The city of Quincy, Massachusetts, is celebrating its 400th anniversary this year with a series of celebrations that honor the places and faces who have made up the community for the last four centuries (or at least the last four centuries since the Europeans arrived, but that’s a long complicated essay for another time). If […]
The city of Quincy, Massachusetts, is celebrating its 400th anniversary this year with a series of celebrations that honor the places and faces who have made up the community for the last four centuries (or at least the last four centuries since the Europeans arrived, but that’s a long complicated essay for another time). If you’re not from around here, Quincy is a coastal community separated from Boston proper by the Neponset River. Colloquially known as the “City of Presidents” because not one but two President Adamses were born and raised there (as was John Hancock who wasn’t President but was at least able to write his name really big), Quincy in many ways has really embodied a lot of what has been considered sterotypically “Boston” since at least the middle of last century. As the socioeconomic landscape of its neighbor to the north has continued to change rather drastically over the last few decades, Quincy has maintained its reputation a tough, bluest-of-blue collar city, a tradition that dates back centuries, when Quincy was a home to shipyards and granite quarries and the first commercial railroad in the US. I have absolutely no way of verifying this, but my gut tells me that Quincy is probably home to probably the largest ratio of active union members among all of Massachusetts’ 351 cities and towns. The ethnic makeup of the community has ebbed and flowed for years, as is the case in most traditionally working-class communities, but the rough and tumble issues have not, nor have the sense of local pride. Hell, Quincy is also the home of the back-to-back-to-back Major League Rugby champion New England Free Jacks and if there’s a more rough-and-tumble blue-collar sport than rugby, I’m not sure what it is. Oh, and it’s also where Dunkin Donuts started.
As such, it would make sense that when Quincy decided to throw a year-long birthday party, it would include its punk rock native sons in the festivities. Long obviously associated with the Boston punk scene, the original Dropkick Murphys lineup got their start essentially on a bet offered to founding bassist/current lead vocalist Ken Casey close to thirty years ago, and set up shop in a Quincy practice space. Casey is the lone member of the original four-piece lineup still in the band, and it can be reasonably argued that, with Casey at the helm, no band of their size in this or any scene has been as proactive and outwardly vocal about supporting blue-collar, working-class causes, loudly and proudly trumpeting, labor unions, anti-fascist causes and supporting programs for underpriviledged kids, people struggling with substance use issues and, of course, veterans. In many ways, they’ve very much become the Irish-infused spiritual heirs to the Woody Guthries and Pete Seegers and Bruce Springsteens and Clash who came before them.
And so it was that the Dropkick Murphys took over the heart of Quincy Center last Saturday afternoon. The normally bustling Hancock Street was shut down for several blocks, and a giant stage was set up a literal stone’s throw from the resting places of a former President and First Lady. By most official estimates, more than 10,000 fans made the trek to bask in the warm summer afternoon sun with Casey and crew to celebrate both Quincy’s official 400th and the coinciding release of the Dropkick Murphys 13th studio record, For The People. Those who arrived early enough – it was a free, outdoor show in a popular urban center after all – early enough to arrive were able to see the band work through a few of For The People’s tracks at soundcheck for the first time, including the stage debut of the uilleann (Irish) pipes pulled off by the band’s recent bagpipe/tin whistle player Campbell Webster. Ever the man of the people, Casey made his way around the barricade area for a round of fist-bumps and high-fives to the early arrivers. Then local favorite DJ Stenny took the stage to provide the soundtrack as the masses arrived, playing a list that largely consisted of 70s rock and classic hip hop tracks for the gathering crowd to dance and sing along too.
At shortly after 5:00pm and accompanied as usual by the dulcet tones of the Chieftains/Sinead O’Connor version of the traditional Irish Easter Rebellion-inspired “The Foggy Dew,” the Dropkicks returned to the stage and immediately ripped into “Who’ll Stand With Us,” the lead single from For The People, followed immediately by longtime classic and fan favorite “The Boys Are Back” from 2012’s Signed and Sealed in Blood. In the half-dozen-or-so years since Casey officially handed off live bass-playing duties to longtime band tech Kevin Rheault – and especially since co-lead vocalist Al Barr has been on hiatus tending to his ailing mother – he’s been a constant source of energy on stage, endlessly pacing back and forth and frequently engaging in singalongs with showgoers at the barricade. The band blazed through close to two-dozen songs over the course of ninety-ish minutes. The new record was well represented, with a total of seven new tracks sprinkled amidst the longtime favorites. Particularly poignant were the new tracks “Chesterfields And Aftershave” “Kids Games” and “Streetlights.” It being the greater Boston area still, of course “Tessie,” “Skinhead On The MBTA,” “The State of Massachusetts” and “Shipping Up To Boston” made requisite appearances. “(F)lannigan’s Ball” and “Barroom Heroes” were crowd favorites, as was the circle-pit-inducing “The Big Man,” the band’s new ode to Pennywise’s Fletcher Dragge, a song that found Casey jumping into the crowd and performing from the middle of the chaos.
And speaking of constant energy…it will never cease to amaze me how many moving parts there are on stage during a Dropkick Murphys show. Webster and his bagpipes, uilleann pipes and tin whistle stood ground at stage right rear, longtime guitarist James Lynch mans stage left accompanied generally by his trademark low-hung Les Paul and Matt Kelly remains perched on his throne, providing the rhythmic backbone to the whole shebang, but Casey, Rheault, and the endlessly multi-talented duo of Tim Brennan and Jeff DaRosa do…not…stop… pacing the stage, whipping the crowd up, and genuinely revelling in the mood as much or more than the show goers. Brennan was constantly switching between the accordion and a couple of Motor Ave electric guitars, while I’m fairly certain I counted ten different instruments for DaRosa – a green Duesenberg electric, two different banjos, a harmonica, a Martin acoustic, a bouzouki, a Telecaster, an F mandolin and the keyboard – across the set’s 23 songs. Amidst the clamor and chaos of a punk rock show, the band and their crew present as a finely tuned and well-oiled machine. Must be something about those blue-collar, working-class roots.
Check out more pics below, including one gallery dedicated solely to the multi-instrumental exploits of Jeff DaRosa!
Prior to this year’s Summer Circus tour, it had been a while since yours truly saw Less Than Jake headline a show. Sure there were Warped Tours and more Warped Tours and even more Warped tours, and a Vans Triple Crown skateboarding thing with Andy MacDonald and Bob Burnquist (and I think Radish also played), […]
Prior to this year’s Summer Circus tour, it had been a while since yours truly saw Less Than Jake headline a show. Sure there were Warped Tours and more Warped Tours and even more Warped tours, and a Vans Triple Crown skateboarding thing with Andy MacDonald and Bob Burnquist (and I think Radish also played), but if memory serves, the last time I saw Less Than Jake headline a club show was the long-since defunct Elvis Room in Portsmouth New Hampshire. So long ago that Jessica and Derron were still in the band and JR was still (Re)Pete from Spring Heeled Jack. I don’t call myself the resident old guy here for nothing…BUT I DIGRESS! The Boston stop on the Summer Circus tour seemed as good a time as any to both return to the House of Blues for only the second time since Covid, and more importantly to check out the Good Ship LTJ again, especially with the dynamite lineup they put together for the early summer festivities.
Bite Me Bambi were first out of the gate for this night, as they were for the entirety of the three-week East Coast run. I was as eager to catch Bite Me Bambi as I was to catch anyone else on this stacked bill, in part because the Orange County-based ska punks don’t make it up to this corner of the globe with any regularity, and also because they’re one of the few modern ska bands that reignited my interest in the genre I first fell in love with three decades ago. Led by the enigmatic Tahlena Chikami, the band kicked off their half-hour spot with “Too Many People” from their most recent release, Eat This. A large portion of the crowd at the 2200 capacity venue had arrived early enough to catch BMB’s high-energy set which included the evening’s first attempt at a circle pit (very much not a Bosotn thing) alongside tracks like “Strippers On A Sunday,” “Gaslighter’s Anthem” and their cover of The Offspring’s “Want You Bad,” a song that is now somehow a quarter-century old and that makes me want to walk into the ocean with rocks in my pockets. Bite Me Bambi’s set was super fun and they sounded super tight, which was especially noteworthy as the touring lineup is a bit of a moving target.
Speaking of bands who feature bold, enigmatic leaders at the front and center, the incomparable Fishbone were up next. Somehow, it was yours truly’s first time shooting Fishbone, and it was every bit as wonderfully chaotic as I’d hoped. Speaking of moving part lineups, the current touring iteration of Fishbone features the iconic Angelo Moore, the return of Tracey “Spacey T” Singleton on guitar, OG trombone/keyboard player Chris Dowd, and newer recruits Hassan Hurd (drums), JS Williams (trumpet/vocals) and James Jones (bass). It also features Moore’s daughter Cheyenne aka Whoop-Dee-Doo, who joined on guest vocals right from jump street on a rousing rendition of the classic “Skankin’ To The Beat.” The stage was constant motion, pure frenetic energy. In addition to lead vocal bandleading duties, Moore oscillated between the theremin and a few different horns (shoutout to Lucero’s longtime stage man Scott for keeping the ship running; not an easy task). The band blitzed through a tight 40 minute set that included classics new and old like “Party At Ground Zero,” “Last Call In America” and of course “Racist Piece Of Shit” before bringing the set to a fun, dancealong close with “Dance To The Music/Everyday Sunshine.”
Suicide Machines occupied the third spot on the four-band bill. My memory from shows from two and three decades ago is more than a little bit foggy, but I do have a vivid recollection of Suicide Machines playing early in the day at my first Warped Tour (Northampton MA 1997 – who was there???) and I definitely remember sneaking my Kodak Fisher Price 110 film camera in and shooting some pictures at that show. I’d never snuck my camera into a show before, and so that means there’s a very distinct possibility that Suicide Machines were the very first band I “shot.” Those pictures may be lost to time, but I should look for them. Anyway, the Detroit four-piece are as good or better now than they ever have been. The always fiercely anti-racist, anti-fascist quartet kicked things off with “Too Good” from their landmark 1996 debut LP Destruction By Definition and never really took their collective feet off the gas pedal. Spearheaded by the dynamic Jason Navarro, the band squeezed fifteen songs into their thirty-five-ish minute set. The bulk of the setlist consisted of songs from Destruction… – an album that they promised to revisit in full on an anniversary tour next year, with a smattering from A Match and Some Gasoline and Battle Hymns and Revolution Spring composing the other half of the set. Brand new standalone single “Never Go Quietly” fit right in as a new classic.
Which brings us to the piece de resistance, the one and only Less Than Jake. With a stage adorned in full Bit Top Circus-esque regalia, the Gainesville-based quintet kicked things off with their ode to their hometown, “Gainesville Rock City,” from 2000’s Borders & Boundaries. “Lie To Me” and “Johnny Quest Thinks We’re Sellouts” followed, with the latter still being one of my favorite songs in the ska/punk world. Pezcore and Losing Streak (and Losers, Kings… and Greased, if I’m being honest) were staple albums in my crew in the days they came out, the soundtrack to endless adventures packed into a friend’s station wagon, singing along at the tops of our lungs while searching for anything at all to do in our corner of suburban New England. I had a moment while standing in the wings, looking at the constant motion on stage – Chris and Roger constantly moving around and playing to the audience when off mic, Buddy never standing still for more than maybe 9 seconds, stage managers endlessly bringing different circus-themed props [rainbow wigs, clown noses, some strange banana-weilding guy in a monkey costume (hi Warren!)] that this is now the fourth decade I’ve seen Less Than Jake in. Sure maybe a little of the hair is greyer (mostly mine) but the band really show no signs of slowing down.
And so, as you might imagine, it was a personal high point of the set when JR’s former Spring Heeled Jack bandmate Chris Rhodes came out for a few songs toward the end of the set. Rhodes and JR occupy a great many memories in my increasingly foggy brain, as Spring Heeled Jack felt like they were one of our bands, even though they were from Connecticut and I was from New Hampshire. Static World View remains one of my favorite albums by anyone, and so it warmed the heart to see two-thirds of SHJ’s OG horn section (RIP Tyler Jones!) side-by-side again. That’s not to say the evening was ALL nostalgia. Less Than Jake played about half of their new EP Uncharted across their set, and the new tracks rock just as hard as ever, especially “Walking Pipebomb.” There have obviously been some weird and misguided jokes about ska and ska punk music for a while now, and I’m not really sure where they come from (sort of like the bad rap emo gets for some reason), but I do believe that bands like Less Than Jake and, really, all four of the bands on the bill for the East Coast leg of the Summer Circus Tour (West Coast gets Catbite and they certainly count too!) demonstrate what is really good and true and positive and celebratory and unifying about the music and the scene, especially given the seemingly neverending shit storm going on outside the venue walls.
The West Coast leg of the Summer Circus tour kicks off July 25th in Phoenix and runs through August 13th in Dallas. Check the full rundown here, and check out more pics below!
We here at Dying Scene Corporate Headquarters are stoked to bring you some brand-new working class punk rock music from yours truly’s stomping grounds…the suburbs north of Boston. Now a four-piece outfit with the addition of Ian Killpatrick (bass) and Forgie (drums) to the pre-existing dynamic duo of Dan Cummings (vocals/guitar) and Brandon Bartlett (vocals/guitar), […]
We here at Dying Scene Corporate Headquarters are stoked to bring you some brand-new working class punk rock music from yours truly’s stomping grounds…the suburbs north of Boston. Now a four-piece outfit with the addition of Ian Killpatrick (bass) and Forgie (drums) to the pre-existing dynamic duo of Dan Cummings (vocals/guitar) and Brandon Bartlett (vocals/guitar), Already Dead are unveiling a brand-new EP to the masses. It’s called I Think It’s Time To Leave… and the band are self-releasing it this coming Friday (June 20th) on the normal vinyl and digital formats.
Here’s what founding frontman Cummings had to say about the new tracks:
“These were the first batch of songs we had after Something Like a War and we were really happy with them. All five felt pretty cohesive together, and it’s five songs in 10 minutes. All killer, no bullshit. It felt like the right move after the long process of making an album.”
Fire up I Think It’s Time To Leave… below and then fire it up again right away because the blistering pace of the five songs in under ten minutes is ‘blink and you miss it’ speed. Then get your own copy!
Happy Tuesday, comrades! We’ve got some more new music to bring to you today, and this time it comes to you from one of my favorite cities on earth…Boston, Massachusetts! The band is called Pimmer, and it was initially the brainchild of frontman Sanford Schaffer. Schaffer enlisted the help of a couple of esteemed Berklee […]
Happy Tuesday, comrades!
We’ve got some more new music to bring to you today, and this time it comes to you from one of my favorite cities on earth…Boston, Massachusetts!
The band is called Pimmer, and it was initially the brainchild of frontman Sanford Schaffer. Schaffer enlisted the help of a couple of esteemed Berklee alum, Jack Rooks and Izzy Davis, to round out the lineup, and they’re planning on releasing a full-length, I Wish I Could Care, in the not-so-distant future. Today, they’re bringing you the album’s second single, “Things We Did For Fun,” and we get to bring it to you first. Check it out, and stay tuned for more from Pimmer, because they’re already working on a brand-new EP!
It was a double-whammy night for the punkers of a certain age a week ago Thursday when a two-headed monster of beloved Midwestern-area bands – Smoking Popes and Off With Their Heads – brought their tour of full-album sets to the northeast for a stop in the metro Boston area. The tour marks the fifteenth […]
It was a double-whammy night for the punkers of a certain age a week ago Thursday when a two-headed monster of beloved Midwestern-area bands – Smoking Popes and Off With Their Heads – brought their tour of full-album sets to the northeast for a stop in the metro Boston area. The tour marks the fifteenth anniversary of the release of the OWTH staple In Desolation and the thirtieth (?!?) of the Popes’ classic Born To Quit, and so it was a perfect time to double up on the back pain medication and head out into the monsoon that spent a full day bludgeoning the area for some punk rocking good fun on a week night.
Located in the metro Boston suburb of Somerville, the venue – Arts At The Armory – is essentially exactly what it sounds like: the old drill shed of a 122-year-old armory that was an active National Guard outpost through the 1970s and now serves as a unique multi-purpose arts and education space in the vibrant community just a few miles from the center of Boston. It’s the kind of place that, depending on the day of the week and the time of day, hosts farmers markets and poetry slams and a regular Joe Strummer-inspired ukulele slam and speed-dating for the polyamory-curious (yes, really). Oh, and punk shows! In some ways, the building’s history and its utilization as a repurposed space for creating art and community might be perfectly symbolic of the community of Somerville as a whole, tightly packed and tightly-knit and ever-changing, from old multicultural blue-collar urban factory center to newer multicultural hub of education and art and innovation. Maybe that’s a not-fully-formed think-piece for another time… In any event, it really is a great spot for a show. Sure, parking sucks (especially in the driving rain), but it’s a big open room with great sightlines and much-better-than-expected sound and lighting and a full video screen behind the stage. It was yours truly’s first time, and it certainly won’t be the last.
ANYWAY, the two-band bill meant that OWTH took the stage at the old punker-friendly time of 7:30pm (seriously!). The three-piece – the inimitable Ryan Young on guitars and vocals, Kevin Rotter on bass, and the return of longtime drummer Ryan Fischer on, well, on drums – ripped into “Jackie Lee” from 2006’s Hospitals to kick things off. The band chose to forgo the traditional band-logo artwork backdrop and instead utilized the video screen to advertise a pretty sweet deal on twin lobster rolls from D’Angelo for the duration of their set, albeit a deal from seven years ago. (Side note – Romaine lettuce doesn’t belong on a lobster roll, but I suppose if you’re in New England and you’ve opted to get your lobster rolls from D’Angelo, you’ve long since thrown caution to the wind.) After a few more crowd favorites, it was into the business at hand, celebrating In Desolation cover-to-cover. Ryan made a few comments about how In Desolation is the album nobody actually likes, which may have just been Young taking the piss as he is wont to do. In fact I hope it was him taking the piss, in no small part because In Desolation is probably my favorite OWTH record. Its raw emotion holds up extraordinarily well after a decade-and-a-half, “Just Breathe” and “Old Man” and obviously “Clear The Air” especially. Young has obviously had time and distance between the events that went into the album’s writing, but from a performance standpoint, the material is as haunting as ever and Young channels every bit of the same visceral reaction night in and night out. It’s a lesson in startling intensity, balanced with plenty of inter-song banter (and lobster rolls) to keep things from overdosing on bleakness.
Then, around about 8:30pm, it was time for the headliners to take the stage (accompanied by an actual Smoking Popes backdrop). The foursome – frontman Josh Caterer and longtime drummer Mike Felumlee accompanied by touring bandmates Reuben Baird on bass and Jack Sibilski on guitar at stage right and stage left respectively – ripped into “Golden Moment” to kick off their portion of the festivities. The lead single from their latest album, last month’s Lovely Things, is a perfect, uptempo shredder that sets a pitch-perfect tone for what’s to come. Then it was on to the matter at hand, Born To Quit start-to-finish. The band released an updated and recorded live-in-studio version of Born To Quit last year – here’s our interview with Josh about it – and it’s fair to say that both that version (which included lifelong Popes Matt and Eli Caterer on their traditional bass and guitar duties) and this version demonstrate that the album itself has legs. It’s songs of falling in and out of love (sometimes in back-to-back songs, a la “Mrs. You & Me” and “Just Broke Up”) performed with such sincerity and earnestness that they belie the sometimes juvenile nature of many of the similarly themed albums written by the Popes pop-punk scenemates of the early and mid 1990s.
When Caterer and I chatted about the new album a month or so ago, I made an off-hand comment about how for some of us for whom organized religion had fallen out of favor, we replaced that sort of connection and worship for lack of a better word with live music. I don’t necessarily mean to suggest that seeing the Smoking Popes live circa 2025 is a religious experience…but it’s not far off. The band is tight as a drum live, anchored by the lockstep connection between the rhythm section. The stretched out length of the headlining set (compared to the last time we shot the Popes, on their opening slot supporting Get Up Kids last year) gave Caterer and Sibilski the space to constantly take turns trading lead guitar licks, with Sibilski maintaining a sense of constant motion on his half of the stage, endlessly jumping, head-banging, and perfecting his Townshend-esque windmill. We’ve spoken before on these pages about Caterer’s ability to write songs of love and heartbreak in a way that still holds up over the decades without turning sappy (at best) or overly cringey (at worst). That’s certainly true on record, but it’s especially on display in a live setting whether on classics like “Need You Around” and “Megan” or on more recent jams like “Madison” and the post-Lovely Stuff anthem “Allegiance.” The Popes brought the evening to a close with a full-crowd singalong version of their 1997 classic “I Know You Love Me” that found Caterer shedding himself of his gorgeous sunburst Coronado II (which somehow sounds even better than it looks, which is a high bar) and singing with the crowd from the front of the stage. It felt perfect; a cathartic, revivalist moment acknowledging that we’re all in this fight together and that if we stay pulling in the same direction in the face of all the bullshit and focus on love and community, we just might be alright.
Flip through our IG galleries for more shots from the evening below!
If I can be allowed a moment of self-indulgence before we begin this story, allow me to peel back the curtain on the process of creating a feature story here at Dying Scene HQ. Most times when you book an interview – even for a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants operation like Dying Scene – things tend to go […]
“My whole life has been a trip since I met these guys.” – Ceschi Ramos (L) on his relationship w/fellow Codefendants Fat Mike (C) and Sam King (R) – Photo by Nic Hampshire. Cover photo by Sean Carlton Jones
If I can be allowed a moment of self-indulgence before we begin this story, allow me to peel back the curtain on the process of creating a feature story here at Dying Scene HQ. Most times when you book an interview – even for a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants operation like Dying Scene – things tend to go generally according to plan, occasional technical glitches notwithstanding. You pick your preferred method of communication, find a place where you’re relatively free of interruptions, make the scheduled call, exchange pleasantries, and get down to business, largely sticking to your predetermined bullet point questions, leaving room for the conversation to wanted and twist and turn in ways you maybe didn’t foresee along the way. Then, you exchange thank yous and joke about how long it’s going to take to transcribe and you wrap it up and begin work on the actual story. But then there are those times that the plan shifts on you right from the jump and it turns into something cool and wonderful in ways you hadn’t expected and makes the story better than you’d hoped and it was no fault of your own. Such was the story of the trip we took here…
The plan here was to chat with Ceschi Ramos, who alongside Sam King (Get Dead) and obviously Fat Mike (NOFX, etc) makes up the three-headed songwriting monster that is Codefendants. Yours truly has interviewed both Sam and Mike on a few occasions, but had never had the chance to chop it up with Ramos, who in addition to his spot in Codefendants has been an extraordinarily unique singer and songwriter and storyteller in the acoustic folk punk indie hip hop crossover world, if that’s a thing. He’s also from the state of Connecticut, and while my interview career at DS is well into its stubborn teenage years at this point, and while Connecticut is the state I’ve spent far-and-away the most time in without actually living there, a quick check at my list reveals that I’ve never actually chatted on the books with someone from the Constitution and/or Nutmeg State. The plan – at least in my head – was to chat about the new standalone Codefendants single, “Right Wrong Man,” and about their upcoming gigs at Punk Rock Bowling and the Punk Rock Museum in Vegas and Rhyme Fest in LA and probably a little about the New Haven music scene (shut up, it’s a real thing).
And so imagine my surprise when Ceschi’s camera jumped to life and revealed not only his face, but those of Sam and Mike over his right shoulder. As it turns out, Codefendants were actively working on new music, and so we connected with Ceschi and friends from Fat Mike’s recording studio in the middle of a session for what will become the group’s second full-length. We can’t tell you many spoilers, although we can tell you that there is another track that features legendary rapper The D.O.C. in a bigger role than he had on “Fast Ones.” And while the album isn’t in the can yet, we can tell you that the aforementioned single/video “Right Wrong Man” won’t be on it. “The new single is a song that we’re dropping off the album cause we didn’t think it was good enough for the album,” Mike explains. “I just think the other songs are better,” adds Ceschi, “(but) the video was my most fun video moment for me. It’s a lot of fun. And I love working with INDECLINE.“
Codefendants’ previous full-length, 2023’s This Is Crime Wave, and the stand-alone singles like “Living Las Vegas” and “Counting Back From 13” have been self-described as “genre-fluid,” and that trend continues on both “Right Wrong Man” and the still-to-be-completed upcoming full-length, though Mike quips “it’s (called) riot pop. It’s a new genre.” “It sounds like if Gorillaz had more balls…or drug problems,” jokes Ceschi.
Ceschi Ramos performing with Codefendants, Somerville, MA
Much of that genre fluidity has been by design, with none of the band’s members being too eager to recreate sounds they’ve already used in other projects. “When we first started the project, Mike was REALLY adamant about not sounding too punk rock,” Ceschi explains. “We had what I think were some really great punk rock songs that he totally canned because “oh that one’s got too fast a beat” you know?”Just now we’re entertaining hardcore again.” And it wasn’t just NOFX sounds that the band are careful to not recreate. “Sam and I wrote this song, and it felt too much like a Get Dead song, so we canned that one as well…it might actually be a Get Dead song now!“
Mike and Sam and Ceschi have close to three-quarters of a century of combined songwriting experience between them in their prior projects, but that doesn’t mean the collaborative process in this project has been easy, particularly when it comes to lyrics. “I’ve never been in a project with two great songwriters,” explains Mike. “We all have to be happy with something. We all have to love it before we release it, and it really works that way.” “We’re all really good friends and trust each other too,” adds Ceschi. “We’ll shout out edits. Sometimes it’s chaotic, sometimes people fucking run out of the studio!“
The bond that has been formed between the three might be publically centered on music and creation, but it’s a marriage that’s helped shepherd them each through some difficult personal times. When work started on new material a couple of years back, “I think we were all kind of depressed or going through our shit,” says Ceschi. “I was,” adds Mike. Even the band’s origin story dates back to some trying personal times that coincided with peak pandemic lockdowns. As Ceschi explains it: “I flew from Puerto Rico where my family’s from and Sam was just on his shit and he was just going through a divorce and he’s like, “come out to L.A. I got a session” and I couldn’t have guessed that it would have led to what it led to. But it’s changed my entire life and I’m very grateful.” “Changed my life too,” Mike adds later.
And while any relationship formed during and after trauma and personal hardships can be a tumultuous one – “this band is going to end tragically,” jokes Mike – it’s also capable of creating some beautiful and surreal and compelling moments. “That tour with NOFX was an unbelievable privilege,” states Ceschi. “I have been doing this for 20 years DIY, running my own label. I feel like I grinded my way to some attention, but it took a lot of teeth-pulling to get where I was. And the fact that I can now play to 10 or 20 thousand people at a show…past age 40…is unheard of, you know?“
A quick search through the back end of the DS Archives (don’t try it on the front end – it’s broken because this site is super wonky, but that’s punk rock baby!) reveals pages and pages of stories featuring Sam’s work in Get Dead and obviously Fatty’s work in NOFX and obviously in helping to build and maintain the punk rock scene over the course of several decades with Fat Wreck Chords. But it also reveals that we’ve been woefully behind covering Ceschi’s career, which has been lengthy and genre-fluid in its own right. Ceschi moved from Berkeley to southern Connecticut early in his teenage years and quickly enmeshed himself in a burgeoning scene that centered on places like the Tune Inn in New Haven. In the annals of rock history, New Haven specifically and Connecticut in general tend to be overlooked due to their relative location wedged as a drive-thru between the Boston and New York markets, but maybe for that reason it became a bit of a unique and diverse gem of a scene. “New Haven had a huge hardcore and ska scene,” Ceschi explains. “Probably the most well-known band from New Haven from the ska scene was Spring Heeled Jack. I also saw the birth of Hatebreed. I saw the birth of a hardcore scene that was one of the biggest hardcore scenes in the nation.” And no, that’s not hyperbole. “Being there at the time, we were on fire. Everybody was there. In fact, I listened to an interview with Madball – and it’s funny, because we’re actually opening for Madball in Italy – and they were like “yeah, Connecticut was actually a bigger scene for us than New York.”
As indicated above, Ceschi’s solo career doesn’t really fit in with a particular genre, unless folk-punk-progressive-hip-hop-latin-art-collective is a genre. As such, he started his own record label, Fake Four, in the mid-00s as a way to release music for he and his brother and their friends and crew who were navigating in similar underground spaces. “I’ve run a record label since 2008 because of necessity,” says Ceschi. “And in meeting Mike, it’s just kind of like my, I had a big brother moment with him where it’s literally the same shit I did, but he just did it on the biggest scale possible, you know?“
Speaking of some of the biggest scales possible, Codefendants are playing Punk Rock Bowling TOMORROW (Sunday 5/25) at 4:10PM on the Monster Party Stage. The single release party for “Right Wrong Man” will take place at the Punk Rock Museum on Tuesday the 27th, and will feature Sam and Ceschi giving a guided tour, then playing a set in the Pennywise garage with Zeta as their backing band (minus Dani – details on that below). Next on the docket after the Vegas festivities is an appearance with the legendary D.O.C. at Rhyme Fest at the LA Coliseum on August 16th. Tickets here. Fire up the “Right Wrong Man” video and check out our full wide-ranging conversation with Ceschi (and surprise appearances by Sam and Fat Mike) below!
***The interview below has been edited and condensed for content and clarity. Yes, really. ***
Dying Scene (Jay Stone): Thanks for doing this. This is awesome. I didn’t know all of you were there together.
Ceschi Ramos: We didn’t know that it was going to happen either.
This is pretty awesome.
Fat Mike: It is awesome. We just finished a song and we’re almost finished another song. And boy are these guys drunk. They don’t do cocaine like me, so they can just get drunk.
Sam King: I wear long sleeves now. (*all laugh*)
Fat Mike: Alright, what do you want?
Well let me start by saying thanks to all of you because this is pretty rad and unexpected. I thought I was just going to have Ceschi and we’d talk about Connecticut and shit.
Ceschi: We can do that!
So you’re writing actively. You’re quite literally in the studio as we speak. Like almost finished with Crime Wave Two Electric Boogaloo or whatever we’ll call it?
Ceschi: The Next Album.
Fat Mike: It’s riot pop. It’s a new genre.
Ceschi: Every album is a new genre.
Fat Mike: We’re actually working on lyrics together, which is really nice.
How does that work? How do you guys write, just in studio? Do you bring ideas to each other or do you just kind of riff? How does that whole thing work?
Fat Mike: Well the thing is, I don’t like doing that at all.
Right!
Fat Mike: I just fucking write my lyrics.
Ceschi: This guy was a dictator before. I had to be like “Yo, stop! Stop editing my lyrics!”
Fat Mike: Eric Melvin has a song called “Riot.” He sings “Riot!…Riot!…Riot!…” He sounds like a fucking frog. (*all laugh*)
Ceschi: Are you saying this because you’re not involved in writing his lyrics? (*laughs*)
Fat Mike: I’ve never been in a project with two great songwriters, and we get the best. We all have to be happy with something. We all have to love it before we release it, and it really works that way. We have this song “The Fix,” and I wrote all these lyrics and they’re like “nah…nah…I’m not singing that. You can sing it, Mike, but I ain’t singing that.” And I’m not a singer in the band, so it gets frustrating, but today it’s been working so well.
Ceschi: Yeah, we’re all lead singers in our own rights, so it’s a little bit challenging for us to have this group, but we’re all really good friends and trust each other too, so we write together. Sometimes we bring ideas to the table and it gets edited in the studio. I mean, Marcel too (*waves*) Marcel has been recording a lot of our new album, and he sees it. He sees us editing together. We’ll shout out edits. Sometimes it’s chaotic. Sometimes people fucking run out of the studio.
Fat Mike: It’s ridiculous. We’ve been working on this record for two years.
Ceschi: Yeah. We used to, and so it started when we lived together at this mansion in Las Vegas that Mike rented kind of, we were all, we were all going through splits at the time with our partners, and we ended up in this big ass house together. I think we were all kind of depressed or going through our shit.
Fat Mike: I was.
Ceschi: Yeah, I was too.
Fat Mike: And Sam beat up my fucking vacuum cleaner.
Ceschi: We had a lot of interesting nights there.
Fat Mike: It was racist because my vacuum cleaner was black. And a robot. So I’m clearly a plantation owner. (*all laugh*)
Ceschi: Sam’s white rage, you know? I was trying to explain to him how Irish people weren’t even white when they first came here.
A hundred percent right.
Ceschi: Oh I know, that was what I studied in school I was a cultural studies major.
Yeah, but that’s a weird conversation to have…
Ceschi: It’s a very difficult thing for people to wrap their heads around, the origins of whiteness, but I studied that shit in university and I mean, like I was trying to explain that to Sam, he got so frustrated, he kicked a Roomba across the fucking hallway.
Well, I mean, it’s a good thing you guys have writing to fall back on in living in a situation like that, because that could have gone like…like the fact that you had a positive outlet is good because even with the positive outlet, you were shooting shotguns into doors and kicking the vacuum. So it’s a good thing you have music because that could have like ended tragically, the three of you being depressed and coming out of relationships, living in pretty close quarters…
Fat Mike: This band is going to end tragically. (*all laugh*) Don’t fucking..
Ceschi: … that might be why we’re going to be the biggest band. I mean, it’s definitely going to be the biggest band in my life. It’s just going to end tragically.
Fat Mike: What’s your name?
My name’s Jay.
Fat Mike: Hi Jay. What’s your last name?
Stone.
Fat Mike: Oh, I like people with two-syllable full names. Jay Stone. You know? It’s easy to say. I bet people call you that. They use both your names.
They call me Jay Stone, yeah. It just becomes one word, it’s easier that way.
Ceschi: It’s like an actor’s name. That’s a strong name.
Fat Mike: It’s a strong name. Jay Stone. So Jay Stone, have you heard this new record yet?
Um, no, it’s not even done yet! I heard the new single. The new single’s cool.
Fat Mike: You know that the new single is a song that we’re dropping off the album cause we didn’t think it was good enough for the album.
Is that right? I’m well, I wondered why that came out, but then there’s like no word of an album.
Fat Mike: We didn’t want to give them a good song off the album. So we gave this song that we all planned on dropping. (*both laugh*)
Ceschi: It’s kind of grown on me though.
And what do you not like about it?
Ceschi: I like it now.
Fat Mike: The other songs are better, that’s the only thing.
Ceschi: I just think the other songs are better.
That’s fair.
Ceschi: And the video might’ve been one of the most…that was my most fun video moment for me. It’s a lot of fun. And I love working with InDecline.
The InDecline guys are awesome. That crew is awesome.
Ceschi (*sits down solo on couch*): Ask me some real questions now, man. (*both laugh*)
This is a…this is a trip already.
Ceschi: My life has become an absolute trip since I met these guys. (*laughs*)
I can only imagine. And so actually that’s one of the things I wanted to talk about. Like you’ve been around for a long time by yourself and obviously Codefendant’s been around for a few years, but for somebody who’s been around for a while, do you still get moments that like, holy shit, this is my life? Like, and I ask, I ask you because like, even just the limited shows that are coming up for Codefendants is like Punk Rock Bowling, then the release party and the tour at Punk Rock Museum and then like Rhyme Fest with The D.O.C. and Onyx and Dilated Peoples…
Ceschi: And then it’s like Europe with the Refused and Madballs.
That’s fucking rad. Like, isn’t it? I mean, that’s still a thing for you, these “pinch me” moments or whatever?
Ceschi: All the time, man. That tour with NOFX was just an unbelievable privilege, you know what I mean? I have been doing it 20 years DIY, running my own label. I feel like I grinded my way to some attention, but it was like, it took a lot of teeth pulling to get where I was. And the fact that I can now play to 10 to 20,000 people at a show…at past age 40, it’s like, it’s unheard of, you know?
It’s pretty fucking awesome. And I have to say, like, at some level, I have to say thank you to you guys collectively, because I’ve been doing this thing with Dying Scene for a long time.I’ve been in and around the punk rock scene for a long time. And I get bored all the time. And like, cause things just sound stale, and I end up listening to the same eight bands I’ve listened to forever. And then I remember hearing about this Codefendants project first coming together, because I’ve been a fan of Mike’s forever and yours for a long time and Sam’s forever through Get Dead and I remember thinking, “well, how the fuck is that going to work? Like that sort of amalgamation…” and then hearing it, I was like, “oh, this is awesome.” And it like reignited that sort of like thing in me. So I thank you guys for that, man.
Ceschi: That’s really, really kind. I think it works because we’re actually friends. We actually respect one another and we could actually yell at one another and kind of like, you know what I mean?
Fat Mike: Like I was yelling the other day and I came back like 30 seconds later and I apologized and I realized what a dick I was being.
Ceschi: Cause I was living with one of my lyrics. I really liked one of my lyrics and I, you know, I’m in a song. I think I’m a pretty, pretty decent songwriter and I think Mike’s a very great songwriter. And I think Sam is too.
Fat Mike: We had other lyrics that we worked on together. And I had this guy sing harmonies on it and it’s like Simon and Garfunkel, and I worked so long on it that I was attached to how hard I worked on it. And when he told me how important his lyrics were to him, it took me a few minutes to realize, “yeah, wait a second, this is important to Ceschi.”
Ceschi: It was a good moment of like camaraderie…
Fat Mike: and humility for me.
Ceschi: And yeah, ’cause Mike’s the boss, you know what I mean? Like this motherfucker built a DIY empire, you know what I mean? That’s the way I talk about it. I think Mike is the biggest DIY artist of all time.
Yeah, I could agree with that.
Ceschi: You know, it’s the same shit we’ve all done. I’ve run a record label since 2008 because of necessity. A hip-hop label called Fake Four. And in meeting Mike, it’s just kind of like my, I had a big brother moment with him where it’s literally the same shit I did, but he just did it on the biggest scale possible, you know? It’s amazing. Even these festivals, Mike said “fuck off Live Nation.” Mike told a lot of people to fuck off because he wanted to do it his own way. And that’s what the last NOFX tour was. It was his way. It was like it was an entire team of people that he had known for sometimes like 30-plus years. And it’s it’s incredible to be included in that world. And I feel I’m super grateful. And to answer your original question, I’m constantly, I’m constantly in these states of like, “what the fuck is my life now?” Like my personal life in many ways has completely imploded, but it’s all worth it because it’s sort of like this marriage to music that I never thought (would happen). I was very ready to quit music and get a regular job, be a teacher again or something, maybe go back to school, you know? Very close. I’m going to get out of here because you guys are working on this song.
You had known Sam before knowing Mike, but then like how long after meeting them, did you realize that like, “oh, this could actually be a thing? Like put our egos aside because that’s a thing, right? Let’s put our egos aside and do this actual like project.
Ceschi: I think it was just the first sessions with Sam, just Sam and I. Sam kind of filled some void in my life, and I think I feel some void in his when we first met. We had recently lost some of our best friends. You know, I lost like 10 friends – like my best friends since childhood – in the span of a couple of years, right? He did, too. He lost some of the closest people. I think that connection, we feel that for each other. And we were also kind of like I think a lot of the theme of this new album is that we’re lifers. This is our marriage. You know, I’m actually going through a divorce right now, like an actual divorce. I think it’s solidified this whole thing of being lifers for music. Whatever this job is (*both laugh*). I think I think my connection with Sam, I think being around Mike, Sam and Mike are such good friends. We were writing a lot of the stuff at Mike’s house, even when before Mike was involved. I remember writing, sitting in Mike’s tennis court. Mike was inside recording like NOFX stuff. I specifically remember him recording that song “I’m A Rat,” which is one of the newer NOFX records. And we’re hearing him sing that. And we had to walk away from the studio because we were being too loud, writing the song “Suicide by Pigs.” We finished that shit in like Mike’s tennis court sitting on the floor, you know, and Mike started noticing and then we brought him like three demos and he’s like, “wait, I want to be involved with this. This is like this is special.”
Was that intimidating? Having somebody like Mike, who is obviously a legend in DIY, a legend in punk rock, but he’s very much his own like songwriter, too. So is that like did that become like an intimidating thing or was it just kind of natural because you were friends?
Ceschi: Yeah, you know, the thing is, even though I’ve known NOFX’s music since I was about 13 years old…
Like all of us…
Ceschi: Right! I’ve met a lot of famous people. And I kind of just treat them all as artists, right? Like my equal. Like, I met Christina Ricci recently, right? I looked at her as another artist that I respect. You know what I mean? That I wanted to talk to. I met Morrissey oddly. You know, Mike was my friend first in a way, and we didn’t even think about making music together. And when he got involved, I knew that it would make the whole thing bigger. But we were willing to do it even if Mike wasn’t involved. We were willing to fucking grind this shit DIY and like, you know, put it through our outlets and Fake Four and whatever. His involvement changed the whole trajectory, right? It made it all more important or whatever. But the best part of it was actually this camaraderie that was built like this. I remember like just late nights at his studio in Sherman Oaks and writing songs together. I hadn’t done that so long, I was a solo artist for so long.
I stopped thinking about fame and I really don’t entertain fame very much. I understand the farce of it all. So, of course, I respect him very much. But it was like he was just another artist equal to us. And yeah, I think all three of us maybe checked each other’s egos at times. But that was really good for all of us. And, you know, so I should say this was like a lockdown time.
Like there was still deep, deep pandemic when we all met and started this band. I shouldn’t have flown to L.A. when I did. (*both laugh*) I flew from Puerto Rico where my family’s from and Sam was just on his shit and he was just going through a divorce and he’s like, “come out to L.A. I got a session” and I couldn’t have guessed that it would have led to what it led to. But it’s changed my entire life and I’m very grateful.
Fat Mike: (*walks through the background*) Changed my life!
Ceschi: I mean, I think we’re like very close friends and like that’s really the most important part of it all. You think that I saw a lot of… honestly, Mike is such a legend, and maybe this is some inside baseball shit…I guess from afar I came in and I saw a lot of people that were just leeching off him and kind of doing fake jobs. This is what it’s like to have like a hundred employees. It’s like, “what does that guy do? This guy is lazy. This guy is terrible at his job.” Like I wasn’t saying these things. I was just noticing. I was like, and I’m proud of him. I’m actually proud of him for retiring. NOFX caused him a lot of stress. You know what I mean?
Like anything, it becomes a business, right? Like, it can be DIY still, but the bigger…
Ceschi: But that’s still like… there were 20,000 people in Montreal, 20,000. We played the 15,000 people in Los Angeles. I mean, NOFX sold over a million dollars in merch on the final shows alone.
That’s crazy.
Ceschi: It’s beyond just “the business.” It’s stressful.
Yeah, right.
Ceschi: The more money’s involved, you know…
Right! More money, more problems, right?
Ceschi: But yeah, I saw it. I saw the stress and I care about him. So I was like, “fuck, dude, you do this for so many people and so many people don’t appreciate it.” Like any boss. I’ve been a boss, too. You know, unfortunately, it’s kind of like I fell into that position. I call myself an anti-boss because of my politics and whatever. But that is like I’ve fallen into that position where I’m the person helping people pay for their kids, working on it still and shit. It’s a weird position to be in. It’s stressful.
That’s why I don’t do it anymore. Right.
Ceschi: So for him, it’s that times a hundred? Like, damn, bro. So I was very aware of that coming into it. And yeah, I don’t know. I don’t even know where this conversation started. (*both laugh*)
I don’t either. But it’s going in a good place, I think. So I was actually looking at my list. I’ve done, I don’t know, a few hundred interviews now for this thing, but I don’t think I have ever interviewed anybody who hailed from my wife’s home state of Connecticut. (*both laugh*) She grew up not far from New Haven. Her dad still lives not far from New Haven.
Ceschi: Oh where?
He lives in Milford now. She grew up in New Britain.
Ceschi: I have a lot of friends from Milford.
Yeah, it’s an interesting place. New Haven’s an interesting place. Having spent some time in that area, like the haves and the have-nots all live really sort of close together, like on top of each other. And like, even just the campus of Yale is both ends of the spectrum in the same place. But I’m sort of curious, like like what the scene was like growing up in Connecticut and like whether a folk punk scene or a punk rock scene or a hip hop scene…was it all of the above, or was it sort of siloed?
Ceschi: OK, so we’re probably from similar eras. I moved from Berkeley, California to New Haven when I was thirteen. So, man, I got to say it was a very exciting time in New Haven. New Haven had a huge hardcore and ska scene.
I was going to say they had a big ska scene.
Ceschi: Yeah. So probably the most well-known band from New Haven from the ska scene was a band called Spring Heeled Jack.
One of my favorite bands of all time.
Ceschi: Yeah! I’m friends with all of those guys. And in fact, like J.R. from fucking from Less Than Jake still lives in Connecticut.
He will always be J.R. from Spring Heeled Jack. Like he’s been in Less Than Jake for 20 years or whatever, but he will always be J.R. from Spring Heel…Chris Rhodes will always be Chris Rhodes from Spring Heel.
Ceschi: You know, all those guys, Rick, Mike Pellegrino. Like I know Tyler, who ended up joining…
Both: Rest in Peace.
Ceschi: Yeah…he ended up joining, you know, Real Big Fish, I believe he was in there for a while. You know, these are characters, elders of mine that I looked up to. Also, I saw the birth of Hatebreed, you know? I saw the birth of a hardcore scene that was one of the biggest hardcore scenes in the nation, I’m pretty sure. You know, the first person to ever record my music was a member of 100 Demons. You know, my cousin, who is 10 years older than me, he was in a band that was managed by the management of Rage Against the Machine. And they were a band called Gargantua Soul. And they played like the New Haven Coliseum with At The Drive In and Gang Starr and Rage. You know, like they did Woodstock 99. The 90s in New Haven was really an amazing time. And there was a venue called the Tune-Inn that was like our main spot.
I would go to shows with my now-wife there. One of our first shows together was a Big D and the Kids Table show with like Thumper and Sgt. Skagnetti.
Ceschi: Oh, Sgt. Skagnetti! Those guys are my boys. They’re like fans of my solo music, and I’ve opened for them. And past the point, I probably should be opening for them. You know what I mean? Just out of respect to them.
Like, right, right, right. Yeah, that’s so funny. One of the first things my wife and I ever did when we were dating, like 20, no, almost 30 years ago was a show in Tune-Inn.
Ceschi: No way. I’m talking to a person who actually knows what the Tune-Inn is. That’s awesome.
Oh, hell yeah. Didn’t they have like a fence down the middle, where like the under 21 people were on one side and 21 plus or the drinking people were on the other?
Ceschi: That happened later. They didn’t introduce alcohol to the Tune Inn for years and years. That was like late 90s. Before that, it was all ages and there was no alcohol.
Oh, wow.
Ceschi: And it was just like us, like smoking cigarettes until I became straight edge (*both laugh*) and just fucking beating each other up. I remember some of my most. This is funny now, but I think some of the most exciting shows were like, 25 Ta Life. 25 Ta Life at that time was so exciting. He would bring like a whole flea market of fucking underground gear. And then I think I saw Candiria there for the first time. That totally changed the trajectory of my music. Candiria was this band, I don’t know if you ever heard of those guys. They fell into the hardcore scene, but they were a metal band who played like jazz fusion. So this is before Dillinger Escape Plan and all that. I think they were quite influential to them. I think they must have been quite influential and an influence on Dillinger Escape Plan, in fact. So they were like crazy musicians. I saw them in like ninety-five, ninety-six for the first time. I went to any show I could at that at that venue. It was it was just my. I went every weekend, no matter what the event. I remember going to shows there that were bad, that were like indie rock bands that three people would show up or five people. I just went no matter what.
Is that where some of like the seed was planted? Like “I could do this!” Whether it was punk rock or hip hop or whatever.
Ceschi: No, that was my cousin. My cousin Opus. He’s the drummer of Cro-Mags right now. He’s been a thrash and punk drummer since he was 16 and he’s 10 years older than me. So it was just watching him doing it. Honestly…I’ll be honest. Opus was a weed dealer and a drummer. And I did all those things, too. (*laughs*) I went to fucking prison for weed. I think he went too. I think he caught a case for that, too, honestly. It’s so silly sounding now.
Isn’t wild to tell younger kids today that like you could do legit prison time for weed? Like you could do numbers…
Ceschi: It’s crazy. I’ve had friends that did five, six years for weed. Like federal. It’s insane.
Yeah, right. It’s insane.
Ceschi: And at the time that it happened, it was insane.
Yeah, right, right.
Ceschi: I was very aware of the fact that it was a really dumb law that I was going under for. So, yeah, it’s so cool to me that, you know, about this place. Did you ever know? I loved a band called Jiker that was based out of New Haven. They were like a skate-punk ska band. They had they were just fast skate punk. But like with horns. They were one of my favorite bands. All of them. And the thing is, Fernando, who ran the Tune Inn, he had a record label and he had a little record store in the Tune Inn.
Yeah, right, right, right, right.
Ceschi: Yeah. And a lot of those bands. In fact, the band called Blind Justice…the singer of Blind Justice, Kris Keyes, was another huge influence on me, and he became the singer of my cousin’s band Gargantua Soul. So there was just… there’s a lot of that. The guitarist of Dismay, which was a hardcore band out of New Haven, became the guitarist of Gargantua Soul. One of my best friends, Viquel James from Blind Justice, you know, went on some of my first tours. He was Talib Kweli’s guitarist as well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ceschi: You know, it was just a lot of like elders. These guys are like a lot of my buddies, they’re like almost 10 years older than me, you know, so.
I think that scene doesn’t get enough credit for…
Ceschi: At the time, though…being there at the time, we were on fire. Everybody was there. In fact, I listened to an interview with Madball. And it’s funny because we’re actually opening for Madball in Italy. But like. Which…my childhood shit is flipping over that. But I listened to an interview and they were like, yeah, “Connecticut was actually a bigger scene for us than New York.”
Interesting. Yeah. Interesting.
Ceschi: It makes a lot of sense when I think about my friends who came out of Connecticut: With Honor, all the Stillborn shit, 100 Demons, Hatebreed, you know.
Yeah, I feel like Connecticut and Jersey, like at least for me and my music became like like more influential than even than a lot of the Boston scene was. And I grew up like half an hour from Boston.
Ceschi: But I remember some cool bands from Boston. I remember that band. I like that band Tree.
Yeah, Tree was all right. Yeah.
Ceschi: And eventually I was in a band called Dead by Wednesday and we played we played Massachusetts a lot. Yeah. And we played all over. New Bedford to Boston. Yeah, I can go on and on about that.
Yeah, right. Do you think that the fact that the scene was as vital and as varied as it was at the time – you guys have mentioned Codefendants as being “genre fluid”…
Ceschi: Haha, yeah, Mike said that. I would never have said it like that … (*both laugh*)
Yeah, but it makes sense!
Ceschi: Oh it does! It is true.
Even internally, you had this career in the folk punk scene, Mike was obviously NOFX, Sam, our people probably know most from Get Dead of course, but his roots are 100% hip hop.
Ceschi: Straight up. That’s another crazy connection. His entire crew from San Francisco is people I’ve known for twenty years. I just never met Sam during that time, but I know literally everyone else from his group.
That’s really weird.
Ceschi: I met them because of touring in Europe too. And like, Derek Weisberg, who did the cover for one of my albums, he knew about Sam years before I did. It’s crazy (*laughs*)
You met when you were supposed to meet, right? Like, maybe Codefendants wouldn’t be Codefendants if you had met in 2004 versus 2020 or whatever, right? Whether you believe in that shit or not, maybe it happens for a reason.
Ceschi: Oh it very much feels like that. It’s one of those moments in life that is still surreal to me, man. All the time. I keep experiencing shit that blows my mind.
That’s awesome, and I like that as someone who is a fan of yours and roots for you. I think that what you’re doing is different enough. Like, when it comes to writing new music, you’re not writing a new NOFX song, you’re not writing Ceschi songs, you’re not writing Get Dead songs, so I’m sorta curious how that process even starts, and can you call each other on like “no, that sounds too much like this old song” or whatever.
Ceschi: I think when we first started the project, Mike was REALLY adamant about not sounding too punk rock. We had what I think were some really great punk rock songs that he totally canned because “oh that one’s got too fast a beat” you know? Just now we’re entertaining hardcore again. We were just listening to Bad Brains in the studio thinking about how we could do like a two-step beat. We’re just entertaining this stuff now because he wanted to get so far away from what he was known for. Luckily most of the things we were bringing to the table were pretty far from the things he was known for. But I remember bringing a fast punk song to the table, and they threw it on the B-Side of a ten-inch. I thought that song was pretty damn good, but because it was a fast punk song – it was like a Jawbreaker kind of vibe – he was like “absolutely not. It’s too punk.” (*both laugh*) And we were just talking about this, Sam and I wrote this song – Sam wrote most of it, I think I wrote the guitar. And it felt too much like a Get Dead song, so we canned that one as well, and it might actually be a Get Dead song now. It’s a super good song, it just didn’t fit with the vibe that we were going for. This new album is almost like if Gorillaz had more balls or something. (*both laugh*) Like if Gorillaz all had drug problems. (*both laugh*)
When you’re writing new music, do you have to figure out how you’re going to be able to pull this stuff off when you’re playing live? Because sometimes it’s you and Sam, sometimes it’s you and Zeta, sometimes it’s you and the Get Dead guys? Do you talk about that stuff when you’re writing or is it just like “fuck it, we’ll figure it out later”?
Ceschi: We’re normally like “Fuck it,” but that’s changed a bit on the new album. We have a few songs that I don’t think we’re going to be able to do live, which is going to be a bummer to some people because one song in particular is a song where The D.O.C. is the prominent voice on the song. He’s got hte biggest verses, it’s one of the best songs on the album, and it’s him! We’re going to be able to do it at Rhyme Fest because he’s coming out for that, but we won’t be able to really play that one live and it’s kind of a bummer. I’m not going to go up there and imitate The D.O.C. I’ll go up there and imitate Mike because Mike’s a closer friend of mine. (*both laugh*) “That’s right, right where it all went wrong!” (*both laugh*)
And Mike certainly wouldn’t mind you taking the piss out of him for doing that.
Ceschi: Yeah, we were just talking about that. But The D.O.C. wouldn’t be possible. It’s not authentic. You can’t mimic that voice. With “Fast Ones,” he’s the last verse, so it’s a little easier. With this one, there’s multiple verses in between our verses. But that’s one of the only songs that’s like that, and hopefully people like the other songs too. (*both laugh*) I think they’re pretty good too.
You’ve all but wound down playing shows solo and wrapped up the solo discography as Ceschi. Do you mind commenting on why? Does it feel like the solo project has run its course, or is it a desire to go all in on Codefendants going forward?
Ceschi: You know…..I never really came into music hoping to be a solo act. It was something that happened naturally because it was an economical choice for touring, recording etc. It never would have been my number 1 choice to be the guy alone on stage that everyone stares at and analyzes. Yet, that’s kind of the thing people knew me for even though I had been in 3 other bands. I like the idea of wrapping up a discography after 20 years – proud of the work I’ve done without compromising my artistic integrity ever. To be honest I think more artists should do that. We are in an era where churning out music like a machine is what tech companies want us to do. People do throw away art to keep their monthly listener counts high. fuck all that noise. Yes, Codefendants is something I’m fully going for. Perhaps my last major hurrah.
In both your solo music and with Codefendants, you’ve been very honest about some of the struggles you go through – depression, trauma dumping, etc. And really, Sam and Mike are similar). The line in “Right Wrong Man” about being a “self-saboteur since the day (you) were born” as a recent example. When you’re vulnerable like that, I’m sure you’re no stranger to fans approaching you about how much a song resonated with them, and telling you about their own struggles. Is that a thing that you get used to and does that ever get uncomfortable having to be a sort of therapist to people?
Ceschi: Talking to Sam about this recently… I realize I never made music for money or girls or social clout or whatever….it was my only form of therapy as a juvenile delinquent dealing with a difficult childhood, depression, etc. I think we want to be voices for the voiceless – write words clearly for people who don’t have that same outlet of expression. Still, it’s absolutely challenging to be looked at as a therapist or even a best friend to strangers who just know me from my music. People come at me like they’ve known me for years when we’ve never met. That’ll always be a trip.
Last time I saw you up in this neck of the woods – at the Crystal Ballroom in Somerville – was one of the cooler shows I’ve bene to in a long time, in part because the lineup had Ian “the punk cellist” on it and because Ian and Zeta and Myles “beatbox poet” all hopped on stage with you at different points. It felt loose and artistic and inspiring. In an ideal world, is that like a perfect example of what a Codefendants should be for you (because I feel like it was for me)? (Side note: it makes me happy to see Zeta play w/you guys. That band is ferocious and they don’t get enough credit. I saw them up here a few years back at free afternoon Labor Day celebration in a local park and it was one of the most cathartic sets I’ve seen in a long time.)
Ceschi: That was a really fun night ! Yes. I think we’d love to have that element at Codefendants shows more often. We’re even doing stuff like that at some big festivals. At the final NoFX show in San Pedro we had Zeta, The D.O.C., Stacey Dee & N8NoFace all up on stage with us. All codefendants in their own right. We see This Is Crime Wave as a growing movement of like minded artists that’s just spearheaded by Codefendants. And, yes, Zeta is one of the greatest live bands of all time in my opinion. It’s been an incredible honor to work with those brothers. Sadly, Dani has been forced to leave the United States – but we hope to all join forces again.
When last we spoke with Smoking Popes frontman Josh Caterer toward the end of 2024, the band were in the midst of what would ultimately be one of their busiest touring years in over a decade (and maybe closer to two). We spoke mostly about the unique re-recording of the band’s seminal 1994/1995 full-length Born […]
When last we spoke with Smoking Popes frontman Josh Caterer toward the end of 2024, the band were in the midst of what would ultimately be one of their busiest touring years in over a decade (and maybe closer to two). We spoke mostly about the unique re-recording of the band’s seminal 1994/1995 full-length Born To Quit which was released last year and about the changes in touring over a career that has spanned three full decades. But there were also tidbits in there about an as-yet-to-be-revealed new full-length record. The record was already in the can and was, as is so often the case, just patiently waiting for a release date.
Fast forward six months, and the release date for that then-untitled record is now upon us. The record, of course, is called Lovely Stuff, and it marks the band’s first full-length since 2018’s Into The Agony. On paper, it’s the longest break between full-length albums in the band’s thirty-plus-year career, which is a bit noteworthy given that the band were broken up from late 1998 until early 2005 (for the uninitiated, the band self-released their covers album The Party’s Over mid-breakup in 2003, five years after it was initially recorded). This time, the band never really went away, staying active on the road and in writing and recording music for a variety of projects as time allowed. But we also had a pesky little pandemic in the middle of this most recent break in released music, causing plans to change and change and assumedly change again. But according to the Popes’ frontman and principal songwriter Josh Caterer, the formation for what would eventually become the follow-up to Into The Agony found its genesis from a bit of a unique starting point.
“I was commissioned to write a song for an independent film that has yet to be made,” he explains rather candidly. A friend put Caterer in contact with the director of the film, and the as-yet-unnamed director gave Caterer a loose framework of what he was looking for. “He didn’t give me specific lines or phrases to use,” Caterer explains, stating instead that he was given the loose framework that the movie’s main character has a series of obstacles to overcome in her life and the rough narrative arc that might involve. The rest was left to Caterer, who is of course no stranger to writing songs about pain and anguish and loss and heartache. “The protagonist of the song,” he explains” is determined to not be overcome by darkness, and is determined to not give up. There’s a ferocity in this person that is like “I’m not going to surrender to my circumstances, no matter how bleak they might be.”
Caterer found himself inspired not only by the core of the character of the song, but by the unique nature of the process of crafting the song itself. Because while Caterer has a long history of creating characters and carving a narrative and a set of experiences for them, the characters are all created by him, and thus contain bits and pieces of his real-life experiences. This process – which resulted in the Lovely Stuff track “Never Gonna Break” – meant creating a story from someone else’s character’s story. “I was really inspired by the process of connecting with that part of being a person. The way that that sentiment was expressed in that song really inspired me to keep writing.”
It is fair and not hyperbolic to say that Lovely Stuff contains some of the band’s best material to date, a statement that is not made lightly by any stretch. Few and far between are the bands who’ve been able to successfully navigate the terrain in what I guess is the pop-punk end of the musical landscape for more than three decades, and especially to do so in a way that doesn’t come across as stale or repetitive or, dare I say, cringy. Caterer is conscious of maintaining a fresh perspective on songwriting as a songwriter as he grows as a person. “It should be an ongoing, interesting experience to kind of figure out what’s really driving you in life,” he explains, continuing that “some people seem like they get to a point where they’re just not wrestling with those questions anymore. And that’s a little frightening. I think we always should be.”
That initial burst of inspiration that spawned “Never Gonna Break” also spawned other new tracks, like lead single and already crowd-favorite “Golden Moment.” Other new tracks like “Madison” made their way into the band’s setlist as far back as 2023, part of what has been the band’s busiest touring calendar in decades. Allow me to insert myself into the story briefly by confirming that the live edition of the Smoking Popes circa 2024 sound as vital and important as they ever have, and that remains true from both sides of the stage even three-plus decades into the experience. “The live show is a chance for everybody in the room – artists and audience – to kind of share a relationship with the music,” Caterer tells. “These songs have a place in your life, and they mean something to you. That can all be mutually expressed and shared communally at a show, and it’s a beautiful thing.”
As was the case on previous Popes albums like Born To Quit, much of the new record was written and recorded in small, sometimes two-song batches. As writing continued, Caterer not only drew collaboration from feature-film makers, but found himself co-writing punk rock songs for the first time. A scan of the liner notes shows co-writing credits given to Caterer’s bandmate Mike Felumlee, and his wife, Stefanie. The former track, the acoustic-driven “You Will Always Have My Heart,” was a bit of a peculiar co-write, as it originally stemmed from a Felumlee solo song from two decades ago. The original version was entitled “The Drive Home,” and appeared on Felumlee’s solo record 64 Hours. Caterer fell in love with the song, reworked a few parts, added his own lyrics, and ran the new version by Felumlee. While inspired by the original song, it was different enough to warrant a name of its own as a Smoking Popes track. The latter song, the Stefanie Caterer co-penned “Fox River Dream,” was a bit more of a traditional co-write, where Josh got the process started, showed it to his wife – a writer in her own right – and incorporated some of her ideas. It was a bit of a new experience for Caterer. “I have a pretty strict internal editor” he states. “I feel like it’s cool to push yourself out of your comfort zone sometimes and collaborate with people in a way that makes you feel a little bit vulnerable. I think the thing that I don’t like about co-writing is you have to show people your process and you have to show people things before you’re done with them.”
And then, of course, there’s the album’s cover, the Wizard Of Oz classic “Over The Rainbow.” Made famous in its original version by the incomparable Judy Garland, the song perfectly encapsulates the overarching themes of the album, which involve finding light and resolve in the darkness and turmoil we’re all prone to experiencing. Caterer and the Popes are no strangers to incorporating Judy Garland’s work into their oeuvre – Into The Agony even had an unrequited love ode to Garland herself – but for many years were a little gunshy about attempting the iconic “Over The Rainbow.” “She is, it could be argued, the greatest singer of all time, and so it’s like you’re going to try to climb in the ring with Judy and you feel like your contribution to that song is going to be valid up against hers?” he laughs. “I’ve always been kind of sheepish about doing that – and I still am – but I just kind of developed a different perspective on it where I’m not trying to compete, it’s more of just an homage to the song. It really did feel like there was something written into this song that was perfect thematically and tonally for this album.”
Astute observers will note that the Popes have continued to release new material that isn’t even on Lovely Stuff. The track “Allegiance” was penned late last year and was released early this year as a unique, standalone track that is weighty enough to exist all on its own. It’s yet another track that came together in somewhat atypical fashion. “I wrote that song really quickly, two days after the election,” explains Caterer. Normally one to take his fair share of time parsing over lyrics and song structure, this song was written much more spur-of-the-moment. “I don’t even know how to describe how I felt at that time. I was filled with overwhelming emotions: rage and disgust, and I just had to get it out,” says Caterer. “That’s one of these times when I just picked up the guitar and just or of tried not to overthink it.”
While many – and I’d assume the overwhelming majority – of us were (and still are) feeling similar feelings of rage and despair and disgust about the election results, the feelings cut especially deep for Caterer, who has long since very publicly lived a life of faith and worship, only to see much of that belief system co-opted by a political party as a sinister means to an even more sinister end. “I feel like probably my own personal motivation for feeling like I need to say that has to do with the fact that people know I’m a Christian, so a lot of folks probably assume that I’m also a Republican and that I probably voted for Trump. The thought makes me sick that there would be anybody out there mistakenly assuming that I voted for this monstrosity.” And so, as a means of providing his own personal light in the darkness, Caterer did what he knows best. “I know that it’s possible to feel hopeless and like there’s nothing I can do, but I know there is one thing I can do: I can write a song.”
Head below to check out our full and wide-ranging interview with Josh Caterer. We caught up on the eve of Good Friday, arguably the busiest and most important time of year for those who live and work in the Christian faith. From a deep dive on his songwriting process to his last Easter season working as a worship pastor (at least for now) to what it means to be in a touring rock band in the year 2025 amidst all of the horrors we’re bombarded with every day, it is a lengthy and dare we say compelling read due to Caterer’s ever-so-thoughtful answers. (*Editor’s note: Josh was already one of my favorite brains to pick in this little corner of the world before this interview, but that sentiment was only strengthened here.*) Oh and also find out where you can catch the Popes on tour this Spring. They’ll look a little different than in the photo below; Josh’s brothers Eli and Matt have hit the “Pause” button on touring, so he and Felumlee will be joined once again by Reuben Baird (bass) and Jack Sibilski (guitar). They’re playing Born To Quit in its entirety and they’re playing alongside Off With Their Heads, who will be playing In Desolation in full as well. It’ll be a party.
***The following chat has been edited and condensed for content and clarity. Yes, really.***
Josh Caterer (Smoking Popes): Jason!
Jay Stone (Dying Scene): Mr. Caterer, how are you, sir?
Not bad. How are you doing?
I’m well. The sun is finally shining, so I’m well.
Good, yeah. It’s amazing what a difference that makes in your emotional well-being.
It really is. It was dark and cold and rainy for what seemed like months, but was really only probably four days. But the sun’s out, things are blooming now. It’s spring in Massachusetts. It’s good, we’re good.
Excellent.
How are you? How are you? How’s the new year? How’s the Easter season treating you? This is a busy week. I know with touring coming up and Holy Week this week, it’s a lot.
It’s a lot. And, you know, starting tomorrow, things are going to be crazy. I’m leading worship at two Good Friday services and a total of six Easter services, two on Saturday and four on Sunday. So it’s going to be kind of intense. But today is just a down day to rest and get ready for that. So it was a good day to have a little conversation with you.
Yeah, I appreciate that. I appreciate you fitting me into that schedule.
Yeah, it is. And it’s going to be my last Easter as a worship pastor.
Oh, really?
Yeah. I have given notice at this church. And I mean, that’s a long story…There’s a lot that I could say about it, but I think I could put it sort of all under this heading is that I have been doing, like, I’ve worked at churches for the last 24 years in some capacity, either as a worship director or a worship pastor. And I’m just kind of burned out on it. And particularly at this church that I’ve been at for the last six years, I just have been feeling over the past few years that this isn’t a good fit. Which makes it weird to work there. If you stay in that situation, it sort of starts to make you feel like there’s a deep spiritual compromise happening.
Yeah, right, right.
Which is not healthy. And so I finally decided to just not work there anymore. And to not work at churches, at least for the foreseeable future. My wife and I are excited about going to a church that I don’t work at. It’ll just be a simpler and more pure way of being involved in church.
Do you feel that a church would want, like, because they know that you’ve been a worship director, there’s always going to be that pull to, hey, we need somebody to fill XYZ role.
I feel like I would serve as a volunteer on a worship team. I would happily do that, as long as I was not the guy in charge of it. And I’m not doing that as my living.
That’s obviously a hard decision, but it sounds like the right one. And especially for that sort of spiritual compromise to come in what’s supposed to be a place of worship, and is a place of worship, but that’s a tough place to have a spiritual compromise.
It is. It is. And I’m sort of looking forward to sort of returning to, like, you know, when I became a Christian, however many years ago it was now. I started playing music at church just out of an act of worship of God. Like, I just wanted to do it. And it’ll be cool to get back to that. It’ll feel nice.
Yeah, when you don’t rely on it for a paycheck, it’s wonderful how freeing it can be. Which I’m sure is probably true of music at some level, right? Like with you guys, if music isn’t your sole paycheck, then it becomes a little, I would assume, more enjoyable.
Yeah, it’s hard to make a full-time living out of being a musician for a variety of reasons, one of which is that you end up feeling like you have to fill your time with a musical activity that you can monetize, even if it’s not exactly what you would prefer to be doing musically. So there’s always some degree of compromise in it, if you’re doing something as a living. And that’s not to say that everybody who works at a church is compromising. I know people who are pastors in churches, and they’re great, and they feel passionate about it, and they feel called to it. Like, that’s what they’re supposed to be doing, and they’re called to the specific church that they’re at, so they feel like they’re in the right place. I’ve always felt like serving in a church is something that I enjoy doing, but my real musical passion is the Smoking Popes. So working at a church, to some degree, is just a job, which makes it weird for me. I shouldn’t be doing that that way. Man, we got right into it. (*both laugh*)
Yeah! Congratulations on life stuff, but congratulations on Lovely Stuff. What a damn fine record you have made.
Thank you. I appreciate that.
And I was thinking about this as I was listening to it, I don’t know, maybe last week. You’re supposed to think that everything that you do is the best thing that you’ve done and whatever, but at some level it does feel like that. It feels like this is. It also feels like I have grown with the Smoking Popes. And it doesn’t always track that a band’s musical career sort of progresses and mirrors some of the things that you’re going through yourself. Some bands you’ll find at a particular point and they’ll always be a “high school band” or a “college band” for you. But I feel like I have grown alongside the Smoking Popes. And so each album that you put out and each time that we talk, there’s like a new appreciation for what you do.
I think I know what you mean, because I have felt that in my life, and it’s this strange kind of communal or connective power of music and of art. I mean, when an artist creates something, on the one hand, it’s very personal. It’s just them expressing themselves. But once they put it out into the world, it connects people to the artist, and it connects people to each other through mutual appreciation of that piece of work, whatever it is. And it connects the artist to the world at large. And this is something I appreciate more and more, the older I get, the more we do this, is the way that releasing recorded music and playing shows kind of are interwoven in this way where the live show is like a chance for everybody in the room – artists and audience – to kind of share an experience of having a relationship with the music, whether you’ve created it, or whether you’re just listening to it. These songs have a place in your life, and they mean something to you. And that can all be mutually kind of expressed and shared communally at a show, and it’s a beautiful thing.
Yeah, and I grew up in the Catholic Church, which for a lot of people in your mid-40s means that you no longer go to the Catholic Church. (*both laugh*) But I have long thought that for myself, the music community and live music, live shows, whatever, that was sort of my version, and a lot of people that I knows version of worship, or a version of church, or a version of communal celebration. The music was our church. The live shows, whether they were in basements or stadiums, that’s our form of coming together and celebrating together in worship.
There are definitely similarities between going to a show and going to church, and it definitely is something that contains a transcendent element. Music can do that in a way that’s even hard to define. It connects emotionally with people in a way that feels cathartic, and it feels like you’re plugged into something bigger than you, which is definitely what’s happening when you’re at church. I don’t really think that live music is a truly satisfying substitute for having a relationship with God. But it does scratch certain itches that are very important.
This is the longest, I think, that the Popes have gone between studio albums, which seems weird on paper, because it doesn’t feel like you went away for the last seven years. Into The Agony seven years ago, six and a half years ago, something like that.
Yeah, it came out in 2018.
That’s wild. But like I said, it doesn’t seem like you went away. Obviously life happened in between there, and COVID and whatever happened in between there, so that skews a lot of people’s release histories.
Now that you mention it, it’s true, but there’s a strange caveat to that, which is that we were broken up for seven years between 1998 and 2005. And so we weren’t creating any new music during that time. But I guess we did release an album a couple of years into the breakup, which ended up shortening the time between releases. And so that creates an illusion of activity when there wasn’t really any. And in this case, even though we’ve released the new album in 2025, we started releasing singles from the album a couple years ago.
Was it that long ago?
Yeah, I think “Madison” was released as a single two years ago.
Oh, wow. I know you were playing live last year.
Yeah, “Allegiance” actually came out in January of this year. “Golden Moment,” 2024. “Madison” was in 2023. And “Don’t You Want Me” was in 2023 also. We considered putting that on the album. But then we recorded “Over the Rainbow,” and we didn’t want to have two covers.
Well, so let’s talk about “Over the Rainbow,” because what a perfect way to sum up the album, I think sonically and more importantly, thematically. So I guess, where did the decision to record “Over the Rainbow” come in? Because I could see a situation where you had that song like in your brain, like it’s been in all of our brains for probably since the first time we saw Wizard of Oz. But thematically, so much of the album sort of relates to that. Did that dawn on you at the beginning of the process, or at the end of the process, that that song just fit so perfectly?
I think toward the end of the process. It’s a song that we started playing on tour last year. At some of the shows, we would come out and do “Over the Rainbow” as an encore. And it was surprising to us that we hadn’t done that before.
Yeah, it was surprising to me.
It seems like such a no-brainer. Having done “Pure Imagination” so many years back, you would think that we would be looking for those kind of songs to keep sprinkling throughout our catalog. There aren’t a million songs that are like “Over the Rainbow” because it’s not only a show tune, but it’s like a certain kind of show tune. It’s a show tune that has a certain kind of yearning, transcendent quality to it. But it’s also a show tune that is not associated with Broadway as much as it is with film. So I think if I’m to be honest, I’ve always kind of avoided “Over The Rainbow” because I was intimidated by Judy Garland’s version of it. And I’ve done her songs before. We did an album that had “Zing Went The Strings Of My Heart” on it.
That was almost my wedding song, by the way.
Oh, nice. But there’s something about “Over the Rainbow” that is so closely associated with Judy. She owns the song, no matter who covers it. And I know there have been a lot of versions of it, but she owns it and every version of it will be compared to her version of it. And she is, it could be argued, the greatest singer of all time. I would put her in that category. And so it’s like you’re going to try to climb in the ring with Judy and you feel like your contribution to that song is going to be valid up against hers? (*both laugh*) I just think I’ve always been kind of sheepish about doing that. And still am! But I just developed a different perspective on it where I’m not trying to compete, it’s more of just an homage to the song. It really did feel like there was something written into this song that was perfect thematically and tonally for this album. And, you know, if I feel like I can’t compare to Judy! (*both laugh*)
Yeah, right. You’re not going to get closer to Judy, right?
Yeah! (*both laugh*)
And to know that that song was written for her, too, and for that specific scene in the movie. I feel like I read something like the guy who wrote it, Yip Harburg, I think, he wrote it like on the side of the road. He was struggling with needing something for that Kansas scene in the movie and just like pulled over on the side of the road while his wife was driving and wrote it out in front of like Grauman’s Chinese Theatre or something like that. For some reason, that song came to him. One of those classic examples of like the song came to you in five minutes but you had really been working on it or thinking about it forever. But yeah, I feel like tonally that song perfectly encapsulates the album. The album is obviously called Lovely Stuff. And at least to me, there’s an awful lot of focusing on like the light in the darkness and focusing on like the good memories and the positive and that, like, this is all fleeting, so let’s focus on love and lightness and things like that. And that’s exactly what that song was written for. It’s exactly like where it fits in the movie. Like, that’s a perfect choice.
Yeah, it is.
Is that a fair read of the album and sort of what you were going through and going for, lyrically especially? Not to peel back the curtain too much, because I like when people have their own stories of what the album means to them, but to me, it sounded like, “boy, this is a bright album. The album cover is like, is bright and rainbowy. Jennie (Cotterill) did an an awesome job, as she always does. And then listening to it, it’s like, well, there’s still some darkness here. But then it’s also like we’re going to focus on the cracks, like where the light gets in.”
Well, I’ll tell you how this album started. I was commissioned to write a song for an independent film that has yet to be made. And I don’t know if I’m at liberty to discuss the details of it. But I had a conversation with the director of this movie. Some friends of mine put me in touch with the director and he sort of shared with me some ideas that he had about the main character. It’s about a young woman who is struggling with some stuff and wants to kind of overcome certain obstacles in her life. And he sort of described to me the trajectory that he saw her taking and just said, “OK, let this serve as kind of like (a guide).” He didn’t give me specific lines or phrases or anything to use or any specific parameters of what the song would be. He just talked to me about the narrative journey of the main character and said, “OK, now that you know that, whatever you come up with is good. Just sort of like write something that seems to go along with that.” And the song that I came up with was “Never Gonna Break.”
I love that song.
Thank you! Yeah, it was an interesting challenge for me as a songwriter. I hadn’t done that before where I was commissioned to write something about a specific character in a film. And so I sort of had to get into the headspace of the person that he had kind of painted a mental picture of for me and in ways that I could relate to, because, you know, there were things there that sort of reminded me of elements of my own life, especially when I was starting out as a younger musician. And so I ended up writing that song. And there is a quality to the song that really acknowledges the darkness around us. But the protagonist of the song is determined not to be overcome by that darkness and determined not to give up. And there’s like a ferocity in this person that is like, “I’m not going to surrender to my circumstances, no matter how bleak they might be. I’m going to go somewhere and I’m going to accomplish some things. And I’m going to kind of believe in my own ability to do that.” And I was really inspired by the process of connecting with that part of being a person. The way that that sentiment was expressed in that song really inspired me to keep writing.
And I do feel like a few of the other songs on the album flowed out of that song. And I was plugged into the same outlet to produce some of the other songs on that album, like, for example, the first song, “Golden Moment,” I think has a bit of that sentiment in it. And I feel like “Never Gonna Break” was sort of like the seed from which the entire album grew. And now looking back on it, listening to these songs as a complete collection, it does seem like there are strands of positivity and hope running through this album that haven’t been as evident on other albums of ours. And that’s kind of cool. I’m enjoying that. And that also pertains to maybe it’s a stage of life for me, you know, having turned 50. I started to think about time and mortality in a new way. Like there’s a finite amount of viable time in front of me.
Right!
And what I find in the face of that is that I have a certain determination to maximize that time and to use it for that which is important to me.
I think that more eloquently sort of sums up the thought that I had when we started this conversation about that I feel like I have grown with the band. I was thinking about the idea of sort of love songs and writing love songs and what that sentiment even means at different stages of your life. Like, what love even means when you’re in your 20s writing a song or listening to music versus in your 30s versus in your 40s and versus when you have children and like how much that changes the equation and how difficult it can be. This is not to take a shot at other songwriters, but I think it is difficult for other songwriters to sort of move through that space eloquently, if that makes sense. Like there are obviously there are songs, bands, whatever that we listen to when we’re 14, 15, 17 and that music is still good when you’re 14, 15, 17, but it’s different for those people to write songs when they’re in their 40s or 50s now if they haven’t sort of matured along and if their fans haven’t matured along with them. I think that the way you put it, as you would imagine, is more eloquent than I would fumble through it. (*laughs*)
There is something about the kind of yearning that you have when you’re young that really serves as fertile ground for artistic expression. So the key then is how do you keep tilling that ground as you move forward in life? Because you don’t want to fall into certain traps. You don’t want to like be 55 years old, still writing teenage love songs.
Yeah, right.
But you also don’t want to completely let go of that fire that was burning and whatever was inspiring that sense of longing. Because when you’re young, you have this yearning about life and you’re convinced that if you just hook up with the right person, that’s going to answer all those questions and solve all those problems. You later discover that it doesn’t. But the key is to sort of look at that fire and that yearning and see what it is. And maybe it’s not entirely ever satisfied by one thing; it’s a growing collection of things that kind of address that issue. Or maybe it’s something bigger than you thought you were looking for. So it should be an ongoing, interesting experience to kind of figure out what’s really driving you in life. I don’t know, some people seem like they get to a point where they’re just not wrestling with those questions anymore. And that’s a little frightening. I think we always should be.
Oh, I agree with you. Yeah, I agree with you. There was something you just said about “Never Gonna Break,” and trying to get in the headspace of a character that somebody else created as an exercise. But I wonder like when you write, obviously, there are threads of your own life, even if you’re not necessarily writing everything in first person has happened to Josh Caterer. But when you write songs yourself, do you craft a character in your head and then put them in these situations and write from that?
I often do that, yeah.
That’s interesting.
It usually is some version of myself. I create a character that has elements of me in it. It has to be someone that I can relate to, who I can understand emotionally, so that I know their heart and I know where they’re coming from, even though they might have a different set of circumstances than me.
But it could be like if you had zigged instead of zagged one day, this is where that person ends up versus where you ended up. But it still started out as you.
Exactly. I think if you have any maturity, you will recognize that you can’t really look down on anybody in this world because you were maybe a few decisions away from ending up just like them or however they are.
I have to tell you, I work in public health now, but for many, many years I taught groups in an alternative sentencing program, for people who are on probation or parole. I have not been on probation or parole myself, and so I have said a thousand times in front of both groups and in professional conferences, that one of the ways that you build a rapport with your clients, if you have never walked specifically in their shoes, is to remember that if a couple nights or one night in particular in your life had gone a little bit differently, then you’re sitting on the other side of the table in the crowd instead of being the one teaching the class. I have said that a thousand times, so for the fact that you just said that, that is very self-reassuring to me.
Sometimes songwriting is like, well, what if I had made a couple of those decisions differently? What if I got caught?
What if I didn’t run fast enough? What if I wasn’t like a middle-class white kid, truthfully?
What if my circumstances were a little more desperate than they seem to be right now? There’s part of that even in imagining yourself to be a younger person or a single person rather than a married person or someone who’s kind of trapped in a relationship that’s different and more difficult; more extreme than any relationship that I’ve actually been in, but I could feel the potential of being there. Some of the first songs I ever wrote for the Smoking Popes were songs that had this kind of extremist approach to romantic love. I think technically the first Smoking Popes song – the first song on the very first EP that the Popes ever put out was a song called “Sandra,” which is about a person who is stalking Sandra Bernhardt.
Oh, right, right, right.
And at that time I was watching a lot of Martin Scorsese movies. So, I was kind of taking elements of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy and like wrapping them together and really imagining myself stalking another person and like, you know, parking outside their house, monitoring all their activities and keeping track of what they do and, you know, trying to furtively take photographs of them and all that. And I never did that (in real life)
Oh, no? You didn’t? (*both laugh*)
I had to recognize that there was a part of me that would definitely have considered following through on that. I almost did just for artistic purposes. I was like, “well, maybe I should try stalking someone.”
That’s dark. (*both laugh*)
I’m glad that I didn’t.
Yeah, right.
I can think of a couple other artists who kind of seem to explore these things. I feel like the work of David Lynch, for example, is like, from what I know about him personally, he wasn’t that dark in real life, but his films certainly were.
Oh, sure. I have had a similar conversation, actually a couple of times, with Brendan Kelly, your fellow Chicago area person, about how, like, the thing we do with songwriters where, because they’re, especially if they’re the one singing the song that they’re writing, that, like, we assume that it’s always first person. Brendan has written some really dark stuff, especially with The Wandering Birds. And he’s like, “I clearly don’t have, like, dead hobos under the front porch of my house. Like, that’s clearly something I have never done.” (*both laugh*) But we put this weird thing on songwriters, lke, they’re writing these things first person so it must be about them, but we don’t put that same sort of thing on film writers or directors. Like, we clearly know that David Lynch wasn’t writing documentaries, so why do we do that to songwriters sometimes? I don’t know…that’s an aside.
I don’t know. It’s a good question. A lot of songs are written in first person. And I think there’s something about the format that invites the listener to participate in it in a first person way. Like, if you hear a song, you sing along the lyrics, and then you feel like they’re coming from you. And when you’re singing a song, you feel like it’s supposed to be an expression of how you feel when you’re singing it. And so I think you experience music in a different way than you do the other.
Whereas you don’t put yourself in the first person of, like, Mulholland Drive or whatever.
Exactly.
That’s a good perspective. I don’t know why I never quite dawned on me that way. That’s a good perspective.
I’ve never thought about it either. Spitballing here. (*both laugh*)
No, that worked! But I do also wonder, and I have asked actually numerous songwriters this over the years because it’s a thing that I’m fascinated by, in the ability to write a song that is either a song of unrequited love or a breakup song or a heartbreak song, things like that, when it is not pertinent to your situation right now. And so I was fascinated to see that “Fox River Dream,” – which obviously talks about love lost and choosing to remember what was versus how things ended up – was co-written by your wife. I think that’s awesome. Because I think that that’s an interesting needle to thread sometimes as a songwriter, to write a song about heartbreak and love lost or unrequited love if you’re in a happy and committed relationship and how awkward it can be at times for your partner, your spouse, and how much you have to fill them in ahead of time. Like, “hey, you’re going to hear a song. It’s not about you, I promise.” So it’s cool that “Fox River Dream” was co-written by your wife. Is that math that you have to do in your head sometimes if you’re writing a song? Do you have to say, “no, this song isn’t about us? You’re not the unrequited love. We’re good.”
Well, she kind of knows. She is a writer herself. And so she understands the parameters of creating characters and finding inspiration to write that isn’t autobiographical. That probably helps. And several of the songs that I’ve written are about her. And I think she’s developed a kind of sixth sense in order to tell, “ah, here’s another one about me.” So she can discern those from the ones that are not about her.
Right.
In the case of “Fox River Dream,” I think I had written the chorus. And I had a melody. So I had lyrics for the chorus. And I had a melody for the verses. And I may have had one or two lines for the first verse. And the rest of it, I just played it for her. And I hummed her the melody that I had in mind. And I said, “what do you think? When you hear this, what does it inspire in you?” And I didn’t have a conversation with her about motivation or who the people were that were supposed to be involved in it. I just said, “here’s what I got. See if you can come up with any lyrics for it.” She ended up writing a couple of stanzas of poetry inspired by what I had played for her. And I grabbed some of those lines and put them into the second verse of the song. I don’t know if this is going to ruin it, showing people how the sausage is made. (*both laugh*) In this case, the first verse ended up being written entirely by me. And the second verse is collaborative. And I think there are three or four lines in there that I took from her writing that she had given me for this song. But then I finished verse one, and she was like, “man, if I had known that you were going to reference Jeff Goldblum in there, I would have written some different stuff.” (*both laugh*) “I just didn’t know you were going to talk about The Walking Dead and The Fly.” I was like, “well, too late! I like what you wrote, so I’m going to keep it.” (*both laugh*)
That’s funny. And how was that process? Is that the first time you had written or that you have lyrics that were written with somebody else? I can’t think, top of my head, of another one.
Let me think. I think for The Popes, it is the first time I’ve done that. I have co-written songs with people for church. I’ve been involved in a lot of collaborative songwriting situations with people. Worship songwriters do that a lot. I’ve never been entirely comfortable with it, but I’ve tried. I feel like it’s cool to push yourself out of your comfort zone sometimes and collaborate with people in a way that makes you feel a little bit vulnerable. I think the thing that I don’t like about co-writing is you have to show people your process and you have to show people things before you’re done with them. I have a pretty strict internal editor. By the time the public hears a song, I have gone over these lyrics with a fine-tooth comb countless times and I have rooted out every single word that I didn’t want there. It looks vastly different than whatever I was coming up with off the top of my head when I was first writing it. You have to trust somebody enough to show them. I’ve had this where I’ve tried to write a song with somebody and the thing that I come up with off the top of my head really sucks, and if it was just me, I could have found something in there that I could have refined it and polished it and turned it into something. But when I first do it in front of somebody else, I’m like, “this sucks, and now this person is convinced that my entire songwriting ability is a hoax.” (*both laugh*) Either I didn’t really write those songs or I’m washed up now. Whatever I had is gone and now I just write crap.
And then add to that layer the fact that you co-wrote with your wife. That’s got to be an interesting dynamic too that’s different than if you’re co-writing with your brother or another songwriter or a hired gun or whatever.
Right. The sort of collaborative songwriting that I’ve done in worship situations has been like multiple people sitting in a room with a guitar. Like, “let’s just hammer this out right now.” But that’s not how I would choose to co-write. The way that I did this with Stef is like I had written something when I was by myself and it just wasn’t finished. But I played it for her and then she sort of went off and days later she showed me some lyrics that she had written. So it’s still a sort of private affair to be writing. You’re taking something that somebody else wrote by themselves and you’re fleshing it out. And that’s the way that it has worked with some of the co-writes that I’ve done in the band. There’s another song on the album called “You Will Always Have My Heart.” It’s listed as being co-written by me and Mike Felumlee, our drummer. But what that means is that he wrote a song that he actually released years ago on one of his solo albums. It’s a song called “The Drive Home.” And I heard that song and just fell in love with it. Some of the lyrics in it inspired me to think about certain specific experiences that I had had. So what I did is I kept the first couple of lines from his version of it, and from there I just wrote a new set of lyrics and I changed the chorus. So the chords and melody in the verses are exactly what he wrote with 85% new lyrics in the verses. And then I completely changed the chorus. So again, it’s something that he wrote by himself a long time ago. And then I took that and added to it by myself. So it’s not like at any point he and I were sitting down together trying to decide anything.
Did you tell him you were doing that? Or did you present it to him afterwards?
I presented it to him afterwards and I just said, “what do you think of this? Do you like it? And are you upset that I changed your song?”
Yeah, right, right.
And he said, “no, this is great.” And for a minute there, the idea was to turn it into an uptempo, fast, punky song. Because his version, if you listen to the drive home off of his album, it sounds like a smoking punk song with guitars and drums. That’s what we were going to do with it. But I sent him this acoustic demo of my new arrangement of it. And the more we listened to it, we just sort of mutually agreed that this has a nice quality as an acoustic song. And then it was Mike’s idea to try to put some strings on it. And also for a while we were still calling it “The Drive Home.” But then as we got closer to finalizing the album, I was like, “Mike, I feel like this is different enough from your original version of the song that we should change the name of it. Like your song and this song can coexist in the world. They’re not the same, they’re distant cousins of each other.”
Yeah, and it might be confusing for people that were familiar with Mike’s.
Exactly. So that’s what we did. Collaboration is interesting. Even if I had to sit down in a room with somebody and write a song, I still think every so often, I’d be like, give me 10 minutes and I would go downstairs. I would need to be by myself. I heard this story about The Doors. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
I probably haven’t, because I don’t like The Doors.
Oh, you’re one of those Doors haters?
I’m one of those Doors haters. I went through a phase when I was 14, and later I was like “Oh, no, wait, I don’t think Jim Morrison was a poet, I think he was just a drunk asshole.” And yes, you can be both, I understand that.
Okay, yeah, a lot of people are both.
Yeah, for sure.
No, it was the story of Robbie Krieger. I heard a little interview with him and he was saying that they were at band practice one week and they all decided, “okay, everybody write a song this week and bring it back next week.” And next week, Robbie Krieger showed up with “Light My Fire.” But he only had one verse, which is, “You know that it would be untrue. You know that I would be a liar // If I was to say to you, girl, we couldn’t get much higher. Come on baby, light my fire.” That’s what he had. And so he shows that to the band and they all thought it was pretty good, but they needed a second verse. So he says that Jim Morrison said, “okay, give me a minute.” And he left the room and he was gone for about 10 minutes. And then he came back in and he said, “okay, here’s what I got. ‘The time to hesitate is through, no time to wallow in the mire // Try now, we can only lose and our love become a funeral pyre.” And Robbie goes, “so I said to him, well, it’s a little dark, Jim, but okay, let’s try it.” (*both laugh*)
That’s funny.
I love that story, especially because Jim Morrison, he couldn’t have done that in the room with other people. He just had to go off by himself for a few minutes. There’s something very private. It’s almost like a bodily function or something that you can’t really show people is when you’re writing lyrics.
Do you think it would change if you were forced to be in a room with somebody like passing around an acoustic guitar or whatever? Would that be how you write or do you write all sorts of different ways, so that being in a room trying to actually physically write with somebody in and of itself is like foreign, right?
Oh, it depends. Different ways. It’s interesting that you said that when “Over the Rainbow” was written, he was in a car and he pulled over because I’ve definitely had that happen where I’m driving along. And there’s something about driving, looking out the window and thinking and you’re getting all meditative and contemplative. I’ve written a lot of lyrics that way. I wrote “Need You Around” that way. I was driving in my car listening to Frank Sinatra on cassette. And I just, I was in the zone, I just pushed stop on the cassette and started singing to myself and came up with “Need You Around” and then I drove home and put chords to it.
I was going to say, so what was the process back then? Because now everybody has an iPhone or a smartphone, whatever, and you have a voice notes app and if you get those moments of inspiration, it’s probably second nature to people now to just hit the voice notes app and record whatever you have and then go back to it. But what was the process before cell phones?
The only thing about that that has changed is that now if you record it on your voice app, then you can forget about it because you know it’s there. It used to be, if you had something going in your mind, you had to keep it going until you could get home, or you could get somewhere where you could write it down or you could get to your little dictaphone or whatever. So you had to be like, “all right, don’t talk to me and don’t go anywhere where there’s music playing or I’m going to lose it. I’m going to lose the thread.”
That’s funny. I realize we’re at like the hour mark right now, which seems like it’s been quick, but I did want to talk about “Allegiance” because I love that song. I find that song so incredibly… inspirational I guess is probably the best word for it. Particularly for this point in time and what we’re going through. And so I sort of said before that the album itself is a lot of trying to find light in the darkness. A lot of that is interpersonal relationships. But “Allegiance” does that sort of on a bigger level. I love that song. I see why it wasn’t included on the album because like it’s a little more macro versus micro, I guess. But I guess, where did that song come from?
I wrote that song really quickly, two days after the election.
Wow. That tracks, yeah.
Usually when I write a song, I’ll write the music quickly and then it’ll take me weeks to hone the lyrics and change them and rework them. But in this case, I wrote that song on November 7th. I don’t even know how to describe how I felt at that time. I was filled with a lot of overwhelming emotions: rage, disgust. And I just had to get it out. And that’s one of these times when I just picked up the guitar and just sort of tried not to overthink it, just get it out there. And by that time, the rest of the album was written and recorded and mixed and mastered. So I guess technically we could have added another song, but we would have had to jump through a couple of hoops to add it. And we already had 10 songs, so it would have made it an 11 song album. And it was just like, “this feels like a different thing. It feels like the album’s already done.”
A thousand percent, yep.
And this is its own entity. So that day I recorded an acoustic demo and I sent it to Mike. And I was like, “I don’t know if we want to do anything with this, but I just wrote this song.” And he was like, “I love it and we should record it as soon as possible.” So we set up a studio session for a week and a half later and went in and tracked it. I called Jamie Woolford, who had mixed our album, and said, “hey, we got another song. Can you mix it real quick for us?” He was like, “yep.” And I don’t know. It felt like it was one of those things where I was just so upset and horrified at the prospect of what was going to be unfolding as a result of this election that I needed to, like before any of that stuff even started to happen, I felt like I need to make this proclamation that I’m not on board with any of this.
Yeah, right.
And I feel like probably my own personal motivation for feeling like I need to say that has to do with the fact that people know I’m a Christian.
Yeah.
So a lot of folks probably assume that I’m also a Republican and that I probably voted for Trump. That thought makes me sick. The thought that there would be anybody out there mistakenly assuming that I voted for this monstrosity. I have to set the record straight. Let the record show I did not vote for this man. I never voted for him once.
Right.
I had three opportunities to vote for him, and I voted against him all three times.
Right. And it is sad. It’s a sad reflection of how that particular party has co-opted not even just religion in general, but especially has co-opted Christianity, has co-opted the evangelical wing of Christianity. It’s sad.
It is sad, and it’s very, very upsetting to me. I feel like, I don’t know, this is a tricky comparison to make. I’m not actually trying to compare myself to Jesus Christ.
Right, right, right, right, right.
Because I fall short on every level. (*both laugh*)
Yeah, right.
But I feel like that thing that motivated Jesus to flip over the tables of the money changers in the temple, he was angry about something specific there. He was angry that people were coming in and trying to take advantage of God’s people.
Right.
And that is the exact sense of anger and outrage that I felt when Trump got re-elected. I was like, “this has happened because Christians in America have been targeted by decades of propaganda from the political right wing.” So, because the people that I know, like my experience of going to churches where the majority of people who attend these churches that I’ve been a part of voted for Trump. But I know these people. It’s not that they’re horrible people. It’s not that they’re racists. It’s not that they are hateful bigots. It’s that they have been conditioned to believe that they are under attack. And that all that we hold dear is under attack. They’re all listening to these voices, these right-wing voices that tell them every day over and over, “the left is trying to destroy families. The left is trying to destroy our freedoms. The left is trying to destroy this country. And the left is trying to destroy the Christian faith…”
Right.
“…and they’re coming for our children.” And that’s like all these things where you just have this like perpetual fight or flight response that is being activated in people so that they become genuinely convinced over time that voting for Donald Trump is like the good and right thing to do. And that is so deeply ingrained in them that I cannot, through argumentation, make them see otherwise.
Right, right, right.
Even though it seems like obvious hypocrisy to anyone outside of the sphere of influence of like right wing media. Like the entire rest of the world looks at that and is like, “how can you follow Jesus and support Donald Trump?” Those two things are polar opposites.
Right, they are a Venn diagram that doesn’t overlap.
There’s no overlap! It’s sort of like, I don’t know, have you ever tried to talk to someone who was like, had actually been brainwashed?
Yeah, yeah. There’s a writer, he’s a national writer, but he’s from here, Luke O’Neill, who has written a couple of books and this may be in one of his books, but he wrote a big long article about essentially like losing your parents to the cult. It was sort of a little bit pre-Trump, I think was the origins, but at least the Fox News sort of thing. And losing a loved one to that being brainwashed and that there is no sense of like reason or rationale or conversation that you can have with them. It is quite literally the same as being like brainwashed, like whether in a cult or however.
It’s really upsetting to me because I feel like a lot of the people around me in church world have been subjected to this. And these are wonderful, loving people. Just who, when it comes to politics and specifically the relationship between faith and politics, they have been systematically just programmed to hold religious beliefs and political beliefs that are completely contradictory to each other. And there’s an elaborate web of like justification that they have built up in their minds as to how both of those things can coexist.
Yeah, right.
I don’t even know what to do about it.
Yeah, I mean, it’s demoralizing in the both figurative and I guess literal definitions of that word, right? Like it’s a lot. It’s a lot. And I don’t know how we combat it. I mean, like what it takes for light to dawn on Marblehead and for folks to realize that they’ve been brainwashed, like being in a cult or whatever. There’s no one right answer, but I think the only way out is through, right? And focusing on the good and the positive and the love, as naive as it can sound sometimes, focusing on the love and the positivity and the communication between us and the relationships. I think that’s the only way we pull out of the tailspin. But I use songs like “Allegiance” as sort of like a way to pull myself out of my tailspin. Like I said earlier, I work in public health and public health is being run by RFK Effing Jr. right now. And so every day is having to combat like pulling yourself out of a tailspin because, like, what new fresh horrors are we going to have come down the pike today?
Right. And I feel like we are all of us being subjected to this psychological and emotional endurance test where every day there are things happening that we should be outraged about. But if you’re outraged afresh every day, you just become exhausted. And you get to this point where you’re like, “you know what, I just can’t do it anymore.” And so you check out and you’re like, “you know what, I don’t care anymore.” But then they’ve won. So if you’re not outraged and you’re not paying attention anymore, they’ve won. But if you’re constantly paying attention, then they’ve won also because you’re so frazzled about it that you can’t really function. There’s got to be some in between where it’s like, “OK, we see what’s going on. We’re tracking it. We’re not responding emotionally to everything. And we know that what’s happening here is that they’re flooding the zone.” I’ve heard that expression a lot lately.
Yeah, that’s the Steve Bannon playbook. Everything, everywhere, all at once, knowing that not everything’s going to stick, but you at least create enough chaos that something will get through.
Right. And so it causes us, the rest of us to go, OK, well, are we supposed to respond to everything? Or are we supposed to stop responding to any of it? Are there people out there who are responding to all of it? Because it seems like any attack on due process or any attack on the law or the Constitution, all of it should be addressed. I don’t have to personally be outraged about it. But I am sort of like paying attention to the people who are supposed to be responding to that and trying to support, you know, the Bernies and the AOCs of the world.
Yeah, right, right. Yeah, I think I find myself being outraged by all of it. But at the same time, knowing that some of that isn’t for me to deal with. I have to focus on the things that I can do to make my little world, my little community better. Because somebody has to, right? So if you’re in a position to do that, why not you?
Right. And I think that’s kind of part of the reason why I wrote “Allegiance.” Because I knew that it’s possible to feel hopeless and like there’s nothing I can do. But I know there’s one thing I can do. I can write a song.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.
And I can put that out there into the world. And so if that’s what I can do, that’s what I’m going to do. And so I think that’s true of anybody. Maybe you can’t single-handedly change the situation, but there’s going to be one thing that you can do. Whatever that is, you should do it. Maybe you’re going to send 50 bucks to the ACLU. Or you’re going to go to a demonstration. Or you’re going to sign a petition. Or you’re going to put in a phone call to your congressperson or something. You’re still going to do one thing. And maybe you’ll do more things in the future. But I just started by saying, you know what? I do have a voice. And I’m going to raise it to say “no to Donald Trump.”
Yeah, right, right. I’m glad you did. I’m glad you wrote that. I’m glad you’ve written dozens of songs. But I’m glad you wrote that song. That song means, like, it’s one of those sort of, like, keeps your barometer on true north when you kind of get stuck in the mire sometimes.
Anaheim’s The Jack Knives are back! The foursome recently spent some time in Asbury Park working with the one-and-only Pete Steinkopf, and the result is probably their tightest and most focused work to date – though given that they worked with Pete at Little Eden, you’d expect nothing less. The new album is called Into […]
The foursome recently spent some time in Asbury Park working with the one-and-only Pete Steinkopf, and the result is probably their tightest and most focused work to date – though given that they worked with Pete at Little Eden, you’d expect nothing less.
The new album is called Into The Night and it’s out May 2nd on digital platforms, and you can check out the lead video, “Kill Me First,” below!
The Jack Knives will make key festival appearances this summer, including: Punk Rock Bowling’s 25th Anniversary — a special club show appearance with Hot Water Music Hoochenanny Whiskey and Music Festival in Rochester, NY — sharing the stage with Joan Jett and The Blackhearts. In an effort to reward their loyal fanbase, Into the Night has been exclusively available on vinyl for the past three months ahead of the digital release.
I feel like every time I do a Dropkick Murphys St. Patrick’s Day Boston show, I tell myself it might be the last year I do it, because it’s a lot. It’s always near Fenway so parking is a bit of a nightmare and it’s always just A) so many people in general and B) […]
I feel like every time I do a Dropkick Murphys St. Patrick’s Day Boston show, I tell myself it might be the last year I do it, because it’s a lot. It’s always near Fenway so parking is a bit of a nightmare and it’s always just A) so many people in general and B) so many people ossified on green beer and Jameson and the older I get, the less that’s my thing. I mean, I come from a Boston Irish family…but I’m not THAT Boston Irish if you catch my drift. But then, something happens that inevitably pulls me back in and reminds me A) why I still love going to shows and B) why Boston can be the best place in the world for a few days. You see, Dropkick Murphys St. Patrick’s Day runs feel like – well, they feel like a homecoming weekend of sorts. This weekend, I saw people I hadn’t seen since last St. Paddy’s Day, or the St. Paddy’s before that even. And I saw people from around the country (and Canada, which I guess will be part of this country before long if a certain orange puppet gets his way) and introduced old friends to other old friends and watched them become new friends, united by the common language that is punk rock.
Wait, sorry, this is supposed to be a show review and photo gallery, not a cultural thinkpiece or whatever that was. Mea culpa. ANYWAY, part of the reason that I jumped at the chance to make my way to Lansdowne Street for another year’s festivities was that the lineup for this particular weekend was insane. I’ve told people before that the last year that I went to a Mighty Mighty Bosstones (RIP) HomeTown Throwdown was for a lineup that featured opening sets from Flogging Molly and Avail and these very Dropkick Murphys and that the lineup couldn’t get better so I had to go out on top. If I never go back to a Dropkick St. Patrick’s show, I’ll have gone out on top there too, as the Sunday lineup included local favorites Rebuilder and the legendary Hot Water Music and Bouncing Souls performing opening duties. That lineup is bananas (not that the other nights weren’t also amazing lineups, with The Kilograms and The Menzingers and Cody Nilsen also helping to burn the neighborhood down over the course of four nights).
Rebuilder in the leadoff position was a particularly special moment. The band have been one of the finest punk rock bands in the city’s underground for over a decade at this point – and co-frontman Sal Ellington and bassist Daniel Carswell have been familiar faces to anyone who’s been in the MGM merch lines since the venue opened – so to have them occupy the bright lights at center stage was an awesome moment. The band – which also features co-frontman Craig Stanton on guitar and vocals and Brandon Phillips on drums and, in a return appearance for the big day, Patrick Hanlin on keys – kicked their set off with “Mile or an Inch” from 2017’s Sounds From The Massachusetts Turnpike, and blazed through a half-hour set that primed the surprisingly early-arriving crowd for the festivities to followed. I’ve seen close to two-dozen Rebuilder shows in venues of all shapes and sizes at this point, and while many of those venues have been of the sweaty, dive-bar variety, they more than showed that they belong on stage with a bunch of career heavyweights in a 5000-cap room.
Hot Water Music were in the two spot, and boy it says something about the quality of your lineup if Hot Water Music gets a half-hour set as second of four on a bill. The foursome ripped through “Remedy” to start the set in high-energy fashion and never really took their foot off the collective gas pedals. The iconic cheat code of a rhythm section that is Jason Black and George Rebelo pushed the tempo from their spot at stage center creating space for Chuck Ragan and Chris Cresswell to soar and wail through the set’s nine songs. I wasn’t quite sure how they’d be able to make a thirty-minute set seem representative of their thirty-year career, but it turns out that following “Remedy” with “Menace,” “Flight and a Crash,” “After The Impossible,” “Turn The Dial,” “Wayfarer,” “Burn Forever,” “Drag My Body” and, of course, “Trusty Chords” does a pretty good job of that. The latter song especially, turned into the first of what would be many full-venue singalongs, with most of the band even cutting out of the last chorus, letting the audience lead the charge before kicking back in in full force. Ragan seemed particularly amped up, at multiple points looking like he was trying to stomp a hole in the floor.
Accompanied by their longtime walk-up song “Don’t You Forget About Me,” the almighty Souls batted third and set themselves a high bar by jumping right into crowd favorite “Hopeless Romantic.” Much like Hot Water Music, the Souls have been headlining stages around the world for decades at this point, so they seem to be of a similar opinion that when occupying a comparatively abbreviated opening spot, there’s no time for messing around or exchanging pleasantries, and it is better to just get down to business. Probably doesn’t hurt that they also have George Rebelo behind the drum kit to keep the needle pinned. I know I’ve mentioned it a few times on these pages in recent years, but I genuinely think that the Souls sound as good or better now than they ever have. Greg Attonito’s voice is probably stronger now than it was three decades ago, and now that he’s recovered from the broken ankle that had him booted-up last time we caught them, he’s a ball of constant motion at center stage. And Pete and Bryan are – well – Pete and Bryan. They’re a package deal, left and right brain at this point, effortlessly creating high-energy melody after high-energy melody in a way that fills out the sound on a live stage more than you’d expect from merely a single guitar and bass. Highlight’s from the band’s fifteen-song, forty-five minute set included “That Song,” The Ballad of Johnny X,” “Gone,” and of course given the location, “East Coast! Fuck You!” The links between the HWM and Souls camps go back decades – long before Rebelo started doing double-duty – and in honor of that, Ragan made a return to the stage to join the Souls on gang vocals during set-closer “True Believers.”
And of course, that means Dropkick Murphys batted clean-up in this Murderer’s Row of a lineup. Wait, sorry, that’s a Yankees reference. Whatever, the Red Sox don’t have a similarly-named team. I mean yeah, the Morgan Magic lineup was fun, but Boggs and Barrett and Evans and Greenwell wasn’t exactly Ruth and Gehrig and Meusel and Lazzeri. I’m gonna regret this section text time I walk through Quincy Center, aren’t I… ANYWAY, accompanied by somber tones of the Chieftains/Sinead O’Connor classic “The Foggy Dew,” Ken Casey led his squad onto the stage and stormed into high-octane singalong renditions of “The Lonesome Boatman,” “The Boys Are Back” and “Middle Finger” before so much as taking a breath. Oh, who am I kidding…it’s St. Patrick’s Day weekend in Boston – every song the Dropkicks play is a singalong.
Casey spent the bulk of the ninety-minute set in a state of constant motion, pacing the length of the stage and making endless trips atop the barricade to whip the devoted into a full-throated frenzy. Tim Brennan and James Lynch hold down stage right and stage left respectively, the latter baring likeness to a punk rock Keith Richards (the one from the Stones, not the one from the Bruisers – he’s already punk rock!). It seemed like every time I looked up from the spot I was wedged in in the photo pit, Jeff DeRosa (guitar/mandolin) and Kevin Rheault (bass) had switched places, which actually came in handy given the limited elbow room in the scaled-down pit. As per usual, Matt Kelly maintained as steady a backbeat as you’ll find in the business from his perch at the rear of the stage, flanked by the band’s most recent piper, Campbell Webster. The setlist on this night drew predominantly from the earlier portions of the Dropkicks’ career, with songs from Do Or Die, Blackout and The Warrior’s Code making up close to half the set. It feels like it was during the Red Sox “Tessie” inspired run during the 2004 playoffs that there started to become a multigenerational feel at local Dropkicks shows, but it never really gets old seeing people across a forty or fifty-year age spectrum belt out the lyrics to songs like “The Fields Of Athenry” or “The State Of Massachusetts” in unison, arm-in-arm.
The Dropkicks found themselves at the center of media attention for what seems like the dozenth time in their near-thirty-year career for making pro-Union, anti-fascist commentary at a recent show. It baffles the mind that there are people who were somehow clueless as to where the band stood politically and who somehow find themselves bewildered that their for democracy and for the American worker and against things like Nazis and dictators, but then again, it’s 2025, so there are a lot of things that baffle me. This weekend found yet another on-stage confrontation with a MAGA-hatted showgoer. You do have to wonder if people make such style choices at a show like this hoping they’ll be singled out from the stage, which seems weird, but we know that proverbial shoe certainly fits.
The four bands on this bill – and really all of the other bands on the bills across the four-night, two-venue run – made for an epic event, and I don’t say that lightly. If it was my last Dropkick’s St. Patrick’s Day show – and I’m not assuming it will be – then I definitely went out on top with a lineup that was second to none and an evening full of performances that were poignant, cathartic, and representative of why this little corner of the music scene (and probably this little corner of the country) is just the best. It was like Homecoming Week for punks from across the land to come together amidst the growing chaos in the outside world to reinforce that we’re all in it together and that there are some people out there – like Rebuilder and Hot Water Music and the Souls and the Dropkick Murphys – fighting the good fight. Check out more pics in the galleries below – and probably stay tuned for more Dropkicks coverage in the coming months!
He was my brother’s favorite player growing up. I remember telling one of my fall ball coaches that and he said “great player to have as your favorite if you don’t care about the fundamentals of playing outfield.”
In what has rather selfishly become one of my favorite show-going events of the year lately, Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy and a cast of supremely talented friends brought their touring REM tribute show to Boston’s Royale nightclub. It’s an idea that really took root close to a decade ago, when Shannon and Narducy started enlisting […]
In what has rather selfishly become one of my favorite show-going events of the year lately, Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy and a cast of supremely talented friends brought their touring REM tribute show to Boston’s Royale nightclub. It’s an idea that really took root close to a decade ago, when Shannon and Narducy started enlisting a few friends to do a handful of one-off shows covering albums they considered staples: Modern Lovers and The Smiths and Neil Young records for example. In 2023, they honored the 40th anniversary of Chicago’s Metro and the 40th anniversary of REM’s Murmur, and it went so well they took the act on the road the following year, adding songs from the Georgia legends’ Chronic Town and Reckoning and a few others to round out a full evening’s set.
Thanks to the success of that run last year – and thanks to the 40th anniversary of REM’s Fables Of The Reconstruction happening this year – the band hopped in the van (proverbially, I think) again for a run of dates that brought them to Boston’s Royale nightclub. The venue – which was previously known as The Roxy, which Narducy played back in 1997 with his old band Verbow – is roughly twice as large as the Sinclair, which was the local stop they sold out on the Murmur run. The larger venue brought with it an expanded venue and a band that was firing on all proverbial cylinders.
Shannon and Narducy and friends (on this run, the “and friends” consist of Narducy’s fellow Bob Mould rhythm mate Jon Wurster on drums, Dag Juhlin on lead guitar, Wilco’s John Stirratt on bass, Vijay Tellis-Nayak on keys) wasted no time diving into the evening’s main event, REM’s 1985 album Fables Of The Reconstruction. Fables is a bit of a weirdly-remembered album. Serving as the legendary band’s third studio full-length, it was also a bit of a transitionary album that still held onto some of the “college rock” sound that made them early 80s critical darlings, but started to dip their toes in waters that were a bit more experimental. It’s an album that I think is received much more fondly in hindsight than it was upon its initial release, but then again, I was 6 when it came out, so what do I know…
ANYWAY, as I was saying, Shannon and Narducy and crew wasted no time, diving right into Fables… opener “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” and proceeded to blitz through the entire album in virtuosic fashion. The band sounded razor-sharp. The addition of keys and a second guitar player gave this lineup the ability to stretch out a little and add a few more textures than the four-piece touring machine that REM was able to in the early-mid 80s heyday. This doesn’t change the core feeling of the songs that so many hold so close to their respective parts, just fills and brightens out the sound. Shannon, for his part, channeled a good deal of Michael Stipe’s stage presence without doing a straight impression. Stipe was a one-of-a-kind ball of energy on stage, especially in the earlier years, and Shannon does a good job of mimicking the energy while not simply aping the entire “thing.” As a critically-acclaimed actor, I wonder if Shannon finds it more important to channel the performance of Stipe himself or his poetic words and the characters they told stories of. Someone should interview him about that; Michael, have your people call my people.
It’s an interesting thing, because it feels cheap to call Shannon and Narducy and Friends a cover band, although I suppose to the letter of the law, that’s what they are. Maybe that’s just semantics – although in the case of two of the Herculean set’s songs, they were technically not covering REM songs, but covering songs that REM were known to dip into in their live show in the early years – Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale” and Aerosmiths “Toys In The Attic.” But it didn’t FEEL like watching a cover band, like a group of weekend warriors living out their alternative rock glory days by starting a band called like Dirty Deeds or Stone Temple Posers or something, giving dive bar performances that are equal part messy garage band practice and Halloween costume audition. Instead, it feels like a group of monstrously talented musicians giving life to the songs created four decades ago by one of America’s most iconic bands. They genuinely do the songs justice, and the night is a bit of a marathon; the Boston stop found them hitting thirty-three songs on the setlist; I think DC reached thirty-seven. And yes, the project has been given the blessing of Stipe, Buck, Mills and Barry, who’ve been known to pop up on occasion at gigs and join the group for a massive homage to their iconic work. There were no original REM members in the room on this evening BUT Ingrid Schorr was in the building, and astute REM fans will recognize her as the muse behind the Mills-penned “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville” which was, on this night, performed in her honor. Also, the stripped-down version of Reckoning’s “So. Central Rain” that Shannon and Narducy played as a duo to kick off the evening’s third set was goose-bump inducing.
Like last year, the multi-talented Dave Hill (Dave, from before…Dave Hill from showbiz, ringleader of the Dangerous Snakes Who Hate Bullshit) kicked off the evening’s festivities in fine fashion. I generally hesitate to review comedy sets in too much detail at the risk of spoiling the bit, but this is also the social media age, and so you probably know the bit already. If you’ve not taken in the Dave Hill live experience in person, it’s equal parts comedy show and blistering guitar performance art. Like a heavy metal late-stage Elvis, Hill barrelled onto the stage in a full one-piece jumpsuit adorned with flames and wolves and snakes and all other sorts of badassery. From there, it was a barrage of tasty riffs – part of Danzig’s “Mother”! A little bit of “Free Bird”! A cursory “Eruption” appearance! – on his sweet Flying V. For a while, he was joined on stage by a bit of a jazz trio (drums and bass and keys) as he regaled the audience with regionally specific pickup lines that would only work in the greater Boston area (shout out to South Station and the abandoned Medfield State psychiatric Hospital) before diving into set-closer “I Was In A Fight.” If you were at last year’s Murmur show, Hill’s set was pretty similar in tone and context, but his individual performance and stage antics make each night a little unique.
Check out a bunch more pics from the evening below, and stay tuned…word on the street is that Shannon and Narducy and Friends will be out on the road in 2026 to mark the 40th anniversary of Life’s Rich Pageant. (And really, Michael, let’s chat!)
Warren Cohen
A Mike Greenwell reference in a punk rock show review! I’m glad to be alive to read it.
jaystone
He was my brother’s favorite player growing up. I remember telling one of my fall ball coaches that and he said “great player to have as your favorite if you don’t care about the fundamentals of playing outfield.”