Might as Well be Ghosts, a perfectly-executed, poetically-written solo record of Todd Farrell Jr., formerly of Two Cow Garage and Benchmarks, officially hit streaming last month and I think it’s pretty damn good. Actually really, really damn good. I had an amazing opportunity to sit down with the very elusive Mr. Farrell at Music City’s greatest punk bar, the Cobra, to shoot the shit about anything and everything that was even remotely related to music.
I label Todd elusive because he’s somebody I was hoping to just grab beer and shoot the shit with ever since I’d come across his Dirty Birds masterpiece of a record, but our paths hadn’t seemed to cross until just before this full-length was due to release. He gained somewhat of a reputation as the wise musician-dad to a few guys in my circle and, knowing his background of opening for Frank Turner and Lucero, I was dying to meet the guy. Yet it wasn’t until a songwriter’s night at the local 5 Spot that I was finally able to meet the dude and chat a bit (coincidentally, it was also my first in-person meeting with Nashville-newbie and Dying Scene friend Roger Harvey). This interview was comprised of equal parts questions about the new record and personal questions seeking wisdom from a dude that had definitely seen his share of the road and has moved into a new stage of his life, or as Todd wisely labeled it, “new adventures”.
“I’ve kind of found myself in this in-between position, like in the song “See You Next Year”. I’m just happy to do anything, I love to make music, I love to record, I love to play. And there was a time, especially during Covid, when I was pretty sure like nobody would ever play music again“, said Farrell. “I’ve somehow stumbled into a good happy medium where like I have a full-time job here, I have kids, I have a wife, I have a family, I have a house. I do like normal dad shit, I coach a t-ball team. But I do still get calls to do some road work every once in a while…” Farrell has made it known, especially during his live shows, how happy he is with this family life he’s built for himself here in Nashville.
I was particularly interested in asking questions pertaining to his balance of family life and music life, a balance I will hopefully be faced with in the distant, but not-too-distant future. When discussing my personal aspirations for hitting the road and my understanding that I hadn’t done it near enough for it to get old yet, Farrell gave an extremely level-headed and well-thought-out response: “it’s not even that it gets old, it’s just you kind of crave new adventures. Like I wanted to be a dad, and I wanted to take my kids to baseball games; I think that’s something that’s important to me. So on that Dirty Bird’s record, there’s a song called “Pawn Shops”, it’s about selling my guitar. And that was written kind of from a perspective of a guy that has not done it yet. And it was, like, this bleeding-heart anthem of how much I want to get out there and do the thing. So on this record, I kind of challenged myself to write the spiritual successor to it. So that’s the first track, “Local Pickup Only”. And it’s the same theme, about selling guitars, and then the turn of both songs is, like, ending up not selling your guitars. But on this one, the perspective is different. This is the perspective of I’ve done these things already, but I still think this is a worthwhile thing to do.“
For the Might as Well be Ghosts, Farrell isn’t in pursuit of a month-long tour of support and sinking every ounce of effort he’s got into pushing it. “I’m just happy I made a record and I get to play the 5 Spot sometimes, and sometimes people take me on tour to play guitar, and that’s cool. Like, there are so few amount of people in the world that get to do even that, and so I’m just thankful that I get to do even a taste of it, and that I got a big taste of it early on, and then now I still get to poke my head in there and do it... I’m not taking it too seriously, and I don’t think anybody should really take me too seriously. If you enjoy it, that’s awesome, and I’m stoked that anybody enjoys the stuff that I still do. I guess thank you to anybody whose listened, and thank you for being interested at all... the fact that I still get to do anything is a gift. Every show I play is a gift, every time I record anything, every time I play with anybody, every time I get to have a cool conversation like this is a gift. So, just, like, thank you for taking your time to take interest in what I’m doing.”
Every song, even every verse at times, features a storytelling through song that I rank up there with the likes of Tim Barry and Cory Branan, but with a humor and wittiness that reminded me a lot of Will Varley. A great example is track 8, “Hey You, You’re Finally Awake”: “The first verse is like, pretty real. Like I’m an older dude now, I have kids. I still have that glimpse of like, old band dude life, you know, “black metal t-shirts in my drawer that I can’t wear anymore” because I’m picking up my kids at daycare, that’s like the crux of that. The second verse is like, just off the wall, random, a COVID rambling I wrote down one time that I thought was really funny... it’s literally just describing the Skyrim Civil War. The Stormcloaks and the like, that’s all it is. And then, the Fox News bit was just because of all the politics... not everything has to be this poignant, super important thing to say. Sometimes you can just do things because you like to do them, because it’s fun.“
From an outside perspective, Todd quoting Shane from their Two Cow Garage days together summed up what I loved so much about hearing the meanings behind these songs: “I quoted him in the lyrics, it’s, uh… “We forget better stories than most people will ever know”. He said that to me a hundred times on the road. What he means is, like when you’re out there and you’re doing stuff, you’re kind of living that life, you see things every single day and everything’s a good story.” But he followed that with a wise personal touch that I appreciated even more: “I don’t think that’s specifically true, I took my kids to their first baseball game this weekend and that was, like, maybe a top-five thing for me. But the point was, there’s kind of a romanticism between band people about the things that you share, the camaraderie and all that, that nobody ever understands until you’re out there doing it. Maybe that’s a little bit of the theme of the record too, I just kind of wanted to tell some of those stories.“
This was hands down my most enjoyable interview to date, my hope is that readers enjoy it a fraction of the amount I did. We talked about tons of great stuff that isn’t touched upon in the write up: his contributions to the new Kilograms full-length featuring Joe Gittleman, Sammy Kay, Mike McDermott and J Duckworth, explanations behind Goose catching on fire at Springwater and “when St. Louis stole all of our shit”, tour stoires and road wisdom, and a whole lot more. Scroll down for the brand new full-length Might as Well be Ghosts and the entire interview transcript.
Dying Scene (Nathan Kernell Nasty Nate): So what’s kind of the timetable for you’re playing career? Like I know about the Dirty Birds, that’s some of my favorite music period, and I know about like Benchmarks, but I’m screwed up on the timetable. Because you did a solo-type record with some Dirty Birds stuff too, right?
Todd Farrell Jr.: So, I’m trying to think, so you’re talking about the “Birds on Benches” record with like all acoustic versions. I did that, I think it was either last year or the year before, but I literally kind of did it as like I’m just hanging around my house and I have this microphone and a guitar, here’s how I play songs live these days. But so like I guess it all kind of started when, in 2011 or 12, I was working at a recording studio out in Kingston Springs, and I like self-recorded an EP where like I played everything myself, just to kind of see if I could do it. And I got trashed on a Drive-by Truckers message board, and then that was like weirdly a springboard into people knowing who I was. I was like, “well, I love the truckers, man, do whatever”. Anyway, then I put a band together, it was just like buddies, like Goose, he played bass in Benchmarks too, and my buddy Jack played drums. We did that and like did a little bit of regional stuff, we would get some decently cool opening things, and we got to open for Two Cow at the Basement in like 2013. I had known them before, but that’s when I kind of really got to know them. And they invited me to sit in with them a few times. But then I was playing guitar for this other girl that next spring on a South by Southwest run, I was just a hired gun guitar player. But we like hit all the same cities as Two Cow so I would just, after our show got done, go see them, and like we just hung out. Then that led to Shane asking me if I wanted to join the band. So I did that, and then simultaneously, we did Benchmarks. Benchmarks and the Dirty Birds are like the same band, but it was kind of like the fresh rebrand, I guess you could call it. We want to make this kind of aggressive, punk, but melodic, and songwriter-based music. And it’s not like “me and the someones,” it’s like this is the band. So we did the “American Night” EP in ’15, we did “Our Undivided Attention” in ’17 on SofaBurn Records, and then around that time, I walked away from Two Cow because I really wanted to focus on Benchmarks. Which leads of course to 2020, putting a record out in 2020 and COVID destroying everything. But it was all good, like I got married and had kids, and was very stoked about my home situation.
Now with Two Cow, like were you guys kind of on that show schedule where it’s like, I don’t know, like 300 shows a year or whatever it was?
It wasn’t 300 while I was in there, but it was definitely 150 plus. For a while it was like a month on, a month off, a month on, a month off. And by a month, I mean like six to seven weeks, kind of, and then a month off. It was a ton of fun, I learned just about everything I know about touring from being in that band, what to do and what not to do. I can’t say enough good things about my time with them.
Well, I’m envious as fuck about doing that because that’s kind of what I’m trying to work my way up to, my goal is 100 shows in a year and my wife hates that.
Honestly man, unless you go to the West Coast, you don’t need to be out for two or three weeks. It used to be you had to be out for more than a month to like break even because you had to find enough like anchor shows to make the trip worthwhile. But now it’s like, figure out where a good paying show is, book a few shows around it and do that. Then it’s good on your band’s sanity, it’s good on your band’s finances, you’re not overplaying. There was a minute in Two Cow and Benchmarks to where we were like in this exact same bar, playing to this exact same crowd two months ago in this town. That’s not really furthering this, you know, we don’t even have new merch. I think bands could be strategic about like how, when and where they tour. There’s a romanticism about being on the road your whole life, but I don’t think it’s sustainable for a band. Having said all that, there are parts of it that I do miss and I’m thankful that sometimes artists will take me and I get to play guitar or whatever. I haven’t done the touring on my own in a while, maybe I will if I get to do something with Sammy [Kay] or whatever.
That’s something I wanted to ask you because you’ve been pretty outspoken at your shows about like you’ve built this life for yourself that you really love with getting married and having kids. And that’s not super conducive to touring like you used to. But it seems like you’ve got a happy medium of you still get out like you went with Will Hoge, but you’re home with family too.
Yeah, like last year I went with Sammy and we did the support for Chuck Ragan. I’ve somehow stumbled into a good happy medium where like I have a full-time job here, I have kids, I have a wife, I have a family, I have a house. I do like normal dad shit, I coach a t-ball team. But I do still get calls to to do some road work every once in a while and these days, obviously if it’s a good paying thing I’m more likely to take it but sometimes with Sammy it’s like we’re opening for Chuck Ragan for five nights.
And you can’t say no to Sammy… *laughs*
To be fair I do say no to Sammy *laughs*, not because I don’t love him but because sometimes it’s like my kid’s birthday. I think I’m in a privileged situation, picking shows, like I know those calls aren’t always gonna be there forever, but like doing a long weekend or a week on the road with someone like Sammy or even like Will Hoge is still pretty cool, he’s on a level more than I’ve ever been a part of, and like I respect the hell out of him. He’s kind of living the dream, he’s also like a family dude, he’s got kids and a family and he’s made more sacrifices than probably I’m making to make that dream. I respect the hell out of him and it was an honor and privilege to do those things. I’m a big fan of his. My wife is a huge fan of his. And so I was like “Vicki, you know, I got a call to do a long weekender with Will Hoge”. That’s how I knew it was legit, my wife knew who he was by name and she knew some of the songs he’d written.
So with the the new record you talked on your EPK you sent me that it was mostly written and recorded over Covid. Were there any outliers, like old songs?
Yeah, there’s three specific ones. One is called “Separate Beds” and it’s like on YouTube, I played it at an in-store in Little Rock in 2015 or 16 or something, I also played the other songs at that same in-store. “Separate’ Beds” I wrote for my wife before we were married. And then this other one on the record is called “Nahmericana”, it’s on YouTube as something else. But I played an unofficial Americana fest thing at the 5 Spot and some guy told me like “your songs are great, but you talk too much about like Taylor Swift and black metal, like you really need to focus on your brand”. So I wrote that song in response to that. And then the third song, that was an earlier song called “Health and Safe Passage”. There is an artist named Chris Porter, he was in a lot of bands, like alt-country bands, Some Dark Holler was one, Porter and the Bluebonnet Rattlesnakes with like John Calvin Abney who’s on that record. So anyway, Two Cow’s on tour at South by Southwest and we run into Porter at the bar, and we’re just hanging out and shooting the shit. He’s a good dude, we all know each other, we’re all friends. But like three weeks later, we’re on the West Coast in Santa Cruz and wake up to hear that there’s a van crash and Porter died in this crash. And I literally wrote those lyrics on my iPhone, I like walked from the hotel to the pier and sat there, wrote those lyrics down. And I didn’t think about it, literally, until when I was recording these songs, I was kind of like “what else could I put on here” and then I found those lyrics. And actually John Calvin Abney, who played with Porter a lot, he’s playing lead guitar on that.
Does this this record kind of a theme?
I think it probably does, it’s probably kind of what we were talking about earlier. I think it has a lot to do with, like you said, where I’ve kind of found myself in this in-between position, like in the song “See You Next Year”. I’m just happy to do anything, I love to make music, I love to record, I love to play. And there was a time, especially during Covid, when I was pretty sure like nobody would ever play music again, I just thought it was not gonna happen. And you know Benchmarks had this whole album, tour flop because of Covid and everything and I was really upset about that. I was in that space kind of where whole world’s changing and I really gotta buckle down and do my normal job and I need to be a dad. I need to do all this stuff because I think music’s done. And then Joe Maiocco, who did kind of the creative direction for the album art, he convinced me, one, that that’s not the case, that it’s worthwhile to keep creating, and, two, that these songs deserve that these dongs deserve to see the light of day. I was just sending him iPhone demos like “here’s a song I wrote today, what do you think?” And he was finally like “Todd, you need to actually fuckin’ record these songs and put them out.” So I guess the theme is just, you know, make cool stuff. You can just make cool stuff and it doesn’t have to be this big extravagant thing. Like Benchmarks, to me, was like I need to make sure I’m printing up records and I need to do the merch and I need to play X number of shows a year and I need to do all this. And now I’m just happy I made a record and I get to play the 5 Spot sometimes, and sometimes people take me on tour to play guitar, and that’s cool. Like, there are so few amount of people in the world that get to do even that, and so I’m just thankful that I get to do even a taste of it, and that I got a big taste of it early on, and then now I still get to poke my head in there and do it.
Well, I think that’s a great mindset to have, a great perspective to have on it.
I get the bug still though, you know. I get the bug that like, man, maybe I want to go back out on the road for, you know, whatever, months and months and months. There’s a lot of me that would be like, oh, that would be really fun. But I also just took my kids to Atlanta to see their first baseball game and I would never give that away. This is what that “Northern Lights” song is about, but just because I really love the situation I’m in now, doesn’t mean I don’t still occasionally look into what that other life was like and think it was really, really fun. So trying to like pull little bits of that into my current life, and exercise whatever kind of moderation I can in playing, and just trying to make myself happy and make those around me happy, it’s cool.
I always love talking to guys like you that have kind of been there and done that in terms of touring. It’s kind of what I’m trying to do now, you know, and you’ve done it. I’ve talked to other guys who have been out there and done it, and in a certain way it’s gotten old. It’s still fresh for me, I’m looking at it in a way like “oh, I could hit the road every day this year and just be gone all the time.” I know, like, that’s going to get old. It’s just really cool talking to you about that and it’s a very level-headed way to look at it.
Well, it’s not even that it gets old, it’s just you kind of crave new adventures. Like I wanted to be a dad, and I wanted to take my kids to baseball games. And maybe that’s really, like, un-punk rock of me or whatever, but I think that’s something that’s important to me. So on that Dirty Bird’s record, there’s a song called “Pawn Shops”, it’s about selling my guitar. And that was written kind of from a perspective of a guy that has not done it yet. And it was, like, this bleeding-heart anthem of how much I want to get out there and do the thing. So on this record, I kind of challenged myself to write the spiritual successor to it. So that’s the first track, “Local Pickup Only”. And it’s the same theme, about selling guitars, and then the turn of both songs is, like, ending up not selling your guitars. But on this one, the perspective is different. This is the perspective of I’ve done these things already, but I still think this is a worthwhile thing to do.
That’s a perfect lead-in to what I had next because I wanted to talk about your one-liners. You’ve probably got, like, no exaggeration, some of my favorite one-liners in music. “Pawn Shop” is a prime example, like, “The hardest part when all your heroes play in bands, is finding out all you heroes live in vans”. Then right after “I’d sell my guitar to buy all my friends drinks at the bar.” I wanted to ask about some of the one-liners you had in “Local Pickup Only.” I mean you kind of just explained that as a follow-up to “Pawn Shop”. Being from St. Louis originally, I’ve gotta ask about the line about St. Louis stealing all of your shit.
That one was with Two Cow. This is my first tour with them, too. We played at the, I think it’s called the Demo, it’s not there anymore, next door to a record shop. Played the show, and this is when St. Louis was at its height of people stealing from bands. And we were like, “all right, we’re going to go out of our way, we’re going to spend money on a nice hotel with a nice locked-up garage”. We play the show, go back to the hotel. I brought my acoustic guitar in, which is like a $90 guitar I got at a pawn shop. All of our other gear’s in the van still. And we wake up the next morning, the van locks are popped, like everything’s gone, everything was stolen from us. It’s an interesting story too because somebody made a GoFundMe for us, and by the time we made it to Minneapolis, we had enough money to just buy new gear. We played at Triple Rock that next night, my first time playing at Triple Rock. But, we just played on borrowed gear from the other bands for the rest of that tour, and then we bought new stuff. But then it came out later, like in the last three or four years, they found all the people that stole everything, it was just this big theft ring. But all that was left was Shane’s bass because he had painted “Soldier of Love” on it and you couldn’t resell that without it being tracked. There’s a big Riverfront Times article, you should look it up, about how we found all our stuff on eBay, and like bid on it, and then they blocked us, and we showed the police and the police didn’t do anything.
What about the Springwater line, about Goose catching on fire?
Goose and I used to play in a death metal band, this is in like 2000, maybe 2005, like a long ass time ago. And, we would play at Springwater. They did this thing called Metal Mondays in October, they would have a bunch of metal bands play. And, there was this band, I run into this dude sometimes, the guitar player from this band, they were called Good Lookin’ Corpse. They would like, take swigs of Bacardi 151 and Spitfire. But this is Springwater, you’re gonna blow that shit. And like Goose is the bass player in all these bands, I name dropped him in that song. He got it all, it like, singed all his arm hair off.
Probably my favorite was “the Dragons, just like I saw on Fox News” from, I think it was from “Hey you”.
The first verse is like, pretty real. Like I’m an older dude now, I have kids. I still have that glimpse of like, old band dude life, you know, “black metal t-shirts in my drawer that I can’t wear anymore” because I’m picking up my kids at daycare, that’s like the crux of that. The second verse is like, just off the wall, random, a COVID rambling I wrote down one time that I thought was really funny. Have you ever played Skyrim?
Oh yeah absolutely.
So, it’s literally just describing the Skyrim Civil War. The Stormcloaks and the like, that’s all it is. And then, the Fox News bit was just because of all the politics.
Well that gets a good laugh every time I’ve heard you play it live, everyone fucking loves that one.
And, you know, I think the roundabout of the whole thing is a little bit in theme with not everything has to be this poignant, super important thing to say. Sometimes you can just do things because you like to do them, because it’s fun.
So what’s your favorite song on the record, do you have one?
*laughs* I gotta remember what songs are on there. Um… I really “Local Pickup”, I really like “See You Next Year”, I have a few different versions of “See You Next Year”. And the version that’s on this is very specific in the way it was done, but it’s not the way I play it live. I kind of want to record the live version. I like “Northern Lights” a lot, that’s a song I wrote about touring with Sammy, actually. It was shortly after I left Two Cow, I was kind of still looking for work. Sammy called, and we did, like, a seven-weeker opening for the Creepshow. I flew into Jersey and met up with them, and we kind of played our way out that way, we went, like, from Jersey to California, up to Vancouver, back across Canada to Winnipeg, crossed over the border on Halloween night, played Minneapolis, and then Benchmarks met up with us in Minneapolis. So I played both sets on the way back down to Nashville and then they continued on the rest. This is in the fall of ’17 and I’m, like, two days into this seven-week-long tour and I get a call from my wife, I find out she’s pregnant. And, one, like, we can’t talk about it, I’m surrounded by people, we can’t like have private conversations on the phone and stuff. But we can’t also be together and, like, dissect that emotion or whatever. So it was, like, a month and a half before I saw her again. And then when I see her again, there’s two bands crashing in our place. But on that tour, we went all the way up to Fort McMurray, Canada, as far as North as I’ve ever been. And the club guy was like “if you drive, like, a few miles north, you can see the Northern Lights.” And we all thought that’d be awesome. But by the end of the show, everybody’s so tired, like we’ll see it next time, wherever. But, like, in my mind, I’m thinking, I don’t know if there’s gonna be a next time for me, I really wanna see it. So that was kind of about that, like that transitional phase, in theme with everything else, getting a good look at what you’re kind of leaving behind, that sense of adventure and discovery and everything. Kind of transitioning into that other, not adulthood, but into like, post-band life. Everything’s a story, I think.
Well, that’s what I really like, I’ve gotten real into the Americana genre these past few years. It just happens to be it’s all punk guys that do Americana that I like. Like, Tim Barry, I think, does it better than anybody where it’s storytelling through song. He does it great.
I’m trying to get better at this. I try to, like, be too flashy on the guitar when I’m writing songs, there has to be a lick or something. But Tim’s like, I’m gonna play G, D, C, and E minor and rip your heart out with those chords. It’s all his words and his melodies and it’s not about being flashy.
Well, I think you’ve got the storytelling part of it down, that’s what I love about some of your songs. You can tell it kind of is a story, not even between every song, but every verse. Like “Local Pickup Only”, you can tell there’s a story to everything you’re saying.
The theme of that song came from something Shane from Two Cow said to me. I quoted him in the lyrics, it’s, uh… “We forget better stories than most people will ever know”. He said that to me a hundred times on the road. What he means is, like when you’re out there and you’re doing stuff, you’re kind of living that life, you see things every single day and everything’s a good story. You see whatever’s funny or terrible or sad or beautiful or whatever, like… you experience life in such a different way than the monotony of, like, your day-to-day work. The best stories that you have, like, in your day-to-day are not as good as the worst stories that you have when you’re doing the thing. And I don’t think that’s specifically true, I took my kids to their first baseball game this weekend and that was, like, maybe a top-five thing for me. But the point was, there’s kind of a romanticism between band people about the things that you share, the camaraderie and all that, that nobody ever understands until you’re out there doing it. Maybe that’s a little bit of the theme of the record too, I just kind of wanted to tell some of those stories.
That’s fucking rad, that fires me up. That’s exactly what I’m kind of going after with my band. The relatability and the storytelling has always been what appeals to me about punk. I mean, you go from, like The Bouncing Souls or NOFX to like Roger Harvey or Tim Barry or whoever, it’s all kind of the same… relatability and, like accessibility, I guess.
It’s interesting for me. I kind of back-ended my way into punk. I was, like, a metal dude. And then I was really into, like, songwriters. I loved Richard Buckner, John Prine. I found Drive-By Truckers and Lucero, and those kind of bands. And that, like, back-ended me into punk music. So I’m not, like, the great authority on punk rock, other than playing in and with a bunch of cool punk bands. Like, I listen to it now. But that ethos that you’re talking about and those, like principles… the sense of community, I think, is the most important one. That existed across all those genres, but it’s very much rooted in that punk ideology. It’s not, like, the DIY thing as much as it is just a community of people that lift each other up, whether that be musically or actually lifting each other up physically in life.
Well, it’s cool hearing from you, somebody who found punk in a drastically different way. Because I was, like looking for punk. And I found it, finally. And then I found, like, Lucero two years ago, maybe. And I found all these guys that are some of my favorite songwriters ever now. You know, like, Will Varley, Frank Turner, Brian Fallon I found because of Gaslight, and Dave Hause, I was a big Loved Ones fan before him. I almost respect them more as, like, it takes some balls to get up there just with an acoustic guitar and songwriting. It’s terrifying. Like, I’ve got nerves real bad being on stage, so I’ve got to have a few beers in me. I couldn’t imagine being by myself up there, I respect the fuck out of it.
I used to be really bad at it, too. This is terrible. The show, I’m trying to think, this is 2013. I had booked back-to-back show, and I was opening solo for John Moreland and Caleb Caudle at the OG Basement. I, like, really fucked up the solo set. Like, I blew it, I was not good. My banter was bad, I didn’t play well, I forgot lyrics, I was so nervous. And then, the band show with Two Cow was, like, killer, probably the best the band ever sounded, probably why I got a job at Two Cow. For whatever reason, playing in a band was so much more natural to me than playing solo. But over the years, I’ve kind of figured out how to play solo, there’s no formula to it. It more just has to do with, like, being comfortable and knowing what you’re going to do.
When developing these songs, John Prine died, and so I started studying John Prine. And then one of my favorite bands and songwriters ever is The Weakerthans, John K. Samson of The Weakerthans. The way he writes, the way he crafts his songs to be conversations with the audience. A lot of these songs are like, John K. Samson, I’m just doing what I think he would do. Like that song, “Skulls and Antlers”, the chorus is just “I wanna start a blackened death metal band”. That’s just me trying to think what would John K. Samson do.
Going back to what you were saying about playing solo, maybe there’s also a little bit of I’ve changed my expectation of what I want my live performance to be. It used to be, man, I gotta make sure I get this many people in here so I can sell some records and t-shirts, I’m really nervous about everything. Now when it’s just me with an acoustic guitar, I can just play my songs, maybe selfishly or arrogantly, but I know they’re good because I’ve worked on them really well. I’ve already put the work in and I’ve practiced them at home. I guess maybe just from playing for years and years, I don’t have a stage fright thing anymore. I’m in total control. When I’m with a band now, I don’t have a lot of time to rehearse anymore so there’s some variables and I’m like, “we’ll see how this goes”.
My love for Lucero, they’re a band that maybe people wouldn’t think I’m into because they’re not like a guitar-forward band per se, they’re not shredding or anything, they’re just like writing really good songs and playing it really well. That’s a band that probably changed my life on taking songwriting seriously and not just wanting to shred all day.
Ben Nichols, Sammy, and Dave Hause are probably the biggest friends of the site. Our head dude Jay knows all of them real well. You two may have met at some point, he was actually the one who told me about you and Micah seeing on Twitter the interview I did with Roger Harvey not too long ago.
Yeah I met Roger when he was living up in Pittsburgh, he’s a sweet dude too.
I’m so glad he’s in town because I got to see him play, he was opening for Greg Barnett at the End, that’s how I found out about him. Fell in love with the dude’s music.
I was at that show, Mike Bay, Borrowed Sparks, was playing that show.
I missed his set because I drove from Chattanooga I think for that show. I’ve actually covered him for the site quite a bit too. But I’m the biggest Menzingers fan and I was like taking pictures for Greg Barnett and his family, hanging out with them, him and Eric Keen which was cool. That’s what I love about punk, how accessible it is. Even like the biggest names, like Fat Mike, my buddies have stories about being around him. It’s so accessible, everybody’s just a dude, I love it. The amount of big name guys I’ve met just here at the Cobra, dudes from TSOL, Sean Sellers was drumming for the Mad Caddies, I was smoking a cigarette with him out back.
It’s pretty cool that people hang here, there used to be no green room. I haven’t played here since it was Foobar.
There’s a green room about the size of a bathroom in there and nobody hangs out in it, they all hang out out front. That’s what I’ve always loved about punk, no one’s got a big head because the ceiling for punk isn’t super high normally.
Speaking of “all our heroes live in vans”, I just remember during that period, I thought Two Cow was just the biggest band in the world, they were the most important band in the world to me and I’m getting to open up for their show. The coolest thing in the world. And then like a year later, I’m in the fucking band. I was like “that’s what this scene is, everybody is just a person”. Something I will say, from playing country gigs and just doing hired gun stuff for people that aren’t necessarily in that same punk ecosystem, like a lot of the Americana punk stuff is crossover, but I would do a lot of Broadway stuff or try to get on big country gigs. And it’s not the same, like right now, we’re saying a lot of names, but it’s not name dropping, it’s just like these are our friends. But people name drop and people get pissed when you try to do that. I don’t know, there’s just a weird vibe, you can’t talk about so and so was a good example.
So do you have any plans with the new record, are you doing any promotion shows for it or any pressings?
I have nothing planned, and this is like, the most haphazard way I’ve put a record out. Everything else I’ve done has been so precise, and so planned, regardless of whatever band. Planned is probably a loose term, but at least we had a plan and a tour, and things like that. I don’t even have a show booked at the moment, and I know that’s not like, what you’re supposed to do, but I kind of just wanted to get the music out. I’ll probably play some local stuff. I would like to maybe do a quick regional run where I hit, like, places where they like me. So I might go to Atlanta, like, Raleigh, I might go to Columbus, Ohio, Louisville, Dayton, Little Rock, Dallas, but I have no plans to do it at the moment. And I do it, it won’t be all at once, it’ll probably be like a couple weekends here and there, but I would like to. But I also wanna like coach my kids’ t-ball team on Saturdays.
What about with like Sammy, or just hired gig stuff, anything you can talk about?
I’m playing this CKY show with Electric Python here next week. I don’t have anything on the books with Sammy. He asked me to do something over the summer that I can’t do, with the Kilograms.
The Kilograms are fucking unbelievable, dude. Were you on that new record?
Yeah, I played pedal steel on it. I literally did it in my living room, I haven’t even met them. They sent me the tracks I did in my living room, and like, we’ve talked on social media, but I haven’t officially met any of them other than Sammy. Which is funny how it all works these days because they recorded all that stuff in, like Cincinnati, and I don’t even know where Joe is, I assume he’s like in the Jersey area. But I guess that’s not like a far-fetched thing these days. Like, that Sammy tour that we did with Chuck Ragan was, like, me and Lydia Loveless and this guy Corey Tramontelli, who did a tour with Stuck Lucky from here recently. It was the four of us and Lydia and I knew each other before, but I didn’t know Corey. Sammy and I played together a lot. But we just kind of, like, the day of the first show got together and jammed for a half hour. I also did that Will Hoge tour, I learned 65 songs and we never rehearsed. The first time we played together was just, like, on stage, in front of, like, hundreds of people. Talking about nerves, I was terrified for the first, like, half of that set. I was terrified, because these guys play together a lot, and I have not. And, you know, like, you can learn songs, you can’t learn the way a band plays them live. You can’t learn, like, he’s gonna do this move that means we’re gonna stretch a verse. There’s a little variance.
That’s something that’s always blown my mind, how well people live can go along with variation in sets.
Dude, with Two Cow, there was a time, this era of Two Cow, we were just like a breathing unit that we knew exactly what we were all doing. We knew what each other was gonna do, and it was great. And that’s how I kind of perceived, like, the Will Hoge situation when I walked into that environment. I was, like, “man, they have that, but I am new here, so I don’t know what I’m doing”. I’m just, like, watching everybody very carefully. I slowly figured it out, I think that’s a cool thing about just bands and musical communication.
Well that’s about all I’ve got if there’s anything you wanted to add about the brand new record?
I guess if I want anybody to take anything away from, like, what I’m doing with this record is I’m not taking it too seriously, and I don’t think anybody should really take me too seriously. If you enjoy it, that’s awesome, and I’m stoked that anybody enjoys the stuff that I still do. I guess thank you to anybody who has listened, and thank you for being interested at all. Kind of like I said, I kind of thought that that creative side of my life might have been over during COVID, and so the fact that I still get to do anything is a gift. Every show I play is a gift, every time I record anything, every time I play with anybody, every time I get to have a cool conversation like this is a gift. So, just, like, thank you for taking your time to take interest in what I’m doing, and I appreciate it.
Yeah, that’s a great way to end it, I appreciate it dude.
