the people she hangs with can appreciate. And it’s not scary; it’s dignified. When she first came to the Yucca Tap Room in Tempe, Arizona, to watch me play, she pulled me aside and said, “Nicole, these people have tattoos.” (*both laugh*) And I’m like, ‘they have tattoos on their face, mom! Look! This is great.” And she’s like “why is it so loud?” My God, it was this completely foreign environment for her and my dad. But to their credit, they babysat a lot while I was out there on tour. I got a lot of lectures, but I also, in the end, got the support I need. Now it’s really spun around. My mom really does get it, I think, and loves to host my bands when I’m in the Bay Area. And now she has become the vinyl warehouse for me, since I don’t have a room in my little place in Seattle. Her dining room in Sacramento is now full from the floor to the ceiling with boxes of records waiting to go to the distributors. (*both laugh*) She’s become a record dealer.
I love stories like that. That’s awesome. Let’s get back to Halloween Love Songs. The album comes out March 3rd, which I think is amazing that it doesn’t come out around Halloween. It doesn’t have to come out around Halloween.
No, every day is Halloween!
Exactly! That music, it plays all the time. It’ll be especially playful at Halloween time, but it’s a really great record as a standalone record. It just happens to be called Halloween Love Songs.
Because that’s the theme; that’s the idea. But there’s so much more to the idea of Halloween than running around with a pumpkin trick-or-treat basket.
I say that as, like, the desk that I do these calls from is stacked with skulls and we have more skulls. (*both laugh*) My wife’s birthday is at the end of October, and so she’s a Halloween kid. And so we just leave the Halloween stuff up all the time pretty much. And my daughter’s an early January baby, so she likes Christmas. So we end up with like, Christmas decorations on the Day of the Dead skeletons and stuff like that. We have to do both. It’s awesome.
Amazing! I love that! Maybe that’s the next theme.
Exactly, yeah. If every day is Halloween, right, Christmas can be Halloween, and 4th of July can be Halloween. (*both laugh*)
Also for some reason, the rhythm ever since the Love Me Nots was to record in September, release in the spring. That timing seems to work really well. And I think it’s because September is kind of the end of the summer tour period. And there’s a little gap in time there where we have time to record. Usually I’m writing the whole time in the van so that by the time September hits, we’re ready. And it takes about that amount of time from the time it’s recorded to get it mastered and pressed and promoted and then have the release date be in the spring. And then the tour starts again for the summer. So that rhythm actually does make a lot of sense. It’s been what every one of my bands has ever done.
This record also sounds really good. It sounds leveled up production wise. And I don’t mean that it’s overproduced, like it’s not shiny and polished necessarily. But I had it on at the gym the other day and then at the grocery store after the gym the other day and I was thinking, in my headphones, like this album sounds awesome.
Oh, I’m so happy to hear that! Oh my gosh, so happy to hear that! We went back to Mark Rains in LA, which is where we did Boomerang. With Boomerang, I was with the older lineup of the band. And our whole goal after making Snake Oil, the one before that…Snake Oil was co-produced by Jello Biafra and Bob Hoag.
Just some guy.
Just some guy, yeah. That great guy. But what he is, is extremely intense. Not a surprise. And so making a record with Jello Biafra and Bob Hoag almost broke our brains because it was like so much information and advice and ideas and it got richer and bigger. There were 126 guitar tracks on Snake Oil.
Good Lord.
I mean, that’s the level of, I don’t know, the OCD level that it reached with two producers that are that intense, thrilled to work together for the first time and making a masterpiece. And it is a masterpiece. It’s wonderful. It’s incredible. But coming out of that, we were really ready to just do something raw and just go back in. And I was also ready for just a new take on the music’s sound because we had done every record of my life with Bob Hoag in Phoenix up to that point. And I was like, “I just want to see what else is out there.” One of my favorite records of all time that got me through a really rough spot in my life was Death Valley Girls’ Glow in the Dark from back in the day. And I played that record until it was falling apart. And so I went back and looked at who produced it, and it was this guy, Mark Rains from Station House Studio in LA, who I didn’t really know much about. Did a deep dive into that and found out he’d done all these great things. From Marilyn Manson to Tanya Tucker, he’s done every style of music brilliantly. Grammys, the whole thing. And I was like, well, I mean, at the time, my old drummer, Rikki, was in Death Valley Girls, so he probably knows who I am. He immediately said yes. And he was like, “I have this time slot free.” And I’m like, “that’s our time slot too. This is our one chance. Let’s get in there and do it!” So, and I was like, “we don’t want you to do anything. Here’s my demos.” A lot of people don’t know this…when I write a song, I write it on GarageBand on my laptop as I’m writing. So I write the bass line. I add fuzz that I like. I write the drum part. I put in the fills where I like them. And I add the right overdrive and I do all this stuff. And then I do the guitar line and I add a second guitar. And by the time the demo’s done, it basically sounds like almost a produced version, except those instruments are fake.
Basically I know all the effects I want. I know all the backing vocals and everything’s ready to go. I do this with every album, but I gave these demos to Mark and I’m like, “the band agrees. We just want this record to sound like the demo. If you’ll just sit back and let us take the reins, we can do this.” And he was like, “no problem!” Really cool of him, by the way. And he did. He just laid back and I was like, “can you add some, you know, space echo to this?” And he was like, “I gotcha.” He’d just add his little magic. I did all my vocals in one day for the whole record. And I walked in that day and he had a candle lit and the lights were low, and he had this chain of microphones, a Neumann over here, a weird little mic over here, a 58. And they were all in front of me so I could sing them on. Bob did like some of that stuff in Phoenix too, but it was just like he already knew.
Yeah, he got it.
Mark knew what needed to happen without even talking about it. And it just so easy. So after that experience, when it came time to do Halloween Love Songs and Rikki is back in the band now, that was just a no brainer to go back to Mark for sure.
Did you do anything differently this time in the studio than the last time? Or was it kind of like, “if it doesn’t, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”?
The big difference was the musicians.
Okay.
Different lineup. And they play differently. They hit differently. Poor Becca, my guitar player. We had been on tour all summer when we went into the studio. Becca had a family tragedy at the very beginning of the tour, but wanted to do the tour anyway, to her credit. Super strong human being here. And she went on this long tour and came back and immediately had to go to a funeral back at home because that was the only time they were able to do it when she was there. Horrible experience for her. And then we started recording because it was our only time off. And she didn’t have time to prepare like she likes to. She’s a little bit different than my past guitar players in that she’s a very thoughtful guitar player. She thinks about what she’s doing more than any punk rocker I’ve ever known. She comes out of the Spindrift mindset where they spend a lot of time and there’s a lot of whammy bar and there’s a lot of nuance. And I love that about her. It’s not the way I think because I’m just like, “oh, let’s get it done, let’s trash it up.” What she brings to the table is this really cool nuance that we’ve never had before; this texture of a spaghetti western style with a Darts riff. And I think what you’re hearing a lot of is the way she plays that guitar. It’s not slammy and trashy like I maybe would have written it, which sometimes overshadows the rest of the production.
Oh, totally. Yeah, I can see that.
It just eats up a lot of space in your ear, right? You can’t even hear some of the vocals sometimes in some of the old records unless the vocals are equally distorted. And there’s a lot, you have to work around that kind of distortion, which I love. But when you have Becca, there’s space all of a sudden. You can hear the percussion, you can hear the background vocals. Mark can do a little more magic with things. We added some trashy guitar riffs underneath, like a layer of rhythm guitar, for example, that had fuzz on it in the chorus or whatever, but it’s panned and it’s at a low level. And so it doesn’t take over anymore. And this is a big difference live too, there’s a little more space in the sound on stage. Rikki also hits differently than my other drummers have. A lot of people don’t know this, when she’s even playing live, she plays to a click. And unlike a lot of punk drummers that I’ve played with, when you’re playing live, the adrenaline goes and you start picking up those tempos and everybody starts going crazy. And it’s fun. It’s really fun. A lot of energy. Rikki keeps it where it’s supposed to be and we have to match her. And what that brings is a lot of force and power. You know, when this lineup hits, it hits you like a black metal hit, you know, it’s like.
Right. It’s not like a buzz saw all the time.
Yeah it’s like, you know, Godzilla stomping. And so you’re hearing that too, that she plays these parts differently than my other past drummers have. And granted, she was on the band in their early records, but I don’t think she was as powerful then as she is now. She’s done a whole lot of years of hard touring with Death Valley Girls and a lot of other bands while she was away from the Darts and she came back powerful. So yeah, she plays differently too. Lindsay’s bass parts are incredible. Lindsay’s the kind of person that you give her a song to learn and she’ll start learning it that day, even if we’re not recording for a year. (*both laugh*) And so she lives with these songs and really she owns these songs by the time we’re ready to get into the studio.
As a failed bass player myself, I tend to sort of lock into that. I definitely locked into her sound on this record. Her sound is really cool.
It’s really cool! I mean, I know Mark’s chain and I know he’s sending their signals through pretty much the same signal path that he was with the last lineup, but it comes out sounding different because the way you hit your string is different.
The way you attack it, yeah, right.
There’s a lot that’s going on, especially Becca is very different from the past, but even Lindsay, just the way there’s a playfulness in the way that she plays, just there’s a fun.
Yeah, fun is the word I would use. There’s real like fun grooves, I think between them, especially…
The power of Rikki with the fun of Lindsay is a really interesting rhythm section. It’s got a joy to it, but it’s hitting you in the face. (*both laugh*) A joyous hit in the face.
And you want another one and another one.
I want another one. Give me more. (*both laugh*)
This lineup is pretty locked into like just being road dogs?
Yes. They were brought on board because they’re road dogs. Kind of the issue with the last lineup was families, jobs. I had three guitar players in one summer because we were doing that much touring and everybody had jobs, families. And we had to keep pushing. It was hard. And being on the road, it makes you grumpy. It makes you tired. It makes you fussy. It doesn’t pay. There’s a lot of things that are really, really hard about the road. It’s just not for everybody. And this lineup is just, they’re professional road warriors. That’s what they do. They expect it. They know what’s coming. They all have their camping towel packed already. They know what’s going to happen. So it made it very easy for me to go, “okay, so our Europe tour in the fall begins on October 6th and ends on December 6th. Are you guys up for it?” And they’re like, “we’re good to go. No problem.”
Now, the only catch to that though, is this one year in 2026, Rikki has decided to go back to being a teacher, which she always did back in the early days too. She quit to write a book for a while and do some other things that gave her a little more freedom. But she’s going back into the classroom starting in the fall. And some other things are happening in her life that are making it a little bit tricky, so she has to step out of some of the tours. And luckily, even last year when this happened, we had Heather Thomas from Nashville step in. And Heather Thomas was actually a Seattleite originally, which is how I got to know her name. But she’s based in Nashville and she’s a session drummer professionally. Incredible drummer. I gave her the songs for our last tour and then didn’t really hear from her for a long time. I was like “are you going to be ready? I don’t really know you?” And she was like “don’t worry,” and everyone who knows her was like “don’t worry.” So she showed up…we met her for the first time in Marseilles, France. Our flight had landed late. We got to this record store with an entire crowd lined up around the block to get in. We had one minute to set up, brand new drummer, didn’t know anything about her.
Never, ever played together?
Not a single note. She sat down with her little page of tiny notes and just killed every single song. We sold so much merch that first show, it was ridiculous. She’s INCREDIBLE. And she’s a pro. She used to teach at Seattle Drum School. She approaches the learning of a song in a very academic way. She writes out the parts. Kind of like me with a classical background, she learns the same way. She’s going to be doing a ton of dates and probably recording with us too. It’s going to be a fun year with some fun people!
Those real professional musicians have brains that work in ways that my mind can’t fathom.
They have to! I mean, I’ll take Lindsay as an example, who probably never thought she would get the call to go on tour professionally. But in the back of her mind, she always kind of hoped that call would come. And now that it’s come, she has learned how to learn a song fast. She’s learned how to pack quickly. She’s learned how to, you know, book all the flights in two seconds, because she wants it more than anything. You figure it out, you know? And plus, it’s not rocket science, it’s punk rock. (*both laugh*)
Right, but there is something to making it sound good and cool and authentic, and not too professional. And I think that sometimes like professional musicians have to know when to pull back a little bit, right? And when to let the the chaos of the moment be the chaos of the moment, not be like, too perfect and whatever.
Exactly. I think the more you play live, the more you learn to work in chaos effectively. It’s just like, it’s just like what we did in the criminal justice system. When things are insane…I’ve got this homeless guy yelling at that drug addict and my corrections officer is losing his mind and everybody’s screaming, that’s kind of where we all excel.
Yeah, right. Exactly. (*both laugh*)
Yeah, that’s when I can take the microphone and say, everybody calm down. You do that. We all do that. That’s what we do. And it’s the same exact thing for a live musician who plays a lot. When the crowds go on bananas, and everything’s broken, and your pedals not working. This just happened in Hawaii, where half of our gear got left in the van, and the show was about to start, we didn’t even realize it. And we had to find like a pedal board t literally a pedal board with pedals on it – that would make sense to our band, right? Even cables for the guitar, we had to find everything in like five minutes. And somebody was just like, here you go. And we’re like, we plugged it in. And it was like, oh, they happen to have the right gear. And we played a great show, you know? Sometimes we’re learning that chaos works to our advantage.
Yeah, sometimes when everything’s on fire all the time, there can be a sense of calm.
Sometimes when it’s all on fire, you get warmer! (*both laugh*)
Yeah, right, right. There can be some sort of like a calm in it, right? You know that you have to figure it out, so you just figure it out.
Yeah, you become very quietly focused when everybody’s panicked around you. Especially in the rock world, that kind of almost makes sense to me because you’re used to people screaming in your face all the time, right? I mean, if you can play a guitar, and sing and crowd surf all at the same time, you can kind of do anything because that’s like the most unpredictable moment of your life right there. If you can keep that going, you can kind of handle anything. (*both laugh*)
That’s the stuff that made me want to just be like a journalist and not like…
I thought you were gonna say a musician!
No, no! Even going to punk rock shows from an early age and being like, you know what? I don’t feel like breaking my guitar because I crowd surfed and somebody kicked me in the head and I’m bleeding from the ear like, I’m okay to take pictures. Like, I’ll learn how to do photography. I’ll learn how to write and interview bands like…
I’m so glad because somebody has to do that too. That also is a dying art in a lot of ways. And it thank God there are people like you who do want to document it because we’ll lose it forever, otherwise.
Yeah. And I like, I dread the day that there really are no places left. I mean, I think enough, enough places will open up wherever in suburbia, like, like Deep Cuts (in Medford, MA), shout out to Deep Cuts. Places like that will be able to keep the machine going. Like that it’s whatever, it’s punk rock, it’s rock and roll. It’s always going to morph and be something else and like shift around and…
it will go into the record stores and then it’ll go into the libraries and it’ll go into the basements and it’ll come back up and it’ll be at the coffee shop again and then it’ll be back in the dive bar and then it’ll be in the big venues. And it’ll be the waves. I’ll tell you, talking about PNW, I mean, just like you were saying, Seattle is so rich with this history here. Everybody you meet, even the young people, it seems like saw a lot of it, you know, they were here for a lot of that stuff. And they, I mean, KEXP, they’re all very entrenched in the history way more than a lot of cities I’ve been in. There’s something in the water here. I’m telling you, it’s really special.
There’s something sort of like mystical being. I don’t feel like that’s a thing that we just sort of create like in our brains, but it does feel like there’s something there, whether it’s in the water or the air or the mist or the mountains or whatever.
Or I could get a little more science-y on you and say, maybe there were some people here who just had it in their blood to be great musicians and people learned from each other and kept the tradition going and grew it. Because I’ll bet you all those nineties kids were influenced by those sixties kids.
Yeah. Oh, totally.
Right. So it’s a tradition you pass down. I was just talking to somebody about this in Hawaii, that you really don’t learn to love to play live music I don’t think unless you’re going to live music and you’re seeing it live. That’s when you really fall in love with it, when it hits you in the chest. Right?? And so they got to see it here. They got to see the really good stuff here from an early age. And I think that influenced just way more people than we ever would have guessed in this area.
I wonder too, if there’s something, and you mentioned Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest, and I wonder if there’s something too, in the Native American culture that is sort of like the thread in both of those places really. The way that they tell stories and the way they preserve stories and not that it’s necessarily a large or really any Native community in the rock scene necessarily in the Pacific Northwest. But I almost feel like the importance of the culture and the importance of the storytelling and the importance of like the art itself. There’s an interesting sociological thread there that I didn’t think about until two minutes ago.
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I will say this, though, in Hawaii, where we played last week, the kids came out and we played a lot of, they were almost all all-ages shows, they came out in droves. Face paint, goth hair, mohawks. It was like the time of their lives because they were saying that not a lot of bands come out there. The chance to see and experience a great live show at the underground punk level is really hard. You might have to go to Honolulu to see a big star to see what they see in Seattle every single day, where the club is hopping still. That doesn’t exist in Hawaii. And so it was a huge night and a huge event where everybody on that side of the island would come to this one little show in this record store and go nuts because it was their one opportunity. And yeah, they’ll probably talk about it. The promoter there is who I was talking to it about. He said it’s really sad because the kids that come up here don’t get to see stuff and they don’t really they don’t really get to see what a great guitar player sounds like when they’re just right in their face on a small stage. They don’t get to look at their pedal boards.
You don’t get that spark. Yeah.
Yeah. You don’t get to see how how you can do it yourself. You know, they see the big stars, but they don’t see the grassroots level punk.
The stuff that makes you realize that you can do it.That’s what got us all to pick up a guitar or whatever when we were 12, because you like “I don’t have to be Yngwie Malmsteen.”
(*laughs*) Please don’t be!!
I know, right? Like “I can be Billie Joe Armstrong.” I don’t have to be Joe Satriani or Steve Vai. Like that shit turned me off from a young age. But then like but I could be like, I don’t know, Mark Lanegan from Screaming Trees
Or like I could play like the Sonics. No problem. You know, trash it up. And these kids, you could really see a light bulb go off in the middle of the mosh pits. You can see it happening. I was just telling a story to an interviewer last week. She said, “what was your favorite moment in Hawaii?” And I was like, we got done playing in Maui at this little record store. It was packed to the gills. And this girl came to me. I saw her in the front row the whole night. She was goth to the nines. And she’s dancing every song. And she was with all her friends having a great time. We were like, “this is amazing!” First of all, it’s amazing to see girls at the shows.
Yeah, totally.
Shewas waiting in the long merch line, and she finally came up and she said, “would you guys sign my face?” which a lot of people were doing. So we signed her face. And then she’s walking away. She goes, “I have no money for any merch. I’m really sorry, but thank you for a great show!” She walks away, turns around with our signatures all over her face and goes, “I’m starting a band!!”
Hell yeah! That’s awesome!
That’s what it’s all about. I mean, that’s what should get us all so stoked up.
That’s that’s what keeps you going, because touring to Hawaii is ambitious. Like that’s a lot of work. Sure, you’re in Hawaii, but that’s a ton of work.
It’s so much work because you have to fly from island to island, so you can’t just throw your stuff in the van. You’ve got to repack it for a flight again the next day. It’s so much of a hassle. And it was an expensive undertaking that, you know, there’s not a lot of population there. And we did well. We did as well as we could have financially. But it’s rough, you know, and we did it for the exposure. And that’s it was worth it for those kids. It was worth it.
Hopefully that kid does start a band. Hopefully all those kids that you signed faces and arms of do.
Happy Hump Day, comrades! For the first time in what seems like forever, we get to bring you some brand new music to get your day going. Today, we’re stoked to bring you a track called “Bare Ends.” It comes to us from Philadelphia post-hardcore band King Slender. Here’s what the band has to say […]
Happy Hump Day, comrades!
For the first time in what seems like forever, we get to bring you some brand new music to get your day going. Today, we’re stoked to bring you a track called “Bare Ends.” It comes to us from Philadelphia post-hardcore band King Slender. Here’s what the band has to say about the track:
“It’s a mid tempoed emo hardcore jam that stabs from different angles, settling in the chorus to anthem the feeling of being worn to the last possible point. Seeing yourself in that state and living with it, like a passenger along for the ride, is the notion the song howls at while acknowledging what it is to resign to it. Our very talented friend, Kevin Morris (Orphan Donor, Full of Hell), was kind enough to lend horns to the track.”
