Brendan Kelly and the Wandering Birds. Photo: Katie Hovland
I hear Brendan Kelly and the Wandering Birds are announcing that they’re going to play their second show ever?
Yeah, that’s right! Mid-February.
I guess the last one was the record release show? Took you long enough.
The first show was really awesome. But the thing is, I played every instrument on this album with my friend Nick, so there’s only two of us that are actually in the band. It’s kind of weird to find people and be like, “Hey, do you wanna learn all these songs and be in this band and not really make that much money when we play because we’re not that popular because we haven’t played any shows?” It’s just like this weird corner we’ve painted ourselves into.
But the first show, I got a bunch of real cool dudes: my friend Nick, who plays on the record, the old drummer from Slapstick, Rob Kellenberger, and my friend Ryan who is like this bedroom shredder, like he sits in his room and plays guitar scales all day, but had never really played a show before. We played this place in Chicago called Beat Kitchen, it was sold out, I think everybody had a really good time. We’ll definitely do more shows. We got Neil from The Lawrence Arms, he’s gonna play the drums, so hopefully if we can nail down a little more of a permanent lineup, we can start doing more shows.
And where is this show gonna be?
This one’s also at Beat Kitchen. It’s gonna be a real Groundhog Day situation.
Earlier in your career, you wrote a lot of political lyrics, and judging by the topics you address on your blog, these sorts of things still cross your mind every now and then. Why has your songwriting gone in a different direction over time?
I’ve found that the way to write a good song, for me, is to not sit down with an agenda. It’s almost like I try to let my mind go blank and I just start writing. Whatever I’ve been thinking about just sort of tends to come through in a more abstract way. And I find that whenever I’m writing overtly political songs, it’s like the cart leading the horse, and I’m letting the agenda dictate my creative process, instead of letting my creative process dictate the agenda, you know what I mean? So if I sit down like, “OK, I’m gonna write a song about police brutality!” it already sounds like it’s gonna be fuckin’ stupid. I think what I try to do leads to more interpretative lyrics, and I guess as I’ve gotten older and more confident, I feel less of a need to stuff my message down people’s throats. I think that the muted edges of abstraction can be really awesome. As long as you’ve got the balls to maybe be misunderstood.
Sure. Speaking of growing more confident, I saw that you’ve gotten into acting lately, what brought that on?
Well, I wrote this movie, because I’ve been trying to get into the screenwriting world, I have a few connections there. So my friend Nick who did the Wandering Birds record with me, he’s this amazing director, and he read the script and said, “Do you realize we could make this movie for like, no money? There’s no explosions, no special effects, it’s just really funny…why don’t we make this movie?” And then we couldn’t find anybody to play the main dude, so I was like “Fuck it, I’ll do it.” But it didn’t start out that way at all. So we made this movie and we’re trying to finish it up and put it in festivals and stuff, and that was like the beginning of all that. It’s a fun hobby, I guess, is the best way to put it? Because I’d have to be a real fuckin’ asshole to be like, “Ohh, now that my career as a professional punk rocker is over, I’m just gonna flip right over to Hollywood and be an actor.” I’ll keep it under the “hobbies” column.
You seem to be a dude that’s into black comedy-type stuff. What are some of your favorite movies/shows/books?
Aw, man… I’ve got good answers for this, um… Well, my favorite books are like, The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, 2666 by Bolaño, um, I really like Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, I like Kurt Vonnegut a lot, I mean, everybody likes Kurt Vonnegut, for good reason. Revenge of the Nerds is really awesome. I like The Royal Tenenbaums, shit like that. I like stuff that’s quirky. Have you ever seen Dog Day Afternoon? It’s not really a comedy but it’s so weird, the way they play drama. It’s kind of like what’s going with Louie, the show, how it’s not afraid to get super dark. It’s like indie film-as-sitcom, and I think that’s really cool, when you can just say “fuck it” to the playbook a little bit, you know?
You’re my second interview in a row to mention Louie. It’s a solid show.
The thing is, he’s so funny that there’s no reason for him to rely on his non-existent dramatic acting chops to do the show, but he’s just like, “You know what? Fuck it. I’m doing it.” And it’s just like- wow. I love that kind of cool bravery, and commitment to weirdness– that’s what I look for in any of my favorite works of art or artists.
Why do the pick scratches on your records sound so weird? Like that clean sound that starts “Brick Wall Views?”
Matt Allison, who’s our engineer, taught us a trick. I don’t do it on the Wandering Birds record…I don’t think? But Chris definitely does. We use a kitchen knife, a butter knife for those.
That’s pretty Eddie Van Halen-ish.
Yeah, totally like, break out the drill or whatever!
So you became a seasoned interviewer when you were talking to bands on JBTV– what’s the question I should have asked you but didn’t?
Hmm, I don’t know… recently, I wrote a blog post about the worst questions you could possibly ask as an interviewer, and you didn’t ask me any of them, so that’s good. By the way, the worst questions are: “What does your band sound like?” “What does your band name mean?” “Who are your influences?” and “What’s a cool story from the road?”
Good thing I didn’t ask about the band name, then.
It’s funny, because the reason I said that is, 100% of the time, the answer is: “We were all sitting around trying to come up with a name for our dumb new band, and then we were like, oh, that sounds okay, I could live with that.” Although, in this case, it was just me trying to come up with a name, and I wanted to call it Brendan Kelly and the Coke Horse, so that it would sound like coke whores, and my booking agent was like, “That band name is too stupid, you can’t call it that.”
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