Meet the band. Photo: Gilda Louise Aloisi, courtesy of Fat Wreck Chords
How did you discover punk rock initially?
A huge channel for me was my older brother. He always had CDs and tapes flying around and the covers were always weird and dark and the artwork was blown out and kind of gnarly looking. Eventually, it became me kind of poaching his skateboard and snowboard videos and watching them in secret or asking him to watch them together. The soundtracks to those videos were always so great. It was a lot of Fat Wreck and Epitaph bands from back in the day. I remember listening to albums like…And Out Come the Wolves, and the Blue album, the first Foo Fighters record, that kind of stuff. Aside from punk rock, there was also that awesome era– whatever you want to call it, that “post-grunge” thing – with, like, Weezer as a band when they began, which I think is just a good fucking rock and roll band. Yeah, I don’t know, it’s that classic story of my older sibling just passing it along to me. It’s that thing where, as a kid, all you want to do is be as cool as your older brother, right? I have him to thank in a big way for a lot.
You were 14 years old when you got into the band thing. What was your parents’ reaction when all of a sudden you graduated high school and told them you were hitting the road to tour?
They weren’t too psyched. None of them were, really. Well, actually, no, it wasn’t all of them, but for the most part they weren’t too stoked about our decision. But they also knew that this was four years after we had been a band all throughout our high school years and we wouldn’t really go to school on Fridays or Mondays just so we could play shows as much as we could on the weekends. They were aware of the fact that it was inevitable, but they still tried to prevent it (laughs).
My parents both went to school and went to university and are both very intelligent and successful people. They’re so supportive. In a huge way, they always have been, but there was definitely a little bit of recourse or whatever when the original plan came out to be like, “You know, instead of school me and my friends are going to travel in this shitty van,” or whatever. I think that’s every parents’ initial gut reaction though – just to be like, “Well, I’ll think about it.” In the end, no one got in the way of what we wanted to do and accomplish. Now, we rarely see our families or friends or girlfriends, but at the same time we’re really lucky to have those folks in our lives because they’re truly supportive, even though they’ll only hear from us every week or couple of weeks. Sometimes on the road it’ll be just a quick hello to tell them we’re alive and well, but they come out to shows too. My grandma usually comes out to some shows, which is great. She always wears this one Flatliners shirt – it’s a really hideous Flatliners shirt, actually – but she loves it.
You have a very harsh style of singing. How do you maintain your voice on tour without tearing apart your vocal chords?
It comes and goes, man. This tour we’re on right now is a five week tour and I was at a different place at the beginning of it and it’s difficult to maintain cause of that. It’s so abrasive, I suppose – the way I sing – ’cause there’s a lot of singing and yelling and hollering involved and it takes a lot of energy. I try to just breathe from the right places like everyone should. I don’t really smoke. I drink, but I don’t smoke, and I think that certainly helps. I used to smoke a lot more. I try to just take care of myself the best I can. I drink a lot of water, even chewing gum really helps a lot to keep my throat lubed up and not dry. That’s like the worst thing that can happen.
Sometimes you just lose it though, man. It’s the human body. You can’t re-string it or get a new drum pad for your voice. Years ago, I lost my voice for over a month. I went to a throat specialist who told me I had done some pretty bad damage to my vocal chords. I’ve done that. I’ve never surgically rectified the problem or anything, but I’ve found ways to learn to live with it and get around it and improve my voice. I’ve actually learned to sing better and I think with every record I’m able to stretch what I do a little bit each time, so that’s kind of cool. It’s not perfect, but I’ve made improvements.
You guys covered “Fireball” on the Tony Sly tribute record that recently came out. Besides the fact that you’re on Fat, how did your involvement with that record, and that song in particular, come about?
Being on Fat, we toured with No Use [for a Name] a bunch of times, which was awesome. Like I said when I was talking about my brother’s skateboarding and snowboarding videos and the Fat bands that were on them, No Use was one of them. Tony Sly was such an incredible and inspirational songwriter, especially among the punk rock community. If you took one of his songs and applied it to any genre, it would be a perfect song. They’re just so well crafted.
As far as how our involvement came about, Fat Mike approached us about it and really wanted us to be involved. It was pretty early on in the process actually, and he told us that he was hoping that what a lot of bands would do is tackle a Tony Sly acoustic song as a full band. It was a cool challenge. It wasn’t like taking a No Use song and putting my voice to it and just playing it. It took a while to decide on a song though. We had a list of like five or six for a couple weeks on the road and we kept listening to them. I don’t know how we all really landed on “Fireball.” We all just loved how sad it was. It’s sad, but it’s a powerful song and we felt that was a good song to celebrate the man’s life and his music and his work. All we wanted to do was just sing that song louder. It was fun to record it. We did it all live with a buddy in Toronto. We’re really glad to be a part of the record – we’re in really good company on it. It’s a cool celebration of Tony.
