In Tempe, I met up with the guys Eve 6 as the came out of hibernation for Innings Festival, 2026. This one gig stood alone in a blank calendar from October to April, and although rehearsal time came at a premium, the band sounded as good as ever. Entering year 31 of the bands storied careers, Eve 6 continue to impress anyone with ears. Max Collins (bass), Jon Siebels (guitar), and Ben Hilzinger (drums) took some time after their slot to discuss their early days playing gigs at small cafes all the way to a racetrack.

Logan Melia: This is my first time seeing you guys it was an absolute blast you’ve been on my list for a while This set, this environment, a little baseball combination, is this a unique environment? Have you played anything similar to like this guy before? 

Max Collins: I’m trying to think if we’ve ever played anything baseball. 

Jon Siebels: I don’t know. We did something. We did some NASCAR thing years ago. 

Max: We played in Rochester in that baseball field. 

Jon: Oh, yeah. But I think that was just in the field though. I don’t know if that was like a theme. 

Ben Hilzinger: That’s true. Oh, so this is a theme? 

Max: Yeah, this is a theme. This is the kickoff of spring training. 

Logan: Well, for Friday, Sox Cubs. Sox be from like 11 to 1, I think. So we’re off to a good start here. Did some research, on you guys and you played some really cool gigs way back in the day. Cobalt Cafe and Coo’s Cafe. Does that sound familiar? Back in LA, do you remember anything from those days? 

Jon: I remember Coo’s Cafe. 

Max: Yeah, I remember when that Jason guy pepper sprayed our friends. 

Logan: What happened there? 

Max: We were like in high school and people started moshing and he got like afraid, I think. 

Jon: For us, like for the band?

Max: I don’t know. And yeah, he pepper sprayed. 

Logan: Do you have any venues that you’ve loved playing since any any standouts in your mind?

Ben: I actually like the Middle East, the downstairs. It’s the downstairs, the bigger club of two venues in Boston. And it’s almost like there’s a ramp next to the stage and some people are kind of… It smells like poo. Yeah, it smells very bad. They have good, what is it? 

Jon: Indian food. 

Max: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really good food. But it smells like this, but it’s always like a very punk venue. It’s cool. 

Logan: Nice. Are you guys big foodies on tour? Are you checking out local spots in the city as you go? 

Jon: It sort of depends I guess uh we don’t do a lot of like long tours now we’re doing really like stuff like like this like one-off stuff yeah so we just stay by the hotel yeah you know and just eat like the airport yeah. 

Logan: That’s what life’s all about right there is eating junk food and sitting in a hotel. When you’re sitting in a hotel what’s on the TV are we are we talking Pawn Stars, Cash Cab, Family Guy? 

Ben: No TV ever in a hotel yeah I never really watch TV in a hotel TV always is turned off 

Jon: Yeah if anything I’ll watch it like a show on on my iPad or something. yeah I never actually turn on a hotel room TV really well

Ben: I definitely doom scroll and focus on my phone I love the Forensic Files is is definitely on HLN Network absolutely it’s just like an old school like half an hour who done it stuff. 

Logan: If you’re in and out, you get the answer within a half hour, which I don’t like those long docuseries that are four two hour things. I want to know who did it now. When you guys are on the road, are you writing at all or are you just like there to do the show? Or does inspiration strike? 

Max: I mean, the way that we do things now, when we’re doing shows, we’re there to do the show and writing is a different thing that we do when we’re back in our respective homes. ‘Sweet Pea’ starts with… Jon, ‘Sweet Pea’, makes like tracks and beginnings of songs, basically, and then we get together and lyrics and stuff, and then plays all of them. But yeah, so that’s all happening when we’re not traveling. 

Ben: I guess we’ve always sort of been that way. 

Logan: Really? It’s two very separate things. 

Jon: Sometimes like if you have like a new song or whatever, like sometimes we’ll play something at soundcheck or whatever, but we’re not really working on it. 

Logan: What is the first thing you guys play when you pick up your instruments? Either alone, as a group, what’s the first thing? 

Max: I mean, for me, if I’m picking up a guitar before a show, I’m playing, what’s it called? 

Jon: Little Red Light. 

Max: Little Red Light by Fountains of Wayne. That’s been my warmup song for probably, I don’t even know how many years now. 

Logan: Really? What about some good warmup for you? Is it just getting the wheels turned? 

Max: It’s a really nice place. It’s in E. It’s, yeah, it’s just, it’s a great song. I don’t know, it gets my, it moves, and it moves my voice from kind of a low range to kind of a higher range. It’s a good warm-ups. 

Jon: Oh yeah, what about the rest of you guys? I think Tom Petty riffs just always naturally come out when I pick up a guitar. 

Ben: Yeah, I guess for me it depends on if I’m doing a… show like this, I’m just trying to figure out that kit because usually we fly with no kit, so I have to learn the kit. So I’m doing just like six stroke rolls to kind of see where I’m at with everything. But if it’s like an actual, like my kit, probably Fool in the Rain by Led Zeppelin, that kind of shuffle. Because you can dictate, I know where I’m at. If my shuffle feels good, then it’s going to be a good day.

Logan: What do you do if it’s a bad day? What do you feel off and you got to show that night? Do you do anything to correct yourself? 

Max: Red Bull. Two to three Red Bulls. And large ones, not like the baby ones. 

Logan: Tallboy Red Bulls. 

Max: Well, I want to keep it a buck here. If it’s a large Red Bull, I’m going to do, if it’s like the really big one, I’m going to do like maybe one and a half. But if it’s a small Red Bull, I’m doing three. But today I only did one Red Bull before the show. 

Jon: Because the freeze dried espresso. 

Max: But we also had freeze dried espresso right before that. So I was going to say, I had a good show on one Red Bull, and so maybe I don’t need three anymore, but I didn’t weigh. You don’t freeze dried. I didn’t weigh the conclusions. 

Jon: Let’s not be rash. Yeah, it could be a one off. 

Ben: This is actually like some baseball player stuff. Like, yeah, like if they like, you know, pitcher like wins a game, he won’t like change his hat or like won’t shave or whatever. 

Jon: “He thinks flies are lucky”

Logan: We’re talking numbers real here, real quick here. I saw in an old interview, you said, ‘we were too young to be calculated’, in referring to your very early years. Do you guys feel as though you have a calculation for these shows now, or do you still fly by the seat of your pants a little bit? Do you think there’s a bit of an equation now?

Max: No, I think when we’re like making music, together, it’s just very much about that moment, moving ourselves in that moment and not, I don’t know, I guess when I think of the word calculated as it relates to like making music, I think of, oh, we want to try to make this to have this outcome or something like that. Like we know what the outcome is going to be. 

Jon: And I think for shows, it’s like we’ve been playing some of these songs for so long that there’s just little things that naturally evolve, but we don’t ever sit down and be like ‘hey, you should say this at the point of the set, or anything like that’. It’s just sort of evolved over the years. 

Logan: How does the rehearsal process look like going up for one-off here?

Max: A what?

Logan: A rehearsal process? You got me, you got me. Do you guys get together beforehand, or do you guys just say, Hey, we’ve been playing these songs for a good long time? 

Jon: No, not much. 

Max: We don’t rehearse. We don’t need to rehearse. I mean, there’s on occasion, Ben is a working drummer, he plays with other artists sometimes, so if we need to bring in, if he’s on a tour, we need to bring in someone we’ll do a rehearsal but I mean we’ve all been playing these songs for a long time now they’re it’s just

Jon: Yeah we did yeah we did like a anniversary tour uh in 2018 so like we were playing the full record so a lot of songs that we’ve like basically never played yeah so we rehearsed like for two days for that. 

Logan: Two long days.

Jon: A skinny 2 days. Yeah, it was forty-eight whole hours. 

Max: Yeah, that’s the thing. I’m using the word conspiracy incorrectly. But it’s um okay I don’t think I don’t think bands need to rehearse really I mean especially if you have a soundcheck yeah you want to run a new song or something like that run it a soundcheck why would you need to go and the thing is too is if you show up knowing your own personal material it just takes one little run through and we’re like cool a lot of people show up and just assuming rehearsals just like where you learn the song yeah and then it’s apparently that’s the British way you heard that no I forget who was telling me that like yeah that in in the UK when you go in no one’s expecting you to have learned the songs you like learn all the shit in rehearsal. 

Ben: Interesting I mean I do like that way better because right now in America I have there’s so many days of learning songs that are not paid for yeah sometimes people tell you like a like a few days worth of day that’s a good point that’s probably why yeah yeah it’s like I’m not on the clock learning these songs but now I do it just because it’s so a good gig so scarce so I’ll say yes to whatever you all yeah I’ll work for a week for free just learning songs yeah absolutely yeah it’s the industry 

Eve 6 were alive at Innings Festival, hitting five tracks from their self titled record. The crowd was loving this 3-piece outfit as they threw everything they had at the wall for this one-off gig. The California rockers will be hitting the south with Fastball this April for a handful of gigs, you can find tickets here. Their latest record “Dream Fist” is out now and you can follow Eve 6 for future updates.

The post Interview: Eve 6 at Innings Festival appeared first on KRUI Radio.

On a dreary and windy Sunday afternoon, I strolled past a green river in the direction of Elston Ave. Strolling though discarded plastic gallon bottles from the Jewel with faded and smudged sharpie inscriptions like a foreshadowing “Borg Dylan”, I found the towering salt girl adorned on top of the 96 year old structure that housed thousands of pounds of salt for close to a century before thousands of people since 2023. This landmark houses not one, but two, of America’s greatest music venues, aptly named “The Salt Shed”. Somewhere that quickly made its way to the top of my favorite venues list, boasts a sleek and new place to watch the greatest bands touring today. Later that night, The Salt Shed would expand its impressive resume of artists as Frank Turner and The Sleeping Souls came to town.

On the final night of their North American tour, co-headlining with Descendents and supported by NOBRO, I spoke with Frank Turner before this voltaic finale. This conversation danced from books to harmonicas in Green Room E before it became inhabited by NOBRO. Touching on his ever-growing library and taking a stab at guessing his most played songs, Turner spun tales of what the past has meant and what the future will hold.

Logan Melia: So last day of work, like you’re holding up all right. 

Frank Turner: Yeah, it’s been a fun run. I mean, I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. I grew up listening to Seven’s music and we’ve been friendly for on and off over the last kind of 10, 15 years, but like, This whole tour is quite funny, like, car headlining is kind of a good thing to do in general, and my booking agent was asking me for suggestions advanced to car headline with, and I suggested Descendants, and he was like, I don’t know if it’s going to work. And I just bugged him, and I said, look, me and Stefan are really good friends, and I know the other guys as well, and I said, it’s worth a Hail Mary. You know what I mean? Send the e-mail, see what happens. So he sent me an e-mail and he called me about a day later and was like, you’re never going to guess, but they just said yes. And I was like, what? So yeah, very, very stoked about it. It’s a huge honor for me to be on this tour. And it’s been a great tour. I mean, we’ve covered a lot of ground in a short period of time. We started here, actually, but we’ve been to Connecticut and Florida and Southern California. And do you know what I mean? We’ve done a lap. So there’s been a lot of sleeping on bumpy tour buses. But yeah, we are done after today. As much as I loved it, I’m quite stoked about that. 

Logan: Oh, absolutely. Put the feet up in the same spot two nights in a row, you know? 

Frank: Yeah, exactly. You know, and I’ve actually been away from home for 10 weeks now because I did a tour of South America before this as well. So I’m very much looking forward to sleeping in my own bed. 

Logan: Absolutely. Yeah. When you have a day off on tour, are you just crashing the whole day or are you… Are you trying to see the sights and sounds of the city? 

Frank: Not so much seeing the sights and sounds, because more often than not, we have days off in kind of like a, not quite a truck stop, but pretty middle of nowhere places, because we’re generally between A and B. But I mean, I keep busy while I’m on tour. I’m mixing some records at the minute, just keeping up with work and correspondence. writing, whatever it might be. So we have a thing that on days off we call it slug life. And slug life means you wake up, you get into the hotel room, you put on the dressing gown, you put your phone on do not disturb, you order Uber Eats, and you just don’t speak to anyone all day. And given the kind of intense sociality, if you like, of what I do for a living, because I’m talking to people all day, Apart from my client, obviously, but beyond that, like on a day off, I quite often don’t talk to anyone. And that’s a good feeling. I’ll watch some Netflix really work for everybody. 

Logan: Have you been watching anything good or read anything good? 

Frank: I’m reading Christopher Clark’s History of the Outbreak in the First World War, which is very good. I’m a history nerd. That was a period of history I thought I knew quite a lot about, and it turns out I didn’t. So that’s been cool. I’m watching a TV show called Animal Kingdom at the moment, which is fun. It’s pretty disposable. It’s not profound, I wouldn’t have said, but I watched it and I watched the Pee Wee Herman documentary recently that was really poor. I can’t remember his real name now, but that was a really… Weirdly moving, actually. I really enjoyed that. 

Logan: Do you have any pieces of media that you’ve held with you your whole life? 

Frank: Yeah, I mean, the obvious thing is obviously there’s tons of records which are hugely impactful for me. I mean, that’s the thing I talk about pretty regularly. In terms of other types of media, I mean, I I read some poetry, not loads, but some. And actually recently, I’m learning Spanish at the minute, and I’ve been reading Spanish poetry, which is, I’ve been reading a lot of Spanish, which is challenging, but a good way to learn the language for sure. I mean, I read incessantly. I’m a bibliophile. My partner is always horrified by how quickly I read. And you know, recently I’ve read, I was reading John Los Passos, USA Trilogy, which is a sort of foundational American novel that’s incredibly long and hardgoing, but I enjoyed it. I think in terms of things that stayed with me over time, the book I always have to mention is Cultural Amnesia by Clive James. I think that book probably changed my outlook on life, politics, and art more than anything else I’ve ever read in my life.

Logan: How so?

Frank: I just think that Clive James has long been my favorite writer. He sat down to write a cultural traces of the 20th century and the number of people he could even think to do that is pretty limited. And I’ve read it a few times. The first time I read it, I just had a notepad out and I was like, I’ve never heard of him, never heard of her, never heard of them. Do you know what I mean? 

Logan: You got homework.

Frank: Yeah, totally. And then I went and read a whole pile of books that he was sort of discussing or citing or whatever and watched films that he was talking about and listened to records he was talking about. And then sort of reread it again and had a better idea of what on earth he was talking about. But he had a kind of, I don’t know if this is quite the right way of putting it, but a kind of muscularly and humorously, but sort of self-deprecatingly sort of liberal view of the world and about sort of the need to resist totalitarianism, wherever it might come from, and all this kind of thing. So it definitely kind of gave my view of the world some sort of like hinterland, should we say? 

Logan: Yeah, oh, for sure. Do you have a big library at your place? 

Frank: Yeah, I do. When my partner and I moved in together, the boxes were arriving, and she was just like, this cannot be more books. And I was like, I’ve got terrible news for you, but it is. Yeah, I have a lot of books and I love them, I love keeping them there. I mean, one could argue how many, what’s the point, how many times I’m going to re-reference things. And there are a few that I do, but it makes me feel nice. I like to kind of stroke my bookshelf. 

Logan: Exactly. It’s furniture, you know, it’s something for the wall. 

Frank: Yeah, exactly.

Logan: A lot of books. Do you think you’ve crossed like the 500 book threshold, the 1000 book threshold? 

Frank: Oh yeah. I mean, I started keeping a list of everything I read in 2020. I read an average of about 60-70 books a year. And have done since I was like 10. I don’t, unfortunately, I wish I’d started keeping this. I’m quite sort of like meticulous about stuff. I mean, you can see it from the way I count my shows and everything. Like I just, I like keeping lists of things I’ve done. 

Logan: Now, speaking of kind of shows, the number I’ve written down is 3,131. Does that sound right to you? 

Frank: That’s going to be tonight? I actually think it’s 3,134 tonight. I think we’ve got it. I mean, the thing about that is there are some people who think that I retain that information in my head. I absolutely don’t. It’s written on the set list. But I wrote the set list just now. So and it’s written in quite a bit. When I first did it, it was in really small letters, and I kept finding myself doing this on stage and squinting at the ball. And eventually my tour manager was like, You know, you could make that bigger. And I was like, Oh yeah, that’s a great idea. But yeah, I mean, the whole show list thing, I started doing beginning. My old drummer in my old band kept a list of our shows, and I always thought it was a bit weird while the band was together, but when we broke up, I was very glad that he did, because it gave me an overview of what we’d done. It’s amazing how quickly you forget things when you do as many of them as I do. And then also the early days of my solo touring, there was no one else there. It was just me. I was hurling on the train, I had a rucksack, I had a guitar. And so there’s no one I can call to be like, hey, what were we doing in February 2006 or something? Because there was no one else at all the shows. So I started coming to the list, put on my website. We got to show 1000 and I organized a show for it with some friends of mine in London. And I said, look, it’s my thousandth show and they were like, what? How would you know? What does that even mean? And I’m like, and I sort of explained this to them. So that one, like not that many people were on board. By the time we got to show 2000, it had become a thing that people were keen on. And we just did, we did like a 2000 cab venue in Nottingham, England, my favorite venue, Rock City. And it sold out very quickly so when it got to show 3000, we went, let’s do a big statement show. We booked Out of Sound Palace, which is like 11,000 people, thinking, maybe we’ll get it sold out by the time of the show. And then it sold out in 24 hours, and it was just like, what the what? So that was pretty cool. And now we’re on our way to 4000, and the first e-mail I had asking me where and when Show 4000 was going to be was about two days after Show 3000, and I was like, this is going to take a minute. And when I say a minute, I mean, probably about 8 years. Eight years. So, because I mean, I have done a lot of frenetics in my life. I don’t talk quite as high as I did in my sort of 20s and early 30s anymore, which is a function of age to a degree. And it’s a function of the fact that me and my band and crew, everyone’s got families now and kids and homes that they live in. I mean, back in like 20, sort of like 2010 till about 2016 was just manic. I think we did 13 months without going home at one point. And now we get to the 3 1/2 week mark and everyone’s like ‘ugh’, And then, like I say, that’s a function of getting older and it’s a marathon or a sprint. I don’t want to kill myself pretending that I’m 22 for forever. So it will take a little longer to get to the next mark, but we’ll get there. 

Logan: Do you find yourself writing any differently in your new age? Do you? 

Frank: Yeah, definitely. I think, I mean, writing as a concept is a very… broad and complicated and ineluctable thing. And I think that it should change. I’ve never really had a methodology for it. Songs kind of arrive and I grab at them when I can and then I spend time hammering them together. I’m sort of keen not to repeat myself, which necessarily implies change, maybe not in a methodology, but I don’t have a methodology, but like, you know, I don’t want to rewrite Love Ire and Song. I wrote that. It’s already there. Yeah, and we still play a bunch of songs with that record live. So I don’t need to write them again. You know, I’m constantly looking for ways to change what I do. And yeah, getting older does, it changes your subject matter, it changes your taste musically, all that kind of thing. So these things evolve over time. I mean, right now, it’s way too early to actually talk about this, but I’m in a very kind of like trad folk place at the moment. The last couple of records I did have been kind of punk rock records, which I love, and we’re on tour with Descendents, so happy days, but I’ve been really kind of deep into kind of old school kind of folk and country again lately. It’s been a minute since I was deep into that stuff. So we’ll see what happens. Maybe there’ll be a grind core record. I don’t know. We’ll find out.

Logan: What old kind of folk records are you listening to? 

Frank: I’ve been A lot of kind of like I’ve got the Smithsonian collection of kind of field recordings of Tran-American stuff, which I love, and the Cecil Sharp House collection. as well, which is sort of the English fluent, the same thing. So I’ve been listening to all of that again. And you know, Phil Ox and stuff like that, and early Dylan and that kind of stuff. I mean, I’m not saying that I’m about to try and recreate all of that. 

Logan: You’re not writing Blonde On Blonde next.

Frank: I would go early at that. I’d say more stuff like Another Side and times are a changing kind of era. I’ve been doing a lot of full band stuff lately, which I love, and I love my boys, and they’re the best band in rock and roll as far as I’m concerned, but there has always been a strand to what I do that is sort of centered around the kind of idiom of one person with an instrument. And I feel like I haven’t kind of paid too much attention to that in recent years, and I’d like to kind of refocus on it. But we’ll see. Like I said, I changed my mind radically in between albums. So there was one point when Positive Songs to Negative People was going to be a white solo album, and it absolutely isn’t. And I think everyone’s quite glad about that, but I had this moment in time when I was just listening to white soul like all the time, Style Council, whatever else, and just thinking, ‘Yeah, I want to do this’, and then, in the end, I went that, and I think everyone’s pleased. 

Logan: You mentioned, you know, the number of shows you play is crazy. According to the set list out of time, I wrote down your top three most played songs and how many times you’ve played them. Do you want to take a guess as to what these three songs are and to how often? I mean, these numbers are probably wrong, but the rough estimates. 

Frank: Well, I think my top three most played songs will probably be Recovery. 

Logan: That’s #3. 

Frank: That’s #3. My God. I Still Believe?

Logan: Number 2. 

Frank: Number 2… Photosynthesis?

Logan: Number one. 

Frank: Oh my God, look at that. I mean, the thing about that, that’s interesting because obviously to some degree it’s just about how long songs have been around. Photosynthesis is a much older song than recovery. That’s fascinating actually. In terms of numbers of times, I mean, the problem with it is I’m vaguely familiar with the work in the set list of FM. And somebody’s uploaded my kind of list of past shows onto it, but like the vast majority of the early ones don’t have a set list. Because no one was writing it down. And I mean, I’m sure I was writing it down. Do you know what I mean? And it’s a surprising thing. A friend of mine who runs a, there’s a festival in England called 2000 Trees, which is sort of like my home festival. I love that place. And James sent me a photo of my set list, which was written on a paper plate from like 2007 or something. And I was like, ‘huh I played that? and also in that order?’ that seems mad to me now. But, I mean, that’s one of the things that to get philosophical for a second, a show is an ephemeral thing. It happens once in one place with one stage with one group of people. And that’s one of the things I like about it. It’s not a bottleable commodity in a way, you know, it’s a moment in time. That’s what they do for a living, I create moments. And so that made sense that day. My memory of that show to the extent that I have one is that it went quite well. So good for 2007, me. The numbers of times, I mean, Photosynthesis has got to be more than 1000, right? 

Logan: All three of these are over 1000. And I’ll say, one and two Photosynthesis, and I Still Believe, are only three plays apart. 

Frank: That doesn’t enormously surprise me. I mean, 2000? I don’t know. 

Logan: Photosynthesis 1666, I Still Believe 1663, Recovery 1377. 

Frank: I mean, this is the thing. I’m actually pretty sure I’ve played photosynthesis more times than that because that song’s on my second record and I’ve played it so many times. And indeed, without giving too much away, we’ll be playing it tonight. But, and it’s a funny thing, like, I mean, there are times when people go, doesn’t that get boring or whatever. The answer to that is obviously not. I mean, it gets boring in rehearsal, because, I mean, to be honest, when we’re running a set list in rehearsal, we usually get the first instance. I play the intro and everybody goes don’t need to run that guy

Logan: Yeah, we know how to do this one. 

Frank: Again, a show is not an isolated event. The whole point of it is it’s an exchange of energy and ideas with an audience. And the audience is different and tonight there’s going to be a different audience to any show I’ve ever played ever. And they will react in a slightly different way. And that means that playing this song is not boring. It’s interesting. because I mean, ultimately, if you were in a band where it didn’t matter who you were playing to, I think you’re doing it wrong. Do you know what I mean? It’s like it should absolutely matter. The audience should be part of the show, otherwise you’re basically talking to yourself. Do you know what I mean? Like, it’s a strange thing. 

Logan: Yeah, Chicago. Great place. We got a Green River right now. Did you catch that? 

Frank: Oh, no, I haven’t. To be honest, this is the nature of touring. I have not been anywhere other than the bus so far today. You’ve got terrible weather today as well. 

Logan: Yeah, we do. We tend to. 

Frank: Yeah, which we’re all a little nervous about because everyone’s supposed to be flying home tomorrow. I love Chicago, though. I mean, it’s a city I only know through touring. It’s a funny, It’s funny, some, you know, my friends back home be like, Do you know Chicago? And it’s like, I know the Aragon Ballroom. Yeah, I know the area, the Aragon Ballroom, the Metro, and blah, blah, blah, and the areas around them. I mean, this is our first time at Soul Shed. This place is rad. 

Logan: This place is incredible. 

Frank: It’s really cool. I mean, at the risk of sounding a tiny bit Aerosmith, like the backstage is delightful. Like they’ve, and you know, they’ve got notes for everybody on the note paper. 

Logan: Yeah, custom coasters. 

Frank: Yeah, custom coasters, the whole 9 yards. So, which is a nice way to finish the tour. We were in Davenport, Iowa yesterday, and everybody there was lovely, but the venue was a lot more spit and sawdust, should we say? 

Logan: I’m from Chicago, that’s why I’m here, I’m a spring break now. I go to the University of Iowa, and I’ve been to the Capitol Theater a few times, and this is quite the establishment. 

Frank: Yeah, it’s a different vibe. But at the same time, one of the things I always prided myself on, there’s a lot of British acts who played a handful of shows in Boston, New York, Philly, Chicago, and LA, and then go, we tried to break America and it didn’t work or whatever. And it’s just like, it’s because you barely went. 

Logan: There. Well, you are in Davenport, Iowa. 

Frank: Yeah, and I’ve done all 50 states. I did them all in a row. 

Logan: 50 days. 

Frank: Yeah, which was a terrible decision, but it’s now in the past. And we’ve played a million shows in Ohio, and we’ve been to Mississippi, and we’ve been to Portland, Maine 10 times probably, and all the rest of it. Occasionally, I do talk to friends of mine who are like, ‘how is it that you have a career over there?’ and it’s just like, dude there’s only one answer to that question, which is craft. It’s a continent. That’s like saying, Oh, we played Berlin and we didn’t break Europe. There’s more of it, you know what I mean? You’ve got to put the hours in, which is one of the things I’ve always liked about America. It’s kind of built for touring and there’s so much of it that you can just sort of keep playing around kind of indefinitely. 

Logan: Yeah, for sure. My first time seeing you in 2023 at Riot Fest here in Chicago, electric set. I was waiting for Pup, which is a great little Canadian punk band. 

Frank: I remember we took them on their first European tour. 

Logan: Are you serious? 

Frank: Yeah, I love those guys. 

Logan: Yeah, and I was so stoked for them, but I got them early and I saw you, and I have a picture of me, giving them a little recap, and it’s like, Frank Turner and the Sleeping Souls, like my new favorite band. 

Frank: Oh fuck yeah.

Logan: And it was just sick as hell. And I don’t remember very specifically that show you brought out Jaret Reddick. I’ve talked to before. He’s brought them up. You brought them out to, I think, play harmonica or something like that. Do you bring people out a whole lot? Do you remember that show in particular? 

Frank: I do remember that show. I remember that weekend. The show itself, I remember, again, this is the thing, I remember the show going well, I remember coming off stage and feeling good about it. Do you remember that weekend where my guitar tech being an absolute, getting drunk and being an absolute terrorist backstage. He found a massive shoe, one massive shoe and put it on and just started limping around the place and the security decided that he was genuinely disabled and started carrying him around and it was just complete bedlam. I saw Tomahawk play, which was awesome. I saw Postal Service, which was cool. And I saw, actually one of the highlights that weekend is I got to watch Snapcase side of stage and I grew up with that kind of music. So I kind of vaguely know the Snapcase guys a little bit, at least Darrell. It was just, that was such a cool thing because I mean they’re not the biggest man in the world, but the lineup of people watching Snapcase from Side of Stage was impressive. It was like Ben Gibbard was there and I was there and the guys from Rise Against were all there and everything and everyone was just kind of like, you know, there was a medium-sized crowd, but you’re still looking around like, you should be paying attention to these guys. And you know, they pray. played a lot of stuff on Progressions Through Unlearning, and that made me very happy. So, happy days. 

Logan: Absolutely. I kind of feel that way when I saw Helmet at Riot Fest this past year. Side stage was Tre Cool, Jack White, just like these powerhouses. 

Frank: Yeah, Helmet, I haven’t seen Helmet for 20 plus years, but they’re an incredible and gigantically influential man. But to go to what you’re saying about getting people up, I mean, we do get people up on stage every now and again. I’ve never quite been the kind of loads of collabs type of guy, do you know what I mean? Like, you watch a Coldplay show or something and there’s like someone getting up every other song or whatever. 

Logan: It’s Noel Gallagher up there. 

Frank: Yeah, at a certain point it becomes a little bit like, check out my famous friends. And that doesn’t sit super well with me. We had a thing years ago, when I did my first arena headline show, this was in 2012. And there’s a we had a bit where someone plays harmonica, and I was kind of going through the list of kind of notable people I knew who were coming to the show, and Ricky Gervais was coming, and Daniel Radcliffe was coming, whatever. And it was just like every single one of them just felt a bit gross, no reflection on them, but just the implications of the crowd is ‘check me out I know this guy’. And in the end, we got my mum to do it, which was way cooler because she brought the house down. You know what I mean? Everyone went apeshit. I mean, we had on this tour, we were in Anaheim and my friend Mike from the effects came down and we got him up to play Harmonica on a song that he wrote, which seemed like a justifiable use of that trick. But generally speaking, I’m kind of of the opinion that if I buy a ticket to see a band, I kind of want to see them play. You know what I mean? It’s like, The occasional pop-up can be kind of cool. And I’ve seen one or two of my time. This is about as obscurantis as I’m going to get in this interview, but like, do you know Sun O? They’re the kind of doom band. 

Logan: They’re coming to Iowa City. 

Frank: Oh, you should go. Yeah. Take ear plugs. They are the loudest band in history. And it is more performance than it is music. But almost don’t listen to anything ahead of time. Just go down and brace yourself. Like, It’s not unlike taking acid, but I saw them play and they had Justin Broderick from Gold Flesh got up and made some extra noise for a bit. That’s probably the best way of putting it. And that excited me a lot and that was really cool. But yeah, I don’t want to overdo it. 

There’s never been a moment during a Frank Turner show I haven’t enjoyed. Turner promised at the beginning of the set that if they weren’t fans already, and he delivered. Between ballerina twirls and a wall of hugs (a much calmer wall of death experience), it was an intoxicating set. Support from NOBROS got the crowd energized early, as they played a stellar set including their latest single DOOMTOWN. Descendents closed the evening with 34 songs including two from their most recent LP “9th and Walnut“. This combination of artists, punks young and old, acoustic and electric, was bombastic and loud. Everything a rock and roll show should be.

Frank Turner never sleeps for long. With almost 50 shows on the books for the remainder of the year, he has time for a quick nap before he returns for a stretch of solo gigs in April and a avalanche of dates throughout 2026. You can find tickets here. Turner is also releasing an anniversary edition of his first record “Campfire Punk Rock 20” releasing on April 10th.

The post Interview: Frank Turner is Learning Spanish in between shows 3,134 and 3,135 appeared first on KRUI Radio.

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.

The post Interview: Peach Pit on Tattoos, The Simpsons in Fortnite, and Norm MacDonald appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Logan Melia: Hi. How are you doing?  

Jaret Reddick: I’m doing great. How are you?  

Logan: I’m doing well. How’s the tour been? You’re out with Simple Plan, Lolo, and 3OH!3 right now, how’s that been?  

Jaret: Man, it’s, you know, in one way it’s like a family reunion because Simple Plan have been our little brothers since 2002, you know, when we first brought them to Texas and then took them to the UK and now they’re taking us all over the USA and so, yeah, it’s great. And then 3OH!3, we just love those guys so much and Lolo as well and so it’s just, it’s been a lot of fun and the crowds have been absolutely amazing, you know, kudos to Simple Plan for putting this thing together and taking us out and really, really bringing it.  

Logan: Yeah, they are, to you guys too, but incredible live bands. I mean, they are jumping all over the place, they’re a joy to see.  

Jaret: It’s a really, really energetic and fun night. I mean, and that’s, you know, that’s, again, kudos to them for picking the right bands because it’s, man, everybody is leaving with a big smile on their face and that’s what it’s all about.  

Logan: Yeah. Do you have any tours that you remember where you’re just like, God, this lineup was just, you know, if we could do that tour again, you know, is there anything that sticks out in your mind?  

Jaret: Yeah, I mean, there’s so many of them. You know, we’re pretty lucky in that for the most part, our entire career, we’ve hand selected who it is we tour with and, you know, we really haven’t supported many bands. It’s usually been our thing and, but the two co-headlines we did, one with Less Than Jake and one with Real Big Fish are definitely up there with this one as far as the best tours we’ve ever done.  

Logan: Are you a big ska guy? I mean, I wouldn’t say that I’m a big ska guy, but I mean, I love those bands as their music and people. I mean, you know, it’s really to me, it sort of fits in.  

Jaret: I don’t even think about it as ska, I think about those guys as being warped tour bands, you know, because that’s where we all grew up, you know, and seeing each other every summer and that’s where we got to be close and stuff. So it’s funny. It’s really until that I read it every once in a while, I’ll just be like, yeah, Less Than Jake just played our hometown of Dallas and I saw a bunch of posts about it and was like, the ska came to, I forget that they’re a ska band, you know, but yeah, they’re a rock band to me, you know, and, and they’re my buddies and they’re, I can’t think of any band that I like watching more than I do Less Than Jake. Maybe Bad Religion, but, but Less Than Jake being definitely one of my favorite live bands ever.  

Logan: Yeah. Now you mentioned Warped. You have an insanely busy year, you’re touring with Simple Plain, you’re doing a Warped or Bus Tour, you’re hitting Warped, Four Chords, Aftershock, you got a million things and then on top of it all, Wembley. 

Logan: It’s a huge year for you guys. 

Jaret: Huge year for us. I mean, and coming off of our biggest touring year ever and now, you know, doing some of these rock festivals for the first time and just really loving it and, and as I said, as you said, Warped Tour is back. So we have those three weekends and then, yeah, our biggest headlining show ever, Wembley Arena, December 13th and, you know, it’s looking like we’re going to sell it out. And that’s just one of those achievements that, you know, it’s, it’s much like, you know, I guess, you know, we’re sort of stacking those up, you know, we’re Grammy nominated, we just crossed a billion streams and now we’re going to headline Wembley Arena, you know, so it’s like, those are, those are like doctorates, you know, it’s, we’ll always have those things.  

Logan: You mentioned Grammys and the blue tuxes. I did some research that you guys won an award that didn’t win the Grammy, but you won the worst dressed that night from a fashion reporter. 

Jaret: We did, yep. From two actually we won it. We were named Joan Rivers “Worst Dressed” and People Magazines actually.  

Logan: Now in retrospect, would you wear the same, going back in time, would you wear the same blue tuxes? Because I personally think that they’re probably one of the best of the night, but would you have taken it up or would you have kept with the blue tuxes?  

Jaret: No, we would have done it again. I mean, we got so much press out of that, you know, I mean, Jimmy Kimmel even pointed us out on his show before we would ever, we’ve done him three times now, but you know, before we were ever even on there and he pointed out to our tuxes and so yeah, we got a, we got a lot of miles out of that. And also we looked so fun that Brad Paisley was there, he was at his first Grammys and he was, he was walking through and he was like, he was like, hey, I’m here by myself and you guys look fun. Can I just walk through this red carpet with you? And I’m like, yes, Brad Paisley, you sure can, you know, it’s super fun. Yeah, it’s super fun.  

Logan: Now you mentioned Warped earlier and you said like, you know, your bands come up together and stuff like that and I mean, this is the first Warped in, what is it, seven years at this point? Is it a lot of familiar faces?  

Jaret: Yeah, it’s definitely, as I said, it’s like a, you know, like a high school reunion or summer camp reunion or, you know, family reunion or whatever, but it’s, yeah, it’s, I mean, it’s, you know, it’s not quite the same in that, you know, originally your Warped tour for however many years we did it, we were on it for about 15 years, I think. And you know, you’re on it the whole summer and so, you know, you’re, all the buses are parked together and you’re, you know, that’s where you, you’re all hanging out and stuff like that. It’s a little bit different since most of us have to fly in for the shows, you know, and so you see as many people as you can. It’s a little bit overwhelming, but it’s, you know, it’s great to see everybody.  

Logan: I saw Dan Povenmire made an appearance and like, you know, many kids my age, my introduction to Bowling for Soup was, you know, through Phineas and Ferb and everything. So how did bringing Dan out come to be?  

Jaret: That was cool. You know, he’s done that a few times. I can’t really remember the first time we did it. We did it at the Anaheim house. Oh no, I do remember.  

Logan: Is that When We Were Young? 

Jaret: When We Were Young.   

Logan: That’s right. 

Jaret: We did that the first time and he loved it, had so much fun. So then he and Swampy both came, oh, and Vincent, who plays Phineas, all came to our Anaheim House of Blues show last year and we did a little thing and then, but yeah, this one was really cool because Phineas and Ferb, it was the week of the day of the debut of the new episodes.  

Logan: The re-premiere. Yeah. 

Jaret: And so they did a whole exhibit, but like put together a whole installation at Warped Tour and people could walk through it and stuff. And so it just added to the show that Dan was able to come up in the jacket and do the voice and we shot love handle shirts out of the t-shirt cannon and my son was there who’s 19. He was able to do that. So it’s just a great day.  

Logan: That’s awesome. Yeah. I was about, I remember my older sister telling me, I was watching Phineas and Ferb with her and she’s like, they’re like an actual rock band, Love Handle. That’s how I fell down this rabbit hole and fell in love with you guys playing and it’s been very cool seeing that come to be with Dan on stage.  

Jaret: Yeah. And just generations and generations of people who love that show so much. And it’s certainly been a pleasure to be a part of it all this time.  

Logan: Now you’ve been still producing great music, like “Pop Drunk Snot Bread”, I love, you guys are still out cooking, “Don’t Mind If We Do” came out a few years ago. You had the release of “Fishing for Woo’s”. Those creative juices are still flowing, which you can’t say for a lot of bands that came up in the same era. What’s the secret to you guys still putting out good quality stuff?  

Jaret: Yeah, it’s just because we still enjoy ourselves and we never really tried to mess with the formula. We just do what we do and we didn’t try to change with the times or anything like that or evolve or copy any styles or trends or anything like that. We just stayed who we were. I think Bowling for Soup fans would agree that every once in a while you just need a little dose of Bowling for Soup to brighten your day. And we figured that out pretty early, that that was our thing and we really just stuck to that. And we still enjoy what we’re doing. We still love being around each other. So it’s been a blessing for sure.  

Logan: And you added “Turbulence” to the setlist I saw for this tour right now. How do you pick, because you play your hits, but how do you swap in those more deep cut type songs?  

Jaret: Yeah “Turbulence” was an interesting conversation actually. It’s really interesting that you would bring that up because we do that during our full set. It’s usually after I do a whole discussion, a quick two, three minutes about mental health because mental health is really something that is important to me and it’s something that I’ve had issues with in the past and I just really like to communicate that out into the world so that people know that A. it can really happen to anybody. But “Turbulence”, it was really just knowing the Simple Plan audience and knowing that they have those songs like “Perfect” and the “Unnamed Song” and those songs that are just really, really heartfelt. And it was like, you know what, this audience, even though we’re only up there 40 minutes, I think they’re really going to be able to take something away from, with the song Turbulence. And so, actually, it was Rob’s idea, I think, and then we just talked about it as a band and we were like, yeah, let’s just try it and see. And it’s really working. It’s a nice, nice little, we’re really, really in your face for like 30 minutes and then it’s a little breath of fresh air, then we’re in your face for another 10 and then we’re done.  

Logan: Yeah. Well, you mentioned a 40 minute set. Do you remember the longest set you’ve ever played?  

Jaret: Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, you know, yeah, we’ve played three hour shows, I mean, plenty of times and we were one of those bands, you know, when we were back in the bar days, like they would have to pull us off the stage. And our 20th anniversary show, I think, was two and a half hours. And they were literally like, it was a union crew, and our tour manager literally had to walk up on stage and be like, they are going to turn on the lights, you need to get off the stage. So, we don’t, I don’t really see us doing that anymore. We’ve gotten a little older and it gets hot up there, but yeah, I mean, we’ve played some long shows. 

Logan: Yeah. Getting old sucks, but you know, everybody’s doing it as you are.  
Jaret: It’s better than the alternative, right? 
 
Logan: Yeah. Okay. Final one. You got, you know, just a big anniversary tour, you’re opening up. What’s next on that? Are you guys writing, do you write on the road a lot, what’s coming up for Bowling for Soup?  

Jaret: Yeah, as you said, you know, we have this tour, we still got another three weeks left and then we’ll be home for a little bit and then we’re touring some dates in the south to get to Orlando Warped Tour. And we’re playing Epcot as well for two days. And then we got the Wembley Arena show and then in February we’ll be in the studio recording a new album. So, and between now and then we’re releasing “Hangover You Don’t Deserve Live” that we recorded in Manchester last year.  

Logan: I love live records, such a fan.  

Jaret: Thank you. Yeah, well, we’re excited about it. You know, it’s our, I think it’s our third or fourth live record. And so this one, it’s really, really cool because it’s the whole “Hangover You Don’t Deserve” album front to back and then some fun stuff at the end, but yeah, it’s just an exciting time for us. And then there’ll be more, we’ll be in Australia some next year, back to the UK again some next year and then a full US tour late in the summer and fall.  

Logan: That’s exciting stuff. Well, you can catch Bowling for Soup in Council Bluffs, Iowa on August 20th. I’m in Chicago right now, you guys are playing the 24th at Northerly, I’m very excited for that. It’s awesome. You got a good stretch. Well, thank you so much for spending time with me. 

Jaret: Thanks for having me. 

Logan: I really appreciate it. It means a lot.  

Jaret: Thanks brother.

To quote my interview with Brendan Brown of Wheatus, “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, Jared Reddick could stand there without a microphone and entertain 2,000 people by himself for three hours. He could do it”. I couldn’t agree more. The energy Bowling for Soup brings to the stage is contagious, making even tho most stagnant viewers give a little toe tap or head bounce. Bowling for Soup will play their biggest headlining gig at Wembley Arena on December 13th with support from Wheatus and Punk Rock Factory. A handful of US dates, including Innings Festival, have been announced as we await the new album and tour dates for later in 2026. You can keep up with the latest Bowling for Soup news here.

The post Interview: Jaret Reddick of Bowling for Soup appeared first on KRUI Radio.

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.

The post Interview: Brendan Brown of Wheatus appeared first on KRUI Radio.

There was something that caught my ear on the 19th of September this past year. Stationed in front of the Radical Stage at Riot Fest, I was awaiting the Rilo Kiley’s return. It had been a busy day, so I arrived to the stage early to get a good spot and take a breath. I knew the band before Rilo Kiley was playing an album in full which is always a treat, so I was excited to see what I would think. When the band walked on stage, they weren’t in coordinated outfits adorned with the eyeliner like many Riot Fest contemporaries were. The voice scratched an itch that had been scratched before. I was immediately drawn in by the front mans story telling, it was like a whirlpool that started spinning me around until I drowned in the world of “Separation Sunday”. This was The Hold Steady, a band that I am a little irritated I hadn’t known about sooner. On the train ride home that night I put on “Separation Sunday”. I found out the familiarity came from band leader Craig Finn’s previous project Lifter Puller, that was on a friends playlist. As the songs kept playing and my Wikipedia search went from blue link to blue link, I fell in love with this band I had not known 12 hours prior. The beauty of festivals right? I had the privilege to talk with Craig Finn about his new solo record “Always Been” which continues his enthralling tales throughout the 11 tracks on the album. Hitting on the challenges of writing in a changing world, the beauty of Newport Folk Fest, and being fans in the bottom of the AL Central barrel, there was little we didn’t discuss in my lovely conversation with Craig Finn.

Logan: Yeah, so it’s nice to be home. I love Iowa, but there’s a little more to do and see here in Chicago. 

Craig: Of course, of course, of course. 

Logan: Yeah. Are you in New York right now? 

Craig: Yeah, I’m in Brooklyn. I’m here. I toured a lot this year, but I’m here for through the holidays and into January. So it feels pretty nice to be home for a bit. 

Logan: That is really nice. Minnesota is kind of where you’re from, right? 

Craig: Yeah from, I don’t have any family there anymore though. So I really only go for the shows now but my family is dispersed. But that’s definitely where I grew up. 

Logan: Does that mean you’re a Twins fan, a Yankees fan, a Mets fan? 

Craig: Always Twins, always Minnesota sports, except hockey, because I grew up a Minnesota North Stars fan, and they’re no longer. So I became a New York Rangers fan in hockey. But Vikings, Twins, Timberwolves, and lately big Timberwolves. 

Logan: You guys had a great game with the Vikings. 

Craig: Vikings had a great game last night. Yeah, I like this. I really, you know, I think we have to stick with this quarterback and see what happens. He’s yeah, it’s there’s growing pains, but I think it’s worth it. 

Logan: It’s his first, I’m in the suburbs and he’s from the suburb right next to me, La Grange, Illinois.  

Craig: Oh, I didn’t know that. I guess I didn’t know where he was from. I know he played at Michigan, but that’s crazy. Yeah, he’s, he looks pretty good. I mean, you know, if you look historically, the great quarterbacks have a rough burst here. So I think you got to give it to him. 

Logan: You know, it’s no shade to your Vikings, you’re not a fully fleshed out team yet either. It’s not like you’re one missing piece away. Like everyone’s got the growing pains. 

Craig: Yeah, absolutely. That’s why I don’t think trading for a veteran, you know, seems like, it’s not like we’re a missing piece. We have a terrible offensive line. So whoever we get is going to get… is going to be running for their lives. 

Logan: Are you a big baseball guy? 

Craig: Yeah, Twins. I mean, huge. Baseball is probably my favorite. 

Logan: That was a rough year for us. I didn’t expect, I expected you guys to be good this year. I’m a White Sox fan, so you know, I hate to admit that you guys were looking good, but. 

Craig: I didn’t think we were going to be good. I thought we were going to lose 90 games, and we did. We have ownership problems so until those get resolved, we’ll be pretty, I think we’ll be pretty mediocre to lousy. I don’t know, I don’t think they’ll do anything. They’re holding on to their good players, but I don’t know what that means. I don’t think there’s a plan beyond that. They’re in their third generation of wealth, meaning it’s the grandson of the guy who ran it well. So that never bodes well. 

Logan: No, it doesn’t. Do you think selling the team is the answer? 

Craig: Yeah, I think getting a more robust owner. The Timberwolves got bought by A-Rod and, his partner and someone just outside coming in and interjecting some, they were, they were talking about Ishbia, who I think ended up increasing his ownership in the White Sox. 

Logan: He did yeah. 

Craig: But he was talking about getting out of the White Sox, buying the Twins. That would have been good for us too. 

Logan: Yeah. I think he’s got his hands on the Phoenix Suns too. They bought Kevin Durant for, you know, 300 million or whatever that was for four years. 

Craig: So I think you want someone whose ego is tied into it, you know? 

Logan: Yeah. Do you think that there’s going to be a lockout? I mean, Dodgers win the World Series back-to-back. They give Otani more money than God’s ever seen. Do you think there’s going to be some sort of lockout within the next few years? 

Craig: I think, unfortunately, we’re looking at it. I’m not an expert on that, but that’s everything I’ve been reading makes it feel like it. 

Logan: I’m getting scared. 

Craig: Yeah. it’s not good because it’s just bad for the sport every time. 

Logan: Yeah. You mentioned a busy year, you know, toured a whole bunch. Now, In full honesty, I was unaware of the Hold Steady and yourself up until fairly recently. My buddy had a Lifter Puller song on a playlist, and then I caught you at Riot Fest and I went, this sound, it sounds so familiar, the voice. And I did some research and kind of fell down this rabbit hole and fell in love with you guys. So I’m new to the Craig Finn and the extended universe fandom. And you have put out a great, great record this year, “Always Been”, how was that process for you? 

Craig: Well, it was really a record I’m really proud of so I was really excited for it to go out and it was really well received. You know, now that the sort of top 10, you know, top 25, top 100 lists of the year are coming in, there’s been some nice placements there. It was a record that I made it with Adam Granduciel, who plays in The War on Drugs, and we have been friends a long time. 2009 we met and it was just fun to spend, to have a reason to spend time with him. And, you talk about records, I mean, I’ve made a lot of records in my career now and this one was particularly easy to make. I find that when they’re easy, they sometimes are, they’re oftentimes better just because I just don’t remember any struggle with this record. I remember, you know, driving to the studio and being excited to be there. We met in California, which was fun. And I felt like I had a vision for it the whole time, it was sort of a real, it was a joy to make. And then because Adam brought in a lot of his War on Drugs bandmates to play on it, who most of them I also know, but they have their own band. So touring with that lineup was not really in the cards, but we did do one big show in New York. 

Logan: The Bowery, right? 

Craig: Yeah. And that was a year highlight, you know, just because it was so fun to get everyone together. There were so many moving parts. I think by the end of the stage, by the end of the show, there were 11 people on stage. But it all came together and it came together quickly and it was just a beautiful night and sort of look back that as that as a real highlight of the year in a year with a lot of highlights. 

Logan: You mentioned a lot of people on stage. Do you remember the longest show you ever played? 

Craig: The longest show I ever played. There was a time in The Hold Steady back in “Separation Sunday” touring, when I had this crazy idea that we should play every song we know. And I don’t know, I think it was going through a real populist phase, but I had this idea that was an ill-conceived idea, but that we should play every song and then people could leave whenever they wanted, you know? When you decide you’ve gotten your money’s worth. 

Logan: Yeah, just coming and going. 

Craig: That only lasted a few shows, but I remember one particular in Fargo where we were playing for three plus hours, and I think what I learned is I think people want to be part of the arc, meaning I don’t think people feel good when they have to leave when you’re still playing. And I also think that I hadn’t really considered how much touring we were about to do and what that does to someone’s voice, you know? So I think I was about to learn that playing a reasonable amount is probably a better idea night to night if you’re going to do 100, 200 days of touring in a year. 

Logan: Busier with the whole thing and everything, you’re hitting up Europe in February, I believe. Your music is, I think uniquely talks about the American experience a lot and a lot of different aspects, you know, the good, the bad, the ugly. Do you notice a difference in reception from a European crowd versus an American crowd in your music? 

Craig: Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of twofold. One is that The Hold Steady started going over to Europe in 2007 and we found a really receptive audience, especially in countries like England and Ireland where English is the first language, there’s a probably a decent drop off after those, for obvious reasons. There’s a lot of words in our songs and you know, I think when people have to translate it, it gets a little harder. But even places where English is very strong have been good, like Holland and Scandinavia. But in the UK, we’ve played some of our biggest shows ever. And I think I just meet people in the UK like a rock and roll fan that is really interested in the American experience and kind of almost in some cases feels like they know more about it than I do. I mean, I meet people that are like going on their honeymoon to Mississippi. And I’m like, that’s crazy, you know, but they’re steeped in all this American mythology that they’re very interested in. And, you know, I think that the history of rock’n’roll has kind of been that, you know, with the Beatles looking at Little Richard and then American bands looking at the Beatles and then maybe the English bands looking at the next wave of American bands. And so there is this kind of conversation back and forth that’s been part of rock and roll history. But yeah, I mean, it’s been an important part of my of my career with the band and with the solo work so I’m going over. I actually have three different trips to Europe for 2026, and that’s what I know so far. So yeah, it’s spending quite a bit of time over there. 

Logan: Now with this record, always been kind of, this picture of America almost. And you really hone in on a lot of people’s vulnerabilities and kind of, you know, their darkest moments. I think you mentioned different characters. How do you decide which ones to kind of hone in on? There’s mentions of eating disorders and mental anguish and depression a lot in these songs. Do you have specific things that you’re pulling on, specific things that make you say, I want to write a song about this? 

Craig: I mean, I think that for a long time, in their earlier Hold Steady, I was looking a lot at kind of, I was kind of making these fantastical characters. And at some point as I got older, I got more interested in kind of just people who were trying to do the right thing, but not able to for whatever reason, or not able to keep their head above water. And I think more and more I’m interested in mental health and, and sort of the way that, for lack of a better word, capitalism, but maybe… maybe just sort of modern, modern life or, the way technology’s evolved, kind of can be stacked against a normal person and what their struggles are and how mental health, finances, etc. play into all that. 

Logan: A big theme in a lot of your music is religion and, Catholicism. And I was raised an Irish Catholic and, it’s cool to see music kind of reflect that upbringing in a way. When you bring in religion into your music, do you find yourself putting yourself back in the mindset of a kid who’s, you know, being dragged to church on Sunday morning or a more adult and, you know, cognitive relationship with it? 

Craig: I think it’s the latter. I mean, I certainly was the kid being dragged to church, but, I’ve always been interested, I sort of, even though I consider myself kind of a labs Catholic, I still go to I still go to mass, not every Sunday, but I go because I like the experience. I think there’s a magic and a mysticism in it all that’s still very attractive, especially in a modern world, especially in a scientific world, and especially in a world that values technology so much to kind of consider this, you know, some of the most basic elements of old, very ancient stories and morality in that context. And I think there is this sense of, if you’re raised Catholic, if you’re raised in any church, really a lingering, a lingering sense of that when you get to big moments in your life. 

Logan: Yeah, and I kind of see those big moments obviously the main character in “Always Been”, tries to become a preacher, even though his heart’s not in it or anything like that. When you’re writing these characters, is there any of you in it or is it fully some other character? 

Craig: There’s always, I mean, John Gregory Dunn said the first character in every novel is the author, and I believe that. I mean, I do a podcast called “That’s How I Remember It”, we talk about this a lot in storytelling because I can write a story about a bank robbery, which I’ve never done, you know, we robbed a bank. But if I put, the bank that I’m robbing, the one that’s just down here, I know how to tell the story a little better because I know what the coffee shop that’s next to it and the dry cleaner that’s on the other side and all this, all these details that are for real. And I think when you tell a fictitious story, but put in details from your real life, you can approach more of an honest telling, even if you’re making up a big part of it. So I think that that’s kind of how it works in my own work. 

Logan: You’ve been writing for a long time and there was a line in “Crumbs” that kind of stood out to me where the main character was talking about his niece and how she’s mostly on her phone these days. That wouldn’t have been a line 20 years ago. So is there a different approach you have to take to writing these younger characters nowadays? 

Craig: Yeah I think I think that’s part of what has been interesting to me is having the characters age with me. And obviously in 20 years ago, I wouldn’t probably not have put even phone or not that character in a song because I once have been around that character a daughter, a young teenage daughter that that the parents, that is sort of at a distance from her parents, but now that is something. I don’t have kids of my own, but I certainly see it when I visit my friends. I think that’s part of the changing perspective of being an artist. I mean, I think that at some point, like when you’re growing up, maybe you have your parents mark your height against a wall or a door or something, and see how you grow. I think different projects as an artist, whether it’s a new album, a new book, whatever, show a changing perspective. Even if you aren’t getting taller physically, emotionally, you’re growing and each project kind of reflects a changing perspective. 

Logan: These kind of narrative stories, I think, are a bit of a dying art form. You don’t see too many of these kind of out in the world. What would be any advice you would have to a younger artist who are also trying to weave these stories together? 

Craig: I think that my advice is just persistence and to do it. I think that when I look back on my own career, there were a lot of times that I didn’t think I was making a difference. I mean, for instance, I’ve played shows, I’ve met people, once I had this band, I had that band Lifter Puller and that, I met people once I started The Hold Steady and things started going pretty well. And people were like, oh, yeah, I’ve been a fan of Lifter Puller since I saw you guys in Cleveland. And I’d be like, there were two people at that show and they’re like, yeah I was one of them. And I’m like, you should have said hello. But you can feel like you’re not connecting, and that guy is going on saying I’m a huge fan now and pops back up and you realize you were getting through. I think part of it is just doing it and creating a practice where you are working daily and working on whatever it is, whatever it is you’re doing. 

Logan: When you’re touring, do you find it difficult to write on the road? If you’re touring, is it exclusively touring or are you also jotting stuff down? 

Craig: It’s hard. It’s harder to come up with something organized, but you can still get ideas down. And, nowadays, I think all artists, I used to write notebooks and now I’ve got a lot in phone notes. If you if you get enough notes, I find travel really to be inspiring, but I can’t maybe necessarily put it in a good, you know, during tour and into like a well organized. My ideas aren’t that well organized, but I can get a lot of notes down that I can figure stuff out later. 

Logan: For these characters, for “Always Been”, were these all characters written exactly for this record? Or were there songs that you’d kind of taken from the past? Or was it all, “Always Been”? 

Craig: Almost all of it is “Always Been”. I sort of said that there’s probably eight out of eleven songs that move this one story forward. And then there’s these kind of, what I call bottle episodes. “Shamrock” would be one and “Luke and Leanna” would be one where “Ed Fletcher’s” would be one where they’re kind of in the same world, but they aren’t those exact same people. And I think of it a little bit like the movie “Pulp Fiction”, where there’s different things happening also, you know? 

Logan: Yeah it’s a great, great record. Do you have any top records of the year yourself? 

Craig: You know, I really loved, there’s a couple records. I loved The Fringe, the band Friendship from Philadelphia. They have a record “Caveman Wakes Up” that I loved. I liked the Wednesday record a lot. What’s his name? McMurtry. James McMurtry. His record, “Black Dog”, and I forget what the title is. Those are three that come to mind that I’ve just loved. But I think I loved more than that. It’s always hard when you’re put on the spot, but those are records I really, really, really connected with. 

Logan: Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time with me. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much. 

Craig: Thanks for being interested. It’s always great to have new people aboard. So I’m glad you saw us at Riot Fest. What were you there to see? Something else in particular or just there for Riot Fest? 

Logan: I was there for The Pogues personally on that Friday. I was like, I’m not sure if I’ll ever see these guys again. And I was able to interview one of the members of The Pogues too, which was awesome. 

Craig: I met one of them at a catering and actually James. James Walburn, who plays with him, he’s not really an OG Pogue, but he, I know I’m friendly with him, but one of, I can’t remember which guy I met at catering, but it was cool. 

Logan: When you’re at a festival, do you stick around and watch the other bands? 

Craig: Some, yeah. I mean, when I can,  I used to. Like when we first started playing festivals, I would go in hard and I would probably to the detriment. I’d probably try too, I’d probably annoy people in catering and things like that. now I try to leave people alone, but, yeah, I liked seeing the bands. I can’t remember what I saw Weird Al at Riot Fest. I know that. was fun. Camper Van Beethoven started to think, I saw like some cool shit. 

Logan: Well, those two stages that you were at, just great. I think Sparks was right there. 

Craig: Yeah, right. 

Logan:  I cover a lot of festivals for this radio station. And it’s, there’s nothing like that festival. I’m not sure if you can attest to it, you’ve played it a few times, but like there’s such a wide variety. 

Craig: It’s a great one. It’s a really good one. The festival that I would just, I mean it’s a sort of different musically, but New Port Folk Festival in Rhode Island is the number one. I mean, it’s the one I’ll go to as a fan. And the location, the music, the vibe is just like, and I think the cool thing about that one is they’ve just made it into such a cool thing that they sell it out before they announce the artists. So you don’t get like one artist fan, they’ll add a huge artist but their whole fan base won’t take it over because the tickets are already sold, you know? I saw Lana Del Rey there and it was very cool, but it was a different audience than you’d normally see for her because, you know, people didn’t know. So I don’t know, I thought it was great. 

Logan: That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s the top of the list for me. It looks like you played that was that 2024? 

Craig: Yeah, 20 is that right? ‘24. No, I played ‘24. I sat in with The War on Drugs. The Hold Steady played ‘23. 

Logan: Okay, nice. 

Craig: Yeah. I often end up there regardless of whether I’m playing. 

Logan: So it’s not too far away from New York. 

Craig: No, it’s great.

Craig Finn has another busy year in front of him, touring “Always Been” in Europe and a few New York shows this winter, supporting The Mountain Goats this fall, and The Hold Steady playing a few dates in the middle of the two. You can find tickets to Craig Finn’s shows here, and The Hold Steady here.

The post Craig Finn Interview appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Tom Higgenson: I don’t think they’re like considered to be emo in the same scene. 

DeMar Hamilton: But they could be on the festival and it would be, it’d be awesome.  

Logan Melia: They were. First year, Avril Lavigne played weekend one, got sick, weekend two, they came in.

Tim Lopez: No shit? 

Logan: Yeah, so they like weren’t ‘on’ on the lineup but you know. They’re one of my all-time favorites.

DeMar: I love them, yeah they’re awesome.

Logan: All right, Plain White T’s, how are we feeling guys? 

Tim: Feeling good how are you? 

Mike Retondo: Feeling great man.

Logan: When We Were Young and we had a big show yesterday with Hawthorne Heights.

Tim: Oh yeah. 

Logan: How was that?

Tim: That was amazing. It was a pool party. 

Logan: You guys jumped in at all? 

Tim: None of us jumped in the pool. I didn’t bring trunks to be honest.

DeMar: We did that emo’s not dead cruise so it was like oh this is the cruise but in Vegas at our hotel.

Tim: Thats exactly what it was.

Logan: How do you like the Vegas Vibe so far?

Tim: I mean, I like it. I like Vegas in short spurts.  

Logan: Weekends.  

Tim: Yep, exactly. 

Mike: It’s nice this year. We did it two years ago, this fest, and it’s a lot cooler now than it was two years ago.  

Tim: Like temperature wise. 

Mike: Vegas breeze rolling through. 

Tim: I feel like Vegas is getting like a little grittier. 

Mike: Grittier? 

Tim: Yeah. 

DeMar: Going back to its roots. 

Tim: Yeah, I think so. As I was driving in, I was like, yeah, this is where like all the bodies are buried.  

De’Mar: Yeah, it is kind of sketchy. 

Logan: On the Uber over here, there was a place with a bunch of tanks and ammunition.  

DeMar: Yeah, right across right here.

Logan: Yeah, that’s my first time here. I woke up, you know, kind of got in the car and that was one of the first things I saw.  

Tim: Yeah, greeted with that. Welcome.  

Logan: Yeah. You guys are on the road quick with the Delilah v. Juliette Tour. So you keep going, are you guys excited for that?  

Tom: Oh, yeah, yeah. Cannot wait and Emo Nite is opening by like spinning a bunch and DJing emo bangers to get the crowd going so it’s going to be a super fun tour. 

Logan: Do you guys have any favorites that you go sneak on to that pre-show playlist?

Tom: Yes.

Tim: Ooh probably but I don’t know if we’re controlling that thing, I don’t know.

DeMar: I’m sure they’re gonna play some some Panic!, some Fall Out Boy you know Taking Back Sunday, Ocean Avenue.

Tom: Yeah the hits.

Logan: Now you’re from the Chicago suburbs, I’m from Westmont, Illinois.

Tom: Oh no shit?

Logan: Yeah right next to Lombard and I’m not sure I’m familiar with the current scene, but they got a cool couple of DIY venues. There’s one called Basement of the Coven in the bottom of a salon that you got like a ladder down or whatever, and your guys’ name is on the wall.

DeMar: No way!

Logan: I’m being completely serious right now. 

Tim: Like a sticker or we have been there? 

Logan: I don’t think you guys have been there. 

Tim: You gotta climb down a ladder to get into the place? 

Mike: That sounds awesome!

Tom: We should go play it!

Logan: Yeah, it’s awesome. Basement of the Coven. It’s right in downtown Lombard and right next to the train station in this little outlet. 

Tim: Dude we should go play it.

Logan: If you guys really want we can set it up.

Tim: Send the info.

Mike: Next to the train stop video building.

Logan: How was the scene when you guys were growing up there in Lombard, what was it like?  

Tom: It was so awesome.  

Mike: Great library. Lilacia Park is beautiful.  

DeMar: I love it.

Tom: I literally just, on the way here today in the car, listened to our friends Lucky Boys Confusion. I don’t know if you know them from back in the day, but they just released one of their independent albums digitally on Spotify. And so rocking that on the way here and thinking back to all those old suburban scene shows. We played with them all the time, Show Off all the time, DeMar’s band, Knockout, Mike’s old man, Tone Deaf George. It was a vibrant scene.  Everybody, all the bands just kind of helping each other out and just trying to build this thing that eventually we moved it into the city and you know we’re selling out The Metro and the freaking Fireside Bowl and places like that. So yeah it was really the scene was important to us back in the day.  

Logan: I did some research. 17 shows was my count for how many times you guys played The Metro.

Tim: Woah!

Logan: Do you remember the very first one?  

Tom: I do. These guys weren’t even in the band. When we started, one of our original goals was to play The Metro. That was like my favorite venue going to shows in the city and within about a year or so we got our first gig there so it was cool. Yeah, actually they let us into The Metro before the Fireside and before any of those other cool venues.

Mike: Who was there? 

Tom: It was with Woolworthy, who I believe is still maybe a band. 

Mike: I was at that show and I have the ticket stub. 

Tom: No shit? Yeah crazy.  

Mike: Didn’t play but it was a fan. I love Woolworthy.  

Logan: Well, I want to thank you guys so much for sitting down and taking time with me. I’m looking forward to your set later today. 

Tom: See you in Lombard, man.  

Logan: I’ll be there. 

The Plain White T’s showed once again what makes them the connective tissue for so many music fans, even beyond the scene. Hitting tracks off of 5 separate albums, and even throwing in a cover by Chicago suburb brethren Fall Out Boy with their song “Dance, Dance”, the Lombard locals flaunted their expansive and entrapping discography. They will wrap up the year opening for Waterparks in December and playing the Magnificent Mile Lights Festival in Chicago. You can find tour dates here as we await what is next for the quintet.

The post Interview: KRUI With The Plain White T’s appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Logan Melia: What are you drinking there?  

Jano Rix: I’ve got a black tea, a Fiji tips out-of-the-box from out there. 

Logan: Only the highest quality. 

Jano: Only the highest quality with nothing in it. Half a cup of water because that’s what it was like. 

Logan: You got to stay hydrated. Are you a coffee guy usually? Or are you tea?  

Jano: I have coffee in the morning. In fact, my whole life until I don’t know, two years ago, I never drank caffeine. 

Logan: Really? What changed? 

Jano: I don’t know. I started to like getting an espresso, like something sweet, like that one. And then I was like, I literally said, maybe I’ll see what getting a habit is all about with caffeine. And it’s on. So yeah. 

Logan: I just started like three months ago drinking coffee. 

Jano: Really. 

Logan: Yeah, like in college, I was like, I’m not going to do it because I can do it without it. I got this. And then over the summer, I worked at a golf course, and it was earlier mornings than I’ve ever had here at school. And that’s what made me fold. I’m a little disappointed in myself. 

Jano: Yeah, you know, it worked. Getting the habit worked. I got it. The thing about it, though, is that, I don’t know, it doesn’t really work that great if you didn’t get enough sleep. It makes you feel awesome if you got enough sleep, it’s even better. And if you didn’t get enough sleep, then you still feel like crap but jittery. 

Logan: Are you a full 8 hours guy or?  

Jano: I’m in a stage where, yeah, that’s good. Seven and a half. Seven and a half. 

Logan: You need it?  

Jano: I need it. Yeah.  

Logan: Do you feel like sluggish if you oversleep? Like if you are wiped, you sleep 10 hours, one day you wake up at, you know, 1130 A.M. 

Jano: If I, well on the road, 11:30 is reasonable. But I, it’s like all about timing. If it’s, I do believe in sleep cycles, at least for myself. So nine hours is awesome. 10 hours would suck. 

Logan: On the road, do you like the on the road thing? Does it mess with that schedule? 

Jano: Oh, I mean, yeah. It messes with my schedule. Yeah, last night wasn’t so great. You know, it depends on how the roads are, if the bus is going to stop in the middle of the night to fuel up. it depends on a lot of things.  

Logan: How long have you been touring for?  

Jano: 25 years, maybe? 

Logan: A little home on the road there, you know? You’re getting used to it. After the 25 years, maybe. 

Jano: Yes, I’m definitely used to it. I’ll tell you what, when I went away in COVID, I did miss it after a while. I loved it at first, actually. That particular thing of not touring, it was so awesome. I was home for months. And then after a while, it was just a huge part of my life, my expression, and also just being used to just seeing new places and waking up in a new place. And just, I don’t know, we have a tour family. I really missed it. 

Logan: When COVID first hit, were you like, I’m not going to do anything musical, I’m going to cleanse myself of this, or were the creative juices still kind of running for you? 

Jano: Oh, I mean, that was not a point in my life where I was like, no, I don’t want to do something musical. I had a point in my life, a few years before that, where I decided to quit music as a profession and that didn’t last. All that did was let me know that it was what I needed to do. It was good in that way. I tried to be a carpenter and I started working and doing like construction stuff. Working for a company and I quickly realized this is cool, but no, I need to put everything into music so that I can figure out a way to make a living doing this. I forget what year that was. I mean, 2009, something like that. But what was your question? Oh, COVID. COVID. Yeah. No, but it was just, I was, you know, I could do without the travel. So like stopping travel. I mean, I also spend the other, part of my artistic life is mostly spent in the studio. And that was mostly gone, but then we started doing sessions with masks and stuff, but touring was dead for a while. And I do remember vividly the first tour date, this live show date. 

Logan: What do you remember about it? 

Jano: Oh man, I cried. Like it was really awesome. I think it was outside, indoor/outdoor, like trying to do the COVID thing. At City Winery in Nashville and I think, what was it? Gosh, I’m trying to remember. Was it an Oliver Wood? I think we did an Oliver Wood Trio solo gig. And Seth Walker also played that night, like a bunch of people I’ve worked with and our friends and musicians I love. And I just, we played our set and then I just remember that felt amazing. And then I remember sitting in the audience, standing by the soundboard and watching Seth play. And I was just like, I was just so struck and moved by like how lucky I am to know these people and that we get to do this and I get to hear this, like after not hearing anyone play live music for so long. 

Logan: In those moments like that, is there like a song that kind of sticks with you from that exact time, or like maybe any other moments where you have a specific song that you remember hearing in a place during a time and you’re like, this is sticking with me? 

Jano: Oh, for sure. I don’t know if I remember a specific song from that night, but speaking of, it might’ve been, because I remember this from Seth Walker, hearing him, “Grab Ahold” which we’ve also done with the Oliver Wood solo stuff that I worked on. And I guess I worked on the original Seth Walker recording of that too. And he wrote that with Oliver and Oliver produced that first album and then I produced the subsequent ones. So I don’t know, that song goes way back and I’ve just, what really struck me, what I’m thinking about is hearing him from across festival grounds. Playing a daytime set, which can be tough in a festival early on, and telling a bunch of people there who didn’t know Seth, I was like, you have to go see Seth. And walking over to the stage and he was on the main stage and it was just like, you know giant fields, sun beating down, and he had everyone transfixed. Like you could hear a pin drop. When he gets into it, it’s remarkable. So I don’t know, there’s one. There’s one, yeah.  

Logan: You mentioned kind of coming out of your little, I’ll say, hiatus/retirement and realizing that you needed to do it more and more. When did you first realize that you needed to do it? Do you remember like how old you were or, you know, what’s really solidified that? 

Jano: I guess I wasn’t like a lot of people who were like, maybe, you know, they got a guitar in high school or something and they’re like in love with it. And I’m like, I think I want to do this because it was around me since I was a kid. My dad’s a professional drummer. And so I grew up, you know, from the time I was tiny, watching him play gigs. And like, there was a, I heard a cassette years ago of me playing when I was 4, playing and singing, and I was like that’s pretty good. I don’t really think I’ve gotten that much better from a four year old, I was just improvising a blues. My parents, they were outside and I went in the basement and just pressed record on a tape deck. And I played and made-up a blues about being all alone in the house, where they were and what they were doing. My dad’s in the shed, my mom’s out working in the garden and like. 

Logan: And here you are, all alone. 

Jano: Yeah. So I kind of, I wouldn’t say I knew I was going to do it because I was also, my mom’s a painter and I drew and painted growing up like equal time to music. So it was like, if I wasn’t skateboarding or something like that, because I also like to do athletic things, but I was drawing, painting, or working on music, piano or drums, mostly drums. So I don’t know, it was kind of bred into me. 

Logan: Who were your favorite artists or painters? 

Jano: My favorite artists or painters, here’s an inside one, Frank Frazetta. He did a lot of illustration, like he did a lot of book covers. My mom was really into illustrators and he was very much in a kind of fantastical fantasy sci-fi style, but fantastic craftsman and fantastic painter. Anyway, that’s kind of a random one to pick out because a lot of the greats I love too. I remember becoming obsessed with Picasso for a while. But yeah, I just saw someone wearing a Frank Frazetta t-shirt and I was like, where’d you get that? And she’s like, there’s this museum. I was like, you went? You know, it’s very inside, but in Pennsylvania, there’s just this Frank Frazetta museum. Yeah, so I don’t know. I was very, you know, that was another thing like my parents, my mom passed down that kind of stuff to me. So just, yeah, a bunch of illustrators I was into. That was a great one. 

Logan: Were you in the comic books at all? 

Jano: I wasn’t. I wasn’t, but I had a friend who really was, so I gained an appreciation of that. Actually, his name is Ben Mara, Benjamin Mara, and I was just seeing, he does amazing comic book stuff now. Really? He’s in it. He followed it all the way through. So I got an appreciation for what that was at the time, but no, I guess just more kind of like fine art stuff and painting. I don’t do too much of that. The most is like, people are like, Who painted that on your ‘shituar’? It’s like, Oh, I just did that. Randomly every few years, I’ll get the bug and I’ll like paint an owl on my ‘shituar’ or something. 

Logan: There you go, an owl on your ‘shituar’. Yeah. You mentioned skateboarding a minute ago. Now, when I think of a kid skateboarding, this music isn’t exactly, The Wood Brother’s isn’t exactly the music that comes to mind. So were you skating, listening to Rancid, or were you skating, like listening to John Prine? 

Jano: We were totally listening to The Misfits. You know, I think musically I had my own thing, but I was on the edge of that skate culture. So I did listen to that stuff. But musically, I was always kind of like, not with necessarily what my friends were listening to, because I had a very focused musical life and stuff I was into. I went through some phases with friends around, but I was really into Pink Floyd at that time. Like really, really into Pink Floyd. 

Logan: I was never a Pink Floyd guy. Me and some buddies put on The Wall for the first time I ever heard it. And it was a life-changing experience. You feel it over your whole body. It just washes over you. 

Jano: That’s cool to hear how someone else felt. I’ve never talked to anyone about what they thought of The Wall the first time. But yeah, I used to, I mean, I was young and I used to watch that movie. I didn’t know what the hell was going on in that movie. But it was like a feeling and they just were able to conjure certain feelings. And when I look back at it, they’re very patient. That music often moves very slow and there’s 16 measures, 32 measures in the middle of a song of just the groove vamp with maybe like 3 guitar licks. It’s like so patient and there’s so much space. And I think I’ve always gravitated to stuff like that. whether it was that or more funky music. Yeah. 

Logan: Do you feel like you incorporate some of that patience into your own music? 

Jano: I do. I don’t think about it consciously much. But if anything, like in the confines of making a record maybe, sometimes I listen back and I’m like, oh, I need to like, hit it a little harder sooner because there’s not enough time to be just patient. But I don’t think about it. It’s something that’s kind of automatic for me, I think. 

Logan: We talked about your mom’s influence a little bit. You were putting together an album with your father. Legacy. Not a whole lot of musicians are able to do that, you know? So I mean, obviously, I’m sure it feels incredibly special. But is there anything in that album that you just haven’t felt before while making music? 

Jano: Oh, good question. Yes. You know, and I don’t know if it’s purely a musical thing as far as like the aesthetics of the music, like the musical choices. But it felt very difficult. different to make that record. I make records all the time. I’m very lucky to have been doing that for a long time. Either as a musician or a producer and we have our studio, you know, me and The Wood Brothers in Nashville. But making a record with my dad was, I think I put more pressure on myself. Not that it had to be, it’s not going to be, I didn’t care if it was a commercial product, but it was just, it just felt more like, I don’t know, I wanted it to be good. I wanted him to like it. I don’t know. It was just, it was harder for me to finish it. I found myself dragging my feet, which is part of, I blame myself partially. We’re equally to blame why it took us 12 years from our first notes put down and recording to the end.

Logan: During those 12 years, were there any songs that you were able to get down in a day or get a good chunk of it down? Or were they all really laborious? 

Jano: Oh, I mean, in the end, I mean, we only had maybe five times we ever got together and recorded. I’d say probably 5 days. Total. 

Logan: To make an album, that’s a pretty good time to make album. 

Jano: There was a lot, okay, but there was a lot of… I spent other days myself, but I erased a lot of it because what we would do is we’d get together, the first time we got together at Southern Ground Studios in Nashville, and we spent an entire day, maybe it was two days, I think it might have just one day, and we tracked basics, just the two of us for, I mean, it’s only the two of us playing everything on the record. Yeah. And we got like half the record done that day. And then another day in the town where my parents live in New York, I went up there and we tracked again. We got basically the other half of the basic the tracks done. And then overdubs, I would work on them like in Nashville and I would add a lot. And in the end, it was just like, a lot of times I just stripped it back to mostly just me playing like a Fender Rhodes, my dad playing drums, our vocals. No, it can’t have been five days. I’m going to give us seven days, but totally working together. But I worked I worked a lot of other days on it myself, just adding little things, taking things away.

(Part 2)

Logan: Do you think you work best with simplicity?

Jano: Yeah.

Logan: In your dream scenario, what are the only things on a record or on a song? What’s the core that can’t be stripped away for you? 

Jano: Well, it could be anything. It could be anything, but I find myself often, like my favorite record by an artist is one with usually with like very little production. Sometimes there’s no crumbs on it, sometimes there’s, you know, not like the instrument I play like I necessarily care about hearing, you know. Like a Dylan record, like a really old one. That is just mostly just him. Yeah. Like, I’m like, oh, it’s not. No offense to my dad who played on Dylan Records. 

Logan: Your father played on Dylan Records? Which ones? 

Jano: The most known recording would probably be “Hurricane” or “Desire”. And he played on “Desire”, he’s playing with congas on that.  

Logan: That’s wild. You ever get to meet Bob? 

Jano: Unless I did when I was really tiny, no, but I heard plenty of stories. 

Logan: Any ones you can share? 

Jano: Oh man, my dad was on the Rolling Thunder Revue. Yeah, if you know that one, it’s like, that’s just a wild tour. Dylan was, I think the cool parts about it, some of the cool parts are he was tired of, he was such a big star at that point. He felt like his fans didn’t necessarily get tickets to the shows because everything was becoming expensive and would sell out right away. So he decided to do a tour, but not book it ahead of time. And he just got some buses, put the band together, because him and Rob Stoner put the band together. And they would just, as I know the story, show up in a town like the night before and just say, hey, we want to play your venue here like your veteran’s hall or something like that. And they would just put posters up, said Bob Dylan playing tomorrow night. And so it was very, to use the term freewheeling, and like, you know by the seat of their pants. And on that tour he kept adding artists and buses, just like pick up people. And then suddenly Joni Mitchell’s on the tour and Alan Ginsberg’s on the tour and like everybody’s on the tour. And it was, you know, so it was like this crazy social hang and wild tour, you know. 

Logan: That’s crazy. Is that something like, is there any off the wall ideas that you would ever want to do as an artist? Anything like a tour where you got, you got no direction in mind? 

Jano: I have, yeah, I have fairly ambiguous ideas that I haven’t really locked down of because I dance a lot. I don’t know if a lot of people know that, but like I teach dance. My wife and I teach Casino and Salsa. Casino is often called Cuban Salsa. But just through that world and interacting with music that way, I would love to incorporate that heavily for the audience into a set, as well as participating in rhythms in the music more than just clapping along every once in a while. Which goes to your question of, which I think this started out with a while ago, of what are the elements that you can’t get away from in music? And there’s a style of music that I really like, Cuban Rumba. And I love Huapango. And in Huapango, it’s just percussion and vocals. And man, music does not need any more than that. When anything’s grooving that hard, you do not need anything else, and all the space is wonderful. That said, I love guitars and keyboards and bass, but I love the simplicity of it too. I think that’s, and the rhythmic grooving nature of it. So I would just, and there’s something, our culture doesn’t have a lot of participation either. in dance socially, at least not white people. So social dances, that’s like, hardly anyone knows how to do those anymore, like partner dancing. But even just dance as a celebration and a ritual. And dance classes are for kids, you know, and then adults, unless they like to go to concerts and dance, they don’t really dance. So I would love to incorporate that, as well as, I think, everyone can play and sing and do music. It’s just like we’re not raised with that as part of our culture. And man, it’s very healing for people to do that. So I’d like to incorporate that. 

Logan: I remember hearing one time, one of my, I took choir in high school and a teacher said, singing and dancing is like running. Everybody can do it. doesn’t matter how good you are at it. And do you find that there’s a level that people need to cross them to be more comfortable dancing and doing that stuff? Do you find that there’s a switch that needs to be flipped because like, I think the average person isn’t maybe comfortable or think they’re capable of dancing. So is there some threshold that they need to cross, do you think? 

Jano: It depends on the person. Because in a way, no, because a little kid can do it. And a little kid can play and sing music and it’s perfect. It’s just what it should be. But I was that person who, I grew up on the bandstand on stage, I did not step foot, I did not dance until I was an adult. I was deathly afraid of dancing, which is probably why I got so into it once I conquered that fear of it, why it made such a difference to me. But yeah, so I was one of those people. It was not in my culture. And I was really afraid of dancing. And then my wife, we went to the Dominican Republic and we took some little dance lessons on the beach. We did some bachata lessons. And then we got back home and she’s like, I really want to take salsa lessons. And I was like, okay, I’ll go with you. And so we went week after week, I was kicking and screaming every week. I did not want to go and be bad at, because I was used to being good at art from the time I was little. I was like, I was like the one who was really good at the art, you know? And here I was terrible. I was terrible at dancing. And salsa requires, you know, a vocabulary, it’s a language. But once I finally got over myself and went to a social, which everyone told me to do, and just dance with people, which I was afraid. I was like, no, I’m going to get good first. They’re like, no, you’re not. You have to go and that’s going to make you get good. You just have to go and suck and dance with a lot of people. When I finally did that, I was so hooked. 

Logan: Really? 

Jano: Yeah, because you are basically dancing duets with different people all night. You’re improvising. It’s like a full body improvisation with music and another person. It’s just like a beautiful connection. It breaks the boundaries of physical connection. We don’t really touch much in our culture, except like with your lover. That’s it. Like otherwise you don’t really touch, you know, you pat your bro on the back. That’s that, yeah, that’s that. So yeah, it was like really opened my world and it was whole, opened my world to new cultures, new language, and the language of dance. So I don’t know, yeah. 

Logan: You mentioned it being like a full body, like experiencing that thing. Do you feel the same way when you’re on stage doing music? And is that, if it is, is it the same use of your full body or is it a different feeling? 

Jano: It’s a different feeling, but it can be very much the same and it should be. And dancing has informed me with my music because my music, has been a professional thing for so long. And in a lot of ways, I put pressure on myself since I was pretty young to perform at that. But dancing started as an adult, and I got to watch myself as it was like a third space. It was not, for a long time, it wasn’t professional and I became professional. And I also saw what that did to my experience of it, you know. And, but it made me aware that I was missing out on some of the joy I originally had in music. Because dancing, and I was like, I couldn’t believe I’d become this person who would just be like, no one on the dance floor, that’s me. You want to dance? Let’s go. I had no problem asking, going to an unfamiliar city somewhere in Europe and meeting everyone, asking them to dance. And it was just with so much joy, like that connection, just the joy of connecting in the moment to just that life between the two of you, between the music moving in the air. And so, yeah, you should have that with music too. And it is a full body experience. Even if you’re playing an instrument that mostly just your fingers touch some keys or something, your whole body’s involved, your breathing’s involved, you can dance with it. 

Logan: Do you feel like that kind of the love, that you’re describing, do you feel it growing every time you do it? Or do you find it to be maybe a little repetitive at times? 

Jano: Well, yeah, it goes through phases and it’s night to night and it’s moment to moment. And I think once you’ve done it long enough, at least for some of us, the only thing to really think about is to notice where you’re at. The music’s happening, like you’re playing the music, thinking about what you’re going to play next is a complete waste of time. Your conscious brain is really way too slow to do all the cool things that you can actually do. But you just kind of realize where you’re at, like, oh everything’s feeling hard. I’m feeling like I can’t hear, I’m annoyed with my in-ear mix, okay where am I at? Like, how am I feeling? Where is this in my body? Can I breathe? Can I just get curious about the sounds and where I’m at? And kind of sometimes I look at the lights in the room and that’ll like bring me back. I think you go through stages too, where it’s like all joy and you’re just excited about it. And then I noticed myself with dance and then I got a level of expertise with it, and I started teaching as people start looking up to you. And then you feel like you’ve got to be somebody. Like when you dance, people are watching you. And you’ve got to represent and you’ve got to, then the joy is gone. And you still might do some hot dance moves, but you’re not really connecting with your partner, you’re not really letting loose in the moment, and you’re not even modeling what you should be modeling. You’ll look back and you’ll, if people videoed you, see you’re not smiling.

Logan: How do you kind of disperse those expectations? When you feel them setting it, is there anything you do to make them go away? 

Jano: You schedule therapy.  

Logan: Not bad advice.  

Jano: Yeah, you know, and I don’t think there’s one solution, but over time, you get different home mantras to tell yourself. If you can remember to remember, then you, like this week I’ll tell you what it is this week on stage, it’s someone talked about curiosity. And so I just like try to get really curious. I mentioned that a few minutes ago, just get really curious about the moment. That’s what I’ve been doing this week, that word comes to mind. In fact, I wanted to paint it on one of my instruments, so I just see it. But I remember last week, I put a little, preparing for the tour, I put a little sign, put it on my rig, and it said, I think, smile, like smile with your body. And when I think of that, my posture gets better. My posture tends to smile and my chest comes up and I tend to breathe in. I smile with my face. And I realize, like, what are you practicing? Are you practicing being stressed out and worried about screwing something up and not being able to, not having your chops up for this tour? Because that’s how you’re going to feel on the tour. No matter, if you practice that for 1000 hours before the tour, you will still not feel ready for the tour, no matter how good your chops are because that’s what you practiced. So try to practice letting it flow and being curious and interested in the sounds as they happen, rather than trying to turn yourself into a machine, being constantly looking for your own faults. Because I can do that. I’m good at that. I spent years doing that. I can play like a machine, I know how to. 

Logan: But it’s better if you let it flow. 

Jano: Yeah. And you can. There’s machines, I mean, you can just have it tell AI to do it now. I think it can make you machine music. 

Logan: It’s not good music. 

Jano: It’s not good music, but it sounds, honestly, it sounds like lackluster music and a lot of people make lackluster music because they’re trying to treat themselves like machines. We’re lucky that’s not what our fans want. At least not with the Wood Brothers. Like they want to hear, like have a human, you know, they always say, God you guys sound so honest. I think it’s, we just let ourselves be what we are, you know, warts and all. 

With support from Irish duo DUG, The Englert was lively for The Wood Brothers. For over two hours, fans were showered with songs old and new with an encore of their hit “Luckiest Man”. It was a busy year for Rix as The Wood Brothers dropped their new album “Puff of Smoke” in August and “Legacy, Vol 1” from Jano and his father released in November. The Wood Brothers will continue their tour this winter, you can find dates here.

The post Interview: Jano Rix of The Wood Brothers appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Logan Melia: Well, I’m here with Cecilia Castleman. How are you today? 

Cecilia Castleman: I’m good, how are you? 

Logan: I’m doing well. You mentioned it’s your fifth day on the road. So you’ve kind of set up a routine a little bit. How does your day look on tour right now? 

Cecilia: Yeah, normally I get in late the night before from the show. And then my mom and I, we’ve just been traveling by ourselves with the dog and we get up early and drive to the next venue and then I get ready and we head to the venue for sound check and yeah, it’s been really fun. But yeah, it’s a lot. I’ll be ready to have a little time off tomorrow, but it’s been the best. It’ll be like 37 shows in total. 

Logan: Is the dog on board for all 37 shows? 

Cecilia: Yeah, she’s been with us the whole way. 

Logan: What’s your dog’s name? 

Cecilia: Toby, she’s a rescue. 

Logan: How long have you had Toby? 

Cecilia: Oh gosh, probably three years. 

Logan: That’s very sweet. Toby, does she come on every tour you’ve done in the past three years?

Cecilia: No, she’s normally home. 

Logan: Home’s in Nashville, right? 

Cecilia: I was born in Nashville. Franklin, right outside of Nashville. And yeah, I’ve lived there all my life. 

Logan: Okay, nice. And that’s obviously a huge scene for the kind of music you’re doing right there. Have there been any kind of out of the ordinary influences that maybe you’ve picked up on? 

Cecilia: Gosh, I think just how you really have to have your chops up in Nashville because you never know who you’re going to write with or who you’re going to run into. And I think it definitely pushed me to be better at what I did. There’s definitely a lot of drive in Nashville and everyone’s really nice and encouraging, but that was the one thing. When you get into a room with people, you better know what you’re doing. So that was the one thing. 

Logan: Have you ever had a moment where you’re like, okay, I actually do know what I’m doing. Has there ever been a switch that’s flipped for you? 

Cecilia: Yeah, a little bit here and there. I feel like the minute I sort of get a grasp on it, something new like comes up that I need to learn. But I feel like I’m slowly getting better every day. 

Logan: Now, big year for you. First, LP, and that came with a collection of songs that you’ve released on previous EPs. When you’re writing these songs, do they fall out of the sky for you or are they kind of a laborious process? Do you toil over them for a while? 

Cecilia: Sure. Gosh, I mean, I write them pretty quickly. It’s just, for me, it’s like figuring out the time to get in the studio and get everyone together. But I made the record with Don Was, who has made a lot of my favorite records. And it was like the first LP I had so many songs, so there was a big catalog to choose from. But it was pretty easy picking the 13 or 14 that we did. The writing really wasn’t the hard part. It was more the executing and getting it how we wanted it and like the production and all that stuff. 

Logan: What are your biggest inspirations when you’re writing? Are there things you kind of fall back on that are just like home runs that always make you write? 

Cecilia: Sure. Right now it’s like Prince and I’ve really been into Oasis. They’ve had it such a comeback. 

Logan: Did you see them? 

Cecilia: I didn’t, no. But yeah, I listen to Fleetwood Mac, it’s a big one, Tom Petty, I love Mayer and all that kind of stuff. Those are like my mains. 

Logan: Do you have a favorite Oasis song? 

Cecilia: Slide Away.

Logan: It’s so good. Another artist that I saw that may have some influence on you. I saw you cover Bruce Springsteen’s “One Step Closer”. 

Cecilia: Oh, yeah. 

Logan: Give me your thoughts on The Boss, I love the guy. 

Cecilia: Yeah, he’s awesome. There’s one of my songs, track number four on the record. I was listening to a lot of Springsteen, especially the “Streets of Philadelphia” song, just with all the synth pads and all that stuff. That was a big one for me. But yeah, he’s great. Especially traveling, you know, like we’ve been up north and, you know, to all the, you know, northeast cities and it’s been awesome. 

Logan: When you’re writing these songs, do you feel like, oh my god, there’s a little Springsteen in this one. Oh my god, there’s a little Fleetwood Mac in this one?

Cecilia: Sure. Yeah, I think it’s like, there’s always that, even subconsciously. I don’t know, I listen to them so much. Of course, I’m gonna sort of, not copy what they do, but they definitely have a big influence on my music for sure. 

Logan: You remember the first time you heard an artist and you’re like, this is magic, this is beautiful. Was there a song that you heard that hit you? 

Cecilia: Yeah it was definitely, things started clicking for me music-wise. I started to feel a lot when I was around 11. Tom Petty, his song “Don’t Come Around Here No More” was in a movie. And I heard it, and I was like, oh my gosh, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen or heard. Definitely that. When I got my permit and I was driving down the road and I heard “Boys of Summer”, Don Henley. So like those kind of moments for sure. 

Logan: Do you remember your first guitar? 

Cecilia: Oh gosh, yeah, I still have it. It was an Epiphone, the Jim Croce Epiphone. Yeah, and my dad gave it to me and it had signatures. It had Neil Young’s signature and Neil Harris’s signature on it. I was so little, so when I would play, like my elbow would rub off the signatures, so they’re not there anymore. And he was not very happy about that. But don’t give a kid signed guitars. 

Logan: I mean, it must have paid off now. You can get another Neil Young signature if you really want. 

Cecilia: Maybe someday, yeah. 

Logan: What guitars are you playing nowadays? 

Cecilia: Two Fenders. I have a Fender Paramount up there and then a Fender Jazzmaster. A big Fender person, Fender Amp, everything’s Fender. They’ve been really nice to me and yeah, I like them a lot. 

Logan: Do you have like a dream guitar? 

Cecilia: Oh gosh, I’d really like an old 335 Gibson. Maybe someday. They’re a little out of the budget right now, but maybe someday I have a nice cherry, distressed red one. 

Logan: The old Chuck Berry vibes a little bit. When you’re writing, do you start on acoustic always or do you sometimes pick up an electric first? 

Cecilia: Oh gosh, both. It depends on the day. I don’t know, I never really have a rhyme or reason to it. It’s just normally whatever I pick first. Whatever’s in tune. 

Logan: Do you play with any open tunings or anything like that? Do you fool around with those? 

Cecilia: Yeah, I do it tonight. You’ll see me change tunings very fast. I love open, I’m in open D sharp, weirdly enough, a lot. 

Logan: I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone play an open D sharp before. 

Cecilia: Yeah, that’s my favorite. 

Logan: Do you write the lyrics first a lot of time for these songs, or do you start with strumming a riff or a few chords? 

Cecilia: Definitely, I start with like a definitely guitar bass chord kind of stuff. A lot of the time. 

Logan: Now you’re the headliner of the tour part of me. Molly Tuttle just released a cover of Fairytale of New York by The Pogues, which great Christmas song. Are you listening to Christmas music yet? Are you doing it after Thanksgiving? Is it after Halloween? 

Cecilia: Oh gosh. Probably after Thanksgiving. Yeah. I love Christmas. I don’t know, I like to save it for like the end of the year because it’s not Christmas yet. 

Logan: To make it really special. 

Cecilia: Yeah. 

Logan: What are some of your favorite Christmas songs? 

Cecilia: Oh gosh, probably “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” is mine are “Blue Christmas”. All those, the classics. 

Logan: The classics. A little Elvis there with Blue Christmas, do you listen to a lot, Elvis? 

Cecilia: I do, I love Elvis. But not too recently, but… he’s Elvis. 

Logan: What is going through your playlist nowadays. 

Cecilia: A lot of Sam Fender. 

Logan: I saw him cover Tom Petty in Chicago like a month ago. He was incredible. 

Cecilia: Yeah, he’s amazing. The 1975, I love Molly’s new record. It’s like the coolest thing. Watchhouse. I feel like since I’ve been on this tour, I’ve been getting back into, you know, the Barr Brothers and more acoustic sort of folky sounding stuff. But even when I’m driving in the car, I love listening to Molly. She’s so incredible. 

Logan: It’s a lot of different genres, but you’re kind of on the rise with all this great artists. You have Billy Strings selling out arenas. So you’ve got all these phenomenal, phenomenal artists like Molly and Sierra Farrell. How does it feel to be a part of that kind of movement?

Cecilia: Oh, gosh, I mean, it’s the coolest. All of them they work so hard and they’re such incredible just musicians, like Molly is like the most down to earth person I’ve ever met and  it’s an all-female band so seeing girls like Sierra Ferrell and even Sierra Hall and Molly, it’s really empowering to me and because it’s not an easy industry right now and music is changing in a lot of ways right now with everything, but seeing Molly has really inspired me every night to just get better at my craft and that’s the goal for me. But live shows are the best. I’m going to hate to get off this tour and go home. 

Logan: What’s your favorite gig you’ve ever played, and what’s your favorite gig you’ve ever seen? 

Cecilia: Favorite gig I’ve ever played? Oh goodness. 

Logan: You can give multiple. 

Cecilia: Sure. I opened for Marcus King in Jackson Hole, Wyoming which is crazy. I love it out west. We did a whole out west run, those were incredible. We played Bozeman at The Elm with Molly. That was amazing. I opened for Sheryl Crow in Seattle, which is fun. And then I opened for this band Inhaler, they’re cool. 

Logan: I love Inhaler. 

Cecilia: They’re pretty good. And I opened for them a couple of times in Atlanta and in Nashville, but I’ve never had a bad show. I mean, you get tired, but I’ve been very grateful. I’m 24, I got such a long way to go, but I’ve been super grateful for everything that I’ve gotten so far. I don’t take any of it for granted. 

Logan: What’s your favorite gig you’ve attend as a fan? 

Cecilia: I just saw Paul McCartney at The Pinnacle in Nashville with my mom. 

Logan: At the Pinnacle? Okay. A, Paul. B, how’s the Pinnacle as a venue? 

Cecilia: It’s really nice, really new. It’s awesome and it sounds really good. But yeah, seeing Paul and like, obviously a more intimate setting than all the stadiums. But he was incredible. That’s probably my favorite. I saw Tom Petty. Gosh, they’re all good. 

Logan: Was that your first time seeing Paul? 

Cecilia: My first time seeing Paul.

Logan: Worth the wait? 

Cecilia: Oh, of course, yeah. 

Logan: I’m catching him next week for the first time and it’s been marked in my calendar for months. The Beatles, do you have a favorite Beatles record? 

Cecilia: Gosh, I don’t know. They’re all great. I’ve been like into all The Wings stuff, like the Venus and Mars and all that kind of stuff. 

Logan: Okay. With The Wings, it just made me think of “Wings Over America”, the live album. Are you a live album person? Or when you’re listening to stuff or do you like the studio recording? 

Cecilia: Gosh, I don’t know. I think it probably depends on the bands for me. I mean, I don’t know. I love a record version.

Logan: Do you collect a lot of records? 

Cecilia: Yeah, there’s a place in Nashville called Phonolux, they have like really affordable records and a really great selection, so I’m always there. 

Logan: Have you stopped by Third Man Records in Nashville yet? 

Cecilia: Yeah, I did my album release show at The Blue Room. 

Logan: How was that?  

Cecilia: It was really fun. So yeah, I did that. But yeah, Jack White is incredible. He has such a vision for how everything looks. 

Logan: His Rock and Roll of Fame speech, so beautiful. I loved it and to see him in red again just tickled me. The White Stripes are obviously a bit of a different sound than what you’re playing. Do you have any, you know, are you listening to metal on the side? Is there anything beyond kind of your sound that reaches your ears a lot? 

Cecilia: Sure, I love a little bit of everything. I mean, my sweet spot; I love like 60s, 70s rocks, you know, all the Eagle stuff and Cross, Stills, and Nash, like that’s what I love. But I also will definitely turn on the pop radio stations when I come back home. I think there’s a place, you can learn so much from all the different kinds of genres. I really love Britrock. My sound is a little bit softer, but I do. Not super heavy metal, but I like to jam, and I like to rock, and I love electric guitar and loud drums and all the things. 

Logan: Do you have a lot of distortion pedals back home? 

Cecilia: Not a ton. I like my blues driver, and I pretty much stick to that.

Logan: What does your pedal board look like? Is it just a blue driver? 

Cecilia: There isn’t one. It’s a pedal board and a tuner. 

Logan: That’s all you need though. 

Cecilia: That is all you need. 

Logan: Can you tune by ear?  

Cecilia: I’m not gonna try. 

Logan: Not there yet? 

Cecilia: Not there. 

Logan: When you’re on the road, do you write a lot or are you kind of just too busy playing all the time?

Cecilia: I have a lot of ideas on the road, surprisingly. You get a lot just seeing new things and everything. I definitely have ideas brewing, it’s just hard to finish them. 

Logan: Do you have any huge ideas where you’re like, I want to do an orchestrated album one day, I want to do some sort of concept story. Is there any big castle on the hill that you want to accomplish one day like that? 

Cecilia: I’d like to do instrumental records. I’d love to do an acoustic instrumental record, I’d love to score indie films someday. That kind of stuff I think would be really interesting, but I do have a lot of songs that I want to get out into the world. 

Logan: How many instruments do you play? 

Cecilia: Oh gosh mainly just guitars and keys. I can fiddle my way around bass and stuff but guitar is definitely my main. 

Logan: Is there one instrument you really want to get good at like fiddle or you want to get really good at drums? 

Cecilia: Probably drums I would kill to be able to play drums, maybe someday. 

Logan: When you’re coming back home after the tour wraps up, are you taking a beat or are you hitting the ground running, trying to get more of these ideas off the ground? 

Cecilia: Oh gosh, probably. I mean, December, January, even through March, the music industry sort of shuts down. So I write a lot during that time because I’m not getting the emails or nobody’s needing me to post on Instagram. So I feel like that’s my creative time when everyone’s off and home. And I feel like I can settle down and sort of get out what I’m feeling. I think I’ll have a lot of ideas, hopefully after this tour, and hopefully they’ll be good enough. 

Logan: Thank you so much for taking chat with me. 

Cecilia: Thanks for having me, this was so fun. 

Logan: Anything you want to tell the people before you head on out. 

Cecilia: I just put out a deluxe of the record, and yeah, just chugging away. Hit me up on Instagram. 

Logan: Well thank you so much. 

Cecilia: Thank you so much. 

Cecilia opened the night playing “Waiting on You”, “Pick and Lose”, and more off her self titled debut album “Cecilia Castleman“. With her Jazzmaster and Paramount in hand, Cecilia welcomed in a sold out crowd to The Englert Theatre. Throwing in a cover of Tom Petty’s “Breakdown”, the audience was enamored, sparking clamorous applause that echoed as she finished her set with “It’s Alright”. I consider myself lucky to have caught Castleman so early in her career and I am eager to see the heights that she will reach. She will continue supporting Molly Tuttle until the 23rd of November on the Highway Knows Tour. The deluxe edition of her record just released in September with four new songs, and you can follow along for whats next on Cecilia’s Instagram.

The post Interview: Cecilia Castleman appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Logan Melia: Derek, how are we doing? 

Derek Sanders: Oh, doing very well. We’re halfway through this tour and having a pretty good time. 

Logan: That’s awesome. Now you’re on the road with All Time Low, The Cab, and The Paradox, a phenomenal combination. You’re kind of one of the pillars of the scene, bringing The Paradox along, getting The Cab back together. How is this combination of new and familiar faces? 

Derek: It’s been so cool. I mean we go way back with All Time Low. The first time we toured with them was in 2007 and we’ve toured with them many, many times in between. We love those guys to death and always appreciate them bringing us out on the road. The Cab, it’s been so sick to see them come back. We’ve also known those guys going back a pretty long ways. They actually just dropped off the tour and Four Year Strong hopped on. Their first show was in Toronto 2 days ago. And same, yeah, Four Year Strong. toured with those guys back in 2007 for the first time and just loved them to death. And we all are huge fans of their band. And I mean, The Paradox has been so cool because we had kind of seen and heard the buzz about them. They work with the same producers, Kenneth Mount and Zach Odom, that we work with. So, we’ve heard a lot about them from those guys and it’s been great to get to know them. And they’re just such a fun band. They have so much energy and it’s always refreshing to have younger guys. They’ve been a band for just a little over a year so everything was super new and exciting and it’s just it’s refreshing to see and it’s been really great. 

Logan: You have brought so many cool bands on tour with you. Earlier this year, you brought out such phenomenal opening acts for yourself. Grayscale, Like Roses, Microwave is an insane live act to see. How do you come across these bands that you choose to bring along on your tours? 

Derek: It’s a whole process between our team of booking agents and management. There’s a lot of that is brought to us from these are the bands that have submitted, and then we kind of throw out our thoughts as well. Microwave is an example of a band that We toured with a couple of years ago and we are just big fans of. So whenever we were trying to put together that tour, we kind of reached out and said, hey, we’d love to see if Microwave wants to do the tour. And with Grayscale and Like Roses, they had submitted as potential opening acts and it’s kind of tough. It’s always difficult because you’ll get a lot of bands that submit and you’re trying to kind of curate the best experience possible. That one I think worked out really well. It feels like that was a really, really strong tour. 

Logan: The tour was a celebration of 20 years of the band. You guys have come a long way. I saw you guys, you played a sold out when we were a young crowd a few weeks ago and you started out in basements. Do you still get a little jittery at all? 

Derek: You know, I’ll tell you, if it’s like the first show that we’ve done in a while, like usually the first show of a tour, I’ll be a little nervous, but most of it’s kind of, for example, right now we’re on this tour. We do the same set every night. Once you kind of fall into the rhythm of it and the pocket of it, then it’s just like, I can do it without even thinking about it. But whenever it’s that first show or the first show in a while, it feels like I’m kind of in my head a little bit about making sure I don’t miss anything or forget any lyrics or cue points or whatever. So if it’s the first show in a bit, maybe I’ll have some nerves. But once you kind of get that one out, it’s like, okay, we got it. 

Logan: Yeah, you’re at home on stage. 

Derek: Yeah, honestly. Yeah and it doesn’t really matter whether it’s for, you know, 300 people or 50,000 people. It’s just kind of the sort of the same just getting up there and doing it, you know? 

Logan: Yeah, 100%. You’re home on stage and home in the studio recently. You’re releasing 3 albums this year. You released “Sweet” in April, “Sad” just last month. You’ve got so many songs, are these songs that just fall out of the sky for you? Or are you toiling over them for a while? Is it a laborious process for you? 

Derek: Yeah we’ve been between, I guess, basically since things kind of opened back up with touring and everything after COVID. We’ve been just kind of staying real busy and, it feels like there’s, kind of a moment happening right now with emo music or really just sort of, I don’t know, like sort of a resurgence of the nostalgia of the early to mid, late 2000s and everything that was going on then. And so I don’t know, it just kind of feels like it’s there. We always kind of joke about the fact that we don’t ever say no to anything and so the more these offers come in to do festivals and tours and just stay active and busy, it’s like, well, you know, it’s we’re we may as well do it while we can. And so, yeah, as far as the music that just kind of came together, the plan originally was to go record our eighth full length album. But we kind of realized as we were getting started with that process that this was last year, that the music we were recording was going to be coming out in 2025, which is our 20 year anniversary as a band. And we just kind of started thinking, what can we do to celebrate that? And after some brainstorming, figured a sort of a three-part release. It’s a hefty amount of music to put out over a longer period of time and just felt like a way to kind of keep the whole year impactful. And so yeah, it’s been it’s been really neat so far. I’ve really enjoyed the process. 

Logan: Yeah, you mentioned saying yes to pretty much, has that gotten you into playing any gigs in some weird places? Any out of the ordinary slots? 

Derek: For sure. I mean, not so much these days but early on, I feel like all the time. It was kind of a weird thing in the mid to, 2005, 2006, I feel like, where there were really heavy  fucking bands and then there were like emo bands. And a lot of times those shows would get lumped together. We did a short tour, a short run of shows with Maylene and The Sons of Disaster. And they’re sick, they’re amazing, but their fans, I don’t know how much patience or tolerance they had for our, whiny emo stuff. But so, I feel like that used to happen sometimes back early on, but not so much these days, I suppose. 

Logan: Now I did some digging through some set lists of some of your older gigs and I’ve seen “Fat Lip” and “Cute Without the E” and even “Don’t Look Back In Anger” by Oasis. Do you have any recollection of playing these and do you have any songs that you would want to cover? Any songs you want to bring into your setlist? 

Derek: Oh, for sure yeah. We’ve definitely done a handful of the covers throughout the years. And what’s interesting is that there was a moment for me where that all changed because before that, I had always felt like playing coverss in the set was just not something I was very interested in doing and just wasn’t excited about the idea. And then I forget what year this was. This is going back probably at least 10 years ago, maybe further. We did A Day To Remember’s festival that they used to put, I think it’s Self-Help Festival. I think this was in the LA area. And Papa Roach played before Day to Remember. I remember watching them and they were so good. And then at one point they played Song 2 by Blur, the “woo-hoo”. And the crowd just goes bonkers, like everybody just loving it, jumping, having a great time. And I feel like that was like, I had kind of a shift in my viewpoint where I was like, if they can play this and everyone here just loses their minds having a great time, that’s beautiful. That’s amazing, you know? So I feel like since then, I was more sort of open-minded to it. But yeah, I love throwing in the covers every now and then. There’s, man, there’s a bunch that I’d love to, it’s kind of hard to, Think of like, you know, the one on the spot. I mean, I’m a huge, you know, for a lot of us, we grew up, you know, I was I was born in 1986. I grew up in the nineties and I loved, you know, all of the alternative rock stuff, all of Nirvana and Bush and Oasis and Red Hot Chili Peppers and, you know, Stone Temple Pilots, all that. So that’s the kind of stuff that like I think would be a lot of fun to play. for our sake. I don’t know that the audience would love it as much, but yeah. 

Logan: Creating like your set list and stuff like that. You throw in some great songs. I think not everyone would expect a kids in love peace of your heart. How do you kind of decide on more of these deep cut songs and which ones you want to bring live to the stage? 

Derek: Yeah, it’s tough. It’s a difficult process and it gets harder every year as we put out more new music. But at the same time, you know, we’ve done it long enough that we, have a pretty good understanding of, which songs are going to be the crowd favorites and which ones kind of work well live, which ones don’t work as well. So you kind of just take all that knowledge and just do your best to curate a set list. And it kind of, I feel like it’s a balance. it’s a balance between you’ve got the obvious sort of banger songs that you’re always going to play, Jamie Allover, Jersey, probably, oh well, oh well, you know. And then you kind of You want to round it out a little. You want to have a little bit of something, you know, deep cut in there or something that rotates where you’re not just doing the same set every tour and, you know, maybe a balance of a little bit of new and some old and in between. And you just kind of have to do your best to put it together. And I think we’ve come to a pretty good spot with it. 

Logan: Yeah, and you yourself, you’ve put out some music under your own name, some solo stuff. “The Heavy Box” in 2023, which I was a huge, huge fan of. How do you kind of decipher what songs maybe lean more towards yourself and your own sound versus the Mayday Parade sound? 

Derek: Yeah, that can be tricky. But basically, it’s mostly been songs that I had brought in, whenever we get together in the studio. We’ll all bring in a lot of songs and there’s a lot of songs that don’t get picked and don’t get recorded. So, for the most part, I think all the songs on that EP were songs that we just didn’t track with Mayday Parade. Obviously, it’s more acoustic based, not as full band so kind of the songs that lend themselves to that. And then just songs that I like that we never did anything with. 

Logan: When you’re writing songs, do you write on acoustic off the bat? 

Derek: It depends. I do a lot of writing on acoustic, but not always. Especially the further developed we all kind of have some level of home recording studio situation. And the more advanced that gets, I’m able to do more. But I guess going back before that, before I had really as many capabilities there, most of it was on acoustic. A lot of it’s on piano as well. That’s kind of the fun of that creative process is I might grab the acoustic and mess around for a little bit. If it doesn’t take me anywhere, I can sit at the piano a little bit. If that doesn’t take me anywhere, I can grab a bass and start messing around or grab an electric guitar or whatever and just kind of keep going until I find something that takes me somewhere. 

Logan: Yeah. Do you remember the first guitar you got? 

Derek: Yeah, I don’t know specific. I know it was a Samick acoustic guitar. I don’t know the model or anything. It was probably a pretty cheap acoustic guitar, but I mean, yeah, as a ten year old, I loved it. 

Logan: That’s the coolest thing in the world is getting a guitar. Was this always kind of the plan for you when you first got that guitar where you were like, okay, this is it? 

Derek: I mean, honestly, it really was. Ever since I was 10, it was all I really wanted to do. And, I feel like I put so much time and effort into it, even as a 10 year old, far more than school or anything. I used to play guitar with my brother and one of my cousins. And we would have family get togethers where we’d set up on my grandparents pool table and perform songs, cover songs, and some originals for our family members. And then when I met Brooks once I got into middle school and I was desperately looking for friends that played music as well and wanted to start a real band. I met Brooks when I was 12 and I don’t think I would be here today if I hadn’t met him. He really is a really talented dude. I feel like he has a drive where, even as 12 year olds, it was like, okay, well, let’s be proactive, let’s call around different venues and see if we can get added to shows. Let’s try to raise some money, let’s get paid to play birthday parties and raise some money to buy some recording equipment and let’s get some merch press and all this stuff that I just think I never would have been able to figure out. But once I met Brooks, we kind of clicked on all that. And then all through middle school and high school, the focus was on the bands that we were in and music we were making. And we started touring immediately after we graduated high school and eventually found our way into this band. 

Logan: Do you remember like the first paid gig that you had? 

Derek: Not 100%, but I could tell you in 7th grade, there were a couple that we did. There was a school event that was like a, like an ice cream social, like an honor roll, after school event thing that we got paid to do. I probably got paid 100 bucks to play. And then there were a handful of our friends’ birthday parties where their parents would pay us 100 bucks to play. So, I forget which of those kind of came in there first, but there would have been in 7th grade the first time any of that happened. 

Logan: That’s a nice way to start right there. A good, you’re building the community fan base. 

Derek: Absolutely. Yes. You got to do it. 

Logan: Going to my friends different basements and backyards to see their shows. I saw a Halloween cover set where a band was entirely Mayday Parade. Do you feel the impact you’ve had on the kids coming up here? Are people knocking on your door, thanking you for what you’ve done for the scene? 

Derek: Obviously when we’re out on the road, we meet a lot of people and see a lot of fans. And it’s, I mean, it’s like the coolest thing. Especially since we’ve been doing this for 20 years, there’s a lot of people that have been with us for a real long time and now either have kids of their own that they bring to shows or whatever. It’s just, it’s incredibly humbling to meet people and hear stories of how we’ve been able to help them or affect them or whatever. I mean, it’s one of the greatest parts of doing this. 

Logan: Do you remember the first time you signed an autograph for someone? 

Derek: I do remember the first time I signed an autograph for someone; I was in high school. I would have been probably about 15 years old and had just started a new band with some friends that we started honestly, almost as a joke. There was a high school battle of the bands and a buddy of mine was like, let’s start a band just to play the battle of the bands. And then, because we were in other serious bands at the time, and I was like, yeah whatever. And this was right when I was kind of first getting into emo music so it was kind of the first, like, let’s do like an emo band. I think we wrote one song and then we were at this party and two of my friends were there that were in the band. We were like, let’s play this song we wrote for everybody, and so we played. I sat at the piano and played piano and they had the acoustic guitar, played the song. The people there like loved it and were asking for autographs. I remember I couldn’t wait till the next day to see Brooks, because Brooks wasn’t in this, every other band I’d been in, Brooks had been in. And I was like, dude we got to get you in this band. Like we played last night and people were asking for autographs. Like this could be like a real thing, you know. So we made-up a position. Brooks didn’t even play piano or keyboard at all, but we added him to the band as the keyboardist just because it was like, if this is going to be a real thing, Brooks has to be a part of it. 

Logan: Do you remember what the song was? 

Derek: I do. It was a song called “Voice in the Darkness”. It was an old the band Defining Moment. It was one of the bands that split to form Mayday Parade. That was the very beginning of that band, Defining Moment. 

Logan: That’s so, cool. I want to thank you so much for sitting down and taking the time to talk with me. I really appreciate it. 

Derek: Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me. 

Mayday Parade is currently on the road with the “Everyone’s Talking” tour supporting All Time Low. Sporting color coordinated outfits under the glow of stage lights that have been home for almost two decades, All Time Low played selections from their brand new album “Everyone’s Talking” that cracked the Billboard Top 200 and hit 28 on Billboards Top Independent Albums. Split in to two acts, with an encore as a cherry on top, ATL gave us 6 tracks off their latest album and tracks touching 7 other albums in their discography. Mayday Parade played new tracks off of “Sad“, “Sweet“, and hit the fans with 4 tunes from their debut LP “A Lesson in Romantics“. An unstoppable night from the scenes pillars at Vibrant Music Hall, you can find tickets for the rest of the “Everyone’s Talking Tour” here.

The post KRUI Interview: Derek Sanders of Mayday Parade appeared first on KRUI Radio.