Chicago rockers Beastii have released Follower, their first album in seven years. Beastii has brought a genre-bending collection of songs to the table that blends garage rock urgency in a post-punk atmosphere. Beastii wears their influences on their sleeves for all to see, and holy crap, is it fun. The first half of Follower channels […]
Chicago rockers Beastii have released Follower, their first album in seven years. Beastii has brought a genre-bending collection of songs to the table that blends garage rock urgency in a post-punk atmosphere. Beastii wears their influences on their sleeves for all to see, and holy crap, is it fun.
The first half of Follower channels raw energy with precision and opens with the song “Justine.” Lyrics praise its titular hero for her intimidating coolness and being a fighting machine. The second track “The Limit,” who dares to join them, is equally a welcome and a challenge. “Cosmic Burner’s” mid-tempo is a nice transition into the surfy and note-bending “Spilt Milk.”
“Evil Eye” channels Le Tigre with its drum machine driving the song. An eighty-second intro jumps into short lyrics about cutting ties with someone and repeating lines, “Don’t look at me! Don’t talk to me! Don’t think about me!” The meditative “Double-Sided Cig” is a Sonic Youth-like song about seeing the faults in the habits you’re cultivating. Its pre-chorus chant “Don’t fuck it up, don’t fuck it up,” gives us a sense that there’s a lack on confidence and frustration in the attempts to make these changes. “Sell Out” is a nice little pep talk on your own creating worth and reminds you not to sell yourself for cheap or discount your personality.
The back half of this album is very post-punk. The Peter Gunn theme-styled bass line for “Butch Beach” is surfy and steady and feels like the long-lost child of the B-52’s “Planet Claire.” The drum-machined “Ghost Follower” is a driving synthy darkwave song “Subliminal” feels like it could fit well on a Pixies’ album. “In The Ground” is a moody romp before closing strong with the new wave “Trusted Mystik” and “Be Sweet.” “Be Sweet” seems to be the amalgamation of the sound cultivated by the band and might be my favorite closing song on a record this year.
I cite these influences of other bands not as a way to denigrate Follower at all. I think this is a well-made album. The best bands are the ones who can take their influences and meld them to create something new. This album succeeds because of this.
Jen Dot’s vocals adjust well to whatever genre is thrown at her. Her and Jesse Fevvers’ guitars work congruently on the rock songs of the album. Maureen Neer shares bass and keyboard duty with Kai Black and Asha Adisa of the band Orisun. The nonchalant keys on the more rockier songs only enhance their sound, but the keys on the post-punk songs really stand out. Chris Lee sits behind the drums and the mixing board on this album and has created a unique sound for Beastii to bring together.
There are right ways and wrong ways to do this sort of album. I’ve always felt bands that did the whole garage rock revival thing take themselves too seriously, but with Beastii, there’s an element of fun and joy that comes through vividly in arrangements. This record is a great journey through music and moods. Don’t sleep on this album. Follower from Beastii is out now.
As summer fades and the smell of fall fills the air, music fans from across the globe brace themselves for one of the most exciting and eccentric music festivals of the year: Riot Fest. The iconic festival boasts some of the best punk and alternative artists, including the classics we grew up on and new […]
As summer fades and the smell of fall fills the air, music fans from across the globe brace themselves for one of the most exciting and eccentric music festivals of the year: Riot Fest. The iconic festival boasts some of the best punk and alternative artists, including the classics we grew up on and new bands for fans to discover. Join us as Dying Scene revisits Riot Fest 2024; the bands, the fans, and the all new RiotLand!
Day One
Despite the sweltering heat, fans turned up for day one to get the party started. Headliners included Sum 41, Fall Out Boy, The Offspring, New Found Glory, Cypress Hill, Public Enemy, The Marley Brothers and NOFX. With so many amazing bands it is hard to figure out where to go first but we headed to the NOFX Stage to see Get Dead.
The San Francisco punk band formed in 2007 and joined forces with Fat Mike and his label, Fat Wreck Chords.
We wound up at the Radical Stage afterwards for several bands; the layout at this year’s Riot Fest looked a little bit different from years past, now complete with all large stages and two sets of stages side by side. Super convenient! Thanks to that I was able to catch some of Jhariah’s set before Canadian post-punk band Home Front.
Home Front’s performance was explosive, complete with an impressive amount of jump kicks, especially for this Chicago heat. They debuted their first studio album Games of Poweron March 3rd, 2023. It is best described as a beautiful blend of post-punk synthwave and oi!
Bay Area punks Spiritual Cramp followed Home Front on the stage with an equal amount of chaotic attitude and on-stage antics. The gritty yet delightfully polished swagger of frontman Michael Bingham easily won over the crowd. Spiritual Cramp also released their self-titled debut studio album in 2023 via Blue Grape Music.
Post-hardcore band Drug Church took the stage next with overwhelming support from their fans who crowd surfed and sang along to every song. Their newest album PRUDE is set to be released on October 4th, 2024 via Pure Noise Records. You will also still have a chance to catch Drug Church on “The Prude Tour” this fall that features support from Modern Color, Soul Blind, and Pony.
The second day of Riot Fest was just as hot as the first! We started at the Radical Stage for Heart Attack Man, the Ohio-based pop punk band. In 2023, the band released their third full length album Freak of Nature.
Over at the AAA Stage I was fortunate enough to catch the end of Sir Chloe’s set, an indie rock band from Vermont. Another fan raced to the railings at the end hoping to get a drumstick as she was a drummer herself. We both managed to get drummer Palmer Foote’s attention who promptly threw us both a stick! The Hives then promptly started at the neighboring Cabaret Metro Stage.
Finally, Health started, a band so many people have told me I just HAVE to see. The LA experimental-industrial rock band certainly is a vibe. Think cyberpunk meets nihilism meets sexy meets dark transcendentalism…yeah, hard to describe, but you can certainly groove to it at your next goth dark wave club night.
After checking out the highly anticipated St. Vincent and L.S. Dunes (who are no strangers to Riot Fest, check out our previous coverage here), nostalgia brought me to the infamous Taking Back Sunday so I could sing along to all the emo songs that got me through high school. Adam Lazzara still has all the moves with microphone tricks galore.
In complete opposition to the previous days, the third and final day of Riot Fest was rainy and cloudy. It certainly set the mood for the bands of the day which tended to be more metal and hardcore, including the reunion of Slayer.
GEL was everything you would expect from a hardcore band with a knockout performance. With the rain comes mud, and with mud of course there will be circle pits in it (and some mud wrestling). Their newest EP Personawas released on August 16th, 2024.
Other noteworthy acts of the day included the metal greats: Mastodon, GWAR, Lamb of God and horror shock rock king Rob Zombie who always put on the best theatrical performance.
New to Riot Fest this year is RiotLand, filled with old favorites like the Logan Arcade, wedding chapel and skate ramp but also the return of the Hellzapoppin Circus Sideshow Revue. RiotLand was great to walk around while waiting for your next favorite band to play or just for some good old-fashioned people-watching. You can pop inside the store replica of the convenience store in the movie “Clerks” for some quick essentials, stop at the Riot Fest Historical Society made in collaboration with the Punk Rock Museum (those familiar with the Fireside Bowl will recognize the exterior!), and even watch some NWA wrestling.
Most importantly the RiotLand experience would not be complete if you did not take a picture with the giant butter sculpture of John Stamos…because why the hell not?
Riot Fest 2024 may be over but there is still an abundance of Riot Fest Presents shows coming up in the Chicago and Milwaukee area. However, it is never too early to start your Riot Fest 2025 predictions and dream line ups!
Keep an eye on Dying Scene for more in-depth coverage of all three days of the festival!
The first full-length solo album by Gina Volpe, of the seminal NYC punk band Lunachicks, is scheduled for release on February 23, 2024. Delete The World was produced by Barb Morrison, and will be available on all streaming platforms. The first single off the record – “Drink Me” – and its accompanying video dropped on […]
The first full-length solo album by Gina Volpe, of the seminal NYC punk band Lunachicks, is scheduled for release on February 23, 2024. Delete The World was produced by Barb Morrison, and will be available on all streaming platforms. The first single off the record – “Drink Me” – and its accompanying video dropped on November 3, 2023. A second single, “The Plan,” follows on December 1, 2023. I caught up with Volpe via email to discuss her new music, her legacy, and more.
DS:What inspired you to do this album at this time?
GV: I had always intended to record a full-length album. It just took a little while to find the time and come up with the funds. I started releasing my solo stuff in 2017 with a 5 song EP followed up by several singles over the past couple of years. An LP was a long time coming so I’m pumped that I’m now finally able to release a full body of work.
DS: How is this album different from the music in Lunachicks?
GV:My solo stuff is different in that it’s more diverse stylistically and not as easily categorized into one particular genre. Sometimes it’s pop, sometimes it’s punk, indie, retro, or rock. Sometimes it’s more singer-songwriter. I have the freedom to shape-shift and experiment. I use synthesizers, acoustic guitars, and samples – along with heavy guitars when called for, so I get to color outside the lines and be as messy as I wanna be.
DS: Will there be more to come from BANTAM?
GV: We got together last year and messed around in the studio for the first time in over a decade. We even released a single entitled “Yo-Yo.” I’m not sure what the future holds for us though. We’re kind of spread out across the country now but none of us would be opposed to playing some shows and putting out more new music. We left the door open so anything is possible.
DS: How did your work with Lunachicks inform you as a musician and prepare you for solo and other work?
GV:I received a hands-on education coming up in the ’90s with Lunachicks. We started very young so I was able to cut my teeth on writing, arranging and recording songs (as well as learn my instrument) throughout our career. Plus, just watching all of the amazing bands we got to play with over the years really brought so much insight and inspiration to me.
DS: The trippy and surreal video for “Drink Me” reminds me of some of the technicolor joy of the 1980’s MTV heyday. Was that intentional?
GV: I came across Stanzii‘s work on Instagram and was immediately drawn to it. It’s very much my same artistic sensibility with all of the bright colors, details, and surrealism she uses. I was so mesmerized by it that I sent her a DM not sure if she would get back to me being that I was a complete stranger. To my surprise, she did get back to me and was totally into making a video for the track. I feel like I hit the jackpot by getting to work with her.
DS: How did the idea come about? Did you approach Stanzii with your own ideas about it or did Stanzii come up with the concept wholecloth? How collaborative was it?
GV: I trusted her to do whatever she wanted. It was important to me that she have the freedom to create in her style and employ the imagery she envisioned for the song. I would put my two cents in here and there but ultimately, I left it up to her to steer the ship. I helped with some of the editing and grunt work – like wiping the greenscreen from the clips and photos but the creative work was all her genius.
DS: Please describe what the video is trying to say, or the ideas being communicated.
GV: The song is about obsession, addiction, and escapism. It relates to the vices we use to check out. Maybe it’s the use of a substance or maybe it’s an addictive relationship with someone who is no good for you but you can’t let go of. I wanted the video to be a trip down the rabbit hole of self-destruction, then coming out through the other side only to go through the whole process all over again. The secondary reference is to Alice In Wonderland. “Drink Me” is labeled on the bottle she drinks in order to make her small enough to go through the door, which is clearly (to me at least) a metaphor for exiting the world and entering into another portal of being.
DS: What is it about NYC, especially at the time Lunachicks was formed, especially the part of NYC from which you hail, that sprouted so many punk legends?
GV:I think what makes NYC so special is the pure infusion of ideas and cultures from all over the world. There is always so much happening here. So many creatives are drawn to this city and with them comes all of the contributions to music, art, performance, etc. that they make continually laying a foundation for the next wave of artists coming in to build upon. There seems to be an endless supply of inspiration due to the sheer number of artists packed into this one crowded city.
DS: Do you see the same spirit there now with newer musicians?
GV: I do and it’s always cool to see all the different generational influences the up-and-coming bands are drawing from. Sure, it may look different from an older generation’s perspective but really, the kids are alright.
DS: I first met you at Riot Fest 2022 . From what I heard around the park so many people agreed with me that Lunachicks were one of the highlights of the weekend [I agree. Plus, I found the band members to all be so nice and fun].
GV: Love to hear that. We had a blast playing Riot Fest. Although it was really hot if you remember [I do recall that it was an absolute scorcher all weekend long]. Chip. our drummer had heat stroke during the set and puked so stealthily in the middle of a song that none of us noticed what was happening lols.
DS: That must feel pretty damn good to know that decades on you are still making such an impact and garnering new fans.
GV:It really is an amazing feeling. We didn’t realize that we had so many younger fans that became aware of us well after we had stopped playing. So for a lot of the people in the audience it was the first time they had ever seen us live even though they had been listening to us for a decade or so.
DS: What was writing Fallopian Rhapsody like, and do you feel it was a comprehensive history of Lunachicks or is there still much to say?
GV:Writing that book was such a great experience. It was hard though and it gave me a newfound respect for authors. It’s a long arduous process and a lesson in patience and grit. In the end though I feel like we got it all in, said what we wanted to say with the expert help of co-author Jeanne Fury and overall I’m super proud of it.
DS: How did you see the response to the book?
GV:We were happy with all of the positive responses we got. People really seemed to enjoy the book whether they knew the band or not. A lot of fans wrote in to say that they identified with a certain story, experience, or feeling and that it impacted them, inspired them, or simply gave them a new perspective to try on.
DS: What has it been like to create an identity outside of Lunachicks with the music you do as a solo artist and with other bands? Of course, even with these questions, there are a lot of references to Lunachicks
GV: Well most people know me because of Lunachicks which is fine because I’m super proud of our band and our history but it can be also tough to get away from that label and just be a solo artist without the qualifying “Gina from Lunachicks” tag. I do understand though that people need reference, they want to know “Who is this person?” and I totally get that. But, my solo music doesn’t always translate over to the Lunachicks’ fanbase, some of my fans don’t even know who the Lunachicks are (most do) but in a perfect world I’d just be able to be me -insert terrible Sammy Davis Jr. impression, “I gotta be me…!” sing-along folks!
DS: How is creating music for a film different from creating music for a more traditional record or band?
GV: It’s certainly a different exercise in that you’re not actually songwriting, there’s no lyrics or any kind of verse/chorus song structure necessarily. It’s also a practice in pairing down and being mindful of where and how you place certain textures and sounds so they don’t step on dialog or feel too intrusive in the scene. I lean towards less happening in a score than more. I’m not a fan of music scores that overdo it.
DS: You played most of the instruments for this record? How is that experience different from playing in a full band or having a full band contribute to an album?
GV:I usually record most of the guitar, bass, and synths in my home studio. Then I bring it all into a professional studio with my producer Barb Morrison and their engineer to finish the track. We do vocals, drums and adding all the cool layers and textures. It’s quite the opposite experience of recording live in the studio with a band. This way I have a lot of room to manipulate the track, try different arrangements etc. and change my mind a hundred times about it all–which is not always a good thing!
DS: Are there newer bands, up-and-coming bands, or artists that excite you at this moment?
DS: Can you see any influence you might have had on them?
GV:Hmmm, doubt any of the bands listed above would have known who we were!
DS: You came up as a musician when there were not as many female-fronted, or mostly female-comprised bands. How much of an improvement has there been in the way such bands are accepted? Is there still a struggle to be known less as a female-fronted punk band and just a punk band. Or is that label something you are ok with?
GV: I’m really glad to see so many more women in bands. It really doesn’t seem to be such a novelty anymore. When we played Riot Fest last year there were some women kicking ass both in mixed-gender bands and all-female bands. But as you mentioned that was one of the things that was the most maddening for us, no matter what music we were making we were always categorized by our gender instead of musical genre. “All girl band music” became the genre we were placed in, what the fuck does that mean?!
Sadly (that) element is present today when I listen to Spotify’s algorithm. If you were to put on a Lunachicks radio on Spotify, the algorithm will mainly stick to suggesting only other female-fronted bands, then conversely, if you were to start a Rancid radio station the algorithm won’t be offering any recommendations for bands with female singers therefore reinforcing this gender separation in rock/punk music.
I am proud to celebrate being a woman and if women and girls (and non-binary people) find inspiration in seeing people up onstage rockin’ out that look more like themselves (as I had when I went to see my she-ros play live) then I am all for it. But we need to do away with thinking that there are two different musical genres solely based on gender.
DS: There is still so much toxicity in the punk scene as we have seen with recent disbandings of decades-old groups. Anti-Flag situation, of course, being the most recent example. How have you tried to confront that? Is it something you have still encountered?
GV: Have to admit that I literally just heard about this, I don’t want to comment until I read more about it. But from what I’ve seen over the years things have gotten better – I mean we wouldn’t even be having this conversation back in the ’90s – or even the ’00’s. And I do believe it will continue to get better and that we will evolve. Sometimes that’s hard to see and there will certainly be setbacks and shitty humans messing it all up but I’m an optimist and I do think eventually we’ll get our shit together, may not be alive to see it, but we’ll get there.
Gina Volpe’s new record will be released in February. A documentary film “Pretty Ugly- The Story of The Lunachicks,” directed by Ilya Chaiken, had its world premiere in NYC in November and just finished an initial online run.
Sometimes referred to as Chicago’s best kept secret and other times called the funniest band on Red Scare, for all of us not currently living in Chicago, we know them simply as The Brokedowns. After officially closing the book on 2022 on a high note with a live show during the late hours of December […]
Sometimes referred to as Chicago’s best kept secret and other times called the funniest band on Red Scare, for all of us not currently living in Chicago, we know them simply as The Brokedowns. After officially closing the book on 2022 on a high note with a live show during the late hours of December 31, they claimed the honor of the last band of 2022 at Reggie’s Rock Club and rang in the New Year in style. Their 2023 is started off on an even higher note, however, with the release of the quartet’s 6th studio album titled “Maximum Khaki”, the band’s fourth release on Chicago label Red Scare.
Out of the gates, the group’s first single “Obey the Fumes” damn near knocks your fuckin’ teeth in. Lead guitarist Kris Megyery kicks the song off with a killer, in-your-face opening riff that sets an excellent tone for the next thirteen tracks of this quick, humorous, thought-provoking punk masterpiece.
In my opinion, this record is what a punk record should be. The songs are fast, both in tempo and duration, with only one track breaking the three-minute threshold (and even that comes in at an even three minutes). The release comes equipped with intriguing, chuckle-inducing song titles that, upon questioning with the band, have both deep and sincere subject matters. After listening from beginning to end and finding myself starting over, I fully understand the pride that these guys hold in their finished product.
“There’s nothing I really regret on [the record],” said Megyery. “At this point I’m usually like ‘Fuck it’s coming out in a few days, this sucks.’ But not with this one, that’s a good feeling to have.”
Keep scrolling for all kinds of cool stuff: music videos for “Obey the Fumes” (which coincidentally was done over a Zoom call as well) and “Samurai Sword Decontrol”, info for their record release show January 28th at the Burlington in Chicago, and the full Q&A with Eric, Kris and Mustafa. Cheers!
(Editor’s note: The following has been edited and condensed for clarity’s sakebecause a good chunk of this interview was just four guys shooting the shit.)
Dying Scene (Nathan Kernell NastyNate): So first off, congrats on the new record. I know it’s not technically out yet as of this intervew, but I’ve listened to it several times and I love it guys. How long has this been in the works, I know your last release 2018?
Kris Megyery (KM): Yeah I think we started recording in February but we did the bass tracking March 7th 2020. So pretty much we started recording right before the pandemic and then we finished it up like last summer.
So you started recording back in 2020, but are these songs a lot older than that?
Mustafa Daka (MD): I remember, Kris, we recorded for like a split or something and you were like hey while we are at it, let’s just like demo all these songs you had just shown us, so like there’s a kind of a real rough recording of all those songs like a year earlier so like 2019?
KM: Right yeah it was that Copyrights cover song for the Red Scare comp. And my idea was to try to record a whole album that we’ve never practiced once and I thought it would go awesome *laughs*. And we did, we recorded that Copyrights song and then we just like live recorded the whole album and I remember during the session being like ‘holy shit this is gonna work’, like we just did the whole album in like a couple hours. And then we got home and listened to it and we were like ‘oh this is a turkey’. *laughs* So we went back like a year later to perfect them.
So I always like to ask this with new releases, did you just kind of collect these songs over time after your last release or was it like ‘alright let’s write another record’ and you just sat down wrote songs and recorded?
KM: Yeah the way we operate as a band for at least the last 10 years since I’ve had kids is pretty much just like whoever writes a song, like me or John, we make demos with the song and then everyone kind of learns it from the demo, like we don’t “get in the lab” *laughs* or spend tons of time. Like this shit all goes really fast because it has to. So it wasn’t over time and we never do that over time. Usually like we don’t even think about recording anything until we have a chunk of songs. There’s never like we’re just knocking around one song like normal bands do. Normal bands are like ‘hey let’s work on this one song and it slowly grows’, where us it’s like we binge it all man*laughs*.
MD: I will say, it’s been funny that Kris, since you’ve had kids, you are real quick to just hit us with like a bunch of demos and some of it’s like a Casio drum kit and everything or sometimes it’s just like the drums that he’s got laying around that he micd up. But you’ll hear his kids all over it, so I think it’s awesome. Where you have kids that might kind of get in the way of your being able to write and record demos, Kris kind of just combines those two times together so it’s like ‘well I’m gonna hang out with these kids, they may as well get involved’ *laughs*.
KM: Where a normal person would be parenting, I’m demoing *laughs*.
So does this record kind of have a theme, I know like with your last release you tackle like some of the thrills of living in the Midwest. Does this have any kind of main theme or does each song kind of have a different theme?
KM: Well a lot of our songs are like political in nature I guess. The last one was actually a lot more personal songs about like growing up and shit, and a lot of like bummer songs. The year we wrote that album like we had a bunch of people close to us die in like one short period of time, so that’s a bummer record for me. But this one is definitely more about just the cultural nightmare we’re all going through, living in our country and you know all that stuff, all that groovy shit.
Where’s the name of the record come from, Maximum Khaki?
KM: So the word khaki, I kept using as this like reference to just like the banality of evil, like bland evil, not referencing like the soldiers, but referencing the accountants who are making the atrocities happen. And when I would write a song I would have the word khaki written in there. It probably started from that Charlottesville rally you know where everyone was wearing khakis, probably stemmed from that. I think John brought it up, he’s like ‘there are like 6 songs where you mentioned khaki’. So khaki was used as a reference to just like bland cruelty. And we were going to call the record “Khaki Majesty” and right before we started making artwork for it the Slow Death from Minneapolis who we’re friends with announced their new album “Casual Majesty”.
MD: I think I told those dudes, I was like ‘you know we’ve got an album coming out called “khaki majesty”, but yeah not anymore’.
KM: I didn’t blame them or anything, but they definitely heard from our attorneys *laughs*.
MD: Yeah I don’t talk to those guys anymore *laughs*.
I know your artwork for the album always comes into question, what drew you to Ryan Duggan for this record cover?
KM: We love him. He did the album “Species Bender” and we love that record cover of ours. And we’ve always loved everything he does and he does with his artwork what I think we’re trying to do as a band, which is like be funny but not be overtly funny; be kind of very subtly funny. And he probably doesn’t want to be connected to us that way *laughs* But it just always makes me smile, always makes me giggle and always makes me think in a nonlinear way, so kind of a no brainer [to go with him]. He’s always been like doing posters and stuff like that around Chicago, and in the last 10-15 years he’s really developed a reputation. He’s got a really unique style.
So starting with “Obey the Fumes” that’s a kickass opener, that’s an awesome opener you guys put out. Walk me through kind of the meaning behind that because I know you said it was about breaking bad habits in one of the press releases, but can you dive in a little bit deeper maybe?
KM: Yeah, initially, like in my head what I see is like an 80s beer commercial where you’re working in a factory, you wipe your brow, you crack open a cool Coors. But in our like dystopian hellscape that we live in, it’s like glue. So you go to your job, and in this case the protagonist of this song goes to a job where he gets skull-fucked by demons every day, and he just wants to crack open a nice thing of glue and fuckin’ cut loose. But that’s the funny version, but it’s like about trying to break bad habits, specifically drinking, like negative drinking habits in a culture where it’s everywhere.
That was actually one of my favorite tracks off the record, do each of you guys have any favorites you’re excited for people to hear once it’s released on Friday?
MD: I love our samurai sword song, that’s probably one of my favorites and I think is the only song that I used to click track on for that whole album.
Eric Grossman (EG): I like that song yeah. “Cinnamon Kings” is probably a highlight for me.
KM: Yeah that song “Cinnamon King” is like our favorite probably. It’s only like 15 seconds long, but so much fun to play. Been playing it live for like three years, we love that one. I like it all, I think it all kind of moves really fast, it’s super short, it’s like our shortest record. It moves along pretty quick, there’s nothing I really regret on it and at this point I’m usually like ‘Fuck it’s coming out in a few days, this sucks’. But not with this one, that’s a good feeling to have.
Yeah I know guys that regret releases they put out because they do it in such a short amount of time, so I mean that’s a good feeling to have.
KM: I wanna warn the listeners, I may be wrong. You might hate this *laughs*, don’t take my word for it, I’m too closely attached to it to have a unbiased opinion.
So I gotta ask you then, some of these other titles are very intriguing. “Honk if You’re Horny” *laughs*?
KM:*laughs* Yeah real subtle.
Tell me about “Osama Van Halen.”
MD: It sounds funny to hear.
KM: It’s a real bummer, but it’s funny. But I was thinking about just like how you know Eddie Van Halen was an innovator, in a very creative way, but like Osama Bin Laden was also an innovator you know what I mean *laughs*, just in a different way. So like the chorus is about like a 4 minute mile because it took forever for people to run it, but once people ran a 4 minute mile like everybody was doing it. So once Eddie Van Halen fuckin’ busted out a power drill every jack off with a power drill could do that. But once someone does whatever fuckin’ atrocities in the newspaper every week, once you see that it makes it that much easier for the next dildo to do that.
That’s actually really cool, I wasn’t sure which direction you were gonna go with that *laughs*. So this is your 4th release over at Red Scare, I take it you’ve had a pretty good experience over there with Toby?
KM: Definitely yeah! Yeah he’s great.
MD: He sends me hoodies and shirts sometimes, and pens, it’s awesome.
EG: Lots of swag. Moose has to pay for them but he gets them *laughs*. When Moose orders it, he gets it.
MD: Sometimes I get $0.69 off and sometimes I get $4.20 off *laughs*.
So from what I’ve seen, the Chicago and Chicago suburbs, the whole scene is flourishing, makes me jealous down here because it just seems like you guys have stuff going on every night. What are some local bands that you guys want to name drop as influences or just bands you’re into?
KM: I’m listening to that Stress Positions EP over and over again for the last couple weeks that’s fuckin’ kicking my head in. Obviously Meat Wave, all the bands Moose said, Wig. Yeah there’s a lot of good shit, there’s always good shit it’s the third largest city in America. Where are you at?
I’m down in Nashville.
KM: Oh yeah that’s not a place known for music *laughs*.
Speaking of locals, Deanna Belos, in “Corndog Sonnet” she named you guys. So when are you guys gonna the line “listen to Sincere Engineer” in one of your songs *laughs*. MD: I don’t write lyrics
KM: It’s hard to work that in, I’ll figure it out. It’s a little lengthy. It’ll probably be in a super offensive song title, she’ll be like ‘hey thanks but no thanks’ *laughs*.
What about outside of Chicago, what kind of influences do you guys have?
KM: Well the obvious answer, everyone compares us to, collectively we all love Dillinger 4. That was like a huge influence for us. Fugazi’s like my favorite band of all time, that’s creeps in there a lot you know.
That’s actually the one that you guys reminded me of on this last record, it’s actually in my notes for the interview *laughs*.
MD: I will absolutely rip off Toys That Kill. Jimmy will send me a text message for like whatever we put out and be like ‘oh I heard it’s great’ and I’ll be like ‘listen to this song, that’s the song I totally ripped you off’ *laughs*. I always am like thinking of Toys That Kill whenever I’m playing somehow, I just love love love those guys and I love their drums.
So your album release is on the 28th, where are you guys playing that?
EG: That’s at the Burlington, which is also pretty close to Moose.
MD: I like it because it’s pretty close to the practice spot so it’s like you just gotta pick up the gear, drive just a few blocks and go right back.
KM: Moose’s love for venues are all based on geography *laughs*.
KM: Chinese Telephones we haven’t played with in at least 10-12 years. And the other two bands we’ve never played with, but we’re friends with all of them. We wanted to play with bands we haven’t played with in at least a decade or never, but they’re all great super great and I’m super excited for all of them. I love them all.
What about your guy’s strict touring schedule? In one of your interviews you said out of town shows 3 a year, do you have those three out of town dates booked up yet or what’s the plan?
KM: There’s a bidding war going on, it’s like when a city hosts the Olympics because when we come to a town it brings a lot to the local economy *laughs*, the dispensaries.
MD: No we haven’t booked anything yet out of town, but we’re gonna definitely play a lot more this year hopefully. We might do as many as four shows out of town *laughs*.
EG: Yeah maybe. We’re talking about maybe.
So when did you guys form, I’ve seen a few different dates, but I’ve come up with 2002?
EG: What you define as the band as it is today was 2002 yeah. John and I have been playing together for a really long time, way before that probably ‘96 or ’97, somewhere around there. I mean we weren’t really serious about it and the band that you see today was 2002. I think that was when we first played with you Moose, right?
MD: Right, I used to watch you guys from like ‘96 and then in 2002 is when I joined the band, holy shit *laughs*.
KM: Yeah we should have changed our name when Moose joined because I feel like it all became kind of different.
MD: But I saw the first Brokedowns show, I wasn’t in the band but I think John was fourteen I was 18
EG: Yeah I think I had just joined the band at that point. I don’t know if I even played that one maybe I wasn’t in yet.
KM: But John was like a fuckin’ 7th grader *laughs*.
MD: I have a DVD that my friend’s uncle sent me and it has the Brokedowns playing like before you and I were in the band Kris. I think it was Taylors last show in the band. Kris and I weren’t even in the band at the time, Eric was but …
KM: Today those are referred to as the who gives a shit years *laughs*.
I’ve talked to a lot of guys who have either quit music or stopped for an extended period of time after doing it for so long, and I mean you guys have been at this for a while and I mean, based on the new record, it doesn’t seem like you guys are slowing down. What’s kept you guys going?
KM: We’re all very close friends and we don’t do much and even when like we were young, the band was never like the top priority. And because it’s never been the top priority, we’ve never had to like really sacrifice. It’s created a very low pressure situation you know.
MD: I always said it was like fishing buddies, but we play music together instead. It’s like when we lived together, sometimes our Fridays are Saturdays would be just going into like Kris’s garage or whatever and just playing for hours, get drunk in the process and sweat it out right.
KM: It’s just as simple as like if someone doesn’t want to do something, we don’t do it. And then the three people that did wanna do it just quietly resent them behind their back *laughs* and we vent to each other about how terrible that person.
MD: It’s always Kris, we always hate Kris.
KM: That’s funny because I always hate you *laughs*.
MD: Oh shit that’s so funny because I hate you even *laughs*.
KM: Honestly though, 21 years, like the band is old enough to legally drink now and I can’t think of an actual fight, like a single one.
EG: I don’t think so, no.
MD: Maybe something I did, probably. If we fought, it had to have been about something I wanted to do or didn’t wanna do.
KM: I love that false modesty there *laughs*.
So you guys have been referred to as the funniest guys on red scare, who’s second, who’s coming for your title right now? I saw Sam Russo a few months ago and that dude was pretty funny.
KM: Wow. We would never say we’re the funniest. Brendan Kelly is obviously insanely funny. The Copyrights are really funny, they’re super funny.
MD: Like personally those guys are funny as hell.
KM: They refer to movies as Kilmers and books as Grishams; every book’s a Grisham and every movie’s a Kilmer, that’s a good bit *laughs*. I love that bit.
Okay, last question here. I know the record’s not even out yet, but do you guys have any other upcoming plans far future maybe? I know you’re kind of known for doing splits, do you have any of those planned for the coming future?
EG: Not really, we don’t have anything planned. Got a bunch of stuff demoed.
MD: I was gonna say Kris already sent us demos for whatever we’re gonna do next, it’s probably gonna be a split.
Any bands that come to mind for doing splits?
KM: We were supposed to do one with Canadian Rifle actually, so probably them. But they recorded their songs and we never recorded ours *laughs*. So we blew that one. But there was a pandemic, in case you didn’t notice *laughs*.
Well that about wraps everything up, I really appreciate you guys taking some time and sitting down with me. Once again, congrats on the new record and good luck with the album release on the 28th.
American Thrills grabbed my attention about a year ago thanks to one of those pesky Instagram ads that everyone seems to despise. For once, I’m thankful one of those scrolled across my screen because it introduced me to another New England punk band to obsess over (and another possible candidate for my upper-arm collection of […]
American Thrills grabbed my attention about a year ago thanks to one of those pesky Instagram ads that everyone seems to despise. For once, I’m thankful one of those scrolled across my screen because it introduced me to another New England punk band to obsess over (and another possible candidate for my upper-arm collection of New England punk tattoos).
It was their Discount Casket EP that gave me a little taste of what these guys had to offer. The only problem was I was left craving more, something a full-length could only satisfy. Luckily, my cravings were satisfied after a relatively short wait, and when I say satisfied, I mean that these dudes released a fuckin’ ripper.
Their recent release Parted Ways hints at the familiar Northeast sounds of the Gaslight Anthem and the Menzingers (who coincidentally were competitors of the same time slot during Fest 20) that many have compared AT to, yet they play their own unique brand of punk rock that I was glad to see added to the always reputable Wiretap Records lineup, one I can always count on the turn out stellar under-the-radar artists.
It was truly a pleasure to shoot the shit with 50% of one of my recent favorite Limp Bizkit-loving bands. These dudes have put out two EPs and a full-length that are truly worth checking out. Parted Ways is linked below, followed by the awesome chat I had with Jamie and Jeff. Cheers!
(Editor’s note: The following has been edited and condensed for clarity’s sakebecause a good chunk of this interview was just three guys shooting the shit.)
Dying Scene (Nathan Kernell NastyNate): Hey, it’s great to talk with you guys. I’ve followed you guys for quite a bit, I think right before Discount Casket came out. So yeah, I wanted to get started and talk to you guys obviously about the new record. Starting off, was this just like a collection of songs that you guys kind of built up and you’re just like ‘okay now we’ve got enough for a record’ or did you sit down with the end goal of like ‘let’s write enough stuff to release a full-length’?
Jamie Otfinoski: You know we wanted to write a full-length, but we did it kind of segmentally, we would do like chunks of songs and it was just a process. We would have demos we’d start to work on, then we’d jump to something else, then like come back to it. But ultimately the end goal was like ‘let’s put out a fuckin’ full length’. Because from my perspective, a lot of bands today do like single after single after single, and I get that because there’s like a method to the madness with like Spotify and all that shit, but at the end of the day like the bands I’m really into, like I’m into a record. I want a whole fuckin’ record and listen to a band to really get the vibe of the band.
Right, I get that. With you guys, you kind of released a single at a time leading up to the record, right, then you put out the whole thing?
Jamie: Yeah we did like four or five singles then we dropped like the last four songs all at once. And once again, that’s the whole thing with the internet, like Spotify and trying to build buzz, they want you to do singles. But ultimately we wanted to roll them into some sort of full-length so people could like sit down and check out our band with a little more than just like one song here and there.
So that was kind of a different approach from these previous eps you released?
Jamie: Yeah, you know we really wanted to, like we did two EPs, we’re like ‘we really wanna go all in and do a full-length’. And the guys at Wiretap were down to work with us on it which was totally rad and it made it that much more awesome. But we wanted to do something full and cohesive where we could do vinyl and finally put out like our first full-length record.
So what was the songwriting approach on this? Do you guys have one main songwriter or is it more of a team effort, what’s that look like?
Jamie: So Kurt, our vocalist/ guitarist, he kind of like, I wanna say he takes some of the reins. We always have a group text going and Kurt will like come up with a chunk of a song and go like ‘hey, check out this chorus?’. And then what we’ll do is we’ll get together and practice and we’ll kind of just like start playing it and rolling until we’re like ‘oh, that’s cool, what’s a cool verse to follow’ or vice versa. It’s like a collective approach, but somebody’s always bringing stuff to the table. Same thing with Paul, the other guitarist, he’ll have like a cool riff, he’ll lay it down and then we’ll turn that riff into a song. So it’s collective, but the two guitarists are kind of bringing the big chunks to practices.
So is there kind of a theme with this new record?
Jamie: You know, we’re like a bunch of old salty dudes that kind of like hate our hometown…
Jeff Wielk: I wouldn’t say hate…
Jamie: We don’t hate it, but you know, we don’t love it either. You know the record’s about like getting older, losing friends, losing family, you know just being disheartened by the people we kind of grew up with who maybe ended up turning out to be maybe not who we thought they would be. It’s just a theme of like get the hell out of our hometown, you know we’re old and salty.
Are you guys born and raised up there [in Connecticut]?
Jamie: Born and raised, yeah.
Jeff: Yeah all of us, we’re from the same hometown originally.
Jamie: You know up here in the North, we talk crap about our community, but ultimately, Connecticut’s not a bad place to grow up, kind of expensive I guess. But outside of that, it’s good people, it’s what we’re used to.
Jeff: We definitely could’ve grown up somewhere worse. New England’s got some great music.
Jamie: That’s the one thing about Connecticut too is like, the tours they come and they play in New York and then they skip Connecticut and play Boston. So we’re like right in the middle, you gotta either drive to New York or Boston to see the shows, nobody wants to play Connecticut.
So yeah, I wanted to talk now about specific tracks here. My favorite track off the record was “Ivy League Swing,” and I wanted to talk about what the songwriting for that looked like, the meaning behind it, some of its background.
Jeff: Paul, uh, wrote that initial riff in the beginning after the song starts with singing. And that first riff, that was like the first thing to come out for that song.
Jamie: That was one that Paul brought to the table and was like ‘I have this really cool guitar riff, let’s make it into a song’. We heard it and we were jazzed up on it and just kind of melded its way into that tune.
So this is more of a ‘me’ question, something I’m always curious about. What’s your guys’ songwriting look like, like how does it work; do you guys come up with like riffs first and then lyrics later, or I know some guys start with lyrics and then kind of build the song around it. It’s something I’ve always struggled with, how to kind of progress through writing a song.
Jamie: It goes both ways; sometimes Kurt will come to the table with like some lyrics over a little riff or a chorus and then we’ll expand on it, where other times, like that song “Ivy League Swing,” Paul actually came with a riff. He’s the guitarist, he doesn’t put the vocals over it, so Kurt kind of took the riff, changed it a little bit, and was able to make it into a song, put lyrics over it. Yeah it actually goes both ways with us, but I’d say for the most part, like 75% of the time, Kurt will have like some part of the song that has some sort of vocal guitar part together and we’ll just build off of it.
Jeff: Yeah like the main hook or whatever…
Yeah like I said, I’ve kind of heard it both ways and I’m always curious with everybody I talk to, I like asking that.
Jeff: Yeah I think it’s mostly instrumental. I’m 90% sure that Kurt kind of comes up with the lyrics afterwards.
So yeah “Ivy League Swing,” that’s my favorite track off the record. What about you guys, you guys have a favorite?
Jeff: Yeah, “Interpretation.” It’s just so different from what we normally do you know. Little bit different of a time signature, I don’t know. I’m like a mid-2000s emo-core kind of guy you know *laughs*
Jamie: I like “Sinking,” when we play live, it just starts off like fast and it’s got an interesting beat to it. It’s a quick little ripper. I like those songs live, they’re just fun to play because there’s so much energy.
You guys had that album release show the other night, what, at Stonebridge? Yeah how was that?
Jamie: Yeah a good old place in our hometown.
Jeff: It’s like a towny bar…
Yeah how was the reception there?
Jamie: It was awesome. Yeah we sold the place out, maybe like 150, 170 people. It was a blast. Andy from Hot Rod Circuit came out and he did an acoustic set. Split Coils played, which is Jay also from Hot Rod Circuit, they’re incredible. And this newer Connecticut band called Shortwave was just fuckin’ awesome. I mean it was really a great time seeing you know all the friends and just having all our buddies come out to see us play our hometown, it was just an awesome thing to be a part of.
Awesome, yeah. So I wanted to talk about Fest 20 a little bit. I was down there and it was actually my first Fest, wasn’t a bad Fest to start out on for my first one I guess.
Jeff: Yeah probably the best one yet.
How was your guys’ show down there?
Jeff: It was awesome, yeah. Super sick.
Jamie: The only downside was our set was right when the Menzingers were playing, which is like tough competition there. But all our buddies came out, we had a good showing, I mean it was fun. I like the smaller venues at Fest. Like I go to the big venues, like I go to Bo Diddley and I watch these bands, but I love seeing bands at like these smaller venues, like Loosey’s, and, where’d we play this year…
Jeff: Palomino, it was awesome.
Jamie: You like pack it out with a hundred people in there and it’s just awesome.
Yeah I think my favorite show from the entire thing was the Dopamines over at the Wooly. That was insane. Do you guys have a favorite set from Fest?
Jeff: This Fest I made it a point, I never even went to Bo Diddley. I never made it there this year. I made it a point to see like not big bands you know. So yeah, my favorite set, there’s this band, I wanna say they’re from Atlanta, and they’re called Seagulls. Dude that band was literally insane. And another set, they’re called You Vandal, they’re from Gainesville, their set was sick. They also did an AFI cover set.
Yeah I kind of agree with what you guys were saying about the smaller venue vibe, it kind of got overwhelming. Like here in Nashville, any of the punk shows, they’re all real intimate, not a lot of people there usually, they’re never sold out. So going to like Bo Diddley it’s a little overwhelming, like I’m seeing Avail but I’m all the way in the fuckin’ back, you know. But seeing like Dopamines, that’s more of what I’m used to. It was cool seeing these bands in these smaller venues that I’ve kind of idolized forever.
So then circling back to Wiretap, how’d you guys get on there, can you walk me through that a little bit?
Jamie: So you know, I’ve always liked a lot of the bands on there, like I’ve had a vinyl from like Spanish Love Songs and all these bands that I’ve followed and looked up to. And some newer bands too are on the label, American Television, some like kind of local guys that are just awesome. So we hit up Rob, we sent him something, we sent him like “Discount Casket” and he was like ‘hey, this is really cool, I wanna put this on …’ he does like a bimonthly charity comp towards like a good cause. He put that on one of his comps. And we were like ‘ oh cool, we’ll keep in touch.’ So then as we started kind of sitting down and putting tracks together for the full-length, we just hit him up again and we’re like ‘hey, we’re thinking about putting out a record, we’re gonna put it out hopefully before Fest. Are you interested?’. But Rob was really like gung-ho and down for it and got us rolling really early on. He was just a great guy to work with, I mean Wiretap has put out so many great releases and he’s so involved with like the scene and a lot of great charity efforts; he’s just overall a great dude in so many ways. So we’re happy to work with him and we’re lucky that we get the chance to put out a record with him.
Yeah I can’t remember when I realized you guys were on Wiretap, but I was happy to see you guys on there because they always have a real solid lineup, everybody on Wiretap I always love.
Jamie: Yeah it’s great.
So you mentioned the Menzingers down at Fest and your guys’ set times clashing, and when I first started listening to you guys, I immediately started getting Gaslight Anthem and Menzingers vibes. I think it was with Punk Rock Theory that they talked about sounding like GA also. But coming from your point of view, what are your guys influences?
Jamie: We get a lot of the Gaslight Anthem, I don’t know, maybe Kurt’s vocals and kind of in that vein. You know, we were in like old school pop-punk bands in the early 2000s, you know we grew up on bands like Hot Rod Circuit, the Get-Up Kids, and kind of like that genre of bands. But more recently, I’ve personally listened to a lot of the Gaslight Anthem, the Menzingers, they all kind of fall into the mix too. So I like to think we’re somewhere in between like those bands and that original scene with all the like emo punky bands. Some sort of blend of the two, I hope, maybe.
So what about a tour, do you guys have anything planned coming up for promoting the record?
Jamie: We’re trying to get something together for the Spring. We have a show coming up, but we’re gonna kind of lay low for the Winter and the holidays. We have a show coming up in January with Teenage Halloween, one of the local bands up here. Awesome if you don’t know those guys, they’re from Jersey actually, incredible. And then we’re trying to get something together for the Spring, we’re talking to some of our buddies around here to do a few dates, but we’re just trying to get everything together, we don’t have anything set in stone quite yet.
So Jamie, you’re the surgeon right?
Jamie: Yeah.
So how do you juggle that with playing shows like that; how do you juggle having enough time with your band and with work because when I hear ‘surgeon’ you kind of think like 80-hour work weeks, crazy work times, no time off.
Jamie: When I was in residency doing all my training stuff, I wouldn’t be able to do what we do now. But now that I’m in private practice, I’m in a good group, I’m on reasonable call schedule. And they’re all supportive of what I do, they think it’s cool. But it is a balancing act with like trying to book shows and playing out around the call schedule. You know all of us are in like our mid-30s to late-30s, so we’re all like career, kids, jobs. So we get out there when we can, just little tours and runs, try to get down to Fest every year. But you know, I don’t see us going out for like a month on the road. We’re kind of weekend warriors at this point.
So a little off-topic, but let’s talk Limp Bizkit here *laughs*.
Jeff: Oh yeah that’s why we’re here!
In your Fest bio, you were called a Limp Bizkit cover band. Give me some background on that.
Jamie: You know *laughs*, we listen to Limp Bizkit. We grew up in the 90s…
Jeff: My first band was a straight-up nu metal band…
Jamie: Dude he was straight up playing Korn covers. You know like people shit all over these bands, we grew up on this stuff and we love this stuff, we embrace this stuff. As much as I like the Gaslight Anthem, I’ll spin a Limp Bizkit record too.
Jeff: Think about this, how many hardcore kids in the late 90s hated Slipknot, but those same hardcore kids now love Slipknot. Yeah I don’t know…
Jamie: With Limp Biskit it’s kind of like a funny thing, but we really like Limp Bizkit and people are just joking around like shitting on it. We listen to Limp Bizkit and we want everyone to know, we’re just trying to put that out there *laughs*.
Right that’s confidence right there *laughs*. Most people are too proud to admit it.
Jeff: Their newest record is fire man.
I’ve heard bits and pieces and it’s not bad. Well that about covers everything I think, I really wanted to hit hard on the new record, hopefully this can help promote it a little bit. We’ve actually been steadily seeing reader numbers rise since the relaunch, especially with that blink-182 thing a while back.
Jamie: Yeah Dying Scene used to be the shit man. Yeah back in the day it was like Absolute Punk, and then Punknews was always there, and then Dying Scene. They were like the three big ones. At least outside of like AP and all that shit I don’t really care about. All the bands I liked were on those sites, that’s where I was checking to find the new stuff. Glad you guys are back.
Yeah I appreciate you guys sitting down with me.
Jamie: Yeah thanks for reaching out and talking with us man, we appreciate it.
2020 was going to be a big year for The Flatliners. After touring far and wide in support of their 2017 full-length Inviting Light, the band took most of 2019 off from playing live. Had things gone according to plan, 2020 would have found Canada’s finest foursome writing and recording a new record and touring […]
2020 was going to be a big year for The Flatliners. After touring far and wide in support of their 2017 full-length Inviting Light, the band took most of 2019 off from playing live. Had things gone according to plan, 2020 would have found Canada’s finest foursome writing and recording a new record and touring heavily in support of the 10th anniversary of their album Cavalcade, an album that made even jaded old punks like me change my opinion on the Flats from being “a pretty cool young band” to “Oh damn, this band rules!” Wouldn’t you know it, 2020 had other plans for the Flats – and for all of us, obviously. Their self-imposed downtime of 2019 obviously bled into the global pandemic-imposed downtime of 2020 (and 2021 if we’re being honest) and coincided with some of the most widespread times of social unrest in probably half a century.
And so was the environment in which the Flatliners, somewhat secretly, finally got to work on crafting a new full-length album. The resulting album, New Ruin, marked not only a return to Fat Wreck Chords as a label home after a one-album stay on Rise Records for InvitingLight, but a return to a more frantic and aggressive sound that was a calling card of some of the band’s earlier work. It is, quite simply, some of the best and most pointed and most vital music of their collective career.
Oh by the way, that aforementioned career just eclipsed the twenty-year mark. That fact is, frankly, mind-boggling not only because the band has consisted of the same foursome – Chris Cresswell on vocals and guitar, Scott Brigham on guitar, John Darbey on bass and Paul Ramirez on drums – for its entire duration, but also when you consider that the band’s members are all in their mid-thirties. I know, right?
We caught up with the Flatliners’ inimitable frontman Chris Cresswell just prior to his heading abroad for a few shows with his other band – a little project called Hot Water Music – to talk about the last couple of years in the Flats’ camp, the writing of what turned out to be some of their angriest work to date, and the ability to simultaneously celebrate both the new album and the comfortable, confident place that the band finds itself at two decades into their collective career. Coming off of the longest break of their career seems to have left the band recharged and laser-focused on what’s to come.
Read our full Q & A with the always affable Cresswell down below. Oh, and check out New Ruin if you haven’t already. Here’s our review of the album, which is out now on Fat Wreck Chords and Dine Alone!
(Believe it or not, the following has been condensed for content/clarity reasons.)
Dying Scene (Jay Stone): So how’s it going?
Chris Cresswell: Good man! Just actually enjoying ten days of home time between tours. It’s been a wild, wild year. I’ve barely been here, I feel like I’m more riff than person this year. (*both laugh*) But in a good way. It’s nice to be back to it. I’ve had a couple little chunks of time at home lately, which is good, man. Necessary. Fill the tank up, you know?
Congratulations on twenty years (of The Flatliners as a band)! It was officially twenty years, what, last week?
Yeah, (September) 14th.
That is wild.
It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, you know? It’s strange to think that it’s twenty officially now. Last year we were planning all the stuff we were doing this year, anticipating the 20th, and we were just like “how the fuck does this make sense?!”
When you can measure the span in multiple decades, it kinda does weird things to your brain.
Absolutely. 100%
I went to a show for the first time in a while this weekend. I saw Face To Face, and we were doing the math, Scott (Shiflett) and I, while we talking, and I realized it’s been 25 years since I’ve known those guys and that we’ve been friendly. Like…I have people in this scene that I’ve been friends with for a quarter of a century…
A few days before the band turned 20, Scott (Brigham) and I realized that we’ve been friends for thirty years. We met the first day of kindergarten, and in Ontario at least, the first day of school is always right after Labor Day. So, we were like “well, we met in ‘92,” so we looked up Labor Day of ‘92 and double-checked it with the school district calendar and we were like “damn, officially thirty years!” So it’s been a big year, for a lot of reasons. Those are two of the big reasons in my life anyway. It’s been a lot of reflection, but it’s good too, because it’s positive reflection that can propel us forward. As much as we’ve been celebrating the twentieth anniversary of The Flats, it’s nice for us to also have a new record out to celebrate the present and take us into the future. It’s not all just pure nostalgia train. And that stuff is cool, I have no problem with that. It’s a powerful drug! But I’m just glad there’s both things happening.
You talked about reflection, and we’re coming out of a time where we were all sort of forced to stay home for however long any of us chose to stay home for…did this period of reflection on twenty years sneak up on you after not really being able to do anything but reflect for a while?
Certain elements of it did, for sure. As much planning and scheming as you can do as a band, everything still comes down to the wire. Everything needed to be done yesterday (*both laugh*) and that’s kind of the nature of the music business at large, as well. But to be honest, that downtime of those couple years, we were pretty well prepared and organized in terms of getting to work and making sure that things were ready for when they needed to be ready. Knowing when we wanted to put the record out – inevitably that got pushed to the summer, but we wanted it out earlier than that – but that kind of always happens anyway, pandemic or major vinyl delays aside – so that was okay. 2021 was pretty well organized and planned. The lamest way I could put it I guess is that we executed everything in a pretty timely manner, which was cool. Because we had 2020 to basically, like, forget we were in a band.
How much stuff did you guys have to cancel in 2020?
A lot, really. A lot! Because we had basically taken 2019 off.
Oh right!
Yeah, back in like spring of 2018, we were like, “well, by the end of this year, we will have gone everywhere we could go on Inviting Light, let’s do something we’ve never done before and take a break.” It was weird to talk about it at first, and then we were all behind the idea, because we all needed it. We had never done that, and it was just years and years and years of solid, heavy touring. 2019 we played two Flats shows, officially, and then we played like a private party with friends and family, and then we did like a Smashing Pumpkins cover set at a different show…which was cool! It was fun! So the idea was that we’d come back and do the Cavalcade 10th-anniversary tour pretty much everywhere, and then we would make a record at the end of 2020 and hit the road in 2021 with a new record, and we’d hit all those places again that we had just hit with the Cavalcade shows. And then all of that took a shit! (*both laugh*)
We canceled a lot. There was a lot of stuff that wasn’t announced. I think there were only two tours that were announced that we had to cancel – I think the UK and Europe one was in the spring of 2020, maybe late April? And then we had a West Coast run in May or June that was announced. But we had shit booked for the whole year. The first month was basically like, who knows what the hell is happening…at first it was postpone everything, then forget that, cancel everything and just figure out how we’re all going to survive and if there’s a way the band can help with that. I mean, we all have lives outside of the band too, which is why taking the break was nice in 2019 and onward. It ended up being I think what everyone needed. Because I know myself and I know that if the pandemic hadn’t happened, I would have been on tour that entire time. I needed that, and I needed for it to be that everyone was home from touring! (*both laugh*)
And I don’t mean that as a competitive thing, it’s just that knowing that this is what I do, and this is what makes me feel most like myself…especially after a year off from The Flats at least – Hot Water was busy but Flats had the year off… I was kinda ready to hit it pretty hard again. But in the end, I was very thankful to have that extra time off. The first few months, we were just chilling and not doing much and kind of enjoying some downtime as best you could. As strange as it was and as many horrifying things that were happening in the world, it was comforting to be home for the first time in forever. And then the writing really started late summer, early fall or 2020. Once that started, it was just like laser focus on that.
Was that the timeline anyway? If you wanted to put out an album in 2021, would you have been writing in the last part of 2020 anyway?
I think we probably would have tried to put a lot more ideas together in the first half of 2020 – or at least spring and early summer while we were touring. We don’t write a lot on the road, but at least if we had ideas we could share them that way and start to compile the list of ideas, and then finetune them when we got home from tour. The idea was to record a record like fall – end of the year in…I guess 2020.
It’s all a blur. (*both laugh*)
Yeah! And it doesn’t matter that it didn’t happen that way, because the way it went down for us is the only way that everyone else knows about. It was nice to have that extra time and to write a lot…
Did you write a lot more for New Ruin than for previous records?
A bit more. We always are in the habit of writing more than we need. For most records, we end up with about twenty songs kinda ready to go. Some of them are always inevitably not as strong as others. For this record, we wrote…I think the final count when I was sending the guys all these ideas I had was like twenty-five or -six. Something like that. Some were fully worked out, some were not, but then we just kinda whittled it down to what we put on the record.
Did you go into it with a direction, either sonically or lyrically, that you wanted to focus on this time?
I didn’t set out to do that, but very quickly with what I was writing about and how the songs kinda felt energy-wise, it seemed like there was a pretty clear vision. Well, there was a pretty clear thesis statement which was “People suck (*both laugh*)…and the world is fucking crumbling all around us.” From there, the benefit of having all this downtime is that I had a lot of time to think about how I personally wanted to bring these ideas even to the rest of the guys, and then us as a band, what we could do together to solidify that even further and go into the studio with a really clear vision sonically and thematically. I had a really clear vision at that point lyrically. And then even not just that stuff, but how we wanted to roll out the record, what we wanted to do with videos… Lucky for us we were working with Fat (Wreck Chords) again obviously, who we fucking love – there’s a reason we’ve gone back, because they’re just family. And with Dine Alone in Canada, it’s great. The whole team is strong.It was the strongest and clearest vision I think I’ve ever had and that the band’s ever had going into something. For sure.
Did it sorta snowball on you, the idea, especially thematically, start as the snowball at the top of the hill or whatever they say and then just pick up steam once you realized there was obviously plenty of subject matter to choose from…because it seems a little more focused than just saying that “people suck”…it seems like a really focused and direct record.
That’s true, that’s true. I’m trying to think of the first few songs I sent to the guys…oh man, I could probably tell you…(*pulls out phone*)…One of the first songs I sent to the guys was “Rat King,” and that was a song where I was like “racism sucks and white people are THE WORST! (*both laugh*) So I’m going to write a song about that.” Maybe that’s a shock to people that that’s what that song is about, but it is! (*laughs*) I never really know what a song’s about until the lyrics start coming. Sorry, I don’t mean to do this during the interview but I feel like it would be cool to know (continues scrolling through phone)
Do you hate actually talking about what the songs are about? Because I know some songwriters don’t want to spoil that thing where “once I write it, it’s not mine, it’s yours” – but sometimes I like to know how the sausage is made.
For sure. And I think with other records I’ve been like “Well, just listen to the song because it feels like it should be pretty obvious.” And that’s I think because on previous records, a lot of it was that I’m a product of my environment and I’m writing about what I know. During all those years of making most of those records, pretty much from The Great Awake up until Inviting Light, a lot of it was on the road, really heavy touring years, and I’m writing about that. I’m writing about what that does to me, what I’ve seen that do to other people, how that feels. And it’s not always negative stuff, but it’s that experience. But this one, having done a lot of the writing at home and seeing and reading and learning about how fucked pretty much everything was around all of us for so many reasons, but all of them really at the end of the day being at the hand of human beings, I don’t mind talking about it because I made a decision to write more about what was going on in the world around me rather than my view of the world.
So, here we go…the first three songs that I sent to the guys were “Rat King,” “It’ll Hurt” and another song that we didn’t record. “Rat King” was one of the first ones that was out there, and it’s a very angry and pointed song about a particular thing and particular people. I think from there – well, “It’ll Hurt” is maybe more like a bit of the older lyrical style that I’ve done over the years. So it was cool to have both of those things kind of running alongside each other, those themes of like how I feel in general and how the world is making me feel right now. At some point, I decided to go down that one path of “let’s just talk about the world and what’s happening right now.” And I’m no expert on any of these subjects, these are just my opinions, you know? (*both laugh*) But if someone out there is reading that “Rat King” is an antiracist song and they’re shocked by that, that’s kind of troubling. And if they don’t like that, we don’t want you to listen to that song. We don’t want you to listen to our band (*both laugh*) if you’re not an antiracist person, you know?
Seriously, it floors me every time that stuff like that comes up from whatever artist, from Woody Guthrie to Springsteen to Jason Isbell or whoever, when people are like “shut up and stick to playing music” it’s like…boy, you have REALLY not been paying attention at all, have you?
No, and like, my God, how many people have learned about how to use their voice through music, you know? It’s a cultural wave that hits people in different ways, but it hits people! It’s similarly confusing when I meet someone who, hen we’re talking and the topic of music comes up and I say “oh what kind of music do you like?” and they say “oh, I don’t really like music.” I think “oh, I don’t trust you at all!” (*both laugh*)
Right!!
And I know that’s subjective because, I mean, music is my entire life, but really, you can’t even tell me like what music you like? And when you hear it, it makes you feel a certain way? I don’t know…
That’s weird. It’s like people who say they don’t like dogs or whatever. Or cats, I guess, although unlike you I’m an anticat guy.
See that’s the thing though, people have an opinion about which animals they prefer. But when people are like “oh, I don’t really like animals…”
That means you’re a sociopath.
“What, you don’t like joy?” (*both laugh*) But really, it was nice to have that time to sit and think about how much I hate the fucking world! (*both laugh*)
Right, but then, as a songwriter, I don’t want to say that’s an awesome responsibility because that’s probably overstating things, but does that seem like it’s a big responsibility, to say “I want to actually talk about this shit in a way that makes sense to me and hopefully to people who have been following and listening to me for twenty years? Because that’s a lot to take on. We had nothing but time to pay attention. It wasn’t just that things sucked for a long time – and probably stll do – but we had all the time in the world to focus on how much it sucked. We had to focus on how racist this little country to the south of yours is …
Hey man, mine too! Mine is no angel. People like to think it is, but we have got a dark history.
Well and some of that came out during the two years of hte pandemic, with all of the news about the indiginous kids at the Catholic boarding schools. It’s an overwhelming responsibility to be able to put some of that shit into words in a way that makes sense, no?
I think that there is definitely a responsibility there. It’s a choice I made to write about this kind of stuff. I’m no authority on the subject, but I know how it makes me feel. At the end of the day, that’s always what I’ve done, it was just different subject matter. Now having all this time to sit in those uncomfortable moments and let those pieces of information – those horrifying pieces of information – the thing you just mentioned about the residential schools in Canada, for instance, let that bounce around in your brain for a while and see how that makes you feel. It’s not going to make you feel good because it’s a terrible thing, to say the very least. It’s a horrifying thing that happened. It is an absolute privilege of mine, and I know that to be true, to just be able to be the guy to sit there and write a song about it instead of being somebody who lived through it, you know what I mean? I understand that there’s a difference, but I’m trying to put my opinion out there in a song in a way where maybe, like we said earlier, it can hit someone in a way that it allows them to think about an issue a little differently.
Or, really at my age now, I’m 35, and I’ve been able to write music for a long time and express the way I feel for a long time, but I feel like at this age – maybe for some people it’s a little earlier or a little later – I feel like I’m part of my community. I feel like I’m a responsible person adding to a community. I’m not trying to take anything away from it, I’m trying to add to it, but not trying to take up too much space or time or air either. That’s very tricky to do in music and in art and this type of thing, but at the same time, there are so many people with maybe a dwindling but a still-existing attention span to hear your ideas, you know what I mean? That’s how I started to think about it and feel about it as well. I’m just trying to add to my musical community with something positive. Essentially, having the conversation about these issues, or at least putting my side of the story out there – and my side of the story is that human beings are the fucking worst and we could do so much fucking better (*both laugh*) better to ourselves, to each other, to the planet, all these things. It was all hitting me so hard because I had time to sit around and think about it. Otherwise man, I’d be on tour, I’d be in a fucking bubble, I’d be living a tunnel vision life like I always was. Not every song on the record, but a lot of the songs on the record are about these particular issues…they’re not new issues, they’re things that I’ve now been able to try my best to compute this kind of information and put it out there. That’s why that record is so angry, because it was not an easy time for anyone!
Did that inspire the sound of the record too? It’s sort of interesting to listen to the last two records back-to-back. The first song on Inviting Light…”Mammals” starts with that sort of slow build. It becomes an uptempo song obviously, but to contrast that opening with “Performative Hours” which punches you in the face right from the beginning and the album doesn’t really let up from there. Was that a conscious choice too, with the heavy subject matter, to put that heavy music behind it as well?
Yeah. Some songs, the lyrics come first even in little fragments, sometimes it’s the music…well, it’s hard to say really which happens more than the other. But if the lyrics came first or at least I knew what I wanted to write about, I knew that the energy of the song had to match that, and vice versa. Because I was already in that mindset of being just pissed off, a lot of the music was very angry, so I knew that the lyrics had to match that. To be honest, once we had a good pile of songs to listen through – the ideas were still being worked on, but once we had a handful of songs where we were like “whoa, this is angry,”…the guys were like “whoa, you’re pretty angry.” (*both laugh*) Like “why not, of course I am, how could I not be?” (*laughs*) I think at that point we were like “well, let’s just make a record that’s going to punch people in the fucking face” like you said. Once the consensus was to open the record with “Performative Hours,” which was an idea that came up early on, we were like “oh yah, this is perfect!” We were able to build off that so well. Musically I think it takes twists and turns throughout the record, but once we chose the songs that we wanted to put on the record, we were like “damn, this is pretty relentless actually.” And that’s what we wanted to do, and I’m so happy with it. And it was the most fun that I’ve ever had making a Flats record, which is funny because it’s the angriest record we’ve ever made by far! (*both laugh*)
And it’s also really guitar-heavy! I mean obviously the Flats have been a guitar band, that’s always sort of been at the front and center, but it’s really riff-heavy this time. I think I texted you when I first heard it that, like, I had plans – my wife and my daughter went out of town for a weekend, and I think I got your album and Jerry sent me the new Mercy Union record on the same day, and they are both really good, guitar-heavy albums and there are so many riffs that I just like “fuck having plans, I just want to play guitar and figure out riffs tonight!” (*both laugh*)
I love that!
But that seems like a bit of a stylistic difference too. Does that come from sitting around the house for a couple years and just playing guitar, or did they come when you started writing with the guys?
A bit of both. It’s always a mixed bag. Each record turns out to be a response to the previous record. I think on Inviting Light, we were trying to build – it turns out – a bit of a different vibe and a different style. We were so close to it that we didn’t really realize what we were doing fully, but I can say that I knew when we were writing the record that we wanted to let a lot of those Inviting Light songs breathe. There were more subtleties, and we’d talk a lot about that it was just as important to know when not to play as it was to know when to play. With this record, we were just like “no, let’s just hit ‘em with everything!” (*both laugh*) Each record becomes an exercise in these things, which is really cool, and we’re lucky that the four of us in the band have gotten to do this together over all these years now. We discover more of ourselves each time we write a song together or make a record together. Part of what we discovered on this record is that we just wanted to fucking rock, dude! (*both laugh*) I know it’s so stupid to put it that way, but it’s real! The energy and the theme of the record and how angry the material ended up being, we’re like “well, we’re going to make this record sound as insane as we can, as powerful as we can.” Sonically that was the vision going into it, that we wanted to make it sound big. Not like something we couldn’t replicate live, because that’s always a bummer, but something that we could just hit people with. Because then when we play these songs live, we are going to feel the power of these songs and we’re going to bring it even harder. Especially after a couple years of not being able to play at all together, let alone go on tour, there’s this newfound excitement. Like, I’ve gotta relax a little bit on stage.
I was just going to ask that.
I’m ready to like kick a hole through the stage every night because I’m just like “I’m fucking back!!” It feels really good.
And then you get three songs in and you’ve got to take a knee. You’re in your mid-thirties now, man…
My first show back was a Hot Water show, and it was at Furnace Fest in Alabama in 2021. I was terrified before the show, I was nervous, I was anxious, I thought I was going to forget everything. And the first note we hit, I was like “ oh fuck yes!” and I was literally stomping so hard on the stage. I think Chuck sang the first three songs and I was like “I gotta chill! I’m like winded and I’ve gotta sing in nine minutes.” (*both laugh*) And it’s the same with the Flats now, man. When we got together to really dig through these ideas as a band after almost a year of sending ideas back and forth, this was now late Summer 2021…the four of us hadn’t been in the same room in almost two years! It was the longest it had ever been. It was amazing and it was emotional and I remember like a week after that when we went to go record, after doing like a week of (pre-production), we did like a “have a good show” thing before we were recording and we kinda all went “fuck, man, this feels powerful.” There was an energy to it, man, and it sounds kinda cheesy but it’s true. It had been so long at that point since we had done anything together, and we kinda knew what we had to. Not in an arrogant way, I hope it doesn’t come across that way because I hate that shit, but there was a confidence in what we were building together and what we wrote and were going into record. Knowing what we wanted to do helped us feel so confident that we were like “fuck, this is going to be awesome.” We’ve never really operated that way before, we’re kinda like “well, I hope people like it!” With this one, that’s still the case, but I think that all of those things – the time away from each other, the time away from this, the time away from the band and being able to do our quote-unquote thing – it just kinda solidified the love for it and the power in it to us, you know?
Well because that could go the other way, right? You could take two years off and just not really be in it anymore or just get to a place where you think you’ve done everything you wanted to do in music or with the band and then be on to the next thing.
And I respect that too, man. It totally depends on the person. I’ve got a lot of friends actually who made that decision since everything that’s happened the last few years, and I respect that. The four of us, like I said, each have lives outside of the band and things have changed. Touring nowadays, we can only operate in a certain way. That’s cool though, because it keeps it special and it keeps, maybe, that feeling that we’ve discovered when making this record and now celebrating twenty years and everything WITH the new record, it keeps that energy and that excitement alive, instead of “hey, let’s go on tour for ten months straight…” (*both laugh*) Fuck that, man, oh my god.
Is this the first time you’ve written a full album without playing any of the material out before? Like, would you workshop things on the road before?
We’d show each other ideas but we wouldn’t jam a lot on tour. We did that a little bit on Cavalcade, and we just felt like we were annoying the people that were working at the club. Because we were soundchecking, and in that era we weren’t headlining the show so if we were opening the show, we might get a thirty-minute soundcheck if we got one at all. The fucking bartender and the venue staff do not need to hear us working through the same 16 bars of an idea over and over again (*both laugh*). We started to do it offstage. Jamming and putting it together as a cohesive thing always happened at home.
Once the songs are fully fleshed out, though, are there songs that would actually make their way into the live set before anyone heard them? Because now everyone’s had a chance to get to know the album for a while before you can hit the road.
I think we’ve always been a little bit protective of playing new stuff before it’s out, and I don’t know why really.
I feel like that’s a YouTube thing.
Yeah?
Yeah, because people videotape shows and put the whole thing up on YouTube now, so if you have a song that you’re sort of woodshedding, why play it in front of people because then everyone knows what it is, and then maybe you don’t even like that song or maybe it takes a turn in the writing process, but now you’re sorta stuck with the way it sounded that one night in Detroit in June or whatever.
Totally. We actually did this very recently with “Rat King” for the music video, but that was the first time we had done that in, I don’t even remember. It was a long time. It could have been for Cavalcade or something, because we recorded a big chunk of Cavalcade one year, then we went on tour for like nine months or something, and we finished (recording) almost a year later. So I’m sure in that era of Cavalcade being like half done or three-quarters of the way done, we were probably playing a couple of those songs live. But, for “Rat King” we did a video shoot in Toronto and part of it was a show we played. We ended up doing this last-minute show at our friend’s bar, Hard Luck, and it was like a week’s notice. No one knew why we were doing it. We had a Midwest tour coming up and we were like “fuck it, let’s play a show in Toronto, and we can film it. We’ll let everyone know we’re making a video, so if you don’t want to be in the video, go to the back, if you want to be in the video come to the front! (*both laugh*) We’re just going to play this one song that you’ve never heard before, and that was kind of exciting. That was the first time we had done that in a while and it was cool. But aside from that…I think “Performative Hours” was already out at that point, maybe “Souvenir” was already out or was about to come out. People knew there was going to be a record, so it wasn’t a huge surprise to play a new song. I think that’s maybe why, because in the past we haven’t wanted to do that because it kinda spoils the surprise. We like to record records kind of in secret. We don’t typically post stuff from the studio
I was just thinking that, yeah. I was looking back at the Flats Instagram account and I did notice that you didn’t post teaser things or whatever from the studio, it was like, all of a sudden here’s the cover art and the first single!
It’s similar to the way that we wanted the record to sonically and musically be, that kind of relentless slap in the face. We wanted to just be like “WE’RE BACK! SURPRISE!” And also, you never know how long after you finish tracking a record, how long the entire process will take. Like for instance, we’re talking today, the 26th of September, and the last day of tracking in the studio for New Ruin was October 3rd of last year. So we finished almost exactly a year ago. Then our friend Dave did some piano tracks at his home studio after that, and then mixing we took our time with. Because we like to take our time with this stuff. That shouldn’t be a surprise to any Flats fan at this point (*both laugh*). So I think part of me and my approach to it which I think trickles down to the guys – only because I’m the most neurotic with this shit, more than Scott, Paul or John – is that, if we put it out that we’re in the studio, people get excited hopefully, and then like a year later the album comes out? I feel like you kinda lose the excitement. You’d lose it on me at least. If it’s a band I like pulling that move, I’ll have completely forgot that I saw that picture or watched that video by the time the record comes out. So we like to be a little secretive about it. It’s fun! There’s not a lot of mystery left in the world, so if we can create a little bit, it’s fun for us!
The terms “hard work” and “blood, sweat, and tears” get tossed around almost nonchalantly in the punk community, not necessarily because the words have lost their impact, but because they’ve become staples of what’s so great about the genre. Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi was pretty spot on in describing punk as “playing […]
The terms “hard work” and “blood, sweat, and tears” get tossed around almost nonchalantly in the punk community, not necessarily because the words have lost their impact, but because they’ve become staples of what’s so great about the genre. Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi was pretty spot on in describing punk as “playing music for music’s sake and being part of a family for family’s sake.” Bridge Nine Records founder Chris Wrenn lived by this mantra in pouring everything he had into backing the local hardcore acts he’d grown close with. And after years of DIY promotion and creative forms of funding, Bridge Nine expanded to become, not only a staple of the Boston hardcore community, but a full-blown label touting some of hardcore punks’ most influential names.
Diligent and untiring labels like Bridge Nine, ones knee-deep in the very scenes they represent, have helped fuel the genre, I’d say, as much as the artists themselves, if not more so. Formed in the summer of 1995 in a college dormitory and mainly focusing on 7″ releases, Bridge Nine was a way for Wrenn to contribute to the flourishing and ever-motivated punk scene of Boston, MA.
“With DIY and hardcore punk, obviously there is this drive, it’s a culture of doing things and contributing. It’s not a lot of people just watching from the sidelines, it’s people that kind of roll up their sleeves and say, “okay, I can do this, this is how I can contribute”. And for me, all my friends were in bands, but I wasn’t in a band. So I wanted a way that I could kind of give back, but also something that I could do to make me a part of the process.”
“So for me, it was starting a label, but I didn’t even mean to start a label necessarily, I was helping my friends put out seven-inches and having them pressed. Because in 1995, when I decided I wanted to do that, it wasn’t a unique idea. There were a lot of people my age that were putting out seven-inch records with their friends’ bands.”
But in pre-internet days, information for starting a label, or even having records pressed, especially on a smaller scale, was extremely hard to come by. Through the help of some friends-of-friends, Wrenn was able to learn enough to put into action what would eventually grow into a full-blown record label and a full-time career.
“So, when you decide like, “oh, I want to put out a seven-inch or I want to help my friends do it”, especially at that time, information was pretty hard to come by. It was pre-internet, so there was no “I’m just going to Google this and find out how to do it”. You had to find somebody who knew what they were doing or had done it before; I mean, there were no real instructions on how to start a record label or press records. There were books, but a lot of them were bullshit and they weren’t really at the level that I was trying to be at, which is fairly small.”
“I was connected with somebody who had a label, a friend of a friend. I didn’t know him, but literally just gave him a call and just said, “What do you know? I want to put out a record, where do I even start?” And this dude was cool. He gave me a list of contacts, kind of walked me through it, and told me where I should get a record pressed.”
“So our first handful of records were done at a pressing plant in Nashville, Tennessee called United Record Pressing. They’ve been around forever, I think since the sixties at least, it might even be older than that. I know that they were the first pressing plant, I think in the U.S., to press the Beatles records. So they’ve been around the block a hundred times, pressed all sorts of records. Basically, I just called them and said “I want to press a record”. And they’re like “Alright, send us a DAC cassette with the audio, send us the artwork for the center labels, and a money order for whatever number of dollars it was at the time.”
“And we still work with them to this day, they just pressed something for us this year. 28 years.”
And thus, Bridge Nine Records was born. The label’s early days were defined by seven-inch releases for local acts such as Tenfold, The Trust, and Proclamation, with the label’s first full-length coming in the form of 1999’s “Taken By Force” by Proclamation.
Chris Wrenn working in the basement art department of Tower Records on Newbury Street (1999)
After close to 5 years, Bridge Nine turned a corner. Wrenn joined forces with a group of close friends, the founding members of American Nightmare, and was able to take the brand across the nation and internationally.
“After about four years of just putting out seven-inch singles with friends’ bands, I started working with American Nightmare. Again, their first record was just another seven-inch single, I’d done a handful of them at the time, but they were the first band that was willing to just hit the road, tour, and get out of New England. Because a lot of the bands I was working with prior to that didn’t really even leave Connecticut or Massachusetts, kind of just stayed local. They were the first band that was like “we want to go hit the road, tour everywhere”.”
“For me, it was an opportunity for them to wave the Bridge 9 flag and for me to wave theirs and for both of us to go across the country, go over to Europe, and be ambassadors for what we were doing.”
“So it was probably Summer of 2000 when, instead of just being a local thing, kids all around the world are starting to pick up and get interested. It was still a few years after that before it was like “oh wait, I have to quit my job and just focus on this.”
With this spike in popularity and awareness, Wrenn was faced with a common problem among any subsect of the punk community: lack of funding. Wrenn’s day job in the Tower Records art department was enough to make ends meet personally, but nowhere near what was needed to fund a label. Through an equally creative and unique solution stemmed, what I would argue, is one of Boston’s most defining brands. What originated as a label-funding campaign fueled by bumper stickers and Yankees-hate merch, Sully’s Brand has now flourished into a celebration of Boston pride under the slogan “Believe in Boston”.
“It’s funny cause it’s never really been like a full-time job for me, it’s never been an exclusive thing. I’ve always had other things that I’ve done at the same time to make it happen.”
“Spring going into Summer of 2000, I had signed American Nightmare, I mean it was just like a loose deal. But they were in the studio, had big plans for their record and I needed money. I was working at Tower Records in the art department, making like $7.50 an hour. So I didn’t have money to even cover my own bills, much less push this band.”
“So friends of mine and I went to Fenway Park where the Red Sox play, it was like less than a mile from our apartment. I was already making all these bumper stickers and t-shirts and stuff for punk bands, so I started making stuff for sports fans and would sell it in the street to people leaving the games. Early on, it just riffed on the rivalry with the Yankees, we would make Yankee suck merch, sell to people leaving the Red Sox games.”
“It was wild! You would just be mobbed, just trading money and stickers and t-shirts. Yeah. I mean, it was crazy, it was like drug dealer money with significantly less risk.“
“So it was initially just an opportunity to go find money elsewhere and put it into putting out records. I had tried some of the more traditional routes at the time; my family wasn’t in a position to loan me money, I went to banks and couldn’t get a loan because I was fresh out of college, couldn’t even afford my student loan, much less another loan. I had no collateral, no car, no anything that I could put up to guarantee something.”
“We just had to figure out how to do it ourselves. After a few years, we raised a lot of money doing that, I mean we would come back after every game, a thousand bucks cash, and I would go the next day and buy money orders and send it to pressing plants and pay for magazine ads, all this stuff that the label needed and things that the bands needed. We even bought one of our bands, Terror, their first tour van with like bumper stickers.”
Summer of 2000 Fenway Courtesy of Kate Bowen
Funds were now taken care of, and the business took on a life of its own. What was initially used as a means to fuel the label soon emerged as a formal brand.
“After a few years, I realized this was a better business than putting out punk records and I wanted to expand on it. So I came up with the name Sully’s, started exploring other stuff that wasn’t based on the rivalry with the Yankees, started focusing on Boston stuff and it just grew into its own company. For 15, almost 20 years, they just kind of co-existed in our office, one whole side would be records and black t-shirts, and the other side was all sports stuff. And after a while, I started to meet people that were Have Heart fans, but also wore t-shirts from Sully’s; there was a lot of crossover.”
Just four short years after sales first began on Lansdowne St. outside of Fenway, Wrenn’s business was gifted some major media coverage with one of Boston’s favorite hometown heroes and a connection that stood the test of time over 15 years later. Ben Affleck’s love for Wrenn’s DIY brand eventually led to significant screen time in “The Town” [one of Nasty Nate’s all-time favorites], the Boston-set crime drama directed by, and starring Affleck.
Ben Affleck in “Killin With Schillin” Sully’s Brand tee, c. 2004
“Ben Affleck wore one of our shirts back in 2004, which was cool. It was during the run for the World Series. And he was, you know, kind of showing it off in the picture.”
“And then in 2009, he was directing a movie, that movie “The Town”. Their costume department reached out to us and said “Hey, we bought a couple of your shirts from a local store and we’d like to use them in this movie.” I didn’t know anything about the movie or what the potential was for it. But I was like “yeah, you’re welcome to, I’ll sign whatever. And while you’re at it, take a look at our website and if there’s anything else, let me know. They faxed me like a four-page handwritten list of everything they wanted. It was just like, holy shit. It was like eight of every shirt, like two different sizes.”
“So I drove them down to the costume department when they were filming, hit it off with the woman who was the costume designer, and we basically became their print shop for everything. We ended up having, I think, six of our t-shirts in the movie. One of our Believe in Boston shirts was on Ben Affleck in a scene, we had this shirt that said Irish Pub Boxing that was on Jeremy Renner, we made the hockey jerseys at the end when they all go out on the ice.“
“It was like Christmas for a while because all these people, they wanted to buy the shirts that the actors were wearing and they got them from us.”
From their early days of putting out local New England hardcore seven-inches to a few short years later being featured in major publications and more than one feature film, Wrenn’s DIY approach and motivated work ethic were common themes that allowed the label to grow to much more than a local brand. Wrenn’s dedicated mentality and laborious practice not only helped further punk rock’s grassroots reputation, but also served valuable in keeping Bridge 9 and Sully’s Brand afloat.
Labels are often the first to be overlooked in terms of the impact COVID-19 had on the music community. Artists and venues were at the forefront of attention when disaster struck, culminating in months of canceled tours and restricted gatherings. However, even businesses such as Wrenn’s, one’s enjoying mainstream success, were not invincible. Yet again, in true punk rock fashion, Wrenn was unafraid to get his hands dirty and got to work, utilizing the same DIY, creative approach that had proven successful over 20 years prior.
“Some of my best ideas have come when my back’s been against the wall, and with the pandemic and everything that came along with it, everyone’s back was against the wall, it was kind of like a do-or-die situation for a lot of people and a lot of businesses. And for me, you know, you just get creative. DIY has been fostered in the punk scene since the beginning. And, you know, I came into it wanting to use my hands and get involved. I think people in punk and hardcore are a little more, resilient, like they’re just willing to work harder, at least in my experience.”
“The pandemic was pretty tough because we had to let most of everyone go, temporarily at least. I had Sully’s, a screen printing business and Bridge 9, all three businesses were in the same space, and literally overnight, we had to send everyone home. It was a month, two months, we depended on mail order.”
“Thankfully, we had a pretty large inventory of stuff. So we started doing mystery boxes and had like these inexpensive, but good value mail order items that people could check out to help support us. And we were just kind of on this really low autopilot for a while.”
“Everything that Sully’s does as a brand is related to tourism and sports and both of those were gone. So I was just like sending packages to people, like just trying to get a buzz. So I looked up Ben Affleck, sent him a few shirts with a card that just said “Hey, it was the 10th anniversary of “The Town”, it was real sick that you included us in your movie and we’re still stoked about it. Here’s some stuff from Boston and thank you”.”
“And he wore all of that. Like every day he went out on these pandemic walks with his girlfriend wearing our shirts. Like that was really, really cool. And so we set up a few more things over the next year or so, and he was repping stuff from Bridge 9 and from Sully’s, which was very cool.”
Ben Affleck Sporting Sully’s Brand “Believe in Boston” Tee During COVID (2020)
Although business slowed for Bridge Nine and Sully’s brand during the 2019-2020 shutdowns, the COVID-19 storm was weathered and Wrenn was able to look forward. Both brands continued expansion and a new storefront location emerged, one much better suited for Wrenn’s objectives.
“It was Summer of 2020, we had been in this same building for 14 years, and our old landlord said he was selling the building. So we were in a period of uncertainty, we were kind of trying to find something new. And the new landlord comes in and basically says “I’m going to double your rent”.”
“I mean we had some good times there, but I wanted something new. So through the pandemic, we had to let everyone go, find a new building, and then basically renovate it and get it up and running. And, so the last few years have been some of the craziest, hardest working years I’ve had, but also some of the best because we’ve landed in a much cooler spot.“
Wrenn outside of the new Bridge 9/Sully’s Brand Headquarters
“It’s awesome, it has this big retail space up front. So we have our own record store, it has a big warehouse in back that we’re going to start having bands play, and it’s right on the main street in this kind of quiet, North of Boston town. It’s kind of weird to be selling Dead Kennedy’s records alongside Bridge 9 releases and Minor Threat and Slayer LPs, but here we are.”
“We got the keys on a Friday and then two days later, like on Monday, we get a phone call from a location scout for a movie. And it was for this movie called “The Tender Bar” starring Ben Affleck. And they’re like “we want to use your building for background in one of these scenes. So Ben Affleck came like two weeks later and filmed a scene in front of our building, which was just a crazy coincidence.”
“It’s kind of like “Oh man, the universe maybe is showing me that we’re on the right path.” We got a chance to chat with him briefly, thank him for repping the brand. And then his assistant asked us to design a t-shirt for him as their wrap gift. So, we ended up designing a shirt, it had his signature on the inside of it and we printed like 500 of them for anybody that worked in the film And that was cool, full circle moment.”
Through all of the excitement, from backing local bands in early Bridge 9 days to taking the label international, from selling bumper stickers and “Yankees Suck” merch outside Fenway to establishing a legitimate brand that’s been displayed in movies and major publications, Wrenn’s label was able to reach, and surpass, its 25th year of production. 25 years of operation holds much to look back on and Wrenn had difficulty choosing just one highlight.
“[Celebration for our 25th] was supposed to be 2020. We were going to do a whole bunch of cool stuff, but obviously, that all got kind of blown up. So we pushed that off to the 30th.”
“One of the cool things about doing a label for me has been finding new bands, bands that I get excited about and I want to help other people to know and be able to hear. And we’ve been able to do that with a bunch of bands, the earliest one probably being American Nightmare because those were guys I lived with. They had a demo, they wanted to record something, and being able to be there at the ground level was very, very cool, knowing their potential and kind of helping them realize it.”
“But it’s also really cool, and I found as just a music fan, to be able to work with bands that I liked before I even started the label. H2O, for example. I mean, I was a huge H2O fan before I even started Bridge 9. Never thought when I started the label that I would ever have a chance to work with them, and now we’ve been working together for 15 years. Or when I worked with Slapshot for the first time, I was a Slapshot fan in high school, going into college, and then to be able to put out a Greatest Hits record for them. That was 20 years ago, last fall, and to be able to continue to work with them over the years, it’s just, it’s cool.”
With 25 years in the rearview mirror and the 30th quickly approaching, Wrenn shows no signs of slowing down with either brand. During the COVID shutdown, Bridge 9 shifted their sights away from signing new artists and aimed at 25th-anniversary reissues.
“So we’ve had, I think nine different LPs that we’ve put out with like silver jackets and silver vinyl, kind of leaning into the 25th anniversary color.“
Chris Wrenn (center, holding sign) and members of Boston’s hardcore-punk scene peddling “Yankees Suck” merch at Fenway in the summer of 2000
With shutdowns and restrictions a thing of the past (hopefully for good), Bridge 9 has been able to shift back to a focus on signing new artists. 2023 saw the signing of 2 new artists, Heavy Hex and Incendiary Device, the release of 5 records and 7 exclusive variants, as well as assurance that much more is sure to come.
Dying Scene caught up with Geoff Andersen and Carlos Gomez of Last Reel Hero at Analogue Records for an interview and photoshoot while visiting them in their hometown of Pueblo, Colorado. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Dying Scene: Tell me about your band. Where are you from? When did you form? […]
Dying Scene caught up with Geoff Andersen and Carlos Gomez of Last Reel Hero at Analogue Records for an interview and photoshoot while visiting them in their hometown of Pueblo, Colorado.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Dying Scene: Tell me about your band. Where are you from? When did you form? Who’s in the band? What instruments do you play or what roles do you play? And how did you come up with your band name?
Geoff Andersen: We are Last Reel Hero. We’re from here in Pueblo, Colorado and we formed in 2017. I believe, the beginning of 2017. I’m Geoff and I play bass. Carlos plays lead guitar and vocals. We have Dan Wiley on keys, trombone, and vocals. Jim Chandler on drums and Keith Sanchez on guitar and a little bit of vocals as well. Our band name, Last Reel Hero, is basically taken from a line in the movie “The Harder They Come” starring Jimmy Cliff and it means that we are here ‘til the end.
DS: I haven’t seen the movie, so now I’m curious. I understand that you have connections with other local bands. Tell me about your connections with The Dead End and Diskount Vodka.
Carlos Gomez: Well, the Dead End is my other project, a psychobilly trio with a standup bass. We kind of don’t really like to give ourselves the genre or name, but we’re a rock and roll band. The current lineup of the Dead End has been around for about the same time as Last Reel Hero has been around, which is kind of crazy…since 2017 or so. And as far as Diskount Vodka goes, Matt Hamilton (aka Pickle) who plays drums in the Dead End also plays drums in Diskount Vodka with my little brother, Cuauhtli Gomez, who plays bass in Diskount Vodka. So it’s a big rock and roll family.
DS: Very cool. How would you describe your music to someone who hasn’t heard of you?
GA: Hard reggae. Punk rock, that’s very reggae-influenced. There are people who want to say we’re a ska band, which technically that’s part of our sound but there’s a lot more to it than that. We’re probably more of a very reggae influenced punk band more than anything.
CG: I would agree with that statement. I would just say that we’re all kids who listen to reggae that play punk rock and it just comes out the way it comes out.
DS: Who are your biggest influences and inspirations?
CG: That’s a good one. As far as this band goes, I mean, we love the Trojan stuff. Anything that came out on Trojan Records is a heavy influence in our band and our sound. The roots of ska and then even the two-tone stuff later on in the 70s in England, I would say all of that stuff collectively. Everything from Bob Marley to The English Beat. One thing I love when we go on tour are the playlists that Geoff comes up with because it’s just all this musical inspiration and we get to the gigs and it’s just stuff that we were grooving on this whole time. And then we project it in what we play and how we represent ourselves. So, I mean, as far as us, that’s what I want to say.
GA: Yeah, it’s old school reggae, ska, rock steady, two-tone, dance hall, old school punk rock, and pub rock type stuff then our just straight-up rock and roll influences. Yeah, it all just comes out. It’s not really even intentional, it’s just what we’ve always been into and then that’s what comes out.
CG: Definitely. I mean, we do a Waylon Jennings cover because anyone could do a Bob Marley cover. Why not do a Waylon Jennings cover? And honestly, I hear more rock and roll in it, but many people are like, wow, you made that into a ska song. So, it’s crazy how it is, but we soak in a bunch of different things. Definitely.
DS: Now, I’m curious. What Waylon Jennings song do you cover?
GA: We released it as a single about a year ago. So, it’s out there as a single on the streaming platforms. We have a new single that just came out 2023 October called “The Calling Of The Gun.” That’s really heavy, heavy reggae…heavy subject matter…heavy song. That’s our newest release.
DS: In addition to this latest single, when should we expect new music from you?
CG: That’s a hard one. We’re currently writing and just working on stuff, especially with it being wintertime. During that downtime, we’re going to try to pump out the new tracks and see where we go. I mean, there’s really no deadline on anything right now.
GA: Yeah, we just released just that song as a single and we don’t have anything else planned at the moment, but it’ll probably be late spring, early summer.
DS: Are you working with a record label? If so, who?
GA: No, our own label, Last Reel Records records. But we’re open to the right offer, that’s for sure.
DS: So, you guys have been performing locally and touring regionally for several years now. Where have you been performing lately? What is the biggest show you’ve played and what is the best show you’ve played? I’m sorry. And tell me about the most memorable show you’ve played.
CG: I already have a few in mind. I guess to start off with the first answer, we commonly play in New Mexico a lot. So, we do play locally here in Pueblo, but ever so often, every couple of months, which is good because it maintains our momentum. People would probably get tired of us just playing every weekend or whatever, but we go to New Mexico a lot and they’re very welcoming to us there. It seems like every time we go back, there’s a bigger following. So, a lot of the stuff we do is a little south from where we’re at currently. As far as bigger shows go, I want to say the reggae festival we played.
GA: Oh yeah. We played the The Sunshine Reggae Roots Festival in Topeka, Kansas about…the year before, a year and a half ago during the summer. That was really awesome.
CG: That was cool. That was a big.
GA: So, we played a big free outdoor show…
CG: That was my number two.
GA: …opening for The Slackers in Denver. It was pretty much the first show that Denver had post-COVID and it was free and outdoor. So, that was a really big show.
CG: That was a huge show and that was one of my best memories just for the fact that Vic Ruggiero from the Slackers comes up to me as I was minding my business backstage and he is just like, “Hey, what’s the name of that song?” And I was like, “Looting and Shooting,” which is one of our singles. He’s like, “Well, I liked it so much that I recorded it on my phone.” That blew my mind. It was just surreal. My thing is that I love bands and love music. Vic, The Slackers… third-wave ska, that was one of the first third-wave ska bands that I started listening to when I was really young. Being a skateboarding kid at like 12 or 13 or whatever, you’d buy compilation CDs, likeGive ’em The Boot or whatever, and I heard The Slackers. So, for me, that was an awesome show. I didn’t expect that side of it. It was already a great big show. And then that was just the icing on top for me. So, that’s the one I will always remember.
GA: Yeah, it was definitely a memorable show. It’s one of our best ones ever. We also got to play with the Skatalites in Denver. That’s one of my favorite shows ever that we’ve played. One of the coolest moments that we had as a band is when we played with The Toasters in Colorado Springs and their trombone player got sick. So, our trombonist, Dan, filled in for him and played the entire show on trombone for The Toasters that night and just killed it. It was awesome. If you went to that show, you would’ve never known – unless you saw that he was the keyboard player and singer in the opening band – that he was not their regular trombone player.
CG: Yeah, that was a great moment. Dan’s a very talented guy, too. He’s a music teacher at a local school. One time, The Dead End did a recording session and I was just like, “Dan, I brought this keyboard down. Will you just come?” And he just busted out all this stuff on these songs that he had just heard that day. It was just mind-blowing. Kudos to Dan. Kudos to all our members because I think we all collectively bring our own element to the band and that’s what makes our band what it is.
DS: So, you said New Mexico is where you travel often for shows?
GA: Yeah, so far mostly it’s been throughout the Southwest, mostly Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, California…Vegas. Kansas, Nebraska, around here. But we have planned…we’re going to the East Coast and back in June. That’s our next tour plan. So, we’ll be all through the Midwest and up and down the East Coast.
DS: So what is the music scene like in Pueblo?
CG: It comes in waves, to be honest. I mean there’s never not a music scene. There’s always kids in bands.
GA: There’s several good bands.
CG: Yeah, there’s old timers like you (Geoff). I’m not trying to call you old or nothing, but I mean you’ve been on the front lines doing it since the 80s and 90s. Paving the way for snot-nosed kids like me to be doing what I’ve been doing. I’ve already been doing it for almost 20 years now. So, the scene never dies, but it does come in waves and at its peak it’s obviously the best. But even when it’s struggling, I mean there’s still bands out there doing it, inspiring other kids to do it. It’s a great thing. I can’t think of a time where there weren’t shows going on, but there has been times where we’ve had great killer venues with touring bands and other times where we have DIY venues like the CR23 Bombshelter here in Pueblo. It’s the only all-ages venue at this point that we have, which is great because the youth wants something to do and it’s a place for them to go, it’s well regulated and shows end at a decent time. It gives the kids a place to play and gives us a place to play to inspire those kids. It’s all energy, it’s all this just energy just being pushed off from one another. It’s amazing. I really enjoy our music scene and we have a lot of great musicians here and I hope to put us back on the map again, if anything.
DS: Very cool. So, you mentioned a few things earlier about what you’re working on. What else are you up to? Have you achieved what you sought out to achieve as a band?
GA: Well, what we’re working on now is just booking a tour to go to the East Coast and back, trying to get as many good shows as possible there. And we are not working on any new material at the moment, actually, but we will be before long. We kind of take a break a little bit in the fall band-wise and then get back on it when winter comes. But our biggest focus right now is just booking our tour and we have a few shows coming up about once a month or so in Colorado for the next several months. That’s kind of it.
CG: I think for the most part we’ve set out to do what we wanted to do and we’ve pretty much accomplished it. I just want to get bigger and better.
GA: We’re just trying to keep expanding. We are where we set out to be musically. Definitely. As far as I guess being known or just playing as many shows as possible and whatnot, we’re still working on that.
DS: What advice do you have for musicians who want to start a band?
CG: Just do it. You can’t be discouraged. There is, being in a band, there is no guideline to this whatsoever. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I use templates from bigger bands. I see stuff they do and I try to apply that towards our bands and whatever. You can’t give up. You have to fine-tune your craft. There are a billion guitar players out there. You can’t be the best guitar player. But if you could fine-tune your craft and find who you are as an artist and then find a way to network, get out there, and get a response from people. So, to be in a band, you have to be open-minded to not only other music but just being on the fly with a lot of things. It’s just maintaining the momentum, being true to yourself, and never let anything discourage you from doing what your passion is.
DS: What is next for Last Reel Hero? What goals do you have for 2024?
CG: I think really it’s like we’re going to go on tour. We need to showcase what we have to the East Coast right now because we don’t have that following there quite yet. Thank the good Lord for Spotify and all that good stuff because we do have people who are aware of what we do. We probably wouldn’t be getting shows if it wasn’t for the internet. We want to take over the East Coast because we already got the West Coast and then we’re going to try to go overseas. Then put out new music along the way,music is the number one thing and that’s the whole reason we do this.
GA: We have a couple Colorado shows that will be playing in the beginning of the year, and then we will end up releasing a single, a new song…a single…digitally, probably in May. We go on tour through the Midwest and the East Coast in June. Our last album, which is our second album, only came out on digital platforms that’ll be released on vinyl coming out in June. Well, it was only on digital platforms and CD. It’ll be released on vinyl in June. It’s called Back To The Sun. We will have some other stuff coming out on vinyl as well in the summer of 2024. And then our next focus is working on the album after that. And keep touring as many places as possible.
CG: Music videos.
GA: And yeah, we want to just keep touring more places.
DS: So what bands are you guys listening to this week?
GA: This week? What am I listening to? I was not listening to Steely Dan. I was listening to Cock Sparrer earlier, I guess, and I was listening to, geez, I was listening to Operation Ivy earlier because I was trying to learn one of their songs that I wanted to play.
CG: I collect records, so I was listening to Frankie Valli. I was listening to Frankie Valli at home and then Revolting Cocks on the way here. Yeah.
DS: Very cool. So, do you have any final thoughts you’d like to share with Dying Scene?
GA: Thank you very much for doing this. Exposing the great town of Pueblo, Colorado to the world is wonderful. There’s always been a small but vibrant music scene here that’s been large at times, but comes and goes and definitely look out for us…Last Reel Hero. We are going to keep on growing.
CG: Yeah. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. It’s great that we could get together and do this. And thank you for taking the time. It just means a lot to me. And Dying Scene, doing what they’re doing…we were featured in Dying Scene in 2018, maybe, which was super cool. So, it’s definitely an honor and a privilege to catch up again.
In addition to continuing to make music and regularly tour all corners of the globe as one of the bands that helped propel punk rock into the stratosphere three decades ago, one of the more unique and, frankly, impressive things about the Green Day camp has been their simultaneous maintenance of a seemingly unlimited network […]
In addition to continuing to make music and regularly tour all corners of the globe as one of the bands that helped propel punk rock into the stratosphere three decades ago, one of the more unique and, frankly, impressive things about the Green Day camp has been their simultaneous maintenance of a seemingly unlimited network of side projects featuring some – if not all – of the band’s core members (Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tre Cool, obviously) and a cast supporting cast of friends and musicians. A quick and probably incomplete synopsis of all of the band members’ projects reads as less of a Green Day “family tree” and more like a Green Day “family wreath”: Armstrong and Dirnt and Cool appear alongside longtime “fifth Beatle” guitarist and collaborator Jason White, longtime touring guitarist Kevin Preston and longtime jack-of-all-trades Jason Freese in Foxboro Hot Tubs. Armstrong and Dirnt and White and longtime Green Day crew member Bill Schnieder and American Idiot/21st Century Breakdown/Uno!/Dos!/Tre!/Revolution Radio/Father Of All... engineer/producer Chris Dugan in The Coverups. Armstrong and Preston are joined by Jeff Matika and David Field in The Longshot. Armstrong and Cool and Dirnt and White definitely do not appear together in The Network. White and Schnieder and Schnieder’s brother Greg and Johnnie Wentz and Willie Samuels had The Influents up and running for a bit there too.
Perhaps the oldest of these projects – and undoubtedly one of the coolest – is Pinhead Gunpowder, a band that traces its roots back to the early 90s. The Berkeley-based iteration of the band featured Armstrong and Schnieder and Sarah Kirsch teaming up with the creative force that was former Crimpshrine drummer (and occasional Green Day roadie) Aaron Cometbus. The band played sporadically and recorded a couple EPs and a handful of tracks for various compilations and they all got combined on a quasi-full-length called Jump Salty that became one of the coolest records of 1994. It was released a few months after Green Day’s genre-defining Dookie, and yet, because it came out on Lookout Records instead of a major label, ownership of Jump Salty in your collection felt like a ticket to an exclusive club. While the masses were listening to (and buying, because it was a different time) Dookie and Smash and a smaller but still substantial group of people went as far as listening to Stranger Than Fiction and Punk In Drublic and Let’s Go!, listening to albums like Jump Salty felt like you were part of the cool punk rock kids club, whatever that even means at this point.
Kirsch would leave Pinhead Gunpowder during that ground-breaking year but the band wouldn’t have to look far to find a replacement. Enter the aforementioned Jason White. The Arkansas transplant had been friendly with the band’s members for years, having befriended Armstrong after an ill-fated Green Day tour stop in Memphis earlier in the decade. Upon relocating to the Bay Area, he also joined Schneider as a member of East Bay pop punk band Monsula until that act disbanded in 1993. The Pinhead quartet of Cometbus, Armstrong, Schneider and White would put out another handful of EPs and compilations and, in 1997, their first-and-only full-length, Goodbye Ellston Avenue, all in a sound that remained true to the band’s East Bay, “Gilman Street” style and sound. (White, as you probably know by now, joined the Green Day ranks on the Warning tour in 1999 to fill out the live sound, making this his twenty-fifth year at stage right.) The band put out their last new material, the West Side Highway EP in 2008 and played their last show to date at 924 Gilman Street in 2010. They never really officially disbanded as much as they just focused on other projects: White and Armstrong and Schneider on the Green Day Family Wreath and Cometbus primarily on his writing and his consortium of independent bookstores in New York City.
There was an ill-fated attempt at reissuing all of the Pinhead Gunpowder material in 2010 under the same record label, Recess Records in this case. (Earlier versions of their works appeared on Recess and Lookout Records and Adeline Records and Too Many Records and maybe a couple of others whose names escape me.) After laying dormant for the better (worse?) part of a decade, the project found itself resurrected a couple years back. Beginning two years ago this week, the band announced plans to team with Oakland’s own Steve Stevenson and 1-2-3-4 Go! Records to reissue their entire catalog in five two-part installments. Like everyone, the team behind the reissues ran into supply chain issues and vinyl production delays (thanks Adele!?!) but the close of 2022 brought with it the rerelease of Compulsive Disclosure and West Side Highway, marking the completion of the project, and meaning that for the first time, the band’s entire discography lives under the same roof.
Yours truly had the distinct honor and privilege of catching up with the one-and-only Jason White to look back on the process of revisiting and reissuing the Pinhead Gunpowder catalog. As per usual when we conduct an interview on these pages, the conversation tended to meander in a lot of the best possible ways, covering ground that includes but is not limited to: meeting Pete Townshend; revisiting early Pinhead material after Kirsch’s 2012 death; White’s personal place in the annals of punk history; the neverending changes in the musical spectrum; the Little Rock, Arkansas, music scene; going to high school with Ben Nichols; 1-2-3-4 Go!’s importance to the East Bay arts and cultural landscape; and so much more. Scroll down to keep reading!
Green Day at Fenway Photo Credit: Brittany Rose Queen
Surprisingly, the following Q&A has been condensed and edited for content and clarity.
Dying Scene (Jay Stone): First and foremost, thanks for doing this. When I saw that the email came in saying “do you want to talk to Jason White from Pinhead Gunpowder and Green Day?” I thought it was a joke. (*both laugh*) Then I realized it was from Chris Hnat – shoutout to Chris – but I’ve been a fan of yours for a long long time, so this is a really cool thing, one of those bucket list items to check off. So thanks!
Jason White: Cool! Cool! Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.
I was talking to a couple of the guys who help run Dying Scene the other night, and we talked A) about how good the reissues have come out. One of our guys – Dylan – is real big on tracking a lot of the vinyl reissues and different variants of things that come out, and he was super stoked about them. And we were also talking about B) how cool it is that, at least for me and where I grew up, Pinhead Gunpowder was kind of like a secret handshake band. Like, a few of us kids were listening to punk rock before ‘94, listening to Bad Religion and Fugazi and especially the Lookout Records bands. And then ‘94 happened and so everybody liked Green Day, and we did too, but Pinhead Gunpowder was like the “secret handshake, oh you don’t just listen to Green Day, you listen to punk rock” band.
A little more under-the-radar, yeah, I hear you. It felt like it was a little more underground and you had to dig it up.
Yeah and you felt like you were part of something, and like you knew more. It felt like a special thing. Anyway, I know we’re sort of at the end of the reissue cycle for the Pinhead records, so it can be kind of tough to figure out where to sort of start and how the story will go, but I wanted to actually talk about 1-2-3-4 Go! Records for a little bit, because that seems like a really cool place. For people outside the Bay Area, and I’m certainly one of them, 1-2-3-4 Go! Records isn’t just a cool underground label, it’s a record store as well.
Yeah, and it actually had two locations for a bit. (Owner Steve Stevenson) had one in San Francisco as well. But yeah, it started in Oakland, and I believe he’s had it over ten years now. It might even go back fifteen. He started off on 40th (Street), between Telegraph and Broadway in Oakland, which used to be a little bit of a dead zone. He wanted to start a store, so he rented what essentially was a closet of a place. I always said that if there were three people in the place, it was crowded. (*both laugh*) He just had a few racks of records and it was just him in the back. We were just excited to have this new store, and it was small, and we were used to the only stores that stuck around were of course Amoeba Records and then one called Rasputin. They’re both great; Amoeba I kind of prefer. But anyway, it was kind of the start of having a small record store again. Now there’s several around, but he started in that closet of a place, then he ended up moving next door because he was doing well enough and he needed the space, obviously. Then he ended up across the street, where he is now. Then he expanded into the room next door too, so he’s occupying two retail spaces. It’s great; it’s awesome, and before Covid, he was having shows in the back. There was a stage, and he was having art shows and events, and it’s kind of turned into a whole crazy thing in addition to the label that he started with.
It seems like it’s sort of a hub, and a lot of scenes don’t really have that kind of space anymore. I live just north of Boston and so I’m tangentially tied to the Boston scene, which is much different than it used to be. But we don’t have a lot of those sorts of places in the immediate area anymore; everything has sort of been gentrified out, so it’s cool that that sort of thing exists and seems to be thriving.
Yeah! I’m just shocked that he did as well as he did because when he started talking about opening a little store, I was like “well, he’s got little overhead in that space,” and I’d worked at record stores in the past so I kinda knew how it worked. But then the vinyl – I don’t know if I’d call it a resurgence, but it became a thing again, right? So he kinda rode that wave and it’s still a thing – I don’t know if it’s peaking or not, but it seems like it’s still a thing.
It seems like it’s been peaking every year for the last decade.
Yeah, and it keeps climbing up, and with Record Store Day and all this craziness. It’s great.
It’s almost turned in the other direction with Record Store Day now, but that’s probably a different conversation for a different time.
Right, that’s the one day to not go to the record store! (*both laugh*)
I used to love it, man. I used to love standing in line in front of the record store, but then it turned into having to stand in line in the mall, because the major record stores around here all moved into the mall, which is a weird thing because malls are dying around the country, yet that’s where our Newbury Comics moved to.
I was going to say, yeah, I remember the Newbury Comics stores.
They’re still alright, and the one on Newbury Street is next door to where it used to be – and smaller than it used to be – so I appreciate the 1 2 3 4 Go! Records has expanded a few times, and the original Newbury Comics is not only much smaller but most of it isn’t music anymore. It’s kitschy things and Pop dolls…
Yeah, t-shirts and posters. I went into that (Newbury Street) location within the last five years when we were on tour, and I peeked in and yeah, it didn’t seem like there were many records anymore, it was more paraphernalia.
They had standalone locations in suburbia, where I am, but they’ve all moved into malls now. So to have to go into the mall to buy records now, it’s like things went full circle a second time… Anyway, so I know that Recess Records had reissued the Pinhead records years ago, and that’s a whole other thing, but when did the idea to reissue them for real under 1 2 3 4 Go! Records come about? Was that during Covid?
It was before that, because I think it had just been long enough where we felt like we could talk about it or address it again. The Recess thing kinda just didn’t work, and we were like “well, it seems like everything’s a little bit hard to find, a lot of it is out of print at this point, and we kind of need to do something besides just having the records that are already out there and then having everything on streaming services.” And it was really easy – a no-brainer, really – because Steve is local, he’s right down the street, he’s a friend, we see him all the time, and he said he’d love to do it. And he said we could do it in these phases, so that it wasn’t just ten records at one time and everything gets lost in the shuffle.
I was going to ask where that idea came from, because that was really neat to do basically five two-episode installments.
I think it became like a 7-inch and an LP at the same time, and then a shirt. And we had never done shirts, so I was kind of more excited about that than anything! (*both laugh*) I do think that financially, it would have been hard to pay for everything right away, so it became “put phase one out, and then as money starts coming in you can pay for phase two” and so on. And that way it would keep things on people’s radar, like “oh, a new Pinhead thing will be out every six months” or whatever it was. It seemed like an okay idea. We wanted to kind of do what we tried to do with Recess, which is to have one home for everything so we don’t have to think about it anymore. It’s all under one rough and it’s easy to manage. That was the thought behind it really.
And this is the first time it’s really been under one roof. I guess it sort of was for Recess, but that didn’t work out.
Yeah, that’s true. Everything came out on different labels.
Did that mean buying rights back or anything? How involved was that process?
No, Pinhead always owned everything. That was not an issue, really.
They’re not necessarily remastered or remixed or anything; was there talk of doing that as well?
For the Recess thing, I might be wrong, but when we were moving forward with it, we kinda did remaster everything, so everything was kinda done. This is actually kind of a funny story, but I think we had mastered it for CD maybe at that time, so everything had kinda been done, and we were like “well, let’s listen to it and if everything is fine we don’t have to do anything to it.” We ended up having to redo a few things for vinyl, and the mastering person we used – I worked at Adeline Records years ago when Pinhead did the records there, and this guy Ken Lee, who was in Oakland at the time, he’s still working and mastering stuff, but he had moved, and unbeknownst to me, he lives five houses down from me, on the same side of the street.
(*both laugh*) That’s pretty wild!
Yeah, it’s really strange! Bill had to come to my house to pick something up, because I had some of the original source material maybe, and he was here and he was like “well, Ken Lee is actually in El Cerrito now” – which is where I live – “and he’s actually on this street” and I’m like “that’s my street” and we looked at the address and I was like “that’s that house right over there.” It ended up being an even smaller world than it already was.
That’s really bizarre, yeah.
It made things really easy to get him materials. So I became in charge of that.
So you’re ultimately happy obviously with how everything came out? Like I said, our record radar guru, Dylan, was saying they came out awesome, and he’s pretty discerning about that stuff.
In terms of sound quality, it was a little hard to approve the test pressings, because I kept A/B-ing stuff, and when we first started, I was like “I don’t know if it’s as good as the original.” And you had to consider how things used to be mastered twenty or thirty years ago versus how they’re mastered now, or how hot they make (the vinyl) now. Initially, I didn’t think it was hot enough, but then they sorta don’t do that anymore because you end up with records that skip and all kinds of things like that. And they sounded fine, I just had to maybe turn it up a little louder than the old version. But it didn’t distort or anything like that, so yeah, I was happy that it all came out great. And Aaron is very detailed. He does all the art, and everything I thought came out awesome. And Steve worked with him and other people and they got it done. They came out great.
Did you run into any of the almost comically long vinyl production issues that people were running into during Covid? Because I feel like the originally-scheduled end of this project was like nine months ago or something like that?
Yeah, we did, all over the place. I think as early as Phase Two, we were like “well, it’s going to take a little longer.” (*both laugh*) Anybody who’s making records now knows that it takes forever. You’re on a waiting list and it’s just a mess. We definitely ran into some of that. He gets them pressed in England somewhere, so we didn’t run into a lot of the usual stuff for the US plants that I’ve heard about. United in Tennessee is very backed up, I think. And honestly, I don’t even know what’s left down in LA from when I used to work at labels and stuff.
I don’t know either, but there aren’t many in my very limited understanding of it.
There used to be a ton but they all pretty much went out of business. Now I think there’s a bunch of new ones, I’m just not familiar with them.
I don’t know of any new ones, truthfully, but then being tied to the punk rock world, I feel like so much stuff gets produced in the Czech Republic by Pirates Press.
I have heard that too. And I have friends with smaller labels that’ll press stuff at a small place in Chicago, and then there’s one in Australia that’ll do like one-offs of like 50 or something.
That’s gotta cost a fortune.
It does, but if you’ve got somebody that has a record that’s not going to sell a ton, you’ve got a cool artifact. It might cost six bucks a 7-inch or whatever, but it seemed worth it, I guess.
It didn’t really dawn on me before, but the last new Pinhead Gunpowder stuff is like fifteen years old now. I think West Side Highway was ‘08.
Yeah, that sounds about right. Going back and listening to everything, the way we did it, since we did the phases, I started with the oldest stuff first and got to the most recent stuff at the end, so it was like riding the arc again. Listening to the first record, I was a fan of the band before I was in it. And (Sarah) Kirsch, who was in the band before, has passed on, so it was sentimental to hear that stuff, because I hadn’t listened to it in so long. But everything made me happy to listen to, still. Some stuff stuck out to me that used to not.
Did all four of you relisten to everything and, like you said, A/B stuff for the project?
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And then some of it got a little confusing in the later stuff because we were like “wait, what record was that on? Or wait, we put out live versions of stuff? I don’t remember that…” We had some stuff from KALX, a radio station here in Berkeley, that I didn’t remember at all. I mean, I remembered doing it, but I didn’t remember it being released on anything. It was cool to listen to the different phases, and to listen to it as “a release.” I guess I always thought of it as “we got together and wrote some songs,” and we had bits and pieces we would either leave behind and then pick up later, or whatever. But it was cool to think about it as a release. So when I hear Shoot The Moon, I think “oh, this one’s a little more loose.” But then …Ellston Avenue was tight and well-recorded or whatever. And the other stuff had its own sort of personality. That was the most interesting part about going back to it.
I know Aaron wrote a lot of the material for Pinhead, but when you guys came together to record, was it like banging it out in a couple days, or were there longer recording sessions?
It kinda varied on each record, but most of the time it was “okay, we have this two weeks to put everything together, so let’s hammer out the songs, practice as much as we can, and then go record them.” Sometimes we’d change stuff, especially vocals. You hear clearer when you’re in the studio and you can make a few decisions there. So usually, it was like “this is the allotted time for the project,” and we’d hash it out in two weeks most of the time. Ellston Avenue took a little bit longer, because it was our only attempt at doing an LP’s worth of stuff at one time. Usually it was five or six songs or whatever.
Ellston Avenue is a tight-sounding record, and a big-sounding record as Pinhead records go. Was there ever talk of making it more of a stand-alone thing, and taking it on the road more? I mean, it was always going to be at least number two to Green Day obviously, but the band never went out on the road an awful lot. Was there ever talk amongst you four about doing it as a bigger “thing,” or would that have been almost impossible given how big Green Day was?
Yeah, I think, in my mind, it was always going to be a project that we could do when everybody had time. Obviously, Green Day stayed busy all through the years, so most of the time we’d be like “we just wanna write some songs together, record some stuff, go play a few shows.” We’d done a couple of mini-tours here and there, like we went up to the Pacific Northwest, to Seattle and back years ago. We went to LA at one point and kinda played around there. It was never really “let’s put the push behind this one and tour it” and all that stuff. It was always just sort of a meeting of the minds or whatever.
But they’re such fun records! And I say this knowing that I live 3,000 miles away and would have never had the chance to see the band anyway, but I feel like that’s stuff that people would enjoy hearing live. Do you miss playing some of those songs live, even semi-regularly?
Oh yeah! I mean whenever we got together to play shows, which was more often than we recorded…I mean, Pinhead is super fun to play live with because it has its own feeling and setting and tempos and energy. It was great, I loved it and hopefully we will do it again soon.
Well that was certainly going to be a question, but now that the revisit has wrapped up, does that stoke the fires amongst any of you to play some shows for the first time in ten or fifteen years or whatever it is?
Yeah, I think if all the stars align soon…we’ve been talking about it for the last couple years, even before we were doing the rereleases, like, if Aaron came into town – the rest of us all live here in the Bay Area – we would get together and just jam at the practice space and play these songs randomly, it was always super fun, but it would always be like “oh, we should play a show…but I’ve gotta leave by Tuesday” or whatever. So it didn’t end up working out, but hopefully we’re going to do it soon!
Where does Aaron live? I always just picture him in the Bay Area.
He’s in New York! He’s been there for a while now, and he’s doing great out there. He’s the owner of a collective that has bookstores out there. They’re really cool. He’s doing great out there.
Is that why the rest of you did other projects – The CoverUps, Foxboro Hot Tubs, The Longshot…not The Network, obviously…so with Aaron 3000 miles away, let’s work on some other projects?
Yeah, like “we’re around…what else can we do?”
I’ve always appreciated that about that whole Green Day crew. That it didn’t stay just Green Day, that you did all these other projects that were creative and under different names and done independently, and more traditional to what I think we envision the whole East Bay scene to represent.
That’s how Bill Schnieder and I ended up doing The Influents+, the band that we had for a little while. I’d come back to town – I was out of town for a couple years and I came back to do Shoot The Moon, and then once we finished that, I just stayed here. We were like “well, what should we do now?” That phase of Pinhead was done and everyone kinda went their own ways, and I was like “well, I’ve got a few songs” and he was like “well, my brother’s got a few songs, let’s start another band.” It was just kind of the natural progression of things.
Did you go back to Little Rock in between?
I did, I went home to Arkansas for a couple years, between ‘96 and ‘98. I went back to play with some friends in a band called The Big Cats, and we gave it a shot for a minute, and then my dad became ill and I stayed behind to help take care of him. Then I came back here and stayed.
We talked earlier about the scene that is the Bay Area, and related to that, Little Rock had a pretty cool scene of its own. If people don’t know about Little Rock, Towncraft is such a great movie.
Oh you know of it!
Yeah, I’ve watched it a couple times! I think I stumbled upon it on Amazon one day, and I would watch almost exclusively either live sports or music documentaries, but this was so well done, and it throws back to that underground scene. I knew nothing of the Little Rock scene aside from that you’re from there and Ben Nichols is from there.
Right! Yeah, I went to high school with Ben. He’s great. We had art together; I think I was one year older than him…maybe we were in the same grade, it’s tough to remember. But I knew him. He was in bands obviously and so we were in the same scene.
It’s such a great snapshot of a scene that I’m not sure exists in too many places anymore. That sort of real, underground, junior high and high school kids starting their own scene and then it becomes this beautiful, a little bit incestuous, sort of thing. I don’t know of many places where that sort of thing exists in this country anymore.
I know, it’s tough to tell. I think there probably are, I just don’t know about them. But not in the same way, especially because of the way we consume things or look things up or find out about them, that part has completely changed, so I don’t know if it is even possible. It was a special time, I think. That was my friend Richard Matson who made that documentary about that time. A lot of cool things came out of that scene. I was stoked to find those people when I did.
I had known of Red 40 a little bit – posthumously, of course…I don’t think their influence really made it to New Hampshire where I grew up, necessarily. But I think it was through watching that documentary that I realized “oh wait, that’s Colin from Samiam!” I obviously knew him as playing drums for Samiam but he was the guitar player from Red 40…
It’s funny because Colin is the oldest friend that I have.
Amazing drummer too, by the way.
He’s the best. I’m so glad that he gets recognition through Samiam, because he’s incredible. We were in our earliest bands together. He was the first person I ever played music with. He co-wrote a couple of the Pinhead things that I did. But about the Red 40 thing…Colin was always known as a drummer, because he’s incredible. Everybody wanted him in their band. But Ben wanted to kinda do this new project, he wanted to start a new band, but it seemed like everyone was already in another band, and so in order not to pinch from other bands, he asked Colin to switch roles and play guitar, and then the guitar player in Colin’s band at the time, Substance, this guy Steve Kooms, switched roles and he played drums. Steve was a pretty good drummer, Colin was a pretty good guitar player, and Ben just wanted to do something different, you know? So he wrote these songs and they ended up recording them almost off-the-cuff. Now I think it’s one of the best-known things out of Little Rock, at least from that scene.
I haven’t seen it happen at Lucero shows, but when you go see Ben solo, like, we drove down to New Jersey a couple weeks ago because he does a one-off every year in Jersey, of all places, at a place called Crossroads, and it’s awesome, and people always yell for Red 40 songs. They clearly only know them from the Lucero connection, the same way I do, but people always yell out Red 40 songs and it’s kind of a cool thing. It’s gotta be cool for him.
Does he ever end up playing some?
He does sometimes. He didn’t last time, but sometimes he’s got one worked up and it depends how the whiskey is flowing by the middle of the night. (*both laugh*) But yeah, I really dig that documentary and sort of like I was saying at the beginning, we had like six kids who listened to punk rock. In New Hampshire, we had little pockets of kids here and there around the state who were into the music, but not enough to probably qualify as a scene, necessarily, but I think we all looked at the Bay Area, the Easy Bay especially, as a special thing, because it wasn’t LA, it wasn’t New York and the hardcore scene – frankly, it wasn’t the Boston hardcore scene which was never really my thing anyway, we all kinda gravitated toward the Bay Area scene and that became the music that we listened to. But to know that there were other places where there were these people just a little older than us and putting these organic little scenes together, it was wonderful. People should watch it. I don’t even know where you can get it now.
Yeah, I don’t know? I think it’s probably on Amazon.
Thanks for doing this. It’s been really cool to follow the Pinhead reissues and to have Pinhead Gunpowder sort of trending on a lot of the punk rock social media pages and record websites. To have that stuff trending again is pretty cool.
Yeah, I agree. I used to sort of be of the mindset of “oh, why reissue everything? Everyone that wants those records already has them, or they can get them if they look hard enough.” But I’m stupid and I forget that younger people might just be getting into it now and will be like “well, I want that, how do I get it?” I’m just dumb enough that I never considered that. But I’m very happy that it’s all out there and available and if anyone is getting hip to it now, that’s awesome.
I forget who I heard talk about a similar thing…Jack White, maybe…but about how stuff shouldn’t be out of print. Obviously he’s got his own label and his own printing press and all that, but I think it was him saying that music should be accessible and available. That people are always finding out about music and they should be able to go out and buy it.
Yeah, there’s value in that. I see that now. I used to feel like “well, we made enough.” I figured nobody else was going to want it. I forget that I’m getting old (*both laugh*) and that younger generations might be interested.
I’ve got a fifteen-year-old, and there are kids in high school that are starting to listen to that era of punk rock now, and that didn’t happen really through middle school. There are kids who listen to and love Green Day, and to me, that’s awesome, and it’s really awesome that they’re falling in love with the same band that we did thirty years ago.
Yeah. Everyone has their own entry point, at whatever age they might be at whatever time, and it’s really neat to see how it all works out.
Do you ever think about where you fit into that whole thing? And maybe that’s a weird thing to even think about, or a super ego-y thing to think about.
Gosh, no, not really. A little bit as recently as last night. We played a Coverups show last night out in this suburb called Walnut Creek, and I said goodbye to my kids and I started driving to go play the show, and I was thinking “well, I’ve pretty much been doing this same thing for thirty plus years…is it weird? No, because it just seems normal. But I think of so many people that I’ve known over the years don’t do it anymore or whatever, so I’m like, well, this is what I set out to do. I just wanted to play music and be in bands and it worked out somehow, you know?” I still always look up to the people who came before me, probably way too much.
(*both laugh*) Yeah, I think we all do.
I think I’m still trying to maybe impress them, you know? That’s still on my mind.
Do you have a running list of people that you’ve looked up to and been able to meet that you check off? Like The Stones and people like that?
There’s a few, yeah. That list grows all the time. Sometimes I’m a little shy about it these days, because essentially I’m like “well, I’m just bothering this person.” I’ll say a quick thank you, I appreciate what you’re doing.
I feel like as a guitar player, you can talk to guitar players …
Yeah, you can talk a little shop. There’s a guitar player that’s younger than me that I approached and just made a fool of myself. I was like “you’re my favorite guitar player on the planet” and he just sort of was really embarrassed for me, I think. It was Paul Maroon of The Walkmen. And I just think he’s incredible. But then it goes both ways. I got the opportunity to talk to Pete Townshend a couple months ago, because we played a charity event with them, and I just got like a quick 30 seconds to a minute to say “Hi Pete, how ya doing? Do you remember me?” I didn’t really want to bother him, he didn’t really want to be bothered, so it was a cool exchange and that was fine!
And now I can say I talked to a guy who talked to Pete Townshend! I’ve actually talked to a couple and it’s wild to me that I have even that connection.
The fourth album can be a bit of a curious point on a band’s timeline. The dreaded “sophomore slump” has long been in the rearview, and generally by the time the fourth album roles around, a band is at or around the decade mark in their career. It can be a time of transition; a […]
The fourth album can be a bit of a curious point on a band’s timeline. The dreaded “sophomore slump” has long been in the rearview, and generally by the time the fourth album roles around, a band is at or around the decade mark in their career. It can be a time of transition; a time to build off some old influences and also to incorporate new feelings and directions out of a desire to keep from getting stale or repetitive. Sometimes, the results can be ground-breaking, at least sonically if not always commercially or critically. Ignorance Is Bliss by Face To Face, for example. Darkness On The Edge Of Town. No Code. Sandinista!. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Life Won’t Wait. Question The Answers. ZOSO, or however that translate without the ability to add runes to the text here. So on and so forth.
And so here we find The Interrupters. The widely beloved LA-based ska punk band are back with In The Wild, due out August 5th on Hellcat Records. Recorded during the forced doldrums that were the shutdown of the last couple of years, the album finds the band (which surpassed the decade mark during said shutdown) building on the high-energy, rock-steady core that they’ve built over the course of three records and hundreds of shows, revealing a work that is their most varied, most introspective, and, subsequently, their best effort to date.
We caught up with the band’s air-tight rhythm section, sensational twin brothers Jesse (drums) and Justin (bass) Bivona to talk about the album’s recording and its personal nature. While much of the process for In The Wild was similar to the band’s previous output, there were a few marked differences that shaped the direction of what was to come. As Jesse explains the fourth album cycle, “one of our little press points about this record and relating it to the previous records is that the first album is kind of like a first date, where you just talk about surface-level things, nothing too crazy. Second album, you start to let them know a little more about you. Third album, you’re kinda getting into the nitty-gritty. Fourth album, all the baggage is out, the drama is revealed, all the secrets are out.”
The secrets are indeed out in more ways than one on In The Wild. It is by far the band’s most personal album to date, and it’s their most sonically diverse album to date, and both of those things are by design. Thinking back to the early days of the band, specifically around the recording of the band’s self-titled 2014 debut record, Jesse describes that the band was “just trying to keep it simple. We weren’t trying to reinvent anything, we were just trying to be a straight-ahead ska-punk band.” The more cohesive the band god, the more layered and textured the sound became, and the more outside influences began to creep in. While still very much an Interrupters record, In The Wild showcases sounds that include traditional reggae and rock steady and 2-tone and 80s punk rock and ‘50s doo-wop. The album closes with “Alien,” which centers around Aimee’s soaring, heartfelt vocals and is, as Jesse points out, “the first Interrupters song with no guitar on it!”
The seeds of In The Wild were initially sown in the early days of the pandemic shut down two years ago. The very early days. In fact, quite literally, the first day. The band had taken a few weeks off after wrapping a lengthy touring cycle for their 2017 album Fight The Good Fight – an album that continued the band’s launch into a higher stratosphere based in part on the crossover success of the single “She’s Kerosene” – in February, and was planning to return to Tim Armstrong’s studio in early March to begin work on album four. That plan was foiled just as it was beginning. “Day one of us going into the studio,” explains bass player Justin Bivona, “was that day where the NBA was canceling, and Tom Hanks had Covid…” After a few ‘wait and see’ days, recording plans – and, frankly, most of real life – got put on pause indefinitely, and the band retreated to what they affectionately refer to as The Compound; Justin and Jesse live in one house while the twins’ bandmates and, more importantly, older brother and sister-in-law Kevin and Aimee, live in the house next door. The two houses share a driveway and, more importantly, a garage, the latter of which would come in handy in a pandemic shutdown.
After some time spent doing what the rest of us did – binge-watching TV shows and movies, going for walks, and reflecting on their lives-to-date. As Justin tells it, that process “Aimee got to do a lot of looking back on her past and realized there was a lot of stuff she hadn’t written songs about.” And so even though the band had plenty of material they were going to work on in the studio at the beginning of 2020, writing eventually continued.
So, too, did recording, though the band didn’t have to go far. “At some point during (quarantine),” explains Justin, “Kevin was like “we need to do this record at our house, in our garage.” It’s a tiny 10×20 room that we would practice in, but it wasn’t treated, there wasn’t any studio equipment. So we spent maybe a month building things. Me and Jesse with power tools building racks to put gear in and tabletops and stuff. Pretty much “tiny housing” the studio to make every part of it work.”
This created the freedom to work together at their own pace. There’s no need to reserve studio time or book an engineer when you can do it all, effectively, in your collective backyard. That moved Kevin, the elder statesman of the Bivona brothers, officially into the producer’s seat. Tim Armstrong, who both oversees Hellcat Records and executive produced the first three Interrupters records, “told (Kevin) to just grab the reins and take off” says Justin, with Jesse quick to point out that their big brother has “always kinda been the shadow producer of everything in a sense.”
And while it may seem daunting to have your bandmate – and older brother, steering the ship, the timeline and the setting and their relationship made for a smooth, collaborative effort. “If we’re working on something and it’s not working,” explains Jesse, “all four of us can be like ‘well, what if we try this, or what if we try this,’…there are no bad ideas until you try (something and realize it’s bad.” “It was just us as a cohesive band, the four of us, working out songs and writing songs, and it really informed the process,” adds Justin. “It was the best thing we’ve ever done.”
The more that writing and recording continued, the more that the direction of the album revealed itself. “Aimee realized that the record was pretty much her life story,” says Jesse, adding “so the songs that didn’t fit with that theme we pushed aside and focused on the ones that told her story the way she wanted to tell it.” Because the lyrics bare so much of Aimee’s past, the task of recording vocals involved being in the right headspace to tackle some of the memories that were evoked. “Doing on the property,” reveals Justin, “it allowed Aimee the freedom to record vocals whenever she felt emotionally connected enough to a song” to power through it, a freedom that proved vital as it is apparent on first listen that Aimee dug deep lyrically, reflecting on some of the messier parts other upbringing and past relationships and grief and loss and trauma and mental health struggles that she has worked on over the years.
The added time and convenience of the recording process allowed the band to work through multiple versions of songs, in order to make sure that the emotion of the music matched the emotion of the lyrics. “There are a couple songs on this record where they were recorded one way and pretty much done,” explains Justin, “but then it wasn’t just fitting in with the rest of it when we would get back there. I think specifically “Love Never Dies” had a totally different feel, it was more of a rock/reggae Clash-y song. And it was dope, but it wasn’t fitting in with everything.” Jesse elaborates: “(Kevin) said “Jesse, play a one drop” so I played this one drop, and then he said “Justin, play this bass line” (*mimics bassline*). And then he said “okay, watch” and he just started skanking, and then he started singing this melody the way that it is now, and we played that for like four bars and just stopped. We were like “yeah, that’s it! Now we’re on to something!”
The result is one of the more straight-forward reggae songs in the Interrupters’ catalog to date. It also features a guest appearance from The Skints, the UK reggae punk band who recently wrapped a successful run opening a bunch of US shows for The Interrupters and Flogging Molly. The Skints are just one of an impressive handful of guest starts that found their collective way onto In The Wild; Tim Armstrong lends his vocal talents to a track, as per usual, but so too do Rhoda from The Bodysnatchers and Alex and Greg from third-wave ska legends Hepcat. The latter recording session occurred at Armstrong’s studio once the initial Covid waves had subsided and society started to open up again. As Jesse tells it, “it was a magical session to be a part of.” Justin explains “Greg and Alex came in and…we wanted them on the song (“Burdens”), but we didn’t really have the part. We went in with them and showed them the song and within a minute the two of them are sitting there writing the parts and figuring it out together. It was so cool to see because they’re literally our favorite ska band.”
It was yet another moment in a decade-long journey that has found the foursome feeling eternally grateful for the opportunities they’ve been presented; playing with longtime idols like Rancid and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Joan Jett and Green Day, playing legendary venues, getting introduced by RuPaul on the Jimmy Kimmel show (as was the case the night before we spoke). Case-in-point: the three Bivona brothers served as the backing band for The Specials during a fundraiser event in Los Angeles back in February, a mind-blowing moment that got overshadowed by the fact that a mini Operation Ivy reunion brokeout pre-set as Jesse Michaels and Tim Armstrong joined for a cover of the Op Ivy classic “Sound System,” an event that damn near broke the punk rock internet. The gravity of those situations is not lost on the band, by any stretch. “The moment that starts getting old is the moment that you’ve gotta start packing it in and figuring out what 9-to-5 (job) you want,” says Jesse.
Keep scrolling to read our full Q&A with the Bivona twins, Jesse and Justin. Pre-orders for In The Wild are still available here. And check out the full list of upcoming Interrupters tour dates, including their European run and leg 2 of the US dates with Flogging Molly, right here.
(*Editor’s note: The text below has been slightly edited and condensed for content and clarity.*)
JS: First and foremost, congratulations on another successful appearance on Kimmel!
Justin: Thank you!
JS: So this is probably then the second coolest thing you’ve done this week…
(*all laugh*)
Justin: For real though, it is good to see your face!
JS: Is that the third time now on Kimmel?
Jesse: Nope, two! Four years ago we did “She’s Kerosene.”
Justin: Almost four years ago to the day. It was like July 26th.
JS: Man, how time has flown. The Kimmel show seems like it’s a cool one to do because the audience is right there, versus some of the other late-night shows where they’re sitting back and you’re kinda playing to the cameras as much as anything. That seems like a cool one.
Jesse: Yeah, they make it seem like it’s an indoor club show,
Justin: Which is really cool.
Jesse: It’s really cool. And the whole staff and crew there is excellent. They’re very nice. We had a GOOD time yesterday.
JS: And you got to hang with RuPaul, that’s pretty cool!
Justin: He’s super nice too!
Jesse: So nice!
Justin: An old punk rocker and a big ska fan too!
JS: I had no idea!
Jesse: Yeah, he played in a punk band in like the early 80s.
Justin: He loved The Selecter and The Specials.
JS: So then he’s totally going to dig your music, especially the new album!
Justin: He gave us the best soundbite! He just said “It’s time for some ska music, bitches!”
(*all laugh*)
Jesse: We were on stage and just looked at each other like “WHOA!” (*all laugh*)
JS: Does that stuff ever get old? And I know I probably know the answer to that question, and actually I think I’ve asked Kevin and Aimee that sort of stuff before, but playing in massive crowds, playing in places like Fenway Park, playing for RuPaul on the Kimmel show…does that stuff ever get old?
Jesse: Never.
Justin: No.
JS: I feel like I knew that was the answer…
Jesse: The moment that starts getting old is the moment that you’ve gotta start packing it in and figuring out what 9-to-5 you want.
JS: When I started doing this Zoom interview thing during the early days of Covid, it was really to sort of check in with people. I was used to doing more phone interviews and then I’d type them up and write a story, but A) the website crashed so there was no publish things anymore for a while, but I liked the idea of actually chatting with people when they were in quarantine and we were in quarantine and you could see each other and stay connected. We’ve been in this weird situation for so long now that music that came out of quarantine is coming out commercially. That’s sort of the long way of getting into In The Wild, which is a really, really, really great album and I know I say that about each one that you guys put out, but the bar just keeps getting raised. So let’s talk about that process. When during lockdown did you realize “well, we’re not going to be out on the road for a while, and we’re not going to be able to go into a studio for a while, so fuck it, let’s do it ourselves”?
Jesse: Well…
Justin: Here’s the thing. We finished the Fight The Good Fight album cycle tour in February of 2020. We ended in the UK with two amazing shows in London. The plan was to finish that and go home. Kev and Aimee were going to start writing for a couple weeks, and then we were going to go into the studio in March. Day, like, one of us going into the studio to record, was that day where like the NBA is canceling and Tom Hanks has Covid.
JS: Right! That’s when we really knew the world was ending!
Justin: Yeah! So we were going to go back in the next day, but everything started getting canceled, so we put the weekend on hold and then the next week on hold, and then the month, and everything just got shelved. So we were sitting at home, and couldn’t really do what our plan was. But it was nice at the same time, because we had just kept rolling for ⅞ years. There was no break. So we finally got to sit back and wait a little bit. We did the live record to give something to the fans during the break, and with that we did the documentary, This Is My Family, and put it all together as like a cohesive concert film. Kinda while we were doing that, we got to reflect on our past and Aimee got to do a lot of looking back on her past and realized there was a lot of stuff she hadn’t written songs about. At some point in the middle of that, Kevin was like “we need to do this record at our house, in our garage.” It’s a tiny 10×20 room that we would practice in, but it wasn’t treated, there wasn’t any studio equipment. So we spent maybe a month building things. Me and Jesse with power tools building racks to put gear in and tabletops and stuff. Pretty much “tiny housing” the studio to make every part of it work. And then they had some songs and we would just get in there the four of us with Kevin producing and work out these songs. It was a fun process because there were no outside distractions, there was no one else we had to worry about, it was just us as a cohesive band, the four of us, working out songs, writing songs, and it kind of really informed the process. It was the best thing we’ve ever done.
JS: So there was stuff written to be recorded back in March of 2020 when you first got off the road?
Jesse: Actually the one day that we did spend at the studio, we were working on the instrumental for “As We Live.” That was the only thing we recorded at Tim’s studio before everything got shut down.
Justin: I think they had “Alien” kind of on the docket, and “The Hard Way” was in there also.
Jesse: Yeah, they had done a few weeks of writing so there was a batch of songs. A lot of those songs got shelved because they didn’t fit the whole record idea. Once Kevin and Aimee started writing a lot, Aimee realized that the record was pretty much her life story. So the songs that didn’t fit with that theme we pushed aside and focused on the ones that told her story the way she wanted to tell it. We’re stoked on how the whole thing came out.
JS: How far into that writing process did the real direction of the album start to take shape, or at least when did she tell you that that was the direction that the album was going to go? And did that involve sit-down conversations…like, I know you’ve been family for a long time but that maybe there’s some shit she was going to sing about that’s a little…
Jesse: No, I think it happened kind of naturally, and it wasn’t until we had like
Both: Eighteen songs
Jesse: …that we were working on that it was like, okay, this batch is all very cohesive. I feel like we’re saying that word a lot? (*all laugh*)
Justin: It was a theme, you know?
Jesse: Yeah, and these other ones, they’re good, but they distract from the message we’re trying to send here and the themes we’re trying to talk about.
Justin: Yeah, once it was like, there’s all these songs (*gestures*) it was easy to look at the board and say, “well, these fourteen (go together).”
Jesse: And there was even a time where we weren’t completely…where we didn’t have like the last three figured out, and we dug up an old one, and once Aimee looked at it, it was like “actually, if I just rewrite these verses, this could fit.” That was “Worst For Me,” which was a sleeper favorite of mine. That song rips.
JS: That song is great, yeah!
Jesse: But it was on the back burner for months! It was just like, we recorded it and then we just forgot about it.
Justin: That was the other great thing about the process. We had so much time just sitting at home that they would finish a song and live with it for six months, then come back to it and say “oh, this song needs a bridge.” Then they would just write a bridge and it would bring the whole thing together. We’ve never really had the opportunity to sit and live with something and then come back to it and fix it. Usually in the studio, it’s like record it, it’s done…
Jesse: Go on tour, it’ll come out when you’re on tour. The most time we’ve ever had off in this band was maybe two months, right before Fight The Good Fight came out. And that wasn’t really time off, that was us preparing for the album cycle and the release and all that. So to be forced to sit on our hands during the pandemic, it helped a lot.
JS: What did you do otherwise to keep creative, musically or otherwise, to keep from getting into those doldrums when it seemed like the world was never going to open up and that sort of thing?
Jesse: You know, that’s a good question. We did what everybody did…binge-watched a lot of TV…
Justin: We did get to a point after the first few months where it was like, “okay, we’ve gotta go outside.”
JS: Touch grass.
Both: Yeah!
Justin: Going to the beach, or going on hikes.
Jesse: Going on bike rides.
Justin: And we had a small quarantine bubble of friends that we trusted to come over, or we’d go over there. But other than that, it was a lot of TV…
Jesse: A lot of movies.
JS: Were you still playing music, even if it wasn’t Interrupters stuff, or did you just like put it away?
Jesse: It was always there. Our back room is always set up so we could always go back there and jam, but there was definitely a time…
Justin: There was definitely a three-month period where I didn’t touch a bass. (*all laugh*)
Jesse: Yeah, I was the same with drums.
JS: Is that the longest you’ve ever gone, since you started playing?
Both: Yeah!
Justin: For sure.
Jesse: Definitely.
JS: Was it interesting working with…I know you’ve worked with Tim (Armstrong) executive producing before but this is the first one where it was listed that Kevin was the producer of (the album). Does that change the dynamic when not only one of the four of you is producing it, but he’s also your brother and your band member? Does that impact the dynamic in the studio or have you been doing it with each other for so long now that you just know how it works?
Justin: Yeah, exactly. We’ve been doing this our whole life. We’ve always looked to Kevin for answers when we have questions about what we’re doing.
Jesse: He’s always kinda been the kind of shadow producer of everything, in a sense.
Justin: Yeah, so Tim gave him full rein…told him to just grab the reins and take off with it.
Jesse: The other thing about the way we work is we try everyone’s ideas, so we could be in the studio and it wouldn’t be like him saying “no, this is how it’s going to be, we have to do it this way.” If we’re working on something and it’s not working, all four of us can be like “well, what if we try this, or what if we try this.” And he’ll say “okay, let’s try it.” There’s no bad ideas until you try it and realize it’s bad, you know? It was very good. And we have such a great relationship and we’re very good at communicating, so there wasn’t any headbutting. It was very fun and very easy.
Justin: And again, doing it on the property, it allowed Aimee the freedom to record vocals whenever she felt emotionally connected enough to a song to sing the vocals.
JS: Especially on an album like this, that’s crucial.
Justin: Yeah! When you have studio time, you know you’ve got to be in there at 5pm and be there til 11pm.
Jesse: We’ve gotta bang out all these songs
Justin: And you’ve got to record these (specific things). That’s almost like a 9 to 5. This way, it was like, if we went back there and she was like “ah I don’t want to sing that right now, let me sing this one.” And also, if she got her second wind at 2am, she could just hop back there and record.
JS: Do you guys live close enough where it’s like “hey, it’s 2am but we’ve got an idea…”
Both: Yeah!
Justin: We call it The Compound. In California technical terms, it’s a multi-family housing property, there’s one driveway, there’s two houses and a garage that we share, and a backyard. They live in the front house and we live here, so we’re right next to each other.
JS: It’s like being on tour while you’re at home!
Justin: I know, but with that being said, when we come home from tour sometimes, we don’t see each other for a whole week. (*all laugh*)
JS: Obviously it’s still early because this album’s not even out yet, but does that inspire you to kinda work that way going forward, now that you know that you can make an album like that in your little garage studio?
Jesse: Yeah I think so.
Justin: I think so, I mean…
Jesse: We haven’t really started thinking about the next one yet, but it is easy to just naturally fall into that. If we have to do a song for something, we can just hop back there and do it. So when we have something (to work on), it’s like “when do you want to work on that?” “I don’t know, tomorrow?” So we just hop back there and do it.
JS: How did the writing process work? Were there times when all four of you were writing together, or do Kevin and Aimee come up with the stem of the song and then you guys work on your rhythm parts? And does that ever change the direction of a song? Like if they start writing and a song has a certain feel, do they give you the freedom to say “hey, we think there’s a different feel that might go better with this song?” Because there are a lot of different feels on this album, and we’ll talk about that in a few minutes, but…
Justin: They would definitely have…it could be anything from the core idea of the song to an entirely fledged out song already, knowing how it should feel and what it should sound like. But, there are a couple songs on this record where they were recorded one way and pretty much done, but then it wasn’t just fitting in with the rest of it when we would get back there. I think specifically “Love Never Dies” had a totally different feel, it was more of a rock/reggae Clash-y song. And it was dope, but it wasn’t fitting in with everything.
Jesse: It didn’t age well.
Justin: It didn’t age well. So when we got back there with the four of us, we said “What do we do with this?” And Kevin said “what if did it more like a roots thing?”
Jesse: Yeah, he said “Jesse, play a one drop” so I played this one drop, and then he said “Justin, play this bass line” (*mimics bassline*). And then he said “okay, watch” and he just started skanking, and then he started singing this melody the way that it is now, and we played that for like four bars and just stopped. We were like “yeah, that’s it! Now we’re on to something!”
Justin: And then we finished it and we were like “dude, we gotta get The Skints on this one.”
Jesse: We built up this track, sent it to The Skints, and they sent us back a whole bunch of stuff that we kept. They’re fantastic.
JS: I was going to ask if all the guests got recorded in studio with you too. Obviously they didn’t if The Skints recorded their own stuff. People haven’t heard the album yet but obviously, Tim’s on a song because Tim’s gonna be on a song. Rhoda from Bodysnatchers, Alex and Greg from Hepcat, obviously Billy Kottage, the fifth Interrupter. Shoutout to Billy Kottage, the pride of Dover, New Hampshire.
(*Justin adjusts camera, revealing Billy Kottage sitting on the couch in the corner!)
Both: He’s right there!
JS: That’s awesome! I don’t think we’ve ever met in person, but Billy and I are both from the State of New Hampshire, so I always think that’s awesome.
Justin: When he comes out here, he pretty much lives with us.
JS: That’s great. There aren’t many of us in New Hampshire, the scene wasn’t very big, so when someone from the Granite State is cool and does cool things, I love it. So shoutout to Billy Kottage. So yeah, did they all record with you?
Jesse: It was all different. The Skints did it on their own in England, Rhoda recorded her vocals on her own at her place back in England.
Justin: (For) Hepcat, we actually went into Tim’s studio for a day.
Jesse: Which was great!
Justin: Greg and Alex came in and it was just one of the most fun days. That’s the thing, we went in to have them record on the song not knowing…Kevin didn’t really know what to have them do. We wanted them on the song, but he didn’t really have the part or anything. But we went in with them and showed them the song, and within like a minute, the two of them are sitting there going…
Both: “ooooh oooh” (*harmonizing*)
Justin: Like writing the parts, figuring it out together, it was so cool to see because they’re literally our favorite ska band.
Jesse: It was a magical session to be a part of. They were sitting there laughing…
Justin: ..having a good time…
Jesse: …singing all the right notes. It was awesome. We did that at Tim’s studio. Tim also did his vocals at his studio. That was later in the process, where things were a little more comfortable, where we could actually travel to a studio and not worry about everything. And then also, we had a guest vocalist on “Alien.” It’s this guy named Arnold, who is a friend of Tim’s and a friend of Brett Gurewitz’s. When we were working on that song, I think it was Tim’s idea, he was like “Arnold’s voice would sound great on this,” and we were like “let’s give it a shot!” So we had Arnold come in and he sang all those background vocals, and he’s got this emotionally delicate approach to his vocals that just lifted that song to another level.
JS: That song is something else…
Both: Yeah!
Jesse: First Interrupters song with no guitar.
JS: Right! That’s actually a thing I wanted to ask about. There’s so many different directions! Obviously you’ve always played on a lot of different influences, but I feel like with this album, you go deeper into the reggae thing, into the 2-Tone thing, and then “Alien” which is unlike anything else in the Interrupters catalog. What made you take the freedom to just kinda go with that. Is that stuff that’s always kinda been in the arsenal but maybe you didn’t want to go too deep on the first few records, but now that everyone’s along for the ride it’s like, “well, let’s push that.”
Jesse: Maybe a little bit of that, but also, it is more that the songs were telling us how we should play them, so to speak. So the way that that song was written, there was never really another way to approach it. That song went through a lot of different versions – not crazy different versions but it was layered up with heavy guitars at one point…
Justin: It was kind of like The Beatles’ “Oh Darling” at one point, where it was like rocking…
Jesse: There were heavier drums on it at one point. It went through a bunch of stages.
Justin: But the emotion wasn’t there. Aimee fought really hard to bring it back to what it should be.
Jesse: What served the song better.
Justin: And that involved one day just pulling it up and being like “take the guitar off, take that off, take that off”…it got down to literally just the drum beat and the string arrangement.
Jesse: Even cutting a whole outro and just being like “no, the song should end right there.”
Justin: And then also with “My Heart,” which is also kind of a different…
Jesse: That “doo-woppy” 50s feel.
Justin: She had already had the melody and was singing it and I was like “well, it’s gonna be in 3, and it’s gonna have this rock feel.” Even if we tried to make it in 4 as a ska song or a reggae song, it just wasn’t working. So the way those songs were written informed the styles. And at this point, we’ve kind of realized that no matter what style it is, if it’s me and Jesse and Kevin playing and Aimee singing, it’s going to sound like The Interrupters. Us just believing in ourselves and pushing it forward that way really helped the process.
JS: When there’s an album I’m really excited about, I try to ignore a lot of the singles and just listen to the album all the way through because, I don’t know, I’m in my 40s and that’s the way we did it when we were kids, right? So I listened to it all the way through and I took notes and next to “My Heart” I wrote “whoa, an Interrupters doo-wop song.” It’s very much an Interrupters song still, but it’s got that sort of 50s diner, doo-wop vibe to it. Which I think is awesome, and it’s cool to see elements like feature in the mix but still be an Interrupters track.
Justin: Thank you!
Jesse: Yeah, initially that was one where we were like “let’s just play like The Ramones would play in 3.” So it was real heavy, but it didn’t serve the song well.
Justin: So dial back a little bit.
JS: I think people are going to dig that song.
Jesse: I think that’s my favorite song on the album.
Justin: Specifically behind the scenes with that song, Aimee had a service dog named Daisy for 13 years, who passed away in 2018. It was like her little girl, and it was devastating when she passed away. She wrote that song about her, and not even just the first time but the first few times I heard it, I couldn’t keep it together. I’d cry every time.
Jesse: Yeah, because when we worked it out in the studio, we just had the choruses, singing “my heart keeps beating, my heart keeps beating…” so that pretty much informed the drum beat just being a heartbeat. And then a couple weeks later when they updated the Dropbox with the verses and said “listen to this,” me and Justin were both sitting right here in our living room with our earbuds on and we’re both just like crying. Like, oh my god this is so emotional, because we all lived with Daisy, she was fantastic. She was a German shepherd/wolf, and we all still miss her a lot. That was a heavy one.
JS: Have you been able to play a lot of this stuff live yet, or are you waiting until the album is out?
Jesse: On the Flogging Molly tour we just did, we were only doing “Anything Was Better” and “In The Mirror,” and then when we dropped “Jailbird” we started doing that. The plan is to play as much of it as possible.
Justin: We tried a few of them at soundcheck on occasion.
Jesse: Yeah, we’d always screw around at soundcheck and be like “do you guys know ‘Kiss The Ground,’ let’s try that”
Justin: Or “Raised By Wolves”
Jesse: But we’re in rehearsals next week for a few days to work on stuff for the European tour, because that’s when we’ve gotta do longer sets, but the plan is to try to learn the whole record.
JS: I think people are going to dig a lot of it. I was just curious about if you’d throw a curveball song like that at people before they’ve heard the album to see what the response is. Because I feel like “In The Mirror” is one of those songs that the first time you hear it, you go “yup, that one’s a classic. That’s going to get the crowd whipped up.” Do you know when you’re writing a song like that that it’s going to be “the one.” Like “She’s Kerosene” was like that. The very first verse when I first heard it, I remember going “well, that’s gonna be a big hit.”
Jesse: When we’re working on it in the studio, I think we’re so lost in the process that we don’t give songs that sort of focus, like “that’s going to be the single, this is going to be the hit.” But there was a point when we were doing “She’s Kerosene” that we had Mr. Brett come in and he was listening to stuff and he when he heard “Kerosene,” he had his little notepad and he was just like “hit.” And we all just looked at each other like “Whoa! Really?”
Justin: We thought there was so much more work to be done with that song and when he gave it that check of approval, we were like “alright, we don’t have to do much more to it.” That was cool. But then also for this record, when there was like 18 or 20 songs, “In The Mirror” was a standout, at least for me. I was like “I think that one is really good.” Then as it dwindled down, it was like “In The Mirror” and “Raised By Wolves” as the top two. They’re different enough, one’s ska, one’s sort of heavy rock, and you’re just like these two are the shining examples of the record and what we’re trying to sound like.
Jesse: And “In The Mirror,” Kevin and Aimee wrote that song ten years ago. That was one that wasn’t written specifically for this record. But when they were doing the inventory for the record, Aimee was like “we should dig this one up, this is a great one.” I remember when we were trying to work that one out in the room as a four-piece, I feel like it was a more difficult one to get away from the demo version, because I’ve been listening to that song for ten years. There is a demo recording of it – it’s not even a demo, it’s a full fledged-out different version of it. And having that ingrained in your brain and trying to get away from it and being like “alright, how would The Interrupters do this,” that was an interesting process. There was definitely a day where I was like “that song’s not going to make the record, we have so many other songs.” (*all laugh*) Obviously, I was wrong, that song rips.
Justin: But it’s wild too, because they wrote it ten years ago. From that time, that’s when they wrote “Easy On You,” “Gave You Everything,” and then “In The Mirror” was in that batch.
Jesse: “Love Never Dies” was in that batch.
Justin: Yup, “Love Never Dies.” I think now if we’re recording, it’s like “hey what else wasfrom that time period? What else did you write then? Anything else we can dig up?” There was some gold.
JS: It’s interesting to hear that it’s from that time period. As I was driving around this morning for work, I listened to the first album and this one back-to-back, because they come out on the same day; the new one comes out on the 8th anniversary of the first one, so I thought it would be cool to listen to them back-to-back. And, I loved the first album when it came out, but it is startling how far you guys have progressed as a band in eight years.
Both: Yeah!
JS: And so to listen to them back-to-back, obviously you can kinda see how ended up here, but at the same time, you’ve progressed so far. So it’s really interesting that that song, in particular, is from that batch.
Jesse: So, one of our little press points about this record and relating it to the previous records is that the first album is kind of like a first date, where you just talk about surface-level things, nothing too crazy. Second album, you start to let them know a little more about you. Third album, you’re kinda getting into the nitty-gritty. Fourth album, all the baggage is out, the drama is revealed, all the secrets are out. That is kind of where we are with this. And talking about the recording of the first record, we were just trying to keep it simple. We weren’t trying to reinvent anything, we were just trying to be a straight-ahead ska-punk band.
Justin: We did like twenty-four instrumentals in three days. Some of them didn’t have any lyrics or anything, we just got the music done. The ones that didn’t have any lyrics done, they just wrote to the instrumentals. There was no going back to redo parts, it was just like “this is it, we’re done.”
Jesse: And keep it simple. Like, for me on drums, it was like “don’t do any crazy fills, just keep it straight, keep it steady.”
Justin: Which is wild, because some of my basslines, I play so many notes! Why did they let me do that?!? (*all laugh*)
JS: Yeah, but they work, and as somebody who wanted to be a bass player when he grew up, I like that they let you play all the notes! …. Thanks for doing this. This was fun. I talked to Kevin and Aimee for I think the first three records, so it’s nice to talk to you guys. It’s been a while!
Jesse: Yeah we’re being let off the leash a little bit. (*all laugh*)
JS: Well and that’s good, you should be. It’s fun that you guys have your own language with each other, and I know that that’s talked about in other places, like the documentary. So it’s perfect that you guys ended up as a rhythm section, and you end up doing this. Is that why you ended up as a rhythm section?
Jesse: Yeah, kinda. It kinda happened naturally. I don’t remember if we talked about it in the movie, but Kevin started out as a drummer. We had a drum set in the house because our dad was a producer and worked with his friends. So there was a drum set always in the house and Kevin gravitated toward that at an early age. But then, one day our dad came home with a guitar and a bass. So Kevin grabbed the guitar, and I was already dicking around on the drums, so then the only thing left over was the bass. So then naturally it was like “well, this is your instrument, this is your instrument…” And then we would just jam as little kids. There’s some video in that documentary but there’s a LOT more video when we were like 7 years old and Kevin is like 9 of us just trying to play like Green Day songs and Blink 182 songs
Justin: Sublime songs.
Jesse: Yeah, Sublime songs! Whatever we were hearing on the radio is what we were trying to play. The crazy thing is that we’ve come full circle and we know a lot of the people we were trying to emulate and we’re lucky enough to call them friends.
Justin: Some are like family.
Jesse: Yeah, some are like family now. It’s been a crazy, crazy life that we don’t take for granted.
Justin: They always say don’t meet your idols but...
Jesse: …we’ve never had a bad experience when we’ve met our idols.
Justin: I couldn’t tell you one person that I had looked up to that I met and they ruined it for me. Everyone’s been amazing.
JS: You know what, I’ve got to say almost the same thing. The amount of people that I’ve gotten to know through doing this for…well, The Interrupters started in 2011 and I started with Dying Scene in 2011. You’re one of the bands that came out right when I was getting started with this whole thing so it’s been a fun sort of parallel, but there’s only a small, small handful of people where you go “wow, that guy’s kind of a dick.” Everybody else has been super cool and super rad and supportive of each other. Especially those people that we grew up listening to in the late 80s and the 90s. It’s a pretty good, supportive group.
Justin: It is, it is. Even when we just started out, to tour with Rancid was amazing, but then to go on and get Rhoda from The Bodysnatchers, we get Horace and Lynval and Terry from The Specials love us. It’s just insane. To have that mutual respect and to get it back is just…yeah…it’s mind-blowing.
Jesse: We did a charity show back in February where we were backing The Specials. I was the drummer of The Specials for a night. We did the whole set, like twelve songs. Justin played piano, Kev played guitar.
Justin: You saw that thing where we played with Tim and Jesse Michaels and did the Op Ivy song?
JS: Yeah, yeah. That was amazing.
Justin: That was the same event. That one song with Jesse was amazing but it overshadowed the fact that we played in The Specials! (*all laugh*)
Jesse: It was just mind-blowing.
JS: Yes! Everyone kinda lost it with the Jesse thing but yeah, that’s awesome. Just awesome.
Jesse: And just being able to sit in a room for a week with Terry and Horace; Lynval got sick so he couldn’t come out, but just to sit there and run the songs with them was mind-blowing.
JS: I’m glad this stuff keeps happening to you, because you certainly deserve it.
