The Lives We Leave in Others: A Conversation with Pat Flynn Of Have Heart

Fifteen years ago, I was in my early twenties watching videos of Have Heart performances on YouTube, completely captivated by the music and the energy surrounding it. I don't think I could have imagined that all these years later I'd find myself sitting in Pat Flynn's classroom, listening to him speak so openly about his life, his students, and the things that have shaped him.

I've spent a lot of time around musicians over the years, but meeting someone at the high school where they teach is an entirely new experience for me. Usually, these days begin outside a venue, in a van, or around whatever restaurant happens to be closest to soundcheck. Today is a little different.

I hadn't really considered the possibility until Pat suggested meeting at his school during our initial phone call. Even then, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. I'd seen plenty of videos of Have Heart performances accompanied by some variation of the joke, "Imagine this is your history teacher," but there aren't many photographs of Pat in that environment.

Inside, I quickly realize this isn't simply a classroom with historical figures pinned to the walls. Nearly everything seems to have been placed there deliberately, and everything has a story attached to it. What becomes immediately apparent is just how thoughtful and passionate Pat is about what he does. There's an extraordinary amount of intention behind his words, whether he's talking about hardcore, teaching history, or the smallest details scattered throughout his classroom.

Pat begins showing me around.

There's a podium that belonged to his father, which he's carried with him through different classrooms. There are posters of historical figures whose stories he feels deserve considerably more attention than they've received. Student projects, old photographs, and bits of hardcore-inspired graphic design occupy different corners of the room.

At one point, he shows me a collection of thank-you letters from former students. He tells me that if there were ever a fire in the building, these would be the first things he'd grab. One letter in particular has stayed with him. Written by the parents of a former student, it describes how their son had begun gravitating toward extremist ideology before taking Pat's class. Through the way Pat approached history, questioning ideas and allowing students to work through their own reasoning, their son began reconsidering what he'd been listening to.

It's a letter that means a great deal to him.

What strikes me most is how much of his approach to teaching seems connected to the ideas that have followed him through hardcore. Community, responsibility, questioning authority, and the importance of allowing people to arrive at their own conclusions.

We spend a considerable amount of time talking about the relationship between memory and history. Pat describes them almost as two people living under the same roof, related to one another but experiencing things very differently. Memory is emotional, imperfect, and often considerably more entertaining. History is the one asking for evidence, questioning the details, and reminding everyone that what they remember isn't necessarily what happened.

Eventually, the conversation turns toward Have Heart.

He talks about how they initially expected their reunion performances to attract a relatively small group of people who'd been around the first time. Instead, thousands showed up. What's surprised him even more is how much younger the crowds have become with each subsequent run of shows. He describes his continued involvement in hardcore as a kind of youth service. It was something he needed when he was younger, and the possibility that it might provide a similar place for someone else remains important to him.

There's also an interesting contrast in how he views his own abilities. He tells me that if his children had him as their teacher, he'd be grateful. It's a level of confidence he's developed through years of work, student relationships, and the environment he's built around himself.

That same confidence doesn't seem to carry over to Have Heart, though. "I don't know why people continuously like this band," he tells me, still struggling to make sense of the band's lasting impact. It's funny to hear him say this knowing that, in a few hours, he'll be standing in front of a room full of people who could probably give him a thousand different answers.

He tells me he needs to change and shave before we leave. He's getting into what he jokingly refers to as his "costume."

He says if anyone comes by the room and ask, I'm his cousin. We both kind of laugh.

Not long after, we're in the car heading toward Cambridge. Along the way, I pull up some questions I had written out and what follows is our conversation.

As a child, you struggled to read and often missed recess to catch up academically, but eventually discovered that history was a subject where you felt genuinely capable. Years later, you've become the person responsible for helping other young people learn. I wonder whether those early experiences changed what you believe intelligence actually looks like. 

When you're working with a student who doesn't necessarily respond to the way something is being taught, do you find yourself thinking about how easily someone's abilities can be overlooked simply because they haven't found the right way to demonstrate them?

Pat Flynn:

I saw this Jane Goodall quotation the other day where she said, "Of our species, we are the most intellectual species, but we are not the most intelligent species."

I thought that was pretty powerful.

There's this education researcher, theorist, named Howard Gardner, who wrote about a theory of multiple intelligences, and I feel like we can get out of the theoretical stage and kind of get into the more practical understanding that, yeah, there are multiple ways of expressing intelligence and of knowing things.

I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that, you know, we needed a church or a cleric, or any type of figure to help us understand our relationship with, uh, the whatever is beyond us. And then, in history, we kind of started to shift towards saying, maybe we don't need that middleman.

And then we've went from there to maybe there is no whatever, to there is no whatever in some stances, not even a maybe.

And I think as a species we're stuck on pretty ancient ways of thinking about the human society we exist in and what the purpose and the meaning of it is. That kind of convoluted through line can complicate how we come to understand what it means to know thyself and think about the world around you.

[Pat interrupts himself after recognizing a place along the way.]

Pat Flynn:

Oh, man, I used to live right here.

This was the worst years of my life.

I slept on the singer of Shipwrecks floor here.

William:

Should we get out and make a photo.

[Pat pulls over the car & we take the photo]

[Interview continues once back in car]

Pat Flynn:

One thing that's made me think about this is the scientific revolution. It seems like it was an attempt to deal with the problem of coming to conclusions based solely on a hunch or an emotion. Maybe that emotion is hatred. Maybe that emotion is love. But I think that with the scientific revolution and the emergence of a more secular way of interpreting the world, we threw the baby out with the bathwater. We've abandoned the heart of interpreting the world in favor of the head, and I think there has to be some type of intersection between the two.

You had this childhood friend Gregory, who made a point of including you when other kids weren't particularly welcoming. Growing up in a military family and moving around so frequently, I imagine establishing those kinds of friendships wasn't always easy. You described him running alongside your father's car waving goodbye when your family eventually moved away. Do you think that friendship shaped your understanding of what it means to really show up for someone? As you've gotten older, have you found yourself returning to that experience when thinking about the friendships you've built or the kind of friend you want to be to others?

Pat Flynn:

Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, in many ways, it did.

I still have this really powerful image in my head of this one kid, in a neighborhood where I was being bullied, who stood up for me and literally ran after our car as we were leaving forever. That sets a standard for friendship at a very young age that's almost unrealistic. It's idealistic, and maybe that kind of thing comes naturally to children, but I've had to accept that it's not always realistic to expect that same kind of social courage from adults.

This kid, at least as my memory serves me, couldn't have cared less that the whole neighborhood disliked me. We'd go on adventures together, and I think that experience really shaped how I approach friendship. I have people in my life who are flawed, and I'm flawed myself. I believe every human being is worthy of redemption. Part of friendship is having people who are willing to point out your blind spots, help you recognize your failures, and hopefully you can do the same for them. But nowhere in that equation, at least for me, is banishment.

I've had falling-outs with friends that still really bother me. They eat at me. And I think a lot of that comes back to Gregory. Here's this kid who stood up for me, expressing how much our friendship meant to him in this incredibly dramatic way, running alongside our car as we left. It's one of my favorite images from my life, and it's always stayed with me.

And, you know, Have Heart broke up at what you might call the peak of our time as a band because our friendships were in a total state of decline. We'd rubbed them raw by touring the world together. We'd kind of overwatered the plant, if you will.

Preserving those friendships was more important to me than continuing the band. So we stepped away, and here we are, twenty years later, playing music we wrote together all those years ago. And I think that's pretty cool. We're happy to do it. It's joyful. We're laughing.

I'd rather have that than continue playing in a band with people I absolutely hate. I don't think that's how you serve friendship.

And yeah, I think I was served friendship by old Gregory, who, you know, I wonder where he is.

I keep coming back to this image of you as a young altar boy attending funerals with almost no mourners. Sometimes it was just you, another altar boy, the priest, an organist, and the person being buried. That's such an unusual thing to experience as a child, being present for such a significant moment in the life of someone you never actually knew.

I know you've talked about how those experiences shaped your understanding of mortality, but I wonder if they also changed the way you thought about strangers. Did you ever find yourself wondering who those people were, what their lives had been like, or how someone could reach the end of their life with so little of their story visible to anyone in that room?

Pat Flynn:

That was definitely part of my development, this weird period of my life where I was attending funerals as an 11-year-old altar boy, oftentimes with almost nobody there.

I think it was a really powerful thing to experience at such a young age. I wouldn't say it was alienating, but it was moving, just seeing how these rituals could honor everyone.

I still think about this one guy who was always there, no matter what. He was a gentleman with long gray hair, and I think he just felt some obligation to attend. In fact, he might have been the most consistent presence at those funerals, aside from Father Tom, me, and my best friend and fellow altar boy, Mark Sweet.

Those experiences still echo in my head. I think they've contributed to this appreciation I have for the prosaic things in life. Or maybe pedestrian is a better word, just the ordinary, everyday things.

I don't know. Maybe it's because I believe there's real meaning in everything. Sometimes you just have to sit with something long enough to recognize it. Like being on your knees while incense is passed around you. There's a lot to gain from those experiences, even the strange ones.

Every now and then, during my never-ending commute to work and back, those memories will come up. And I don't know how often I think about the absolutely forgotten, because I don't really believe those people were forgotten. I'm still talking about them.

They left a ripple in my life, and I think that's one way of looking at the story of an unattended funeral.

Your father was a speechwriter, taught English and Latin, and had a tremendous appreciation for poetry. Much of your own life has also revolved around language, whether through writing lyrics or teaching. I'm curious what it was like growing up around someone who placed so much importance on words, and whether there were certain habits, expressions, or ways of thinking that you picked up from him without realizing it.

As you've gotten older, have you started to recognize some of those things in yourself?

Pat Flynn:

Yeah, my father was very intentional about what he said, when he said it, and, just as importantly, what he chose not to say.

I think his appreciation for the power of words, and even the power of silence, really showed itself on September 11th, 2001.

Two days earlier, I'd watched my high school burn. My father taught Latin and English there after retiring from the Army, and I was a junior at the time. School had been canceled on September 10th, and I wasn't sure whether we'd have classes the following day.

So I woke up that morning a little later than usual, figured school was still canceled because parts of the building hadn't been repaired, and went downstairs thinking it was just another day. Then I looked at the television and realized some pretty fucked up shit was going on.

I remember walking into the kitchen, confused and curious, thinking my father might have something to say about it, especially given his military background.

And I'm sure he had plenty of thoughts, but his understanding of what to say, what not to say, and how to say it really came through in that moment.

I knew kids whose parents were freaking the fuck out. They were telling them things like, "We're going to war. You're going to war." There was this fearmongering happening, and I don't think some of those parents realized how much their children were looking to them for guidance on how to understand what was happening in the world.

But my father was different.

I remember he paused, barely even looked at me, and simply said, "It seems like the country is under some type of attack, and we're just going to have to read the information carefully, day by day." And that was it.

Then I asked if I could go see DS-13 that night, and he said, "Yes, of course."

Now that I'm a parent myself, I look back on that and think it's kind of insane. But I've also come to realize that everything my father did was intentional. He understood that his reaction, the words he chose, and the way he delivered them would have an immediate impact on how I processed what was happening.

He understood the power of language, not as something performative, but as a way of informing someone. I think what he wanted me to understand was that you can't allow fear and emotion to dictate how you interpret the world. You have to make room for reason and rational thought.

And that's something I've carried into my own classroom.

Whenever there's a conflict happening somewhere in the world, I try to address it with my students. Not because I'm required or obligated to, but because I want to.

Whether we're discussing the past or something happening in the present, I try to approach those conversations the way my father approached that morning. With an understanding that emotion shouldn't be the shot caller when it comes to how we interpret the world and make decisions.

The proceeds of your final show went toward a women's shelter in New Bedford run by your mother. I came across a quote where you recalled her saying that she and your father had raised good kids, not necessarily nice kids.

I've always found that distinction interesting, especially considering how much of Have Heart's music deals with compassion, personal responsibility, and standing up for what you believe in. What did your mother mean by that, and how did those values shape your upbringing? Do you think watching her dedicate so much of her life to helping others influenced the ideas you eventually expressed through your music?

Pat Flynn:

I think my parents could see some bullshit. I sensed their ability to sense the bullshit.

My dad grew up poor, in the projects, and my mom had a pretty standard lower-middle-class experience. Just middle class, I would say. Her dad was a printer.

But my dad kind of got out of the lower class and had a pretty standard middle-class experience. I think that kind of class-hopping gave them an ability to see the bullshit on different sides.

My father went to West Point, a prestigious place where I'm sure there was nepotism and legacy, like there are in any places of so-called prestige. And I've inherited a little bit of that in-betweenerness as well.

I think it comes down to just following through. You can have really nice-sounding language, a really wonderful, beautiful yard sign that says, "In this house, we don't accept racism," and all this stuff. But what are you doing inside that house? Who's allowed to come to that house? Who would you welcome in this house in actuality?

I think maybe the sentiment of that response was, worry less about how you appear and focus more on how you are.

It's not so much a rejection of political correctness, because my parents were decent people who believed in the importance of language and it mattering. Even the small things that might seem like a micro-micro problem could mean a lot more to other people.

I inherited that too, to be decent and not to just scoff at being decent. But it's more than just words. How are you acting toward your fellow human beings?

I know I inherited that from them because I don't know where else I got it from.

I think my parents also had an ability to kind of sneer at the administrative class, who really likes to poo-poo and encourage nice behavior, but the follow-through on their end perhaps is missing.

Yeah, I think that's my two cents.

Leading up to Have Heart's final shows, you talked about wanting to play one last smaller show at Anchors Up in Haverhill because your friend Josh Hynes, who ran the venue, had supported the band since its earliest days. I thought there was something meaningful about making sure that both the venue and the person behind it were part of the band's goodbye.

Years later, you mentioned wanting to organize shows in New Bedford to help younger musicians build a community of their own, and I couldn't help but draw a connection between the two. What did Josh's support mean to you back then, and do you think your desire to create those same opportunities for younger bands comes partly from remembering what people like him did for you?

Pat Flynn:

Oh, yeah. Josh Hynes, wonderful human being.

Josh was on the North Shore, Jimmy Flynn was in Boston, and we were from the South Shore. Our scene had kind of gotten its nuts cut off because the venue we had stopped doing shows. We tried another place called El Dangeroso, and even a practice space, but it all fell apart. It was really hard to build a community when there was nowhere to play.

So we started going to more shows on the North Shore, where Josh had built this incredible community. Jimmy was booking shows in Boston, at what I like to call Hardcore Stadium, but the North Shore was really where the scene was happening. Boston was a little dead at the time, although Jimmy was actively working to build it back up. Josh gave us our first show on the North Shore. I haven't thought about that in a long time, and I should.

The North Shore is such an important part of Boston hardcore history. You had bands like Ten Yard Fight, Converge, Piebald, Cave In, guys from In My Eyes. They were all coming out of the North Shore, eventually going to school in Boston and playing there, but they'd always come back. I'm a firm believer that a lot of magic happens in the suburbs.

The suburbs are a weird place. I think a lot of people end up there because they can't afford to live in the city, but there's this perception that everyone living there owns property and has money. That's not necessarily true. There's real hardship in those places, just like there is in cities. And there's something about being in a city that people find legitimizing, especially when you're playing music. But that whole experience taught me that it really doesn't have to be that way.

I was reminded of that a couple of years ago when I visited Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher's Crass house, way outside of London. It was rural, surrounded by this idyllic English countryside, and it was essentially where a fucking fuck ton of everything Crass happened. It wasn't happening in the slimy, anarcho-punk streets of London. It was happening out there, in the countryside. And here were these people making music that was pulverizing and confronting some of the worst aspects of human society, in a place where those things probably weren't even being talked about explicitly. I couldn't believe it. It was sick.

All of that is to say that Josh took us into this community he'd built, one that came out of a long history of hardcore on the North Shore. And being welcomed into that was huge for us. He wasn't a gatekeeper. There were no gates. His attitude was basically, "Come on in. Anything that helps build this beyond what it is right now is what we're going for."

I remember those first few shows. We didn't even have anything recorded yet. We just played, and Josh kept checking in, asking, "When's that demo coming out?" He was a little older than us, and that encouragement meant so much. We didn't have much of a scene of our own, and we weren't necessarily quote-unquote cool. But he didn't care about any of that.

I remember being nervous about playing the North Shore because this was where bands like Piebald, Converge, and Ten Yard Fight had come from. They had this long-established scene. And by long, I mean this was 2003, and some of that stuff had only been happening for maybe nine years. But to us, that felt like an eternity. It was this hotbed of hardcore, and suddenly we were being welcomed into it.

That experience sent a message to me about how important it is to let people into spaces they might not normally have access to. Because when you do that, things get messed up in a really awesome way. Things start to swirl, they grow, and new ideas begin to form. That's what Josh represented to me.

And I think that's part of why, as I've gotten older, I've become less interested in the idea that people need to be playing music in cities. I'm really passionate about kids in any fuckhole town feeling like they can create something wherever they happen to live.

There were these kids from Wrentham, Massachusetts, who put on this sick show in a barn. Something like 200 people showed up, just a couple miles off the beaten path. It felt like Peter Pan, Neverland stuff. Like, wow, hardcore isn't supposed to be here, but it's happening.

I'm totally into that. I just gotta find the time to consistently book more shows of my own.

There's a certain tension in continuing to perform words you wrote at a point in your life when you were still figuring out what you believed. Have Heart's lyrics often carry a tremendous amount of conviction, and I wonder whether there are moments when you find yourself singing something your younger self believed wholeheartedly that you'd approach differently today. Not necessarily something you regret, but something you might want to sit down and have a conversation with that younger version of yourself about.

Pat Flynn:

I think I was oddly very careful, almost unknowingly. At the time, I didn't think I was particularly thoughtful. I remember feeling like I was struggling, but looking back, maybe I was consciously trying not to be too specific, especially on The Things We Carry. There were more universal themes going on there. I'm pretty proud of that 19 or 20-year-old who was writing that shit. I think it's pretty good for someone that age.

I don't want to focus on the little, tiny things, but I'm glad I approached it that way. I don't like certainty. Life changes, and I don't like a lot of judgment. But sometimes you do judge things, and you can take a stance. When I think of songs like "Watch Me Sink," that's a pretty self-reflective song, I guess you could say. I don't know why, but I think I was just quite thoughtful.

Have Heart's weird because, especially on that first record, The Things We Carry, I hadn't really tapped into anything deeply personal yet. I was trying to. There was some stuff going on in my life, and I think that starts to reveal itself as the record progresses. By the time you get to "The Machinist," it's not obvious to the listener, but that song is about something deeply important to me. Then you get to "Watch Me Rise," which is fairly thinly veiled. I'm talking about somebody.

And then, for some reason, I just kind of broke through and said, "I'm just gonna write about myself here."

So The Things We Carry is more universalistic. It's easier for people to get on board with. Then, when I went into Songs to Scream at the Sun, I decided to focus more on myself. But I'm glad that in that earlier, less personal material, I wrote in a way that wasn't so judgmental or self-righteous. I think there was a tendency in straight edge to be that way.

Even our song "Something More Than Ink" is kind of a funny straight edge song because I was pushing back against that classic "you broke edge" mentality. At the time, there were songs that were basically saying, "Fuck you, I'm edge," and I remember thinking, I don't like that.

It's funny because "To Us Fools" was originally a demo song that we put on The Things We Carry. I was 16 when I wrote it, and it's a very 16-year-old straight edge song. "To all our foundations that fell apart, and all those kids who believed in you..."

I'd have to double-check those lyrics. It's hard without the music. But then there's, "We won't let go like you." It's weird. It's very much like, fuck, you know?

But I think it makes sense that I wrote a song like "Something More Than Ink" after that, because it was almost a direct response. Like, yo, that's fine. You do you, I'll do me. Nothing's changed here. Right on. I'm still here. This is my thing.

Now that I'm 41, I'm really glad I had that careful-mindedness. Because even with "To Us Fools," I'm basically saying, I feel like a fool, but I'm not going to do that. It's not really a "fuck you," outside of the fact that I scream "motherfuckers" on there, which is just fun.

[Pat notices Nancy outside the car. -Rolls the window down- ]

Pat: Nancy!

Pat: That’s Al Barile's wife.

Pat: Hey, Nancy!

Nancy: Hey! How you doing?

Pat: I'm doing a little interview. This is William, he's a photojournalist from New York.

Nancy: Oh, Nice.

Pat: Yeah. I'll chat with you in a bit.

[Finishes train of thought]

Outside of those tiny, neurotic things, like wishing I'd used one word instead of another, I'm really happy with it. If I met that 20-year-old version of myself, I think I'd be pumped to meet a kid who's thoughtful, who doesn't have everything figured out and knows it, who's okay with that, and who wants to do right by people.

I'd do what I do with my students. I'd call their parents and say, "What'd you do?"

So, in a way, if 19-year-old Pat Flynn got into the car right now and I got to know him, I'd want to talk to his parents and ask, "What did you do?"

So, you know, there's that.

You've spoken about your records existing as a kind of personal archive for your children, and you've also expressed concerns about how hardcore history is documented and preserved. So much of what survives tends to focus on the larger moments, while the smaller, everyday experiences gradually disappear.

I wonder whether that awareness has influenced how you think about your own life and the things you leave behind. Do you feel a need to document your experiences outside of music, through journals or personal recordings, or does songwriting already serve that purpose for you?

Pat Flynn:

My immediate response is that I'm not an archivist, and I don't want to do things for the archivist. What I really want to try and do, as best as I possibly can, is simply be in the world. I think it comes down to how you define what it means to be human.

I want to be a... Oh, fuck. Sorry.

William:

You're good.

Pat Flynn:

I should be taking a left here, but that's all right.

[Continues Conversation]

As a human, I want to be in the world, and that means interacting with people. It means making decisions, causing effects, making things happen, and having things happen to me. That's where I kind of focus. And the added bonus is that I think those experiences become a breeding ground for a well of clues about the past for those who weren't there.

At a very basic level, I think that mystery of how things used to be is one more reason life feels worth living. I love history because there's this endless well of stories, and historians are constantly going towards the clues. But the clues I leave behind for the people who come after me, chronologically, I want them to read as genuine.

And so, I kind of struggle with writing a journal unless I really need to, unless I'm trying to figure shit out. That's what lyrics are for me. I think I struggle with journaling because I've been so lucky to have this thing called songwriting in my life. In many ways, the songs I write are my little journal entries.

William:

You don't feel a need beyond that, essentially, is what you're saying?

Pat Flynn:

Yeah. I imagine I would be scrawling on the wall to showcase that I am in the world if I didn't have songs. So perhaps, at that point, I probably really would be writing in a journal.

I do want to scrawl and vandalize the world with me on it, but not in a literal way. I want the world to kind of feel my presence. I'm here. And I don't mean that in a tyrannical takeover kind of way. I just mean I'm in it. Here's my fingerprint.

And when you find those fingerprints, you can kind of swim in the cool, but entirely imperfect wonder of what that was like. And I'll take that, having lost a lot of really important people in my life who I didn't fully get to know.

I was thinking about the lyrics to "Bostons" just yesterday, and I literally refer to my father as "a father I hardly know." And then two years later, he passed.

So all I got is the wonder. But I have some clues to work with, and I'm good to wonder.

Throwing Stuff at the Wall w/ Doug Dulgarian

There has always been a little bit of a junk-drawer quality to They Are Gutting a Body of Water. And im not saying that as a pejorative, but its more so that Doug seems to have very little interest in deciding that two things do not belong next to each other. A guitar part can sit next to a breakbeat. Something beautiful can get interrupted by something silly. A song can sound finished and then suddenly feel like somebody opened another tab over it.

A couple years ago that all became swanlike (loosies 2020–2023), a collection of material pulled from the years between records. Half-finished ideas, demos, beats, old uploads, little pieces of songs that had been sitting around in different forms. Instead of cleaning all of it up into something that felt like a proper album, Doug let the loose ends stay loose.

KOOL FAITH / LOOSIES II feels like that door has been opened much wider.

Doug has described the idea behind the mixtape by going back to the CDs he remembers finding in convenience stores when he was younger. Cheap jewel cases put together by local DJs, loaded with favorite artists, new beats, vocal stems moved onto things they were never originally recorded for. Sometimes the combinations worked perfectly. Sometimes they probably should not have worked at all. The point was hearing somebody else look at all of those separate pieces and decide they belonged together anyway.

That seems like a pretty good way into these 29 songs.

Across the mixtape, people from different corners of the world surrounding TAGABOW keep wandering in and out. Bands Doug has shared records with. Artists connected through Julia's War. Friends. Rappers. Electronic musicians. People who have been around this thing for years and people whose presence still feels strange enough on paper that you want to hear what happened.

And rather than have Doug explain every one of those collisions from his side, I wanted to know what the record looked like from the other end.

So I reached out to all of the contributors on this tape and asked each of them the exact same question. What did they give Doug to work with, what was it actually like making something together, and was there some accident, conversation, weird decision, or small moment from the process that they thought was worth remembering?

Below are their responses in no particular order.

Drawings by: Ray Morgan

LUCY (Cooper B. Handy): He mentioned the project to me more after I sent him some vocals and I was blown away with the amount//variety of artists he had on board~ we’ve worked together before in a similar way. I like how busy he keeps himself with communal projects. For my song on the album he asked me to try a range of vocal registers after I sent him my part, then I sent him higher vocal takes and he blended them in nicely. I sang about the spotted lantern fly

Hotline TNT (Will): Doug sent me the instrumental for this off the bat and made it clear that he wanted a halfway point between Tagabow and TNT, and I think he achieved that. I took a crack at the vocals one afternoon, and I’m happy to say that he and I are at a point in our friendship where he can give me very open feedback, basically told me “this is good but you can do better”. He was right, I went back to the lab and came up with a new melody and lyrics and got the song to where it was always supposed to be. Doug is a collaborator and peer, but also a hero of mine and I was really honored that he asked me to chip in for this record.

Beat Fella: Doug originally reached out to dupontpavilion who then reached out to me because he thought the track fit my vibe. I’m a small Instagram rapper so it was crazy to be invited on such a cool project. I remember Doug sending a picture of himself in the group chat with me and DuPont with his tongue out and that really stuck with me.

Dupontpavilion: Doug brought me in just by hitting me up. I had poste about liking some bands like horse the band and orchid and he messaged me being like "i like your music and im working on something and i see you fw this type of music" and I was like I know you tagabow. I had been calling him tag. he ended up just sending me an instrumental he had made. I thought it was mega fire and i recorded a verse doug was like "that shit weak you gotta change that shit fr fr brodie" thats verbatim wat he said brodie and all and i was like for sure brother so i rerecorded a new verse and he was like "i fw this one od. old was was kind of ass ngl but this one global"

Then i was like this shit acoustic af lemme get beatfella on this cause i fw beat and he works acoustic and shit so i was like you should fucking get beatfella on this i sent doug some beatfella and he liked it so he was like bet but he gotta get on it fast

I sent it to beat and beat was like this is dope and recorded like 7 different verses

Frankly an eps worth of verse in like 3 days just working working working on it crazy.

Cashier (Kylie): Doug texted me asking to collab on a track, which was an immediate yes. I asked him if he had any references to which he replied with 3 of my own songs lol. Doug provided the track- I wrote a melody and lyrics, and me and Jo played guitar on it as well, added some feedback etc. It was very seamless and fast and came naturally, the vision was clear from the track he sent me. One weird decision was not really putting “real” bass and drums in the track which kind of makes it stand out from the rest of the record, as well as it being a very melodic, almost pop song. I’m really grateful for the opportunity to write with him and he was so supportive and encouraging the whole time, so it was pretty easy and beautiful and fun.

Options (Seth Engel): Doug and I made this track after a show I played solo in Philly with Echotracer. We went back to Doug's spot in the warehouse after the show, and he busted out a Casio midi guitar - nylon strings but with a MIDI pickup, and a wild array of funny MIDI sounds. It was super fun watching Doug go thru his sample library and pull beats and samples quickly.

We tracked a bunch of the MIDI guitar and chopped it up until we had something we both liked. Pretty sure I did the ambient layers with a regular electric guitar.

The original version had a sample of "One More Time" by Daft Punk at the end, was super funny and fit nicely. The whole experience felt very playful, didn't feel like either of us were trying too hard to do anything other than have fun and throw stuff at the wall until it stuck.

Tony Bontana: Doug sent me a beat pack after we were speaking about making something together - I wrote to 2 / 4 of the instrumentals that he sent We were both pretty excited about the track. I mixed the song probably about 20 seperate times over a few months and ended up with the version that’s on the mixtape only after sending the stems to Doug did I realize I unintentionally put autotune on one of my vocal layers.

Taurus Judge (Ian): Our song “old irish” started with Doug just texting me up asking if I wanted to jam. He didn’t mention the project at first but explained it when we linked at his practice space. I was stoked because the lineup was just a list of our mutuals and people whose music I love. He showed me some of the stuff he had been working on and this guitar he’d been obsessed with and wanted me to play.

It was this weird Casio guitar with a tape player built in. It looked like it had to be from the 80s by my guess, and I had never seen or heard something like it. Super blown out. Extremely dope but the opposite of the tone I use in our band which pushed me to play things that I wouldn’t normally gravitate towards. You can hear it the first couple seconds of the track.

I improvised with it for like 3 minutes and Doug immediately chopped it up into a song. It was my first take but Doug heard something in it and arranged it into this whole ass song on the spot in like a half hour. Verse, chorus, bridge. Doug works really fast. From there we just took turns doing random overdubs we thought of on the spot: different guitars, amps, feedback, noise, some acoustic, synths, and eventually bass. Doug and I’s rigs are pretty different which helped us get a range of sounds; I play a Jag thru this wimpy old Traynor combo amp from the 70s and Doug plays a strat thru this huge stack and the contrast was really nice to bounce between. We ended the session with this skeleton of a pop song and a longer improvised noisier section that we didn’t super know what to do with. What stood out to me was how different our processes were and how despite that we could make some we both thought was dope. Doug mixes as he goes which I’ve started doing a lot more.

He also showed me what a sans amp was haha I bought one the next day

Over the next couple days we tried to fill in the gaps of the songs. He thought we should get some vox on the poppier part and suggested Gage from Fib who I’ve recorded a bunch at our practice space. I thought that was perfect and suggested Charlie from Fib also come by to add some live drums.

Hooky (Scott): These songs that I’m on were from the past year or two when we were working on the new god of war album

Wed either work on music at the warehouse or in his apartment, most of what I would contribute to any of those song would be a guitar lead or and sequence on his minilogue xd synth, and what always sticks out to me is we get to smoke cigarettes in the warehouse and usually would meet to work on them at like 10 pm and go super late.

Very relaxed setting and not having any goal in mind just making beats and seeing what comes of it, and Doug would chop everything up and make a song out of it.

I love making music with Doug he’s super encouraging and knows exactly when something hits lol

Melaina Kol: I mostly did sound design and provided samples for the song old Irish, it was really fun I’ve never worked with him before.

He kept telling me to add more and more as the process went on.

FearDorian: I had just moved houses, I spent about three days directly after a tour i had been on packing and unpacking, & doug reached out to me about a track on the mixtape.

I was overjoyed to be apart of the world he’s created, funny part is , he probably sent it to me on a wednesday and was like “is it possible to have this done by friday morning?” i had been in a bit of a runt recording, and exhausted from moving but I went to an empty room in my house, sat on the floor of that room for about an hour and just recorded the verse there.

Honestly given the circumstances & if it was anyone else i would have just said no, but I love doug so much & appreciate everything hes done for me (he cleared my first sample ever) i knew i had to record right then,

he told me after that the song was gonna be with rxknephew, so even crazier

Haloplus+: Working on this song was like throwing a ball back and forth but only a few times, trusting and respectful:

I like you, I like you, I like this, ok, I like this, ok, lets go.

Cooking: Ive known Doug for a long time now but this is the first time weve ever worked on something together, it was nice I like working with Doug we're both the same type of fried so it worked out well. I think he just sent me a snip of a.song initially and then we hung out and went ooo this would be cool or oooo that would be cool that kind of thing.

All pretty normal stuff, I think the thing that stands out is that Doug had the ability to organize and wrangle a whole group of people, my self included, that aren't exactly known for being "all there" so to speak. Music's one thing, everyone can do that, but not everyone can execute someshit like this idk.

Toner: It was nothing really crazy though he just sent me a track & i wrote lyrics & a guitar lead over it - i didnt know it was going to be on an album & that was pretty much it!

Her New Knife (Edgar Atencio): I went into recording with this pitch shifted guitar part. We tracked it and looped it and I continued to track different guitar layers. Enough for a form.

Eventually I wanted to try out this baritone guitar Doug had recently built and I used it to make the low guitar hook at the beginning and the end of the song. A fire alarm in the warehouse rang and we cut the session there. A few days later Doug had more or less arranged the track into sections and added these awesome drums and some bass and extra layers. I remember telling him I wanted it to sound like “walking in the city” -not surprising that he knew exactly what I meant by that.

That’s how it felt working with him, everything was very natural, nothing was forced. I wrote a verse, he wrote a verse, we made some final edits, and it was done.

(p.s pitch shifted guitar part was inspired by Delius by Kate Bush)

Morgan Garrett: I think doug first sent me 2 audio files, the beat and maybe the melody. They were separated into 2 files. The percussion track sounded crazy, it was in a really weird timing. The core of the rhythm is all Doug. He just wanted me to do my thing, there wasn’t any direction given although I initially asked, he didn’t want to get in the way. I think I sent back a demo and all the stems as I was working them out, lots of layered vocal takes, some heavily processed electric guitar and maybe bass, and a slew of MIDI orchestral sounds and reverb busses bounced down to audio. I sent him a rough mix but then told him to add anything else to the track. I think there were more audio quirks and noisy sounds added in the mixing stage, maybe some more bass added somewhere too, and I think some moments were chopped and moved around a bit after I handed off my audio to him. It was hard to tell who did what by the end. I think that’s what makes it special.

We didn’t have a lot of back and forth on the track, it really came together seamlessly probably maximum a week, I had two 3 or 4 hour sessions of developing sounds and recording vocals and guitar.

Doug sent me a video of our song playing through an insane speaker and tape machine setup which also included those speakers that are hidden in plastic rocks in someone’s back yard. I think it was during a mixing session or maybe a final production session. I couldn’t wrap my head around the video other than I heard our song playing at what sounded like a crushing volume. It was awesome.

Izzy Camina: Doug sent me a bare bones demo. I sent back an edit with some vocals and new production. After a few weeks the track ended up completely taking on a life of its own, with some of my vocal melodies replaced with synths, new people on it, etc. It evolved enormously. My OG vocal didn’t stick around, but the consistent thread was Doug’s kindness and care and interest in me being involved beyond just my voice, which was liberating. Overall top notch human and a great privilege to be involved in the project.

Doug saw me as a whole person/artist/producer, not just a vocal. That’s a rare experience for me, so it was extremely meaningful, especially as an established TAGABOW fan.

Spirit Of The Beehive (Zack): I didn’t have much to provide considering we were busy finishing the new spirit record and I was fried creatively so I mostly just played 12 string and nylon over a demo Doug already had. We wrote and recorded vocals in the same session. It was nice collaborating and would be cool to do again under less time constraints.

Horse Jumper Of Love (Dimitri): This was January 2025 I drove down to Philly and stayed with Doug and Emily for a couple nights. I had a great few days with Doug, I love hanging out with him. We were driving around Philly in his van. I think Doug had just started doing the custom guitars and we were going back and forth to our buddy Bay's crib who was helping him work on one.

Recording was great at Heather's studio. Doug had everything written and was coaching me. He was not afraid to tell me if I was being pitchy which was very helpful - I had never had someone do that for me. We did the lines until it was totally right. I had always been lazy about vocal takes and this literally changed the way I do it. Now when I do my vocals I think of this experience and I think of Doug telling me to do a line over cus he knew I could do it better. It was one of the best things someone could have done for me because now I don't settle for "good enough" vocal takes but only the best ones.

His work ethic is inspiring.

Full Body 2(Dylan & Cass): We made a few of the tracks a long time ago tracking guitar at his warehouse spot and I didnt know they were still around until i heard them w/ Lucy and Haloplus so it was awesome to hear old forgotten ideas resurface. For heart knower, we worked on that one largely ourselves but we went into Dan Angel's studio with Doug and got to slam the track onto tape and utilize the echo room which was super fun.

Scarlet Rae: Doug sent me “letter and point” as just an instrumental, without Dead Sullivan on it. He wanted to see what I’d come up with before I heard what Boone had done, which I liked because it’s easy to get pulled in a different direction once a melody and lyrics are already there. I sent my verse back, then Doug sent me Boone’s rough vocals. What we’d both come up with was completely different, so I roughly mixed the two together & started mapping out a structure. Boone had written the outro vocals, and we all thought it’d be cool to make the ending more of a call-n-response, so I sang on that too and reversed some bits of the lyrics for some glitchy pieces.

Honestly making music with people I meet online like this is has such a special place in my heart, and always centers me back to why I love music so much. It’s how I continued to stay inspired in high school and made friends with people across the country, so being part of this was truly a pleasure, and genuinely one of the only things I like about the internet.

Greg Mendez: About a year or so ago Doug hit me up about this song that tagabow had done the whole instrumental for and he had done a couple vocal parts and he asked if I wanted to fill in the rest. So we went over to our friend Scoops’ studio and I wrote a melody and lyrics on the spot in front of the mic and within an hour or so it was all tracked.

It was fun, I had never really written vocals in that way before and it’s always sick to work with Doug on something. I didn’t hear it again for like a year and when I did I was like “wait I think I could do better than this” and then recorded an entirely different idea one day before I left for a long tour. It probably wasn’t better. In the end I was like “I hate everything I’ve done” cause that’s just the vibe sometimes, but they ended up combining the two versions during mixing and that is what you hear on the album.

Dead Sullivan: Doug called me to ask about working on some songs together cause he said he was putting together collab record.

He sent me a handful of tracks, one of them being the country western track. I listened to it and had a melody for it in my head so I recorded some vocals, then played a little slide guitar and some lead at the end.

We also wanted to make something together a little more from scratch, so he asked what I wanted and I said maybe something a little slower and bare so I had more room to mess around. I wrote some lyrics and recorded vocals for it, tracked some guitars, then he had Ben play drums. One of the vocal parts was written with a call and response in mind, so Doug had scarlet fill it out. She wrote her own verse on it, did some doubling/harmonies and cool vocal effects on it, and that brought it all together.

A Conversation w/ Horse Jumper of Love, Ten Years After Self-Titled

1:46 PM. I got to the venue about twenty minutes before the band did. Enough time to feel nerveous again and walk around the room a little, figure out where I wanted to be and remind myself that I did in-fact remember how the cameras work.

When the van pulled in Dimitri jumped out almost immediately and came over to say hello. From there everything started moving inside. Cases, amps, drums, ect ect.

Soundcheck started and I began taking photos, working my way around the room while they figured out levels and tried to account for the slapback in a space that big. I always like this part. Before doors, before there is an audience to perform toward, when songs are still being stopped halfway through and somebody is asking for more of something in the monitor. For a little while you get a concert almost entirely to yourself.

There was something especially strange about watching it happen with these songs.

Horse Jumper of Love were here to play their self-titled debut in its entirety, ten years after the record first came out. A record made by three much younger people in Boston, before any of them could have known what those songs were eventually going to mean to people.

Ten years is enough time for a record to start accumulating evidence.

Below in conversation with Dimitri Giannopoulos of Horse Jumper of Love we talk about what survived, what changed, and what happens when you pick up a record you made ten years ago and play the whole thing again.

The anniversary edition has so much physical evidence from that period tucked inside it, old photographs, drawings, handwritten lyrics, tabs, pieces from early tours. Did you always have the instinct that this stuff was worth keeping, or when the ten-year release came up did it become a search through drawers, boxes, hard drives, and other people's apartments to figure out what had somehow survived? And was there anything you found that actually changed the way you remembered that period?

I’m a bit of an emotional hoarder. I kept a lot of straight up trash. It’s relatively organized in several shoeboxes in my room. Each one is for a different era in my life and every so often I go through them to feel a pain in my heart. Just some examples: There’s an old candy wrapper from a chocolate eyeball, a piece of red string, a plastic finger, a bunch of receipts or ticket stubs I’ve kept even though most of the ink has faded. There’s notes of course. I don’t think the stuff is necessarily worth keeping. In fact probably because I hoard so much stuff, it has emotionally stunted me. Part of this album re-issue was about moving on, about going through all that shit with intention so I could finally see the other side of things I never did end up getting closure for. I was accepting that I wouldn't get closure. Nothing changed the way I remember that period but looking back on it with this much time between definitely put it into perspective. I put a lot of emotional weight on people from my past, but it was all me, I was the issue for putting so much meaning onto things.

I noticed a tiny thing while going through old interviews that I wanted to ask about. In that 2016 Allston Pudding piece, the early version of “i love you very much forever” is called “Heathen,” but on the anniversary record that 2013 recording is called “Heather.” Was “Heathen” actually an old title for it, or was that just something that got misprinted somewhere along the way? And now that “Heather” and “i love you very much forever” can actually exist next to each other on the same release, do they still feel like two versions of the same song to you, or have they become two completely different songs that just happen to share DNA?

“Heathen” was the original title. I changed it along the way because I didn’t want it to have a weird religious connotation. Religion played into things a bit then. I was a 19 year old virgin when I wrote it and it’s kind of a horny song, written through an immature lens. I lost my virginity a year later when I was 20 and changed the title to “Heather”. A bit of a melodramatic move..

To me they are two very different songs. I think ILYVMF is a lot cooler. I remember in 2012 when we were playing the song around Boston people really liked it, our friends coming to our shows did at least. I was writing really poppy music. I wanted to be a band like Vampire Weekend or Fleet Foxes when I was a teenager. If you ever find Jamie’s and my high school band, you’ll see what I mean. But then I got really into Swans (specifically ‘Soundtracks for the Blind’), MBV, and Atlas Sound. That changed everything for me.

The whole S/T record was kind of self sabotaging. When people liked what I was doing I wanted to do something else. Maybe I’m a contrarian. That’s why I slowed that shit down and made a raw album that wasn’t poppy anymore and I wanted that to somehow expose the wound childhood leaves on all of us growing up.

There’s also a slightly strange question of what the self-titled record actually is.

The original 2016 release was eight songs and ended with “i love you very much forever.” “Orange Peeler” came into later editions, and now the anniversary edition presents it as track nine. When “Orange Peeler” originally surfaced, you talked about it as an older song that was important because it helped the three of you learn how to play together, even though by then you weren’t sure it really represented the band anymore. Was that history part of why it felt important to keep “Orange Peeler” as part of the record for the anniversary edition rather than returning to the original eight-song version? At this point, does “Orange Peeler” feel like it was always part of the self-titled to you, or can you still remember the version of the album that existed without it?

Orange Peeler was similar to “Heather” in fact I think I wrote those in the same month. I was less embarrassed about it and actually was going to include it on the original release. I sent the album to someone I really admired and looked up to at the time before it was going to be printed to cassette and they told me they liked the album but that Orange Peeler sounded like a “shitty Death Cab for Cutie” song which is really funny but back then that comment burned me and I scratched the whole thing.

I was extremely insecure in my early 20s and relied on a lot of affirmation from friends and girls and had a hard time taking criticism. I’m happy the song stayed on the record though - It was part of my original vision and I should have trusted myself. I was lucky to get a second chance with the 2017 Joy Void release.

“Bagel Breath” is one of my favorite examples of the three of you leaking into each other’s work because the phrase only exists because Dimitri misheard John singing “bagel bread” in a Community College song and then asked if he could steal the mistake. Ten years later, are there other things on this record that began as somebody else’s accident, misunderstanding, or idea and have been absorbed so completely into Horse Jumper that nobody remembers whose they were anymore?

Yes this happened sometimes. The lyric “Spaceman feels good” was a misheard lyric from a Boston band I loved called The Devil and a Penny. Their song “New Song #1” had a lyric that went "Specimen fields, gold.” 

“Ugly Brunette” is a reference to the Kieslowski short film “Talking Heads” where he asks a girl “Who are you?” and “What do you wish for?” and she answers “I’m an ugly brunnette” and “I’d like to have a lovely baby” . I misread the subtitle as “lonely baby.” then thought “lonely child” sounded better. The sample from I Want to Paint Horses and the end of Orange Peeler is also from that short film.

Some of the handwritten material in the anniversary booklet comes from your time working as a museum security guard. You’ve talked before about having to sneakily write things down because you weren’t supposed to have a pen or paper while you were working. Are there particular songs or lyrics on the self-titled that you can trace directly back to something you wrote while standing in one of those rooms? Looking at those notes again now, can you still remember what was happening around you when you wrote them, or has the writing completely outlived the circumstances that produced it? And were you ever actually caught writing something down that eventually became part of a song?

I remember writing the chorus of Bagel Breath in the galleries. “Borrowed my toothbrush” I had started seeing a fellow security guard at the museum. We did a shift together one night then biked straight to my house so she didn’t have any of her things and in the morning she was working again. She used my toothbrush then left. I thought it was really intimate. I was working later on and I wrote the lyric on a piece of scrap paper. I was writing a lot of lyrics about her in the galleries, things were real romantic then. I’d say besides Orange Peeler and Sun Poisoning, all of those songs were written in the galleries.

There’s a bunch of small surreal ones - one that comes to mind isn’t for the S/T but I was writing the songs for “So Divine” around the same time. For the song “Poison” there’s a lyric that goes “I opened my legs so you can crawl through” that came from some little kid running around in the galleries and he kept screaming at his dad: “open your legs so I can go through you daddy” and I just remember thinking that was really weird. I used to write things people said down.

I would get caught a lot by my boss. I used to think that job would have been awesome if you could read a book while you were standing around but now I’m happy you had to be secretive and hide what you were doing. It made it feel kind of risky.

“July 5th” is barely a minute long, and I’ve always been curious about how you decided where something like that belongs on a record. It sits between “Ugly Brunette” and “Bagel Breath,” almost like a little interruption before the album starts moving again. Was it always something you thought of as a complete song, or was it a fragment that you liked enough to leave exactly as it was? And now that you’re performing the record in its entirety, does something that short serve a different purpose onstage than it does sitting between those two songs on the record?

To me it made perfect sense being there and it feels complete because the song is just the poem and the poem is complete. I think it serves a purpose introducing some of the themes of the album. In a way the whole album is kind of based on that poem so it made sense being early on.

Jamie mentioned in an interview last year that “DIRT” is still one of their favorite older songs to play because of the space in it, and that there are nights when a room understands that space and nights when people talk through it and the song doesn’t land quite the same way. I’m curious whether playing the entire self-titled in sequence changes that relationship with the audience. By the time you reach “DIRT,” do you feel like the songs leading up to it have already taught the room how to listen to what you’re doing, or is that something you still have to negotiate every night?

Playing the album through makes that part feel really heavy once we get to it. I used to think I could negotiate with an audience but now I read the room. If we are opening for someone I usually don’t include DIRT in the setlist. If we are headlining I’ll put it on most of the time. I used to, when I was feeling like a little shit and opening for an audience that was not there to see us, play DIRT super quiet and then make it obnoxiously loud for the heavy part. And I’d play other really quiet songs to make it uncomfortable for them, like “oh you came to see a rock show and have fun? Well here’s this instead..”. It never did what I intended to do but I would feel proud that we got up there and played a song like “Stray Dog” or “DIRT” perfectly through a chatting audience.

You’ve talked before about not wanting a live show to be an exact recreation of a recording, and about older songs naturally changing as you develop as musicians. But there’s something strange about dedicating an entire tour to a record that people have spent ten years learning in one very specific form. When you started rehearsing the self-titled front to back again, were there moments where you realized the way you play something now had drifted surprisingly far from what you actually recorded? And when that happened, did you feel any responsibility to move back toward the original arrangement, or does trying to recreate the record too faithfully almost defeat the purpose of playing it ten years later?

I view recording only as a snapshot of how the song is at that time. If you continue to be a band inevitably you will move away from the recording as time goes on and you play more. I usually never listen to a track I’ve recorded ever again after it’s out, your muscle memory of the song changes through the years in the same way your normal memory changes. I listened to the S/T for the first time again only when we got the remastered version back from Greg Obis and I was like damn ok we’ve strayed from this quite a bit. We play Bagel Breath faster, we play Spaceman slower. I forgot there was this second detuned guitar in the choruses of Orange Peeler, etc. and I think my voice sounds a lot different now. As long as the core of the song is still there that’s all that matters. If you’re basing your performance on a recording you will lose the true human/ spiritual element of what it is to play an instrument and perform. I think of someone like Jonathan Richman/ The Modern Lovers - I feel like that is a dude who has probably never played a song the same exact way in his life because he’s focused on true expression.

TAGABOW Presents: "Gestures Been", Played Again for One Night Only

In Greenpoint, TAGABOW opened the night with five songs from gestures been, a record Doug Dulgarian has not spent much time thinking about for years. Horse Jumper of Love were there celebrating ten years of their self-titled record, but before that anniversary set started, TAGABOW briefly brought their own past back into the room.

The set had only been practiced a few days earlier. Evan Moffitt, who played bass on the record, was back onstage, and for a little while TAGABOW looked less like the band as it exists now and more like a version of it that had been sitting untouched somewhere since 2018. “fake twenty,” “houseplant,” “jadakiss,” “yawner,” “daytime europa stuff.” Songs made when the project occupied a much smaller world, now being played inside Warsaw to people who may not have found TAGABOW until years after this wasreleased.

The night before the show, Doug told me they did not plan on playing the set again. So before any of it happened, the night already felt precious. gestures been came out eight years ago. The people around the record changed, the band changed, the rooms got bigger. Then, for a few days, they had to go back and figure out how those songs lived in their hands again, just to play them once and put them away.

Below is a conversation with Doug about what its like to perform gestures been after all these years.

You said you practiced these songs only a few days before the show. Did you approach it like relearning old TAGABOW songs, or did having Evan there make it feel more like temporarily stepping back into the band that actually made gestures been?

Good question. I think it was all pretty natural, Evan knew the roots and we could kind of fill out the rest from there. Definitely felt like the same band that recorded it all. 

When you only have a few days to relearn something you made eight years ago, how much do you actually try to figure out what you originally did versus just trusting whatever your hands want to do with it now?

A lot of it is kind of approximation. Music is weird man, it’s so specific to so many separate times. Life is like that. I could never be the same person I was in 2017 again. So in that way it’s like we’re just playing these old songs as modern versions of ourselves. In that way it’s an even totally different thing.

When you set out to play this set, were you trying to make the set sound like gestures been in 2018, or was it inevitably gestures been filtered through everything TAGABOW has become since then?

Very much the latter. I don’t think we really have a choice on that.

Of the five songs you brought back, was there one that surprised you by feeling much better or more natural to play now than you expected it to?

yeah yawner felt very very natural to play. It was utilizing a lot of mechanics I would continue to use for years. Funny to think these simple songs were the framework for the rest of my music making life but they definitely were.

When you relearned “fake twenty,” were there any choices in the writing or arrangement that immediately felt like early versions of things TAGABOW still does now, or did it mostly feel like a language you’d stopped using?

I keep answering your questions one before- a sure sign that you’re a great interviewer. But yes, definitely framework.




“houseplant” starts with these really specific physical details about another person, then moves into the plant in the bathtub and window, and by the end you’re calling yourself the houseplant and looking at the sun as something temporary. Coming back to the song all these years later, do you still remember the actual people, places, and circumstances those details came from, or have parts of it become detached from whatever originally happened?

Yes definitely. There was a house venue that kept a large houseplant in the bathtub all the time. And I was at this show just feeling really weird and alien to everybody else. That’s kind of the gist of it.

With “yawner,” do you still remember what “put on your jazz voice” was referring to? It feels so much like something somebody actually said or did that I’ve always wondered whether there’s a specific person or moment buried in that line.

Not at all. I think I was referring to myself code switching trying to make new friends.

When gestures been came out, those songs existed in a much smaller world. What did it feel like to play them all these years later in a room like that, with that many people there to actually receive them?

Dude very weird. At the end of the day, I think the special part was playing with Evan again, and with Ben on these old songs, and with PJ who is now a staple in making music for me. It was really cool to be honest. A full circle thing.

You said you don’t plan on ever playing this set again. Did knowing that from the start change the way you experienced the show, especially with Evan back onstage and that older version of TAGABOW only really existing again for that one night?

Yeah totally. A one and done was cool. It was like well, we just gotta represent the old shit once, and we’re done. And in that way, it was like a level of a video game. Playing new songs is so much scarier. Because it’s like yo this is who I am NOW. And it’s weirdly definitive. Even tho we all change. Even tho you won’t be that person in a few years. It’s weird to acknowledge the person you are right now. Because that’s the most important one. It’s relieving maybe to think that it’s also completely composed of all these former versions of ourselves. That’s cool

Thanks Will!! 

Aren’t We Amphibians Talk Ballroom Emo & Childhood Friendships

I first met the boys in Aren’t We Amphibians back in April when they came through New York with Ben Quad. I immediately fell in love with them as people. They are an incredibly welcoming and endearing group right off the rip, which is nice because I have a tendency to give people every bit of myself pretty quickly.

This time they got into town early. The venue wasn’t even open yet and they were going to get food, so Josh shared his location with me and I wandered into the cafe about ten minutes later.

After eating, we walked up the block to a camera store that had a photobooth tucked inside and piled in to take a bunch of stupid photos together. There is something about Aren’t We Amphibians that makes most things feel like this. Three people who have known each other long enough that the band sometimes feels secondary to the fact that they are genuinely just friends who like being around each other.

A little later we were talking about my past addiction to Rust before falling into a RuneScape rabbit hole. This tracks. Brandon can apparently talk about Pokémon and basketball forever. Josh can disappear into MMOs and JRPGs. Tyler seems perfectly happy hearing about all of it.

Eventually I asked Josh to write me a setlist. He did. Then we walked out toward the stage because they actually had a show to play.

Near the end of their set I emptied everything out of my pockets side stage, grabbed my camcorder and ran up to stage dive.

All night I watched people go over heads, disappear into the crowd, fall down and immediately have hands reaching toward them. There are shows where a crowd feels like something you have to protect yourself from and shows where the crowd seems to understand that everybody in the room is responsible for everybody else. This was the latter.

Below are some questions I asked the guys leading up to the show.

You've called what you do "ballroom emo," which sounds like a joke until you put it next to Parade! Parade! and this idea of taking some pretty bleak experiences and turning them into something celebratory. When did "ballroom emo" first get said, and was there ever actually an idea behind it, or have people now spent more time analyzing the phrase than you did inventing it?  

[Brandon] - I remember the term coming up in some of our early band practices as an observation that most of our music was in ¾ time. It was also around the time when everyone in the scene was discussing waves of emo and attaching themselves to specific styles so we thought it was funny to make up our own.

One of the earliest stories I found about you is that Las Vegas show where somebody started reading a children's book between bands and somehow the entire room got invested in it. Then years later you make Parade! Parade!, and the cover itself looks like it could have been pulled from some strange old children's book. Is that completely coincidental, or has that kind of children's-book imagery, where something can look innocent or playful while something stranger is happening underneath it, always appealed to you?  

[Josh] - I would say it’s pretty coincidental. Honestly for the visual we really wanted it to be drawn but look like it still exists so that’s where the paper cutouts of all characters came from. I think there is something to be said for the vibe of the art reflecting the general vibe of the album though! Little more playful and happy etc. etc.

[Brandon] - We also really like the album art for folie a deux by fall out boy and wanted to pay homage to that style.

Brandon, I came across this conversation where you went pretty deep on basketball, creepypasta, the SCP Foundation, horror movies and video games. Josh and Tyler, which of Brandon’s rabbit holes have you had to hear the most about over the years? And does everybody in this band have one subject where the other two know not to get them started?

[Tyler] - Most definitely Pokemon and basketball. Brandon recently got into the WNBA and now I know a significant amount more about it than I ever thought I would. I would say Josh has a special interest in MMO’s because everytime we talk games it’s always old school runescape, final fantasy 14 or some other JRPG. I love hearing about the guy’s interests.

Because Parade! Parade! is pulling from things that had already happened rather than documenting the present, were there photographs, old texts, voice memos, demos, notebooks or anything else you actually went back to while making it? Or is the record entirely built from memory?  

[Josh] - Entirely built from memory! Although I do wish there was something like that for the songs just for the archival purposes. We do have a ton of the voice memos from the writing process which are fun to go and look back upon sometimes.  

Is there a song in the catalog that the three of you completely disagree about? One person's favorite that another person would happily never play again, or something you almost didn't release that has somehow become important to people?  

[Brandon] - That has been a hot topic actually in the band because of our song mother nature. It's one of those songs where we stopped playing it for a while cause it felt very different from our newer stuff but now we are at the point where it is our most popular song and we kind of have to play it.

[Tyler] - If I had to lose a tooth to never play Mother Nature again I would pull it out myself.  



What's the oldest unfinished Aren't We Amphibians idea that still gets brought up? Is there some riff, demo or half-song that's been following you around for years because nobody can quite figure out what to do with it?  

[Brandon] - Perhaps unrelated but I have been pitching the idea of covering a specific pop song for years now and I probably will continue to pitch it til I die.

Josh, you've said you met Brandon on literally the first day of second grade and were pretty much inseparable after that. Do either of you actually remember that first day, or has "the first day of second grade" just become the official story because you know that's when it happened? What were the two of you like when you first became friends?  

[Josh] - It actually was the first day of second grade! I had just moved to a new school in a new part of San Diego and I knew absolutely nobody. We both were in the back of the line in the morning while waiting for the first day and I just asked Brandon if he wanted to be friends and he said yes.

[Brandon] - I remember it the same way! Josh and I definitely got into trouble sometimes but we were always a couple of jokesters who liked to stay inside and play video games all day.

You three have known each other long enough that your families knew this friendship years before Aren't We Amphibians existed. What do your parents make of the fact that the kids who were constantly hanging around together are now disappearing for weeks at a time to tour in a band? Was there a point where one of them realized, "Oh, they're actually doing this"?  

[Brandon] - Our parents have always been very very supportive of us and Josh was already considered part of the Cunningham family long before any of this music stuff happened. When the band started we all were living together too so it really is just a family operation.

Tyler, in that early interview, Josh and Brandon give this whole origin story and your contribution is basically, "I'm just the bassist." They also said they genuinely expected you to say no when they asked you to join. Why did they think you'd say no, and what made you say yes?  

[Tyler] - I have no clue why they would think I wouldn’t want to, maybe because I didn’t do much of anything to begin with. I agreed to join because at that point in my life (senior year of high school) I didn’t know what my purpose was. The idea of playing music,especially in a band, brought me that purpose I was looking for and I haven’t regretted the decision once since.

Josh, you were involved with improv theater in high school, and a lot of musicians have to learn how to actually be comfortable in front of a crowd. With improv, you were already putting yourself in front of people without even knowing exactly what you were going to say next. Do you think doing that so young made becoming a frontman and performing live easier for you, or did playing music in front of people feel like a completely different kind of vulnerability?  

[Josh] - Yeah absolutely it made it an easier transition for me. If I never did improv I would probably be very quiet and reserved in between songs but I think it made me way more comfortable on stage and talking to an audience without any sort of plan. But it still is at least a different kind of vulnerability, especially with playing emo music. 

Distorting Time W/ Radiator Hospital

I reached the venue just as a car pulled up and Sam stepped out. He said hello before he had finished gathering his things, and within a few minutes we were walking up the street for pizza. Soundcheck was still an hour away, so nothing needed to happen immediately. Somewhere between the venue and the pizza place, we discovered that we had both been born in Michigan.

I had brought him a seven-minute loop cassette as a gift, hoping it might eventually find its way into something. This led us into talking about four-track recorders. Sam still uses the same one he bought in high school, a machine he found at a yard sale for fifty dollars and now carries onstage with him. Later, he showed me the cards he keeps with each cassette. Every one is marked with the precise knob levels needed for the songs it holds. Tiny handwritten instructions for rebuilding an entire arrangement in real time.

Before soundcheck, we walked over to the photo booth. I never like giving too much direction inside those things. The booth already controls the light, the timing, and the four small chances it gives you, so it feels better to leave something to accident, my only request was he take his 4-track in with him. For the final frame of the second strip, I climbed inside with him.

We talked about old remarks that I came across while doing some research. At an early house show, after too many crowdsurfers kept landing on the stage, Sam apparently declared, “No more flying people.” Years later, when an interviewer gave him the word “guitar,” he replied, “Boring.” Both comments made more sense after spending a little time with him. There is a playfulness to the way he speaks about music, but also a restlessness. Nothing seems too sacred to be questioned, laughed at, recorded backward, or rebuilt into something else.

In the minutes before the set, I stayed behind the curtain while he gathered himself. Gear switched on. Cables were checked. The correct cassette was placed into the four-track. Sam adjusted its levels using the notes written on the card, then when his desk clock he brought with him showed it was time he told the front-of-house he was ready.

The curtain began opening almost as soon as the words left his mouth.

I made a few photographs from the side of the stage before slipping into the crowd. During the first few songs, a question internally seemed to move slowly from person to person: are you going to stand there, or are you going to dance? More of the room began giving in. Sam carried the same joyful energy he had while walking around for pizza and sitting inside the photo booth. He was going to dance. He was going to enjoy himself whether the room followed or not.

Before Distorting Time, you considered allowing these songs to exist under a different name. I have struggled with a similar impulse in my own work, wanting things to have separate identities before eventually recognizing the thread connecting them. What changed that made you hear these songs as part of Radiator Hospital again? Was there a particular night, sound, or physical sensation when the project seemed to switch back on?

Well all the songs for the LP I actually made specifically after I decided it was going to be an RH album. For several years prior, I was writing songs with the idea fhat I was gonna maybe try something different, but once I scrapped that, it was pretty easy to switch back into RH mode, with all my new kind of ideas and attack plans in place.

Can’t Make Any Promises captured Radiator Hospital as a four-piece, while Distorting Time was made primarily alone, even though you still describe the other members as irreplaceable. When you are recording without them, what remains present in the room? Do you hear their instincts, anticipate their reactions, or carry certain habits that could only have developed through playing together?

Well, that album is actually only about half with the band and half with just me. And pretty much all of the lyrics are about the band itself breaking up. I played with the same lineup for 10 years, even though before/during/after that it was always kind of a solo project. So i certainly would write to their playing when I was playing with them, but it was incredibly freeing to just make an album by myself knowing that I could recreate it myself without other musicians. They are irreplaceable because I wasn't gonna keep doing a live band RH with different people, which ultimately led me to my new live performance path.

There is something strange about returning to the four-track connected to the earliest Radiator Hospital recordings and having it become not only the center of the new album, but another body onstage carrying the instruments and voices that are no longer physically there. When did that machine stop feeling like a way backward and reveal itself as the way forward? Has the studio swallowed the live show, or have you simply exchanged human chaos for the possibility that one small machine could ruin the entire night?

Last fall I was asked to go on tour with the band Saintseneca. I was initially just going to play solo guitar, typical singer/songwriter style which I've done many times before. But then I had the idea to try the tape machine thing, and it worked really well. I initially only planned to do it for half my set, but then i just went crazy from there. It honestly only ever felt completely natural, and i wasn't really thinking of it as a throwback or a future thing, just a present thing.

A cassette forces every sound to occupy a physical strip of time. It can be rewound, slowed down, damaged, recorded over, or simply run out. The album was also written and recorded within a relatively short period. Did working quickly on that particular format make time feel less like the subject of the record and more like one of its instruments, while preserving the moment before you could question or polish it away?

Sure :) I love working quickly and to a deadline, I think i end up making better stuff that way. And recording to tape and with just four tracks only helped to simplify and streamline what i was up to.

You have said that you could never have made this record at another point in your life. What is present in Distorting Time that the younger person holding the same four-track would not have known how to make, leave alone, or understand? After doing this for nearly half your life, what has become genuinely easier, and what has become harder because you can now recognize your own escape routes before taking them?

Well I definitely am better at recording, like the sounds are technically captured better, but that's not really what i meant. I guess i always was making home recordings and thinking about how i would either play them stripped down, or with a rock band. And now I've found this new way which isn't either of those. So i'm just making my songs my way. It's still hard to write a bridge so i usually skip those :)

In “Wall Between Us,” some of the distance is blamed on Father Time and Mother Nature, but then you ask who actually laid the bricks. Were you thinking about the difference between distance that forms naturally and distance that people actively construct, then blame on the passing years? When you sing about living the old you down, does that mean escaping an earlier self, accepting him, or simply learning which parts of him cannot be outrun?

That song is about when a friendship just drifts apart, not for any bad blood or ill will. Like it just kind of fades away even though both people still think fondly of each other. And the part about living the old me down is partly about making new RH music, and partly about just always wanting to be better and improve myself and learn from my mistakes.

The album begins with “Can You See the Future?” and ends with “Distorting Time.” It feels like a movement from trying to look ahead to admitting that our view of time is unreliable in every direction. Was that arc intentional, and where does the present tense exist between those two songs?

The arc and title of the record was not intentional, after a while it sort of started becoming aparrent and i leaned into it. 

Years ago, when somebody asked you about the guitar, your immediate response was “boring.” On this record it has to sit beside keyboards, bass, drum machines, manipulated tape, and all these other possible textures. What did you have to make the guitar compete with before it became strange enough to interest you again?

Honestly the most fun I have been having with guitar lately is recording to tape backwards. You can play really bad and it still sounds cool! 

Earlier Radiator Hospital records sometimes used fictional characters or invented events to carry emotionally truthful material, but the project now contains more than fifteen years of actual history. Does fiction become more useful as the biography gets heavier, or harder to hide inside? With “Wildman Dance” looking toward an artist who kept working into his nineties and “Ballad of Big Nose George Parrott” reaching backward into your own family history, were those figures helping you measure inheritance, longevity, or the distance between the person you came from and the person you may become?

I love embodying someone else and writing from different perspectives.

Those 2 people and stories were just kind of branching off points to really write things about myself or people i know.

This record moved between a lot of different spaces. It began at home, was partially finished in a professional studio, and includes songs that first reached people through Patreon. Then the official Bandcamp credits end with political statements that are much more direct than the songs themselves. After all these years, has maintaining control over how the work is made and shared also given you the freedom to decide when a song should remain ambiguous and when something needs to be said plainly?

Actually none of the songs on the LP were from patreon, but i did put out a bunch of songs that way that the label is gonna put on an exclusive tape. Those are the songs that are a little more trying to do something different than RH. As for being plainly political, it's hard because ultimately the kind of music i write is really simple pop songs, and it's hard to not sound trite or heavy handed. I try to make my beliefs and politics clear in my everyday actions. I'm always trying to make something meaningful within the fine parameters of a simple song.

A Conversation W/ Greg Mendez About Songwriting & Stillness

Greg pulled up in his car and greeted me before even putting it in park. There was no big arrival, no entourage, Just a car, a few pieces of gear, and Greg moving things inside while I took some photos. It felt fitting for someone whose songs often seem to begin the same way, inside something ordinary enough that you might miss it if you were looking too hard for a dramatic entrance.

As he sat on a folding chair with this brownish grey Casio balanced on his lap, I couldn’t help but find myself thinking about the room itself. Twenty-three years earlier to the month, Elliott Smith played what would become his last New York show on this same stage. It wasn't that Greg reminded me of him, It was that they seemed to share the same quiet gravity. The ability to stand alone on a stage with nothing more than a guitar and a handful of songs, and pull everyone in the room to complete silence.

It had been a while since I’d seen a soundcheck that easy. He played a song once, asked the sound person how it felt, agreed with the answer, and moved on. No second guesses. No long negotiation with the room. Just a small adjustment, a nod, and the sense that the song would either hold or it wouldn’t. It reminded me of one of the questions I’d been sitting with before the show. Listening to Greg talk about writing, he’d almost never described himself as searching for songs. Watching soundcheck, it felt the same way. Nothing forced, nothing overworked. Just small adjustments until the songs settled comfortably into the room.

Around six, his wife and sister showed up and surprised him with cookies, as if their mere presence was not already enough of a gift. I spent the rest of the night in the green room with them, watching the kind of teasing only family can get away with. Sweet, casual, precise. The kind of love that hides inside jokes because saying it plainly would ruin the rhythm.

Outside, while we were standing around, a girl wandered over to bum a cigarette and asked if he’d play “Gum Trash.” He smiled and told her he couldn’t. She paused for a moment, then asked about “Sweet 16” instead, explaining that she’d gone to rehab when she was sixteen and that the song had stayed with her ever since. It’s interesting how naturally songs become placeholders for parts of people’s lives. She wasn’t really asking for “Sweet 16.” She was handing him a memory that happened to have his name attached to it.

Five minutes before the set, we stepped outside again so he could have a smoke. On the way back in, I asked if he was okay with flash while he was onstage. He told me not to worry and that I could do whatever I wanted. As we walked toward the stage, I asked if he had written out a set list. He said he would figure it out when he got up there. At one point, someone sneezed during a song, and without breaking the shape of it, Greg slipped in a perfectly timed “bless you.” The crowd laughed softly, but the quiet stayed intact. It was less of an interruption as it was proof of how closely everyone was listening.

A lot of people discovered your music through your self-titled record, which almost creates the illusion that your story starts there. I’m curious what it’s been like watching people work backward through years of songs. Have those older records started to feel different now that they’ve become part of a larger conversation?

Well there are definitely people who still think the s/t is my first, which is fine by me to be honest. I’m happy if anyone listens to any of it in any capacity. It’s been cool to see people connecting more with the older ones too, my relationship with them is pretty distant at this point but I still can feel the songs when I play them live.

One thing that struck me is that you almost never describe yourself as searching for ideas. You describe noticing them. Then, once a song arrives, you seem incredibly disciplined about shaping it. It made me wonder if those are really the same instinct. Is writing mostly about learning to notice things, and editing about protecting what made you notice them in the first place?

I think I just try to do all the searching and shaping unconsciously, maybe noticing is just unconscious searching. I think our minds do a lot more than we realize or can control, and I think I am more drawn to writing about the world than writing about my idea of the world. Obviously it’s impossible to fully disconnect from my idea about things but when I try to let myself be as open ended as possible that’s when the real shit comes forward. I don’t tend to come up with things that I like or things that surprise me when I’m limited by too much self awareness and control of the process. I guess that is my awareness of the process.

When people ask about Philadelphia, you often answer with intersections, shopping centers, or places you’re passing through rather than neighborhoods themselves. Listening to your songs, they also seem to happen in those same kinds of in-between places, sidewalks, parking lots, hallways, outside someone’s apartment. It made me wonder whether your memory works geographically, or whether it’s really movement that sticks with you.

Yeah maybe it’s movement that sticks with me. So much happens in the in-between places, it can be hard to add up because a lot of times they don’t feel obviously connected but, how much of our lives do we spend in parking lots, intersections, shopping centers? Maybe more than we realize. It’s as real as anything else. I also think I was born in maybe the first generation where a lot of our experience is fractured and not really totally tied to a particular physical place, I feel like a lot of the time I’m only truly present in a space when I’m moving. There are so many distractions now it’s very hard to be there for stillness.

Beauty Land almost sounds like a destination, but the record seems much more interested in ordinary moments than extraordinary ones. It made me wonder if beauty, for you, is something that’s already there waiting to be noticed, or whether paying close enough attention is what makes something beautiful in the first place.

Yeah I mean I do think beauty is a perception and a matter of persective, eye of the beholder or whatever. If you go in thinking something is ugly that’s probably what you’ll see. Maybe it’s a matter of noticing but also I think it’s a matter of having an open and neutral view when you go in. And sometimes it’s the surroundings that give things their weight more than the actual thing, like a flower growing up out of a crack in a parking lot.

You’ve said you usually care about how something sounds before you’re worried about exactly what it means, and your songs often leave a surprising amount unsaid. I wonder if those instincts are connected. Have you found that meaning has a way of revealing itself over time, both for you and for the listener, rather than needing to be pinned down immediately?

Yeah definitely, I usually have no idea what a song means to me until it’s finished, or sometimes even long after it’s finished. I feel like this is the surest way for me to be honest. If I go in trying to say something in particular, I’m more likely to end up being dishonest, even if it’s just in the sense that the thing I’m trying to say isn’t really something that I need to be saying. I’ve never felt that way about a song that I let write itself. It’s also just more exciting to me to just see what comes out instead of having a concept and then trying to execute it.

I remember reading about you separating your studio from your home because it became difficult to rest in a place where you were always making things. It made me wonder whether that boundary changed the songs themselves, or if it mostly changed your relationship with being creative. You also once said you don’t really trust comfort creatively. Do you think artists sometimes mistake struggle for the thing that’s making the work good?

Well I haven’t made anything in the new space yet, so I’ll have to get back to you on what kind of difference it makes. I have no idea and that is intriguing to me. I don’t trust comfort as far as, I think it’s important to always push myself when I’m making something, if it’s feeling totally easy it means I’m not pushing myself to do my best. If we’re talking about the myth of like, artists struggling personally and it tying into their brilliance, I think that’s probably mostly bullshit. If anything I think people can make great things in spite of their struggles, not because of them. There is something to be said for experiencing the good and bad in life, but I think I’m usually primed to do my best when things are pretty good and I’m feeling good.

Earlier we talked about the idea of noticing, and it made me curious about whether being noticed changes that process. You’ve spent nearly twenty years paying close attention to the world around you, and now there are far more people paying close attention to your work. Has that kind of recognition changed what you notice, or has it mostly changed what you trust is worth noticing in the first place?

I’d like to say that it hasn’t changed anything but i think anyone who says that is either lying or actually hasn’t noticed how it’s changed. What the actual effect is, I can’t say for sure because I have no way to A/B it. My perspective is always shifting for so many reasons.

Is it for better or for worse? Who knows. I still do just try to following the feeling and make something that I believe is worthwhile, because that’s the only thing I can do with certainty. The idea of what an audience wants or expects from me is just a projection.

There is something you’ve said before about not wanting to expose people in your songs. Listening to “Maria,” what struck me wasn’t just that the other person isn’t made into the villain, but that the song seems just as interested in your own limitations and what can’t be repaired. That feels true across a lot of your writing. Even when relationships end painfully, your songs rarely seem interested in assigning blame. Has writing that way changed how protective you feel toward the real people inside those songs, or even toward the version of yourself who wrote them?

Yeah maybe?

Or maybe it’s the other way around. Probably some combination of both to be honest. I kinda think it’s rude to expose real people in songs, I don’t want to use music as a weapon, and also I think i just find it more interesting to look at a broader picture in a song, I like to try to find the place of an impartial narrator. I’m human like anyone else so in my life I find myself assigning blame and making villains as much as the next person but eventually I have to take a step back from that because otherwise it just eats at you until you turn into a gnarled ball of hate, excuses, and resentments. I’ve had enough of that in my life at this point.

Very Big In Sheboygan: An interview w/ Ben Quad

Edgar and I exchanged numbers a few days before the show, just to make the day feel less like chance. He kept calling me “bb,” casual, disarming, the kind of shorthand that drops the walls immediately, the same way I tend to move with people until they give me a reason not to. I got to Elsewhere around 2 p.m., gear already making its way onto the stage. I found Emily first, the only familiar face, and we talked for a bit until I spotted Edgar up on stage getting ready for soundcheck. He came down, introduced himself properly, and from there the day just started to unfold.

At some point, this girl Lexi ended up backstage, talking to Sam and then started telling me about knowing them from small town college parties, watching it all click into place now. It felt almost parental, like pride without ownership, just witnessing the scale shift in real time. That energy carries into everything, the show, the conversations, even this interview. Nothing overly polished, nothing forced, just a continuation of being around them, asking questions the same way you would in a room where everyone already feels let in.

Backstage, right before everything tipped into motion, Edgar lifted his shirt, just casually, like it was already understood, and Sam followed without a word. No explanation, just instinct. Edgar looked at me and said come on, and it didn’t feel optional or weird, just part of whatever this was. So I did. All of us standing there, touching stomachs like it meant something, or maybe like it didn’t need to mean anything at all, just a small, absurd ritual before stepping into something louder.

I remember joking that their walk out song should be something by Riff Raff, half serious, half not expecting anything to come of it. But when it was time, they actually came out to “Tip Toe Wing in My Jawwdinz’, and it caught me off guard in the best way. It felt aligned with everything else, loose, unfiltered, a little chaotic but intentional underneath it.

When you think back to the earliest version of what you’re doing now, not the refined or intentional version, but the really scrappy, uncertain one, what did it feel like you were chasing at that point, and do you feel like that impulse has stayed the same or shifted into something else over time? 

[Sam] All we wanted to do is make music that means something to someone, ourselves included. That hasn’t changed one bit.

There’s that gap between being seen and actually being understood, and I’m wondering which of those feels closer to what you’re experiencing right now, and when people come up to you and point to specific songs that hit them in a real way, what is that moment like for you, especially when their reading of it either lines up with what you were going through or drifts somewhere completely different

[Edgar] I think we experience both of those sides fairly evenly. It truly feels awesome when someone clocks the lyrical meaning of our songs and comes up to us to talk about their similar experiences. On the other hand, we’re fully aware that our music sits in a lane where it often gets misconstrued as breakup music.

In a way, we do write our lyrics in a more open ended fashion so that there is more room for interpretation. I’m firmly in the camp that I’m fine with our music resonating with people in different ways.

I was side stage watching Lexi during your set in NYC, knowing she’s been there since the early basement shows, it made me curious what it feels like for you to look out and see someone who’s witnessed that whole arc, from small rooms to a space like Elsewhere, does it still feel surreal in those moments?

[Sam] It’s one of the best feelings in the world to share those moments with old friends. Surreal isn’t a bad word to use but I’d compare it more to a feeling of accomplishment. A full circle kind of feeling.

And when you think about that progression, does it feel like the full stretch of time it actually took to get here, or does it collapse into something that feels a lot faster in retrospect?

[Sam] Retrospect almost always feels faster in these instances. I feel like it was just yesterday we were scrambling to play whatever bar show came our way.

There’s this push and pull across the record where things feel both really immediate and also kind of distant at the same time, like you’re inside the moment but also watching it happen, how did you approach balancing that feeling when you were writing

[Edgar] To be completely honest, I think the push and pull was just a natural product of the overall album’s creation. I’d like to think Wisher is a window into how we were living our lives at that time. We basically sat down and wrote a collection of songs that captured this chapter of our lives. Maybe it’s an age thing that makes us want to reflect on the past but also seize the opportunity to live in the moment.

In All Your Luck, the repeated promise “Leave all the details up to me” sounds like a coping mechanism as much as devotion. When you wrote that, did it feel comforting, controlling, or both and who is the “me” speaking?

[Sam] Funny enough, I think it was actually Edgar who had written that part of the chorus. Edgar and I write a majority of the lyrics together as he has a lot of little melodies floating around in his head while he writes his guitar parts. I had the first half of the chorus down and he came up with those tag lines at the end. It’s all just meant to be symbolic of devotion and the willingness to help take any kind of weight off of your partner.

Classic Case of Guy on the Ground repeats “Are we having fun” like an anxious chant. Did you intend that as crowd-participation, self-interrogation, or social commentary and what did you not want it to be read as?

[Sam] When writing it, it definitely had more of a condescending tone if I’m being honest. This song was meant to be a “told you so” moment. My favorite part about music is that it can be read in anyway. This song is pretty straight forward too. As long as it’s not played at an RNC, you’re fine interpreting it anyway you want.

A tour can hinge on the people behind the scenes, whether it’s the driver, the merch person, or the tour manager. Bringing someone like Emily into the fold, who can handle all of those roles and still keep things calm, feels like a rare win. Do you remember what it was like the first time they got in the van with you, how that initial dynamic clicked or took shape?

[Edgar] The first time we met Em was actually last year the night before our tour with Free Throw started. She’s goofy and awkward like us so she fit in pretty much immediately with our camp. Super early on, she was already going above and beyond her role without us even asking. E.g. she learned to drive with a trailer at the beginning of that tour and has taken the bulk of the driving duties since then. Having someone like her on the team makes things so much more fun and easy and we’re so, so grateful to have her on.

You’ve described a workflow where many lyrics came together rapidly during early tracking on Wisher, which songs had complete lyric drafts and which were still being written right up to final takes?

[Sam] The only two songs that were fully written before we traveled to the studio were Painless and Classic Case, and It’s Just a Title was almost done by then. Once we got to the studio we spent the first two weeks writing lyrics while drums and guitar were being recorded. The only song not done by final takes was Very Big in Sheboygan, which we wrote a good amount of on that last day. We were stuck on it the whole time and it took that fire under us to get it done. Funny how that works, as it’s now one of my favorites from the album.

You recorded in New Jersey with a producer you hadn’t previously made a full-length with; what was the single most consequential choice that changed a song’s arrangement (instrument swap, amp choice, synth decision)?

[Edgar] Like Sam brought up before though, Sheboygan was the last song that really came together on the record. The initial draft started out very pop punk-coded (in fact, don’t tell them but the working title for the song was “Koyo”). I remember that was the song we were workshopping the most as a group with Jon.

We just had so much fun adding sugary hooks and weird little synth layers all along the song. Jon has such an amazing ear for that kind of stuff. I think it really took a life of its own on those last two days. Everything from the synths to the lyrics and vocal cadences was a product of the studio.

Comfort in the Quiet, An Interview with Racing Mount Pleasant

I got to the venue and immediately understood that winter was not done with us yet. It was cold in that way that makes your teeth feel involved. I stood outside waiting for Anna, stamping my feet and trying to remember why I ever thought carrying so many cameras in February was a good idea. She let me in just as the band was walking onstage to start soundcheck, which felt like slipping into a movie halfway through the opening scene.

I dumped my bags in the green room, loaded a roll of film into the Pentax, hoping my fingers were still warm enough to work properly, and went straight to the stage to start shooting some test frames. I climbed up to the balcony, leaned over the rail, and fired off a few fisheye shots, trying to get a sense of how warped I could make the room before it stopped feeling honest.

After soundcheck wrapped, we regrouped backstage and talked for a bit, nothing urgent, just pleasantries. At some point I decided it was extremely important that we go to a photo booth up the street, everyone agreed. Halfway there, we stepped into what can only be described as a winter puddle of unknown depth. Shoes soaked instantly. No going back.

We made it to the photo booth, did the thing, waited for the photos, and then found out the machine had jammed on the group before us. No photos. The band had already migrated to a bar, so I walked over carrying the bad news. That was when I noticed, with a mix of relief and disbelief, that there was another photo booth inside the bar right next to the venue.

So I delivered the bad news, we shrugged, and did it all over again. After that, we went up the street and ate hot dogs like it was a necessary part of the ritual, then rushed back to the venue just in time for them to take the stage. Wet shoes, film loaded, night officially in motion.

Before sitting down for this interview, I reached out to Andrew Bishop, Chair of Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation at the University of Michigan, where the band first took shape. I asked him from his perspective as an educator, what distinguished Racing Mount Pleasant during their time at U of M, and how do you see those early qualities reflected in the band they have become.

In response, Bishop shared the following:

“Racing Mount Pleasant is one of the most imaginative groups of young musicians and students I have had the pleasure of witnessing in years. They bring a uniquely expansive perspective to music, drawing from deep folk traditions and far beyond, all brought to life by remarkable musicians from across a wide range of stylistic backgrounds.”

The decision to change the band name came after the album was already taking shape, and the name itself came from a misread highway sign. Once Racing Mount Pleasant became the name attached to the work, did it retroactively change how you heard the songs or understood what the record was holding? On a practical level, did that shift also change how you thought about presenting the band to new audiences versus people who had followed you as Kingfisher.

[Group] The name change did not change how we view the relationship to the music, or our outlook on the band or the album we were recording at the time. It happened during the end of the recording process and it gave us closure with the music we had been writing and recording over the previous 4 years. The name feels uniquely ours. We’re glad to have more people discover us under this moniker. 

Sam, you have mentioned that on your very first day of college, within minutes of meeting Connor and Callum at orientation, you casually talked about wanting to start a band with a lot of people. Now, years later with two full albums behind you, How does it feel to look back at that moment knowing how real it became, and when you are writing lyrics now, do you ever think about that early version of yourself and what he was hoping to express before he even knew what the band would become

[Sam DuBose] Over this tour, I have thought a lot about how we have technically “done it”: we’re touring, we’re recording, we’re doing everything that a band tends to do. What’s interesting is that because this band wasn’t an overnight success, there hasn’t been a defining moment where it felt like I/we have accomplished anything drastic or life changing. Basically, it hasn’t felt like we have had our “we made it” moment. It’s been a really slow grind for me and everybody in this group to get to where we are. 

During this January tour, we keep saying to each other that we can’t believe this is what we’re still doing with our lives after 5 years. At the risk of sounding cliche, it feels like nothing has changed and yet, everything has changed.

The lyrics I write are almost always about the people I know, or the situations we end up in. For the self titled album, we were essentially writing music about the scenarios surrounding us as we were making the album. I feel like with the self titled album behind us, we can finally move on from the life we had when it was being recorded. I’m really excited because honestly, it was a really hard few years for me. 

And I think meeting Connor and Callum was one of the best things that has happened to me, as well as everybody else in the band of course, but they came a little bit after.

Early on, you said you were not wanting to be “entertainment for a party, but wanting to do more” and curate a specific experience for people in the room. Now that 3 years have passed and the new album has been out in the world for a little bit, I am curious how you see that idea today.

In practice, what does creating that experience actually look like for you now, and have any parts of that goal shifted or clarified as you have watched people engage with the record and the live shows

[Group] When we first started playing shows, we would sit down and have live visuals accompany what we played. The more we have continued and played larger rock venues, the quicker it became apparent to us that it wasn’t the most practical thing to put on in those settings. In the actual music, we definitely still aim for there to be intimacy. Someday, we would absolutely love to bring visuals back to our shows on a consistent basis. 

Some ephemera from the church “34th Floor.” was recorded in.

There is a strong collective feeling in the way the band operates, where the music feels like it belongs to the group rather than to any single voice. There are only a few bands that have really done that well, the group A Silver Mt Zion comes to mind, not in terms of a similar sound, but in how they function like a family. Other musicians or instruments can move in and out of that space and it never feels disjointed, it feels like they belong there as part of something larger. I am curious whether there were examples like that which shaped how you think about collaboration, trust, and making music that feels shared rather than centered on one person

[Group] It honestly happened very naturally for this band to essentially hive-mind our music, along with every aspect of being a band. There’s definitely a format that we follow when we work together. A vast majority of what we write now is as a group, and like everything that comes with this band, it’s a slow trudging grind to get anything finalized cause we all care way too much about what we do. Sam DuBose will bring in a song, or a lyric, or a melody, and the full group will finalize the sound/structure/parts of the song. We have not intentionally structured how we work together based on other projects. We essentially just ended up in a position where for better or worse everybody brute forces an idea and we end up with what everyone thinks is best at the end of the process. 

[Left To Right] Sam DuBose, Casey Cheatham, Connor Hoyt, Tyler Thenstedt, Callum Roberts, Kaysen Chown, Samuel Uribe Botero

Kaysen, you entered the band after first experiencing it from the audience, which is a rare transition to make. I am curious what it felt like to cross that line, from receiving the music to helping shape it. How did seeing the band from the outside influence the way you approached joining it, and for the rest of you, how did having someone who once stood in that room listening change the internal dynamic of the group, if it did at all

[Kaysen Chown] I remember very vividly sitting (slightly uncomfortably) on the basement floor of a mutual friend’s house who was hosting the show and thinking about how this band’s sound really stood out from any other DIY college band I had seen. At that point I was a super senior in college, so I had 5 years under my belt of moshing to deafening college bands—which is totally awesome in it’s own right—but Kingfisher captured the attention of the room in a way I rarely witnessed in DIY settings. At that point Sam Uribe had already reached out to record strings on one of their songs (Regulate), so having the prospect of collaborating with them was really exciting. As much as I was impressed by the horn arrangements and accompanying visuals, in perhaps a selfish way, I was already starting to imagine some string arrangements that could take the songs to the next level—I’m thinking of Annie as a particular example. I didn’t expect the band to offer me a spot in the already quite large ensemble, but the first day of recording strings with the band later that week was such a good hang that it seemed like a natural fit.

Most of you came into this band with formal musical training, especially in jazz, which gives you a deep technical vocabulary to draw from. I am curious how that background shows up in the day to day decision making. Are there moments where you consciously avoid doing something you technically know how to do because it would disrupt the emotional tone of a song. When you are writing horn parts, how much of that is written versus improvised, and how do those choices shift once a song moves from the studio into a live setting.

[Callum Roberts & Sam Uribe Botero] We’ve all spent countless hours developing our sounds and abilities on our instruments. For those of us who studied jazz, a majority of days and nights were spent practicing, and there’s some sort of inherent virtuosity that comes from that. There’s never been a point where we have actively tried to add something technically challenging just to do it, and like you said, we often will purposely stray away from that to leave more room and allow for more vulnerability. That being said, as horn players, we always try to make any part uniquely its own, and try to have the horns function at least slightly differently on every song. Sometimes it takes the roll of lead/rhythm guitar - other times it fills a more traditional “horn” sound, but there is an active attempt to make it unique in some way on every song, and because of that, every now and then we do write some pretty technically challenging parts. 

Almost every part I’ve written was improvised at first, and over the course of months or even years, one improvised part will stick, or gradually settle into a solid part that stays more or less the same. But both in and out of the studio, there is still a lot of improvisation that exists in most of our songs, and there are only a few parts that are completely the same every time.

Samuel you spent time serving as a caretaker for a church, which meant living inside a space designed for reflection & ritual. I am curious how being alone in that environment shaped your relationship to sound and silence, especially the way you think about letting a room breathe rather than filling it.

Churches also carry a long musical history through hymns and worship songs that are built on repetition, restraint, and communal feeling rather than virtuosity. Did being surrounded by that influence the way you think about pacing, harmony, or emotional weight in your own writing, and do you see any quiet relationship between that world and the way Racing Mount Pleasant approaches melody and repetition

[Samuel Uribe Botero] I grew up in a catholic household, like many other Latinos. My living situation during college was very circumstantial, as the room I found myself in was passed down to me by a friend (I am not personally religious). I did however play in a few churches when I was growing up, which had some influence for me, but as far as living in this space, it’s hard to gauge how much of a direct influence it had on my musical choices. I’ll admit there were nights where I would go into the Sanctuary, where the mass is held. It’s a beautiful room. 

We ended up recording 34th floor in there. Maybe you can say the acoustics of that room shaped how that song came together. Or maybe not. Spaces of worship are acoustically designed for a link between perceptive and emotional resonances, so in some unintentional way we may have brought that link into our recording choices. We also recorded some live takes of unreleased songs and other projects DuBose and I worked on a while back in there. I would love to put on a show there someday.

There’s a shared communal experience that happens when we play together. Allowing for the right voices to shine at the right time comes with a lot of restraint when you’re in such a big group. That, more than anything, has taught us about letting something to breathe and grow naturally. Maybe it’s intrinsic to communal music or maybe we borrowed those musical choices straight out of hymnals without realizing, but the intention of repetition etc. is all for the music to work as best as it can. 

You have talked about memory as something that shapes the album rather than a straight narrative. When you write, are you more interested in preserving how something felt or conveying what actually happened

[Sam DuBose] Some of the songs, Call It Easy, Emily, Seminary, etc, were written even before our first album was released. Those songs kind of became some of the pillars of what would make up the self titled album. The meaning of those songs have definitely changed after writing and recording the rest of the album. So I would say that specific memories associated with that music isn’t necessarily important. It’s the way that those songs have essentially been playing in the background of my/our lives for five years. We have all personally changed so much, but those songs have mostly stayed the same. So I think our outlook on them is the biggest thing that fuels this loose concept of memory. Songs that were written more recently that ended up on the album will refer back to moments from those earlier songs. 

They Are Gutting a Body of Water Are Reeling In Degradation

There’s a particular restraint to the way TAGABOW work, a refusal to inflate feeling or posture above it, which gives the album its weight. Nothing is dressed up, nothing is framed as larger than life, and that choice feels deliberate. Spending time with Douglas and the band made it clear how closely that approach is tied to survival, humility, and the ongoing work of understanding oneself. The answers don’t resolve neatly, they wander, double back, contradict themselves in productive ways.

In conversation with Douglas Dulgarian of Tagabow,

When I spend time with LOTTO, not just as individual tracks but as a complete environment, it feels connected to a very particular chapter in your life. It has this sense of a moment when your thoughts, your routines, your physical state, and the way you moved through the world were all pressing in at the same time. 

I find myself wondering what it felt like for you to be inside that moment while making the record. Did the process of writing and recording bring you face to face with parts of yourself that you had not fully acknowledged before, and if that happened, how did it affect the choices you made from day to day in the studio. 

I am also curious about the version of yourself who walked away from the finished album. Did you feel transformed by the work, or did the act of creating LOTTO simply clarify the person you already were, almost like the album held up a mirror you had not looked into quite that closely until then.

Douglas: These are some fucking amazing questions. I guess the whole purpose of art in my life is to figure out who I am constantly, or maybe like, to create some idealized form of myself that supplements my core basic beliefs about myself. And then try it on. See if it fits. With LOTTO, it was kind of a weird time starting out, because in writing it I had just relapsed on opiates for the sixth major time in my life, and I guess the idea of the record was like; “how would it feel to strip back all of the idealized forms of myself I have built, and wear that one?” And in some way, I suppose, that is an idealized form of myself as well. When I walked away I can say that the main feeling that I had was that of being too naked. Sometimes it’s nice to hide behind some sort of mask, some persona. I think that’s like the “rock star” thing to do. I wanted to be anti rock star. I guess the weird part of that is there’s no coming back from that stance. Once you’ve shown your hand everybody knows. And I think that’s honestly healthier for me. I’m a person, with problems. Remaining humble in basically way is really the only way I will ever stay clean I think. My life is not some movie. It’s a mixture of a ton of real life moments. 

You once said you never want to "feel better or worse than anybody else" in life or in art. How does that belief shape the way you write songs, especially songs that focus on despair or isolation or the loneliness of daily routines, How did that shape Lotto?

Douglas: I think a better way of saying that is “I don’t want to position myself as better or worse than anybody else”, because at the end of the day I have literally lived in nearly every format of available lifrstyles for myself, and all of those formats are still available to me at any time. An even better way of framing that is: “I am still all of those things, constantly, and we all are.”Homeless and strung out, struggling but having a roof over my head, or doing very well financially; enough to just spend in stupid ways. I’m not entirely sure how that belief helps me write songs, but it does open the door for me to be like; “I too can be a musician as well”. Especially initially. I still struggle with imposter syndrome. And that’s something I talk about in the music too I think. It translates in a lot of ways- I really try and relate to people as opposed to compare to them.

When you perform live now, especially songs from LOTTO, does the energy from the crowd, the spaces you play, or the people you meet shift how those songs feel to you?

Douglas: I cannot tell as I am turned around. Hahaha

Do you think uncertainty and precarity are essential ingredients for writing songs like yours, or is there a way to carry the same emotional weight from stability?

Douglas: holy shit, what a question. I used to believe that all art came from pain. I now know that’s simply not true. A genuine sense of safety and security allows for you to explore, and that’s necessary for growth, for finding new pathways. It’s impossible to talk about places you’ve never been. It’s hard to put your finger on things while you’re in a moment. But it’s very easy to talk about places you’ve been when you’re no longer there. Everything in retrospect makes sense, usually. Hindsight is always 20/20. Have you ever been so mad that you just leave a conversation? Nothing helps more than some time to let it all sink in. That’s life. Emotions are bigger than reality. Experience is just the right size. 

We have talked before about a shared love for VHS. The way older formats seem to breathe in a way digital images never quite do. VHS and other older formats deteriorate over time, which means the images will eventually fade & degrade. Does that idea of impermanence feel important to you. When you choose a format that is already unstable, are you expressing a belief about how art should age, or are you exploring the idea that certain memories or moods are not meant to stay crisp

Douglas: I was thinking about this yesterday. I used to believe that everything was impermanent. But now I think that everything is kind of permanent, really. And let me explain myself: everything has some sort of effect, and that effect creates more effects, so on and so forth. Everything is important. And maybe that’s what makes the degradation of something like a video format so comforting. That the past fades away.

The name RL Stine carries a certain cultural weight, stories about fear, horror & mystery, things that feel familiar but also slightly unreal. Your song of the same name is grounded in a real person moving through the horrors of life. The title adds another layer that changes how the listener approaches it. What made that name feel right for this song, and once you chose it, did it shift the way you understood what the song was actually revealing to you or about you.

Douglas: So you nailed it with the meaning, haha. But also I love zeitgeists. I love things that are culturally significant. It’s fascinating to me. If there’s some massive blockbuster that everybody is talking about, I will go to the theater and watch it. And I try to reference those things, especially in song titles. Jadakiss was a whole ass cultural movement where I grew up. Diamond Dallas Page and WWE as well. I think that’s a thing too, I always try to draw from childhood.

So much of your work blends sound and image and fragments of daily life that might fade with time. If you could choose one feeling or one idea that you want listeners to hold long after the visuals have degraded and the songs have settled into memory, what would that be. And why that one above everything else

Douglas: You’re a teenager. You and two friends have biked though the woods to explore an abandoned psychiatric center. It’s the summer and the sun is starting to go down, and the very idea of the cool air is refreshing to think about. Your t shirt is stuck to your body, wet. As you walk around the back of the building, paint can in your hand, ready to try your best among the other profanities on the wall that faces the woods, you notice long snakes of some type of black substance across the broken asphalt, strands of grass interrupting the jagged purpleish bulbous ground here and there. Plastic cups and bodega bags are scattered here and there, but the snakes really grab your attention the most. Alien looking. Maybe these black things are long seeds of some kind? Maybe more pieces of plastic? You walk over to them and touch one, and it degrades in your hand. Long tentacles of ash from fireworks, you realize; those shitty cheap fireworks that leave more than they start with. And then you realize, they had to have been set off before the last rainfall, and was that only two days ago? Yeah. People have been here recently. Exploring this shitty place. Painting dicks on the wall

Inside Marietta’s Return: A Look Behind the Scenes of A Reunion

I spent the day with Marietta through the slow hours before their reunion show at Warsaw in New York City, watching soundcheck drift into dinner at a sports bar a few blocks away and then into the long, quiet stretch before doors opened. All afternoon we wondered what the crowd would be like, and the answer came the moment the band stepped onstage, the room erupting instantly.

I spent the night moving through the venue with a handful of cameras, capturing a behind the scenes look of the day while putting together questions for the guys, thinking about how strange and rare it is to watch a band return to something that once meant everything to so many people. Almost a decade later, their return feels less about starting again and more about facing the passage of time and the versions of ourselves that grew in its wake.

You emerged in the scene right as the so called emo revival wave was cresting and collapsing at the same time. Did that tension affect how you understood yourselves as a band, or how you imagined the future of what you were making?

ETHAN: Not really, to be honest. From the time I was introduced to emo, I wanted to be in a band. I was aware of the emo genre having a boom at the time that Marietta formed, but that was mostly a byproduct of being in a band and living and breathing the scene.

EVAN: I think to some extent - our predecessors, including bands like Algernon Cadwallader, Snowing, Hightide Hotel, Street Smart Cyclist, Glocca Morra, etc. - informed how we wrote our music, but our contemporaries, the bands we were frequently playing in basements with, (Girl Scouts, Nicknames, Sovereignties) played a role as well. I had begun to conceptualize Marietta as a “party emo” band, because I think our venues for performance led to certain aspects of our songwriting - i.e., anthems, breakdowns, dance-y parts, moshy parts. As far as the future of Marietta during that time - all I knew was that I wanted to keep playing and writing, and I was definitely interested in leaning more into a “pop” sound, in an effort to make it more palatable to new listeners. I think you can hear this on As it Were.

The Philly DIY era you came up in has been mythologized from every angle. If you strip away the nostalgia and the lore, what was the private reality of that time, the part of the story that never made it into the version people tell now?

ETHAN: I think the version that folks represent now is pretty darn accurate – and a lot of those sentiments continue to be true today. The Philly scene has always been incredibly welcoming, warm, and full of some of the most talented people I have ever met. The scene allowed me to play a show where I met my wife and found my best friends, and that is a situation and circumstance that is not at all unique to me. There are so many similar stories I’ve heard throughout the years, so many people that decided to move to Philly on a whim because they heard about the scene and stayed here, so many bands we toured with that said the Philly shows were the best ones. There is something really special about the scene in Philly and its ability to lift people up and allow them to make cool art.

However, I don’t want to in any way devalue other scenes or places. Wherever you can find your people and can do what you want to do in a safe and supported way, that fuckin’ rocks. Philly just happens to be where I found my place

ANDREW: When I first came to philly I was still mostly listening to pop punk and ska and 90s boom bap. I was kind of oblivious to the importance of a lot of the bands that were swirling all around the Philadelphia scene. To me, the part that I think I lot of people overlook is I think a lot of us packed out these house shows just because they were good hangs. I just wanted to sit on a couch and drink 40s and try to meet people, and house shows were a great place to do that. I didnt want to play in a twinkly emo band. I didnt know what the hell that meant. What I did know was that damn near every friday night there was a rowhome basementfull of 20-somethings screaming along to every word that Stinky Smelly sang- and I wanted to feel that too.

Being in your early twenties is hard, and if I take off the rose glasses I remember a lot of social anxiety in that scene. There were a lot people that I thought for years were cold or too cool or stand-offish, that I later learned were just uncomfortable in their own skin like I was. It’s easy (and fun!) to glamorize it now, but there was plenty of awkwardness & letdown in that era too. I mean- most of us in that scene gravitated towards emo for a reason. 

If you look back at the internal world you were writing from during the early days, would you describe it as hopeful, chaotic, fragile, searching, or something more complicated? And when you play those songs now, does the emotional center feel familiar or has it shifted with time?

ETHAN: As I mentioned before, my life now is much different than it was 10 years ago, so there are some lyrics that I can still absolutely tap into what I was experiencing emotionally at the time, and others where I can recognize where I was coming from, but do not feel as emotionally resonant as when I wrote them. At the time, I was broke, my mental health was in a place where I didn’t have the tools to help get through it in a healthy way, I had not met my wife yet or it was during the time when my wife was across the country so I missed her a ton. 

Now, I am married to the love of my life, I have regular therapy sessions and take medication for my OCD and anxiety, and I have a stable job that allows me to pursue the creative outlets I enjoy. There are certain lyrics that are very specific to the time where I can identify what I was going through and empathize for that younger version of myself, they just feel more distant thansome of the other stuff I’ve written.

EVAN: Speaking mostly on the songs I wrote for Marietta, I think “searching” is an apt description of my internal world. I wrote those songs between the ages of 19-21, and the term searching can be applied to all aspects of the music I made during that period of time. Lyrically, I was focused on relationships, growing up, and life transitions in general. Musically, I felt like I was learning as I went - how to play in alternate tunings, how to write “emo” music, and how to structure a song according to the “rules” of emo. Prior to Marietta, I don’t think I had a strong musical identity - I was malleable and receptive to any style, and it just so happens that Ethan motivated me to write in the style of emo. If I had never met Ethan, it’s quite possible that my trajectory as a musician would have led me to a different style or scene. Playing the songs now, as I’ve mentioned before, actually helps me to better understand both my history and my aspirations as a musician. And having seen the significant increase in listeners to Marietta, I think I’ve finally accepted what made these songs so impactful for so many people. So, the emotional center of these songs feels very familiar to me - the things I was writing about and the way I wrote songs are part of the broader story of my life as a musician. I certainly spoke from a younger and more impulsive heart, though. 

When the band ended in 2015, it felt abrupt from the outside. As you reunited, did any emotional loose ends from that period resurface, and did revisiting the songs force you to confront versions of yourselves you had not thought about in years?

ETHAN: Speaking only for myself, I think there was a degree of insecurity and guilt on my end, both of which are residual feelings from when I left the band. When I decided to leave the band, I wanted the boys to keep going – I didn’t want them to stop just because I wanted to stop. But they (very nicely) didn’t want to move forward without me, so Marietta came to end. Even though I know I made the right decision for myself, I can’t help but feel guilty about that. With that said, once we started practicing again, all those feelings quickly fell away.

EVAN: The reunion of Marietta was a no-brainer for me, but I don’t think it could’ve happened any sooner than this year. Though our disbandment in 2015 was not as abrupt as it felt to our fans, as we had decided to call it quits probably about 4-5 months prior to the announcement, it did feel a little bit like the rug was pulled out from under me. Following Marietta’s breakup, myself, Andrew, and Ben went on to form Narra, which was a punk-influenced departure from the emo sound of Marietta. After Narra broke up in 2018, I was musically adrift for awhile, and I honestly had to do some internal work to kind of rekindle my relationship with performing and songwriting. As some may know, over the past approximately 6 years, I’ve been working on material by myself, and spent the better half of 2025 recording an album which will be released under the name Home Star this coming January. I think if it weren’t for my immersion in Home Star’s music, I would have been less open to a Marietta reunion. It took me some time to integrate that chapter of my musical life into the broader self-view of myself as a “musician” or “artist.” Now though, I am proud of Marietta’s work and value it in the story of me and my guitar.

Coming back to this material after nearly a decade, do the songs feel like they still belong to you, or do they feel like artifacts from another life? Was there a moment in early rehearsals when something clicked and reminded you why Marietta existed in the first place?

ETHAN: They certainly feel like they still belong to me in the sense that I wrote them and I am proud of them, but singing the lyrics again for the first time in 10 years gave me a ton of perspective I was not expecting. I wrote those songs between the age of 20 – 25, so when I sing those lyrics at 35, I realize just how young I was. There are certain aspects of my lyrics that are evergreen to me personally – a decent chunk of the material stems from my mental health, which will always be applicable to my life – but then there are lines that are extremely specific to a place and time. Which is not to say that they don’t resonate with me anymore, it’s just difficult for me to relate to them because so much has changed in my life. 

Practicing again felt natural. When we first started practicing again, I felt self-conscious because I have not played in front of other people in 10 years. But then we started joking around and being our usual insufferable selves and things started falling into place quickly. These boys are some of the people I feel most comfortable with in my life, so it was easy to remind myself that when I started playing again.

EVAN: Because it’s been so long since I’ve played or sang these songs, I did feel a certain amount of distance from them initially. Not to mention that most Marietta songs are written in alternate tunings, when I picked up the guitar to relearn the songs, it quite literally felt like speaking another language for some time. Since 2015, every song I’ve written has been in standard tuning - so to return to these old tunings was a really concrete way of returning to an older version of myself as a musician. All of this being said, when we began rehearsing together earlier this year, it felt like we didn’t skip a beat and it all came back to me rather quickly. Being in a basement with my boys playing music together was the reminder I didn’t need, but very much valued, of why Marietta exists at all.

When an old song suddenly feels foreign, do you try to honor the emotional urgency it carried when you first wrote it, or do you allow your current selves to reinterpret its tone and meaning in a way that reflects who you are today?

ETHAN: Just because a song or lyric doesn’t carry the same impact for me that it did before doesn’t mean that is true for everyone else, which is something that has been so damn cool to see over time as more people have found Marietta. For whatever reason – be it streaming, social media, luck – we now have so many more fans than we ever had before, which has introduced a huge amount of people to listen to the songs for the first time and interpret them for themselves. It has been so cool to talk to all the fans and hear their stories and what the band means to them. That has allowed me to look at the songs from new perspectives.

EVAN: Personally, I sink right back into the feeling and emotion of the songs when I play them. Certain songs, musical passages, or lyrics really transport me to a place and time that feels really comfortable. I don’t feel a tension between my past and present self. 

ANDREW: It’s a bit of both. The physicality of drumming has always provided a release for me which inherently stirs some emotion. So coming back to these songs it's been pretty easy for me to latch on to some of that and really ride it back to 2013. On the other hand, I'm doing a lot more singing during our live performances now than I ever was able to do back then, and for that element of it I'm definitely drawing from a fresher well. "Look at me, Ma! I'm 32 years old and still in emotional turmoil!"

Now that the reunion shows in October have had time to settle, what were the biggest takeaways for you as a band, either emotionally or creatively, and how are those experiences shaping what Marietta might look like for fans next year?

ETHAN: A big thing I wanted to address going into these shows with Marietta was my confidence level as a musician. Prior to late 2024, I had zero formal training or lessons with guitar. I started playing when I was about 16 and taught myself. I am lucky in that two of my lifelong best friends are unbelievably talented musicians (which are referenced at the end of “Dantooine”), so I was able to learn a lot from them by osmosis. Other than that, I learned on my own – which is not meant to be a brag! It’s to illustrate how much I did not know. I knew some chord shapes, but that was from memorization and guitar tabs, not because I knew music theory. I played in open tunings mostly because they are super pretty and it was easier for me to write riffs to. I never fully felt like a capital M, “Musician”. A lot of that was imposter syndrome, but some of that is because I did not have a fundamental understanding of my instrument. 

So, late last year, I started taking guitar lessons for the first time in my life, and not only do I have a better understanding of music in general, but gosh darnit if it didn’t make me fall back in love with guitar. Now I know what each note on fret board is, I know what a triad is, I can do all the scales, I am comfortable with complex chord shapes, I am learning songs that I previously would have cowered from because I didn’t think I could do it. That was a big personal hurdle in terms of doing these shows. I am really happy that I decided to take lessons. Walking up on those stages felt a little less daunting because of it. Which, again, is not required for you to write music! There are so many self-taught musicians that are utterly bonkers at music. This was an obstacle that was important to me to get through, as well as something I always wanted to do. 

My transformation in my confidence level as a musician was a big takeaway for me. Going from feeling like I had no right to be playing music to other people to feeling like I belong. That will certainly go a long way for whatever comes next with the band and whatever shape that takes. 

EVAN: I’m mostly just filled with gratitude for the opportunity to have played for so many fans who care about Marietta, and really thrilled to have been performing again. It’s a really important part of who I am that I let fall by the wayside for many years as I tended to other important areas of my life, but a part that I intend on honoring going forward. 

ANDREW: Our crowds have been so overwhelmingly positive and kind and active as hell. We got in this game to scream gang vocals at & with our friends back in 2012 and it’s heartwarming to hear people at these shows belting our lyrics along with us in the year of our lord 2025. 

A Day With bloodsports: An Interview on Anything Can Be a Hammer

There’s a pulse at the center of bloodsports’ music, something quiet and restless that expands without warning. Their debut album “anything can be a hammer” leans into that tension. I met the band at Union Pool on the afternoon of their release show and followed the day as it unfolded, photobooth strips, monitors buzzing, the stillness before people pour in.

When the room eventually filled and the energy peaked, it was clear the record had hit a nerve.

After the show I asked them about the record and the instincts that guide their work.

(Left to Right) Sam, Liv, Scott, Jeremy

I’ve spent time with you at your practice space, and there’s this playfulness to the way you interact, a room full of inside jokes and easy laughter. How do you preserve that original impulse of a song as it moves through rehearsals, shows, and finally recording, without sanding off the edges that make it feel alive?

[Jeremy] I think for me, I tend to think of recording and performing both sort of like acting. At some random show on some random Tuesday night where you just came from work, there is no way that you are going to feel the intensity of emotion that maybe made a song interesting at first. There has to be a conscious effort to maintain and try and recreate those same feelings and moments. We are all very good friends and have spent a lot of time together. We really encourage each other to be vulnerable in the music we write, and I think that being such good friends allows that to happen in an organic way. 

[Scott] I feel like the writing process is where I feel the most liberal in terms of risk taking. This leads to the occasional “a-ha” moment as I’m working through my parts for songs as we put them together in the rehearsal space. Those moments typically feel pretty special, and I try to preserve some of that impulse as we play the songs over and over, whether in practice, on stage, or in the studio. 

[Liv] I hold the belief that music is kinda pointless if it doesn’t hold emotion - so why would I want someone to pay money to see us, and experience nothing at all? I’m emotional all the time so maybe that has something to do with it haha 

There’s a breath in your arrangements, the way a guitar line lingers a second too long or a vocal slips just under the mix. Are those choices intentional upfront, or do they come from intuition in the room as you work through takes?

[Jeremy] Going into the studio, we placed a lot of emphasis on dynamics. I think for me personally I didn’t have a lot of confidence in my music at the time we recorded this. I remember second guessing absolutely everything, and there really wasn’t much left to chance. I anticipate the next record to be a bit different, and I think there will be more room for intuition and for moments to just happen. 

[Scott] Ditto to what Jeremy said about dynamics. A lot of times I try to practice restraint in my drumming, which serves to emphasize those lingering guitar lines and vocal slips because I’m not taking up too much space in the mix. I’m bringing a lot of my jazz instincts in moments like those, trying to play my drums in conversation with the rest of the band. 

[Sam] Yeah definitely intentional, I think less is more a lot of times. Also just never doing more thant what the song calls for I think is a mantra of sorts that we say a lot

[Liv] This album is intentional from front to back. Every single bit. To the point where it almost drove me nuts. 

When you’re playing live, what’s the moment where everything shifts from performance into something more out of body? During the release show, especially in “Rot,” there was a point where it felt like the song was taking over both Jeremy and Sam. What does that moment feel like internally?

[Jeremy] I get very nervous before shows, even after playing hundreds of them the feeling has never really gone away. I think at a certain point that I can’t remember, I began to channel that into the performance instead of trying to hide it. All the leg shaking and wiggling that I do on stage isn’t really a stylistic thing, it is actually just me being really nervous. I think as far as Rot goes and what that feels like to play live, it feels really good. I think it is a much needed release for all of us. We are all high strung people. 

[Scott] I’d like to say I lose myself at some point during the course of playing a song live, but that wouldn’t be completely true. I definitely feed off the energy that the rest of the band brings to a performance, though. When moments like that happen, especially during Rot, I’m hitting the drums harder to match that energy, but I’m also very cognizant of the fact that I need to hold it down in a predictable way so that Sam can do his thing. 

[Sam] Yeah I’m usually really nervous before shows, but once I’m on stage a lot of it just fades away because I can focus on the task at hand. I think on rot it’s usually the first time during the set that we can really let loose so all the pent-up nervous energy from the whole day just explodes. After that song it becomes a lot easier to block everything out because all my cards are already on the table so to speak.

[Liv] Once we finish ‘Come, Dog’ I can enjoy myself. I get horribly nervous playing that song, but thankfully Scott keeps me in the pocket every time. The ending of the title track is my favorite because I can fall into Sam’s direction - it’s this sense that I’m completely surrendering. You can see it in all of our eyes that we just meld together, it makes me happy and I feel proud of that ending.

How do you negotiate the tension between precision and chaos in a live setting, deciding when to hold back and when to let things unravel?

[Jeremy] I have been leaning more into just going for things recently. I remember growing up listening to the band Iceage and being really inspired by them. They were always messy but there was just so much emotion behind it and you could tell that they really meant it. 

[Scott] As the process of performing these songs has become more comfortable, I’m taking the opportunity to go for things more often. I’m drawing from some of the same logic and thought processes I explained in my last answer in these moments as well. A song like Rot requires a lot of precision during the first half, but more recently I’ve been letting the drums breathe a bit more in certain moments. 

[Liv] I think a lot of these decisions are not based solely on our musical ideas, but also our actual personalities. The way Jeremy plays guitar is the way Jeremy is. And even more than that, the way Sam sings is the way Sam is. Same with Scott and same with me. When we have a fun night out or a huge argument, it literally sounds like verbal versions of the music. We have a funny and slightly dramatic dynamic as a group, and I’d say that affects the way we handle dynamics in the music.

“Anything Can Be a Hammer” was produced by Hayden Ticehurst, someone known for pulling honest, unforced performances out of artists. What stood out to you about being in the studio with him?

[Jeremy] He is a silly guy, a true meme lord. A fellow gooner. 

[Scott] He’s someone who just gets it. What stood out for me the most is his ability to pick up a lot without us having to explain. I think his strongest suit is just being able to anticipate the type of sound a band is going for and allowing that to materialize more or less organically over the course of the sessions. He’s very smart.  

[Liv] I think it is awesome that he will not laugh at something he does not think is funny. He will make you sit with your bad joke. It’s hilarious and commendable. Obviously, his insane talent stands out - but at this point people should already know that about him.

Hayden’s mixes often leave space and texture intact rather than compressing everything into a wall of sound. How did that shape your approach to recording this record?

[Sam] I think Hayden was so much more familiar with the studio and the ways in which you can use instruments, we would attempt to describe a sound we wanted and Hayden would come up with something like blowing out a vintage reel to reel and plugging a guitar into it, or adding an unholy amount of distortion to a mellotron.

[Scott] He definitely knew how we could get the sounds we were looking for on this record. As with what Sam said, his familiarity with the studio and all of the gear in there made it a lot easier. I don’t think we had much of a set in stone plan outside of the arrangements — we were open to playing with how those arrangements came across in a recorded medium. I think his experience as an engineer and his overall skill/attention to detail allowed him to suggest ideas without ever coming across as challenging. 

[Liv] Hayden is an insane talent. He’s a master of his craft but also of the spaces in which he exists - I’m not sure there’s a single piece of gear or instrument he doesn’t know everything about.

So Close, So Far: An Interview w/ Stateside

For Stateside, clarity comes from facing things head-on. Their debut full-length, “Where You Found Me”, released two weeks ago on Pure Noise Records, doesn’t shy away from emotional heaviness, it leans into it. The California band lets themes like longing, guilt, and distance shape the album’s core, giving them as much presence as the guitars & choruses they sit beneath.

This is a record made of aftermaths, the kind that don’t come with clean endings. It’s about the moments that linger, that follow you into your day, into your bedroom, into your next relationship. Through songs like “Stay Sweet” and “Aly’s Song,” Stateside reckons with emotional proximity and emotional restraint, asking: What do we owe to those we’ve lost touch with? How do we carry the people we can’t talk to anymore? And where does clarity actually begin?

In this conversation, the band reflects on writing the record, what it means to be “found” in the first place, and how their creative instincts evolved as they stepped into their first full-length release. The Polaroids that accompany this interview were taken after a show in New York, right after grabbing Taco Bell and just before catching the train. I had one pack of film left so we had no second chances, that unrepeatable quality feels like the right backdrop for this conversation, an honest snapshot of where things were, right before they moved on.

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Your debut album "Where You Found Me" has been described as “a culmination of all of the experiences and emotions, both negative and positive, that the band have been through”. Can you share some of the key experiences and sacrifices that inspired this record, and how they shaped its overall narrative?

Erik - The emotional context of the record is framed within sidelining careers we’d gone to school and dedicated time for, putting personal relationships on hold, juxtaposed with the unique experience of touring as much as possible. Sacrificing the ‘normal life’ for the uphill battle of growing a band from nothing to something. 

The lead single “Stay Sweet (feat. Knuckle Puck)” explores the theme of “losing that feeling of being invincible”. What personal moments or stories led you to write this song? How did the collaboration with Joe Taylor of Knuckle Puck come about, and how did his input influence the track?

Lemus - Stay Sweet is informed by the first time someone showed me The Smashing Pumpkins, and thinking back to the context of life at that moment. How easy and simple things were back then (and childhood in general), compared to the adult troubles of now. When we tracked the vocals for the outro, we all thought it would make a great feature. We were talking about how we could hear Joe’s voice over it, so we asked and he was down! He tracked his part and sent it over, it was all pretty simple thankfully.

The album title “Where You Found Me” is intriguing and suggests a sense of place or self-discovery. What does this title mean to you personally, and how does it tie together the themes and emotions of the album? Do you see the album as more about being discovered or rediscovering yourself?

Alex - I felt like I was missing life events of my friends and family to tour and do this band. I felt like I was letting my friends down by just not being around to experience these important moments, because I wanted to ‘follow my dreams’ in music. The line “leave me where you found me” has a more negative, self-deprecating vibe, but “where you found me” became a positive take on it. Referencing how the life I chose is somewhere in between.

If someone only had time to listen to one song on "Where You Found Me", which would you choose and why? What do you think that song reveals about where you’re at right now?

Ben - Aly’s Song for sure. Both thematically and sonically, it nicely sums up some of the key points from across the record. “So Close, So Far” could be seen as a subtitle for the whole album really.

Now that you’re launching a full-length debut with Pure Noise Records, what are your goals for Stateside’s future? Are there new themes, sounds, or collaborations you’re eager to explore in the future? What do you want fans to remember most about Where You Found Me as you look ahead to the next chapter of your career?

Erik - Where You Found Me feels like a solid foundation for us to jump off on to bigger things, and I hope that people remember it that way. We honestly don’t really have specific sonic plans other than making more songs true to what we’re feeling and what we’re about. 

Now that the album is out in the world, has your relationship to it changed? Do any songs feel heavier, or lighter, now that people are singing them back to you?

Erik - It’s always interesting to see other people’s takes and interpretations on the songs.  Aly’s Song feels more impactful now for sure, people have been connecting specifically with that track. There was one guy at the New York show who was screaming the lyrics back, he was really into the moment and it was apparent they were impactful to him. Those moments always feel validating for us.

If this album is a snapshot of who you were in this moment, what do you think will surprise you about it when you look back in ten years?

Erik - I’m curious about if the stresses and worries in our lives that went into this record will seem insignificant 10 years down the line. It’s obviously expected for the viewpoint to change with age and time, but some experiences of being in a band are just universal. 

In recording this album, what did you learn about your own creative instincts, either as an individual or as a collective? Did anything about the process surprise you or challenge your assumptions?

Erik - My instincts are to play it safe and do things that are already comfortable. Working on this LP definitely pushed us to experiment and expand.

Alex - I was anxious about how writing was going to go, since this was my first record with Stateside. Fortunately, the songs came together smoothly and naturally. 

Ben - I’m pretty surprised on the final tracklist that made the record. We came in with about 15 demos in varying stages of completion, but most of them were upbeat rock songs. I wasn’t expecting the slower, more emo jams to make the record but I’m happy with how everything came out. I think we needed some of that to open our heads to influences we wouldn’t normally include on Stateside songs.

In regard to Aly’s song, the opening lyrics are “I take your picture where I go / And every night you call my phone when you’re feeling so alone.” There’s something fragile about that gesture, preserving someone’s presence through a photo, trying to bridge distance. What emotional weight did that image carry for you? Was it an act of care, of holding on, or something closer to guilt?

Lemus - In my old wallet I kept a ton of photos with friends and people I care about. Like 10 years worth of photo booth strips. That’s just a way I would keep people with me when I was far from home. The line is referring to that, but also the irony in the way I have their photos with me but I’m still getting calls from those people. I’m the one missing from the equation.

“All the words that I had said, and were they ever meant?” There’s a quiet unraveling in that line, a questioning of your own sincerity, or maybe your ability to communicate at all. Were there things left unsaid in real life that found their way into this song? Did writing it feel like a confrontation with how you’ve used, or misused, your voice?

Lemus - Yes questioning sincerity is correct - realizing I’m making promises I can’t keep. It’s reflection of asking myself, do I actually intend to follow through with these, or is it just easy because I’m thousands of miles and weeks away?

A day w/ Aaron Heard of Jesus Piece

I spent the day with Aaron Heard of Jesus Piece, a frontman who has built his name on intensity, discipline, and the kind of presence that turns a room chaotic before the first note even lands. He grew up in the Philadelphia hardcore world, carrying that scene’s grit and community-first mindset into everything he touches.

We had planned to meet up when he got into New York for Jesus Piece’s show at Elsewhere, and that was the plan when I went to sleep the night before. By morning I woke up to a message that he had been arrested at the border, no clear updates, no confirmation he would even make the show. Hours passed without knowing what direction the day would go.

He did end up making it into the city, tired but grounded, and we finally sat down to talk about it all. We filmed a clip of him explaining exactly what happened at the border, and then drifted into the other parts of his life people rarely hear him speak about. At one point he laughed and said a bunch of badass girls were driving up from Philly to make sure the crowd moshed properly.

This is a look into that day, the chaos & the arrival of an artist who carries more than his stage presence lets on.

The Wonder Years’ Emotional Legacy: An Interview with Dan Campbell

I met Dan Campbell about a year ago when he walked into the shop where I was working. It was a slow afternoon, and we ended up chatting and he mentioned he had a show that night and that I should come out. I’ve wanted to have a proper conversation with him ever since. Now, with The Wonder Years set to play a show just blocks from my apartment, we finally connected before the show over email to talk about survival, grief, faith, and the strange comfort of keeping old songs alive.

The Wonder Years have made a career of setting that tension to music, albums that catalog grief without glamorizing it, that interrogate faith and failure, and that carry the same weight into questions of loss and belief as they once did into old wounds, and the stubborn ache of growing up. For a band that came up in pop punk’s most emotionally fraught era, they’ve managed something rare, aging with self-awareness, and without flattening the urgency that defined them.

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You’ve described early albums as survival documents. When did you feel like your writing started to shift from surviving to unpacking? Do you ever worry about losing that urgency, or has growth just made the questions deeper? 

I kind of still view them as survival documents. I think that, when you are afflicted the way that I am, and the way that a lot of our listenership is, the darkness is kind of always around a corner. That was, in a way, the major through-line of THGOF. That the low hum of sadness is always present, it just changes in volume. I am still here, so I am still surviving. I don't think it will ever be "survived."

There’s an ongoing tension in your lyrics between sincerity and self-deprecation, as if you’re apologizing for how much you feel. Where do you think that impulse comes from? Is it about humility, defensiveness, fear of sentimentality?

I'm not sure it's any of the three, honestly. It's more about making space in the lyrics for the full breadth of my humanity. I want to make honest songs, that are truly reflective of who I am, and self-deprecating is just a part of that whole. I don't always like me. I don't know anyone who does like themself all of the time. And so I think being open about that is part of what makes our songs ours. And yea, there's a little gallows humor in it too. And maybe that is in some ways a mechanism, but less for me and more for the audience. I think if anything, I'm trying to make it less uncomfortable to watch or to listen to.

Do you ever write lines for past versions of yourself? What do you think those younger selves would say if they could hear “The Hum Goes on Forever”?

I think my younger self would be proud that I am still here. And I think he'd be very excited about the music we're making now. Hum, to me, is the most fully realized version of The Wonder Years. It's everything I always wanted it to be and the only album of ours that I look back at and don't have at least some regrets about. And I do want the songs to always be in dialogue with one another. They're a document of my life, and so it's logical to me to think about old songs when writing new ones, and to consider the ways that my life and viewpoints have shifted.

Is there a song that still hurts to play, not because of the audience or the performance, but because you haven’t fully walked out of it yet?

The creation of the songs is for me. That's, largely, where I find the catharsis and process the trauma. Once they're written and recorded, I've often moved to a point of understanding with them. The live performance is more for the audience. It's meant to help illicit that same cathartic moment for them. And so, my focus is usually on playing the hell out of the song rather than on what went into building it. That said, yea, every once and awhile, there's a crack in that wall, and I find a song really difficult to play.

Sometimes it's on an anniversary, or at a specific venue. Sometimes though, it just hits me out of nowhere.

You’ve wrestled openly with faith, not always with belief, but with God as a metaphor for absence, loss, and blame. How has your understanding of faith changed, especially since becoming a father?

I'm a little less abrasive about it now. My beliefs haven't changed much, if at all, but I don't see a lot of value in shoehorning them into conversations. I do still see religion being used as a tool of colonialism, a tool of oppression, but I also recognize that it brings a sense of peace to a lot of folks, and peace is hard to come by right now, so I am not interested in taking that from anyone.

Is there a line or a song you almost didn’t release because it hurt too much? If so, what one and could you expand on the feeling surrounding it. 

There's an original draft of Cigarettes and Saints with a line that I eventually had to change. It was written out of anger, and I knew that anger would eventually wash into sadness and then maybe even pity, and so I knew I couldn't leave it in the song. The song is forever and the feeling wasn't.

You’ve written about people you couldn’t save, but also people you never met, the funeral in “Cardinals,” the kid in “Cigarettes & Saints.” Where does your sense of responsibility to the dead come from? Is songwriting a way to hold vigil?

Mostly it's a way for me to process grief. I understand myself better when I write songs and I needed to write those songs to move toward closure. And also, it feels nice, performing a song every night that keeps someone's memory alive.

What It Sounds Like to Survive Yourself: Interview w/ VS SELF

There’s a kind of quiet power in telling the truth before you fully understand it.

Vs Self writes from that edge, where memory collapses into meaning, and sound becomes a way to carry things too sharp to hold alone. Their work traces a personal geography: blackout years, self-erasure, the slow uncovering of identity.

On Everything Seems Better Now, the title misleads with purpose. It’s not resolution, it’s resistance. The refusal to pretend healing looks like a clean break. What follows are songs that name joy without choking on it. Songs that hold anger without apology.

Each track is a breadcrumb, a confession, a signal flare.

I sat down with Kyle Schlenker (guitar/vocals, they/them) of Vs Self to talk about the emotional scaffolding behind the band.

"Between the Knumears split and your newer work, have you noticed a shift in the kind of sadness you’re writing about? Was there something that triggered that change?"

Desert Pt. II and Frances were written during the same time period as the songs on the split. Desert pt. II is about feeling the need for a change of surroundings to match the changes in my life. 

Frances is a fully positive song in my eyes. It only hits on sadness to highlight the joy and belonging I’ve found by listening to other peoples’ music. It’s named after Frances Quinlan from Hop Along. They’re my favorite song writer of all time. They came out as Non-Binary around the same time I was figuring out my own gender identity. It made me feel as if I must have been drawn to their music and lyrics because there was something in them that I recognized, even if I didn’t know what it was at the time. It was oddly validating in a very awkward time for me. 

I’d say I honestly notice a bigger shift after Everything Seems Better Now. I was still drinking when we wrote that album and was at the lowest point in my life. Despair is the perfect transition song in my opinion with the lyrics fully focusing on how deep of an alcoholic pit I was living in. 

Tide & Swell was written a bit more recently and is about finding myself and my gender identity and how that was the missing piece that finally allowed me to get sober. I guess the shift I see is that in the older material I was writing about current sadness, while in the newer material I’m talking about how I finally got past most of it. LJP.HTPaPSTLBM for instance is about friendship. The title as well as one of the verses is a reference to friends’ bands I’ve had some small hand in, whether it be a few practices, a single show, or recording on a song or two. The bands I’m referencing are Littlest John, place., How To Paint a Picture, sunspot, and Travis Lees Beat Movement. 

In “Leave Everything” there's this exhausted kind of anger simmering under the surface, almost like the anger is pointed inward as much as outward. Was there a specific event that fed into that double-edged feeling?

Yeah I’d say that the anger in this song is 100% pointed inward. The lyrics are kind of switching perspective between my own thoughts and how I think my ex must have felt, so any outward resentment in the song is still aimed at me. It’s about the longest relationship I’ve ever been in coming to an end because I couldn’t stop drinking. It got to the point where I had broken my promises to get my drinking under control that I just stopped making them. I felt completely powerless.

The title "Yesterday by The Beatles or: Imagine by Yoko Ono as Sung by John Lennon" feels like it's mourning something Why did you frame the song title around two of the most iconic songs about memory and hope? 

This song is mourning the time I wasted blacked out and the friendships my drunken/drug fueled paranoia ruined. The title is actually a cop out. The first title I thought of was “Yesterday”, but there must be a million songs with that title. The second title I thought of was “Imagined” so I just gave up. 

On the Knumears split, the songs feel like they are grappling with the concept of "home" not just a place but a version of yourself. Was that intentional, or did that sneak up on you after the fact?

The home as place aspect was completely intentional, but the home as a version of myself aspect snuck up on me. I was traveling for work at the time of writing those songs and would spend 6-9 months out of every year living in hotel rooms all up and down the west coast and in Nevada and Arizona. It was a very lonesome experience and I often felt that I had no home. I was also discovering a very different and better version of myself at the time. 

Is there a "sleeper" song in your catalog, one you personally feel is one of your most important, even if fans don’t talk about it as much?

Maybe Maudlin. I wrote the lyrics while hanging out with my friends one day. We were watching live videos of Amy Winehouse and the topic of her dying after a relapse came up. We ended up looking up statistics on how often people relapse and how likely they are to die if they do.

How much of "Everything Seems Better Now" was written during a time when things actually felt "better," versus looking back at harder moments?

Everything Seems Better Now was 100% written during hard moments. Greg and I wrote all of our own lyrics on that album and “Everything Seems Better Now” was his line. I don’t know if this was his intention or not, but to me it always felt like a lie, not only to the person the line is being delivered to, but to the speaker as well. I suggested we use the line as the album title because it affected me so much. 

Songs that feel like prayers: Interview w/ Dogwood tales

On April 17th, I spent the day with Dogwood Tales as they prepared for their set at TV Eye. Hailing from Virginia, the band blends warm, harmony-driven folk with a slow-burning, emotional pull that lingers long after the last note. We wandered around Ridgewood, grabbed pizza and coffee, and I convinced them to squeeze into a photobooth before they hit the stage. Somewhere in the middle of all that I had some questions for them, This is that interview.

When you’re writing, do you ever feel like you’re channeling something rather than crafting it? What does that feel like?

I often feel like the goal of making music or art is to feel like you’re channeling something rather than working to piece it together. I think when you gather with your best friends and really focus in on what you’re making, its hard not to feel like you’re channeling something. The sounds on our upcoming album, and on sending feel very naturally acquired. They feel like they compliment the songs and make them what they are. Rather than crafted, a-lot of the sounds/ moments/ songs feel tapped into, or channeled. Looking back on my favorite music i’ve made i can say all of it seems like so.

- Ben 

What’s a mistake or accident that led to something you couldn’t have planned and kept in the final version?

Drivers side fantasy and dream are both tracks that were recorded by Kyle and I. they both are full of “mistakes” or just poor audio engineering, but i think that’s what makes them cool. The intro of drivers side fantasy is really abrupt, when normally there’s a second before a song starts, but with this recording it just starts and you’re immediately hit with that blaring blown out guitar. It wasn’t very intentional for it to start like that, and even that guitar part was added last minute. -

- Ben 

“sending” feels intimate and introspective. Was there a particular moment or experience that catalyzed the creation of this EP?

We recorded our upcoming album in February of 2024. Sending feels like an in between to our upcoming album or a link between our old music and new music. It is compiled of old and new demos. Kyle and i made “drivers side fantasy “ at my old house in harrisonburg in about a half hour. He had the song idea and it just came together very naturally.

- Ben 

In “Dream,” there's a delicate balance between melancholy and hope. Can you share the inspiration behind this track and how it came together?

“Dream” is simply about having a dream about dying and waking up and being grateful for what you have. It’s about being grateful for your life and getting through some hard times and personal battles. It’s a very simple song lyrically, but it means a lot to me. It is about finally feeling like you’re where you need to be. Finally being present.

- Ben

“I saw angels” features Terry Fang. How did this collaboration come about, and what did Terry bring to the song's atmosphere.

This collaboration came about very naturally. Terry Fang also known as Travis Legg is an amazing local artist and friend. We often make music together.. He is also the main driver for what we do visually. We love his art style and drawings. This song came about from a demo that travis and kyle made together. Travis is making beautiful sounds on his Juno 106, as he often does. Travis always brings a beautiful layer of lush, atmospheric synth or keys that carries you back to when you were a child.

- Ben

The EP was recorded in your home studio. How did this environment impact the recording process and the overall feel of the EP?

All of the Ep except for “Mt Jackson” was recorded by Kyle and I, on my laptop in GarageBand.

I think that it came together the way it did because the intentions of these recordings were to be demos, not to release them. With the help of Danny Gibney ( our bass player and engineer ) we were able to clean these songs up and give them a proper mix into what they are now. I think you can hear the demo-ness of these tracks, but they also live on, on their own.

- Ben

“Mt Jackson” was produced and engineered by Erik Romero. How did his involvement influence the track's direction and sound?

Erik engineered and produced our upcoming album, and “Mt Jackson” is a part of that group of songs. I think he did a great job helping create the space that the song now has. This song took a long time for us to figure out how to play live. Developing this song in the studio really helped it take on a new life. Erik played a huge role in helping to create the sounds on our up and coming album.

- Ben

The EP is described as “a sending, a prayer.” What emotions or messages were you hoping to convey or release through this collection of songs? What does prayer mean?

The idea for calling the EP “sending” came from a religious practice in Final Fantasy X which was a deeply impactful game from my childhood.

A “sending” is a ceremony performed to send the soul of someone that is no longer alive to the afterlife where it can be unbothered and not at risk of reincarnating as something evil. My uncle had passed away in September of 2023 and the grief was really getting to me. The day after he passed I made a little guitar recording on my tascam that got turned into our track “sending”. It was improvised and was a snippet of a longer recording. I just remember thinking of him while I played it and imagining him leaving life in peace after a lot of complications in his later years. Making the recording that day felt like my own ceremony of acceptance of his passing and a belief that it was all as it had to be, in spite of the pain my family was feeling. I am grateful to call the EP “sending” and to have that recording because it feels like a peaceful place now to feel that grief and relief all at once.  

- Kyle

Ce Qui Reste Quand Ça S’éteint - Interview w/ Corridor

You’ve mentioned that no one wanted to be the ‘main’ singer in Corridor, how has that decision shaped your songwriting or sense of ego within the band. 

Dominic : That decision was initially made because none of us thought of being lead singer in the band. We didn’t have much experience at this point. Nowadays, when we write a new song, most of the time we know by the end of the process who should sing it. I think we’ve grown knowing whose voice fits better for the vibe.

When writing collaboratively, what’s something you’ve learned to let go of, and something you insist on holding firm?

Dominic: I’m not sure if we learned something to let go of, but we clearly insist on being really democratic about the music. If someone doesn’t like the song, we do not record or release it. It can be frustrating if 4 out of 5 dig something, but it is what it is

You’ve cited influences like Chad VanGaalen and Dog Day, what’s something about their work that you think listeners might overlook but you find really formative?

Dominic: I think their music in general is just overlooked, especially for Dog Day. They were both influential on how we recorded music in our early days. So many Canadian bands tried to sound like them, so were we.

The album name ‘Mimi’ was chosen early and stuck, how did the name start to shape or influence the emotional tone of the album as it evolved?

Jonathan: I don’t remember exactly what was the spark of it all but I remember I was digging some stuffs to sample in some old cartoons. There was a character named Mimi and at some point in the story everyone is looking for her, yelling Miiiimiiiiii. I loved that part, you can even hear it at the beginning of the record. Mimi is also the name of my cat, an old grey & white furry ball without teeth that is always puking everywhere. On the group chat we were often sharing the same meme picture of an old weird looking cat that looked exhausted. I just had my daughter, and moved to a new neighborhood so I guess I felt connected to that picture. I drew it for the album cover and that’s it.

“Mourir Demain” came from real-life thoughts about mortality, what other tracks were rooted in specific adult anxieties or mundane realities that surprised you creatively?

Jonathan: Most of the album is. The idea of Mourir Demain Phase came out while I was shopping life insurances and writing a testament, things I had to do cause I was newly a dad. Phase IV is kinda post-nostalgia. I remember I was going through my old neighborhood and I felt like that page of the past was closed for good. Mon Argent is about having to care about money. You know, you grew up a punk, saying fuck this and fuck that, then you realize you’re having suppers with friends talking mortgages, doing your tax on time… Jump Cut is when I started to feel overwhelm by nowadays technologies, probably the same ways my grand-parents were with the beginning of internet. Portes Ouvertes talks about moving to a new house. Chenil is about catching animals in this new house, I had to get rid of mices, rats, racoons, all in the same year I moved in. It’s funny, I just thought the concept of a generic and beige adult life was incredible. I wanted the album to be personal and honest and so that was my life at that moment.

With Samuel Gougoux joining and introducing more electronic textures, what’s one new instrument or sound you didn’t expect to fall in love with during the Mimi sessions?

Dominic: Before entering the studio with Joo-Joo Ashworth, he suggested we get a Korg Delta for synth textures, we ended up really liking the tones of this analog synth and it’s basically all over the album. None of us really knew what it had to offer. It really saved some of the songs.

Self-producing ‘Mimi’ gave you more freedom, was there a moment where that freedom became overwhelming or chaotic? How did you rein it in?

Dominic: It became chaotic especially near the end of the mixing process. Some of us thought it was finished, some didn’t. Normally, when the producer is not part of the band, he would determine when it’s done or not, it was kind of a hard moment, but in the end we managed to finish it without killing each other lol. Also, money was an issue because every mixing session would cost money, bankruptcy wasn’t an option.

Ableton and remote work shaped this album. How did those constraints reshape the way you thought about ‘liveness’ or spontaneity in your music?

Dominic: I think this is part of what makes Mimi different from the other albums. It’s the first we didn’t record live, so everything was really clean and crisp and we weren’t really used to that. It was especially difficult when it was time to figure out how to play a live version for shows. It took Sam some time to really figure out how the setup should be. 

In a past interview, you mentioned that the whole concept for Mimi actually came to Jonathan when he bought a leaf blower, realizing he was “becoming one of those guys” who gets excited about yard tools. I love that an everyday moment like that sparked a creative idea. Are there any other surprisingly mundane or non musical moments that have inspired your music? For example, have things like a random errand, a photo you saw, or an offhand memory ever planted the seed for a song or theme?

Jonathan: Yeah, a lot of this album ideas are coming from my everyday life. Like I said, shopping tools, working on your house, bringing your car to the garage, suppers with old friends. It just felt poetic to talk about this normality. Like there was something deeper to say about the whole thing. 

Several Mimi song titles read like nods to photography or film, “Caméra,” “Jump Cut,” even “Phase IV”. Do you consciously think in visual or cinematic terms when writing music? (By the way, was “Phase IV” titled after the cult ’70s sci-fi film of the same name, or just a coincidence?) Can you give an example of how a movie, a specific scene, or a filmmaking technique (like the abrupt feel of a jump cut) influenced the atmosphere or structure of one of your songs?

Jonathan: We actually have a moodboard for the album and most of it is action movies and explosions. We didn’t have so much music references to give to Joo-joo before recording the album so we gave him this instead. We knew, for example, that Jump Cut needed to feel like a car chasing scene in a spy movie on steroids.

Jonathan, I know you’re an illustrator and you’ve mentioned that you “have always opted for an illustration” rather than using band members’ faces on album covers. The cover of Mimi, featuring that wonderfully scruffy cat (Mimi herself, I assume) has a distinctive handmade charm. What visual art influences went into designing that cover and the band’s overall aesthetic? Are there particular artists or art styles that inspire the imagery of Corridor’s albums and merch? And how does your graphic art background shape how you present the band’s identity?

Jonathan: I’m basically an illustrator and an animator. My references are basically what I grew up with, old NFB animation shorts, graphic novels, 70’s french comics, 40’s cartoons. So yeah, I’m far from fashion, that’s probably why you won’t see our faces on an album cover. I did some stuff for other bands before. Knowing how musicians are most of the time painful to work with, I guess it was easier (and cheaper) to do this kind of thing myself. It’s fun, you know, being able to it without someone telling you to change this font or that color for no fucking reason. Since the beginning , directing music videos and making album covers for the band were also ways for me to experiment new stuff and different techniques. It’s nice, it feels like they totally trust me with that part. I always propose a couple of ideas to the band. Somehow it’s always the shittiest idea that makes the cut. Basically, when it make us laugh, it’s a good sign. I wouldn’t say I was inspired by something for the album cover other than the picture I drew. 

Your music videos often have a playful, homespun quality. I’m thinking of “Mon Argent,” where you ended up creating a whole visual concept in a single day using whatever was on hand, a Lite-Brite toy, falling pennies, and Dom’s collection of ceramic cats, after a technical mishap on the shoot. How do spontaneous DIY moments like that influence your visual storytelling? Do you draw inspiration for your videos from any specific filmmakers or visual artists, or is it more about embracing happy accidents and creativity with everyday objects?

Jonathan: This video is a disaster. Basically I had a really cool concept. It was 3 different clips of masked characters playing through different tv screens and interacting with each others. Somehow, the day I was shooting, I stepped on the wire and it broke inside one the television. The video was due the day after so I had to figure out something else on the spot. It is what it is. I created a lot of music videos before, 5-6 for the band and I’d say that I’m kinda proud of them. But this one… It’s not embarrassing but it’s more something that I would only consider as ‘’content’’. The label didn’t even put the final version on Youtube hahaha

Interview questions & research done in collaboration with Molly Alexander.

A record built from what lingers - Interview w/ Robber Robber

Some Questions with Nina Cates (vocals / rhythm guitar) of Burlington-based band Robber Robber

You’ve said you like ambiguity—has anyone ever interpreted one of your songs in a way that made you see it differently yourself?

Yeah- I feel like I write in a way where there’s a lot of room for interpretation. People ask if songs are about something and I feel like the answer is always yes.

Even if I didn’t intend it that way to begin with, once someone finds meaning in a song, that’s what it’s about.

How did the shift from Guy Ferrari to Robber Robber reshape your identity as a songwriter?

I feel like in the Guy Ferrari days it was a real kitchen sink approach- I still like some of those songs a whole lot but it was definitely less focused in a direction.

Robber Robber feels like we’re acting on what we learned from Guy Ferrari experiments. In a lot of ways it feels like a different band.

Were there any songs or ideas from your Guy Ferrari days that you carried over into Robber Robber, or did you feel the need to start completely fresh?

Absolutely! We still play a couple carry overs here and there when we want to mix it up- Robber Robber’s definitely more representative of where we’re at though. 

Is there a song on the record that felt like it taught you something about your own tendencies, musical or personal?

Writing primarily from a 3rd party perspective even when it’s about myself was something that I didn’t really realize I did until I examined it after.

Much easier to be vulnerable that way which is something to be examined later on perhaps haha. 

How does Burlington as a physical or emotional space show up in Wild Guess, if at all?

Definitely! There are themes of examining conflicts in my life in Burlington all throughout the record. The winters are long and can be brutal in Burlington and I think that can lend to being more introspective and it’s when I tend to write more lyrics.

In “Dial Tone,” there’s a jittery, off-kilter energy—did the arrangement evolve from a jam, or was that tension always intentional?

I don’t think that one came from a jam. Just Zack and I screwing around in a basement over Christmas break from school. I think that one started with guitar and drums and then we built off of it but few of the songs start in the same way as each other 

Urian Hackney’s engineering has a punk legacy, how did his approach shape the way this record feels sonically?

We thought a lot about which songs we felt would suit his energetic, punk studio approach. You can definitely hear it on How we ball and Dial Tone. He’s great at suggesting tones and letting us layer tons of stuff and I think those songs benefited a lot from his approach! It was nice to have that contrast with Benny’s approach which felt a bit more experimental for some of the songs we wanted to get a little wavier on like Sea or War. Very glad we got to work with both of them and so lucky to have both of them local! Burlington’s very lucky in that regard

You’ve said you write from a third-party perspective, have you ever surprised yourself by how much personal truth slipped in anyway?

All the time! I’m still realizing the ways in which the songs ring true to myself. I mentioned it a little bit before but I think positioning it like that makes it easier to talk about myself and switch between subjects but there’s always a through line that sometimes isn’t obvious to me until long after the song is written. 

Do any lines from Wild Guess feel like they came from somewhere subconscious or dreamlike, rather than something you deliberately wrote?

Tons of them- I feel like songwriting is a pretty magical headspace you have to get in. Some of my friends like Lily Seabird can sit down and write a song front to back in one go which I think is nothing short of magic. I am not that way, I feel like I have to charge away at tons of lyrical ideas until I have something I instinctively feel good about and by then the meaning I started with might’ve become something very different but just as true.