Jack: Hello, Josh.
Josh: Hello.
Jack: Hello, Eric, coworker Eric, and welcome to 400 Floor. I'll start out with you, Josh. I'm going to ask the question that I always ask, which is what was your introduction to music as a young person, and how did you come to know that that's what you wanted to do and how did you get into the scene community, etc., that you now find yourself in? Kind of a big question.
Josh: So I definitely came from a musical family, my dad was a guitar player and my uncle also played. My dad used to actually play with Tom Cochrane. I don't know if you guys know who that is. Did he ever make it in the States?
Jack: I know the name, but I can't say I know who that is.
Josh: He had a song called "Life is a Highway" that came out later but he was in a band with my dad called Harvest. So growing up, there were a lot of guitars and pianos and stuff in the house.
Jack: Where did you grow up?
Josh: I grew up in Toronto, where I am right now. And then, yeah, I just started getting super into music and the first album that I remember liking was Elvis Costello, because my dad had the cassette and I just remember being like, "Damn, this is so cool. What is this music? What is this new wave?" I didn't know it was new wave, obviously, but I was just super into this whatever I thought it was at the time. And then I have this funny memory of one day seeing the cassette tape and it's the iconic one. I forget what the album's called, but it's him with the camera and I remember being like, "That's the guy?!" In my mind it was this, you know, like...
Jack: In your mind it was a cool guy. [laughter]
Josh: I was like, "This nerd made this music?" Yeah, and that was honestly the more I think about it, because I was thinking about it today, that was kind of the first thing I liked as a young kid, was Elvis Costello.
Jack: How old do you think you were at that point?
Josh: I must've been five, honestly.
Jack: Wow, yeah. That's about the age of people who appreciate Elvis Costello.
Josh: Yeah, exactly. But then I guess when I really got into music probably was around 12 or so. My brother had a Squier Telecaster just lying around the house. And I was like, "I wanna start playing guitar." And my parents were like, "Okay, we'll buy you a guitar but you need to play this thing for a year and figure it out if you actually care about this. Then we'll buy you a guitar." So I was pretty into probably Blink 182 and Green Day and NOFX and just classic pop punk, you know? Rancid. You're a kid and you see these music videos of guys with mohawks and leather jackets playing this fast music that you've never really heard before. But it's also super accessible when you really think about it, it's pretty easy to digest as a young kid.
Eric: It's kids' music.
Josh: Yeah, it's literally kids' music, but it's sick kids' music. [laughter] And I remember it just blowing my mind like, "I want to play guitar. I want to be in a band." And around that time, things moved really quickly and thinking back on it, the music that I was into, it moved so fast. In seventh grade it's pop punk, Blink 182. Then by the next year I'm deep into nu metal. Then the year after that it was black metal, so it moved super quickly. And the funniest part about this guitar thing I was saying is that my dad was like, "Learn to play the guitar and then I'll buy your own guitar." And by the time I'd played the Squire for a year, he was like, "Okay, I'll buy you a guitar." And we went to Steve's Music and we're looking at guitars. And at this point it's a year later so I'm into nu metal and stuff and I see a B.C. Rich Ironbird with a big black spike and the Floyd Rose and all that crap. And I was like, "That's the guitar I want. That's the guitar." So technically my first guitar was a B.C. Rich Ironbird.
Jack: Amazing. He's like, "Goddamnit." [laughter]
Josh: He's like, "I taught you how to change strings," all this stuff just the window.
Jack: Well, so then from there what was the progression to start a band or being like, "Oh, I can make my own music"?
Josh: So around that time - again, going back to the whole genre not quite making sense thing - my first band when I was 13 was called Ficus and, looking back, I couldn't even tell you what genre of music it was. It was "heavy," I guess, but it was, like... You're also trying to find people that are into the same shit that you're into, so I would have friends, like the guitar player… I was wearing all black and had a wallet chain and then the guitar player had a polo shirt. [laughter] None of it made sense aesthetically. But we started to play around at that point in the city because I grew up in the city. So going to venues and stuff, all ages venues, was not more than ten subway stops away.
Jack: Are there recordings of this band?
Josh: There definitely are. I probably have them on a hard drive.
Jack: We have to get these for the pod.
Josh: Well, the funny thing is, recording this - and none of us had obviously had any recording experience or gear to record - I don't know if you remember this, but our friend John who was the drummer had - I think it just came with any sort of P.C. - this 30 second recording thing that you could just hit and it would...
Jack: Yeah, Windows Sound Recorder?
Josh: Yeah! [laughter]
Jack: That was my first DAW. The little tiny window, it just has the green waveform. Yeah, for sure. Windows Sound Recorder, definitely.
Josh: Yeah, so what we used to do, and it's actually really funny, with the bass player - he was the drummer's brother and we'd be jamming at his house before we moved to my parents house - but I remember us recording once in their basement and we're like, "No one really cares about the bass, so you're going to be in charge of hitting that button after 30 seconds." Because if you can hit it right at the exact time, it would go for another 30 seconds.
Eric: Hacked it.
Josh: So I don't know where somebody has these recordings, but we literally would have to play and then be hoping that it would cut right at the right second. And even if it didn't, we still used it and definitely burned CDs and sold them.
[Ficus "Breakfast at Bouvers"]
Jack: How old were you when you were doing this band?
Josh: I started it when I was 13. So yeah, we were in this band Pirate Rock, and it was just the two of us. And on my own I started messing around with a GarageBand. We were actually messing around with GarageBand, but on my own I was just recording my own little things and I was playing guitar and singing. And I started this sort of anonymous project called Little Girls. I was just doing that for fun and I uploaded them to MySpace, these tracks. This is the beginning of the blog era, or I guess the blog era was happening and...
Eric: Wait, were you anonymous or people didn't know who you were?
Josh: I was anonymous at that time. One earliest version of Little Girls actually had fake band members written in the description. There were no photos, there were all these found archival pictures where I would scratch their faces. [laughter] But it was purely just for fun. I wasn't trying to do anything with this project. I just was making these little songs and I was literally singing into a paper towel tube to muffle my voice and create this chamber of reverb and to sing quietly so no one could hear me because I was living at my parents' house. [laughter] So with that project, basically I posted the MySpace link in the comment section of that blog, Gorilla vs. Bear. I was working at H&M at the time...
Jack: Oh my God, you're really painting a picture of an era right now. [laughter]
Josh: So I go into H&M to work the next day and I go home and I pull up the MySpace page, just kind of curious. I'm pretty sure I made it maybe five days earlier. I pull up the MySpace page and the three songs that I uploaded have 20,000 plays each. And I was like, "What the fuck is going on?" I couldn't figure it out for a couple of days. I was like, "Why am I getting all these friend requests? Why are these playcounts just skyrocketing?" And then I randomly went back to that blog Gorilla vs. Bear and saw that he had posted being like, "Sometimes if you drop an anonymous comment in a comment section we'll post the track if it's good." And then next thing you know, my inbox was filled with all these small record labels hitting me up.
Eric: Wasn't there just one Little Girls LP? What was the record called again?
Josh: Yeah. It was called... [laughter] Concepts. [more laughter] I know, 18, 19. So I put these songs up and then that label Captured Tracks who weren't really a thing yet. Mike Sniper was in my DMs, I guess being like, "This is cool, I want to put this out as a 7 inch." And I was like, "Sure." So he took two tracks and then Mexican Summer, who were also a new label at the time, were like, "We also want to put some stuff out." So then I put out two records with those guys pretty quickly. I remember the turnaround being really fast, and then they're like, "Come to New York and play a show." And I was like, "Okay." So then I put a band together and then next thing you know, we were in New York. I think we played one show in Toronto, and then I think the second show was in New York at Union Pool with Psychedelic Horseshit and Real Estate.
Jack: Oh my God. Wow, what an era.
Eric: Did you open?
Josh: Yeah! I mean, all those bands were, like... At this point I had had the 12 inch and the 7 inch. Again, it's the blog era hype cycle. There was kind of this lofi, pre-chillwave. People always talk about the 2010s and chillwave and whatever. No one really talks about the kind of lofi... But it wasn't beats, though, it was guitars and drums and stuff. It was a lot of bands that were one person that turned into bands because people started listening.
Jack: So, Eric, same question: what's your background with music? How did you get introduced to it and find your way?
Eric: Earliest memory is this Muppet Beach Party cassette tape that really fucking rocked.
Jack: Yes.
Eric: And I would just rock it all the time, driving to Cape Cod and being stuck in traffic. I remember we would just rip Muppet Beach Party and this weird burned tape that one side was a Beatles mixtape and the other side was Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd. Just listened to those things over and over. And then I left the Muppet Beach Party tape in the car and it melted. So I took my mom's Pink Floyd mixtape and I started listening to that all the time.
Jack: Just as an arbitrary thing, you're just like, "Well, here's another tape."
Eric: "Here's the other tape in the car." I wasn't from a very "musical" house, but they listened to it a lot. You know, my Soviet bloc parents didn't really have the broadest taste, so it was a lot of Pink Floyd and Kraftwerk, again and again and again. Those were my first memories being like, "I really like this, listening to this is fine." And then I had an older cousin who's maybe 12 years older than me who was very "grunge chick in the '90s" and kind of groomed me or, you know, manicured me. She'd take me to Newbury Comics and be like, "I'm going to buy you a CD, pick something out." I remember I picked out Hello Nasty and she was like, "Fine, but I'm also going to buy you the Vaselines and the Meat Puppets." And I was in fifth grade. So she'd go out of her way to expose me to shit, buy me Our Band Could Be Your Life. And I think that she actually had a very large impact by being like, "Go play rock & roll!" And then my uncle bought me Nevermind and that was kind of it. I was like, "I want to play guitar." My parents used to make my sister take violin and she was a nightmare about it, constant screaming like, "I don't want to practice! Fuck this! I hate this!" Crying all the time. So they didn't try with me. And then when I showed interest, being like, "I want to learn music," they're like, "Yeah, okay." So I started playing guitar and then not that dissimilar to Josh or any other teenager in the vague Northeast, fucked around with some of the kids, had punk bands here and there, and then in high school started this band. I remember the idea... Okay, I'm doing this in the wrong order. So I got into playing guitar. I had a grandfather who was doing some sort of speech therapy thing in this really mad scientist, small apartment kind of way. But he was doing some thing where he would record people with accents speaking and play the recordings back to them to help people get rid of their accents. And I think that he would go to RadioShack and be like, "What do I need to do this?" And they would upsell him on all this shit that he didn't need. So he died and then boxes and boxes of recording equipment just showed up at my house and it was all these handheld tape players, all these cassette tapes of these weird, speech therapy sessions. And this Tascam Portastudio. So I got it and I just started fucking around with this stuff.
Jack: You just got the lofi home recording starter kit.
Eric: Yeah, I think I was 11 or 12 and I went through these boxes. My dad had a new house and put all these boxes in some room and was like, "I don't want to deal with the trauma of my father's death." And I'd be like, "Well, can I deal with it?" And I would just go through these boxes and all of a sudden had this weird little studio at home. Then I had this friend that lived down the street. We were kind of learning how to play guitar together. And then he wanted to record a Coldplay cover, so we did. And that was the first recording we ever made. But we spent one weekend just being sweaty little B.O. 12 year olds making this Coldplay song. And afterwards we were like, "Oh fuck. Let's start a band." We just did that for a while and then the band turned into this thing called the Wednesday Nights. We're going to Newton South High School and playing our first show, the WBCN battle of the bands at Harpers Ferry. What's the band that Adam Levine is from? Maroon 5. Maroon 5 came up through this thing.
Jack: Wow, so this is an esteemed battle of the bands.
Eric: Well, I don't know if they played the battle of the bands but they used to play Harpers Ferry, this place on, like, Com Ave or something in Boston. But it was our first show and we won that round and we advanced to the next round.
Jack: Nice!
Eric: And we were kind of like, "Oh, people kind of like this." We wore suits and stuff. So everyone's like, "You guys sound like Interpol." But we didn't.
Jack: That was my next question: how much did you sound Interpol?
Eric: I mean, there was some riffing... But yeah, we did that. And so we were just this indie band in Boston and then sometime later in high school, I was working my first... It wasn't my first shitty job, it was one of my first shitty jobs. I was working at this place called the Pita Pit and this guy named Greg, who I ended up knowing much later, was really upset because his friends were all going to see Black Dice and he had to work. And it's his first day and I was like, "What's Black Dice?"
Jack: Your Joker moment.
Eric: Everything changed. Through the singer of my band and through this moment, I met Gobby, who is, for the listeners, an esteemed, prolific producer who I've worked alongside for a very long time. And I met a lot of people who we all still hang out with today. But we were all kids then. And I remember someone played me Broken Ear Record and everything changed. I stopped hanging out with everyone I knew, I bought a 404 and only hung out with people who were into Black Dice. We were smoking so much pot. And we had this weird noise studio in my mom's basement. When we started what turned into this band called Truman Peyote, we started the band for a couple... We played for, I don't know, eight months or so, and then everyone went off to college. So it turned into this thing where the band existed, but there were three, sometimes four different people who would go play as the band.
Jack: The franchise.
Eric: Yeah, yeah. It was like, you're getting whoever, you don't know who it's going to be, but they're playing tons of shows. And there's a thing that took me many years to unpack. We wanted to press buttons, we were super into buttons and wires. And that was also the time. So we assumed that Excepter and Black Dice and Animal Collective and all the bands that we were idolizing never practiced. So we were just this weird, shitty, stoned electronic jam band. We were a jam band. And we had our little palette of moves or whatever, but we were pretty loose and all over. I had dropped out of school because we had a bit of buzz and I was like, "Fuck you everyone, I'm going to be a rocker." And then I was like, "This sucks." I was in college and I dropped out to do this for a year and we were just, like, so stoned in the back of some van. And I was like, "This ain't it." So I went back to school in Toronto where me and Josh met, but I was still contributing to this band, even though I wasn't really digging what they were doing and I was moving in a different direction. At the same time I was making music on my own as EZBoy. So I was living in Toronto, but I was still vaguely connected to this bloggy, indie world, so I got booked to play South by Southwest and CMJ. I hitched a ride with Real Estate from Toronto to Chicago, and then I met the Truman Peyote guys there and we drove down to Austin, and this guy that I had never met before was in the band now, and he was in a trailer and he was driving. And then I realized he was high on acid and I'm just in this RV and I'm like, "What am I doing?" At the time, I'd been back in Toronto for a couple of months. So we're at South by Southwest, I'm confused, I'm being torn in all these different directions. I knew that Josh's band, Little Girls, was there.
Josh: Hold on one second. Did we not meet at CMJ first?
Eric: Oh, no, we did do CMJ first.
Josh: It was CMJ, because I remember we met in New York.
Eric: I might have gotten the order of events mixed up, but we were doing the indie circuit together. We were both at CMJ and I saw Josh and his band at the artists lounge and everyone's getting haircuts and shit [laughter] and I talked to his bandmates and Josh wouldn't say a word to me because he was fucking cool guy. He cool guy'd me. [laughter] Hold on! Then, three days later, we're all in Austin for South by Southwest. I knew that they were opening for Andrew W.K. at this weird bar. And this other guy, Elliot, who I kind of knew, was playing in Josh's band. He was walking down the street, he was wasted and he was wearing cowboy boots that he bought there. He didn't have socks because his feet stunk on tour or something. So he was limping, covered in blisters, and he ran into us. We kind of looked at him and he fell on me and Caleb, the guy was playing with us. He was like, "Just say you're the band! Say you're the band!" And he snuck us into Josh's show and we saw them play and then we watched Andrew W.K., which was sick. Then a week later we were at this bar called Ronnie's that everyone's to hang out at and that was when me and Josh actually had our first conversation. Josh was like, "Yeah, I think I saw you in New York and I think I saw you in Texas." I was like, "Shut the fuck up, bro." [laughter]
Josh: That's not true. That's not true. No, no, no. Nice try. We chatted. I remember specifically we chatted at either South by Southwest, maybe it wasn't New York, but we chatted at one of these places outside Toronto. And I remember we were talking and I remember saying it to you because I'm not an asshole. I was like, "We should hang out back in the city, the place that we live in." And you were like, "Yeah, man. Cool, cool, cool." I didn't call you or anything, but we ran into each other a couple of weeks later at Ronnie's and then we just started talking and hanging out and laughing and we've been friends ever since. [laughter]
Eric: Yeah, we became friends. For a couple of months before that I was living in Toronto and people thought I was Josh.
Josh: Yeah, this was a whole thing.
Jack: Wait, but so it's not like you guys were just like...
Eric: We didn't know each other yet but people thought I was him. I had just moved there, so maybe I was the new guy or whatever. I was at some house party that he was playing and someone interviewed me thinking I was him. [laughter]
Jack: That's cool.
Eric: I just rolled with it.
Josh: I, to this day, would love to find that interview because what did you say?
Eric: I remember they asked "What are your influences?" And I was like, "Limp Bizkit." [laughter] Which is not that far off from the truth. I mean, everyone loves Limp Bizkit. So he's downplaying the whole... He's like, "Yeah, I was asked to go play in New York." But in Toronto he's on the cover of their local rag Now magazine, eating a bowl of unwound cassette tape with chopsticks. [laughter] Josh was all over the place. He was a little downtown city success story. He's being very coy.
Josh: Even bringing it back to that Psychedelic Horseshit and Real Estate show, I'm pretty sure I was headlining that. But within that world. I was still super niche shit. But no, because at that time I had gotten a lot of crazy success. And again, going back to the blog thing, it happened so quickly and it fell apart even faster. But for one year I was in the Fader and the Guardian and on the covers of these magazines and all these newspapers and went on tour and had a career and licensed songs to crazy commercials and played all these festivals and things. So it was definitely a thing.
Eric: I knew who he was. [laughter]
Josh: But the funny thing, though, about that era was the fact that Eric had curly hair and we don't look alike, but we don't not look alike, you know what I mean? It's not an insane thing, especially back then. If you just saw a press photo and, again, keep in mind my press photos at the time were very mysterious-ish, right? It wasn't just my face.
Eric: Yeah, I never thought about that part.
Josh: It wasn't like I was hiding my face, but it wasn't just a straight up photo of myself.
Eric: I got paid once because someone thought I was him, they handed me a wad of cash.
Jack: You're like, "I love this guy Josh." [laughter] "Keep it going!" You're like, "I'm your biggest fan, man! Keep going!" He's, like, rooting for your success.
Josh: The fucked up thing about that story, though, is the fact that you guys took the money.
Eric: No, no, no. Don't say that. I was a hired gun in a band. They gave me a wad of cash. So I walked up to the guy whose band it was that I didn't really want to play in. And I was like, "They just paid me." But he had already gotten paid, and it was just written all over his face, what happened. And he was like, "Just keep it, just keep it." And I was like, "No, I'm not keeping it.".
Eric: We met each other and then it ended up that we lived right down the street from one another.
Josh: This was a fun era.
Jack: What area of Toronto?
Eric: Queen Street. Everyone that was a dipshit that didn't have a job would go get coffee at this cafe at 1 or 2 p.m., when we woke up. [laughter]
Josh: And we would stay there until 5.
Eric: Yeah, and smoke a bunch of cigs, go buy beer. I don't know, we started hanging out. There's definitely this weird moment in Toronto where there was kind of a scene around this thing where it was, much in a Our Band Could Be Your Life sort of way, this was around the time where people realized they could just start having their own parties at little bars and download VirtualDJ. And this was at the point where someone DJing is, you know, they're playing "Bizarre Love Triangle" by New Order. Dance music wasn't really quite a thing for sure.
Jack: We're coming to a wonderful, fruitful era. We call it blog house. [laughter]
Eric: It was blog house era.
Jack: This is peak, or proto into peak, blog house era.
Josh: Yeah, I had a party. So again, going back to this... Here's a little funny side note that kind of connects this: around this time I meet Eric in the States, we come back to Canada, we meet again. We now know each other, but we're not necessarily friends. We don't hang out per se. I had a party at this bar called the Beaver, which is on Queen Street. Again, we all lived on this one street. I later found out that Eric lived, like he was saying, just down the street from me and a little bit further was this bar we used to all go to called the Beaver. I used to have a party there with Elliot, who played guitar in my band. It was called Pretty Pretty. And again, no one was trying to be a DJ, we're just playing whatever the fuck we wanted. This was kind of in the era too, with Facebook events where you'd put the names of all the bands we liked and things we liked at the bottom of the event. "This is what you're going to hear.".
Jack: Classic.
Eric: Weird French new wave, minimal, cold... And I was always like, "Fuck this music."
Josh: It wasn't just that, but it later turned into just that.
Eric: It was very dark. The aesthetic was very dark.
Josh: Yeah, but it was also fun. But the funny thing about this, though, is I had met Eric, I knew who he was, and I'm, quote unquote, DJing again, just on my laptop. VirtualDJ, crappy mp3s, it didn't really matter. Cheap beer, just packed full of art school nonsense. And Eric and his friends would show up and everyone was kind of, not being too cool, but everyone kind of had this air of "I'm a mysterious person" or whatever, blah blah blah. Then Eric and his friends roll up and they just don't give a fuck. And at first, you know, because I'm really a pretty respectable, nice person. I'm like, you know, don't tag the bar, don't smash glasses, don't whatever. Just to paint the picture, let's just pretend that everyone is, for the most part, wearing all black. These guys would come in with tie dye shirts. We were all sort of friends but they would come in and just cause shit. And I remember I'd be playing, I'd be DJing and Eric would, or somebody else would pick him up and just throw him into one of the tables with all these pint glasses. [laughter] And everything's broken. And now people are cut. [laughter]
Jack: This is my business partner we're talking about right now.
Eric: We were fun!
Josh: I remember me and Elliot being like, "Man, why did we befriend these guys?" They're just causing so much shit. And I remember just being like, "You can't do that." But they had such a fun energy that you couldn't be mad. Like, look at this guy's face. You couldn't be mad. He'd be like, "Oops!" [laughter]
Eric: We were the Americans. Me and my 7 foot tall friend thought that we had carte blanche to do whatever we wanted because everyone was Canadian. We weren't violent!
Josh: No, no, no.
Eric: We were just dancing. Very aggressively. [laughter]
Josh: And fall into people and break things and it just didn't matter. But the reason I brought this up is because I remember this happening and for a second being like, "Fuck these guys that we met in the States, they're actually kind of annoying." But then we just kept hanging out. It was one of those things where it wasn't like we were like, "Oh fuck these guys," they were fun to hang out with. And again, knowing that we were all kind of into similar shit, we lived in the same neighborhood, we were just bound to hang. We all were trying to be musicians, we were all just chain smoking and no one really had a job. Everyone was just kind of bumming around and we were all on the same level, living very similar lifestyles. Of course, naturally you hang out with these people all day and all night, all the time. And as Eric was saying at this coffee shop, we would just go meet there, drink coffee, chill until the sun went down, go buy beer, go drink, go do something, go to bed, and then just repeat it. We did that for, I don't know, a year.
Jack: What year is this, 2023? [laughter]
Eric: But there was a lot of everyone of this age being like, "Is this okay?" No one was bad, it's not like anyone was a junkie or into crime. It was a lot of pirating Logic, showing people tips and tricks with plugins and honestly, going back to the competitive thing that I was talking about in my roots as a high school musician, it kind of felt that way in this little Toronto scene for a while. I think part of that was due to some of the promoters kind of putting people at odds with one another and being like, "Why won't you book me for this show?" Or people booking a huge party and keeping all the money. But there was this weird bubbling moment there of everyone making lots of shit. Josh hasn't gotten to it yet, but he and our friend Talvi started a band called Prince Innocence. Me and my other dipshit friends that Josh is talking about that just love breaking beer glasses, we had a synthpunk, spazzy metal band and Kontravoid, goth lord himself, lived a block away from us, so everyone was hanging out. And every week or so it would be: go to someone's house, listen to the new track that whoever made. And there was this weird thing where everyone had very different angles on it, you know, Cam was making this goth music. I had, I don't know, this just brain damage band. Josh was learning how to make really classy, refined, pop music. And these are all the people hanging out. It was a lot of arguing, but not in an angry way, everyone's pushing each other forward. We'd hang out with Cam, goth guy, and be like, "Why the fuck don't you laugh at anything?" Josh would show me his tracks. I'd be like, "No way, man. This shit is way too commercial. This is, like, Zara music." And I'd show him my tracks and he'd be like, "This sounds shit." [laughter]
Josh: But the fun thing about that era, though, what I always look back on this and actually loved, was the fact that - this is going to sound super corny, but I don't care - we were all just friends because we liked each other, not because we were trying to be in some sort of a scene or movement where we all make the same shit. In fact all of us made completely different shit.
Eric: It was cool because everyone was different.
Josh: Yeah, and the thing about this time with all of us is the fact that, aside from being friends and aside from all making different music, we had all gotten to the age where we were into just weird shit, for whatever reason. So we were all surprisingly very supportive and would oftentimes put together bills that in theory made no sense. But we all did it because we were just like, "No, no, no, no, this this works, we're all friends." We're all trying to play these shows, my kind of synthy pop band, believe it or not, played with Eric's thrashy, spazzy synth band and these lineups worked because it had gotten to the point where no one wanted to go to shows. It's like, "Here's four garage rock bands and here's four goth bands, here's four whatever bands."
Jack: I still do not want to go to those shows. That's amazing, the kind of synchronicity or whatever. Just the fact that everybody, just by virtue of being friends, happened to also... Because obviously you guys shared some sort of common musical vocabulary maybe. Underground music, whatever. But you're at these different different poles, you know?
Josh: Oh, 100%. But the thing is, we all listen to the same music. That's the funniest part: we would all party together and hang out together and we were all listening to basically the same music. We were just making different music.
Eric: I think that there was this other thing about it where Josh and I have made a very small handful of tracks together, most notably "Hot Sebastian."
Josh: I was going to say "Hot Sebastian."
Jack: Cue "Hot Sebastian."
[Eric Farber & Josh McIntyre "Hot Sebastian"]
Eric: You know, Josh and I didn't know each other for that long, so it was this kind of thing where I was like, "Hey, we're starting this band. We want to send this single out to people, show me what a press release looks like." As opposed to friends that you've known for years you'll be like, "Yeah, of course I know what a press release looks like." And because everyone was kind of playing a different angle or the acts weren't that different, everyone could kind of help shape each other's projects by being like, "No, you should do this" because it wasn't whatever. It wasn't like, "You're the Strokes and we're the Hives and we're competing for the greatest rock band." It was just like, "Oh, you guys are doing this thing with your video, you guys are doing this." Everyone actually really helped push each other forward because there was so much space between everyone's projects. The supportiveness that people take for granted, which I feel now has turned into social media or podcast economy, it's no small feat, you know, to get on stage in front of people and be like, "I'm going to do a thing." For people to even push each other on and be like, "I'm going to compete with you, I'm going to encourage you to be better, and also we're going to sell out a 300 capacity room every two weeks" is very tight.
Jack: So this is, to get this in a timeline, 2010, 2011?
Josh: This is 2011 to 2014, maybe.
Eric: Yeah, so Josh met our friend Talvi, who he was dating. She lived in Montreal at the time, he was going back and forth all the time, learning how to be a synth pop producer. I was living with my friend Mike. We were playing this band that was not yet called Cellphone, and I taught him how to play bass. I had this TR-707 drum machine that we would all practice to, and we'd play at 220 bpm because that's the fastest that it goes. This was the vibe for a while, Josh is either in Montreal or not in Montreal, I'm practicing. We were like the Gestapo of practice. We were like, "Everyone has to have insane chops to play in this band."
Josh: But this era was interesting too because, like you were saying, at this point, towards the end of this or the middle of this, I was half in Montreal and half in Toronto. But this is the Grimes era, this is when Grimes was just about to pop.
Jack: I wanted to make sure not to gloss over this: you started this project with your girlfriend at the time, Prince Innocence, which put out a couple records and did a bunch of stuff.
Eric: Chipotle playlist. [laughter]
Jack: Yeah! I wanted to make sure not to gloss over this thing, which I'm aware of, this project.
Eric: Prince Innocence was kind of big for a minute.
Jack: Yeah, totally. Do you want to talk about the genesis and how it progressed?
Josh: So that project kind of came about right when... Little Girls never really ended. I never really officially stopped the band, we just kind of stopped doing it. And around this time I was dating Talvi and she was in Montreal. So I would go there and just bring my laptop and hang out. At this point I didn't want to be a frontman anymore. I didn't want to be the singer of this band and jumping around and whatever. I wanted to just make music and let someone else be the face of it. So I'm toying around with these kind of synthy instrumentals and I was like, "Oh, Talvi, do you want to sing on these?" And she was just like, "Yeah, sure." So she started singing and then we made this band and then started playing in both Toronto and Montreal. And then it weirdly just got a lot of press, really fast, all the time. This is I guess kind of post-blog era, but this is more the music publications era of the Fader and Noisey and Pitchfork and all that. Someone would just be like, "Oh, here's this new track."
Eric: You're downplaying being good at this. You're like, "Everything I put out weirdly gets a lot of press." [laughter] "It's so weird!"
Josh: No, well, this goes back to one of two things. Obviously I was making in this case even more accessible music than I was before. But people I feel were always afraid to just reach out and ask for things. And I feel I was always the person that was like, "I'm just going to go figure out who's writing these damn articles and I'm going to send them the song and I'm going to send it to every writer that I can see online." And I did it all the time. I would just send my music and it would get either rejected or just no response, all the time. But I would send everything we made. I'd be like, "Here's a new single, here's the artwork, here's a little video we shot." I'd just send it all out. And we ended up kind of getting into this press cycle and we became a band that people knew outside of Toronto and Montreal pretty quickly, but we never actually put out albums. We were just putting out a lot of music, putting out EPs, putting out singles and kind of just doing it at our own pace and ended up eventually moving past this synth pop thing into more at this point the sort of experimental club music kind of shit, because I was also becoming a DJ at this point. I was becoming a "real DJ" at this point. [laughter]
Jack: Well, okay, to try to keep it cranking along, I'm going to pop back over to you, Eric. So now we're kind of breaking it up now, but this era of Josh going back and forth, Montreal, Toronto, doing Prince Innocence, you went back to the States.
Eric: Okay, so as we mentioned before, I had this band going called Cellphone.
Jack: Oh yeah. Actually, you know what? I want to talk about that. So let's talk about Cellphone. We didn't actually really talk about it.
Eric: Me and my friend Mike were living together in an apartment that me and my friend Jay lived at previously. Jay moved out. He still had keys, so it turned into one of those houses where I just never had a moment alone. We started this band, practiced all the time. We played a lot. There's a couple of iterations of the band, but there were these three core members: me, Mike and Jay. I was living in Canada as an illegal alien because I fucked up my papers. Someone put out a record for us, Telephone Explosion, I think. This record label put out the first Cellphone record and then I had to bite the bullet and leave Canada. I remember I left and then two weeks later was the record release show. We took this band very seriously. We all worked at a pizza place together. We all lived together. We lived and breathed this thing. The album was coming out, we were playing all the time and we started getting offers for gigs in New York. But we kept saying no because I couldn't cross the border.
Jack: And come back in.
Eric: Yeah, so it kind of turned into this thing where I was like, "I'm fucking this up." We started getting into the grant system, but they'd have to leave my name off the paperwork. And honestly, that band starting to gain momentum was the thing that made it very clear to me. I was like, "I'm illegally living in a country, I can't even put my dipshit rock & roll band down on paper" or "I can't be part of it on paper." So I bit the bullet. I left, record came out. I was so sad about it. I remember a couple of weeks after that... No, not a couple of weeks, a few months. I moved to New York and they came to play New York dates. I started on guitar, I ended up on keys and Mike was like, "We'll never have another keyboard player again." They came to New York and there was a keyboard player that was playing my parts wrong. These people were my best friends in the world. They were playing a show at Union Pool or something, and I watched three of their songs and I just left. I was like, "I can't handle this."
Josh: Yeah, I remember hearing about this. You texted me! Do you remember you were texting me being like, "Okay, I had to leave, I couldn't be there"?
Eric: I was so sad.
Jack: Yeah, that's brutal.
Eric: It was a low point. I worked on this band for five years and then... Whatever, I got over it. I left and visited Toronto a while later, and then Mike, who was in the band, and I were at some dinner party, Cellphone was playing. In Toronto, there's so many shows, it's like, yeah, you're late to the show. It's like any city. He was like, "If you miss our set, I'll never talk to you again." And I was like, "We need to get in a cab right now." I went, they're playing at the Bovine Sex Club, and we got there and he was like, "This is for founding member Eric Farber." And I watched them play, they turned into this killer thrash three piece and I've never smiled bigger in my whole life. I was like, "Those are my fucking boys."
Jack: So it ended up being amicable in the end once the wounds were healed.
Eric: Totally, I wasn't hurt about it at all. Okay, so if we're focusing on my musical narrative, I moved back to New York, my friend Gabriel Sugreu a.k.a Gobby, who we watched perform yesterday, and I met. The thing I was talking about earlier when we found Black Dice, me and him met and we'd go to his house and just make beats. One of the good things about moving back to America, I was like, "I'll get to see Gobby again." I was in Boston for a sec, he was in Boston for a sec, and then he moved to New York and just kind of moved into my apartment. Me and him started working together and we started this band called Mūt. And for a while we were working in this way where - I think I had my first coding job - I would go to work, Gobby would wake up and he would work on a track for five or six hours. I would come home from work and then he would go to sleep in my bed and I would work on the track until it was time for me to go to bed. And then I'd be like, "Gobby, get the fuck out of my bed. Go sleep on the aerobed." We were doing this thing for Esther [Gauntlett] and Jenny [Cheng]. We had a deadline for this Gauntlett Cheng thing and the two of us together made this 30 minute orchestral, classical music piece. But we were working on it in this super intense way where we were touching the same files all the time. I wasn't like, "Gobby, come sleep in my bed." After a few days it was like, "Oh, when I go to work, he sleeps in my bed." That's been my big collaborator here over the last couple of years. The other day I opened up an old computer and I saw that me and him have so much stuff. So we put out Mūt 1, we did Mūt 2...
Jack: In the Neu! font.
Eric: Which - what do I call it - the amazing hit single from Mūt, "Everything Is Cool," is the intro theme song to Josh's podcast.
[Mūt "Everything Is Cool"]
Eric: Okay, so we're at Josh, 2016...
Jack: Yeah, you were saying that we skipped ahead a bit with the Thermal stuff, so I would love to fill in...
Eric: Yeah, Josh has many years I wasn't around for.
Josh: Right, I guess you weren't there. You would visit, though. So basically, after Eric left, around this time was when I really started taking my DJ career seriously. Because I will also say that a lot of the shit that I played, actually a lot of it - not a lot of it, but a chunk of it - came from Eric. You're the one who showed me DJ Rashad and juke shit.
Eric: Me and Josh used to DJ together a lot. And I was kind of joking earlier, being like, "Everyone's playing New Order and minimal wave." Back 2010, I got hooked on footwork and juke and I would play it out in Toronto and I would either absolutely crush it or usually just clear the room.
Jack: I mean, that was the craziest shit.
Eric: And Josh and a couple of other people were like, "What the fuck is this guy playing? What is this music?"
Josh: That's a lie, Eric. You cleared the room every time. [laughter]
Eric: One time I crushed it. [laughter]
Josh: But I mean, no one knew what that music was. And oftentimes we were talking about timing and stuff, but you were way too ahead to be even trying to play that shit. But so in this era of 2016, 2017, we were still doing Prince Innocence and we were touring a bit, but I was kind of way more into DJing, I was really into DJing at this point. And I had a new party called Baby Blue at the Beaver, at the same place that these parties we talked about back in the day that Eric used to get thrown into the tables and stuff.
Eric: I was throwing myself. [laughter] Mike was throwing me!
Jack: So it was violent, but it was violence directed at yourself.
Eric: It wasn't violent! It was just, like... disruptive. [laughter]
Josh: It was just controlled chaos. But I ended up doing a new party there, which is, again, when I found this sort of scene and sound of like, "I'm not seeing this, it didn't exist in Toronto," but I found this sort of niche music that was, like, Fade to Mind and Night Slugs and all that stuff. It was experimental, noisy, crazy shit mixed with club music. So basically one of the labels that had put out the last Little Girls record in 2012 had been hitting me up for years being like, "What are you doing next?" Prince Innocence was kind of weirdly off limits because we kind of just did our own thing and were offered many a record deal and turned them all down. We were just like, "No, we're just going to do it ourselves and own our masters and make our own money." And to this day, I still make money from that project.
Jack: Amazing. From sync deals or something like that?
Josh: Sync deals and radio stuff and...
Jack: Chipotle.
Josh: Chipotle.
Jack: I mean, honestly, we hear it all the time down on the block on Broadway, you know.
Eric: I'm not making that up, right? You guys were on the Chipotle playlist, right?
Josh: Yeah, yeah. I still am probably. But so basically he just kept being like, "What are you doing next? What are you doing next?" I was like, "Prince Innocence is off limits. I'm not making solo music, I'm not trying to do this." And then around 2018, I would say, was when - again, I'm DJing a lot - I was making all of these edits. I was making all these things just for SoundCloud. All of this shit I was just throwing up or whatnot. And then I started making my own productions and then finally was like, "Okay," to this label, Hand Drawn Dracula. I was like, "Here's a record that I'm working on that's dance music." And this is a label that does not, has never, put out dance music before. It was very much indie rock. And they were like, "We'll gladly put this out." And I was like, "Let's just do it." So that's kind of how Prince Josh started. And then I have another record coming out this year actually, which is my second one.
Eric: But Josh is also glossing over that okay, so Hand Drawn Dracula's like, "Yeah, we'll put out your record." He's putting out the first single and, again, every single piece of CanCon falls into place and for his first single, "The Joy," instead of it being a song with a music video, ten people decide to produce a short film for him. [laughter] The song is just playing in the background of interviews of eight people being like, "Here's the most important moment of my life," with expensive cinematography.
Josh: Jacques Greene is in it for some reason.
Eric: Josh just walks backwards into success all the time because he's really kind and straightforward. And he plays dumb. [laughter]
Jack: Wow, okay, this is definitely going in the edited episode.
Josh: You truly unpacked it.
Eric: Bro, I've known you for a long time.
Josh: No, because I do play dumb. I do play dumb. That's my thing. [laughter]
Eric: They're like, "What if there's an intro for it?" You're like, "Well, I don't know, what if it's a short film?" And they're like, "Whoa, yeah, cool." And you’re like, "What if it's feature length?"
Josh: They’re like, "It's going to cost $10,000." And I'm like, "Well, what if you just ask so-and-so for the money?"
Eric: I'm not a big gamer, but when the Pokémon are charged up or whatever and they do their big move, you have a really incredible way of going, "Eh..." And that makes every ask sound totally fine. Someone can be like, "Well, that's going to cost $40,000." And you'll be like, "Eh." [laughter]
Josh: If only you knew what I was working on right now, you'd laugh. There are some expensive things happening right now. [laughter]
Jack: Really? Do you want to talk about it?
Josh: Yeah, I have a big music video coming out for my solo record. It hasn't been shot yet, but it's expensive.
Eric: I'll be visiting Toronto or Josh will be here and he'll be like, "Hold on, I'm going to go work the room." And he'll come back in 15 minutes and be like, "I'm scoring a movie. Do you know anything about timecodes?" [laughter]
Jack: Okay, this is getting very interesting.
Josh: I did score a movie recently. [laughter]
Eric: I'm not shaming it, I'm saying that you literally have a really wonderful business sense where you congeal projects and you make it happen in a way where at the end of it, everyone thinks that something good happened and you were in the center of attention. [laughter]
Josh: I mean, I literally shot a music video, what, three days ago?
Eric: Yeah, I mean, you guys. So Josh and Lauren have started this band recently where they're working at this tempo where it's, like... we send each other half finished shit a lot. Josh will go to the studio, send me a demo, song's not done, a video for a different track came out the week before and he'll be like, "We're shooting the video for this one tomorrow." They're going Lil Peep mode, just being like, "Just keep going, just keep going."
Josh: Well, the thing is, I've always found that you always have to stay ten steps ahead. And why not? Because if you set yourself up to put things out, if you just plan, it's not that crazy. When I'm telling you that we're shooting a video for a Thermal track... We shot one two days ago for a track that's not finished yet. The track is finished, we recorded it a month and a half ago, it's being mixed right now. By the time the video is finished, the master will be done.
Jack: I feel we are getting to the point where we could just say, "Hey, it's been great having you guys on," but I want to have a space to ask, is there something that you want to add?
Eric: Actually, damn. So this is earlier. I was like, "Alright, me and Josh are going to do the podcast with Jack. What notes do we want to make sure that we hit." And I was like, "Josh, Jack is going to ask us about what our collaborations are like." I'm going to be like, "Me and Josh never really made that much music together. However, we have had some very successful collaborations," and I was like, "You gotta tell the story." The best thing that me and Josh ever did, other than having a beautiful friendship over many years, is that we devised this system that we just would fall into like clockwork, where when we were going out in Toronto or wherever we were when we had the info, if we were going to any club or any party, Josh would change my name in the contacts of his phone to the person who owns the club and then I would send him a bunch of text messages being like, "Do not make them wait. They are VIP. You let them in right now." And we would just walk up to the front of the line and show it to the bouncer. [laughter] This is me and Josh's greatest collaboration. We did it all the time and it would just kill, we would be VIP.
Josh: It would be us standing out in front of a bouncer. And I'd be like, "Look at my phone. I'm This is this is the contact of," I'm just going to say it, "Mikey Apples. I'm texting Mikey Apples right now." And I'd say, "Hey, we're outside. The bouncer won't let us in." Eric is right behind me, I changed his contact to Mikey Apples, Eric goes, "Let them in! Let them in! They need to come in right now!"
Jack: Eric would be live texting directly behind you! Oh my God, we have to do that at Nowadays or wherever.
Eric: We're too old to do that!
Jack: No, no, no. We are not too old to do that.
Eric: That was the best thing me and Josh ever did together. [laughter]
Josh: It actually was.
Eric: We'd show up something, we see a line, we'd look at each other and Josh does this thing where sometimes he pretends to get really serious. He'd point at his phone and be like, "You know." [laughter] I don't know why everyone doesn't do that.
Jack: It's brilliant! Just gonna go ahead and say that is the one of the top candidates for the intro to the podcast. [laughter]
Josh: It's good. I think that's also a good note to end on.
Jack: I think so.
Josh: Alright, I guess this is it? I love you guys. Enjoy tonight.
Eric: Bye!
Jack: Yes, we'll talk soon. Peace.
