Many artists never manage to create anything as good as their debut. With no pressures or expectations and all of the time in the world to write and craft their songs, they put everything into it revealing more about themselves than they even realise. The subsequent releases are different twists on the same old formulae, their one idea stretched thinner and thinner until there’s nothing left. Jeff Rosenstock is not one of those artists. He’s currently in a creative golden age with critical acclaim for everything he does matched by an ever-growing fan base. Before Jeff officially went solo in 2012 he’d had a wealth of success with bands like The Arrogant Sons Of Bitches and Bomb The Music Industry!, with a reputation as one of the hardest working guys out there. His punk ethos runs through everything he does, from the music he makes to his pioneering methods of making a living as a full-time musical artist. He was making ska music when it wasn’t cool and in case the name of his old band didn’t make it clear enough, he’s not the biggest fan of the music industry. This is a man who chose to release his last album POST- with no fanfare on New Years Day, a move that any marketing executive would probably describe as a “bad idea” at best. Everything he makes he releases for free and he doesn’t have the patience for long publicity building lead times; once that thing is mastered he wants the fans to hear it right away. When invited to play the Pitchfork Music Festival, Jeff announced from the stage how much the band had been paid for the privilege, taunting the sacred cow from their own platform.
All three of his solo albums to date have been stone cold classics. His songcraft is incredible, crafting the perfect pop-punk songs with a wholesome rawness that captures his infectious personality perfectly. His free-spirited honesty shines through everything he puts his name to, whether it’s as producer for artists like Mikey Erg & The Smith Street Band, as the composer for the soundtrack for hit Cartoon Network animation Craig Of The Creek or as one of the most exciting solo artists in the world alive today. He sings each song as if it’s his last night after night. Jeff Rosenstock is the real deal. I got the chance to catch up with him before he played Den Bosch’s W2 with his band, the sole Dutch stop on his current European tour.
This whole country, particularly for English language culture, tends to revolve around Amsterdam. You, however, are doing just one date in The Netherlands and it’s in Den Bosch. What’s the link?
It just turned out like that. We have a friend who always books us in Amsterdam, and I think the day that we wanted to get just wasn’t available at the venue. We had a good time when we were last in Amsterdam, it was a good show. When I saw this place on our tour wrap I was like “What the fuck is this place? I can’t pronounce the name of this!”. I don’t know, that’s how it turned out, but I’m really glad it turned out that way because this is great town.
Have you ever lived outside of the US?
No, I’ve lived in New York forever. I grew up in Long Island and I’ve lived in the city for 18 years for the most part. I’ve bounced around a little bit, moved back in with my parents once or twice for short stretches, and I also lived in Athens, GA for a year which was really fun. For the most part I’ve lived in either Manhattan, Queens or Brooklyn, which is where I’ve lived for the last ten years.
Athens, GA is a place I only know for one thing.
R.E.M.? Neutral Milk Hotel?
R.E.M. actually, I didn’t realise Neutral Milk Hotel were from there too.
And the B-52s!
So there’s Jeff Mangum hanging out there too?
I don’t think Jeff Mangum lives there anymore, but you see Michael Stipe. We saw Michael Stipe at a second-hand shop the first day we came in.
Like as if it’s setting you up to expect that to happen every day.
Right, he’s the ambassador there. Somebody new moved in so they told him, “they’re gonna be at Agora, so just walk around in there a while Mike”. Athens is a really cool, small city. It’s awesome, I liked it a lot, but came back to New York.
Have you ever been tempted to make jokes here about you being from the New Amsterdam?
No, I haven’t. That seems like it’d take several steps to get to the punchline. I don’t know, I never have any idea of what I’m going to say when I’m playing.
I’ve never seen you guys play live before and I’m looking forward to that, but one thing I think when listening to the recordings is, “how the fuck do you do this night after night and not have your voice torn to shreds”?
I drink a lot of water, and I warm up. I’m not that much fun. I just do a handful of things that I’ve learned from friends. Sean from AJJ gave me this vocal warm up app called Vocal Eze a long time ago and that really changed a lot. I try to go to sleep at a reasonable hour if I can. I don’t drink before I play. I think that if you do that stuff then on a good tour your voice gets stronger. Hopefully. It’s a muscle and you’re exercising it all the time.
Interesting. I remember seeing Japandroids and noticing that whenever they get to a bit live where he’s belting it out on the recording, he either sings it low-key or just lets the crowd fill in the gaps.
Oh no, I don’t do that, I’d rather just sing it bad. I’ve played so many shows with Bomb The Music Industry! and my band ASOB before where I just literally had no voice, just screaming because that’s all that could come out. I’d rather miss a few notes or have some voice cracks. I don’t like going to see bands where they don’t even try to sing the high notes, I always try to sing them and sometimes it doesn’t work.
POST- came out New Years Day, which weirdly feels like a long time ago now, even though it’s the same –
In internet time it’s like ten years ago.
Yeah, it’s weird. One of the most apparent differences I noticed with it was that there’s a lot more space in your sounds, particularly on USA and Let Them Win. I remember hearing you mention elsewhere that Fugazi were a big influence in terms of their dynamics.
Yes!
Usually when an artist first starts exploring something like that, I find they try something, and it sounds a bit weird and doesn’t quite work but you respect the direction they’re going, but on Let Them Win you don’t even notice how long it is because the transition is so natural and well done.
Oh thanks, that’s really nice of you, thank you.
Is that a direction you’re going to be exploring more of?
I’d love to, but I don’t feel like I have a grasp on it yet. Discovering ambient music in the last two years feels like the first time I’ve really dived into a genre of music that I knew absolutely nothing about. It’s clicked for me and connected with me in a way that I haven’t felt probably since I heard punk.
Oh, wow!
It’s strange because it’s the exact opposite of punk, essentially. It’s functional music. It’s music that’s there to centre you or make you feel calm. It’s not supposed to feel repetitive, it’s not supposed to have a hook, it’s not supposed to have energy. It’s supposed to just be there as a blank canvas, you know? Something about that is really appealing and interesting to me, so I listen to it a lot. I’d sit in coffee shops when we were on tour and listen to Ambient 1 or Discrete Music by Brian Eno and just write lyrics because they were playing some indie-pop shit in the coffee shop and I couldn’t pay attention. It zeroed everything out.
You write the lyrics independently of demos or the music itself then?
Yeah, sometimes. It’s not always the case but I feel a lot of the time you get a handful of lines that you’re proud of and then the rest of it is to get the pronunciation and articulation. A lot of the time if I know what the melody is and I know how I want it to go, then it’ll be a matter of sitting down and writing it out and seeing what looks good on the page, what I feel is honest and doesn’t feel pretentious or stupid. I’m basically trying to write shit where I don’t sound stupid, so when I look back I can think, “I don’t think I sounded too much like a stupid idiot here” but sometimes I’ll leave that stuff in because I’m like “Well you know what, I am a stupid idiot”.
Do you ever write some things while you feel like you’re in the zone, certain that it’s all amazing and then you’re too scared to look back at it in case it’s really bad?
That’s not even a fear as much as the knowledge that when I look back at it, it’s not going to look as good as I thought it was. Occasionally when I look back I think “Oh, OK, this one doesn’t need much editing, this one’s pretty much done”. Lyrics are such a funny thing. I feel like the best way to write something that doesn’t feel belaboured is to get through the whole song and thought process, if you can, and see where it takes you. I figure out a lot of what I’m singing about after it’s done. A lot of the time I’ll look back on it and see what I actually wrote and think “What am I actually talking about here? What are the points here where I’m not talking about this? How do I connect it all?”.
Do you think of a theme beforehand? Worry and POST- feel very thematically whole.
Worry definitely has. On our honeymoon I brought a guitar because whenever I’m somewhere not in a band situation and not at home, if I can relax enough to write some music, I want to be able to figure it out, you know? Just play guitar and not think about it. I like playing guitar. I think for Worry I just woke up really early one morning and sketched out the concept of the record, which is essentially the idea of whether it’s possible for love and capitalism to co-exist in the same world. That’s the core of that record to me. I wrote a whole thing out and that kind of helped to guide it, but it was also pretty loose. With POST-, when I started writing and realised the things that I was writing about, it was then about how the other songs fill in the gaps or how other songs explain the other side of it. To make it feel whole, fair, honest, or whatever the fuck to me. It’s something that I really tried not to think about too much, I just tried to do it without thinking about how I usually would. I think that with every record it always ends up being a different thing. Sometimes it’s a bunch of songs that are disconnected but because you wrote them in this year-and-a-half period; that’s the connection. POST- feels like that because the lyrics for four-fifths of the record were written in a week-and-a-half.
You’re married and you tour a fuckload. I moved to this country with my wife’s work and she works remotely for long periods meaning we’ve had to find ways to make things work, but the distance is a weird and tough thing to deal with. How do you cope with being married and being on the road so much?
I don’t have to deal with distance at all, my wife is our tour manager and our merch person.
Oh!
The other side of that is that we’re both very aware of that being our situation. We’re all friends in our band so it’s not a thing. Especially since in the rock n’ roll world people are sexist and if they find out that your wife is “just the tour manager” or whatever, it can become a thing. I wanted to tour more in a way that distance wouldn’t ruin us or anything and I knew she’d be good at it. She was in Bomb The Music Industry! for a little bit, it’s not like she’s never been on tour before. The distance isn’t a thing, but we have work mode when we’re on tour and we don’t really tell promoters that unless they know that’s what the situation is. We mostly just talk about work a lot now. It happens when we’re at home too because she helps me run a lot of stuff since right now I’m doing too much stuff so we’re doing it all together. It’s cool that we get to work and spend so much time together.
How do you divide the business side and the romantic side?
I don’t know, it’s always something we’re trying to transition in the balance of it. I think in any relationship at all it’s a flowing thing and whoever you’re in a relationship with you try and treat it with care and try to be sensitive of what the other person is feeling and never feel like you can’t be truthful about the situation and how you feel. Every now and then we have husband and wife time, we’ll go get coffee together and hang out and talk shit or go walk around a little bit.
With Chris Farren joining you on tour and –
That’s another relationship.
(laughing) Yeah, I was gonna ask, because you guys are close right?
Yeah, we’re good friends, I love that we get to tour with Chris Farren so much. He’s the best.
You’ve just announced a new Antarctigo Vespucci album. You guys sound very spontaneous when it comes to those albums. Was that something you’d already planned to do before starting this tour?
This Antarctigo Vespucci record took a year-and-a-half to make, which is so fucking long for us. We usually make it in three weeks and then put it out that next week. It’s just because I was busy touring with our band, I’m working on a show called Craig Of The Creek on Cartoon Network which I’m scoring that takes up a lot of time.
I thought you just did the theme, I didn’t realise you do the scoring of the actual episodes themselves.
Yeah, so I’ve done roughly 33 episodes so far, it’s fucking crazy. I knew with the last record Leavin’ La Vida Loca, we put it out while my band was touring a lot and though I was really proud of that record, I felt like I did a bad job putting it out. I felt like I didn’t hit as many people as it should have. I was prouder of that record than the amount of time that we were able to share the music with people. With this new one, we just kind of waited until there would actually be a break in the schedule since for the next year or so. The plan is to take a little bit of a break from the road for this band for a little bit. We’ve been going hard since 2015 and obviously bands exist for a lot longer, but we’ve pretty much been either on the road or recording since then. It seemed like a good opportunity to get some perspective and get your emotional head together.
Wow yeah, and you’ve had the Craig Of The Creek commitment on top of that, which is hardly a trivial amount to get done in itself. Are you recording those on the road as well?
No, I tried and did a bad job, so I do all those at home. When I get my schedule from Craig Of The Creek, I look at the touring dates and go “These are the six months I’m working on the show and these are the days that I’m on tour” and use a calendar to mark it up. When I get back from tour, it’s hectic. When I get back from this tour, I have to do four episodes right away which is intense. I just try and give myself breaks when I can. I really like the show and I really like making music for it and I feel super-lucky that I get to do it. I’m tired sometimes but whenever I’m not busy and I have the time to let it hit me, I am super happy with what I’m doing.
Do you find you’re the sort of person who struggles to relax?
Yes! I don’t think I do relax anymore but I think I did before I had this cartoon show. I’m the sort of person that when Christine and I went on our honeymoon I’d be like “wake up! What are we doing, what are we doing!?” instead of just laying around and not doing anything. I think even now if I had two days of doing nothing I’d struggle.
Didn’t you spend some time isolated in a house on your own when writing POST-?
Yeah, sure. It’s funny because I don’t know what counts as work or what counts as not work because though it’s time I have to dedicate to something, it’s something that I really enjoy doing. I don’t approach writing as if it’s work at all. I don’t write records because I know I have to have a record out, when it feels like songs are coming together I start thinking “OK, what do these mean?”. Going up there and having that space and being alone was awesome, it’s what you dream of as a writer. To go off into the woods in the winter in the snow with a bunch of synthesisers and guitars and get to play as loud as you want, as late as you want and go at your own pace.
Get that Captain Beefheart or first album Bon Iver thing going on.
Yeah, totally. That’s me relaxing. Getting to write at my own pace. I didn’t go up there thinking I was going to come home with a record, I went up there thinking I have a bunch of songs in my head that I have not demo’d and I don’t know what they sound like. I demo every record with full arrangements because I want to hear what it all sounds like before we go in.
What instruments do you play?
I don’t play the drums and I don’t play any brass instruments but I play pretty much everything else. I play sax, bass, guitar and synths. The band, as in my band, we all play on the records and we play live but when I’m demoing stuff I play it all, and when I play Craig Of The Creek I play it all.
I know this question is from a while back, but back when you decided to start performing as Jeff Rosenstock.
That’s six years. Crazy.
Yeah! I don’t like to dwell on time scales these days, ten-year anniversaries for things freak me out.
Oh yeah, we did a Worry ten-year anniversary show at the end of last year.
A what!? A Worry!?
Yeah, just for-
Oh, right! (laughs). For the last few years I like to occasionally celebrate the fact that it’s been ten years since Rebecca Black’s Friday came out and enjoy how annoyed people get when they work out that’s not true. With each year it’s getting closer to the truth though.
It’s coming up. That’s crazy. What a tune.
Yeah! Anyway, back to the original question. You’ve had mostly the same band members all the way through. Why did you make the decision to make these albums as a solo artist and not just form a new band as such? I know a lot of Bomb The Music Industry! was just you writing, so why make this decision at this point?
It is the same writing process as Bomb The Music Industry!, basically.
But why?
I don’t know. When Bomb announced that we were breaking up, I was talking to Sean from AJJ on the phone about it and he said “Oh shit, we’re touring with Future Of The Left and we were talking about bringing Bomb out, but then we thought it would be weird to have you open up the show, we wouldn’t be able to give you the amount of money we feel you would deserve. Would you want to come out as Jeff? You could play sax and keyboards with us!” and I said “Yeah, that sounds great!”. I had a bunch of songs that I was sitting on which I was trying to finish up which ended up being I Look Like Shit which I got done during that tour. I continued working on songs but in the meantime I had made a record with the Bruce Lee Band (Community Support Group). I produced it and played bass, and Mike (Huguenor) played guitar and Kevin (Higuchi) played drums. I really liked playing with them but I was also working on songs and I was thinking of putting them out. I was going to put out just the demos basically, the stuff that I was working on at home, but it didn’t feel like it had the life in it that I wanted it to. Then we played those last Bomb shows and I was feeling a little bit confident in myself so I called up Jack Shirley who recorded Hard Girls and Deafheaven and a bunch of other great bands, he’s awesome. I thought “Fuck it, I’m going to call somebody and see how much it would cost to go to a recording studio and do this”. Then some stuff happened, then I asked John (DeDomenici) from Bomb The Music Industry! to play on it, and Jack recorded it. Then we were touring that record and during that tour, and we had a wedding to go to in Las Vegas. This is all a weird story, I don’t know how much of this makes any sense. Basically, our friend was getting married in Las Vegas and we were recording in East Palo Alto so we could book a tour there, then go to our friend’s wedding and then just fly home afterwards. Then when we were in LA I got an email from Christina at SideOneDummy that basically said “Hey, we hear you have demos for a new record and we like I Look Like Shit, do you want to send them over?” and I emailed back “Wait a week and the record is going to be done. Also we’re playing in LA tonight, do you want to come?”. Then we hung out with Christine and Jamie (Coletta) and on the weekend of that wedding, it was also the weekend of Punk Rock Bowling so everybody from SideOneDummy was there. It was like “OK cool, I guess this is kind of happening!”, it was a last second decision. Do I try and come up with a name for this band because now this is our band that’s doing this? That’s a long way of saying, bands break up. I’ve been in bands that break up and I don’t think I have time for that shit in my life anymore. I wanted to be in a situation where if I wanted to do something I didn’t have to start a fucking side project to do it. Like if I wanted to make an ambient record or something, I didn’t have to call it something else and keep thinking of names for things. I feel like it’s all part of me.
Does this tie into your impatience? No, that sounds like a harsh way of phrasing what I’m trying to say.
No, that’s a fair way.
You really want to do things and you have these ideas and you don’t want anything to stand in your way and by being you then that’s one less thing.
Yeah, I guess so. I didn’t expect us to have a band that was going to be the same band or anything like that but we all just really like playing with each other. We had another drummer in New York who does still play with us when we do one-off shows. It’ll be me and John (DeDomenici) and our friend Tim (Ruggeri) who played drums with us for a little while and our friend Laura Stevenson plays with us sometimes, so people come in and out. There is weirdness to it, but there’s niceness to it. It’s all really small weird things that are hard to quantify. It does feel strange at times but we haven’t really thought of any band names that have stuck. “And The.. Something?”. I can’t really think of any “And The” that have really stuck.
Would you really want to be Jeff Rosenstock And The Something?
I wouldn’t mind but I feel like “And The” feels weird. Mostly we just say that we’re Death Rosenstock because it feels like a band name to me. That feels more like it because I feel like it’s the five of us doing it together rather than being “And The”. None of them seem to care or get bent out of shape about it, so that’s good. It’s pretty clear that it’s a democratic feeling in the van.
I get what you’re saying, so none of the others are planning a mutiny. “No, I’m Jeff Rosenstock now!”
Well yeah. We all treat each other with the amount of respect that we want to be treated with and try to look out for and help each other out no matter who’s fucking who. Not who’s fucking who!
It’s amazing how such a slight inflexion on a sentence can make such a difference.
Exactly, yeah.
Your success as a solo artist, sorry I mean commercial success.
Thank you for clarifying!
Well it’s true! There’s a big difference I think.
I think so too.
Your commercial success as a solo artist has been significantly bigger than it has with your previous projects, and perhaps coincidentally you’ve also moved away from ska.
There’s a ska song on Worry!
Yes, but it was a very little ska song!
It’s short, yes. There’s some though!
Compared to the rest of your back catalogue, there’s a lot less though. If I understand right, the inclusion of that one ska moment on Worry meant you had to talk about that a lot too.
Well we played it at Pitchfork festival and I feel like that was the goal for me. Play a ska song that Pitchfork has to say is good and then the universe will fold into itself.
Did you get much bitterness from the ska scene for that correlation between ska and success, or has the reaction mostly been positive?
It’s been positive, but the reason that we don’t play as much ska anymore has nothing to do with that. I was writing the record Vacation and I felt that with the songs I was writing I’d be shoehorning ska parts into them to make them ska songs. I thought, “why the fuck would I do that?”, I don’t need to do that. I love ska and I wouldn’t want to listen to a ska band that was playing ska just because they were supposed to play ska. I felt that’s why the third wave ended up getting such a bad rep at the end because bands were just playing ska songs because they were supposed to be playing ska songs, so I stopped doing that. When I was writing ska songs I was like “OK, cool, this is a ska song, I’ll put it on the record”. The Pulp cover (Dishes) is very much a ska cover and I Look Like Shit and Rainbow is just a ska punk song, but otherwise that just hasn’t been what I’ve been writing. If I was good at dub or reggae or anything like that then maybe I would go down that road because that’s what I’m listening more to.
Well, combine the ska and the ambient and –
Yeah! Oh yeah, that’d be sick. To make a reggae and ambient record? Yeah, that’d be cool. But it’d have a groove, so that would be the problem. Whenever I listen to ambient music with drums or hooks, I’m like “No. Nope.”
What ambient artists do you like, or who was your gateway?
Brian Eno definitely. Just listening to those two records when I was on airplanes, at airports just to help calm me down and help me sleep or just walk around and not hear the noise. My friend Matt told me “Music For Airports. You should listen to that when you’re at an airport because you’ll notice the little dings and stuff that are going on and how they blend in with the music”. I was like, “oooh shit” and I did and I kind of get it. Those were my ways in. There’s a band called Stars Of The Lid who I really like a lot and I listened to that a lot on tour, and Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Music for Nine Postcards which is basically a Rhodes and analogue synth and that’s it, I love that record. My friend showed me this guy Hakura Nakamura, it’s all really floaty, dreamy stuff.
Rhythmless
Some of it’s rhythmless, I’m happiest when it feels like it has no tempo or rhythm. I think that’s the ambient music I’d like to make some day. The way it is at the end of Let Them Win was that I knew I had the melody for the end of the song and I just stretched it out as long as possible. If I fucked it up and played the wrong note, I’d play it as long as possible and see where that took it, then I’d layer another thing on top of it and try to play along but again just stretch it out as long as possible, and that was kind of it.
How’s your absolution from social media going?
I’m still on it.
But what about that tweet of yours saying you were making a plan to leave it?
Well I’m trying to, and I’m trying to get people to sign up to the newsletter. I’ve been talking about it a lot more because touring for this record is going to be winding down at the beginning of the year and I just need to get out of it. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve talked about hiring somebody to do it. My problem with it now is that it’s this bullshit thing where your job is to advertise a product or a show but you have to do it with this enthusiasm where if you’re having a bad day, you’re faking enthusiasm to put forth this persona of “I’m authentic and this is really me doing this”. It’s always me doing it. You can see on my Instagram posts the ones where I’m like, “Fuck this! Fuck this!”, I don’t like that part of it at all. I know that it’s how people find out about shows though and I like communicating with people which is something that’s really great about it. I can talk to people in a way that’s not like at a show where I don’t really hang out afterwards because I’m thinking about my voice. I like talking to people on Twitter because it’s really short and it’s public. Sometimes I get emails that are really heavy mental health questions that I have no business answering and that doesn’t usually happen on social media in the same way.
How do you deal with those?
I just write back and say that people love you, don’t kill yourself. I try and say the things that people have said to me in bad times. We’re not who we say we are on social media and I’m realising that more as I’m doing these posts where I’m telling people to go to shows. I really should just post something like a flyer and say “Gig is at 8 o’clock”. You put out your best self, you put out the person that you want to be perceived as on social media.
And even if you share your weaknesses it can be interpreted as insincere, it’s a lose/lose situation.
What do you mean?
You know how some people will share things about how they’re struggling with their mental health or current situation, which is an incredibly brave thing to do and something that I’m not brave enough to admit to publicly but respect those who do. Some people will accuse those who do as just doing it to get sympathy, which even if true, so what?
Yeah, yeah, clearly they need a little bit of love. Yeah, it’s all fucking weird. I’ve got 30,000 followers on each of these things. I don’t know what to say to 30,000 people, that’s not me. I am still a person and the more I think about the way other people perceive me, the more I lose touch with myself and the more I start to feel lost in this world. This goes back to being on tour for three-and-a-half years where you start to feel disconnected with knowing who you are. Obviously, there’s way more positives that outweigh that which is why you keep doing it. I walked around a beautiful city in the Netherlands today, ate great food, people are being really nice to me and making me coffee, you know? I get to play music with my friends which is the best thing and makes me feel a million times better every time. You end up only saying things that are going to be the right things to say and then all of a sudden you are this person who only thinks and feels the right things and doesn’t make any mistakes, doesn’t fuck anything up or has a thought that everybody wouldn’t be able to rally behind. I don’t feel that way about myself, I’m a bit of a fuckup. I make mistakes, I say the wrong thing sometimes, you know what I mean? It’s weird, social media is just a great place to represent yourself dishonestly and I don’t think there is a way to represent yourself honestly, warts ‘n’ all, because people jump on that shit no matter what you say.
It’s weird isn’t it because this wasn’t a problem for artists years ago, and even if the technology had existed there was still money flying around for bands to have other people handle this sort of thing for them. Either that, or they’d have the luxury of being a recluse and putting out music whenever they felt like it.
Yeah, it’s something that I think about a lot. In my heart of hearts I’m a bit of a recluse and I like my friends and I like to be able to walk around my city, but I stay home most of the time and I work on music.
So more of a Jeff Mangum than a Michael Stipe.
Yeah, but making a decision to do something like that affects the friends that I play music with. It’s something that we’ve all been talking about together and which everybody in our crew is super supportive to me about. They’re all down for me to be a fucking weirdo if I need to be a weirdo and to disappear if I need to disappear. They’re all very nice and that’s part of the reason I have a hard time not just staying on tour and doing it because I love these people.
It’s as if being on tour is your home now.
Yeah, it’s the truth. We’ve been joking about that a lot on this tour because we’re at the point where a lot of the time we’re getting hotels, AirBnB’s or hostels, nothing fancy. We get to a place and we walk around a city, it’s like the world is what our city is now. It’s so fucking cool and so rad and lucky an experience to be able to be having with people I truly love and respect as musicians and respect as human beings. We’re a family. We’ve gotten robbed together, we’ve gotten bedbugs together, we’ve all been through a lot of shit together. We’ve lived in a house in the middle of nowhere making a record together. We’ve all done a lot together.
You see more than each other’s social media sides.
Yeah, exactly. POST- is out now, and you can stream it below.
