Jesse Richman Wins King of Air and Spreads Stoke on Maui
Jesse Richman Wins King of Air and Spreads Stoke on Maui
I sat watching this year’s King of the Air competition on Youtube, barely comprehending how these athletes attached to kite above and board below, were flying so high in the air, flipping around doing insane maneuvers and dropping back on to the water. It was fascinating, and terrifying at the same time. Maui’s own homegrown kite surfer Jesse Richman took the first place at King of the Air, for…
Hillary Clinton May Have Received 800,000 Votes From Illegals
Hillary Clinton May Have Received 800,000 Votes From Illegals
Donald Trump has claimed that the 2016 election was rigged. He is now calling for an investigation of the election and specifically looking into voter fraud. The Washington Times reports: Political scientist Jesse Richman of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, has worked with colleagues to produce groundbreaking research on noncitizen voting, and this week he posted a blog in response…
Maui’s own Jesse Richman is kitesurfing the Great Barrier Reef’s 1,000 kilometers to fight Motor Neuron Disease
Maui’s own Jesse Richman is kitesurfing the Great Barrier Reef’s 1,000 kilometers to fight Motor Neuron Disease
Remember when a true test of endurance was measured by the ability to maintain hand contact on the prized car door longer than anyone else standing in the Ford parking lot? Now, replace the car with a gigantic kite and implode the asphalt parking lot into the expansive Pacific Ocean. Instead of your biggest concern being not trying to pee within the next 24 hours, it’s struggling to complete two…
I never planned to be here. I hadn’t written anything in any “official” capacity since my days at my college paper, and that was nearly a decade in the rearview when I was convinced to sign on here. Sure, I still dabbled -- a couple of LiveJournals here and there; a tumblr for personal-oriented music writing (that’s still around and will have some new life injected into it soon). But when a blink 182-loving internet friend named Zack (RIP ASchismOfZack.tumblr.com!), who had just started turning his little music blog into a slightly less little music blog, asked me back in 2010 if I would chip in with some reviews, I thought it would make for a fun exercise and a nice distraction from the salt mines that are New York legal document review projects -- and nothing more.
(My first review? A Circa Survive Daytrotter session. Why in hell was I reviewing a Circa Survive Daytrotter session? Reading it now, it isn’t as bad as I thought it would be, which maybe means I haven’t come as far as I think I have.)
Somehow, five years and something like 350 reviews, interviews, profiles, features and op-eds later (not to mention lord-only-knows-how-many editing jobs), I’m still here. I’ve stretched my writing muscles, put myself through a training regimen and discovered that this is something I want to make part of my professional life, long after I’d left any such pretensions behind. I’ve become a regular contributor at Alternative Press. I’ve gotten to chat professionally and personally with the people whose music has meant so much to me. I’ve flown to Austin for SXSW (4 times!), to Chicago for Riot Fest. I’ve sat in a 3-hour traffic jam only to get drenched in the most miserable rain you can imagine -- with some of the best people you can imagine -- at Skate & Surf. I’ve spent Christmas Day each year banging out cheeky holiday “reviews,” to this day still my favorite regular feature we’ve had, and one I was happy to sheppard. I’ve built bridges to places and people I never knew existed, and burned a few that needed burning. I’ve made lifelong friends in Zack and Connor and Ashley and Erik, and in so many of our former staffers, not to mention all the friends I’ve made in the wider punk community via this little website. I’ve sparked new friendships from old acquaintances (suppy, Adrienne!). I’ve found a community -- multiple communities, really -- that don’t have me questioning whether I belong. And hopefully, somewhere along the way, I’ve written something that touched someone, that made them open their eyes to something they didn’t see before, be it out in the world or within themselves.
I’ve also shuffled jobs; met an incredible woman who, to my continual daily amazement, agreed to marry me; and, in the coming months, will be moving across the country and becoming a father. A lot changes in five years. I know this place has changed me for the better. I hope that maybe, in some small way, it changed you for the better too.
I want to give special recognition to all of the badass women who have been part of #TeamPOZ over the years. From our first editor-in-chief Emily Coch on down, women have held it down on our front end, our back end, our Reviews section, our Showcase section, our Photo galleries, our op-eds -- everywhere. So to Emily, Adrienne, Ashley and Deanna and Caitlin (who have just started a great new podcast), Maysa, Sydney, Brittany, Becky, Ali, Marie, Hilary, anyone else I’m unfortunately forgetting right now (I’m sure there’s a few) and all of our awesome female contributors over the years -- thank you for making this place better than it ever had any right to be.
I’m not writing this to pat ourselves on the back. We didn’t put out a special call for women, or institute a quota, or set out trying to make a statement. We simply went looking for the most talented, most passionate, most awesome people we could find -- and this is who we wound up with. Which means that if you’re running a music site and it doesn’t look like this, you are actively doing something wrong. Do better. Our strength as a scene will always follow directly from the diversity of our voices.
My staff bio begins, “Jesse was the first staffer at PropertyOfZack, and will be here until someone turns out the lights.” When I wrote that, I didn’t expect that we’d be choosing to flip the dimmer switch quite so soon, but here we are and here I am, keeping my word. In the five years I’ve been here, we’ve accomplished so much. We took a husk of computer code on a free platform and pumped that shell so full of spare minutes and hours, excitement, curiosity, hard work, anger and love that it became something wonderfully special, vibrantly alive and singularly ours. We took this place we built, filled it with family and made it a home. Maybe we've outgrown that home; the fact that it’s now time to leave in no way diminishes what we’ve accomplished here.
PropertyOfZack was great. PropertyOfZack is great. Ever will it be.
Ah, the Vans Warped Tour. Is there any tradition more time-honored for those remotely in the orbit of punk rock? The traveling circus of musical misfits is about to commence its 21st trip around the country, and the POZ team, in keeping in line with tradition, have sat down and waxed some poetic on a few of the bands we’re looking forward to seeing most this year. But, with every yin comes a yang, and in the interest of keeping things real, we’ve also gone ahead and decided to cover some bands that none of us have ever heard of – plucking some colorful-sounding band names from the infinite list of “Warped Tour Bands” and giving them a spin for the first time. It’s just like attending Warped Tour itself – it’s a few bands you love, and a few bands you’d have never thought of. So, check out our Can’t Miss It coverage below, and keep an eye out Thursday as we check out some new-to-us names.
Connor Sheehan: MC Lars has been quiet since releasing Lars Attacks! in 2011, his most recent LP aside from a Greatest Hits release. After completing a stint on both the 2011 Warped Tour (with Weerd Science) and the 2013 Warped Tour, MC Lars is back at it again with his distinct take on rap. If you’ve ever heard an MC Lars song you don’t need any selling, but if you’ve never listened to Lars I implore you to check out “This Gigantic Robot Kills” or “Signing Emo,” a song that is shockingly relevant almost 10 years after its release. (Seriously, the Mall-emo revival will be real in a year and “Signing Emo” will be a reality.) Calling himself “nerd-core,” which is a genre of rap usually relegated to rhymes about Zelda under an 8-bit beat, MC Lars tackles subjects from Hamlet to Melville’s Moby Dick. Honestly, I have not listened to MC Lars since probably his appearance at the Portland date of the 2011 Warped Tour, but after taking in a throwback to the summer before my sophomore year of college I find myself wondering why I ever stopped. Some personal favorites aside from the one mentioned above are “Annabel Lee R.I.P.” and “Venomous Box Jellyfish,” the latter of which is one of my favorite hip-hop tracks this side of Kanye’s Late Registration (hyperbolic? Maybe, but it’s how I feel).
Remember Never Shout Never (or nevershoutnever! as I prefer)? Yeah, I don’t really either, but since high school was officially 5 year ago, let’s jog our memories. At the time nsn!’s The Yippee EP was hot shit for me and my girlfriend at the time, and looking back it is a glorious amalgamation of Fruit Loops beats and an acoustic guitar (and yes, I tried to emulate this style in my writing at 16). Modern day Never Shout Never may be a far cry from the style of The Yippee EP, but their most recent release, Recycled Youth Volume One, features re-workings of his old songs that I remember. And while most of the songs do not hold up in the slightest, that’s what happens upon revisiting a band from your past. I would still probably try to check out a bit of Never Shout Never to see how he has progressed in the past 7 years, and who knows what kind of set he will play; last time I saw Never Shout Never, quite a lot of smoke rose from the crowd, including from the performers themselves.
Zack Zarrillo: I first heard about Moose Blood nearly two years ago via AbsolutePunk. The song in question includes the band’s (in)famous Brand New reference, which unlike many others I knew, turned me off from listening to the band. Fast-forward a year, and the band released *I’ll Keep You In Mind, From Time To Time* through No Sleep Records. I waited until the album came out, then listened in full, and then quickly fell in love with Moose Blood.
The sound and energy captured on the record is a rare one, and I’ve wanted to expose myself to their live show for quite some time now, but I haven’t been able to, just like the large majority of their other fans. Being from the UK, Moose Blood have an interesting potential to make Warped Tour their summer, by capturing the full attention from all fans that will feel lucky to see them, because who knows when they’ll be back. It’s hard for international bands to “break” in America because of cost, but I hope we can all help Moose Blood go further than previously possible this summer.
When I think of the modern Warped Tour, I think of a few bands, and Four Year Strong are one of them. To me, Four Year is the epitome of a Warped band in the most complimentary way possible. There’s something about the effort they put into what seems to be an effortless performance: the energy, the impact, the ability to grow facial hair.
I remember watching Four Year Strong last year in New Jersey on Warped next to my Bad Timing partner, Thomas Nassiff. Every x-minutes we’d look at each other at the same time, completely floored. It was like we were watching the best Warped performance of all time, song in and song out. The band is just so commanding, and hearing songs from the entire catalog in front of a parking lot filled with sweat is the number one way I want to watch Four Year Strong. Long live the easy.
Jesse Richman: I was first introduced to Braden Barrie, the kid behind SayWeCanFly, when I was asked to write about him earlier this year for an outlet that shall not be named. Generally, a phone interview is standard practice for that sort of thing, but when I saw that he would be in New York for a show later in the week, I figured, why not go chat in person? Turns out, it was a damned good thing I did, because the best way to understand SayWeCanFly is to see Braden live, looking like a lost member of JamisonParker and singing songs just as affectionately mawkish – songs about love and loss laced with a youthful flair for the dramatic and the slight cringeworthiness of a life where everything is constantly at stake in the way it can only be for a teen – from behind an acoustic guitar in a manner that was de rigeur in the mid-00s but is virtually lost now. Just as importantly, I got to see a hundred of Barrie’s fans line up to meet the man and maybe snap a selfie – while he was still on stage, with three songs left in his set. Did I mention this was a 2pm Sunday matinee? Get on board now, because whatever your feelings are on that sort of thing, SayWeCanFly is going to be big, and you’re either coming along for the ride or getting left behind.
Family Force 5, on the other hand, have been on the scene for a decade but have spent the last few years laying so low that you’ve probably forgotten they existed. Do yourself a favor – hop on Spotify and throw on “Kountry Gentleman” or “Love Addict” or “Get Your Back Off The Wall” or “Radiator,” and remember what it felt like to lose your goddamn head. Last time around, the band of brothers (both familial and honorary) brought a madcap live show full of props, drops and can’t-stop-dancin’ party anthems. I have no idea what we’ll see this time out – it’ll be the first time I’ve caught the band live since the departure of former frontman Solomon Olds a/k/a Soul Glow Activatur – but FF5 have earned my benefit of the doubt, and I can’t wait to see what sort of summer fun they’ll be bringing to this year’s Warped Tour.
Adrienne Fisher: Want to hear the most no-brainer recommendation for your Warped Tour experience that any of us could suggest? Go see the Wonder Years! You don’t need me to tell you that carving out time to go bounce around to one of the strongest and most consistently great live pop-punk bands of our scene will be a commitment long worth your while, and for those of us Warped Tour burnouts who are over-the-hill and want to lock in what little enjoyment we can derive out of these extremely outdoors, extremely populated, and extremely outside of our target market events, a Consistently Great Band in our schedule is key. The Wonder Years always seem to plan for a setlist that is at least a little varied from their last time on the ground touring, and with LP5 (well, LP4 if you don’t feel like counting GSOI!) recorded and in the pipeline, it’s at least a little possible that a new song or two might find their live debut this summer. But hey, even if you don’t manage to find your way over there for your semi-annual reminder to not be sad anymore, we all know that that we’ll be hearing about the dates of their fall plans on the last day of punk rock summer camp when the VWT radius clause expires. Like I said, these things are consistent!
And while we’re on the topic of being beholden to consistency, let me also rain praise unto a band of hardworking, kickass punk rockers who completely took the continental U.S. by storm in 2014, the almighty PUP. This group of wily Canadians released their punk as fuck, scrappy-yet-technically-fierce debut LP in the United States last year to thunderous buzz and tour opportunities aplenty; if Fest had an awards show, these guys would have won Breakout Artist by a landslide. For fans of gritted-teeth melodies, guitar acrobatics and smash-into-the-wall-at-80-MPH pacing, PUP is another band that boasts ridiculous proficiency when it comes to performing and captivating a crowd live, and we’re hoping that their stint on the Warped Tour, the sweatiest, hottest, most rigorous tour that exists won’t completely turn them off to hanging out in the United States in the future. But really – come for their full-blown instrumental shred in “Yukon,” stay for their Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” cover, buy the shit out of their self-titled record, and regret nothing.
Crawling Towards the Sun: The Hush Sound’s Bob Morris Starts Again, Again
by Jesse Richman
The Hush Sound’s Bob Morris has twice erected musical projects the old fashioned way – building from the ground up, according to the music industry’s well-worn blueprints – only to see them come crashing down around him. Now, after a decade of struggle, he’s burning the plans and walking away; in the process, he just might have rediscovered the Swish in his step.
It’s a dreary Saturday, and Bob Morris – one-time bandleader of the quarter-million selling Hush Sound; former label-mate of Pete Wentz and Brendon Urie; a man who, if he never headlined them, at least stood on stage in half-full arenas, opening for acts ranging from The All-American Rejects to OneRepublic – is playing for roughly two dozen mostly disinterested diners milling about on the rear patio of a kebab shop. They make loud conversation while settling in for lunch, as one does at 12:30 in the afternoon. The patio is covered, which is a very good thing, because we are outdoors in the middle of a rainstorm.
From a tented stage twenty yards away, separated from his “audience” by a damp stretch of muddy lawn, Morris cobbles together a set consisting of tracks from the Hush Sound, whose fall came as abruptly as their meteoric rise; Stamps, the breezy indie-pop act he founded in the wake of the Hush Sound’s demise and subsequently had ripped out from under his feet; and Le Swish, the strictly part-time project Morris is currently struggling to launch… at least, when he’s not busy with his new day gig, a dog-walking business. If anyone would seem to have license for enmity right now, it’s Morris.
The Hush Sound’s story is one common to so many former buzz bands, it’s practically archetypal: high school kids have fun banging out tunes; get discovered by an ear-to-the-ground taste-maker trying to burnish their own rep; and suddenly find themselves in way over their heads. The names – Ryan Ross, Pete Wentz, Fueled By Ramen, Crush Music Management – might speak to a particular scene and a particular time, but the themes are universal.
“All these huge bands were on our management [Crush’s roster included Panic! at the Disco, Cobra Starship and the Academy Is…, among others], and they were trying to make us that,” Morris recalls. “They would say things like ‘the chorus on this song isn’t explosive.’ And then we’d put explosion sounds on the chorus and send it back to management. We were fucking brats, but we didn’t know. We just thought we were being funny. We didn’t want to bow down to anyone, but at the same time we did feel pressured to bow down because we did want to continue on and we loved the growth of the band.”
The growth was rapid at the outset. Like Vines, the band’s first album recorded exclusively for Fueled By Ramen[1], was met with resoundingly positive reviews, selling upwards of 50,000 copies and propelling the band to touring gigs with virtually every notable name in the 2006 emo scene – Fall Out Boy, Jack’s Mannequin, Boys Like Girls and dozens more. But tensions between Morris and co-leader Greta Salpeter led to a brief split; while they quickly reconciled, the sonic vestiges of that rift echoed through the band’s 2008 follow-up, Goodbye Blues, an affair so disjointed that it often sounds like a pair of solo EPs mashed together. (In a sense, it was.) The album failed to grab the public’s imagination, quickly tumbling off the charts after a disappointing #75 debut.
I ask Morris if it was tough, seeing so many label-mates succeed while the Hush Sound floundered. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t notice it,” he affirms, “but we also, to be honest, were fucking assholes and thought they were all shitty. There you go. We just thought all those bands weren’t that good. We like[d] them as people, but we [were] like ‘ahh, I don’t like that kind of music, and it’s obviously going to be dated [soon].’ Whereas I can still put on the Hush Sound and it still sounds good to me.”
A year later, amidst ongoing creative tensions between the principals, and between band, label and management, the Hush Sound quietly severed their ties and turned out the lights. “I think, after Crush, we thought we had been worked over or something like that.” Now, with a few years’ remove and a lot of personal growth, Morris sees the situation with clearer eyes. “They were trying to get money; we were trying to get money. We were just trying to play in front of people. There was no strategy for us. For them, obviously there was, but for us it was just like ‘hey, everything’s working. Fall Out Boy is taking us on tour, we’re getting craft services, we’re touring in a bus, this is great!’ No complaints.”
The Hush Sound set out on a level track before the vicissitudes of major label-dom sent it astray. Stamps, on the other hand, was headed off the rails right from the start. Formed in 2010 by Morris, drummer Adam James and guitarist Ian Crawford (a friend of Morris’s who’s served time in The Cab, Panic! at the Disco and Never Shout Never, among other outfits), Stamps “was initially supposed to be this rock n’ roll thing. And then we heard Crawford’s then-girlfriend Ren Patrick sing. We brought her into the band, and it drastically changed the direction of the band immediately.”
If the band settled into an uneasy equilibrium after Patrick joined, then Crawford’s departure shortly after the release of 2011’s Stamps Ventures of a Lifetime – following his breakup with Patrick – tilted the scales sharply. “[Ian] left the band as they broke up, and then [Ren] started dating [Adam], so I didn’t really have any control over the couple anymore. It was a weird situation. I like them as people, but it was a hard thing to have a vision of mine taken. What they want to do is more pop.”
Patrick and James weren’t the only ones who differed with Morris on the direction the band should take. The band headed into the studio with producer Marc McClusky [Weezer, Ludo, letlive.], who (according to Morris) “just disregarded everything about our band. And he’s a great musician and a talented producer, but he did not give a shit about making Stamps-the-band, he just wanted something he could sell to an A&R, and that’s the way people are in the music industry.” No longer a believer in the act’s direction, and either unable or unwilling to reorient Patrick and James, a disillusioned Morris left the band he had formed.[2]
It was a split driven by clashing egos as much as by artistic differences, and if Morris blames himself for any part of the ill fit, it’s for inviting in someone who clearly still rubs him the wrong way. “I think I proposed [her joining]. I think I was like ‘wow, she’s a terrific singer.’ I didn’t understand that when you’re dealing with a young girl who’s been told she’s terrific her whole life you’re going to run into personality issues. Not on her part – I have personality issues. We all do. But our communication never got strong. It was always tense.”
“I’m in my mid–20s and I’ve been through it. She didn’t even want to put the Hush Sound in our bio because she wanted it to be about her. I’m like, ‘well I think that putting that our band has sold a couple hundred thousand records is a good thing for a bio.’” Morris won that battle; he lost the war.
“That was the saddest time in my life.”
Look: the picture I painted in the intro isn’t entirely accurate. Morris does, in fact, own a dog-walking business. But he’s also been busy writing and recording songs for patrons via commission-an-artist service Downwrite[3] and playing guitar in the backing band for pop up-and-comer Genevieve (“I think she’s definitely more talented than everyone else, ever. I just think she’s terrific!”). The Hush Sound, while no longer cranking out new tunes, continue to play sporadic live dates.[4] And he has a new band he’s helming, a perky, quirky indie-pop project he’s calling Le Swish.
“Le Swish is just a bunch of dudes making music.” Those dudes include old friends and collaborators Chris Faller (bassist for the Hush Sound) and Eric Hehr, who played in Salpeter’s post-Hush act Gold Motel. They’re people Morris trusts to help see his vision through – and make no bones about it, Le Swish is his vision and his alone. “It’s my baby, and they are very happy to help me make my baby, I guess. It’s very specifically not everyone else in LA trying to desperately chase some sort of trend. I’m just creating honest music that I like with people that are down with that and are not worried that ‘oh, we should be sounding like Ke$ha.’ That’s an outdated reference now, but that’s because I don’t give a shit. It’s outdated because that’s the last time I gave a shit, when Ke$ha was popular. “ In between our interview and this feature, Morris has played his first gigs under the new band’s auspices and issued the first two singles – “Work 4 U” and “Competition” – of what he promises will be an ongoing song-a-month release calendar.
It isn’t just the music that promises to be different this time out. While Morris’s art clearly remains his life work, he’s now committed to music no longer being a weekly paycheck. That’s right: not resigned, committed. Stepping away from music as a full-time concern isn’t just practical reality for Morris, it’s by design. “I want to specifically make my money outside of music so that I can create honest music,” says Morris. “My personal music, I want to not think about how much money I’ll make from it or if it’ll be a hit song. I want to have money, and create shit without thinking about money. That’s what causes people to change, and get worried and censor themselves, and it ruins art.” To that end, sure, we’re at SXSW, but in that context today’s soggy kebab shop show seems less like a misguided effort at generating interest in a new project, more like an opportunity to work out some tunes while supporting friends.
So ultimately, the rainy-day gig isn’t nearly as depressing as it seems on the surface. As Morris puts it, “I’m not mad about it. I’d rather play songs I love in front of zero people than play songs I don’t to a million. I want to create this piece of art that doesn’t exist, and only I can make it because everyone is the protagonist in their own life.” That’s a literal truth, sure. But it also speaks to his personal growth. After years suffering the consequences of allowing himself to live at the mercy of others – industry kingmakers, overbearing band-mates, his own self-sabotaging ego – Bob Morris finally appears ready to step into the protagonist’s role in his own life.
As our conversation wraps and Morris heads around front to grab some lunch, the rain continues to pour down in buckets. Yet somehow, you get the sense that the sun, still up there somewhere hiding behind the ashen clouds, is almost ready to make its appearance.
The Hush Sound’s debut, So Sudden, was first released independently, though it later got the FBR reissue treatment. ↩
Stamps persists as a duo, cranking out gooey vocal-driven synth pop lauded by the likes of Perez Hilton and touring – at least, if you consider playing daytime gigs at high schools a tour. ↩
The kebab shop show is actually a SXSW Downwrite showcase; other performers on the bill include Mark Rose [ex-Spitalfield, Downwrite co-founder], Shane Henderson [ex-Valencia] and Hawthorne Heights. Morris and the day’s other performers are among dozens available to write you a custom song – see Downwrite’s website for more info. ↩
The initial impetus for Le Swish was actually an abortive Hush Sound reunion. “We were doing a little bit of stuff, which I’ll admit, I thought was going to be more stuff. Greta had [her new solo project] Springtime Carnivore all lined up and kind of didn’t mention that. She did not mention that all of the new songs that I heard her writing were not for the Hush Sound. So I had about 30 songs written and I had no way to put them out because all of her songs were going to that project, so I formulated Le Swish.” It’s the same bugaboo that seems to infect all of Morris’s stories – scrambled communications, differing priorities. “We always have a lot of fun playing shows, but she seems to be doing that, and I definitely am more concerned with creating new music.” ↩
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Split The 7”, Split The Interview: Kevin Devine and Meredith Graves (Part One)
by Jesse Richman
Devinyl Splits No. 2 with Kevin Devine and Meredith Graves is out today via Bad Timing and Devinyl Records. In conjunction with each release in the series, Senior Editor Jesse Richman will be taking part in a conversation with Devine and his split partner. If you couldn’t tell by years of reading POZ, I’m a massive fan of Kevin, and it’s an honor to not only release his music, but also to be able to share more about it on this website. This is my disclaimer. Go read the interview, and check back Thursday for part two! - Zack Zarrillo
Kevin, what do you remember about the first time you discovered Meredith and her music?
KD: I think it was the NPR stream of the [Perfect Pussy] album. I hadn’t seen the band play yet. I sat there and listened to the album, and without realizing, I had listened to the album four times in a row by the time I picked my head up. I really loved it. It’s all these things that I like about good, abrasive, engaging punk music that was also really smart and really full of feeling. Kind of mysterious too, you had to kind of really dig in to get to these very layered and meaningful lyrics. They sit kind of equal with the chaos that was happening around them, which I also liked -- there was some work to be done, which I think is cool.
And then I played a show in Manchester, England -- the Deaf Institute -- and it happened to be the night after Meredith and... I think Joanna Gruesome was on that tour with you?
MG: Yep.
KD: I had played there a couple of times before, and I liked it. My shows there were solo acoustic shows, and I was really curious about how a more hardcore, punk-rock, whatever you want to call it... “up” show played in the room, because of how the room is laid out. I was curious about whether people were still up in those bleachers in the back, or whether they would come up and be physical and engaged, and because it’s 2014 at that point and not 1995, I was just like “well why don’t I just ask her” and I went on Instagram and sent a picture of the set times from their show and was like “Hi! We don’t know each other, but I like what you do. How was your show?” Sort of just kind of sent up a flare about opening up a dialogue.
And then we kind of were sending these email-Instagram-texting-postcards from our respective Europe trips to each other after that, checking in both about how the tours were going and how our brains were doing. There’s a thing about touring that’s very particular, that you can jump into a level of engagement with someone about, you know, “how fun is it! Also, how crazy do you feel! Also, how disorienting is your experience! And how great is it!” There’s just all this stuff happening, it’s a pretty kaleidoscopic experience. So we kind of got in on that, and then Instagram became email became text became coffee became Meredith being cool enough and kind enough to do this with me.
Meredith, from your end, tell me what you remember about getting that first Instagram message. Did you know who Kevin was? Were you surprised?
MG: I was just very happy. I have bad social anxiety. I think it’s kind of part of the larger mythology now that I was thrust into the spotlight very unwittingly with this band -- it all happened overnight, very quickly. Almost two years after it all started, I’m still very shy. In events where I’m around other musicians, like at festivals and in situations like that, I have a lot of trouble talking to people. I have a lot of trouble approaching people. I always assume that other people, especially musicians, are far more accomplished than I am and don’t want to talk to me or be my friend. So to get a message from Kevin, who’s someone whose presence I’ve been aware of for so so so so so long; whose impact was so tangible in the community that I was part of growing up; who had connections, strong relationships with musicians that changed my life and the lives of all my friends -- getting such a kind letter from someone who’s been so important in my life was so cool! And immediately it was like “oh, obviously we’re going to be friends.”
We always laugh about this, but I got his letter when I was in a McDonald's in Poland. One of the hard things about touring overseas is your phone doesn’t work, and you’re x amount of hours ahead of everyone at home, and you can’t get in touch with anyone. And I’m lonely, and that first tour was during a really bad time for me. I was really sick and really stressed out the whole time we were away. So just this weird, random reach-out from someone whose work I’ve cherished for so long in this McDonalds in Poland where I’m furiously trying to connect to the wireless and I feel so weird and so isolated, and this is the message I get. It felt really good!
KD: It’s funny, that initial feeling and that initial response that you had. I started to look forward to both having a minute to send these missives out and to get them back. It became a thing. Like when I would get to a venue, or if we got to where we were staying and there was WiFi, and there was another picture postcard or message from Meredith, the openness describing what she was going through, it felt pretty quickly like a level of intuition, and there was some depth as if you’d known the person longer.
MG: When you meet someone and you end up with a relationship that’s worth it to work on; when you meet any friend and it becomes something that brings you joy and becomes something that’s really worth it; that’s amazing! But when it’s someone that gets what you do too, that you don’t have to explain things to... Having a common language is so important. It’s meeting someone who speaks your native language.
Was there any awkwardness when you finally met in person, or did that same intimacy just carry right through?
MG: No, there really wasn’t! We literally hung out for eight hours the first time we hung out. We walked the entire length of the Brooklyn bridge. We drank a shitton of coffee. I was in the early stages of dating my boyfriend...
KD: That’s right!
MG: ...and I was like like “I really like this guy, what should I do?” We didn’t talk about music at all. He gave me love advice.
KD: We just kind of had this pinging, wide-ranging conversation that literally started in the backyard of a cafe and spanned boroughs. It wasn’t, like, manic. It was just wide-ranging and dynamic but also comfortable. It was like “yeah, this is a person that I’m going to be friends with.”
I want to approach this a little bit backwards. One thing that your songs on this split have in common is that they’re both are about very intimate, delicate situations. So I was wondering if you felt that the intimacy and the safe space that it sounds like you’ve carved out in your relationship lent itself to making these songs part of something that you did together.
KD: From my side of that, yes. We both have a lot of expressiveness about intimate things in our respective catalogs. So I think some version of that was probably going to be in what we wrote, because we both write that way. My memory of this is, we talked about that way before we’d heard either of our songs, and kind of way before we even recorded the songs. Maybe I had written the song that I recorded. I just remember there being a bout of text messaging about both of us arriving at these pretty delicate, or intimate, or maybe even painful topics and writing from something that needed to get written, and then looking at each other and saying -- I think Meredith even said a few times that there was strength in the fact that we were going to do that together.
MG: The whole point was doing it together.
KD: There was definitely support in that.
MG: I have both songs, and one day a few months ago I was stuck on the subway for half an hour and I just listened to the two songs on a loop, over and over again, and listened to how they became enmeshed with one another. And now I can’t listen to one without the other anymore.
I’m fucking terrified -- I’m not ready for people to hear this, it’s so sad to me. I’m so scared that there will be a pushback to the way it sounds, because of the subject matter. I’m scared. I’m really sensitive, and I’m not doing any of this for artifice, it’s really one of the saddest things I’ve ever written about, one of the saddest things that’s ever happened to me, and it’s fucked. The only reason I know that it’s going to be okay no matter what happens is, when I hear those two songs, all I see in my head is me and Kevin standing in a room, facing each other and singing to each other. It’s a really big leap, but I always feel like I’ve got Kevin there being like “hold hands, we’ll jump.” I’m okay as long as he’s there. And no matter what happens, this record is really, for me, a 50-50 playing field, us looking at each other and saying “okay, we’re going to do this, alright? Good.”
The point is to clear the space around us, giving each other permission to make room for our trauma. Whether people like it or not; no matter how many mean people are going to be like “I don’t like this, you’re not a very good guitar player,” all the things I’ve been telling myself for a month that people are going to say to me about this record; when I get scared, I just remind myself that no matter what people think of the song itself, this is about me speaking truth to my experiences and it’s about me confiding in one person. The song is really like a letter I wrote to Kevin. It’s like a thing; it’s me telling him what happened. So I got to direct the song for a person.
Tell me a little bit about writing the song and where it came from.
MG: It’s hard to talk about specifics. It’s so fresh. I think the best thing for me to do would be to talk about what happened to me in a very broad sense. It’s a song about being 27 and getting older and doing what I do for a living and being in the position that I’m in, and wondering if my life will preclude me from having relationships and having a family someday. It’s a song about loss, and it’s a song about wondering if the choice I’ve made isn’t more serious than I considered. Wondering if I’m ever going to have kids. Wondering if I’m ever going to get married. Wondering if I’m ever going to be able to maintain a stable relationship or have a family with someone, because of what I’ve chosen to do with my life. It’s a song about loss, and about turning 27 and realizing that the older I get, my window is closing.
And of course there’s a whole other conversation that I’m not even engaging with about how, for a woman, your cultural capital is often seen as your ability to have children and your desirability. On the Perfect Pussy record I wrote about marriage and relationships a lot, but this is different than that. This isn’t about other people necessarily -- it’s about me wondering what I want, and asking myself, do I want these things ever? Do I want a partner? Do I want a family? Do I want these things I seem to potentially be incapable of having? Wondering if I’ve made the right choice, and being pretty destroyed by a series of events from this fall that have brought into my head the possibility that I might never have that.
Kevin was a great person to confide in when that stuff was happening. We both found ourselves in these situations within, like, a month of one another. Just being able to be like, alright, well we had this project we were thinking about anyway, here’s our opportunity, let’s do that. Let’s make this a conversation about things other people might also be experiencing, as sad as that is. Let’s do what we do, which is be vulnerable with each other and with people, you know?
There’s strength in numbers, being vulnerable together.
KD: You get hurt being vulnerable. But also, there’s a kind of bravery in letting yourself be vulnerable. Vulnerability is not necessarily cool and detached; it requires a level of engagement that isn’t always looked at as cool but is, to me, the difference between -- and I like a lot of cool, detached art too -- but the stuff I tend to let all the way in is usually by people who are letting me in. That’s one thing in the creative world, but it’s also that way with your friends. I’ve definitely been a person who’s overextended myself and gotten hurt as a result. And that’s not always, or even often, the other party’s fault! Which is the difference between where I think about things now, and where I thought of them being a teenager. But I’d rather overextend myself and get hurt if it means I get to keep open. I don’t do well closed.
I can’t know what that experience that Meredith is describing is like; I can’t know because there are definitely differences in our experiences. But I know those feelings, and my version of those feelings, super well. And there was a lot of relating, if not to the exact specific circumstances of the song, to those fears and those thoughts. I relate and was grateful for her writing that song, because it’s another mirror.
Let’s talk about your song, Kevin. You’ve been pretty straightforward about what and who that song is about.
KD: My friend died. Mike Skinner is his name. He played drums in Miracle of ‘86, which is the band I used to play in. Then he played drums in my touring and recording project for this stuff. We had a pretty consistent musical relationship for nine years, and then intermittently for the last four years of his life.
He also was one of the five most important people in my life for ten years. On a personal level, he was familial in all directions that word suggests. He was there when my father died; he was there at my wedding. We went all over the world together, and we had a lot of really beautiful, funny, layered, deep times, and we had a lot of frustrating times. We were running buddies, and did a lot of drugs and drank together and got in a lot of mischief together, and also both tried in our own ways to kick that shit, and that was a whole other layer of the later part of our relationship. He was a big part of the picture from the day I met him to the day he passed. It was pretty shocking. It definitely was not a thing that was on the horizon -- everyone was pretty floored, and still is pretty floored, picking apart the bones of it.
I had a piece of music I had been playing a little bit while I was on a recent tour of Australia, it was the verse figure of that song, a guitar part. I didn’t really know what the song was yet, but I knew I liked it and wanted to come back to it. And then I had a dream -- the first verse of the song, which is basically him turning up hanging from the ceiling in my room, floating, suspended like he was in a play, like he had a harness or something around him. And he said “do you remember that time we played that club in Geißen, and we had bought coke and rolled joints of it, and were smoking it, and our buddy Chris Bracco came in” -- who’s played in the band forever, and he doesn’t do that and never did -- “and was about to pick it up and smoke it because he thought it was weed, and we were like ‘no no no no no, don’t do that’?” I think it was a moment for Chris, like “what the fuck are these guys doing?” Like he didn’t know the water he was in, or the depth of the water he was in, and then all of the sudden was like “whoa! First of all, when did this happen, when did you go get this? Second of all, what are you doing? This is not a wrinkle of our social dynamic I was aware of!”
It was always kind of a funny story until one of the principals isn’t around. It just kind of takes on a different cast or something. I was a little concerned about writing that verse of that song because I was a little concerned that it might be... unfair, or I don’t know, could potentially be seen as too revealing, or disrespectful in a certain way. But it was one wing of a many-winged experience that he and I had. That was part of what we did together for a long time. It’s more disrespectful, and certainly less rooted in reality, to act as if that’s not a thing that happened for years. And that was specific to my experience of that person, and his experience of me. All the mess and all the beauty.
The dream is an entry point to that day’s dialogue-with-self about the loss, and what can I do. You can have acceptance, and you can have all kinds of high-minded and helpful frames, but it still just sucks and is unsatisfying. And the end of the song kind of hangs on that chord, because there is no resolution. I don’t know how you resolve this stuff. I remember talking about it with my friend Rob Schnapf, a record producer who made a few of my records, and one of the biggest projects in his life was he basically made all of Elliott Smith’s records. We were talking about some of the parallels between the two situations, his loss and mine, and he basically said “it sucks, and it sucks forever, and the character of its suckiness just changes.” Ten words and I can’t beat that.
Meredith, Kevin talked a little about what he got from your song and his experience listening to it. What about on your part, listening to the song Kevin did?
MG: I think Kevin’s writing has given me a positive model for grieving. I think what he’s done is create a safe framework to experience all of the emotions directly impacting and surrounding his grief, and what he’s created is a really vulnerable portrait of the way one person grieves that will make other people in similar situations feel less alone. You’ve made me feel like it’s safe to think about the loss I’ve experienced, and I think the song will have the same impact on other people when they hear it.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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Matter Of Time: A Chroma Q&A with Cartel’s Will Pugh
by Jesse Richman
Ten years removed from their defining debut LP, Cartel are one of the few products of their era still standing (albeit barely at times). As the band readies to kick off the second leg of their Chroma Tour -- which features the game-changing album played front-to-back in full -- Senior Editor Jesse Richman caught up with frontman Will Pugh to look back at the band's breakthrough -- and forward to their tenuous future.
Let’s step back in time for a little bit. The first time I saw Cartel was on a Militia Group showcase tour with Brandtson, the Rocket Summer and Umbrellas in 2004. At that point, you had only released the Ransom EP. What do you remember about coming off that tour and preparing to finally record a full length?
Will Pugh: We had done a lot of pre-production prior to that. I believe even before we did that tour, the producers, Zack [Odom] and Kenneth [Mount], had come over to Kevin’s [Sanders, drums] house where we were rehearsing and laid down some stuff. We did some stuff in Joseph’s [Peppers, guitar] basement, working through the tracks. So we were pretty damn prepared for that record. I remember a couple times in the back of the van where we were working on parts, like the bridge to “Burn This City.” Whatever came to mind that we could add. We were thinking of sequencing, ways to tie songs. It’s probably the most prepared for a record we’ve ever been.
When you were writing “Honestly,” do you remember if you knew that it was going to be the single? Could you tell?
We knew it was good. We knew it had a big chorus and whatnot. But I don’t think we had any idea.
Did you have any other songs you had earmarked as “the big song”?
I think the label did, a little bit. They thought “Matter Of Time” was going to be the one. I specifically remember a conversation about that. “Guys, this is the song that takes you guys from a quarter-million records to a million records!” Ok, sure. Let’s get to a quarter million first!
It was a different business back then.
Yeah. I think we just believed in the whole thing, really.
I want to talk about “Q” and “A”. “A” in particular is super studio-tricked-out. It interpolates half of the other songs on the album. That’s a really ambitious thing to try on your first record. Was it ambition, or was it just that you didn’t know any better?
A little bit of both! Before we went into the studio, we pretty much laid out the way it was going to go up until the “Burn This City” chorus comes back in on top of the “Save Us” chorus. After that, we were like “from here, every four phrases something will change or come in. We’ll just keep building, stacking, taking stuff away.” We put that song together in the last few days of tracking. Zack was actually mixing “Q” while we were still finishing “A”. So as he got to that point, we were bringing tracks in and tossing them in as we finished it out. I wouldn’t say it was composed in advance, but it was planned. It was kind of a happy accident, but with a lot of focus.
Chroma came out on the Militia Group in September of 2005 [check out this incredible promo, which is somehow still online], but it was a slow build. Did you know from the start that the album would eventually be upstreamed to Epic Records? Or was it a matter of, things were selling, so now they wanted to pick it up?
We were actually talking about the upstream in, like, August of 2005, once we had recorded Chroma and a few people had heard it. I think we did 3,000 [in sales] the first week, which was about how much we had sold of the Ransom EP by that point. April of 2006 is when the official upstream happened, but there were a couple months of talking before that. I think we had done maybe 30,000 prior to that, so it had picked up, we were doing pretty alright. And then when it got re-released [by Epic] in the summer of 2006, that’s when, with Warped Tour and everything, it popped. I think it went from 30,000 to 80,000 by the end of Warped Tour. And after that was when the single popped.
Do you remember any particular moments where you realized that Chroma wasn’t just your “starter” record, it was the record?
The Detroit Warped Tour date. On Warped Tour, you’re in a vacuum, you don’t know what’s going on in the real world, you’re waking up at a festival every day. “Oh, parking lot again. Sweet.” You know? But I remember we were noticing our merchandise... We had to have a guy print our merch, throw it in a duffel bag, and jump on a plane to come bring it to us, because we were dead fucking out. When that happened, I was like “we paid for a plane ticket last minute to get merch? That’s gotta be wildly expensive!” “Yeah, but we didn’t have any merch left.” I was like “oh, we must be doing alright!” And then Detroit Warped Tour, there were I would say 7-to-8,000 people stacked up.
In the fall of 2006, we were doing all the radio shows. I remember I was going to my family’s Christmas and I got a call from my manager, “we did 10,000 records this week.” What the fuck? Like, really? Then we hit 100,000 [in total sales]. 200,000 was approaching. That was probably the time. Early 2007. That was probably when we were like, “yep, alright, sweet, this is probably going to be our calling card for a while.”
Did you start to worry about how you were going to have to match it the next time out?
We had already been writing. When you’re in it like that, it’s another vacuum. It was the five of us, our crew and our management, the whole team. You sort of start to collapse in on yourself, in a good way, it shields you from everything that could be happening. It was never a whirlwind, or anything we felt overwhelmed by.
Was there time to sit back and enjoy it all? Did you get to go buy anything? Obviously you guys aren’t “rock star”-level ballers.
The [winter 2007] Cobra Starship / Boys Like Girls tour was the peak of the Chroma cycle. Right when we got back, we had to cut a check for taxes. That kind of brought us back down to earth. It was like “sweet, we got a check from the tour.” Then the tax guy hits us up. “All right, cool. Taxes suck.”
If you’re paying a lot, at least it means you made a lot!
It’s true! It put a damper on things, but I think it was good, otherwise we would have come home and blown it on a bunch of gear, and then we would have gotten the tax bill, and “whoops, sorry Uncle Sam!”
Let’s jump back to the present. I think your core fanbase was real happy with [2013’s] Collider, and I know you guys were happy with it. But there’s definitely a point of diminishing returns, where you’re just not getting the same amount of kids out to shows. You recently posted on Facebook that your upcoming tour of the UK will be your last time there, because it no longer makes financial sense.
International touring, we don’t make any money. You have to be All Time Low. You have to pull pretty hard. The flights are expensive, and then you’ve got gear so that adds cost, and then traveling around -- it’s not like we own a van there. It takes a lot of time and effort. Visas, blah blah blah. So it just doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t mean we’re not touring anymore, it just means we’re not going to the UK. Even this run we’re doing, we’re doing one Chroma show and then three Slam Dunk shows, and we’re not making a penny. It just covers our costs. So what’s the point? I’ve been to England. It looks the same.
If ten year tours weren’t a thing, what would Cartel be doing right now? I know this has put the wind back in your sails when you really needed it.
That’s a good question. We’ve been planning this pretty much all last year. We specifically didn’t tour last year on purpose, so that we wouldn’t deflate whatever market we did have. So that people, even if they didn’t care that it was a ten year tour, would come see us. I don’t know what we would be doing. Would we be making a new record? I really have no idea.
After this tour wraps, does Cartel go back to being part-time for everybody? Where you can get together, do an album, do a short tour or two on it, and other than that you’ve got your lives outside of this thing?
It probably will remain the same. We’ll see. We don’t have a label or anything like that that we’re tied to. This tour has honestly done better than we thought, so you never know. We don’t have any songs written, so there’s not going to be a record in, like, June. It’s not coming down the pipe like that. We never like to say anything for sure, just take it as it comes, which is really what we’ve done for our entire career. We’ll push back from the table after this and reevaluate. I’ve got [production work lined up] in the summer up until August at this point, and I’m trying to book out the rest of the fall.
Do you worry that doing a ten year tour plays into the perception of Cartel as a nostalgia act?
It is hard to avoid, to be honest, because Chroma was that record, still is that record. Doing the tour, we’re seeing a lot of people coming to shows. We’ve had five nights in a row sell out. Where the fuck have you been for ten years? We see a lot of older fans, people we haven’t played to in a really long time. It’s a good feeling, but at the same time you’re wondering “are you going to stick around this time?”
I think some people might think we’re a nostalgia act. I don’t see it that way. New Found Glory is a good example, they’ve played a bunch of ten year tours and they’re still putting out new records. With this kind of record and the reception it got initially -- especially compared to the album sales of the rest of the albums we’ve put out -- it could be pretty easy to get [pigeonholed] into that. But I think it’s more important what we think about our own band versus what other people think.
You guys put a lot of work into the Chroma vinyl package, to make it worth it to people.
Goddamn Czechoslovakia, man. Get your new records pressed somewhere else. “Oh yeah, we can get it done before Record Store Day. ...Oh, nope, we blew it on cutting the master plate, so now it’s pushed back six weeks.” We’re almost sold out of our release and we haven’t even shipped it yet. We were working on it since April of last year, game-planning and putting things together. Rico [Andradi] from TEAM*’s label is putting it out, Field Day Records. It’s been our main focus for a while.
Is that something you ever see happening with your other albums?
I’d like to see all of our records on vinyl, honestly. I think they’re rad. I think we particularly love vinyl, just the physical product of it, it’s very cool. I’d love to see it happen for all of them, but I think we’ve got to do the ten year wait on it. It is what it is.
I don’t know how many copies of the self-titled vinyl we could do. That’s still our second-best selling record. Some people panned it, but it sold better than the records they thought they liked. I would love to see the self-titled on vinyl because I think we could do some really cool stuff with that. Plus there’s a lot of songs; it would have to be a double disc, it might have to be a triple disc. It’s a pretty long record. 14 tracks. We wouldn’t put the Wyclef version of “Wasted” on there.
How did that all come together? I presume the label just said “put Wyclef on here because we want to sell records”?
They wanted to get some kind of cool collaboration. We asked Butch Walker if he wanted to do it, but he was totally swamped. He was like “I love you guys! Atlanta! But I can’t do it.” It would have been sweet. We had a song we wanted him to be on, a b-side on the self-titled, “Getaway.”
[Wyclef] came about because our A&R was a manager for the Fugees. So we were tossing around some things. We thought that “Wasted” was a special song. Let’s get a hip-hop guy to remix it. We asked Andre 3000. We were trying to use the Atlanta connection. Butch Walker! Ok, no? Andre 3000! Oh, he’s in a hole somewhere, he Dave Chappelled himself? So then [our A&R] was like “you know, Wyclef loves to collaborate with different kinds of artists.” Wyclef? Fugees? Bring it! He brought that whole thing in, did it all himself. It’s pretty cool. I don’t know about “nuclear North Korea” being a lyric in our song, but sure? That’s Wyclef bein’ Clef! Cartel and Wyclef singin’ “bring the troops back!” Well, yeah, but that’s not what the song’s about...
This ten year thing has been so unexpectedly successful. Do you do something to capitalize on that momentum while you have it? Like, I know that wasn’t the plan, but do plans change because it’s gone so well?
I don’t think we know yet. The east coast run has gone really well. We’ll see how the west coast shapes up. It’s definitely put a little more life into things for sure. We all feel the energy again, in that way. I doubt we’ll wait for a ten year self-titled tour. That would be a hell of a record to pull off live! A lot of shit! That record has a lot of tunings on the guitar. Chroma is like, drop the top string, bring it back up. The self-titled record is like, whole new guitar. We’d have to have three each to do that record. And that means guitar techs and things like that.
More money you don’t have.
Yeah, more money we don’t have. We might do some one-off shows of that. Maybe not a full tour. Do a New York show, an Atlanta show, Chicago, LA, something like that. That would be an interesting album to see how that reception turned out.
I would be into that, for one. I think it’s an album that, like you said, it got panned at the time but it sold well. And I think people like it more in retrospect than they did at the time, I think people have come around to it. Maybe people were put off more by the circumstances around it than by the album itself?
I think that was exactly it. I was talking to my wife about it the other day. Maybe we put out our fourth album second. Maybe we did it out of order. We wouldn’t change anything; that was the natural progression that we did. We started listening to Radiohead a lot and there you go.
If, I dunno, Universal were to come to you right now and say, “hey Will, hey Cartel, we’re going to give you enough money to make an album, a year and a half of tour support, and enough money that you families can live comfortably for the next year and a half -- but you’ve got to make this album in a bubble,” would you do it?
[other band members, listening from the next room over] “I would!” “Fuck yeah!”
I mean, yeah, probably! A year and a half of support? Yeah, alright, sure! There’s not a whole lot of jobs that will give you that sort of guarantee. I’d probably go do it. You want farm animals involved? No, no, definitely wouldn’t do that. But yeah, I’d probably do it.
So then what’s the line? What’s the cutoff to get you back in one of those?
One miiiillion dollars. No, I dunno. Shit, just no bullshit. That’s my cutoff. Leave the personal trainer at home. Leave the farm animals at home. Actually do what we told you to do, which was make it funny, because that’s what it was for us. I don’t think there would be a line other than that.
It would be worth it to keep making music?
For a year and a half? There’s a lot of bands that won’t be around in a year and a half, that have no idea that they won’t be right now.
There’s a lot of bands that aren’t around now, that were at many different points throughout your run, who thought they’d still be around at this point. What do you credit with the fact that you’re still here to?
[from the other room] “College shows!”
That is actually probably the most appropriate answer you could get. College shows.
[other room, again] “Seriously, we could afford to make music.”
Lets wrap this up. Ten years; a life in music really. You’ve seen high moments, you’ve seen low moments. How do you feel ten years in with the whole experience?
I’d try and eat better food! Less McDonalds! Nah, I wouldn’t change a thing.
