transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Hello, everybody, and this is Jughead, and welcome to the show. I'm very happy you could make it here on your own time, seeing that this is living in the clouds digitally. You can listen to it whenever you want. And I am going to do my desperate plea right now. If you are an avid listener of this show and you haven't donated to the show yet, maybe it's about time, you know, trying to push it too hard, but I still want you to... It's more important that you're listening. That's what my mother says. But if you want to help out, you can go to the website www.jugheadsbasementpodcast.com and you can press that button that will take you to the Patreon page and you can join the Patreon and donate to the show at the two, five and $10 tiers. You get slightly different stuff at each tier. Most of those get you unedited videos of most of the interviews I have conducted way before the at home audience gets the audio. You also get the audio podcast a little bit before the at home audience. You also get a little bit of writing and access to me that you can email me or talk to me if you have some questions. If you want to help out in other ways, please write a review. Star review is great, but an actual written review with words is even better. Sharing episodes is amazing, so please do that. That's enough selling of myself and the show. I just want to keep it going, and to do this, I need your help, both as a listener and a financial supporter. Truth be told, there it is. Let's go right into it. Really like this guy, and I think you probably do too. Right now, you're listening to Maximum Piss and Vinegar by Dillinger Four, off the record Versus God, on Hopeless Records, released in 2000. Hello, everybody, and welcome to Jughead's Basement subcategory, low-fi interviews with hi-fi guests. This week with Erik Funk of Dillinger Four. He talks to us about his band Billingsgate, Victory Records to Nemesis Records, the Erik Funk, Erik Fink Story, Bloodline, Angerhouse, and the Move to Minnesota, The Beginning of Dillinger Four, Friendship, and the Thing About Paddy, Dynamics of Their Voices, How Titles Fuck with the Brain, Aaron Cometbus and Scooby Don't, About the New Song, plus much, much, one, two, three, more, more, Dillinger Four. Let's go.

Speaker 2:
[03:29] Unmute, there we go.

Speaker 1:
[03:31] Ah-ha.

Speaker 2:
[03:32] Hey, we did it.

Speaker 1:
[03:33] You did it. Well, hello.

Speaker 2:
[03:35] Hello.

Speaker 1:
[03:36] I've never had you on before, so I want to hit some points that you've probably have gone over like hundreds and hundreds of times, like histories and stuff. But I'm hoping that we can hit it with a little bit more familiarity with each other and having been from the same place, and you know in my band, I know your band. So I'm hoping it brings out a little bit of their originality into that often traversed trail.

Speaker 2:
[04:00] Right. We're tricky because we have very little Wikipedia. We had, I guess, probably like 97. I think we were doing layout for an early record, and we were in a college computer lab. Someone was doing, I can't remember who was doing it, but we were using the college computer lab, and then someone was like, whoa, you guys have a website. We're like, what? We have a website? It seemed crazy. Yeah, it was just some guy here in Minnesota needed to build a website for a college class or whatever, and he decided to build one on D4, and then that's been our official website until literally, it was an Angel Fire website, which I don't even know what company that was.

Speaker 1:
[04:45] Oh, yeah. I know you see a lot of those old webpages or Angel Fire, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[04:49] It was just lousy with Papa, it was just garbage. Not by any fault of his, he didn't go into web design, it was just the thing he needed to do, but he maintained it. Then Angel Fire, I think finally just quit as an entity last month, and they said, well, that's it. We were probably the last site still there.

Speaker 1:
[05:11] Those are gone from the internet.

Speaker 2:
[05:12] Yeah, they're gone. Stay tuned for Dillinger Four official.

Speaker 1:
[05:18] Take two. Take two, I guess.

Speaker 2:
[05:20] But there's not much documentation of us. When you try and go back and find stuff about us.

Speaker 1:
[05:29] Yeah, that's true. I listened to a couple of your interviews. I was actually surprised that there wasn't a separate Wikipedia for you, just you alone, because that often happens since you had a...

Speaker 2:
[05:43] My ego hates that. Honestly, now it's all I'm going to think about tonight.

Speaker 1:
[05:49] Well, I do have Wikipedia savvy people that listen to this. So they will probably do some updates for you.

Speaker 2:
[05:58] Yeah, I think that Triple Rock had one.

Speaker 1:
[06:02] Yeah, yeah, Triple Rock definitely had one.

Speaker 2:
[06:03] But there's no link that links me to that, or yeah.

Speaker 1:
[06:07] Yeah, I had an interview with KJ from Chicks Dig It. We met here in Japan, but we had never met before and we really got along well. But one of the only times I did it, but it was so much fun, is that I really, I based the interview on just the Wikipedia. So we went through his Wikipedia and pulled out all the true and false statements. And someone went and corrected everything. So it's feasible.

Speaker 2:
[06:33] Yeah. I had a thing where it drove me nuts where someone, and this is earlier in Wikipedia or whatever, we're still trying to understand how it worked exactly. But we also had one and it said, Dillinger Four are an influential punk band from Minneapolis. And then a few months later, for some reason I looked at it and it just says, are a punk band from Minneapolis, an influential is out. And I'm like, why would someone take influential out? That's good.

Speaker 1:
[07:04] Come on.

Speaker 2:
[07:05] And then I looked and I was starting to understand, oh, you can actually see what people do or whatever. And someone had gone in there and was like, no source cited for influential cleaned that up. It's like, what the fuck do you care?

Speaker 1:
[07:21] I know I had a couple of those on my personal one. I did that too where I changed my personal stuff and people said, I know, I know when I, it's like.

Speaker 2:
[07:31] And then someone put it back. And then, and they cited sources, things from articles that said, Dillinger Four influenced it. Dillinger Four, Dillinger Four. And then I took it down again. He's just got, it's just, it just obviously bothers him that we might be considered influential by someone.

Speaker 1:
[07:45] All right. See, already we've gone, we've gone off the rails. But so just so the audience knows, you and I met just recently, like as a couple of weeks ago.

Speaker 2:
[07:54] Yeah, sure. I mean, we, you know, we were, we've been in the same places more than a few times.

Speaker 1:
[07:59] Yeah, but this is the longest conversation.

Speaker 2:
[08:01] Mostly me being in places you were playing, watching you play. Yeah. But yeah, no, first time we met or chatted really. Even in Black Outs, played Triple Rock, right?

Speaker 1:
[08:13] Yeah. I thought you weren't there, but I think you were there because you knew about the Teen Idols incident that happened that night. They got into a big fight.

Speaker 2:
[08:20] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[08:21] So you were there.

Speaker 2:
[08:22] But again, we probably just didn't really interact or whatever.

Speaker 1:
[08:25] Not that much, no. But this does lead me to where I want to begin. I actually want to start way back at Billingsgate because there's not even a lot of stuff online about that.

Speaker 2:
[08:33] Not a lot, no.

Speaker 1:
[08:49] But let's talk, I'll save my question for just, when did that start?

Speaker 2:
[08:55] I came to high school in 87, and I was already like a guitar guy, but I was a metal guy through and through, kiss, not makeup, kiss, back patch metal guy, that's like through and through. But I knew guys that were older than me a year or two, that had also played music, and I knew they were into more punk and stuff. We just loosely the same circles, and one of them I used to buy weed from. The first week of my freshman year of high school, he comes by my locker, he's like, you need to buy weed? I'm like, totally, I need to buy weed. He's like, he used to play guitar. Again, he's like, you want to come to a band practice? I mean, that's all I wanted to do when I got to high school. That was like my mission, was like a real band. He invited me, and I was like, I remember being like, you have a singer? He's like, yeah, kind of. It was Paddy. I went to the band practice at his mom's house in the basement after school. I knew the drummer and I had known the guy that invited me, and then they're like, this is Pat. Back then, Paddy was Pat. This is Pat. He's a singer. I mean, Paddy's looking at me, and I just could not look less like a guy he wanted to be in a band with. I mean, I have long hair, metal. I mean, he was clearly not into me immediately. Then we smoked some weed, went up in his bedroom, and he started playing like, or not Paddy, the guy that invited me, Steve. He started playing records like SNFU, Social Stores and Misfits, and I was able to figure them out on the spot, which is a skill that no one else in the band had. All of a sudden, the light bulbs lit up for Paddy. He's like, oh, this guy can play all these songs that I keep wanting to play because the other guys can't figure out. So he's like, all of a sudden he's like, okay, I'll work with this. This I can work with. So then I think we just played, I Want to Be Your Dog for an hour and a half, and that was the start of the band. Then yeah, then Paddy came by my locker, maybe like a week later, with a stack of records, and was just like, here, listen to this stuff. And someone got their Hey Kicked In compilation, which covers like a million great bands. Yeah, it was a few great comps, like SNF, You Know What I Was Wanting to Play, like Seven Seconds Records, you know, just stuff. And he wasn't even trying to sell me on the stuff that was more medley, he was just like, this is here, this is all good stuff. And like, yeah, just I caught on to it right away. I mean, I had been aware of and had some punk, I had a couple of Dead Kennedy, Seven Inches, you know what I mean? But yeah, I was just like, I love this stuff. I'm totally happy to keep doing this band. And that was the start. So it technically started in 87. Then we went through some like, we were like a cover band. We played our first show opening for Tar and the Dwarves at the Shanley Shack on Northwestern's campus. Yeah, that was our first show, my first show of like a real, something like a real show. But we were just still, we were just playing covers. You know, like we didn't really, we had a couple of originals. But, you know, within like a year, year and a half, like we were all originals and we started to get really into like that hardcore scene and the New York hardcore stuff and all that. So that was kind of, we kind of veered towards that pretty quickly. And then that was right when Victory Records was starting. And Tony, for all his faults, of which there are many, one good thing he did was had a house in the Western suburbs where he would put on shows. And it wasn't just hardcore bands. I mean, kind of everyone was a house that you could play. So all kinds of stuff played there. So we would obviously go out there because we were just going to any show we could go to anywhere. And that's how we ended up on Victory because we would go see, only the strong Tony's band and stuff like that.

Speaker 1:
[12:38] Yeah. And I think people had mentioned too, when I put a call out to some questions for you, but that you're actually the second release on that label. So yeah, you're VR2.

Speaker 2:
[12:49] VR2.

Speaker 1:
[12:50] That's really in the beginning. So that's before anybody knew anything about it.

Speaker 2:
[12:54] Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, Tony was just at the very beginning of learning how to rip off bands, but he was getting a head start right away, right out of the gates. The worst thing was that our record came out. And I mean, to be fair, we were 15, 16 year old kids, like playing music that was pretty like derivative of all the bands that we, you know what I mean? Like we were really breaking any new ground. Our record came out and just timing wise, like Victory Three came out basically at the same time. And that record was Integrity. And Integrity was a fucking amazing band of that genre. And then at which it has gone on to have, you know, to be like a legendary band in that world. So we got overshadowed pretty quick. People were like, Victory Records, Integrity, you know, like those gigs kind of a novelty. But we did a lot for the age we were.

Speaker 1:
[13:46] I could remember, Erik, if I was trying to see it timeline wise, if Akhtong Chicago that you did, was that, that was after your first release on Victory? Because they're around the same time. They're like-

Speaker 2:
[13:59] It must have been kind of right around the same time. Yeah, because the song, yeah, because the song we put on that-

Speaker 1:
[14:05] Brotherhood.

Speaker 2:
[14:14] So that song actually- So, so Paddy was a singer of Billingsgate until we did stuff. Like we did a couple of demos that he was a singer of.

Speaker 1:
[14:23] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[14:23] And then he got kicked out of high school and had to go to boarding school in Indiana. And we were just like, well, there's no- that's not practical anymore. There's no way Paddy's going to be able to come back just on weekends and like do this. So our bass player at the time, we called Squirrel, then he just became the singer. And then we just never really had a bass player. We just kind of different people that did it where needed. So Brotherhood was actually a song that Paddy wrote the lyrics for. And originally Paddy sang. And I can't, it must have been Doug Ward, I guess whoever, it was probably Doug Ward said, he knew that from our, I think they, I think he listened to our demo and was like, I want this song for the comp, even though it was kind of an older song for us, which we'd only been a band for a couple of years. Probably not a high point of that comp, that's for sure. We were representing though, we were representing that style.

Speaker 1:
[15:11] Yeah, no, I don't, I mean, I hadn't looked at that thing in a long time and I was looking on there, I was like, oh my God, that's right. That's how, because Ivy League is on there and that's how we met, like Panic. And I actually ended up working with Scott Gubb Conway, you know, and even of Black Ops for 20 years. So there's a lot of overlap there. And that's one of my, actually one of my favorite Weasel songs, I wrote the melodic solo for that, which is the Teenage Slumber Party.

Speaker 2:
[15:35] So yeah, Teenage Slumber Party.

Speaker 1:
[15:38] Yeah, I originally wrote it for my, for Amanda Lynn. And then I changed it for that song.

Speaker 2:
[15:46] My favorite song on that record was actually by a band called The Groove Diggers.

Speaker 1:
[15:50] Oh, I'll have to go back and listen to that.

Speaker 2:
[15:51] Go back and listen to that Groove Diggers song. That is a cool, cool fucking song.

Speaker 1:
[16:05] Do you remember, I kind of remember that we all went into Solid Sound. Was that true? Did we reserve time, and then all the bands came in like a line? I think it did happen that way.

Speaker 2:
[16:19] No, actually, so this is weird. Yeah, I don't have any recollection of recording that version of Brotherhood. I feel like I remember that, but I really don't remember if we did that.

Speaker 1:
[16:33] Yeah, I feel like we reserved time at Solid Sound with Phil Bonet. I mean, I could probably look at the record. Yes.

Speaker 2:
[16:39] No, you're right. Yeah, because I remember Phil. Why else would I remember Phil?

Speaker 1:
[16:44] Yeah. Okay. So that isn't the case. So I was there when you recorded it. I remember all the bands coming in, but yeah, because I was there the whole full time for all the bands coming in and out.

Speaker 2:
[16:53] I am remembering it a little bit now. I can't picture it, but it's all clicking.

Speaker 1:
[16:59] Yeah, and then, let's see. So do you have another one on No Apologies, which was on Nemesis Records? Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[17:08] That was our big break, right? We got a shot at an LP on like a, it wasn't Revelation, but Nemesis had put out some bigger records of that genre. The guy that owned that guy, Big Frank, had a record store called Z Records in Long Beach.

Speaker 1:
[17:26] Yeah. I had just started on him. He just passed away two years ago.

Speaker 2:
[17:30] He just passed away.

Speaker 1:
[17:31] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[17:32] I have a really crummy tattoo that he did for me. It's not his fault. It was just a bad idea from the start, but that's the sum total of what we got paid as a band was one tattoo on my ankle. Literally, I've been told. It's funny. We did that record. Just so DIY. We're clipping like half tone, we're laying the record out on paper. But at the end, it was right at that time. It was like 1991, I think, when the album came out. If you had a guy that looks straight edge and he was pointing on stage, and yet the other guys jump in, it just looked like one of those kind of records, except for our completely ridiculous name and strange red and purple choices of colors. But somehow, they had a distribution deal with Cargo, so those records got distributed widely. And someone I met later on, God, it might even have been John Reese, someone who worked at Cargo said that they had gone back and that that record had sold something like 30,000 or 40,000 copies. We never got anything. We just got some copies when we were out on tour. He gave us like 33 copies to sell at shows.

Speaker 1:
[18:44] That seemed like a theme then, because that's probably around the time that Walk Through Fire was like ripping off all the Chicago bands.

Speaker 2:
[18:50] Sure. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[18:52] Like No Empathy, Life Sentence, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[18:56] Right. But it's not like we had a deal and they broke it. It's just we, no one ever asked. We never asked what our deal was or like whether there was a deal. We were just like, gotcha.

Speaker 1:
[19:06] I think we precede you a little bit, but we were going through those time where, I think you even said this in an interviewer, I read it somewhere. But I talk about this a lot, you had Offspring, Nirvana, Green Day. But before that, there really wasn't, as a band, you weren't really thinking you were going to have a career in it. Like you were a punk band, it's like there wasn't like, so you didn't really, I don't think take those contracts so seriously, as much as we should have probably.

Speaker 2:
[19:39] Right. In hindsight, yeah. I talk about that a lot because I think it's a different, I think there's a point where you started your band before Green Day, or you started it after, well, not before Green Day, obviously we're around, but before what happened in Green Day. I just think it changes the psychology of being in a punk band from that point on. Because from that point on, you have this example of like, you can be a multi-platinum selling band playing this kind of music, and if you start your band, that's always there, that's possible to you. If you started your band before that, there were no real examples of that, and it just wasn't something that you factored into why you were doing it, because why would you, because it didn't happen to anyone. It wasn't. I just think that somewhere in there, people that started punk bands before that happened just have a different mindset baked in.

Speaker 1:
[20:32] Yeah. It's funny because usually I go to the same psychological place you were going about that like exploring what is that mentally that happens. But my tangible thing that I always end up coming to is the physically like we had toured in a Chevy Malibu or you spend all your money on a van to build it out and then it dies somewhere along the line. What I noticed when I started even in blackouts was right after that explosion, that all of a sudden you had parents with their kids who bought them buses or rented buses, and they had all this top of the line equipment. There's nothing wrong with that, but it was that mind. It was that mind change that they were going into this thinking, we're going to invest all this into this so that we can get our money back eventually.

Speaker 2:
[21:17] Yeah, because that was a realistic possibility.

Speaker 1:
[21:21] Yeah, yeah, they were investing in their futures in that way, and it definitely changes the brain takes into that information.

Speaker 2:
[21:27] Sure.

Speaker 1:
[21:28] I was confused here, and once again, clarifying your past, there's a Nemesis band called Bloodline with Erik Fink, but were you involved with them at all or not?

Speaker 2:
[21:37] The Erik Funk, Erik Fink Story is kind of good, although maybe a little too inside baseball for people who were really into like Revelation Records on court. But he, so no, so Bloodline, there was a guy named Bruce Fisher, who was an Evanston guy, grew up with me and Paddy, and he was a straight edge guy. He was just like part of the whole straight edge scene. He was called Polar Bear. Everyone called him Polar Bear. He came up to Macalester in Minnesota to go to college, started a band called Bloodline with Bill Bulger, who was with us in Japan.

Speaker 1:
[22:09] Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. When he does your art, does he do that?

Speaker 2:
[22:13] Yeah, yes, yeah, he did that. So Bill and I became friends, Bruce Polar Bear when they started Bloodline years ago. Then when Billingsgate first came up to Minnesota, Bill put on the show. So I go back with him to that time, I guess, early 90s. So yeah, Bloodline was a band. They started, they did a seven-inch, they put up themselves. Then they put out an album on Nemesis after Billingsgate's album. Then when Billingsgate was breaking up because everyone was going off to college, they were still going, they needed a guitar player and Bill was like, you want to come up and I didn't know what I was going to do, where I was going to go to school. He's like, hey, if you come to Minnesota to go to school, you can be in Bloodline. All right. So I did a tour with them, came up and went to Hamlin University up here. Then after my first year at Hamlin, we did a Europe, we did a huge, not huge size-wise, but just length-wise, like a seven-week slog through Europe.

Speaker 1:
[23:03] Wow.

Speaker 2:
[23:03] And right before we went, we needed, our bass player wasn't going to be able to go on the tour. And there had been this guy for years on every of those major New York hardcore, Revelation Records bands, Gorilla Biscuits, Youth of the Day, Side by Side, Alone in the Crowd, all those. There was a guy named Erik Fink and he was in Side by Side, and he was in a band called Uppercut. He's also thanked on all those records. Erik Fink thanked on the Warzone record, thanked on the Youth of the Day record. When I was in high school, I would joke at people, I'd point it out and be like, oh, that's a typo, that's me thanked on the Guerrilla Biscuits record or whatever. Just a weird thing or whatever. Funny, our names are very close. Then a buddy of mine at Hamlin, which is a small, I mean, I'm a 1500 student, small liberal arts college in Minnesota, was like, hey, there's a new guy in my sociology class, and he's in all those same bands you're always talking about. I'm like, oh, really? No, whatever. He's like, yeah, he said he played in like Gorilla Biscuits. And I was like, what? A guy who said he played in Gorilla Biscuits is in your sociology? What the are you talking about? You know what I mean? He's like, yes. And the weird thing is like his name is Erik Fink. I'm like, are you kidding me? What the, Erik? That Erik Fink, is that my schooler? So pretty quickly I found him. And yeah, turns out it's him. And turns out we need a bass player to go to Europe in a couple of months. And turns out he just bought a bass, even though he had never really played bass. He would always play guitar, but randomly he had just bought it. It just all seemed like so, it was just all coming together. So Erik Fink and Erik Funk went to Europe together with Bloodline. I'm sure is a good dude now, but he managed to be such an insufferable break during that tour. He smashed his bass for effect on stage at the second show. We had seven weeks left and he has no bass now.

Speaker 1:
[24:53] Oh, man, oh, man.

Speaker 2:
[24:54] I feel like who fucking does that? He was just so trying. There's one more part of it. When I got to college, so I'm like 18 or 19 and I need a fake ID. I hear there's a girl on campus who's getting people fake IDs because she has the actual, you know the raised like the seals? You have like an official birth certificate, there's like a press they would put on it. Yeah, so you could feel it. That's all you needed to get a Minnesota, a real Minnesota state ID was a fake birth certificate, or sorry, a birth certificate. She had one of those so she could make, because the certificate itself is just like a photocopy. She was making those, so she's like, what do you want me to put on it? She's like, we usually make it kind of like your name and not your name. I'm like, put Erik Fink. This is all before this happened. For like three years, I had a fake ID that said Erik Fink before I met Erik. Yeah, then I met Erik. So I had a fake ID that said Erik Fink when I met Erik Fink. I could drink. He was being illustrated. I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[25:55] Okay. So that actually clarifies it a lot.

Speaker 2:
[25:58] That's really interesting. So I joined Bloodline though. Yeah, we did one record on a label called Doghouse Records.

Speaker 1:
[26:04] And you're on that record?

Speaker 2:
[26:05] That one. Yeah. It's a weird cast because it was me and then the other guitar player that we brought in was this guy Dustin, who was in a band called The Labido Boys. And now he's in a band called Snapcase who are big in that world still and still performing or whatever. But yeah, and then Fink and then, it was just a weird mix of people that got together. It was only maybe like a year, year and a half, and then it was time for that to be done.

Speaker 1:
[26:43] Yeah, yeah, I gave it a little bit of a listen. But I wasn't sure whether it was you then. I stopped listening because I was like, I don't actually know if that's Erik or not in that.

Speaker 2:
[26:52] Yeah, so I wasn't on the Nemesis record. I was on the Doghouse record.

Speaker 1:
[26:54] Because that kind of transitions you from-

Speaker 2:
[26:57] That's how I get to Minnesota.

Speaker 1:
[26:58] To Minnesota, so that's actually an important little piece there. What I thought, I also use, I cross-reference Wikipedia a lot with Discogs, because Discogs has all those links. But they don't have you on the Bloodline records. They just have the Erik Fink. That's where I got confused. I was like, oh, maybe there's just confusion with anything.

Speaker 2:
[27:19] That's just more confusion because Erik Fink isn't on that record. He didn't play on anything. All he did was one summer tour. Once again, the Erik Funk, Erik Fink thing, it's not over yet.

Speaker 1:
[27:27] No, it's not. It will never be over.

Speaker 2:
[27:31] Still crossing paths. Who fixes all that stuff?

Speaker 1:
[27:34] I don't know about this guy. I don't know how that one works because people do that because they buy and sell things on that site. That might be driven by audience also, I'm not sure. Wikipedia is just anybody can become a member of Wikipedia and then-

Speaker 2:
[27:49] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[27:51] Review it.

Speaker 2:
[27:52] Yeah, and also somewhere in there, right in that time, kind of simultaneous to Bloodline, there was one more band which we did put out like a double 7-inch. I don't know if it would even register on Discops. It was called Angerhouse and that was Paddy singing.

Speaker 1:
[28:13] I have the EP now. I got it on, actually it's on Bandcamp for, there's this thing called DuPage Hardcore and they have, you can purchase it for any price. You weren't in Illinois then.

Speaker 2:
[28:53] We kind of started in the last few several months, maybe, that I don't know. Yeah, it was kind of like, I would come down, like I would pick up Paddy in Green Bay, and then we'd come down and we'd play a show at McGregor's. I mean, that band was just pure fun. It was all of our kind of best friends. And it was like a weirdly kind of cool band. And we were doing basement shows around Evanston and stuff like that, which really hadn't like Billingsgate. And there was house shows here and there, I guess. But I don't know. It felt like we had a little thing going. There's this little scene all of a sudden kind of like around just like Evanston and Will Matt and stuff. And all those guys who are not all those guys, but a lot of those guys who ended up in Fall Out Boy. I know some of their early, maybe first punk or hardcore shows were Angerhouse shows and Will Matt and Evanston. Like they were part of that. And like Big Roy, did you ever meet Neo Big Roy? Worked at the Metro for a million years.

Speaker 1:
[29:52] I probably know him. I don't know him by name. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[29:54] There was all these people that were all of a sudden kind of around after Billingsgate during Angerhouse. And I thought that band was cool. We had two singers. I think it was a really good, way better of a live band than I'd ever been in. Because with the two singers and one of them being Paddy, it was, you know, lots of band members.

Speaker 1:
[30:09] I can hear, like listening to these bands, I can start hearing the transition from that into eventually Dillinger Four, that Angerhouse fits in there.

Speaker 2:
[30:18] The thing about Billingsgate and Angerhouse, and the thing I was mentioning about Billingsgate that I think was a little different about Billingsgate for that specific genre we were in, is that Billingsgate was like a really political band. All of our songs were about, you know, they were about like women's rights, they were about police, they were about, you know what I mean? And in that little corner of like hardcore, like most of those bands weren't really writing political stuff. They were all like, you stabbed me in the back and, you know, you were my friend and, you know, it was all that kind of stuff. And like Billingsgate were writing, because Squirrel is a really smart dude and that guy could talk Marxist politics when he was 15 years old, better than any adult I know now. And that's what he was passionate about. But we were writing about serious topics and writing like left-wing politics and that kind of music. I think that's the one thing that was maybe interesting about Billingsgate. But it's also kind of what happens with Dillinger Four because all through this, we listen to everything. Like you've met Paddy enough to know that Paddy's an encyclopedia of knowledge of punk music. And we love everything and we loved catchy stuff. After Bloodline was like, you know what, I'm just kind of sick of doing all this mad hardcore stuff. And I just kind of want to do a fun band. Paddy and I started talking about it and we're like, we should do that because Paddy had all of a sudden become a kind of a bass player. He was like, I can play bass. Okay, let's give it a shot. And we thought at that time, as you well know, because you were in the band that every other band was trying to sound like at the time, I feel like around that time when Screeching Weasel, maybe like, my brain hurts, wiggle, like that time, the queers had blown up again, every, you know, like, you know, that spawned like hundreds of bands that wanted to be exactly like that, right? That wanted to like do it. But they only really wanted to do the like love song stuff. They didn't realize that Screeching Weasel was actually like political, had opinions, like, you know what I mean? Like they just did the like, kind of like, just the purest sort of like Ramones, like that queers side of things more, you know what I mean, love song stuff. And we're just like, well, let's do a catchy band, but let's do political stuff, which there just weren't there. I didn't seem like there were a lot of bands doing that right at that moment. Like Propaganda was starting to, was doing it.

Speaker 1:
[32:35] Mm-hmm, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[32:36] But the glut of bands, I mean, if you played in a catchy band during those times, like, you know, you go play a show with six other bands, they were all either cookie cutter bands trying to be you guys or Scott bands, right?

Speaker 1:
[32:49] Yeah, and both have that sort of same thing. I think we talked about this when you were here about that, these sort of derivative bands or bands that are inspired often forget like key things that a band is doing, you know? That's why then it becomes a...

Speaker 2:
[33:02] Right, yeah, you have to latch onto the wrong part.

Speaker 1:
[33:04] Yeah, it becomes a Xerox of a Xerox, you know, a copy of a copy, like in that movie, you know, whatever that Michael Keaton movie is where he copies himself. It becomes like a down version of something as long as you...

Speaker 2:
[33:17] Right.

Speaker 1:
[33:17] If you're forgetting these elements. So yeah, I think it's really cool that you took those elements. But before we get there, exactly, I have some clearing up to do. These last bands that lead up to Dillinger Four. Angerhouse you brought up, but then you have this Impetus Inter and Dillinger Four, but they all sort of overlap in time, like...

Speaker 2:
[33:35] Yeah, they do.

Speaker 1:
[33:35] Cerebellum Records, Dillinger Four, Impetus were on. So I'm just kind of getting a clarification of that time period.

Speaker 2:
[33:43] Those were the people that did the band Impetus Inter, which was just like a Twin Cities kind of like a screaming, kind of emo-y, screamy, kind of hardcore, but more in that vein of like Gravity Records and like some of that just kind of... The real like, I wouldn't want to call it screamo, but it was just, yeah, noise, somewhere but hardcore noise stuff. But they did, you know, they were just friends from the scene up here. And then they started a label, not to put out, but they put out the first Dillinger Four 7-inch. And then they needed a bass player for a tour. And Dillinger Four was planning to go on our first full real tour later the same summer with Scooby Don't. So I was like, oh, if I go on this five-week-long Empatizenter tour, I'm going to be able to be at all these venues or real houses and be like, hey, here's our 7-inch. We're coming through in six weeks. Like, can we get a show, which is exactly what I did. It actually worked pretty well. We got probably half the shows that we played on that first real Dillinger Four tour just because I had just been there with Empatizenter. So but again, I don't think I really played on it. I mean, comp tracks or I think maybe I just played on some comp tracks of theirs and did a little touring. But it wasn't a band. I didn't write a thing. I didn't write. I wrote nothing for them.

Speaker 1:
[35:17] Yeah. So there we go. We got you into Dillinger Four here.

Speaker 2:
[35:21] Yeah. So I guess they put out the first two Dillinger Four 7-inchs.

Speaker 1:
[35:25] Yeah. Let me ask you something that, I don't know, a racket bring for this. I mean, and I'm asking this question where I would have to think about with my good friends. But what do you think attracted you to Paddy or Paddy to you? Just in French, not even bands. It seemed like you had the opportunity in a band and he had to go away, but then you two stayed in contact.

Speaker 2:
[35:59] Yeah, we stayed tight. The thing about Paddy is, anybody who meets him takes a shine to him, usually. He's just such a naturally funny person. He's conversant, he's smart. He's just got a personality that people gravitate to. He's just always been like that. And I think I, again, it doesn't take a genius to see it, like, you know, I think Paddy is a crazy, original and like talented person, you know? He had musical taste and opinions as like a 15-year-old that were like, you know, he could have been like a good music writer then. You know what I mean? Like he's just so like, I just found it still find like his take on things like super fascinating always, you know what I mean? And like, he's just got a great gauge for like what sucks and what doesn't. I think if anything, all of our friends from that friend group that were around Billingsgate, you know, were really tight, like a lot of we were just a really tight group of friends all through school doing the band. Not everyone stayed in touch forever, but everyone I think still likes each other. And so I think that would have happened anyways. I think the big leap was the whole Paddy being able to play bass and he had gone to school in Green Bay. And I was just having a typical first year of college, just kind of walking around and not getting the grades and partying too hard probably and it just wasn't working out. And I was like, well, dude, why don't you come up? You can probably get in and transfer to where I go. You can come up here and we can try and do a band. I mean, at this time, he told me, I knew he had been playing in a band in Green Bay. They were called Phineas Gage. They got to open up for the Violent Femmes at the college. End of Year Bash or whatever. It was like the big thing or whatever. But they were just playing college parties. I was like, wow, it's crazy you play bass, man. So when he shows up in Minnesota and he's going to play bass, he only had two strings and he was still just sliding one finger up and down the whole way to get to each note because he didn't know how to use any more than that. So at that point, I could have been like, yeah, I'm not really sure you play bass, or what I did do, which is like, yeah, we can work with this. If we just stuck with it. Then the next question was like, well, who's going to sing? Paddy had sung in bands we'd done and other stuff, but it wasn't like singing, singing, it was like he was a hardcore singer, he was a yeller and I'd never sung at all in anything. Then I remember driving down to Chicago for Thanksgiving or something to see my family and singing along to just punk stuff in my car and starting to figure out like, oh, this might work, I'll give it a shot. Then when we played our first show, we didn't have lyrics, we were just singing gibberish over. Because we are the kings of lyric procrastination. I mean, I'm talking about the fucking kings of it. We were then too, so we were just like, fuck it, we'll play our first show, we have six songs, none of them have lyrics, but whatever. Then someone gave me a board tape of it. I was again, months later driving down, listening to that and be like, nope, I'm out, never doing this again, that's terrible. I sounded like I'm the toy dolls on speed, I don't know what it's like. I was like, oh my God, no, this is a very, very, very bad idea. But somehow Paddy talked me off that ledge and was like, no, no, just stick with it, just stick with it.

Speaker 1:
[39:45] Yeah. I was going to ask you because I mean, I think a lot of people like that dynamics between your two voices. He's got this low growly sort of voice, and you have like almost a toy doll sort of high end, giddy-lee sort of thing. Were you surprised when that came out of your mouth? I mean, like-

Speaker 2:
[40:01] Yeah. The thing, I still don't understand my voice. One thing is that I've never done, I do no care for my voice, or like I've never made an attempt to like try and be a better singer, or like do you know learn anything about it or anything like that. And it's just we figured out, like even on our first seven inch, I think for some reason, if I sing a take into a mic, that's okay. If I do it again, double it, sounds cool. And it's worked ever since, like every single, except for one seven inch, every other thing I've ever recorded, like all my vocals are doubled, all Paddy's and Billy's are not. Their voices sound fine when they sing. My voice sounds dumb unless there's two of me. I don't get it. I don't understand what it is. But then the downside is that still when I get a board tape, I don't sound like me on a record.

Speaker 1:
[40:56] We discovered that too, like VAP, it does the doubles and like on the Mopes, we did all that and I do doubles of my voice. I think when you don't have that growly lower voice, that hides some of the or the out of tune-ness becomes a part of it. But when you're actually singing more, it's more noticeable. So that double actually helps the melodic voice a little bit more.

Speaker 2:
[41:20] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[41:20] That's what I've noticed.

Speaker 2:
[41:22] Yeah. Recorded, I'm super happy with the way my voice sounds. I feel like it sounds different. I don't feel like I sound exactly like any other singer for better or for worse. But boy, then when it doesn't have that double, it's like, oh. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[41:44] I remember just on the surface when I saw you, I'd asked you about your relationship with Lawrence Arms because they have a similar but different sort of, they have like a lower gravelly, more like Brendan voice and I don't know the other guy's voice, but that's kind of has that split dynamic going too.

Speaker 2:
[42:00] Yeah. Chris's voice is more is cleaner and like, yeah, more sung and Brendan stuff is more growly and yeah. But yeah, somehow it works.

Speaker 1:
[42:12] Let me see how I want to tackle this question because I want to start talking about the bringing in of the melody. I know that Weasel is an influence and I can hear other look out stuff like, I don't know whether Crimshyde or Operation Ivy, but it seems like that really took root in you guys. I guess my question to you is you went through so many different slight changes on your travels from Billingsgate to this. They're also hardcore. It wasn't just a, we want to start a band with this sound. There must have been some passion that took over too because I could see someone that goes, I'm just going to try this melodic thing because it's popular now. But that doesn't seem your reasons. It seemed like there was something more passionate or intentional deep in the two of you. Because you don't just imitate us, you create your own thing with it, is what I'm trying to get at, I think.

Speaker 2:
[43:04] Jawbreaker was a big influence too.

Speaker 1:
[43:06] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I could see it, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[43:14] Yeah, and actually J Church too. The first song we played together, like Me Lane and Paddy with the intention of being a band, was Bombed by J Church. But also because it's a pretty easy song, and Paddy was not as good as he is now. That's the easier one. But no, you know what I think what it was was, all the bands I had been in up to that point, I was writing music, I wrote all the riffs or I wrote those songs, I arranged them, the parts. Not always 100 percent alone, but typically, I would write most of it. When we started talking about trying to do Dillinger Four and trying to write other kinds of songs, adding that element of being able to write the vocal melody, I got super into that. The songwriting I had done all the way up to that point was just writing riffs and having no concept of what the vocals were going to do on top of it, because the singer was just going to do that. I had no part of that. Then ultimately, the vocals and vocal melodies, and that's really what people most identify with in pop songs, whether it's hardcore or that's the part that people grab onto is singing. I think all of a sudden writing those songs and being able to control that part of it too, being like, oh, I got really into that. I think that was the thing that if there was a passion that took over, it was being able to write the whole song, not just riffs that someone else was going to write something different to sing over.

Speaker 1:
[45:08] Right. I don't know if this is a hard thing to put yourself in that place, but could you feel the difference in you and playing Dillinger Four compared to the other bands like live? Is there a different energy to it?

Speaker 2:
[45:22] We immediately brought such a totally different attitude to playing shows and stuff than any other band I'd been in. None of the bands I've been in were serious, like, oh, we're trying to be serious and be successful or anything like that. But Dillinger Four got me, Paddy and Lane together, we didn't give a fuck. We're showing up two people in the room, 30 people in the room, didn't matter. Paddy's sticking a fucking screwdriver up his butt, and we're just chugging beer. You know what I mean? We just, we just brought this instant party thing to what we were doing, which pretty quickly we realized what people were starting. Once we started putting out some sevens, you guys are like, oh, you guys are like these insane dingbats on stage. And obviously, Paddy back then was very wild, and we would just, maybe we'd play three songs, maybe we'd play a whole set. You never know. We were just like that. But our recorded stuff was more pulled together, and we actually had songs about stuff that didn't matter. So back then, it seemed like if you were one of the bands that was like, we're a crazy, stupid, drunk band, your songs were also about crazy, stupid, drunk band stuff. And if you were a band that wrote about more serious issues or politics, then you were probably not the crazy, wild, fun, drunk band. We were all of a sudden doing both, but there weren't really many that were doing both. So I think that's where we found our sweet spot. But it just felt better. It was more fun. Like people smiled when we played, like people didn't smile when Billingsgate or bands like that played. It wasn't like fun. It was all about like hardcore, you know? So yeah, it was just bringing a sense of fun to what we were doing from the minute we started.

Speaker 1:
[47:16] How did the Sauron guy go wrong? What's his name? Sauron? To your first? Yeah, Sloan to Billy. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[47:27] Sloan was... So when we chose the name Dillinger Four, there were only three of us and we weren't actually planning to be a four piece.

Speaker 1:
[47:35] We were just playing.

Speaker 2:
[47:37] It just sounded better than Dillinger Four. Then we met Sloan. He was playing around in bands around town. We had just finished recording the first Seven Inch, but we were still making the art. We were like, oh, Sloan's going to join the band. We're going to have a second guitar player now. I was happy about that because I hadn't gotten used to the idea of singing and being the only guitar.

Speaker 1:
[48:05] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[48:06] We decided even though he didn't play on the record, we'll put him on the art for that. Then I think that he played on that and then he played on the second Seven Inch. Then we did the first, that big long tour with Scooby Don't. Billy was in Scooby Don't. It was like six weeks, sometimes no shows for several days, that kind of tour, camping out in some poor girls' moms' house for four days. Are you guys going to leave or are you just getting jobs or what are you guys going to do? It's cool, we got a show in Tallahassee Sunday. But it's Thursday, I know. But Sloan, he's a super good dude, he still is, but he could not roll with the level of not give a fuck that me, Paddy and Billy had, or sorry, me, Paddy and Lane had. Because even then it was like, what time's the show? Don't know, when we get there. We were just not professional. I mean, we were barely capable of it. We just did not care. And Sloan wanted us to try. He wanted us to care that we were in tune or on time for the show or whatever. And it just was bubbling up in him through that tour that he was just getting more and more peeved with us. And it came to a head in Gainesville where, same thing, we were drinking 40s in the afternoon. We didn't get to the show on time, whatever. And he was like, this stuff doesn't stop. Sorry, we have a voice we do when we're talking about Sloan. It's kind of like, he's like, if this doesn't, I'm flying home. And I remember laying to someone and just being like, fine, go, go, go get your ticket right now. Please, like no problem or whatever. And then an hour later, he's like, okay, I'll finish the rest of the tour. It's like, well, we didn't really ask you to finish it, but that's fine too. Whatever you want to do. Lane in the meantime was working behind the scenes talking to Billy, because Scooby Don't was clearly at the end of their thing too. Lane was like, hey man, the minute we get done with this tour, you're in Dillinger Four, right? Billy was like, yeah, man, yeah, let's do it. So then he came to me, he's like, hey, I talked to Billy, he's in the band. Sloan's out. They're like, okay. But he said he's staying. Lane's like, no, no, no. Billy's going to be the new guy. So this just happened. We got back. I don't remember telling, probably Lane did it, telling Sloan he's not going to worry. That's a long, sorry, a very long way to say, I guess it was just a personality mismatch. Then Billy, so far so good. I feel like he's got the job, but you never know.

Speaker 1:
[50:49] Well, it's been 30 years or something like that.

Speaker 2:
[50:51] Yeah, but if he one deviates from the line even by this much.

Speaker 1:
[50:57] He's out, he's out of there.

Speaker 2:
[50:59] He knows it. We say it all the time.

Speaker 1:
[51:01] Erik, I'm interested in this and I don't know if there's an exploration in it, but I'm interested in this commitment to a band, but also this sort of defacing of the commitment to the band. You've been doing it 30 years. It's very, I mean, the music is thought out and also artistic in a way that I really like. There's art that permeates it, which I think makes it very different from a lot of the other stuff that was coming out. So what is this sort of, did you really just have jobs that you knew were your jobs and the music was supposed to be fun? Or did you think that this taking it, goofing around with the seriousness would make it popular? I mean, I'm just really interested in that sort of dynamic of the stabbing, you know, like making fun of yourselves and taking it seriously.

Speaker 2:
[51:53] I don't. I mean, when we started, Lane was headed straight to grad school. Lane always knew he was going to be psychologist. I mean, there was no, you know, like, you know, he stayed on that path the entire time. There was never any thought of like, oh, like, maybe we should spend some more time. And then when our first album came out, that was in 98 and we opened Triple Rock in 98, which obviously was a strong commitment to open the business.

Speaker 1:
[52:21] So basically you grounded yourself in your city.

Speaker 2:
[52:23] Right. You had to be there. Yeah. And I was embarking on like a major business endeavor that it would have been silly to be like, oh, plus I'll do the band more. You know, that was like probably going to need to do the band less. Now, we did that first album and it was better received than we thought it would be, you know, or sort of like got it got more notoriety than I think we expected. Not that we, you know, blew up or anything like that, but it just it got noticed more than maybe we thought it would. And instead of having like less possibilities to go out and like tour, we all of a sudden had more and then less availability for it. So I think we just got used to the idea that like, you know, the band is just what we do, how we can in between the other things that we're doing. It was like the die was already cast, like it was going to be that almost from the start, you know? So we just kind of leaned into it, I guess, you know? You know, maybe when there were some more heady times, like when Green Day took us to Japan and stuff, and weird stuff like Avril Lavigne is like showing up on our shows, and you know, like things like this where you're sort of like, is there something happened that we don't understand? You know what I mean? Like is there more, does this actually have some sort of commercial value that we don't see or something, you know? And I mean, maybe we could have at those times said like, well, maybe we should try for that more or like, or I don't know, like stop saying no to things that we had said no to, like the Warped Tour and things like that. Those conversations are usually pretty short. Because we always just had a thing where, and we still say this, I mean, it doesn't always work out perfectly. Sometimes you swing and miss, but like we, our thing has been like, just don't play a show that you wouldn't go to, you know? Like if you just do that, you're pretty set, you know what I mean? Like if you wouldn't go to it, like just don't play it. So that over the years has prevented us from a lot of corny situations where like we didn't end up playing stupid corny things because we wouldn't have gone to those things, right? So that also meant like taking some opening slot on some bigger thing with bands that we don't even think are cool.

Speaker 1:
[54:49] Yeah, right, right, right.

Speaker 2:
[54:51] That's a quick conversation because we wouldn't probably go to that show so then we wouldn't play it.

Speaker 1:
[54:55] Yeah, we had, me and Ben used to have conversations about that too, which is why in some ways we became a big band in a small scene or something like that, you know, because we decided early on that we wouldn't open. And we wouldn't be an opening band. We had two rules that made it really difficult for me to book shows across America. We wouldn't play after 10 and we wouldn't open.

Speaker 2:
[55:21] That is tough. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[55:22] So we ended up never playing with like big bands at the time because we wouldn't.

Speaker 2:
[55:27] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[55:28] Yeah, it was really bizarre.

Speaker 2:
[55:29] But yeah, you think about it. I mean, it would have made perfect sense for you guys. Because I mean, if at that time, certainly like you would have been like, who would have been like maybe Bad Religion or Social D or bands like that, that were big enough that they could carry like a good, strong sized, like middle band with them.

Speaker 1:
[55:46] Yeah, no effects was up and coming. They were a little bit ahead of us in that big crowd.

Speaker 2:
[55:52] You guys would have been obvious on a lot of that kind of stuff. Yeah, you didn't do that stuff.

Speaker 1:
[55:56] No, we chose not to.

Speaker 2:
[55:57] Yeah, which I think is a good choice.

Speaker 1:
[56:00] I don't know those weird things about like what could have been or what. But I think I always thought our band belonged, and Ben and I always talked, belonged in the underground. Like we thought like his voice would never do well in the mainstream. He'd have to change it too much. And we like kind of being messy and you know, I mean, professional but messy, and it just didn't seem to fit there. So we could make all these choices that, to me, I feel probably made us more influential because of that than if we had just decided to throw it all away.

Speaker 2:
[56:32] Yeah. No, I think that's totally true. And to that extent, there are times, I mean, of course you do recognize that like, no, like this isn't just something that we want to make this choice because of, it's okay to calculate in, like honestly, it will look cooler if we say no to this. So yeah, I don't want to make it seem like we're never aware of the fact that, you know, avoiding things, you can come away looking cooler for like blowing up a big opportunity than from just doing the opportunity, right? We've been aware of that, working in our favor.

Speaker 1:
[57:04] Yeah. Erik, I want to go with this and I think I'm a good person to do this with, and I really like this element of the band and there might be a few different parts of it, but like I said a little bit earlier, there's a lot of, I don't know if you like hearing it or not, but there's a lot of artistic work going on in the construction of these full-length records. It's, to me, it's very obvious, like whether it's the playing with the titles or just the sound in betweens, but I was just listening to the compilation that came out last year. I think the show is Geniuser.

Speaker 2:
[57:35] Yeah, that's super old stuff.

Speaker 1:
[57:36] Yeah. And the thing, it's really good, but the thing that really lifts your band is that full-length, and it's not even like a concept, it's just like a feel. Like I always listen to the record more than I listen to a song, if you know what I mean.

Speaker 2:
[57:51] Sure, sure.

Speaker 1:
[57:52] That seems embedded in there. And I just wanted to talk about a couple of things of that.

Speaker 2:
[57:57] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[57:58] Was there an excitement from going into doing EPs and doing albums? Was there artistic talk or do either of you have artistic history?

Speaker 2:
[58:08] Like not in any other like, I mean, Paddy is very talented drawing. Like he's a really talented artist in that way. But he's never done anything. He just, he does it for fun or whatever.

Speaker 1:
[58:23] Did you two ever go to the Art Institute in Chicago together? Just to visit?

Speaker 2:
[58:28] No, I mean, we've been to art museums together. I was just kidding. Not in our formative years. I don't know. I mean, but I think we both, I mean, we've both always been into books. We've both always been into, I think we've been into art. We've been into film. You know what I mean? Like in, you know, not like crazily, but yeah, I mean, I think we're, you know, I think, I do think that when we, especially in the early or really, I mean, all of our records were a long time ago, but we definitely all had that feeling of like, sequencing matters, like which song goes when is important, like how it flows from one. And it was kind of a, I remember kind of a drag on the later ones, like the two FAT records, where we're realizing like, okay, well now FAT has even, I think at the time we felt like we had more distribution than even Hopeless had, which is funny now how things have turned out with Hopeless owning FAT. But when we realized like sampling stuff, we were starting to get nervous about like, okay, because we were just taking things that weren't ours, we didn't have rights to or anything like that for samples in between stuff. So then we start feeling like, okay, we need to generate more of our own, to make it out of things that are ours or like, we can't just pull or have to find really obscure records or really, which made it a little. But honestly, all that stuff like the in-between song stuff, that's Billy and Paddy. They are the ones, Billy and Paddy and actually Dave Gardner, who recorded all those records. Big part of that too or whatever because he'd be like, I got this crazy record with this and that. But it's funny because even when we play songs live sometimes, we'll play that last note and then I still hear in my head the sample that comes after it. Because yeah, it all becomes like one thing and I hear what you mean or whatever about that. You get used to the cadence of the whole thing and the samples tie them together.

Speaker 1:
[60:29] Yeah. I know. I was interested because even watching you in Japan, the audience reacted to it. They react to different songs differently, but I couldn't help. I guess once again, it's the artist, me and the non-linear guy. I just took it all in. It's like a thing. I don't even know any of the songs that are on any of those. I love them all, but I wouldn't be able to know what one was a song.

Speaker 2:
[60:55] Yeah. I don't know the names of most of our songs.

Speaker 1:
[61:00] Yeah. That's the next element I wanted to get into. This is more into the psychology a little bit. Do you think there's some effect on how you relate to your song? If the title is not going to be connected to it, how does that fuck with the brain?

Speaker 2:
[61:17] I don't know. I've only written of all the songs. With our songs, by and large, there's some crossover, but if I'm singing it, I wrote it, if Paddy's singing it, Paddy wrote it.

Speaker 1:
[61:30] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[61:31] With a little collaboration always. We both tend each other, or that makes it sound like we actually are doing this way before when we actually do it, which is usually right before we're singing it in the studio. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[61:44] Well, I can hear it in the progression. I've heard you in interviews where in the beginning of days, you sang more together on songs. As the band goes on, you start writing more separately. You know what you want to bring in, who knows what he wants to bring in. That part of it makes sense to me.

Speaker 2:
[61:59] We'll run the whole thing by, and be like, I feel like this part, maybe something different and then maybe I'll come up with it. There's always some shrink. The first song on our first 7 Inch, I also did the title, and then I think that's the last thing I ever titled. Paddy's just done all the titles for all my songs ever since. So it's nice freeing. I don't have to think about it. I don't have to think of what the title is going to be.

Speaker 1:
[62:23] Do you think that affects how you write it all? Because I know that I can't help it as a writer. I often think of what's going to be the catchphrase of this song. My brain just goes with that sometimes. Or what's going to be the melodic part that sticks out. Is that the actual title or would you want to be contrary to that and not be about? I don't know if you've ever wanted too much of that makes the Baby Go Blind in Chicago, Neo Futures. It was my theater company for 20 years. A lot of Evanston kids used to go to fallout bowlers, go to a lot. But we'd have to write our own titles for these two-minute plays. Sometimes I would play with it not being a part of that or sometimes, I would name the title the thing that the thing is about, but I don't say it in it. All of that is gone for you guys, or it's just put in the hands of Paddy. I'm just curious.

Speaker 2:
[63:12] Put in the hands of Paddy. Then it's also put in the hands of Paddy for lyrics he didn't write that he has no idea why I wrote them or what I'm getting at exactly. Then he has to interpret what he thinks I'm writing about and then come up with a title for it. Usually, this is also something that he's doing in the last couple of days while the art is getting finished and he just needs to do it. So it's not like he takes weeks on each one. He's probably doing them all right now, you know? So sometimes he hits it closer, sometimes not. An example, we have a song called Gainesville, right? And it's, you know, in our probably top three most known songs.

Speaker 1:
[64:08] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[64:09] Or like, and that's one where, you know, it a little bit backfired, like the song, the chorus goes like, feels like summer in October, and it's really happy, and I hope this day is never over. So then he took that, we used to go play The Fest in Gainesville a lot, and that's in October, and the song, in his mind or whatever, he thought, like, oh, I'll call it Gainesville, because it's like summer. But it has nothing to do with Gainesville. I wrote that song when my father-in-law was dying, full of gizzards, I just wanted to like write, I sort of intentionally was like, I just want to write like a happy song. Like, I just want to write one that's like real, you know, like, and so I kind of wrote it more about, you know, like it's a happy song. It's about like appreciating what you have now. It's about the fleeting nature of things and time getting away from you and all that kind of stuff or whatever. That's inspired by, you know, going through, you know, having our family member sick. But you know, all of Gainesville thinks it's about Gainesville. Like, they would get down there like, hey, I got Gainesville, we're like, hey, I got Gainesville. So, I mean, that's one where like it where where where the title landed is so far.

Speaker 1:
[65:25] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[65:26] From what's really in the song. And sometimes I'd be like, ah, I feel kind of bad. Like people think I wrote a song about the fest in Gainesville. Like I would never write a fucking song about a punk fest. Like that's not what I write songs for. You know what I mean? I would, I did like that's the one time where. But at the same time, you know, it's fun to play in Gainesville.

Speaker 1:
[65:46] Yeah. I just, it's fine. It's, I could see a band doing that for a record, but then to make it like a crucial part of your band is really just an interesting move, I think. It's just.

Speaker 2:
[65:56] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[65:57] I don't know. In my mind, I can't help but think that it creates some sort of like distance, like maybe a distance that works for you somehow, where your song can just exist however you want it to exist. Then the title doesn't have to have anything to do with it.

Speaker 2:
[66:13] Another part of it is that we also like, I think Paddy obviously was going to be doing that for his size. That's obviously something that he thinks is a more interesting way to do it. I don't know what influences exactly led him to that, or where he came to that. I'm not exactly sure. But I do know that we always felt like it's a more interesting thing. We used to talk about the band Anti-Flag, right? We crossed paths with really early on, did shows for them in Paddy's Basement when we were all just doing shows in basements. They're good dudes and I like them, but except for turns out in some later, more recent times.

Speaker 1:
[66:57] Yes. We don't need to go there.

Speaker 2:
[66:59] But that's not part of this story. But just for an example, we always felt like if you can write a song that says, fuck the government without actually having to say the words, fuck the government, you're doing a good thing. That's going to be a better song. If the song should say that without ever having to say it. Whereas a man like Antiflag would just say, hey, let's write a song called Fuck the Government. And then it would say, fuck the government in the song. And it would also be the title of the song. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1:
[67:33] Yeah, I actually confronted them about that. And I've done this with a couple of political bands because my beef with a lot of those is that they never get beyond what I call the news headline. Like the song never digs into what the journalist digs into. It's like the slogan of a...

Speaker 2:
[67:50] Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. So there's that too. I think the titling falls into that too. Like, okay, like, if you've written something that's like... So it's all about the kind of juxtaposition stuff. If you wrote a really... Like for us, you write a really, really, really catchy chord progression, maybe throw one off note in it. Or go to put one darker thing in it, or do a big open noise thing for a second. Or if you feel like the lyrics you wrote are like two on the nose on a thing, then you can take the title and throw some uncertainty about what the song's about by the title not really making sense with it. You know what I mean? Or by the title maybe leading the witness into that maybe it's actually about something different. It's all about doing stuff like that.

Speaker 1:
[68:38] Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense to me too. Yeah, then if someone who actually really wants to dig into your lyrics has to actually dig into the lyrics and not just use the titles and reference points.

Speaker 2:
[68:48] They can kind of wonder like, why is it called this? You know, and they may never get an answer. But, you know, but that's the fun of it, I guess.

Speaker 1:
[68:56] I had a couple people ask some questions and one of them was, I felt pretty funny, I didn't know this, but there was on the, I guess early on Fat Records made a reference to you being Screeching Weasels with balls the size of grapefruits. And I thought it was funny and I realized I had, when I heard someone write that comment, I was like, he was wondering about what you thought about that comment. But I went for like, I could hear it, but I'm someone who had never used balls as a reference. I would just say like your edginess or like the use of chord transitions and the speed at which you do chords is very different from us. But I could see where someone might have said something.

Speaker 2:
[69:42] Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think Screeching Weasel was Screeching Weasel with balls the size of a grape.

Speaker 1:
[69:49] I agree with that too.

Speaker 2:
[69:51] Yeah. I mean, who knows what they meant by that?

Speaker 1:
[69:55] I think there's so many other influences going on in there, but I was trying to hook on to what he was trying to see there. I was like, I could see that.

Speaker 2:
[70:03] Screeching Weasel was a big influence, and it just really was. So I would have been totally fine with that, but not exactly understanding what it meant exactly, but yeah, but.

Speaker 1:
[70:21] The reason I just asked that right after what you talked about, because I think what you do, and even Ben was trying to do, and I try to do with even Black Outs, is throwing in chords or little things that make it pop out of that melodic, straightforward three chord that you can play with that, and still make it melodic, but it has some weirdness. I'm also curious about your relationship. You had some crossover with Aaron Cometbus at the time, because he was living around that area, and then he drummed also with Scooby Don't and toyed around. And I'm just wondering about that effect on you as a punk during that time.

Speaker 2:
[70:58] He was a big deal at that time, man. He was such a big, and we were all such fans of his writing. And he had toured and played with Scooby Don't. I don't remember how they kind of got together, but then when we did the tour with them, he was playing, and then Scooby Don't had a thing where basically like they, it was in one of those van related, like they bought this crazy Winnebago that was going to be their tour vehicle. I think it lasted the first like four days, and then that was it. So there were several weeks of the tour where Scooby Don't wasn't actually on the tour, but some of them were just rolling with us just for fun, and then they joined back up later. So we did that tour, and then we did another tour, and Aaron just jumped in and just kind of just hung. On that tour, we had Aaron, and do you remember Dishwasher Zine? Dishwasher Pete?

Speaker 1:
[72:08] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[72:08] You can just quit the job and go somewhere else, right?

Speaker 1:
[72:11] Exactly, yeah. I mean, I don't like being tied down to a job. After two or three, four weeks at a job, I go stir crazy.

Speaker 2:
[72:17] So he at that time also had become like, everyone loved Dishwasher Zine. You know, he was on The Letterman. Like it was like, so we were like showing up, we'd show up at these punk houses, like this band that like no one had really heard of, but with like the two most famous Zine guys. Everyone was all excited. We were like, wait a minute, what? That's Aaron Cometbus? Wait, that's Dishwasher Pete? Like, you know what I mean? So we were like the guys that knew Zine guys. I don't know. I loved Aaron and it was lots and lots of like long overnight drives just like non-stop cigarettes and chugging coffee with Aaron. Like he doesn't drive, but he's good at keeping people awake and just had a lot of good times with him. And then, you know, then Paddy went on and did Cleveland Bound Death Sentence with him. He apparently came to our show. We did a show in New York, I guess it's been two years ago now, and he was there. Paddy and I were just talking about this the other day. I'm like, he was there? He's like, yeah. I'm like, I never even fucking saw him.

Speaker 1:
[73:29] Yeah. I finally got, Aaron doesn't do interviews and he finally agreed after like five, six, seven years of me bothering him. He did the Crimshrine one I did years and years ago. I got everyone. I got Jeff Ott, Pete. I got everyone to be interviewed for that. Then he just dropped off the scene of doing any interviews and he did one recently. But the reason I bring it up is because me and Larry always talk about how going to hang out with Aaron is like a full day thing. I'll just go for these long walks and every time I would write to Aaron and say, please do my show and he goes, just come to New York and we'll do a long walk. Yeah, there's those certain people that you just want to be with and hang out and just have great conversations. I want to go to two more places, Eric and then we'll let you go. I'm just a little curious as the hop from Hopeless to Fat, because for someone who has been in music this long, I don't really know the details between things like how those, I know eventually Hopeless just bought Fat, so that's why I was interested to talk about it. But I don't know much about the guy from Hopeless. I know Fat Mike, but what kind of transition was that? Did it feel like a musical transition or just a leap or just the equal movement?

Speaker 2:
[74:49] No, I mean at the time, I think what Hopeless Ultimate got their success with was with bands that we didn't see at all. Like we didn't see what the interest he had in them was. So even Hopeless aesthetically was always a little bit of a mismatch for us or we were never real sure about the aesthetic of Hopeless.

Speaker 1:
[75:13] Just so the audience knows, the last record on Hopeless was 2000 and the next record on Fat was 2002. So it's somewhere in between that period you transitions.

Speaker 2:
[75:21] Yeah. The Hopeless thing was a two record deal. So we had to do two, although we were fine with doing the second one. It's a cool label, the Lewis owners sweetheart. After we came to the label, at that time their bands were really like, against all authority, Mustard Plug. Both of those are like ska punk bands. We weren't like a great and obvious fit. But then after we came, then he signed like Scared of Chaka, The Weaker Thans, 15 for a minute. You know what I mean? So it started to, I felt like it was becoming more, the Selby Tigers who were friends of ours from here. It felt like it was becoming a little bit more of a, the label was almost coming our way a little bit. But then that obviously had more bands that we felt we had a lot more in common with. Or more bands that they'd put out more bands that we identified with, for sure, you know? And we started to meet people from FAD and stuff and started to get along with them. And bands like A Veil that we went back with all the way to Billingsgate days, you know what I mean? And then Hopeless at that time also was like, hey, here's this, check out this demo by this band I'm signing called Thrice or Avenged Sevenfold. And we were just like, what the fuck is this? Apparently, they were both going to be massive fucking worldwide smash success bands, but we didn't, we were just like, what is this stuff he's putting? He's getting into like weird, like, I don't know. So we felt like he was going kind of, that taking that label in like a different way, aesthetically anyways. And whereas I think Fat was getting closer to what we, you know, it seemed like they were even getting a little out of their just purely Southern California thing, you know, sort of face-to-face bracket, black weapon.

Speaker 1:
[77:15] Yeah. He was probably in his, I can't remember the exact dates of this, but you know, he had Honest Don's, but then he sort of merged it back into Fat Records. So it seemed like he was exploring with that sort of more melodic take.

Speaker 2:
[77:27] Yeah. And then like against me coming right after and stuff like that, just kind of, I don't know, like, it just seemed like that that was going to be a better fit. And, you know, it was one record deals. So which we, again, not that we were like super bummed about having to do a second record on Hopeless or whatever, but at that point, I was already like, yeah, one record deals. I don't want to commit multiple records to anyone. I'm like, so I like that too, you know, but we were lucky at that time because it wasn't just. I mean, honestly, like, you know, Brett flew us out to talk with Epitaph, like look out in his last gasp was Ben Weasel actually called me when he found out we were maybe going to Fat to try and talk me into going to look out, which is funny because that ship was about to be completely gone. I mean, but but but we really like we kind of had our choice of the of the sort of like punk labels of the of the time. Lucky, we kind of had our choice and chose Pat and Nick. It was great. You know, it's been it's been cool. Even all these years since Civil War, they've always treated us like we're still a band on the label, even if we haven't given them in 18 years, you know, which is cool.

Speaker 1:
[78:40] Mike can sometimes be very hands on and sometimes just let you do what you do. What was your relationship with him?

Speaker 2:
[78:46] I think he sensed in us. I mean, yeah, he never, he was like, nope, you guys, you're already an established band. You already do what you do. Just do it. Just do that. And yeah, he never was like, hey, do you want me to like produce your records or, you know, like nothing like that. Like, I mean, I think he heard at least the second one, maybe the first one the whole way through when it was like done and packaged. And like, there's no, you know, he was like, send me demos so I can like give you opinions like none of that. Never. So maybe it would have been a good idea. I don't know. But, but no, you never, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[79:18] I don't know. Civil War is a very solid record. I don't know. I wouldn't, I wouldn't mess with that.

Speaker 2:
[79:23] Yeah, I mean, but yeah, no, he was, yeah, you know, we got to do a lot of fun stuff because of Mike and, you know, like, like they're an example of when we did, they're kind of the only one really, except for the Green Day thing where we, where we did do the like go on tour with the bigger band support slot stuff or whatever. And, and I liked it, but I liked it because it was them and they didn't treat us like they're a big headliner, you're one of the opening bands. And, you know, they're the kind, they were always the kind of band where it's just like, your room, our room, who cares? It's all one backstage and it's all just, you know what I mean? There was none of that weird like big band stuff from them. So I think we, we had fun on those, on those tours.

Speaker 1:
[80:03] I just remembered a side thing that isn't even a question. It's just more like when I listen to music, I actually get a little jealous. Your records are really damn good.

Speaker 2:
[80:10] Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[80:12] But what I really, what Weasel moved towards, and I think, I don't know, someone from D4 commented when I was there with even Black Ops about Barking Like a Dog about that. The mute, the mutes, all the down stroke mute, how tight that is. I don't know if that was you. Someone told me it was, talked to me. I can't remember who it was. Yeah. From D4.

Speaker 2:
[80:29] Probably Billy.

Speaker 1:
[80:30] But, which is true. But what I missed, because when he got started, when Ben got really sort of militant about that, I was actually a better up and down muter. You do a lot of really fast up and down muting, and I'm just a little bit jealous of that because it's so effective. It's different. It's a completely different sound.

Speaker 2:
[80:52] I love the sound of all downpicked palm muting, but man, I don't get at it. I run out of gas like, oh, I'm just like, I don't have it.

Speaker 1:
[81:05] But the sound that you create is, maybe it's a little bit of that metal experience. Because I remember I used to try to imitate like Brian May with up and down muting, and I was never as good at it as him or anything. But it has that feel, that like that. I don't know that earlier metal.

Speaker 2:
[81:21] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[81:22] But not like that hardcore metal that came out, more like the, I'm talking like Judas Priest, early queens.

Speaker 2:
[81:29] That was all my shit. Like that's what I learned how to play guitar. Yeah. I wish I would have like, sometime, you know, I've gotten, like I peaked as a guitar player when I was like 16 or 17. And I've gotten worse every year since, you know? There's stuff that I could play then that I haven't been able to play for a decade, you know? Like I just, I'm down to like where I can really only play stuff that I write. It's like not good.

Speaker 1:
[81:56] I'm on an opposite trajectory now. Like when Weasel, I was just barely, Weasel, I could, I mean, I had my own style. Like I used my whole arm. I could play pretty fast, but I would use my whole arm. It was like crazy. I couldn't use my wrist. I couldn't use my wrist. But then I discovered, I mean, I chose to be a better musician and I formed even a black house and I started learning like chords and all this stuff and fingerpicking and all that. Now, I'm bringing it back into my man semi-famous now with Polly from the Bomb Pops and Ryan from the mixtapes. I'm bringing that stuff back into the pop punk world. It's fun because now I'm better actually.

Speaker 2:
[82:36] I think about how much better guitar player I could be now after all these years, if I would just been trying to get better.

Speaker 1:
[82:44] Yeah, but look at what you've done, man. I mean, you're an artist, so you want to be better than you. You never can reach that perfection, but you did a good job.

Speaker 2:
[82:54] But it's a drag when you hear something in your head that you then realize you can't have it, that you can't actually do it.

Speaker 1:
[83:03] Yeah, I was that way with off time stuff or even up strokes. I just, like what Lint from Operation Ironman is doing, I sat there for days trying to do, and it's just not in me to do, like I don't have those.

Speaker 2:
[83:16] Or like singing and playing too. There's just certain things. It's the patting your belly, rubbing your head or whatever. There's just certain things where it's just like, I just can't sing that while I play that. I just can't. But that's what's nice about our band is like, that's how a lot of those things get figured out. Like, hey, you sing that line, because I can't or because it's not comfortable.

Speaker 1:
[83:37] That's the great wonders of the double guitar too that I love too. It just takes a little of the stress off. You can bounce it back and forth.

Speaker 2:
[83:43] This new song that we just put out, right? We're playing it for the first time ever a couple of nights before we saw you in Tokyo. There's a part later in the song where it just breaks down to just a simple three-chord guitar thing, and I kind of sing over it, and then it gets back in, right? Maybe on the plane on the way over, I'm like, hey Billy, maybe it was at the last part. I can't remember, but I'm like, hey, can you actually just play that guitar part so that all I have to do is sing, and I don't have to try and come back in and do whatever, and he's like, oh yeah, totally. It's just three chords, no big deal. It's the same thing he's going to play when he kicks back in anyways. Then in Tokyo, we get to that part, he just doesn't play, he just stopped. Then I just sing that part completely acapella. But that's the alcohol factor of before, we're not reliable for each other on stage necessarily. But we're just like, what the, dude?

Speaker 1:
[84:39] We're gonna be a party band.

Speaker 2:
[84:40] And one thing, just play that thing.

Speaker 1:
[84:43] You actually just went to where I wanted to end with, which is the Don't Happy, Be Worry, The One Song. And a lot of the people that were responding to me were like, well, when are they gonna do a full record? I'm not really interested in that. I'm more interested in the impetus to actually do a song after so long. Like you just have something and then you brought it to them? Or what was the reason?

Speaker 2:
[85:05] I said, there's been kind of like a press thing that went along with it or whatever. But like we really, I mean, we've always been writing some stuff. It's just neither like in my case, especially, like I love writing music and writing like vocal melodies and writing like the song and I just really don't love writing lyrics. Like I'll do it. I get through it. I, you know, in the end, I'm happy with, happy enough with it, but it's, it's a chore to me. So like all these years, like I'll be writing songs, I'll have stuff, but I'm not going to sit down and like write lyrics and like make it a finished song unless I have to on a record or something, you know? So we started corralling songs like in the last few years and like we probably got, depends on what you consider done. But I, you know, like so we started recording last year, we recorded that song mostly kind of like last year. But we have a great situation right now where one of the guys that worked on all of our records has his own studio now and he does mostly commercial works and he doesn't really need to do band recording for, he doesn't get to do band recording, he has to do just all this kind of like jingle work. So he just wants to do it for fun. We can just go in two hours at a time, few hours here, a few hours there, and just nip away at recording new stuff, which is good because it's the only way we can do it. Downside is we can just keep doing that, like, oh, let's just tweak it a little bit more.

Speaker 1:
[86:31] Let's just do it.

Speaker 2:
[86:32] You know what I mean? So there's not that like, we only paid for the studio till Sunday, we got to be done. We don't have that, so that's not helping our thing. But I think that one, we just, I realized that there's nothing else to do to it. Like, it's just, it's done and not going to be any more done. We could keep messing around with it, but it's done. And we've been so, you know, we've never put out a music really in like the, certainly not the social media age. I mean, even when Civil War came out, that was just still barely kind of like the internet age, you know, like, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[87:08] 2008, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[87:10] So, you know, there was a little bit of that like, I don't know, these days you put out, I mean, it used to be you put out your record and then you waited and over the next several months, you'd see like reviews and zine stuff, you know, now it's called this instant feedback where like, God, like, put out a song, does that everyone crap all over? Like, I don't want to do that, you know? It doesn't sound very fun.

Speaker 1:
[87:31] I am not a fan of the way music is working these days.

Speaker 2:
[87:35] Yeah, so I think I was kind of daunting. But I mean, it's been, it's, you know, I'm glad we just ripped the band-aid off and put something out. I mean, that's part of it, it's just like, you know what, we just gotta rip this fucking band-aid off, put a song out, but we felt like that song sits in a good place where it's enough like everything we've done, that it's clearly us, it's a little bit different than, you know what I mean? It's a little bit melodic, it's a little bit tight. It just felt like, okay, we're not out here at 30-plus years of doing this band, like trying to make a lot of new fans. It's just about being thankful for the fans that we still have, and putting out stuff that hopefully they will still like. So we felt like that song would do that. It seems like, I mean, fuck, I've been thrilled about how much people liked it. But there's more coming down the pipeline for sure.

Speaker 1:
[88:22] Oh, great, great. What I like what's happening, and I've said this in a couple of my interviews, is that, I don't know, there's always been that in punk that now you're too old, and you even hear it like in music too. It gets like watered down over ages, and that happened in like rock too, with Aerosmiths later stuff is so watered down.

Speaker 2:
[88:39] Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[88:39] It's like dangerously, it hurts my ears. But I'm really proud, a lot of the older citizens of punk that are coming and doing this really edgy stuff, like Off is one of them. And Timebomb, I just forgot his name now, from Husker Du.

Speaker 2:
[88:56] Oh, oh, oh, Greg. Yeah, Greg Norton.

Speaker 1:
[88:58] Yeah, Greg Norton's band is really tough. There's a bunch of them and your song is right up there too. It's just as edgy and exciting as the 2008 stuff, so.

Speaker 2:
[89:09] Yeah. Yeah, it's weird. I mean, you have to kind of look at it and go like, okay, show me the list of bands who put out their best stuff at like year 30. Like, it's a pretty short fucking list.

Speaker 1:
[89:20] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[89:20] I'm not even sure that list even exists. So once you kind of realize that and like just accept it and just be like, you know what, let's just put stuff out. No one's expecting you're going to put out your best stuff.

Speaker 1:
[89:30] Yeah. I think it releases some pressure, which is what it is. It does.

Speaker 2:
[89:33] It totally does. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[89:35] My last thing, I was just curious myself because now Kate is trying to, a PR person has come to me with The Arrivals. Is it a coincidence that Paddy and The Arrivals are having something almost in a similar timeline?

Speaker 2:
[89:48] Total coincidence.

Speaker 1:
[89:49] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[89:50] Total coincidence. The only thing that is just that Paddy with The Arrivals, he doesn't write for them. So those guys, whatever their process is, when Isaac and Ava, they were there like, oh, we got a bunch of new songs and then they just send them to him and then he'll just take a bus down to Chicago and spend two days and just play all that stuff and then he's out again. That just happened a few months ago. And then it just, we didn't know when their thing was coming out or anything. So yeah, it's just pure coincidence. Wow.

Speaker 1:
[90:24] That's interesting. Yeah, that's it.

Speaker 2:
[90:28] All right, man.

Speaker 1:
[90:30] That pause at the end wasn't like an uncomfortable pause. It was me saying that we did it.

Speaker 2:
[90:34] We did it. Yeah. Turns out I can talk and talk and talk. Yeah, I'm a blabber.

Speaker 1:
[90:43] Yeah, I think people want it. I mean, a lot of people were really excited when I announced that you were going to be on because. Oh, cool. So I'm very glad we got time to do it. Also, when I'm done, it's actually done. I like to just actually really hang up when we say goodbye.

Speaker 2:
[90:59] Gotcha.

Speaker 1:
[91:00] Is there anything else you'd like to say before we put a nail in this coffin?

Speaker 2:
[91:05] I mean, I just appreciate it. It was really nice to meet you in the other side of the world.

Speaker 1:
[91:11] Yeah, I had a great night. I was smiling like this when I went to pick.

Speaker 2:
[91:16] We had a great tour. I'm still buzzing from it a little bit. You know what I mean? It was such a fun experience. I'm so happy to get over there again after so long. But yeah, it was a fun treat to meet you and thanks for having me on, man. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1:
[91:29] Yeah. All right, Erik.

Speaker 2:
[91:30] All right.

Speaker 1:
[91:31] Have a good rest of your night.

Speaker 2:
[91:32] Have a good rest of your day. Bye. Bye-bye.

Speaker 1:
[94:14] If I still have your ear, you've just been listening to Don't Happy, Be Worry, by Dillinger Four, released April 1st, 2026. Thanks, everybody. That was a swell time. Up next, we have some related things. We will have Isaac from The Arrivals, which is a band that Paddy plays bass in. Also, I'm gonna do a little push for my own band here. I mentioned it in the podcast, but Semi Famous has put out a record this year called Not Sorry, and you can find it on all of your audio streaming social network type places. I'm very proud of it. I think it's one of the best records I've done in quite a while, and it's getting good press. Not a lot of press, but the press that we get is good. There we have it. Thanks, everybody. Push the show, share episodes, donate if you can, and see you next time. I mean, I won't actually see you with my eyes, but I'll picture you, and you picture me.