Deadguy: "Our name is the reason that people remember us!"

Deadguy, with their iconic release "Fixation On A Coworker," shook the waters and laid the foundations for a sound that merged metal and hardcore through organized chaos. Later, many would call these sonic landscapes mathcore, and bands like Deadguy inspired worthy successors such as Converge and The Dillinger Escape Plan. Much happened in the meantime during an artistic journey filled with obstacles, and Deadguy decided to leave the music scene for decades, but as it turns out, that was not meant to last forever. Thirty years later, Deadguy’s legacy in heavy music remains intact, and they are now returning with a brand-new album, "Near-Death Travel Services", as if not a single day has passed.

On the occasion of this very important event, we sat down for an extensive conversation with Deadguy’s vocalist and visual art director, Tim Singer, diving deep into their return to recording, what these years have held for them, and the evolution of the scene. In a rich, substantial interview, Tim Singer opened up many topics, speaking with great joy and even more humor. So put their new record on your headphones and enjoy everything he had to share with us!

We're here with Tim Singer from Deadguy, from Rocking.gr. So, hello, Tim. Welcome!

Welcome here. Really glad to speak to you. Thanks for having me.

Appreciate it. You're welcome. I want to ask a lot of things about what brought Deadguy back together. But first, let's start from your very recent news. You're getting out a new album, after 30 full years. And the new album is going to be named "Near Death Travel Services". How do you feel about that? How do you decide to record an album after such a long time?

Yeah, it's funny. So, you know, "Fixation on a Coworker" turns 30 in a couple of months. So, it's been a long time. It was not really planned. We just got back together for a documentary that someone was doing about us. And that was the first time. So, that was about four years ago. That was the first time we all sat in a room together. I'd seen each other as a group in decades. And yeah, it was almost like nothing, no time passed. We couldn't remember why we hated each other. Because we were young and dumb. And we just hung out and shot. And even in a studio where we were, where we all met, where the director, who's a big fan, had already set up instruments, and he wanted to hear us practice. So, we all just sort of sat there and played songs together. And it just worked. We were all, I think, probably a little skeptical about what it would feel like. And then we were quickly, really comfortable with each other. We all still love all those songs. Like, the time passed. I was surprised how much I still like the songs 30 years later. Because I hadn't listened to Deadguy in probably 10 years or so.

If you look at Instagram stuff, everybody wants to show how cool they are. I sort of want to celebrate how flawed we are

I mean, they were pretty iconic. But you actually helped me a bit here. There was this documentary called "Deadguy Killing Music". How do you feel when somebody reaches out to you and tells you, "I want to make a documentary about your band", a band that released one album that turned out to be a cult classic years later. And this kind of brought the band back together. The documentary was praised a lot.

Yeah, so when I was approached, my only hesitation was that I didn't want one of those documentaries that made us seem super cool and super deep, walk in slow motion and we solved the world's problems and we were just somehow super special. Because one of the core messages of the band is that we're not super special. We're just like, lyrically, at least, I'm expressing what I think are everyday frustrations, right? That just most people don't share. If you look at Instagram stuff, everybody wants to show how cool they are. I want to celebrate how flawed we are. And because I feel like there's something about that, where we often connect right in a really honest way.

The documentary, I didn't want to seem too deep. And then it was really cool, because it's more about all these other people in bands talking about us, rather than us talking about how cool we are, and how, let's talk about this song, or whatever. So it's really cool to hear people in all these different types of bands talk about what Deadguy meant to them when we did it. We had no idea, we were just doing our band, trying to find our own way to make music that felt a little original.

Because we were sort of disappointed in the scene at the time, everything felt very formulaic. We were just like, fuck that. Everybody's trying to put a little too much polish on everything. And I wanted to be really raw and ugly, with great musicianship. We had no expectations that we were helping kickstart a job, nothing like that. We were just out there waging war musically. And then we exploded after one tour.

Who said the most interesting thing about Deadguy in the documentary, according to your opinion?

It was all interesting. Some people were like, they were the band you don't talk to, because you're just afraid of them. And I never really thought we had that. None of us are super tough. But I think we were just unfiltered and people just recall stories, apparently, I one time introduced a song and just said, this is about, "a brick that was thrown at my head", which is the story of "Nine Stitches". It's a true story. So it's just funny to hear people's reactions like that. Or I heard the one guy's in a pretty big band, and he loves the lyric about God sent mom to Pennsylvania. I don't know, just all of it was really interesting. Or like, these other two dudes from Connecticut were like, "they wore shorts. I can't believe they wore shorts. I guess we're allowed to wear shorts now!". Like all these things. We didn't know we were making these impressions on people. We were just out there being ourselves. And I think that, Jake from Converge talked about the artwork. And that's part of what I do for the band. And so that was really kind of cool to hear from Jake, because I super respect his opinion on things.

Anything other than kicking ass after 30 years, would have felt like failure

A little bit afterwards, where you decided to reunite. There was also a live album release through Decibel Records, "Buyer’s Remorse". So yeah, how did that came around? I believe you first wanted to see how you would hear yourselves live.

Decibel has been in our corner, and they're all lovely human beings and sort of an extension of the band at this point. Our first show back, and the documentary leads to this, at the very end of the documentary shows us getting up on stage at this really large venue in Philadelphia, where I live, where we're playing in front of thousands of people. A sold out metal fest, The Decibel beer metal fest. And we had practiced like crazy, more than we ever practiced when we were around, because now we're 25 years older. There’s all this hype and folklore. And now you're putting us up on a stage in front of thousands of people. Of course We’re gonna be tight, and we're gonna fucking just kill, because we had no choice, it was either pass or fail. Anything other than kicking ass would have felt like failure. And then, the live recording just sounded good. Somebody mixed it, Decibel wanted to put it out. We were sort of psyched about it.

From day one, getting back together, we wanted to write new material, but I think we were not sure of who we were yet. None of us live close to each other. I think logistically we had not started to dream about things. We just thought that was a cool way to document the whole thing. And Decibel wanted to do it. Ιt just sort of happened.

Now we do have the new album, "Near Death Traveled Services". And I want to know first, a little bit more about where the title comes from and since you're the right person to ask, where the album cover comes from.

So typical of Deadguy, we probably had about 30 album titles to choose from. And following "Fixation on a Coworker", it's a tough title. So "Near Death Traveled Services" is one of the several things that was on the board as far as potential names. And it's basically Dave the drummer, he's still handling most of the booking and all that kind of stuff and he jokes that he runs "Near Death Traveled Services", where it's like, we toured Japan or we toured Europe, and we usually bring a friend. And at this age, so many of our friends, like our one roadie nearly died of COVID, our regional bass player nearly had to have a kidney transplant. So there's this joke that we're almost like a "make a wish" foundation for our friends. We brought our old bass player Japan with us, we brought our roadie to Europe with us. So just this inside joke about Near Death Travels.

Because who knows, life is short. And we're closer now to the end than we were 30 years ago, obviously. This could last a year, this could last six months, this can hopefully last longer than that. That captured our feeling even just about touring and traveling and then I also had apocalyptic feel, because I feel like we live in very apocalyptic times. And the cover, obviously, is that compared to 30 years ago, which I thought was bad enough, it's gotten worse. This bus stop at the end of the world's, this is apocalyptic, but I almost want to make it sort of beautiful. I wanted to make people think maybe if they saw just the record cover, that we got a little softer, which is not the case. It’s not a chaotic cover. It's more deliberately put together. And the inside book, it's way more back to my more chaotic style of doing collages. That was just a fun thing that mostly Dave, Crispy and I worked on together. I'm the one who puts it together but the three of us brainstorm these ideas.We liked the idea, almost like we're a travel agency.

We like the sort of subtext that we sold our souls to the devil to come back

This is a very cool story, actually. With the chance of comparing past to future, you've had already a couple of video clips out. One is for the song "Kill Fee" and for the song "New Best Friend", which is something that you didn't really used to do all that way back. I also found very interesting the fact that it combines views of the band, some animation, and some other visuals that come from, let's say, other era TV, I would describe it like that, because there are snippets of a lot of stuff. How does it look now that you are releasing video clips? Where's the inspiration behind the theme that I noticed in between the two? And who did you work with for those?

So, none of us have done video, that was a new thing. We're on Relapse now, which is this fantastic label that's been around forever that we just feel lucky to be on this label. They're all fantastic. We're this band, we're not professional. We haven't been around for 25 years. And they were like, "we want to do a record".nSo already, we're like, "that's amazing!". And then they're like, "when the record comes out, we're going to release four singles, we're going to do videos", all this stuff. And then we have this team of people that we're not used to having on our side. So that's been great.

The first video, we just had in our head that we wanted to just be in this office setting, but we also just wanted to be campy we didn't want to be like, "everybody show up wearing all black". We just wanted to be sort of dorky. And the guy who directed it is actually the documentary director, Bill Saunders, he's another extension of the band at this point. He found an abandoned office building in New York City. Those are really people's tax records that were thrown around. I don't even own a suit. So it was kind of funny, because Relapse told us "just show up like you're going to your corporate job". And we just all showed up with whatever we could muster as far as suits. And we just always thought it'd be almost funny if we always look forward a little bit like we're playing this really crazy music. We also like the sort of subtext that we sold our souls to the devil to come back. Now we're making all this money, which we're not, we just thought it'd be funny to almost make fun of ourselves.

And then the second video, Dave's wife, Karen actually put together, she's this awesome artist, who does all these illustrations. Some of those illustrations are in the documentary. We had a second song to do, we couldn't get everybody in the same place again in front of a camera. She just did it. She had all this illustration and found footage, live footage, other stock footage, and put this thing together and we gave it a thumbs up.

She did the third one, too. She already had this idea where it's more like space invaders and asteroids and all these video games. We just love that they're just crazy. We don't want them to be us lip syncing too much and pretending like we're playing in front of an audience. All of a sudden, we have a video experience.

On the music side of things, I've been lucky enough to have some private moments with the new album. I can see that there is a huge reference to the past, but something seems more clear in the sound in the matters of re-adjusting to the current era and actually sounding fresh without losing what you had in the previous record. That's something very important for me to keep track without sounding the same and outdated and also sounding unique in what you do. So I wanted to know, how did you want the album to feel like?

This is a great question! Because it's a funny thing, I was talking about this the other day where it's like, this new record could have diminished "Fixation…". If we put out something now that would almost made people question if we just got lucky doing "Fixation…"or like thinking, "they are not as good as I thought they were". If you ever watch a trilogy of movies, by the time you get to the end of the third movie, if it sucks, it almost makes the first movie seem a little sucky. That was in my head a little bit.

It's tough, because you don't wantv to just sound like the previous album. We just use the same creative approach, we don't pay too much attention to our contemporaries. We're not going to listen to a bunch of Dillinger Escape Plan, or Converge, or Neurosis, we're not going to listen to all this stuff, and be like "where do we fit in this?". I'm still influenced by the same lyricists and vocalists that I'm drawn to outside of heavy music or just my own personal style by now. We've all been around long enough that we know our approach to things. But it did take a while, because the five of us hadn't tried to do this together in a long time.

And the funny thing is, "Kill Thieves" is the first song on the record and it's the last song we wrote and it flows right out. People have told me "that could have been on "Fixation…". It flows right without sounding like we are trying to be like "Fixation…". I try to just match the ferocity. I'm not trying to get style points for someone who's matured as a singer. I know what I'm good at, I know what I want to do when I make music. I just stick to that and work really hard on my lyrics, like I always have. That just served me well. And those guys always make killer music, and they know how to write on my style of singing.

It took us a while to feel good about making new songs, right? But then all of a sudden, we had like 11 and everything we recorded is on this record. You have to reinvent the chemistry, basically.

I believe it's almost more difficult to reunite with some people to write music, rather than starting something from the beginning.

Yeah, and you don't want to force it, but we did start writing very early. Four of these songs have been around for probably two or three years. A couple of them, we even played live a couple times, just to see if they fit us. That's a great way to test the song. We also worked with Steve Evitts, who did "Fixation…". He just knows who we are, because he was there for every single thing we recorded. There's a lot of trust in him as being that outside voice, the person not trying to write, who knows us and would tell us if something wasn't working, or it's out of character. But for the most part we would work a song, and if a part was being tortured too much, we'd kill it and find another part. And it always works. It's just more remote. And it's kind of funny, because different members would go to the studio and do different things. We'd sometimes go to the studio and hear what the last person did last time and get surprised. And they're all sort of layered into these final songs. But it was cool. It's hard work. We're all pretty pleased.

I appreciate cynical humor

You mentioned that you are inspired by some lyricists and artists outside the heavy music genre. Would you care to name a few?

Fiona Apple, or Steve Albini from Shellac, or even Johnny Cash, or Mark Lannegan, stuff that's maybe not as obvious as like, Henry Rollins, which is an obvious one. To me, there's even like Nirvana, if I sense that the front person is authentically damaged in some way, or there's like a meaning to it that's beyond writing cool lyrics that sound tough. That's what resonates with me. It doesn't have be someone screaming, It's just more, "there's a smarts to it. and there's a desperation to it". I also appreciate cynical humor, I would guess. Like even Tom Waits or Nick Cave. Someone who's looking at society through a certain lens, that's what I'm drawn to. Sometimes just the way someone turns a lyric might just get me going. And then I just get into the studio, and I sound the way I sound.

Outside the things we already mentioned, I really like the approach that you have on "War With Strangers" song. I think it might be the slowest tempo that you have recorded thus far. So was it a special occasion, something you wanted to try? Because even your voice sounds still angry, but it starts off soft.

You want to have a little bit of range on a 10-song record, right? It's the next single, I'm pretty sure. There's no rules, right? - Other than we can't try to be too slick. We have a bullshit detector. Especially Crispy. He's got the biggest radar for that, it feels like we're trying to be stylish or cool. That's off-brand for us. So, hopefully, we write more stuff like that, because we do plan to write more, which is kind of fun.

I'm proud and then a little bit surprised and humbled that Ben Koller has said that "everybody rips off somebody, we ripped off Deadguy"

You said it before that, you had huge shoes to fill, while having only one release back in the day with "Fixation On A Coworker". And I'm really interested to see how exactly do you live up to, even when you were not in a band, with having released an album that many people, listeners, the press, start to consider as iconic for a music genre that didn't even exist back in your day. And having a lot of bands mention it as an influence. How did it feel for you up to the point before the reunion?

I'm very proud of our approach and our fearlessness at the time. But I'm also humbled because bands that are so much bigger than us, bands that I really love, like Dillinger or whoever cite us. I just saw Ben (Koller) from Dillinger, he was playing with Suicidal Tendencies. And, my wife pointed out that a lot of my lyrical style, you could point back to the first Suicidal Tendencies record. That's not a conscious thing. My wife pointed it out to me. And then I just saw Suicidal play. And I was telling that to Ben. And Ben's like "well, yeah, everybody rips off somebody, we ripped off Deadguy". That always hits me in a way where I'm proud and then a little bit surprised and humbled. But I have learned to own it and just be proud of it, because we did work hard. We did not accidentally wrote that record, we worked hard on it. There's no promise of it being popular. We always questioned whether people are going to like this. It doesn't sound like anything. There's a certain pride in the fact that we put something out there as pure as we thought we could with the abilities that we had. And people did like it.

And they took it and ran with it, which I loved. I love art history. I love the idea that we created this pillar and all these other great bands took it. And what I really like is they don't really sound like Deadguy. They sound influenced by Deadguy, but they don’t sound exactly like Deadguy. I think that's a hard thing to do. But you can hear the influence, I just take pride in that. I'm a small part of it. I don't write the music for Deadguy. I help arrange it sometimes, but it's Dave and Christy and Keith and Jimmy. So, I'm also just grateful that I hooked up with these guys, randomly, 30 years ago.

How do you feel about the evolution of the term mathcore? Because, it's something that people use to describe you and describe a lot more bands, but I sometimes feel that the genre labels that come after somebody already plays this type of music and this term doesn't exist, they kind of create it to describe a union of people that are not self-represented.

Definitely, when we were around, that was not a thing. We're mathematical in the sense that Dave, the drummer, he can play jazz. And we are doing certain things where the time signatures might be a little wacky, but we know where we're going to meet in the middle. We were not that band that's trying to prove to you how much calculus we can do on stage. I think we brought as much chaos as math. I always thought that term didn't make sense for us. I almost think it sounds like a prog rock term, right? In my head, that's too orderly. Math is too orderly and Deadguy is not, at least my, the way I participate in Dead Guy is not super orderly. I actually love to like ramble over the songs. I might do certain different things that’s more like freeform or organized chaos. That's what my father used to call his music. Organized chaos. I really like to describe my life like that. I know where my shit is in my office, but no one else would know. That's sort of what Deadguy is, right?

Our name is the reason that people remember us!

I wanted to know how many jokes, you were getting about two things. First of all, you named Singer and being the guy on the vocals, and the actual name of the band.

That’s why people remember us! The fact that my name is Singer is ironic, because I don’t sing, I do vocals, it is a bit different. This is indeed my name. And I also love our band name. The other day I went to a funeral of a neighbor and I was terrified someone would ask "Heeey Tim how is your band going?" and then someone else asking "Oh, what’s the name of the band?" and I would have to say "My band is called Deadguy!" at a person’s funeral! Other than that, I believe when one of us actually dies, the headlines are going to write themselves.

Back when I was a kid, punk rock was a bunck oh white kids jumping up and down, mostly boys and some girls at the edges of the pit and that has changed for the better

What made the most impression to you as far as the differences of being a band in the 90s and going back at it now in the 20s. From streaming to the return of vinyl, to touring after Covid, there were a few changes. What was the most iconic to you?

A couple of things. One is the heavy music scene got bigger than I ever thought it would be. And in the hardcore world, since we are half metal half hardcore, we’re comfortable in both worlds, it got more diverse. More women, more age ranges, more racial profiles, transgender people, everything. They have all been woven in the scene. Back when I was a kid, punk rock was a bunck oh white kids jumping up and down, mostly boys and some girls at the edges of the pit and that has changed for the better. We are very away we are five white old guys doing this and we are very grateful for these type of bands coming out.

The shows themselves, they are the same as far as the craziness. More people are taking pictures! You have phones in your face now. Otherwise the shows feel the same, except that I’m older, sweatier, and taking longer to recover between shows.

The other funny thing is that people now know the words to our songs. We never toured for "Fixation…". The album came out and we didn’t played it live then. Now people know the words like crazy and it’s amazing. We also have more people on our corner, rooting for our success. We thought we were at war with everybody, even the bands that we liked. We were trying to shake things up, because we were feeling like everyone was copying the copy of another band. We were there to fuck shit up. Now we are growing with this and enjoying how big it got.

People that get more into the scene, now that they have the information available through the internet, they are very eager to discover those obsure bands that did one album that was very important back in the day. And these bands come back to being relevant.

Exactly! As much as I hate Spotify because we get paid nothing, it does make it super accessible, people can find shit so easily! Geography is not the barrier it used to e and that’s awesome! I mean, I’m talking live with Greece right now!

What are the next plans? Are you going to have a tour? Maybe even see you in Europe?

Yeah we are actually looking into all of that, we have a European and a US tour management we’re not gonna be doing any ten month tour but we are mapping it out, especially places we haven’t been, like New Zealand, or Japan where we went last summer. We’d like to go to Eastern Europe of South America. But we do plan in the near future to play around the planet as much as we can. We all have day jobs so we try to arrange some live shows here and there, on weekends, but we are open to any opportunities. We will say yes to a show as much as we possibly can. We figured that it is now or never!

Τhe amount of people that reach out to me about mental health and our lyrics, it's remarkable

You mentioned something that I wanted to ask you. How the scene has evolved about being more inclusive, more widespread, and I'd like to know if you've noticed some bands that you really believe are doing something very cool and very unique, like you felt you were doing back in the day?

Soul Glo, Gel, Zulu, I've discovered things like Pig Destroyer, Red Chord that I didn't really pay attention to before. As far as having important messages and stuff, I don't know necessarily. That's a great question. I should pay more attention to that. It's more about Deadguy’s responsibility in that regard, where I always want to make it known that I'm an advocateof that we're not tough guys, that we're not from violence. I'm trying to think of a band that's super political, or just has that right mindset. Rid of Me comes to mind, or Scowl.

I don't know, there's so many new bands. Gouge Away, I don't know if you listen to Gouge Away, but I love how she shares her personal journey. I love all these people who are just putting their lives out there. I feel like there's certain people like her, where they leverage other platforms that really connect with fans in that way.. Even Jeremy from Touche Amore, or I don't know how to say their name, or the singer from Killswitch Engage, those guys they’re always talking about mental health. I feel like there's these platforms beyond the music where people discuss things. Τhe amount of people that reach out to me about mental health and our lyrics, it's remarkable.

I feel like you need just a good bullshit detector for social media. As much as I want to hate it, I've connected with so many people that wouldn't have met otherwise

So that's a great thing to connect to ask about. How do you feel about the role that social media play now in music? I mean, you've mentioned the good parts, which is the ability to have a platform and to speak for so many other things, and to reach out to so many people outside of the scope of your music. But of course, there are some other aspects to it.

I feel like you need just a good bullshit detector for social media. As much as I want to hate it, I've connected with so many people that wouldn't have met otherwise. I didn't have this person's phone number or email, but somehow we connected on Instagram. And now we can actually chat with each other. So I love that aspect of it. The negative of it is that it's another marketing tool and you have to adjust around it. You always have to be a little bit skeptical. I think there's definitely bands that probably leverage that. But I don't know. We leverage it for Deadguy. And I leverage it personally. And if you follow me personally, you're gonna get inundated with vegan stories all the time. I can't stand when people prop up this idea of perfection or be better than you, or solving an argument in five seconds. I can't stand comment threads where people are trying to out-asshole each other about something. As far as following people that I really like, like Jay Weinberg or Walter from Quicksand or whoever and they're traveling and they're showing you behind the scenes. I think all that shit is so cool. But I think that's how I use it. Very different kind of visibility.

I find it very interesting in your case, because you were a band back when none of these things would exist back in 95. And now you are returning to be a band to a totally different world and music scene. So I find it very interesting to see your take on that.

In my day job, I keep up with this stuff. None of it's foreign to me, I stay in front of these things as much. Me and Dave, he's sort of in tech, he could explain AI to you more than the average person. I'm not on TikTok. There's too much goofiness going on over there. And I almost feel like that makes me old, because I'm not on TikTok. I don't need more platforms, there's plenty. I wish Meta didn't own Instagram, I wish there was a punk rock version that was successful. It's those things that frustrate me, probably more than anything is that Instagram is this platform that is so integral to my day job and my band. And I hate that Mark Zuckerberg owns this fucking thing. I hate everything he's about. But it's like, if I see someone driving an Amazon van, I'm not mad at them, they just have a job. But I fucking hate Jeff Bezos.

Sometimes it's good to just sit with your depressing, dark thoughts, or just nothingness and figure out what the fuck am I going to think

It's all so integrated and I'm a willing participant. And I know that, if I post a Deadguy photo, Facebook probably owns it to some degree. So there's those things that frustrate me about it. But at the same time, well, congratulations. Yeah, it's the new era addiction. It's extremely difficult to live without it. But on a personal level, I forget to bring my phone places, I'm old enough where life existed before all this. And I purposefully will not take the phone out. If I'm stuck in an elevator, I'm not gonna take my phone out because I'm afraid to just be bored. I try not to use it as a crush every time. I don't need to stimulate 24/7.

Sometimes it's good to just sit with your depressing, dark thoughts, or just nothingness and figure out what the fuck am I going to think. I do feel like that could be like a lost art. I do feel like AI is going to make it easier for people, but it's gonna make lazy people easier.

There’s a friend of mine who owns an ad agency. And I was like, Are you worried? Everybody's got a camera, and then shoot film on the phone now. And he just goes, "Dude, everybody's got a pencil. Doesn't mean they can draw, doesn't mean they can write". I think it was that way. It's a tool, if you use it like a tool, or it's a crutch, if you use it like a crutch, I try not to, so that's my approach to it. And that's what I tried to instill in my kids. That's the crazy thing. My kids are the age I was when we started Deadguy, during their 20s.

That must be weird for you.

Well, a little bit, because I can go, "Oh, when I was your age, we made this record that people still care about 30 years later".

There's something I ask everyone, which are your five records that you have on rotation the past few months?

The New Young Widows record, I've been listening to.

Pelican is another one that I just started listening to a lot lately.

Those are the, those are the two newest things. Then I've been listening to a lot of Mastodon.

Oh, right. Pig Destroyer.

I've been playing a lot of Suicidal (Tendencies), because I just saw them.

The first two Suicidal records I've been playing.

Mastodon, I've just been sort of lazily playing whatever. I just hit play on Spotify and just let it go. I'm good friends with Paul Armano, who does all their cover art. So that's how I discovered them in the first place was when I'm probably 10, 15 years ago.

And I'm hanging out with this guy, Paul, who I met in Philadelphia and went to his house. And it turns out he's this amazing artist, and he works on these Mastodon covers. And these covers, they're literally eight feet tall when you see them in person, they're amazing. That's what got me into Mastodon. And then Jimmy and Dave befriended them. They went to a show in New York and hung out with them. Sometimes that's what puts a band on my radar. I'll just hit play. And it's like all Mastodon for a couple hours.

That's one of the things that's a little bit of a bummer about today versus back then is that you had to have the album or the CD, and you put it on. Nowadays, it's like, "Oh, I'll discover these new bands and I'll just go to their Spotify station and hit play". And it does make you lazy about that shit. But at the same time, I get to listen to whatever I want to listen to.

Do you feel that possibly the return of Vinyl records in the market might help a little bit on this? Because, I found that distance in people, especially my age that lived a lot on the age of CD and Spotify.

I hope so. It might be a pendulum thing. Because there's so much to be discovered by listening to what a band intended by these 10 songs. There's a flow, every time I do a record, we think really hard about the order of it,. And every record is like a time capsule. The next record is the next batch of songs. And it's a progression, even if it's subtle. One of our favorite games that I play with friends is "what's a perfect record that has no skips?" Radiohead, "In Rainbows" is a perfect record. Maybe Zeppelin "IV". Rollins Band, "Lifetime", maybe. "Laughing Hyenas" by Life of Crime, maybe. Maybe Interpol, "Turn On The Bright Lights". Modern perfect records, those are tough. What would come to your mind?

I do have a few in mind, to be honest. "Deathconsciousness" by Have a Nice Life is a record that I think is iconic on what they did. "Glow On" by Turnstile is, a record that's changed the way the world received hardcore.

Yeah, for sure! We met those guys in Japan at a little dive bar. They were great. They were cool. Yeah, it's funny because I feel people want to not like them because they've gotten so popular. I love people getting popular if they're doing something and I support their views. They're super progressive. And good for them. They don't need a day job. I think that's fantastic. More people should be able to make music because then they'll just make better music. If that's all you have to think about, that's a win. I don't want them working at Walmart. I work with gigs on my day job, so I know what to win. Turnstile, I'm proud of that. I listen to them a lot. I'm looking forward to the new record. I think there's a listening party like this weekend or something.

Where do you want to see the new record to evolve? Do you do you want to overseed the previous record or do you just want to have two different music entities that mean a lot to you, regardless of what people think?

It's funny, I think I just wanted to be that belongs on the shelf with "Fixation…". That was my goal. We're on this bigger label and being exposed to like newer, younger, broader audiences. I'm hoping they hear this record first and then go back and find "Fixation…" and are pleasantly surprised that something that old sounds this fresh. I still think it sounds pretty fresh. It doesn't sound like the golden oldies.

But I want people to love both records. Now we've got twice as many songs to pull from when we go play shows. That's kind of cool.

Well, thank you so much. You can finish up the interview with whatever you want to share with the world, the readers and your listeners, whatever you think is important.

Yeah. So thank you. This has been a great conversation.

To me, the most important thing out there is have some empathy. You can be pissed off at the right people. There's a lot of people to be pissed off at. People in power, pulling a lot of strings. But the rest of us that are wallowing in the dirt, let's just try to have a little bit of empathy for each other.

And when you show up at a show, just have a good time. That's forever. All the rest of it is kind of bullshit. Thank you so much!