We all regret things, even some things we didn’t do ourselves. I spoke with Canadian indie-rockers Peach Pit ahead of their set at Innings Festival on February 20th as they shared stories of favorite gigs they’ve seen, video games they’ve been enjoying, and card games that have gone wrong.
Logan Melia: Okay, rock and roll. So guys, how are we doing? I mean, first gig in a little bit, right?
Neil Smith: Yeah, we were just talking about that today. It’s our first one in a couple months, so we’re a little nervous.
Peter Wilton: Bit rusty
Logan: Really, bit rusty?
Neil: Well, we rehearsed, but yeah.
Logan: What does the rehearsal process look like? Are you guys just getting together once, multiple points?
Neil: Oh, dude, we only can do it once. Honestly, we like playing our songs in our rehearsal room by ourselves is like torture. Yeah, I hate it so much. It gives me like the feeling of like when you’re in high school and you have to do like a project or like or homework and you don’t want to do it.
MIkey Pascuzzi: When you do it the night before it’s due.
Neil: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we run the set. We run the set.
Chris Vanderkooy: Yeah, we’ll argue for the first half about what the set should be. Yeah, then go for lunch and then run the set twice.
Peter: But yeah, any part of those, the set always ends up being pretty similar.
Neil: Yeah, yeah. Some songs like have to kind of be later in the set. You can’t like blow your load super early with popular ones right away.
Logan: What’s the setlist looking like? Are we doing a lot of stuff off Magpie?
Neil: No, we’re doing two songs off Magpie.
Chris: Two songs off from two to three.
Neil: Yeah, we mostly have to always do most songs off of Being So Normal, our first one, just because it’s the most popular one.
Chris: That’s what we tell ourselves.
Neil: No, it is true, though.
Chris: But those songs also have the most energy, I think. A lot of the time, compared to the new ones, we love those recordings on the new albums. Yeah, the old stuff, it just goes over well live to people who have never heard of these before, too. So if we’re trying to draw new people in, that’s the good stuff to do.
Logan: I saw you guys in May of last year in Chicago.
Neil: That was so fun. It’s a cool spot.
Logan: It’s such a beautiful venue right on the lake right there. You guys open with that little combo with Warpigs there. How’d that come to be? Because when I think about you guys, with all do respect, I don’t think about Black Sabbath.
Neil: I think it was yours or Dougle’s or yeah, we basically for the past, for the past like 7 years, we’ve been opening our show with a bit of a cover. So we’ve done, we did a Led Zeppelin song. We did Slayer. Slayer.
Chris: Yeah, and the Slayer was really fun because we had just kind of put out our most folky album and people were coming out to the shows and it was just like post-pandemic. And then we would just drop into Slayer and we could see the visible confusion on the crowd’s faces. And so ever since then, we were like, this is so much fun to come out like this and do something a little unexpected. So yeah, it’s something we’re kind of always striving to do and look for another cover.
Logan: Is there anything unexpected coming today that I should prepare myself for?
Neil: Uhhh… no.
Chris: No, we wrote a little instrumental to start off our first.
Neil: Oh, that’s true, yeah, for sure. We’re going to open with the Arc Raiders theme song.
Logan: That’s really sick.
Neil: Yeah, we just walk out to it.
Logan: Are you guys Indiana Jones fans?
Peter: Oh, no. Oh, OK. Sorry. It’s confusing. There’s a new video game out, kind of like Fortnite kind of style vibe. It’s called Arc Raiders, which sounds like Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Logan: That’s where my mind is.
Peter: But I actually have a huge hit.
Mikey: Yeah, I love it.
Peter: That was my favorite movies as a kid ever.
Chris: Actually, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Peter: Oh, yeah. We should open with John Williams.
Logan: Fortnite… You guys play any video games recently? You guys hopping on anything?
Neil: I guess Fortnite a little bit.
Chris: We were in Fortnite for a while.
Neil: Mikey’s been playing, what have you been playing?
Mikey: Ghost of Tsushima and Ghost of Yotei. It’s like the samurai game.
Neil: They’re a big God of War guys.
Mikey: Oh yeah, the God of War. I played that a couple years ago.
Neil: I flew down here with my PlayStation actually. Yeah, I put it in my carry-on bags. More than half of your bag. Yeah, half of it is closed and the other half of the suitcase is my PlayStation. So I can play Arc Raiders.
Logan: Did you guys see the Simpsons season of Fortnite?
Neil: Actually, I did. That was pretty awesome.
Peter: We hoped on together.
Neil: Did you guys get the Homer?
Peter: Yeah, you kind of had to, right?
Chris: No, I never figured out how to do the scans.
Neil: You just put your credit card in and then you get it.
Chris: One time when we were really into Fortnite, Neil like bought me a skin on Fortnite for my birthday, but I just logged on. I didn’t realize someone had sent me anything. I was just like, ‘they just gave me a free skin I’m the Mandalorian now’ And I like texted him being excited and he was like, that was neat.
Logan: But you know, it’s a little gestures like that.
Chris: Oh yeah, totally.
Neil: It’s a great gift actually, a skin.
Chris: A Fortnite skin?
Neil: You wouldn’t buy it for yourself.
Chris: No, yeah, exactly.
Logan: Neil, I saw in an interview, you said that you are kind of a jokester guy at all. You write the quote I had written down, “I come up with the jokes for the show”.
Neil: Oh, yeah, for that onstage show. Offstage show tho…
Chris: Mikey comes up with them.
Logan: Now, I know you guys are Canadian. Norm Macdonald. Do you have any favorite Norm moments, any jokes?
Chris: We can’t say them on air.
Neil: Norm is like, he’s just like my favorite person maybe ever. Like I’ve seen, there’s like no Norm MacDonald clip on the internet that I haven’t seen. I mean, just like, I don’t know. Everything is good. Like his interview shows are good. His jokes are amazing. I love the, I want to quote, I’m trying to think.
Mikey: The Larry King bit where he’s like ‘I’m a deeply closet homosexual’.
Neil: So what you’re saying is your gay?
Chris: Do you know what a deeply closeted man is? A man who won’t admit he is gay. Yeah, I’m deeply closeted.
Neil: I mean, he’s just, I mean, Norm, dude. I wish I could have seen him live. He’s the best. He’s the best of all time, for sure.
Logan: Are there any acts either comedic or bands that you are lucky you saw live? Like, did you see like Tom Petty a year before he passed?
Chris: Yeah, I was at Red Rocks visiting my uncle and I went and checked out the venue and I was like, oh, this is beautiful. Well, I wonder if anyone’s playing tonight. Tom Petty was playing with the Heartbreakers and it’s like, oh, sweet. Oh, there’s still tickets left. Uh, 80 bucks. I’ll see him another time. He died like six months later.
Neil: This was also for context, you were like 20. Yeah. And so 80 bucks was like, I can’t afford that.
Logan: I’m 20 right now.
Neil: I don’t have a job. Yeah.
Chris: There was 80 bucks in 2014.
Logan: Canadian or USD?
Neil: USD so even worse.
Chris: Yeah, it was rough. But yeah, I mean, Neil got to see Paul McCartney in November. Oh, yeah, it was a bucket list one.
Logan: I was like, yeah, I should have said hi.
Neil: Were you there? Yeah. Oh, really? Yeah. Last day of the tour.
Logan: No, it was the day before.
Neil: I mean, whatever. Yeah, we flew in with our wives and went and saw him. We’ve been like, yeah, we were like, we have to see him?
Chris: Yeah, he was great.
Neil: Yeah. He was so good, right?
Logan: Oh, my God. He’s how is he not good? He’s so old. And for him to, like, dance a little bit.
Chris: Every time he walked up to the piano, I was like, he’s going to slip and fall.
Neil: He’s didn’t take a sip of water. He didn’t take a drink. He played for three hours.
Logan: It’s like no shade to Bob Dylan. Great artists, but I’m not sure if you guys have seen those live videos. He just kind of sits there behind a piano.
Neil: Yeah, those guys are weird because I don’t get it because they’re so loaded, they don’t have to do it with the money, but they still go on tour. And to be honest, if we have enough money to not go on tour, we’re 80, I’m not going to be going on tour with you guys.
Chris: You’re going to miss us more than you think.
Neil: No.
Logan: Just with United Center, Springsteen just announcing new tour. Are you guys Springsteen fans at all?
Neil: Yeah, sort of. I saw him a couple years ago.
Chris: I love his album Nebraska more than anything else.
Neil: I went and saw him. You’re a big fan. Yeah. Okay. I don’t want to shit on Springsteen though. I got free tickets to go see Springsteen and it was pretty good. It was like 3 hours long. He plays everything. But it’s just like the Springsteen arc of the show is like… They go to 11 and then they just like stay at 11 the whole entire time. Like every song is 1, 2, 3, 4, and then you’re like, oh my god. I’m not a huge Springsteen fan. It was, it was cool. I did learn some deep cuts that I listen to now.
Logan: Hell yeah. What is on the playlist these days for you guys? Anything fun? Anything unexpected?
Neil: Geese, dude. Nobody listens to that, man. Actually though, there’s like two Geese songs. They’re like my favorite song ever right now.
Chris: Yeah, Jessica Pratt. I’ve been listening to a lot of her. She’s great, she kind of sounds like she should be playing for a great haul in Beowulf times. You know what I mean? She just sounds like an ancient singer-songwriter.
Neil: What are you guys listening to? I haven’t been listening to that much music, to be honest.
Mikey: I just throw on playlists and whatever’s on there.
Neil: I guess I got some records recently. What did I buy? I bought so many albums at Toomes Records Store. Pat Kelly. He’s a reggae singer from Jamaica. That’s it.
Chris: It was cool. There’s this band, The Districts, that we really love.
Logan: Philadelphia, right?
Chris: Philadelphia. So their lead singer started his own solo project called Super Infinity. And he kind of just dumped. A ton of songs out without making a big deal out of the release, and I think for that reason, I didn’t hear about it for a while, but now I’ve gone back and listened to this record it’s like 20 songs, some of my favorite songwriting ever, their production is amazing, his voice is incredible, so really good, really recommend, especially if you like The Districts.
Logan: Yeah, it’s more research. Your album, I think it was From Two to Three, was originally named Fuckboy Blues. Can I get a confirm or deny on this?
Peter: That was You and Your Friend. You and Your Friend, which we wanted to call the album Fuckboy Blues.
Neil: And then we have a song called Feeling Low in brackets, Fuckboy Blues. Okay, so basically what happened was it was our first album after being so normal. We wrote a song called Fuckboy Blues. We got on Columbia. And they basically just recommended that we don’t have a song with the word “fuck” in it because they wanted it to be the first single. They were like, yeah, this is going to be on the radio. And then it just, I don’t know. The song didn’t really go anywhere.
Chris: Yeah, it could have been huge.
Chris: But yeah, yeah, we were going to call it “Fuckboy Blues” because Neil has “fuckboy” tattooed on his ass.
Neil: Not by choice. Yeah, it’s true. I went to Asia, this was back when I was like 20, I went backpacking in Southeast Asia. Me and my friend were playing this card game called cribbage the whole time that we were away. And in crib, if you lose really bad by a certain amount of points, you get skunked. So we were playing like a game of skate with crib, where like every time you got skunked, you’d like write a letter. Anyway, long story short, I lost the bet. And the bet was that you had to get a tattoo on your ass that said skunk, which is kind of stupid, but whatever, we were young. And I came home and we were at band practice, and this was way back in the day. This is even before Mikey was in our band, we had a different guy named Tom. The guys were like, you’re getting your fucking tattoo tonight. Peter, he was doing a little stick and pokes at the time, he’s like, ‘we’re going to do the tattoo tonight. We’ll go to that party. You’re going to do it tonight’. And I was like, oh, shit okay, whatever. So then we go to the party and like, I lay down on the floor I yanked out my pants Peter gets all the needle ready and we have a bunch of friends there my sisters there and he’s like okay Neil like whatever you do like just like don’t, I don’t want you to look at it until it’s done and I didn’t I swear to God I didn’t even bat an eyelash at that because Peter’s like a really really you know Peter he’s a really really nice guy he’s not like a piece of shit.
Logan: Do you agree?
Neil: I would say you’re not a piece of shit.
Peter: I don’t think so.
Neil: So he’s doing the tattoo. I’m like, taking a little while or whatever, and at one point I was even like, damn this is taking a while. And then right, he’s like, I’m just about done. And right when he finished, everybody in the room burst out laughing. And I was like, ‘NOOOO’. And I ran into the bathroom and they, yeah, he touched me.
Chris: He was, Neil was like livid.
Neil: I was so angry.
Chis: It was not good actually.
Peter: No one ever like, here’s the thing. I wasn’t initially like, this isn’t a great idea. Everyone else was like, it’ll be funny. I think it was my idea. His sister was like, he’ll think it’s funny. And I was like, I didn’t know him that well at the time. So he did it and then Neil was so mad and I started crying.
Chris: And I, in the moment was like, you know what, we shouldn’t have done this, it was very fucked up but this will be funny later.
Neil: Yeah, it aged well
Logan: How many years ago was this?
Neil: 11 years ago. A long time ago
Chris: Yeah, we were very young ago.
Neil: So anyway, I’m going to cover it up eventually. I still have ‘fuckboy’. I go to the local community center to go use the sauna a lot. And whenever I’m getting changed, I’m facing the lockers of people. They don’t see your junk, and I can just see someone looking at my ass.
Chris: Yeah, totally. That was a really evil thing to do, but I think made us stronger.
The greatest joy in life is learning isn’t it? We are all students of life. I think I learned a lot during these 13 minutes. For example, we learned that Neil Smith, lead singer of 2021 JUNO nominee for Breakthrough Group of the Year Peach Pit, has ‘fuckboy’ tattooed on his butt. Learning!
The Canadian quartet continues to be a constant in my ears with their latest release “Magpie: Expanded Edition“, and the rest of their charming discography. Their set at Innings Festival featured a dozen tracks spanning their decade making music and opened with that beautiful instrumental jam as promised. Peach Pit has only a select handful of festival dates on the calendar, including the recent announcement of Shaky Knees. If you can, catch this band. Their live shows are filled with ear worms and high energy. If you walk in not knowing any songs, you’ll walk out wanting to know. For future updates, can follow Peach Pit here.
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