At the helm of a storied band, Brendan Brown stands tall carrying the Wheatus through their 30th year. From working at fish markets to playing Wembley Arena, there are few things Brendan hasn’t done. As we explored what molds his music, his guitar history, along with the beauty of playing Adjacent Festival at sunset.
Logan Melia: Hi, this is Logan Melia with KRUI 89.7, Your Sound Alternative. I’m here with Brendan from Wheatus. How are you doing?
Brendan Brown: Good, how you doing, Logan?
Logan: I’m doing well. How’s the tour? I mean, you guys are nearing the end right now.
Brendan: Well, we got about, I think we got about 10 more shows or something like that. Yeah, we’re close to the end, but it doesn’t feel like it. feels kind of more like the middle.
Logan: The middle. I mean, you know what you’re in the Midwest. So, you know, you still got half the country. You’re playing in Madison or Milwaukee tonight, and then you’ll be hitting up Des Moines, Iowa in a few days. How does it feel to like, you’re traveling a lot, you’re doing things. Does each show kind of blend together a little bit? Or can you tell the difference?
Brendan: No, the set’s never the same. Night to night, because we do all requests. Obviously, we’re playing the whole first record, and that’s part of the request concept, but it hasn’t been the same set twice. So it’s each venue, each night, each flow of the way that the show goes is really quite unique. So we don’t feel that, we don’t feel that staleness, which is one of the reasons we do it that way.
Logan: That’s a really cool. You don’t hear artists doing that too much. I mean, you got a nice back catalogue of, you know, what is it, four or five albums you got? So it’s, you know, do you ever get shouted out something where you’re like, oh, we’re going to stumble our way through this one? Or are you pretty confident?
Brendan: Yeah, 100%. That happened a couple of weeks ago, somebody shouted out “The Story of the Eggs” in Fort Worth. And we did work that song just a little bit for sounds, but that song’s that song’s a wicked pain in the ass and we didn’t we didn’t really work it enough. And we said, okay, well, are you willing to be at one of our rehearsals? And they were like, yeah. So I was like, okay, here we go.
Logan: A little fan participation there. That’s really cool.
Brendan: Yeah.
Logan: Do you have any fan interactions that stick out in your mind? Anything that you’re like, that was so cool.
Brendan: They all kind of, they all kind of do. People surprise me with the reasons that they get into this band. I’m always kind of stunned by the fact that there are groups of people who show up because they got into like our like really dark, weird progressive EP series on in like 2008, 2009, 2010. Like that stuff, the “The Lightning EP” and “The Jupiter EP”, those two, those two, it’s like that always kind of takes me for a loop a little bit because they’re so kind of, I don’t know, I don’t want to say that they’re hard listens, but they’re dark and sort of meandering. then it’s not “Teenage Dirtbag” let’s just put it that way and that is like, oh, you got into us because of them. Okay.
Logan: “Teenage Dirtbag” with just, you know, the sprinkles on top after all that. Do you have any time when you were in the studio and you saw a random instrument? How often do you go off the board and be like, I have a wild idea for something?
Brendan: Oh, every time we record. I could send you pictures of the drum kit for “Lullaby”, but it would be easier just at this point to say that there was a 50-pound ship’s bell hung over a beam dangling down in the middle of the kit, and the kick drum was 38 inches. And I had quarters velcroed to the beater, to the drum kick drum beaters, so that it would, and they were hitting other pieces of metal that I had velcroed to the front of the batterhead. So it was like, it was also like 150 year old snare drum on that kit. It was a weird, it was a weird kit because whenever I want to get drum sounds and I want to make sure that drum sounds I’ve never heard before, I have to build something strange, some like Rube Goldberg shit that no one’s ever seen before.
Logan: I think this will keep people coming back though.
Brendan: Yeah, it’s fun. It keeps it interesting. You know my studio feelings are always based on discovery, right? Like you’re always looking for something new. You’re not like, oh, I want to get the kick drum from “Teenage Dirtbag”, you know? No, like never. Like it’s always something very strange and out there. If you listen to “Lullaby”, that one’s on streaming already. That’s one of those examples of like, what is this?
Logan: Yeah, I feel like it always is, when I kind of dove into your discography, it’s never, you can feel a progression throughout your music on, just creativity and figuring out, that I guess there is no singular sound to Wheatus. Would you agree with that?
Brendan: Oh, yeah. No, there never will be either. I mean, is that a little bit of the way that I approach guitars might be similar in sort of like the, it’s like a big full mid-rangy sound, like more like a somewhere between like Boston and Metallica or something, Dinosaur Jr. kind of thing. But even those three, those three points of reference, so wouldn’t have anything to do with one another necessarily. So yeah, I think it’s always, it’s always kind of, the only reason I get excited about it is if I’m able to discover something that’s a sound that I haven’t heard.
Logan: What was your first guitar?
Brendan: Oh, that’s a good question. I think the first electric guitar I ever had was a Guild Burnside, which I kind of searched for on Reverb from now and again, they’re only like 200 bucks still. But, and the first serious guitar that I had was a, there was a Les Paul Firebrand series that had fallen off the rack at the local at the local Gilbrine store. It had fallen like 8 feet to the ground.
Logan: You got a little discount on that one?
Brendan: It had this humongous chip out of the bottom of it, like the size of like a like a tea saucer or something big, big, it was like a huge missing piece of wood on the bottom of it. And they had tried to fill it in with wood filler and repaint it and it looked like shit and I actually wound up getting that with some lawnmower money that I had, which I think that was like 200 bucks. But that was serious because even though it was cosmetically destroyed, it still played like a good Gibson, you know, a halfway decent Gibson. So that was a I guess a serious guitar. I think I was, I think I was probably 12 when I got my hands on that.
Logan: That’s really cool. Was lawn mowing your preferred profession when you were growing up?
Brendan: Raking leaves. Prior to being, when I was 13, I started working at a fish market. So I had money at that point. Like I was gainfully employed during the summers anyway.
Logan: Can you smell the smell of fish now or has it just gone?
Brendan: Oh God, yeah. They used to make me change outside.
Logan: Really?
Brendan: Yeah.
Logan: How long did you work there?
Brendan: I worked there for all through high school and then college a little bit as well, the summers and then sort of Christmas time. And then I always had jobs. I always had weird jobs when I was a kid. I was delivering pizzas when I was in college and all that stuff. Yeah, it was all to buy gear. It was always to buy gear.
Logan: That’s what it is. You know, you got to pay for that bell somehow.
Brendan: My dad did, my dad stole that bell. It wasn’t paid for. He stole it from a boat he worked on.
Logan: Good. As he should. You know, the world is your instrument, take what you want. The guitar you’ve been playing recently, I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, it has a little Wheatus logo in it as like a, I’m not sure, like the thing that leads to the hollow part of the guitar.
Brendan: Yeah, the W holes. Yeah, so it’s a completely hollow guitar. It has no middle block. Yeah, I designed that guitar with a guy named Brian Neville in New Jersey, and he’s the one who made it go from being in my head to being a real thing. It’s a wedge. It’s like 1.8 inches deep on the bass side and it’s almost 5 inches deep on the treble side. So it sits on you like a piece of pie, you know? Yeah. And it’s much more ergonomically, it’s much better. But it’s 36 frets.
Logan: That was my next question, that’s a ton.
Brendan: Yeah. It’s a humongous guitar, but it doesn’t feel humongous when you’re wearing it.
Logan: How often do you travel up? Maybe not to fret 36, but fret 31, something like that.
Brendan: All the time. All the time, yeah it’s fun to go sliding all the way up there. He really did it, he really did it I don’t know how. And he made like, I think the neck is sort of like, I wanted it to be like an 80s kind of shredder neck on a jazz, classical sort of jazz arched top, So it’s like a Paul Reed Smith from on the neck, but like a late 80s Paul Reed Smith kind of styles, sea form neck on the from just on the neck side. But on the body side, it’s like a Django Reinhardt kind of, you know, Wes Montgomery jazz box kind of thing.
Logan: That’s a really cool combination.
Brendan: Yeah, it works.
Logan: Yeah. What were you listening to growing up?
Brendan: So much stuff. Mostly AC/DC from when I really got serious about guitar, like, I guess my mom showed me how to play My Girl when I was 8, and I kind of took it from there a little bit. I kind of went and went from there. And I think it was like lots of 80s radio stuff like Cyndi Lauper and Huey Lewis and the News, and a lot of Prince. I loved Prince from an early age. And like I said, tons and tons of AC/DC. I used to just play along with AC/DC records until I knew every note.
Logan: Really?
Brendan: Yeah, Just to videotape myself playing along to Angus. Just to see if I was doing it right.
Logan: Were you doing all the shuffles and kicks and everything he was too.
Brendan: Oh yeah, I was dancing like him too. That was part of it. If you can’t do that, then you’re not an entertainer you know. You got to be able to do it and make it look easy.
Logan: Bingo.
Brendan: Which it is not.
Logan: You found that out pretty quick, I assume?
Brendan: Yeah, very much so.
Logan: Do you have any, I don’t want to say guilty pleasure artists, but you know, artists you either back then or now that, you know, you wouldn’t exactly expect to be listening to on the Wheatus tour bus?
Brendan: No, guilt associated. We just have a wide range of stuff that we listen to. There’s a lot of 90s hip hop fans in this band. So if Tribe Called Quest or like any of the Roc-A-Fella catalog, anything from Biggie, you know, got some Eminem fans too, getting into later hip hop post. post, I don’t know what you would call that era, but it’s like we listen to a lot of jazz and a lot of pop, like, the umbap will come on. It’s like Matthew’s music. Like we call it Matthew’s music, like the pop music. You know, he loves pop. We just, you know, it’s nothing we don’t really like. It’s really hard for me to not like music. There’s only like a handful of songs I don’t like.
Logan: Do you have any off the top of your head?
Brendan: Like fucking “Freebird”.
Logan: Not A Lynyrd Skynyrd guy, I take it?
Brendan: Well, no, I don’t mind Lynyrd Skynyrd. I like some of the riffs and stuff, but fuck that fucking song. Shut up. Shut the fuck up.
Logan: Do you hate it because people call it out?
Brendan: That, and also because it sucks. It’s like a long, it’s like a long, boring song.
Logan: It takes them 5 minutes to get to the good part.
Brendan: Yeah, man. like it’s too long, I mean and I’m a Rush fan.
Logan: You’re used to the long songs.
Brendan: I should have tolerance for this, but I don’t.
Logan: I feel like every time I go to an open mic night, I hear “Teenage Dirtbag”. Did you have any of those go-to songs when you were started out playing that you were just like, and like, is it cool that yours is one of them now?
Brendan: When there was open mics, I used to do the Black Crows “She Talks to Angels”. I used to play that one sometimes when I was younger. So that was kind of my go-to. But the fact that the fact that Dirtbag has become a karaoke standard, that just blows my mind. I don’t even understand it.
Logan: It’s incredible. I hear it everywhere. I’m not even looking for it. And it’s just it just bounces down upon me.
Brendan: Yeah it’s an interesting that it was not a hit in the States in any sense of the word. It like came and went on American radio.
Logan: It was crazy in like Australia and the UK though, right?
Brendan: Yeah, it blew up overseas. It did have like pop mainstream pop success overseas, but in America it didn’t do any of that stuff. And it’s weird for me to have it to come back around here in the States again. It’s just like, oh my god. We used to we used to not be able to really tour the whole United States. Yeah, and just keep going but now we could just stay on the road to America. It’s really weird.
Logan: I was about to say. I did some research, and I was just like, setlist.fm said you’ve done more shows in the UK than the United States. And I was like, wow, like I didn’t realize just how big you guys were over there. It’s awesome.
Brendan: Oh yeah, we were humongous over there. Yeah, I mean like the biggest thing we ever did over there is 2004, we played the Prince’s Trust Party in the park. It’s like Prince Charles’s, well, he’s a king now, I guess, but his like personal festival in the middle of London. It was a live audience of 250 million and in the park itself. And it was a live television audience of 11 million. And we were between Beyoncé and Meat Loaf.
Logan: My God, what a combo.
Brendan: We did some really interesting like crazy pop stuff, overseas. But then we would come home and like, we knew who we were. It was kind of an interesting time.
Logan: Yeah, it’s a, that’s a weird, what’s, is dichotomy the right word for that?
Brendan: Yeah. You can call it ironic.
Logan: Ironic. You guys are playing Wembley with Bowling for Soup in December. I mean, that’s Wembley Arena. That’s insane.
Brendan: Yeah, man. That’ll be our second time playing that. And I believe it’ll sell out. So that’ll be our second time playing it sold out, I think.
Logan: That’s so cool. You guys toured with the Bowling for Soup guys a little bit last year, too, right?
Brendan: Oh, yeah. We love that band. They’re another band that had a strange course that they wound up taking. You know, nobody wanted to fuck with them for a long time and they just develop their own thing. And I swear to God, if you went to a Bowling for Soup show and the PA caught on fire and all of the microphones failed and somebody stole all the guitars, Jaret Reddick could stand there without a microphone and entertain 2,000 people by himself for three hours. He could do it.
Logan: He seems like a talent.
Brendan: He’s a genuine, he’s a genuine talent. He’s a genuine entertainer. He’s like fucking Johnny Carson or something. It’s crazy.
Logan: That’s awesome. And I focus a lot on music festivals in the show and you guys are playing Ocean’s Calling. this coming September. It’s a pretty cool lineup with a bunch of people. Do you have a festival, obviously that King Charles Festival you brought up, but do you have, any other festivals that stuck out to you?
Brendan: Actually, my favorite festival that we’ve ever played was Adjacent Festival in, I think it was May of 2022.
Logan: That was like Paramore, right?
Brendan: Yeah, we were direct support to Paramore and I couldn’t believe it. I was like, what is this? Who made this? You wanted the other “W” band. And it wasn’t, it was real. So many people watched us play. And I thought for sure that, you know, what’s going to happen is it’s like halfway through our set, people are going to walk over to Paramore and get their spots, right? I was like prepared for that. I was like, there’s no way that’s not going to happen, it’s cool it’s cool, don’t worry about it, and they didn’t. They didn’t. They didn’t. They stayed. They stayed until last note. And it was this beautiful beach. We were looking at over the ocean and there’s seagulls flying and like the sun set during our set. So it kind of like turned, we started playing in the daylight and we stopped at nighttime, you know. And it was just, it was just so cool. That’ll always be mine. I always feel like we, we finally arrived that in that moment.
Logan: That’s really, really cool. Wow.
Brendan: Yeah, it was super dope.
Logan: Do you have any favorite, obviously I said teenage dirt bags cover by a ton. I’ve heard, you know, Weezer and Phoebe Bridgers and, you know, Lizzie McAlpine, everyone do. Do you have a favorite cover you’ve ever heard of that?
Brendan: I think SZA’s cover is really cool. SZA did a live cover of it. Chris Carrabba from Dashboard Confessional has been covering it since like 2003. And his version is really dope. He takes it really slow and really acoustic and it’s awesome. Of course, Phoebe’s is great. Ruston Kelly’s version is really killer. I don’t know if you’ve seen that.
Logan: I have not, but I’ll have to.
Brendan: Friends keep sending me live videos of that. He’s so good at that song. It’s crazy.
Logan: Oh, that’s sick. Well, yeah. I want to thank you so much for spending time with me. You got a show tonight and you got you got three of the last couple are sold out already. You got Des Moines going fast. You got an exciting week ahead of you.
Brendan: Yeah, it’s going to be great. I’m really excited about all this, just the ability to tour my own country and do it. You know, I’m 51 now, so I can actually like really appreciate this. It’s not it’s not blasting past me, you know, feeling this like odd nostalgic arrival feeling, It’s cool. I’m very grateful. We feel really lucky.
Logan: Yeah, well, let me tell you, you’d be lucky to see you guys live. You guys are an absolutely great act. I’m very excited that you’re coming around. You can catch them in Des Moines, Iowa on the 14th for you Chicago folk on the 16th that is sold out. Yeah, just thank you so much for spending time with me. This was lovely. Any final thoughts?
Brendan: No, just come to the show and do a little bit of homework first, decide what you want to hear and yell it at us. That’s how this that’s how the set happens.
Logan: You can yell at Brendan from Wheatus anytime you want, guys. That’s what we’re taking.
Brendan: Yes, it’s very interactive. I do what you say.
Logan: Oh, well, thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. Really appreciate it.
Brendan: Thank you, Logan. Take care of yourself. We’ll talk soon.
With an impressive back catalogue and their latest release, “At Restoration Sound”, there is always something next for Wheatus. Brendan will be leading the band to Wembley Arena with Bowling for Soup on December 13th, and will hit the road once again in the States this spring, playing Wooly’s in Des Moines on March 13th. You can find tickets and the rest of the tour dates here.