Bomb The Music Industry! fans everywhere were saddened last week by an announcement of the band’s impending (probable) breakup. Since forming in 2004 for the music collective has impressed friend and foe alike with a strict DIY regiment that has held true for the band’s entire career. On a rainy day in Davenport, IA, Dying Scene caught up with BTMI! regulars Jeff Rosenstock (guitar/vocals), John DeDomenici (bass), Tom Malinowski (guitar), and Matt Keegan (keys/trombone) to discuss future plans, songwriting, and more.
To read the interview, click here.
Connor (Dying Scene) What’s up with this hardcore 7” you mentioned recently in your blog post? Has that been recorded yet?
Jeff: No, we’re going to work on it in September. There’s details we can’t yet reveal, but it’s going to be….interesting. I dunno, I really just wanted to make a good hardcore 7” that’s interesting, you know? That’s really all I can say at this point.
What kind of hardcore style?
Jeff: I mean, I like Bad Brains, I like 7 Seconds, I like Minor Threat, there are other bands I like, but also with some fucking, like, good-ass breakdowns and stuff in there right? And we’re also trying to keep the songs really short. Really short breakdowns and really short songs. Hopefully like 8-10 songs on a 7” would be optimum.
What else is in your future now that you guys are (maybe) breaking up?
Jeff: We don’t really know. We’re still kinda feeling this whole thing out pretty much.
Ideally, if money were no object, what would you do?
Matt: Play shows in crazy places…like Kazakhstan! And go to other weird places.
John: I think I would also like to go to weird places. I don’t really think money is going to hold us back a lot. Whereas now we’re all kept in the same place as a band, after this we’re going to have a lot more freedom to go other places. There’s an option for that now that we’re not going to be tethered down in New York.
Tom: I’d like to still make more records, try to get a bigger space to make them in, have fun and be more creative with it, have more options open than what my current situation allows.
Jeff: I think if we had unlimited money you and I would just build a place together.
Interesting that none of you said cooking meth.
Jeff: No, that’s how we get the unlimited money, I thought that was understood. But I could probably cook a lot more, buy more ingredients, I just don’t have a lot of ingredients in my house right now.
John: You’re missing a lot of ingredients, yeah. Right now you’re just cooking mac n’ cheese. You’re missing way too much.
Jeff: I have batteries in my house….that’s an ingredient to meth, right? I just bought a ton of batteries.
John: That’s not….yes.
How old were you when you wrote 25?
Jeff 25!
Just had to clear that up for the record.
Jeff: Well, here’s the thing, here’s how much BTMI! cares about its fans. I was 25 when we recorded the demo to that song. When we recorded the record, I was 26. So we set it at the same tempo as in the demo and used the vocals from the demo, so I’m not a fuckin’ liar. It was actually less effort than singing it again. That’s extreme laziness.
Skappleton.
All: [Maniacal laughter and applause]
John: We JUST found out they stopped doing that because of us.
Yeah, there are tons of rumors, like you guys starting a fire in the hotel room.
Jeff: I don’t think that’s true but John did try to stab someone in the hotel and rip up their plane ticket.
Just trying to clear you of any arson charges here.
Jeff: Yeah, no arson. That is one of the few things we didn’t do wrong.
John: Maybe the only thing.
Matt: And I’m not even entirely sure we didn’t start a fire in the hotel room.
How was playing the actual festival?
Jeff: Terrible. Absolutely terrible. It was like three days of being hung-over started the second we started playing. And we had to play for an hour and a half, that’s fucking hard.
John: And one thing that I don’t think is understood always is that we are very good friends in this band. We genuinely love hanging out with each other and there was a lot of time where we were all in different parts of the country, and this was the first time we had seen each other in I think over a year. So we were so excited to see each other, we kinda forgot we had responsibility.
Jeff: Well, we didn’t forget at all, we were practicing while getting drunk in the hotel room! And we also made it really clear to them that we weren’t going to be good and we weren’t worth the money it was going to cost them to have us, they didn’t care.
In your lyrics, you pour your head out into the song. It’s pure honesty. How does that feel, to put out your deepest, sometimes saddest thoughts for everyone to hear?
Jeff: I don’t know any other way to write, really. At the risk of sounding cliché, it’s therapeutic to get that out of my fucking dumb brain to be a normal person. And when putting it out and people like it, it makes me feel less alone as a sad person despite all the remarkable luck I’ve had, and that sadness won’t ever go away. It’s kinda cool…well, not kinda cool, it fucking sucks, but at least I can do something with it other than sit in a corner and cry, doing meth, watching Breaking Bread.
Who would you want to hear write lyrics like that? What person in the world do you most want to hear everything inside their head?
Tom: Alex Trebek.
Jeff: Rajon Rondo of the Boston Celtics.
John: Tom Selleck.
Matt: I dunno, Kurt Vonnegut or someone.
Jeff: Yeah, you’d really love to see Kurt Vonnegut write something one of these days. I wonder what’s on his fucking mind.
What are some of the weirder/more hassling routes you’ve had to take to ensure a show is all ages?
Jeff: Well, for example, here, I couldn’t just look up a bar in Des Moines, Iowa and go “Hey, let’s play at this bar.” It’s hard to find stuff like this, and the hardest part is you do stuff like basement shows so everybody will be able to come, but ironically, some younger people aren’t into that scene and it can be hard to find the address because you can’t put it online. A lot of venues will do all-ages shows, but they charge you $500 extra to do it. And we just eat that; we lose $500 that day to play an all ages show.
Do you frequently lose money on those shows?
Jeff: No fucking way man, we’re Bomb The Music Industry!
What are your respective power animals?
John: Panda. The saddest bear of all, because it can’t do anything but eat and sleep. And it’s going to die because it only wants to eat the one thing that’s not good for them. It’s like us; we only want to drink beer.
Jeff: Rajon Rondo.
Matt: Koala.
Any final words? Warnings? Legal advice?
Matt: Don’t throw guitars at people’s faces.
John: Don’t leave your boxers on the bar.
Jeff: Don’t leave $11,000 on the street in New Orleans. Live a good life like Tom.
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