Now on the the actual reason for this piece: BGF LP #3, “The Misery Suite”. Black Guy Fawkes records are incredibly dynamic, drawing from loads of different influences. In a genre that could pretty easily become stale and boring, I’m constantly amazed at how Americana and Folk is able to stay fresh and how artists like Roger Harvey, Tim Barry, and Cory Branan are able to keep from falling into the cookie-cutter songwriting that has plagued other genres. I think Black Guy Fawkes showcases perfectly what I have loved for so long about guys of the punk/americana genre, not only is the music unique and attention-grabbing, but they’re able to do whatever the hell they want.

The reason I slap the Americana label on Black Guy Fawkes is not really at all to do with the upcoming release, but from the records prior. “Life, Love & The Bomb” and “Trying Times” both, for me, fall into the category of what Brian Fallon has been doing outside of Gaslight Anthem music the last decade or so: not exactly what can be described as traditional Americana or Folk, but something else hard to describe with another genre other than alternative.

“I think of records kind of like movies, right? I wanted to have a very cohesive beginning, middle, and end for it. So the theme of this record was basically, in 2023, I started therapy for the first time. And it was me confronting a lot of things that happened in my life. I finished two years of it, and just remembering that first year, I wanted to just write a record about what I went in there, what baggage I went in there with, but also what I walked out learning at the same time. So the first half of the record is kind of, the record is 10 songs, the first half is about me, my baggage. Then the second half is me unpacking it, basically.” 

Having hung out and talked with Ian quite a bit, I knew he was a big fan of theatre; his vocal style has always kind of reminded me of what I have heard in the few musicals I have seen. But it was fascinating hearing in-depth about the role that film scores and theatre played in not only influencing the sound of this record, but in crafting the record’s playability.

September 19, Black Guy Fawkes’ “The Misery Suite” hits streaming everywhere via Asbestos Records. Attached below is the first single, ‘Racial Battle Fatigue’ featuring Angelo Moore from Fishbone, along with the preorder link and some other of my favorite tracks. Be sure to read the full interview below as we dive into a whole lot more than what I alluded to earlier. Be sure to keep a special eye on the Dying Scene site throughout the middle of August, we may just have another Black Guy Fawkes surprise coming your way! Cheers!

Dying Scene (Nathan Kernell NastyNate): What’s going on, man? How are you doing? 

Ian Robinson (Black Guy Fawkes): I’m doing good, I’m currently sitting in my friend’s house in Denver on tour with Pet Needs. We did Tempe, Arizona, we did Anaheim. Tonight we’re, no, tomorrow, not tonight. Oh my, time’s not real right now. We’re at the Skylark Lounge tomorrow in Denver. And then they’re doing a show in Lincoln that I’m not on. So we’re driving up there two days from now. Then we have Madison, then we’re doing some of Midwest, East Coast and back to Midwest. 

Oh, that’ll be cool, man. Where’d you play in Tempe? 

We were at Yucca Taproom.

Okay, yeah, I had a buddy play there not too long ago. That’s a cool spot. 

Yeah, I played like a shorter set because I realized that not only are seasonal allergies a thing, but also desert allergies are a thing too, and I’m not accustomed to that desert life. So I’m like, I’m slowly getting over the allergies right now, I’m a little bit stuffed up, but trying to get ready for tomorrow. 

I’m completely with you, dude. I’ve been out there a little bit and it tears me up, man. So tell me a little bit about what you’ve been doing, man. You’ve been real busy lately, doing a lot of cool shit. 

Yeah, I mean, predominantly I’m doing some more Pet Needs shows and then we’ve got Camp Punksylvania. Then I’m just getting ready for this next record for the most part, just getting everything in order. I’ll be announcing it here soon. And yeah, that’s pretty much it, touring has taken up a good part of this year so far.

Do you have anything planned for the record, like promotion for it? 

Yeah, so we’ll be announcing the record on Juneteenth. We’ve got a lyric video coming out for it that day alongside the lead single for it as well. And we’ve got a few other releases happening throughout the summer and going into fall. We’ll be announcing some more fun stuff too with the full band as well. 

Nice, so yeah, tell me a little bit about the full band, who’s in it, because from when I’ve seen you and when we’ve hung out, it’s always been solo stuff. I’m interested in the guys you’re playing with. 

Yeah, so this is it. It’s Corey Mackereth, one of those guys who predominantly have been playing with me for the last few years, for like the last 10 or 12 years now. He’s one of my closest buddies. There’s Zach Dodge, he plays bass and also does some of those harmonies as well. I consider this man to be kind of like our George Martin, but his name is Derek Shank. And he’s produced every single record that I have. And he’s also played drums on Life Over the Bomb and this one too. So that’s predominantly the band and that’s who I’ll be bringing out to Camp Pennsylvania this year. Everybody gets to experience that. We played full band, I think in 2023. And last year we just did a duo with me and Corey, but this one, since we got this new record, we’re going to be bringing everybody in. So it’s going to be a fun one.

That’ll be fun, man. You’ll have to let me know how Camp Punksylvania is because I’ve got some buddies playing it also. Stuck Lucky, you’ll have to check them out, really cool ska punk band from here. Is there anybody you’re particularly excited to see up there? 

I’m fucking excited for Lawrence Arms. I’m excited for the Vandals, they’re my good buddies, I love them to death. I’m excited for fucking OBGMs because they are going to fucking rip it. They are one of my favorite bands out right now without a shadow of a doubt. 

That’ll be cool, man. I’ve got buddies that are going up there, they’re pumped for Dillinger 4 and Lawrence Arms because they’d never really gotten to see either of them.

 D4, that’s going to be so good. I think I’m going to be there the whole weekend, I’ve gotta find out if I am or not, but if I am, then I’m going to be up front fucking screaming along to D4. It’s going to be so good.

What day are you playing? 

I’m playing the 21st, Saturday. 

That’s a good day, man, with like Make War and Get Dead playing.

I’m so hyped for Get Dead. So it’s funny, like I’ve known Ceschi for a little bit, I just met Sam King like not long ago, too. Oh my God, they invited me out to play this after party for Punk Rock Bowling. The debauchery I saw happen at that party *laughs*. I didn’t think Get Dead played, but Codefendants played at PRB this year. I didn’t get to see them, unfortunately, because I was on the barricade for Laura Jane Grace.

That’s a good excuse. 

Yeah, that’s a good excuse. Well, I saw they had Fat Mike join them on a song, which I was upset I missed. 

So with the new record, I listened to it, dude, and I absolutely loved it. It sounds awesome, you killed it. So tell me, I always like starting off with this, is there kind of a theme to this record? Were you writing with a common theme or are these kind of sporadic songs you’ve had? 

So the way I write music is, I think of records kind of like movies, right? I wanted to have a very cohesive beginning, middle, and end for it. So the theme of this record was basically, in 2023, I started therapy for the first time. And it was me confronting a lot of things that happened in my life. I finished two years of it, and just remembering that first year, I wanted to just write a record about what I went in there, what baggage I went in there with, but also what I walked out learning at the same time. So the first half of the record is kind of, the record is 10 songs, the first half is about me, my baggage. Then the second half is me unpacking it, basically. 

So I like asking this also, were any of these songs ones you had had for a while, or did you kind of write all these at one time? 

So it was a mixture of both. There’s some songs I wrote a while before. There’s one song on the record called Glass Houses, which I wrote back in, I think, 2023? I had the concept for it. But then I, so originally I wanted to write a record that was very, that was in the vein of, like Block Party / Radiohead, but it wasn’t. For some reason, I just put on In Utero, and I was really inspired. And it gave me the idea of writing what now is called “Misery Suite”. So it inspired me to kind of write that about the way that therapy for me was very, it was healing, but it was also kind of dirty. You had to get down and dirty with therapy so you could confront some demons. So I wanted the record to kind of have that dirty, like, grungy sound to it. 

Well I really, really enjoyed it. Do you have any favorites off of it?

It’s hard to pick. It’s weird, this record is, it’s like me picking my favorite child, and I can’t, it’s hard for me to do that. But, like, the one that I had fun, like, writing it, and just recording the most, the song called ‘Racial Battle Fatigue’, which will be the first single that we put out for this. That one kind of took me a little bit longer to write. So we started tracking this back last year around June. Like, during that time, that was right after we met and hung out at Jorts Fest in Nashville.

Yeah, that’s right, like June or July.

Right, yeah. So, when I was writing this record, I had the melodies already, but I was struggling with finishing the lyrics. So we tracked drums, and we tracked, like, second guitar with Derek. Then after that, I just kind of listened back over it and started writing, like, writing along to it, just kind of feeling. I was like “all right, how do you feel right now, and what kind of vibe are you going for?” So, I feel like this was, this was a slow process of writing, we really took our time, when you hear it, there’s a lot of intent when it comes to, like, themes, and when it comes to musicality in it.

What’s your writing process normally look like, because the way you put it sounds like this was a bit of a change for you in terms of length of time. But how do the ideas start, were you writing this with your band, or did you have these kind of ideas by yourself, and you brought them to the band and they interpreted it? What did that look like?

Pretty much all the songs start out, I pretty much write all the songs, and I just take it to them and they add their own parts onto it, too. But then, we get into the studio, and it is, like, semi-collaborative. It’s weird, like, for the first two records, “Life, Love & the Bomb” and “Trying Times”, it was, like, they’re kind of showing us what to do, just giving us different ideas. But this time, this time was kind of more me and him, putting in input, working together on it.

Gotcha, okay, that’s cool. One thing I always love to hear the answer to, with your personal writing style, how does a song start? Like, do you come up with a melody first, or do you have a vocal melody? I’ve heard guys that talk about having a line, that they write around one vocal line. What’s it look like for you? 

It goes back and forth. So, usually, it may start just with one simple line, or one simple melody. Sometimes, I’ll just start out with just a guitar strum or something like that. There’s one song off the new record, it’s the last song, it’s called ‘Spotlight’.

I love that one. 

Thank you. That’s probably one of my favorites off of it. So I wanted to have this, this very like Weezery, undone, mixed with kind of like Teen Spirit. I wanted to just be this very repetitive thing where you just get into the rhythm of it. So, um, that one, it just started out with that opening line, “Dear sweet misery, fuck off from me”. From then on, the song was written. But then there were songs like, ‘Racial Battle Fatigue”, it started out with “you got me fucked up”. After that, it took a while to get all the lyrics down for it. But I always knew that I wanted it to be this very, like beastly voice, ragey type sound to it. So, in a way, the way I write records, usually I try to find some sound that I really enjoy, that’s why I like the grunginess. And that’s why I feel like to an extent, [this record] is kind of my love letter to the 90s and to like 90s alternative, 90s grunge.

Like I said, out of every record I wrote, I’m the proudest of this one, because we were there, we really did take our time, we literally spent a year working on it. I think it’s gonna be something that somebody can find like a little piece of themselves in along the way. 

So ‘Spotlight’ was definitely one of my favorites. And what’s the one right before Spotlight? 

Right before Spotlight was ‘This Radio’. 

Yeah, those two are probably my favorite. And I see what you’re saying, where it’s like a movie, you finish really strong, you feel that the record is concluding. I really dig that. 

I have always felt movies and music, they’re so interconnected. And I love film scores, I don’t feel like some people pay attention to them. So, I love the show, Shrinking, oddly enough, while in therapy and while writing this record. And there’s a moment in the song where, so if you haven’t seen it, spoiler alert, Jason Segel’s wife, she dies in a car accident from a drunk driver. And in season two, they run into the drunk driver and like they have a flashback episode, they show Jason Segel and his daughter. His wife died and he doesn’t know how to be a dad anymore. And it shows the drunk driver side, where he murdered somebody and it’s pushing away the love of his life too. And then there’s a song playing like during that whole montage, and I forget the actual name of it. But the line was, ‘for a minute you’re my whole world’. And when you hear that song and then when you listen to it,like what it’s saying during that scene, that’s powerful to me because I don’t think anybody really pays attention to like, those close finite details.  

That’s really cool, I know you’re big into theater, do you see any of that kind of influence coming over here too? 

Oh, 100%. So I got a lot of shit for this, but I love Jesus Christ Superstar. Un-ironically, I love Cats. I don’t care what anybody says, I will watch that all the time. I’ve heard people that hate it, I’ve heard people that love it. You gotta go in there with the right mindset. And when I say the right mindset, I mean being either on drugs,or just knowing what Cats is *laughs*. But yeah,  musical theater has always been a very big influence. Again when you hear like these, these recurring themes in songs and in musicals too, recurring on musical interludes and stuff, you really, you start paying attention to what they’re saying a lot more. Like Jesus Christ Superstar, you hear Mary Magdalene sing about Jesus, ‘I don’t know how to love him’, because she doesn’t know how to appreciate him. She doesn’t know how to be there for him, or anything like that. Not that she doesn’t know what to do, if he loves her too. And then like later on, when Judas betrays Jesus and when he finds out that Jesus is going to be crucified and also died, he says the same thing, he repeats that same melody, ‘I don’t know how to love him’. Stuff like that is very powerful to me. Like in “Misery Suite”, there’s a couple of them. At the end of “This Radio” there’s a very special guest who I cannot name right now, but he repeats a line because I wanted to show that that song was kind of about the fact that music has saved my life on many different occasions. And some of the artists I listened to back then, that inspired me to do Black Guy Fawkes, are now friends of mine. So I wanted to get somebody who I grew up listening to to be on this record and to repeat that line. I just wanted to show that they sing about the same stuff that I do basically, there’s no actual like gray area or anything like that, like every artist has been through what we’ve been through at some point, that’s why we connect with that. Music has always been like the universal thing for me, because it brings everybody together. It doesn’t matter what class, to an extent, you come from, everybody listens to it and everybody feels the same thing or something similar to it.

So do you have plans for this record? Are you putting it out with anybody that you can name, are you doing vinyl? 

We’ll be doing a vinyl run, we’ll do pre-orders on the 19th, it’s gonna be with Asbestos records again. I work with Matt Flood from Asbestos. I can say with a whole heart, I would take a bullet for that man. He has put me on to just so many different acts, introduced me to so many different people, he came at a time where I thought nobody really gave a shit about what I was doing. But then he heard Intrusive and I was able to talk to him and he really praised me on what I was trying to do and he really wants to help out as much as he can. So we’ll be doing another release with him, it’ll be out this fall.

Were you impacted at all? Didn’t Asbestos Records, didn’t their warehouse or something flood?

Luckily, that did not affect me at all. It affected quite a few people, but he did a fundraiser, we were helping raise money for that, and he got enough funds to get back on track with it.

Good, I’m glad to hear that. So, you talked about this being kind of centered around you starting therapy and going through therapy. I’ve asked this before to other guys and I kind of get mixed responses, but is songwriting and the music you’re doing, is that a type of therapy for you at all? 

It is, music has always been a very therapeutic thing for me, I always try to write, like, what I’m feeling at the time. It happened a little bit during “Life, Love & The Bomb”, but then when “Intrusive” happened, when I started writing that, it kind of got more personal. I feel like that was the crux of where, I always thought that Black Guy Fawkes would just be kind of a separate entity, but the more that I write, the more that I get into this project, the more I see they’re becoming more synonymous. But yeah, it’s always been a major form of therapy for me. This record in particular too, because I really wanted to capture, like, what I was going through in therapy at the time, so it gets heavy. There is some, like, tongue in cheek humor, there are parts that might make you weep. But that’s what therapy is, basically, it’s not a fun process, it is scary, but it’s just, it’s healing, and healing is a down and dirty thing.

Right. I think, I think you would agree, but what drew me to punk initially, was just how real it is and how, um, I guess how just personal it is. You can find personal things in a lot of punk music, it’s a lot of normal people singing about real things. I always like to talk shit about like mainstream country, especially being in Nashville. All the country songs are cookie cutter, you know what it’s about, trucks, beer, or whatever. Whereas punk, it’s about so many different things, it’s just personal experiences that are applicable to everybody, and that’s kind of what I see in a lot of your stuff too, it’s just very relatable.  

So that’s one reason why I’m happy that I’ve been able to meet people like Frank, like Chuck, like Laura Jane, like Dave Hause and all of them. Like my list of Frank Turner songs, it shows a flawed human, and he’s very open about addressing that. Same with Dave Hause singing about sobriety, you hear him singing about things he’s going through, and Laura Jane dealing with when she was first coming out and the dichotomy of being trans, stuff like that too. It’s comforting, being in the scene where you’re meeting these people and they’re writing about the same things, it helps you realize they’re wanting to get better too, and it helps you kind of realize that I can do it too.

So I know this record’s not even out yet, but are you working towards another one already? I don’t understand how people do it because I cannot personally pump out songs like that, but a lot of guys already have like another record lined up or something. 

Let me say this, this record took me a year to write, and it may take me a year to write the next one *laughs*.   

I really appreciate you doing this, dude, I am pumped for this record to come out. I know everybody’s going to think it’s as great as I think it is. You killed it.

Thank you so much. Yeah it’ll be out in September.

Sounds good man. Have a good time on the road these last few dates, and keep killing it, dude. I love keeping up with you on Instagram and seeing all the cool shit you’re doing.

Thank you, man. I’ll talk to you here soon.