As evidenced in part by his debut album, 2015’s Past Lives & Pass Lines, Jared Hart has been busy carving out a pretty legit niche for himself as a solo artist…that is when he’s not occupied by either his duties as founder/frontman of New Jersey punk band The Scandals or filling out the guitar and vocal sounds in Brian Fallon’s band, The Crowes.

Most recently, Hart has announced a run of solo European tour dates that’ll keep him busy from late September through mid October. The twelve-date run kicks off September 28th in the Netherlands, and finishes up just in time for Hart and a full backing band — some of whom will look familiar to all you fans of the larger Jersey punk scene –will support Racquet Club, the new band featuring (among others) Sergie Loobkoff from Samiam/Knapsack fame on their first run through the northeastern US.

Head below for the full rundown of Hart’s tour dates, and stay tuned for news on upcoming Hart solo music in the very near future!

Past Lives & Pass Lines hit the streets in November 2015 on Say-10 Records.

It didn’t make it into the interview we published a little over a month or so ago, but when The Falcon frontman Brendan Kelly and I were chatting about his band’s then-anticipated run of US tour dates and yours truly mentioned that he would be at the Cambridge/Boston stop, the inimitable Kelly remarked in his inimitably tongue-planted-firmly-in-cheek style: “that’s the first night of tour…that’s going to be the real dick-in-the-mud show!”

And so it was with those comically tempered expectations that the presently solidified  incarnation of the at times historically fluid four piece “supergroup” lineup (we’re allowed to call Brendan Kelly, Dan Andriano, Neil Hennessy and new recruit Dave Hause a supergroup, right? That meets the criteria?) strode to the stage of the upstairs room at the legendary Middle East club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to begin their first run of non-Chicago shows. What followed, though, was a performance that was anything close to worthy of the “dick-in-the-mud” label that Kelly predicted.

Anchored by the criminally underrated backbone (can you use “anchor” and “backbone” in the same descriptor for a drummer or is that lazy? It’s lazy, right?) that is Neil Hennessy on drums, Kelly and his wingmen ripped through an impressively lengthy setlist (18-ish songs by this writer’s count) that covered all of the band’s releases, paying particularly close attention to the brand-spankin’-new Gather Up The Chaps (released March 18th on Red Scare Industries). There was a certain amount of depravity and comic relief, to be sure; it’s punk rock and it’s The Falcon after all, so not taking one’s self to seriously is written in to the job description. (One particularly comedic between-song exchange found Andriano mocking Hause’s customized denim jacket, to which Hause returned fire with a comment about taking fashion advice from a guy who dressed like a bat for fifteen years.) And though the music is occasionally designed to sound a bit like a multi-car pileup at freeway speeds, the sheer number of years of professional musicianship on stage kept the tempo up and the melodies tight and kept matters from hurling themselves too far into the abyss. It’s worth noting that watching The Falcon live, one could easily be fooled into thinking that the project had been doing this together for quite some time. It’s also worth noting that they seemed to be having enough fun that maybe, just maybe, the problem will remain a fairly regular project going forward. (Also, as a bit of a related aside, Hause, who has made a career out of crafting tight, catchy rhythms and personal, heartfelt lyrics absolutely shreds on guitar, applying layer after layer of tone and texture to the milieu; seriously…who knew?)

Direct support on the evening came by way of The Scandals, who, in spite of hailing from New Jersey, continually receive a hometown welcome in the greater Boston area. Jared Hart and his cronies (drummer Paulie Yaremko, for what it’s worth, is single-handedly this writer’s favorite drummer to photograph) wasted little time and energy with small talk and banter, however, and filled their half-hour-ish set with their group singalong-heavy brand of street punk. It really is genuinely impressive to watch a non-hometown band fill an opening slot at a sold out show with such a high level of uptempo audience participation (including a guest spot from Burning Streets’ Drew Juliano who took Hart’s guitar so the latter could launch himself into the audience himself).

Grand Rapids-based four-piece, and Falcon Red Scare labelmates The Lippies were second out of the gate on the evening. Led by frontwoman Tonia Broucek, the self-described feminist pop punk act served as a bit of a welcome change of pace on the evening, with a style that has drawn obvious comparisons to such influential bands like The Avengers and mid-90s riot grrrl acts like Bikini Kill. Sadly, for time reasons that were not of their own making, the band’s set got cut one song short at the last minute in unfortunate anticlimactic fashion.

Boston’s own Trophy Lungs kicked the evening off, and if you’re going to look for a Boston-area melodic punk band to kick off a show for a national touring act, you could do a hell of a lot worse than the now four-piece band (drummer Brendan Guerin and co-frontmen Kevin Bogart and Kelly McGuire are now joined by second guitarist Dave Isolender, playing only his second show with the band on this particular evening). It’s been fun to watch the buzz build for these dudes, who finally put out their debut full length, Day Jobs, toward the end of last year, and continue to garner positive acclaim, based in large part on their tight, high-energy live show.

Head below to check out our photo album from the legitimately memorable evening.

There comes a point in the life of many a songwriter where the pull to move outside the comfort and familiarity of their “day job” band becomes too strong to ignore. It seems increasingly as the music industry continues to change in the post-Napster era that we find ourselves in that this occurs now more than ever as working class artists, especially in the traditionally DIY corners of the scene, continue to try to eke out a consistent living in spite of ever-dwindling record sales.

The latest to throw his hat into the solo singer-songwriter ring is Jared Hart, frontman for long-running New Jersey street punk band The Scandals. Though the band’s output of recorded music has waned a bit in recent years for one reason or another, the band have kept busy on the road, finding themselves regular touring companions of their fellow New Jersey brethren in The Gaslight Anthem. The last several years have also found Hart taking to the solo act thing, lumping his acoustic guitar and some Scandals merch into a car and playing shows primarily across the Eastern half of the country. “That’s one of the most fun parts about the whole thing,” explains Hart, speaking specifically of a group of New Hampshire natives that made the trip to a recent Hart gig in Boston. “On one of my first acoustic tours, I played in their living room. There were maybe 30 or 40 kids there, and it was crazy. It was one of those experiences where you realize there’s no other way you’d be hanging out with these people unless you were on tour with your guitar in their fucking living room. I would have never been friends with them, let alone would they have heard my music, if I didn’t just grab an acoustic and hop in a car.”

While many of these were of the one-off or “long weekend tour” variety, Hart is presently in the midst of a nationwide tour opening for another Jersey rocker turned solo artist, My Chemical Romance’s Frank Iero. The present tour kicked off at the above-mentioned Boston show on November 1^st, with Hart taking the stage solo less than 24 hours after playing a rousing full-band Scandals show at FEST 14 in Gainesville. Cutting ones teeth in sweaty, dingy punk rock bars comprises a vastly different audience than playing for the MCR faithful, who continue to come out in droves and who still tend to trend younger and more evenly split along gender lines than one’s normal punk rock show. “It’s a different kind of crowd, and it’s been a different experience from the shows I’m used to playing, but it’s all positive,” says Hart.

While much of Hart’s solo live set is still peppered with time-tested Scandals staples (“Avalanche,” “Four Seventeen,” etc.), he’s touring now primarily in support of his forthcoming debut full length. Entitled “Past Lives & Pass Lines,) the album is culled from a  series of tracks written over the last several years that didn’t quite fit as Scandals tracks, but that were worthy of seeing the light of day nonetheless. “Every song on the record can kind of be related to a point in my life where something fucked up happened,” Hart explains.  What started as a couple songs recorded for a split 7-inch release turned into ten of the more personal songs from Hart’s songwriting catalog. “I didn’t want to have a downer song on a Scandals record, so I’d save them. And then I started pocketing them and pocketing them and pocketing them and all of a sudden I had all these songs…”

As more solo shows lined themselves up as the months continued, Hart found his stockpile of songs not only growing, but trending in a particular direction allowing closure for some of the above-mentioned “fucked up” events. The songs, says Hart, are “kind of bookmarks. I think that as things happened and progressed and things happened, I realized there’s a common theme with all of them. They were very cathartic to write in the sense of “I’m saying this, I have this point in time, and I can put this here and leave it here.” Though some of the tracks date back to 2010, thematically, they began to “lump together as a whole and become an entity together instead of just one song.”

If you’re worried “Past Lives & Pass Lines” finds Hart wandering down the road-more-traveled that is typical for the punk-frontman-goes-solo set, fret not. While certainly centered around the acoustic, there’s more than enough experimentation to keep things sounding newer and different.  “My buddy Frank (Marra, the album’s producer) was super experimental,” explains Hart. “From day one, he said “I want to get weird on this. I want to throw some stuff out there.”  So we just did that and we’d layer it and look at each other when it sounded bad and delete it right away!”

It can be a bit of a tenuous decision to announce to one’s bandmates that you’re going to put out an album of material that doesn’t include them. A great many people who’ve come before opted for the solo direction when things had blown up, or just dried up, with the bands that they cut their teeth with.  Luckily for Hart, and for fans and friends of The Scandals, things are presently all good on both fronts. “They’ve seen me working on this for a year-and-a-half and they’ve been super supportive. So there wasn’t a need for a sitdown where I had to break to them that I was putting (The Scandals) on hold. So I’m lucky in that sense. They’ve all been pretty stoked about it,” says Hart with a sense of relief and happiness in his voice. “So if the Scandals can do six months and I can do six months, it’s perfect. If the Scandals can do ten months and I can do two months with this, that’s great!”

More than a decade into plowing ahead a decision to make a living as a working musician, Hart continues to be about as busy as he’s ever been, a sign that a long-shot gamble might become closer to paying off. The EP that The Scandals recorded with Brian Fallon close to a year ago is finally, hopefully, about to see the light of day early next year, which will hopefully parlay into another Scandals full-length. In the mix, hopefully, will be solo and full-band trips across the pond. “The Scandals and the solo thing definitely have to get out there,” says Hart hopefully. “I have some friends that are going to be releasing the solo record over there, so that’s big on the radar right now, trying to plan the year around that, because those are big chunks of time. Hopefully it’s another busy one; that’s all I’m asking for!”

Past Lives & Pass Lines is due out November 27^th on Say-10 Records. Pre-orders are available here. In the meantime, you can stream the album here, and read our full conversation below.