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 gestures been actually becomes once you pick it back up and play it 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. 

They Are Gutting A Body Of Water @ 40.7099920, -73.9262855

Yesterday At 3:10PM.

Doug texts me a GPS pin. I grab my camera bag and run out the door. When I get there, there are about twenty people playing volleyball and absolutely no sign of a show. I text Doug to make sure I’m in the right place. He tells me they’re around the block scouting another spot.

A few minutes later another set of cords come through, a couple streets over and on the other side of the tracks. I find a hole in the fence, cut across that way, push through some bushes and suddenly pop out in front of a bunch of familiar faces.

Things are already starting to assemble themselves. Cables are being run to generators. Fif is doing sound out of the trunk of a car. People are carrying things back and forth trying to turn a dead-end street into a venue before anybody really has time to think about it.

At some point we realize Emily left her pedals and bass strap somewhere. I realized the strap had almost perfect little notches at each end. Good enough, My camera bag became a strap.

I asked Doug if he cared if I climbed onto the roof of the van once everything started to kick off so I could shoot a composite from up there.

He said he didn’t care, just don’t let anybody else up. Fair enough.

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Eventually I abandoned the van. Next door there was a lot full of old garbage trucks, so I wandered over there and climbed on top of one of those instead. It was a great view from up there, A few hundred people packed into the end of a street, train tracks behind them, generators humming, everyone gathered around.

Maybe forty minutes later the music stopped.

Walking back from the parking lot next door, I found a kid’s school ID on the ground. I carried it back into the crowd, holding it up next to random faces until eventually I found him and handed it back to him. As people started disappearing, Olivia came over and gave me a hug. We talked for a little bit and I made her photo before everyone scattered.

Before leaving, I grabbed everyone to walk over to the tracks for a few group photos.

A show had appeared out of almost nothing and disappeared about as quickly. I hugged everyone and went on my way.

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Two Nights With Dinosaur Jr. At New York Honky-Tonks

I spent the last two nights with Dinosaur Jr. in two different New York City honky-tonks.

There is something slightly strange about that sentence until you stop and remember that the original concept for Dinosaur Jr was “ear-bleeding country.”

The two nights were part of a run of shows put together by Fender, placing Dinosaur Jr. in rooms considerably smaller than the amount of amplification they brought with them.

These rooms are built for a different kind of noise. Wooden walls, neon beer signs, cowboy boots, low stages and people packed close enough together that dancing feels almost necessary. Places better suited for pedal steel than a wall of Marshall amplifiers, and yet it somehow works.

The first night started at Lucinda’s, a room not entirely unfamiliar to J Mascis. Before Lucinda Williams’ name was above the door, 169 Avenue A was Brownies, a dingy rock club in the east village. J played there last on July 17, 1998. Twenty-eight years later, the name on the door had changed, the neighborhood around it had changed, and the walls had lived a few different lives, but somehow J Mascis had found his way back.

I found myself outside by five standing in the rain completely soaked. The first person in line was named Steve, who let me stand underneath his umbrella. Megan was behind him, we started chatting a bit and somehow within a few minutes discovered that we both knew Jim Spring, who had been floating around the Dinosaur Jr. universe since making early videos with them.

Inside, the absurdity of the room became more obvious. We all crammed around the eight inch high stage covered in amps. I wedged myself close enough that Lou Barlow would spend part of the night worrying aloud about the headstock of his bass connecting with my face. Eventually it hit the guy next to me instead.

After the first song, a guy pushed his way toward the stage, tapped Lou on the shoulder and suggested they turn the vocals up.

Lou laughed. “If it’s not loud enough, you can put your head to the monitor.”

For the next few songs the guy stood there fanning himself with one of those collapsible hand fans before eventually disappearing back into the room.

The following afternoon I took a detour on my way to Skinny Dennis and I watched Dinosaur Jr. play four songs in Tompkins Square Park while the Parks Department tried to stop the whole thing. I heard someone say they would just eat the ticket if it came down to it. At 2:54pm, Dinosaur Jr. started playing anyway.

A few hours later I was standing inside another honky-tonk. Skinny Dennis was somehow even tighter. Megan, who I had met on the first day was once again beside me at the front of the stage. The room filled until everyone seemed stacked on top of each other.

Somewhere around the fourth or fifth song I looked up and saw a crowd surfer coming over our heads.

Behind The Scenes w/ Radiator Hospital @ TV Eye

I brought a small VHS camera with me while working on the photos for the interview with Sam at TV Eye. The video is a loose collection of moments from the day: Sam writing out the setlist, the two of us squeezing into the photo booth, every cassette being checked and rewound before the show, soundcheck, and a few songs from the crowd once the room started moving.

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.

Cash Only Tonys Records A Record

I had known about Cash Only Tony’s for a while before I really knew Cash Only Tony’s.

My friend Luke had put me onto them, and after that they seemed to keep appearing somewhere in my peripheral. I first remember meeting them last year at Music Hall, when I was there working on a piece with a band they were opening for. After that, their name just kept showing up. Which is maybe the strange thing about Cash Only Tony’s. For a band that has released relatively little music out into the world, they seem to exist almost everywhere.

Their audience has largely been built the old-fashioned way, physically. People show up. Friends bring friends. Someone hears about a show happening somewhere and suddenly there are bodies pressed against the walls. The recorded songs almost feel secondary to the larger thing happening around them. So when Annika asked if I wanted to spend two days in the studio while they recorded their upcoming album, there wasn’t much to think about. I filled two bags with cameras and said I would be there.

For two days, I watched seven people try to turn the songs that have mostly existed in basements, packed rooms, and on the road into something that could survive being trapped inside a recording. I shot seven rolls of film and three hours of footage hoping I could capture that lightning in a bottle.

Maybe that was what interested me most about being there. Cash Only Tony’s already play like a band in constant conversation with themselves. Onstage, they spend most of the set facing one another instead of the crowd. From the outside, you could mistake it for distance, maybe even feel like you are watching something you were never entirely invited into. Spend enough time around them, though, and it starts to look completely different.

They are always checking in with one another. Little jokes passed across the room. A quick look when something goes wrong. Eye contact that seems to say everything is fine without anyone actually having to say it. What looks like seven people turning away from the audience is really seven people turning towards the thing keeping the whole machine moving.

The studio takes that same private language and slows it down.

Now there are headphones. Repeated takes. Seven people listening back to a few seconds of sound that most of us will eventually hear without ever knowing how long they spent talking about it. Someone plays something again. Everyone listens. Someone disappears outside and comes back in. A joke gets thrown across the room. Then the room gets quiet.

They listen again. Then they do it again.

These photographs are from those two days.

On The Road W/ Racing Mount Pleasant

A month ago, I went on tour with Racing Mount Pleasant. These are some photos from my time in the van and the places we passed through along the way. You learn pretty quickly that touring is mostly the space between things. Highways and gas stations. Somebody always asleep. Somebody always hungry. A soccer ball appearing whenever the van stopped moving for more than ten minutes, as if every parking lot in America had been built specifically for killing an hour before load-in.

Somewhere along the way we ended up at an Airbnb where the drapes were almost the exact same color as the walls, an interior design decision somebody had clearly felt very confident about, even tho the should not have been. We watched a documentary about Steely Dan there. At 12:43 in the morning, a bunk bed collapsed. Tyler slept on an air mattress practically underneath the dining room table. Sam Dubose stepped on a cactus at a rest stop because I had dragged everyone away from the van to take photos under a tree. There were Walmart runs, long stretches of highway, half-finished conversations picked back up three cities later, and an impressive amount of time spent figuring out where everyone was going to sleep.

None of this had much to do with playing music, which meant, of course, that it had everything to do with being on tour. The shows might be the reason everyone gets in the van, but most of the trip happens somewhere else entirely, in parking lots, kitchens, gas stations, borrowed rooms, and the hours spent watching the road through a window. The small, mostly useless moments that take up nearly the entire day somehow become the part you miss once there is nowhere left to go.

I miss being in that van.

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.

Racing Mount Pleasant : Summer '26 Tour Vlog

A few weeks have passed now, and I'm still finding little reminders of this trip. Setlist stuffed into my jacket pocket. A receipt stuffed into a camera bag. The notes I kept typing into my phone while waiting in airports. Three cities have already started collapsing into one memory, somewhere between delayed flights, gas station dinners, hotel rooms held together by blow-up mattresses, and furniture neatly stacked in the corner.

I landed in Denver for the first show after a broken pilot's chair delayed the flight, wandered through an empty venue while barbecue smoked outside a gutted Airstream green room, then spent the next few days following Racing Mount Pleasant through Des Moines and Minneapolis. Somewhere in between there were soccer balls kicked around parking lots while waiting for load in, Casey's dad telling me he'd read my interview with the band back in January, a kid named Nolan who drove several states with his mom just to say hello before the show, and an entire room rearranged every night so nine people could somehow convince a two-bed hotel room to become home.

The shows themselves almost feel secondary looking back. Smacking my head on a stage beam I'd been explicitly warned about with a piece of neon green gaff tape, Byron laughing through the encore because he suddenly had a guitar in his hands instead of merch. Stopping load out long enough to bury a dead bird in the alley. Sitting alone in another Delta terminal with my legs resting on a Pelican case while my flight home slipped from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. By the time I finally made it back to New York at five in the morning, the last thing waiting for me was three taxi drivers screaming at each other in the LaGuardia pickup garage. Somehow it felt like the only appropriate ending.

Lowertown Comes Home After Two Months On The Road

Saturday night the rain couldn't decide what it wanted to be. Not enough to send anyone running for cover, just enough to make the walk to Bowery Ballroom feel slightly inconvenient. The kind of weather that leaves everyone checking the sky every few minutes hoping it'll finally commit to something. I hadn't planned on documenting anything that day. My camera bag was sitting at home. All I had was a point and shoot and a children's video camera that somehow made perfect sense when I grabbed it walking out the door.

By the time I found Olivia, the room had settled into the familiar rhythm of soundcheck. Drums. Guitar. Vocals. More Vocals. Bass. The same language spoken in every venue, regardless of the city. Between songs we talked about the road. They had just finished driving the same route I'd done a few weeks earlier, only in reverse, comparing cities like people comparing dreams they weren't entirely sure had happened.

At some point I realized the stage was framed by these absurd lime green curtains I'd somehow never noticed before. Maybe they'd always been there just like that.

The hours before doors are always my favorite. Olivia disappeared into makeup before an interview, which gave me just enough time to make the mandatory Red Bull run. Back at the venue, Avsha and I dug through the van for a jacket while he showed me tattoo flash and photos taped to the van walls. Dinner was at Fiat, where almost everyone ordered salmon, not because anyone was craving salmon but because after weeks on the road a real plate of food starts to really mean something. The waitress asked if they were in a band. They invited her to the show, and she pulled out her phone to save their Instagram so she could show her boyfriend later.

Backstage, a friend of theirs wandered into the green room wearing a black eye and immediately began explaining how he'd gotten it. Every new detail somehow raised more questions than it answered. I kept looking across the room at their booking agent hoping she understood what had actually happened. Every time we made eye contact it became increasingly obvious neither of us had any idea. Across the room, Avsha quietly scribbled the night's set list onto a paper plate.

Once the lights went down, Bowery became a completely different place. I tucked myself behind those impossible lime green curtains to stay mostly hidden while I shot. From there I watched one girl at the barricade completely surrender herself to the night. One minute she was resting her head against Olivia's monitor staring up toward the band, the next she was throwing herself around without a trace of self-consciousness, as if she'd forgotten anyone else was in the room. Near the end of the set, Olivia turned to the crowd, trusted them without hesitation, and let them carry her away from the stage.

bloodsports at Total Bummer Fest

Bloodsports were the first band to kick off Total Bummer Fest yesterday,

I was supposed to meet them at their practice space earlier that afternoon. Instead, I ended up on the wrong street entirely, standing outside a warehouse that had nothing to do with anything. A few texts later, I was back in an Uber heading to the correct building.

By the time I arrived, they were already practicing.

The elevator doors opened onto the fifth floor and before I could even figure out which room was theirs, I could hear them playing. The opening of "Trio 1" was coming down the hallway, bleeding into the sound of the freight elevator and distant conversations from other rooms.

I followed the noise. Found the door and slipped inside. Set my bag down. Pulled out my camera and started taking photos.

The room felt exactly how a rehearsal space should feel. Cables everywhere. Cases stacked against the wall. Half-empty water bottles.

The thing I always forget about rehearsal spaces is how different they feel from stages. Songs are still becoming themselves in those rooms. Nobody is performing yet. Nobody is trying to look like a band. They're just working. A little while later rehearsal was over. The room emptied quickly.

Drums packed away. Cases closed. Amps being carried toward the elevator.

We loaded everything in piece by piece and squeezed ourselves into the remaining space.

Searows @ Webster Hall 5/6/26

A few weeks have passed now and I'm still finding undeveloped rolls of film in my jacket pockets.

It had been raining most of the afternoon.

I got to the venue early and spent a while standing beneath the marquee, hiding from the weather and waiting for Alec and Marlowe to get back from lunch. Another Red Bull. The second or third of the day. Hard to remember.

At some point a fan arrived five hours before doors and sat down beside me. "Is this where the line starts?"

For a while it was just the two of us under the sign while the rain kept coming down.

Later, during soundcheck, the room was still empty. Cables everywhere. Alec stood onstage with an acoustic guitar while their voice echoed back from the walls. For a few minutes it sounded less like a concert and more like someone testing a memory. They played "In Violet." I finished my second roll of film and had a good cry somewhere in the middle of it.

Afterward we went looking through thrift stores near the venue. Marlowe disappeared into a fitting room with a quilted coat while I stood outside holding a collection of dresses and trying to take photographs at the same time.

Upstairs I found Alec debating a bag.

Not dramatically. Just turning it over in their hands and presenting arguments both for and against its existence in their life. Eventually the bag won.

As the afternoon went on, more people arrived. Friends from Portland. Theatre kids. We spent the next twenty minutes discussing whether the word "soft" should fully pronounce the T before wandering into a completely unrelated conversation about the British monarchy. The venue slowly filled.

During the show I found a railing to climb over and a ladder leading to the ceiling behind the stage. I climbed it.

Looking down, I could still make out the fan who'd arrived five hours before doors, now at the barricade singing along.

The rain had stopped by then.

Holidays In United States @ Tv Eye 5/5/26

A Day With Touché Amoré

Yesterday I arrived to the venue too early as usual, starting to rain, the band running late. I texted my buddy Mitchell to see what he was up to and he told me he was on his way trying to decide between bike or car, once we arrived we walked around a bit, looking for places he could make some portraits. After we ended up at a bar, I had fries and a coke, just something to pass the time. Gabby showed up with her friend, then Mitchell’s friends came.

We went back to the venue and stood stage right waiting for it to start. I saw Anna but felt too anxious to say anything. I started shooting, got through two rolls before I broke the back off my T2 and had to figure out how to put it back together. On the third roll I dropped it while fixing Clayton’s mic stand, it bounced a girl handed it to me, pit in my stomach wonder if it would fire again. Once they started playing “~” I just said fuck it and started to stage dive.

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.

Behind The Scenes w/ Nothing

I reached out to Nicky sometime in late 2024, trying to figure out what doing something together could look like. It stayed in limbo for a while, back and forth, never quite landing. Then the show at Warsaw came up and I reached out again, He sent me a text with a time to be there. I got there early, around one, trailer already open, gear spilling out, everyone in that half-arrived state, waiting to be let inside. After we made it in and it was time for soundcheck I realized I forgot my earplugs it was loud enough to rearrange the room, just that sharp, lingering ring settling in and staying there like it had nowhere else to go.

After, we had a quick stop at a record store for something they had to handle, then I broke off, five p.m. and realizing I hadn’t eaten since the day before. Back home, food first, then straight into mixing chemicals, prepping to develop film later. Sat with Molly for a while and chatted about the photo stuff, letting the noise dull just enough before heading back out.

Here is some photos and video from the day.

A Day with Haywire, A show With Haywire, Some Photos Of Haywire

Yesterday I texted Nicky, fully a shot in the dark, just asking if he thought the guys in Haywire would even be open to what I do. No expectations, just sending it out and letting it sit. Then suddenly I’m in a group chat, no buildup, just dropped in with Austin, and immediately he’s like, let’s do it.

Met Austin up the street from the venue, some office building with an all you can eat buffet, bar glowing too clean for the night we were about to have. He told me to grab food first, we’d talk after. So I did, plate in hand, pacing a little, waiting to feel normal. Later we ended up on the roof, I was nervous, talking too fast, trying to land somewhere real, so I brought up Boston, how I’ve circled back to it a few times, how it never quite sticks. Then I told him the story, the one I don’t usually tell, about Lower Allston, about the home invasion, about killing a man. It came out flat, like something already processed. And for the first time in a long time, there was no shift, no judgment, no tightening in the air. He just took it for what it was, basically saying it was the cards I was dealt and that was it.

We drifted from there into talking about interviews, how they don’t really make sense for them, how the whole structure feels off. I got what he meant. They’re not trying to create distance. They’re a band that collapses it. He’ll jump into the crowd with you, let you crawl on stage, shove him, and he’ll throw you right back into it. No barrier, no script. If you want to know something, you just ask. He’ll answer. There’s no performance to it, no filtering. Just direct, honest, almost disarming in how simple it is. And in an industry that’s usually layered in strategy and half-truths, that kind of openness feels rare, something you notice immediately and don’t forget.

A Night With Water Gun At Nightclub 101

Yesterday I got to Nightclub 101 around 2:30, hung around waiting for the band to arrive. Piece by piece load in was quick, messy, quiet in that specific way, cables everywhere, no one fully settled. Soundcheck started without warning.

I stayed against the wall, hearing them live for the first time, noticeably missing a bassist, low end just not there, someone still late, still somewhere else. But it didn’t fall apart. A lot of bands can’t translate what they’ve made into a room, but this did. The sound felt intact, and her voice cut through it all beautifully.

After, we went down to what they called a green room, really just a basement closet, no air, no space, barely a room at all.

Took some photos down there, everything felt slightly off, like being stored somewhere you’re not meant to stay. Eventually we drifted back outside, just lingering in front, waiting again, the night stretching in that slow, shapeless way.

Later, I went to grab Molly from the train. On the walk back we passed a pile of karate trophies dumped in the trash, gold figures mid-kick, frozen wins no one wanted anymore. Molly said we should take one. It made immediate sense. So we did, carried it back with us, this weird little artifact, like it belonged to the night as much as anything else.

Back, we handed over the trophy like it made perfect sense, like this was always part of the plan. They didn’t question it, just laughed and said they’d put it on stage. Of course they would. It already felt like it belonged there more than wherever it came from.

Before their set, me and Molly slipped into a corner booth under a disco ball, sitting in that low, reflective light, waiting and sharing silly videos back and forth. The room started to fill in slowly. When made our way into the main room to watch, the trophy was already on stage, planted in front of the monitor like a small, gold witness. It caught the light every few seconds, flashing back at the room.

Here are some photos from the night.