When last we chatted with the inimitable Brendan Kelly – at an upstairs table at a firehouse-turned-swingers-club-turned-music-venue in a sketchy Providence, Rhode Island, neighborhood – his The Falcon project was winding down its year-long revival and there was talk of working on a new Wandering Birds album and firing the engines of the USS Lawrence Arms up again. It may have taken a tad longer than expected, but last Wednesday in the Boston area (see our photos and review of that show here), The Lawrence Arms kicked off the first of three scheduled twelve-day tours in the in support of their latest album, We Are The Champions Of The World.
If you’re not familiar with WATCOTW, it’s a Fat Wreck Chords-released 29-song retrospective culled from the band’s nearly twenty years in the game. We caught up with Kelly again on release day (March 30), to discuss how a band without any bona fide “hits” – at least in the traditional sense – could pull together a “greatest hits” album. The idea, believe it or not, came from their Fat Wreck Chords boss himself. “I would love — LOVE — to take credit for masterminding this,” explains Kelly, “but as with everything in punk rock, Fat Mike came up with the idea!” As you may have noticed, Fat Wreck has gotten in the “greatest hits” game in recent years, with bands like Swingin’ Utters and Me First And The Gimme Gimmes and No Use For A Name getting the treatment. According to Kelly, Fat Mike reached out directly with the proposal. “He hit me up and he was like “hey, we like you guys, I seem to recall you guys liking us a lot. We’d love to do a greatest hits record.” I was like “that seems like an odd thing to do!” Like, really? When No Use For A Name puts out a greatest hits record or NOFX puts out a greatest hits record, I get that. But we’re the fucking Lawrence Arms…it seems like an odd thing.” Ever the businessman, Fat Mike of course had a method to his madness. Says Kelly: “He made a good point, or at least I’m attributing this point to him. (He said) ‘the way people consume music these days is that they just go on Spotify and check something out. Wouldn’t you like to have a bunch of good songs in one place so everybody can just go there and you can make sure they’re not getting something that’s not that representative of your band? A greatest hits record is a great way to do that!“
With that, Kelly and his longtime TLA comrades Chris McCaughan and Neil Hennessy set to figuring out exactly what songs to include on such a retrospective. Individual fans might take issue with a particular favorite of theirs not making the cut, but the album is largely representative from the best parts of each of the band’s albums. Well…almost the best parts. Never one to pine wistfully on the olden days, Kelly isn’t the kind of guy who listens to his own catalog with any regularity. “I didn’t go back and revisit the old recordings at all, which MAYBE kinda bit us in the dick a little bit on this release, because there is a song on the record, that’s not supposed to be on there.” If you’re one of the lucky ones who already obtained one of the first pressings of the album, you may have already caught the mistake. While it is listed on the album’s official tracklist, the song “The Northside, L & L, and Any Number Of Crappy Apartments” does not actually appear on the record. In its place is “Someday We’re All Gonna Weigh 400 Lbs,” the track immediately before “Northside…” on the band’s debut album, Guided Tour Of Chicago. The mistake’s roots trace back nearly twenty years, as when Guided Tour… was being put together, not only did Kelly pull the album’s artwork and layout together, but he and an old engineer did the digital markings for the tracks as well. “This is so boring…” laughs Kelly without realizing exactly how big a dork I and many of the band’s rabid fans are. “We both didn’t know what we were doing, which is why there’s that five seconds at the beginning of Guided Tour Of Chicago that’s Track 1. So all the tracklisting is pushed as a result, and so when whoever either at Asian Man or at Fat was sending the .WAV files, I looked at them and said “oh, Track 6 is “Northside…” and it was labelled as “Northside…”when they sent it over, but it was actually “Someday We’re All Gonna Weigh 400 Lbs” instead. If you’re lucky enough to get a physical copy that has that song on it, hold on to it, because someday nerds will be fighting tooth and nail to get their hands on it!:
While We Are The Champions Of The World contains snapshots from each of the band’s studio albums – full-length and EP – it also contains five previously unreleased songs, all culled from the recording sessions for what would be their highly-regarded 2006 full-length, Oh! Calcutta!. Curiously enough, they also represent the only real unreleased music from the band’s vault’s, save for one song that the only existed on cassette tape. “(Oh! Calcutta!) was a unique record for us,” says Kelly. “We were in the studio for like three months. We were writing like crazy. I had a broken kneecap, so I was in a full leg cast. My songs kept getting angrier and angrier at the time…because I was fucking angry from being in a cast for six months! We just had this huge amount of material, and at the same time, as the record started coming together, we started to see a real vision of what it was becoming and how it was cohesing (sic).“
As you’re reading this, the band’s first twelve day run in support of WATCOTW is about halfway over; after a two-week break, the second leg fires up in Seattle on April 27th and runs through May 6th in Denver. Both runs feature the likes of highly-regarded Red Scare Industries acts Red City Radio and Sincere Engineer. Both put out stellar releases within the past couple of months. And while most readers here are well versed on the likes of Oklahoma’s Red City Radio, the buzz behind Sincere Engineer’s Deanna Belos is intense and still growing. “Deanna is awesome, man,” states Kelly with the tone of a proud older brother. “She’s just like this weird kid from Chicago that grew up listening to all the bands that played with us and she really did her own thing, man. It’s really neat. I balk at taking credit for things that turn out well! But she’s been influenced by a lot of the things that a lot of my friends and peers have done, and she’s really synthesized it into something very cool and unique. I’m really happy to be part of Red Scare to give her a platform and I’m really happy that we’re taking her out on tour!”
Head below to check out our full Good Friday (the punkest of holidays!) chat with the always entertaining Brendan Kelly. There’s also more than a little bit of information on that aforementioned still-in-the-works Wandering Birds record!
Brendan Kelly (The Lawrence Arms, et al): It’s spring vacation week, so it’s sort of chaos. Our nanny took a vacation – this is all very punk, by the way – she took a vacation because she thought that we’d be gone, and then we couldn’t be gone because I had to maintain working this because I’m going on tour. This is all very exciting, very punk rock.
Jay Stone (Dying Scene): Yeah, well I’m home today because my kid doesn’t have school because it’s Good Friday, which is still somehow a holiday in parts of the state of Massachusetts? Talk about very punk…the punkest of holidays.
I mean, it is about a death. I guess that’s kinda cool. And they called it “Good Friday,” that’s kinda punk!
The place that I was working before where I am now, they used to have a parade, where they would shut down the downtown of the city of Lynn, Massachusetts, and do a Good Friday parade, where they reenact the events leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus. It’s a really bizarre thing when you’re looking out the window of your office and there is a guy carrying a cross down the street and people dressed as Romans and they’re whipping Jesus and the crowd is chanting…
WOOOOW!
It’s frightening, honestly.
That’s weird.
(*Laughs*) Anyway, congratulations on new release day!
Yeah man! It’s new release day, it’s also Chris McCaughan’s birthday! It’s a good day to be the Lawrence Arms!
Shoutout to Chris, wherever he is right now. Happy birthday wishes to him!
I have not spoken to him today, yet. I texted him a little bit last night, at midnight.
Aww, that’s adorable. I don’t know if you read reviews of your own work, especially if it’s for a greatest hits compilation, but as I was finishing notes for this like an hour ago, some mutual acquaintances of ours at The Bad Copy put out a review of the new album and it’s fucking hysterical!
Kendra interviewed me yesterday and told me about it. I haven’t seen it yet but I’m looking forward to reading it.
Sorry this is so late in the album release cycle. If there’s something you haven’t been asked yet, we can just start there if you want…
No, man, it’s totally cool! I started doing press like three days ago and it was like “oh yeah, that’s what this is all about! I remember this whole thing!” Don’t worry, man. This is quite literally my job! (*both laugh*)
I think the last time we spoke was in Providence at the very end of The Falcon’s run…
Yeah, yeah! Was that the place that was the swingers’ club with the glass floor?
Yes! That place has since closed, unfortunately. I think it’s probably going to be turned into condos or something like that. Anyway, I think the last time we talked, the plan after The Falcon wound down was to do a new Wandering Birds album and to get The Lawrence Arms back on the road more, I think you said “so people remember who you are.” Was this project a sort of offshoot of that last part? How did this all come about?
You know, I would love — LOVE — to take credit for masterminding this, but as with everything in punk rock, Fat Mike came up with the idea! (*both laugh*) He hit me up, and he was like “hey, we like you guys, I seem to recall you guys liking us a lot. We’d love to do a greatest hits record.” I was like “that seems like an odd thing to do!” Like, really? When No Use For A Name puts out a greatest hits record or NOFX puts out a greatest hits record, I get that. But we’re the fucking Lawrence Arms…it seems like an odd thing. But he made a good point, or at least I’m attributing this point to him since I think he said it. I don’t know, but I think he did. And it was that “the way people consume music these days is that they just go on Spotify and check something out. Wouldn’t you like to have a bunch of good songs in one place so everybody can just go there and you can make sure they’re not getting something that’s not that representative of your band? A greatest hits record is a great way to do that!” And I was like, “yeah, fuck! I’m fucking sold!”
Yeah, right! I had never thought about it in that context.
Yeah, I think it’s a really smart idea, so therefore I put aside the fact that I don’t know that we deserve a greatest hits record and said “yup! Let’s do it!” (*both laugh*)
Did he then tailor what ended up being the tracklist or did he leave that up to you guys?
That was up to us. We had to talk it out with Epitaph and Asian Man obviously, to get the licensing for those songs. That ended up not being a problem at all, because they’re also really top notch. Everybody was really cool with it. I kind of worked out a master list, just because I’m kind of the first person that responds to emails, generally. And I sent it to Chris and Neil and asked if there was anything that was missing off there that should be on it, and they each put their two cents in. Then I gave it to some Fat staffers who were familiar with our whole catalog and they voted on it, and the songs that got the most votes are the ones that ended up on the record. Then I sequenced it.
I should say thank you for the way that you sequenced it. I’m somebody who listens to an album start to finish like an old person, and I like the fact that you didn’t just put it in chronological order, because I think that’s a cheap way out sometimes.
Yeah, and…there’s a little bit of craftsmanship that goes into every detail of something. You can be lazy about it, but you can also spend the extra fifteen minutes and make it a little bit cooler, and that was my thought. I really like sequencing records, I like the sequence of records, it’s always been something that fascinated me, even as a really little kid. I remember listening to albums and saying “Oh, I understand how this works. The best song is the third song on a record, or the fourth. The third-best song is the first song on the record. The other best song is the first song on the second side.” I see the math behind all that, but why it works like that has always been something that’s really fascinated me. So the idea of putting out a collection and not sequencing it thoughtfully really never came up. That’s the kind of shit I dork out on.
Oh yeah absolutely. And it sorta plays like a setlist does, or it plays like the sort of a mixtape you’d give to somebody if you were trying to get them into a band or whatever. I’ like that part of it!
Well then I’m glad it worked out! It’s hard for me to have too much perspective on that.
This might be sort of a weird question, but how nostalgic are you about the band? I know that it being almost twenty years since you were formed – is it sort of a nostalgic thing for you to put out something like this now?
No, it’s not. (*laughs*) This is just a band I’m in, and this is just the next step in it or whatever. It’s cool, I’m glad we’re able to do it, and I’m really fucking glad that people still care, but I’m not wistful or anything, you know what I mean? This is the next project in the game, you know? My whole life is tied up in this band, obviously. It’s my best friends, I’ve gotten to work with and meet some of my heroes, I can’t say enough great things about it. But I think kind of a big theme in our band in general, and definitely a theme in my life, is that once something is over, it’s over. Move on to the next thing. So I don’t want to be a nostalgic band or a legacy band so much, and I guess the best way to do that is to put out new material and to stay active and keep your self as relevant as you can as an old man (*both laugh*). To me this is more exciting from the perspective of “hey, wow, this is a cool new package! We get to go on tour! This is fun!” There’s not a lot of wistful staring at old pictures (*laughs*).
I didn’t necessarily think that there would be, because I don’t necessarily pick up on that vibe from you, but at the same time, it is a milestone release. But I think you also handled it in the most Lawrence Arms/Brendan Kelly way possible, if that makes sense!
That’s the only way we know how to do things! (*both laugh*)
You really went for it, and I like that. Even the name We Are The Champions … it’s tough to be self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating at the same time, but you nailed it.
That’s pure Chris McCaughan right there. I was like “what should we call this record?” and he was like, “I don’t know, We Are The Champions Of The World?” And I was like “Yup! Done!”
When I heard that there was a greatest hits album, I just kind of assumed that the name would be “Greatest Shits” or something along those lines. (*both laugh*) Apparently that’s already a thing though, since I just Googled it…
I’m sure you get a LOT of interesting results with “Greatest Shits.”
Yeah, I think there was a KMFDM album called “Greatest Shits,” most recently. Anyway, how frequently have you listened back to the old material over the years? Did you just know what songs you wanted to be on the album, or did you have to go back and listen to things and get a feel for how things sounded again?
Nah, we play a lot of our songs, like when we do those War On Christmas shows where we do three nights in Chicago and play all different songs every night, that ends up being like 54 songs or something like that. So I’m pretty familiar with the catalog from it being a living, breathing thing that we have to associate with in a live setting. I haven’t gone back and listened to that old shit in a LONG fucking time. I just listened to Buttsweat And Tears because just because we’re going on tour and I wanted to familiarize myself with it, and because this record’s coming out so I should really check this stuff out and see how it sounds. I’ll listen to it a whole, whole lot while it’s being made. Once it comes out – once other people get their ears on it – I’ll listen to it again because that kind of gives a new perspective. But after that, it’s over for me. I didn’t go back and revisit the old recordings at all, which MAYBE kinda bit us in the dick a little bit on this release, because there is a song on the record, that’s not supposed to be on there.
Wait, really? I don’t think I knew that?!?
Yeah! That is the case! (*both laugh*) Hopefully this will become the stuff of, like, upside-down misprinted stamps and things like that, but on the very first pressing, for reasons way too stupid to go into detail on, the song “The Northside, L & L, and Any Number Of Crappy Apartments” is not on the record, but instead, the song “Someday We’re All Gonna Weigh 400 Lbs” is on the physical copies and the digital download copies. It’s all because of — this is so boring — but when we did Guided Tour Of Chicago, I put that record together myself; I took the pictures, I scanned them in, I Photoshopped the booklet together which is why it looks like shit. I also, with our old super fuck-up engineer, did all the digital markings for the tracks. We both didn’t know what we were doing, which is why there’s that five seconds at the beginning of Guided Tour Of Chicago that’s Track 1. So all the tracklisting is pushed as a result, and so when whoever either at Asian Man or at Fat was sending the .WAV files, I looked at them and said “oh, Track 6 is “Northside…” and it was labelled as “Northside…”when they sent it over, but it was actually “Someday We’re All Gonna Weigh 400 Lbs” instead. If you’re lucky enough to get a physical copy that has that song on it, hold on to it, because someday nerds will be fighting tooth and nail to get their hands on it!
That will be worth tens of dollars some day!
I know, right?!?
It’s like an error card in baseball. I used to collect baseball cards and that error cards and shit like that were the coolest.
Yeah, that’s the thing! And it’s ultimately nobody’s fucking fault…well, I mean, it’s my fault, but it’s my fault from when I was fucking 23! (*both laugh*) I’m not really trying to beat myself up about it. Everybody is like “oh God, we’re so sorry!” and I’m like “what are you talking about? This is great!” It’s so…I don’t really like to use terms like this but in this case I will make an exception…it’s very ‘on brand.’
Absolutely! It might be the most ‘on-brand’ part of the whole thing.
That’s what you get when you don’t go back and listen to the tracks! I guess that’s the point of this little anecdote.
There are five or six songs on the greatest hits album that were outtakes from Oh! Calcutta!. Was it a normal thing for you to have that much material recorded and not really do anything with?
No, actually those are the only available outtakes that I think we have. I looked for everything else. There was one song that got left off of Greatest Story… which only existed on cassette, and we could not find it. We would have included it if we could find it, but it was only on cassette, and how are you going to track that down? But that was a unique record for us. We were in the studio for like three months. We were writing like crazy. I had a broken kneecap, so I was in a full leg cast, and I was writing like crazy at the time. My songs kept getting angrier and angrier at the time…because I was fucking angry from being in a cast for six months! We just had this huge amount of material, and at the same time, as the record started coming together, we started to see a real vision of what it was becoming and how it was cohesing (sic). Those songs started not being ones that fit into the greater picture. A lot of people think of our records as being sort of thematic, and I think that’s sort of true and it’s something we pay attention to. At a certain point, those songs, for whatever reason, weren’t hitting the theme as hard as the ones that ended up on there, so they ended up being outtakes. But that was a very unusual situation for us.
Why do you think that they never came out until now? That seems like a thing that people do…put out the album and then here’s a 7-inch or a Record Store Day release or something like that, where it’s like “here’s some songs that didn’t really fit on anything!”
Because we were waiting for this, man! (*both laugh*) No, I just don’t think we cared, really. We put out the record we were stoked on, and we wanted to focus on that. By the time it was time to put something else out, we put out the Buttsweat and Tears EP, and those songs were WAY better than the songs that weren’t good enough to go on (Oh! Calcutta!), so it seemed kinda lazy to me. Now, since they’ve been in the time capsule for so long, I think it’s actually interesting. At the time, I think it would have seemed like not a carefully-plotted next step in a career, you know? It’s kinda lazy.
It’s a really interesting listen to go back to a greatest hits album or a career retrospective album or whatever you want to call it, and to watch how a band has progressed over time. Are you guys conscious of the change in sounds and direction over the years at the time – like, if you put Guided Tour… up against Metropole, it’s not even the same band, you know what I mean?
Yeah, for sure. And I think that it’s important to remember that when we did Guided Tour… and we did Ghost Stories, we hadn’t even played a show yet. I’ve said this in the past, but I almost consider both of those albums to be like our demos, you know? It wasn’t until we got on stage and started playing that we said “okay, this works” or “okay, this doesn’t work,” “this is what is like what we’re trying to develop and this is what is falling flat.” From there we went back, and after those first two EPs that we did, which appear on Cocktails & Dreams, that’s sort of the beginning of the sound that I associate with the band and that I think most people associate with the band.
But yeah, those first records are a different band. The first practices we did, Chris played bass and I played guitar! The entire notion of the band changed a lot after we put out Ghost Stories and started getting a few people to care. We went out on a bunch of tours and we came back and were like “oh, we’re kind of a real band now! We should probably take this a little more seriously!” A lot of people, a lot of bands, are lucky enough to emerge fully-formed. You’ve got your person with a vision of who they are and what they want to do and what they want to say, and they’re young and they know how to say it and they know how to sing it and they know how to play it. They come out of the gate and make this career-defining record, and then they’re trying to play catch-up for the rest of their career. With us, it was very much the opposite.
When we started, we didn’t know what we were doing, and we had to listen to each record and evolve our sound based on what works and what doesn’t work. The three of us are not only really big students of song-crafting in general, but we’re also very cognizant of the fact that it’s real easy to get lazy and start to suck. There’s always a very careful push to — I don’t want to say “evolve” because I don’t want to sound grandiose — but to continue to refine and really try to improve on what you’re doing in whatever little way it is. We’re a punk band, we’re not changing the world or anything. In our own way, we pushed what we can do into new and exciting places, for me at least! (*laughs*) And it’s not lost on me, our band changes drastically with every record. That’s always been sort of part of the idea.
Believe me, your band has made a lot of impact, to me even more so as you’ve become more– I think you’ve always been self-aware and self-deprecating, but I think on Metropole, there are a few moments where I went from thinking “I’ve always liked this band” to being “I totally get this band differently now.” Like “Seventeener” for example is obviously a song that, when you hit a certain age, that song becomes your reality, you know? That was the first time in The Lawrence Arms’ catalog where I went “whoa…” Some songwriters have a thing that they do where it seems like they’ve been following you for a while and writing your specific story, and with “Seventeener” I went “holy shit…there’s one of those moments!” That sort of connection has grown over the years, and I think that’s a really awesome thing that not everybody can pull off.
I do want to go back to the point, and this is key, that if we had been great at this at the beginning, we wouldn’t have the luxury of being able to progress like this! (*both laugh*)
Fair enough!
You know what I mean? I remember talking to a buddy of mine who’s in a pretty popular band and he was talking about how he’s getting ready to write new songs for their new record and so he’s going back and listening to the old stuff, and I’m like “that’s the worst fucking idea I’ve ever heard in my life!” (*laughs*) It’s like eating your own poop for nutrients, you know? It doesn’t work! Even if you’re a band and you’re like “oh, man, Bad Religion really blows my hair back, I want to be a melodic hardcore band” and then all you listen to is Bad Religion, what’s the best thing you can be after that? A worse Bad Religion! You know what I mean?
With us, at first I listened to a lot of punk rock and I took a lot of my cues from punk rock, but at a certain point, I was like “you know what, man? This isn’t that cool. The stuff that I love in punk rock, they’re already doing it so well in this exact genre,” so now I’m trying to take most of my influences from hip-hop and country music, because now I can infuse those ideas into punk rock and hopefully come up with something that’s not just a completely boilerplate thing that everyone would expect. Now, does it work? I don’t fucking know. But those are the mental exercises that I try to use to keep things evolving. And also, I’m a forty-one year-old man now. I’m not a young kid with no responsibilities that lives in a fucking van. I’m a dad. I’ve changed, and it would be disingenuous of me to write an album that wasn’t about me.
Obviously the album is just out today, but is there a plan to keep writing going forward? Do you guys do that stuff in phases and with a plan, or is it just kind of like “when it happens, it happens”?
Well, yeah, so as I mentioned to you in Providence, I’m finishing up a Wandering Birds album right now. I’m not doing anything else in the world of music until that’s done, besides going on tour, obviously. But in terms of creative output, once that’s done, yeah I feel like The Lawrence Arms is the next thing on the docket for me. I like being in this band, and if we’re not going to be a legacy and nostalgia band, the only solution to that is to keep putting out records. So it’ll be time to fire up that machine.
I’m really excited for new Wandering Birds. I know I said this a year ago or whenever it was, but I still go back to the first album all the time.
Well, I’m really glad to hear that, because I am SO excited for this record. I feel like in ten years, people will go “that record was really great, actually. I was wrong!” (*both laugh*)
You’re assuming they’re not going to like it right off the rip?!
Dude, it is completely…there’s no aspect of punk rock involved in it at all anymore. It’s a whole different beast. I think the first record set up the promise of what the band could be, and this record is what the band could be. It’s very strange. I’m really stoked on it.
That’ll be this year, hopefully?
Yeah, I mean some of it’s being mixed as we speak, so it’s closer than you think!
That’s awesome! (The Lawrence Arms) go on tour this week…it’s already fucking April!
Yeah, this Wednesday.
Right, up here in Boston. It seems like it’s been a while since you’ve had a few two-week runs with the Lawrence Arms, yeah? Maybe since Metropole?
Yeah, it’s been a fucking minute, man, and it’s a little bit nerve-wracking to be honest.
Really?
Yeah, and I don’t know why. It’s obviously something where the second that I get on a plane and get in the van, it’ll be like “oh, right, this is my life. I know exactly how to this.” But right now, it’s been a while, and the idea of leaving my job and leaving my family and all that kind of stuff is a little more overwhelming than it used to be. But, whatever, it’s fucking twelve days…
Still, it’s twelve days here and then twelve days out west with a couple weeks in between?
Yeah, and then twelve days in Europe too.
You’ve got Red City Radio on the road with you here. That new album is fucking phenomenal.
Yeah, it’s fucking great! The last one was fucking great too, the self-titled one. They’re just a fucking monster of a band.
And I unfortunately know very little of Sincere Engineer, but what I know of Sincere Engineer is that everybody that I know that respects music, says that she kills it.
Yeah, Deanna is awesome, man. She’s just like this weird kid from Chicago that grew up listening to all the bands that played with us and she really did her own thing, man. It’s really neat. I balk at taking credit for things that turn out well — (*both laugh*) — I can point to some bands that are completely ripping us off and they stink and I’m like “I’m sorry! I’m sorry that I did this to the world!” But, I don’t think Deanna is ripping us off at all, I just want to make that overt. But she’s been influenced by a lot of the things that a lot of my friends and peers have done, and she’s really synthesized it into something very cool and unique. I’m really happy to be part of Red Scare to give her a platform and I’m really happy that we’re taking her out on tour. It’s going to be awesome.
Do you put those things together or is that you and Toby together?
Yeah, Toby does most of the heavy lifting. I’m really more of like the Queen of England of Red Scare. I’ll show up to the mall openings and shit, but I don’t get involved with like making the national budgets or anything like that. It’s mostly Toby bit I have a hand in it as well.
Even putting tour lineups together for a tour that you’re on, is that still Toby, or are there more moving parts than that?
Well, there are more moving parts than that, but at the end of the day, I would say that Toby as the most interest in that, so he does tend to lead that charge a little bit. I care, but not nearly as much. And there’s always the thought of “man, we should put other Red Scare bands on this because it’s a cool thing to do.” Or other Fat bands, for sure.
Alright, I won’t take up too much of your free afternoon. I’m really looking forward to Wednesday night.
I’m also looking forward to it, and it’s going to be interesting, because we’re flying in, and Boston is going to be our first practice! (*both laugh*) On stage!
It was kind of that way with The Falcon when that fired back up. I think the show at the Middle East was the first real show after the Red Scare anniversary show or whatever, right?
Was it? Maybe it was…yes, I think you’re right. That was like our first actual show as a band! That was pretty cool. At that point, we had just made the record, so at least we were all firing on those cylinders. But yeah…who knows what’s going to happen. The beauty of having been in this band for so long and having so many songs is that I can really pick and choose the songs that we know how to play and that people like! And we can kind of work through those, and then we can get into maybe the more esoteric choices as it rolls on! It’s going to be great! There’s nothing I love more than seeing if I can pull it off!