Jack: Hey, nice to see you guys. Thanks for coming on and talking to me today. How about we start with you, Shawn? How did you get into music in the first place and what were your early experiences with music? Was it through family, through friends? What can you remember about that?
Shawn: Well, I grew up in a small town in Iowa called Muscatine, Iowa. It's a river town on the Mississippi River in the southeast part of the state, near the Quad Cities, kind of near Iowa City. It's an obscure, very rural state in a lot of ways. My hometown was very agricultural, like most of Iowa. And then it was also very industrial, so it kind of had this mix of being at a typical Iowa agricultural town, but also it had a bit of rust belt industrial, lots of factories, sort of working class town. Most of my childhood growing up, music really wasn't a part of it at all. My parents weren't very into music. The only thing I really remember listening to actively is my dad had some [Bob] Dylan tapes that he would play. And so music really wasn't a part of my life that much until I hit my teen years. I'm 42 now, so this is the '90s when I was a pre-teen and a teenager, and in middle school around the sixth, seventh grade was when Nirvana and Green Day and all these bands started jumping to major labels and it was like a big deal at the time. I was a little bit too young to fully grasp all the minutiae of that, the politics of all that and stuff, but that was the point when it came on my radar and became a part of my life. And the distinct thing I remember is I used to listen to this radio show out of, I think, Davenport, out of the Quad Cities. I would sit there late at night, when I was supposed to be in bed. And I would try to record songs off this alternative late night radio show. It was like a show on a regular radio thing but they would play music that you usually wouldn't hear on the radio. And I distinctly remember recording off of that Jawbreaker song, I believe it was from Dear You, which had just come out at the time. And so Jawbreaker and Dear You were kind of the initial spark of me turning on to what would become for me, underground music in general. And at that same time there was stuff like Green Day, Rancid, all of the bands of that era that were more like punk bands than the grunge bands. I was more attracted to the punk bands. And so that was like the initial spark for me. But I think too, what was interesting is I had grown up with a real sense of the 1960s and '70s counterculture, anti-establishment politics, stuff like left politics through my parents, through my dad. And so that I think too was this point where I could start identifying things in contemporary music that I could relate back to these historical political movements and things that I had been interested in as a kid, weirdly. Even though I was growing up in a place at the same time - and I'm not I'm not trying to throw shade at it - but the time I grew up in and where I grew up is such a cultural wasteland in a lot of ways because the way I feel like I absorbed culture was through library books or television or movies or whatever you could distill down from this sort of small town strip mall. Like, there's the evangelical in town that was in an old supermarket, you know, or whatever. But I think, too, my mom always took me and my brother to the library. And that was a place where I would just wander around looking at whatever I looked at. So I was just kind of a nerd with history and my dad's stories about the '60s. He grew up in the small town in Iowa, Muscatine, but then he moved to Tucson, Arizona and went to college in order to avoid going to Vietnam. Just had a lot of adventures and a lot of wild times and he told me a good amount of stories from those times. So I think in the back of my head there was this kind of mythology that was brewing. And I was interested in these things and had this kind of moral background towards left wing stuff. But when I discovered punk, I could sort of instantly relate to it in that there was this through line or in my imagination it was some new version of that. And so as that extrapolated out with whatever I got into initially, the stuff that was easier to find, whether it be, you know, you go from Jawbreaker and Rancid to Lookout! Records and then you're two steps away from Dischord or Vermiform or Gravity or all these things I got into. So really once I got into it, just like as far as the digging in, the collecting and the mail order catalogs and the zines and all that, it just exploded for me. And that's also probably a personality thing. I think I'm still a hardcore collector in a lot of ways, just the digging thing and the networking thing, the whole DIY platform of that era. It just quickly built on itself very rapidly. So that was the initial thing in my hometown. And at the same time there were local gigs with local bands from my small town, and it was kind of percolating at the time. So I remember I think it was in the eighth grade, our old YMCA would have these DIY shows and local bands would play. And it was of the era where you might have a band that's more like an indie band that kind of sounds like Weezer or Superchunk or something like that and then you'd have more of a punk band and then you'd have kind of a metal band of that era or even a nü metal band of that era. All on the same bill. So I started going to those local shows pretty much right away around that time. There was just a group of my friends, we all started to discover this stuff sort of at the same time and then got introduced to some older kids that had been in it a little bit longer. And then that exposure grew. But really it was also just, like, you buy a record or a CD and you look at the liner notes and you start start trying to pick out - you know, because I didn't have the Internet yet, really - and then you get the little mail order catalog that comes with the record and you just check some boxes and like, "Alright, I'll try these out," and you send it out with your money order and wait for it to come back. And you're just taking these risks on music, essentially. We had to imagine so much of it, you know? I mean, if you're growing up in this town in Iowa, really to go to a record store, we'd have to go to Iowa City, which definitely by the time I got my license at 16, I was driving to shows in the Quad Cities of the Iowa City all the time. Even Des Moines, I heavily started going to gigs and my parents were cool with it, they were supportive of it. It was also that I was a straight edge kid. I didn't really know about straight edge in that era exactly yet. And I would go on to meet a bunch of straight edge kids that were much more like the straight edge hardcore kids of that era. But I just sort of decided not to drink or do drugs and then discovered straight edge. I was really into Fugazi and Minor Threat and the Dischord stuff. So I always was a straight edge kid that was more the Fugazi version of it than the Earth Crisis version, even though I met a lot of kids that were the Earth Crisis version and Ryan will be able to maybe go into that more because a lot of those kids were from his hometown. But once I started going to Iowa City and going to the Record Collector in Iowa City, then and going to gigs at Gabe's in Iowa City, it just kept rolling on itself and doubling and tripling and the stuff I'm being exposed to and the stuff I'm into. Sometimes it would just take meeting a random person. There's this guy, Jason Salleck, who is a few years older than me, and he was this really intense record collector. And I remember meeting him and we started hanging out once our ages were sort of compatible, because that's also a thing when you're 13 and you're trying to hang out with an 18 year old, there's this huge gap, but by the time I was 17 and he's 23 or something, it starts to shrink. So he was someone and there's other people, too. But you meet this random person that just can expose you, you know, he just exposed a bunch of us to even more stuff. So that's just kind of how it went in those early days. And skateboarding was definitely a part of it too. In my mind, skateboarding... And this goes to the imagination where you kind of have to imagine this stuff, it's like we're all imagining what punk is and what the history of it is and how all these things connect. And it was all piecemeal because you couldn't just... I mean, I didn't even have cable TV at home, so I didn't even get to watch, like, 120 Minutes and put it together. And I remember at some point I saw some footage of Sonic Youth when I was in middle school, which is around the time I discovered Jawbreaker. That was also like, "Oh, there's something about this band, how they dress and the whole thing." And so it just grew in itself like that. And then eventually I went on to go to college and ended up going to a state school called the University of Northern Iowa. Then that's where it just went up a notch, and another notch and another notch from like people I ended up meeting.
[Wet Hair "Cult Electric Annihilation"]
Jack: So Ryan, same thing. What's your version of that story?
Ryan: So I grew up in a smaller town, closer to where Shawn was just talking about, where we both went to college. I'm from Waverly, it's about 9,000 people. Surprisingly, though, there was kind of a lot going on. By the time I was in middle school, the older kids around Shawn's age already had a fully formed scene to jump into. But before that I didn't really grow up with too musical of a family. We just listened to the pop radio or whatever in the car. And then in fifth grade, it's kind of the first distinct music memory I have, of my friend Matt having Dookie and that just blew it open and he dubbed it on tape for me. Eventually I got my own copy, which I still have, and it's probably the most played album of my life, in full transparency, you know? It's still good. So I got into that and that got me really into music but I was in fifth grade, so I just listened to the radio, moved onto Metallica and your White Zombies, that kind of era of stuff until middle school. A couple of my friends who had older siblings who were in the music, they started getting into Rancid, Descendents, Suicide Machines, and I'd hear that stuff with them and it just clicked and it just changed. I was just all in on that stuff. This is probably going against what's cool, but I liked that Metallica had, like, songs, you know what I mean? Whatever appealed to the radio. I was a melody guy. That just kind of kicked it off. I still remember my friend somehow had two copies of the Suicide Machines Destruction by Definition and I just remember him giving me that, and it changed my life over the course of a summer. It was like, "Okay, we're into skateboarding and ska punk, and that's it." And that really coincided with the first show that I went to, which would have been at the end of eighth grade. Like I was saying, there was a really fully formed local scene that I think had a lot to do with my musical experience. And so all the kids that were four years older than me had all these cool bands and they were tied in with bands and other towns like Marshalltown, which was like 2 hours away. Then even with Muscatine, where Shawn was from, some of those bands would come and play. But yeah, I just have the distinct memory of a skate park benefit show in my hometown that there were ska punk bands, straight up screamo bands, chuggy hardcore bands, and that opened it up. I never looked back. I went to every single local show I could ever go to, which is still the main method of music that I've consumed, small shows. It was a small town, so I knew people that went to see Marilyn Manson or something, but it would be 2 hours away. Your parents would have to take you. And my parents were really supportive, but they were in the way that I was the youngest kid and they were just like, "We trust you, you can do whatever you want." But they weren't going to drive me to Iowa City to see Metallica. You know what I mean? They just never did any of that stuff. So that first chunk of time where I was just going to local shows, it was all whatever would be in Waverly, which weirdly there were quite a few shows. And then I was just kind of content with that, you know, skateboarding, going to see the shows that were local. And then eventually my friend Travis - he was a phenomenal musician, savant level guitar player, and still that's what he does - he was just like, "We're going to start a band and you're going to play the drums," which I had zero aspiration or skill at. And then he just kind of showed me and he was like, "You just do this: together, apart, together apart." You know? And it frustrated him to no end because no one was ever as good as he was at anything, in any of the bands he was ever in high school. He was just always bummed. So we started a band and it was pretty terrible except for him. That just kept going and then that evolved into another high school band that was a ska punk band and we got to play a bunch of shows and had our licenses and would drive to Muscatine or Des Moines, which is how I ended up meeting Daren [Ho], at a ska show. Our school bands played together.
Jack: Amazing. What were the bands called? Do you remember?
Ryan: The one I was in was called the Skabortionists.
Jack: Okay, I was about to say. Daren didn't mention that! I always remembered that name and I was like, "Daren, were you in the Skabortionists?" "No, my band was Driving While Stupid."
Ryan: Yep, that's his band.
Jack: But he never mentioned that you were in the Skabortionists! He's never mentioned that before.
Ryan: So that was also just our goal: to be, not stupid, but it was definitely trying to be offensive and, like, shitty. So I know we got in trouble at a couple of gigs, but we were okay, I guess. I don't know. But that's how I met Daren and met a bunch of people, doing that. Then that eventually led to Shawn. But I guess I should talk about... He mentioned the straight edge hardcore thing. That was crazily huge in my hometown. I don't know if it's because there was a big wrestling contingent and that sort of crossover. [laughter]
Jack: If you couldn't get more on the nose, the culture around this is, like, wrestling equivalent.
Shawn: Yeah, and background for people who might not be as cooked in this stuff: in the '90s - I mean, it started in the late '80s - but in the '90s, especially in the late '90s, there was definitely a connection, a through line, from straight edge hardcore, youth crew style hardcore or even metalcore, chuggy hardcore, and dressing like the caricature of a jock.
Jack: The letterman jackets, you know, it's so on the nose.
Ryan: Or, like, gym shorts with a huge t-shirt or the long khaki shorts and a super long chain wallet with huge gauges.
Shawn: Headbands. [laughter]
Ryan: Everybody, the day they turned 18, getting straight tattoos, that kind of thing. Showing up to high school the next day with massive Xs tattooed on them, which was wild. But yeah, so that was just huge. And then also it was the late '90s, early 2000, so it was hyper masculine, aggressive hazing culture, which tied in really well with the straight edge hardcore scene. I also think it weirdly tied in with the kind of creeping right wing Christian conservatism, weirdly, because there was also a lot of religious crossover in that scene, even in my hometown, where people would be like, "I'm Christian straight edge and into like brutal, murderous, hardcore like Hatebreed." You couldn't believe how many Hatebreed shirts were at my high school. On any given day three people are wearing a Hatebreed shirt and there are 600 people in the whole school, you know what I mean?
Shawn: What was weird for me is, this is fast forwarding a little bit, but when I met all the people Ryan's talking about, I was really confused because I came from a scene that was - just to be frank - way nerdier and it was really not very masculine. It was sort of about being a nerd and kind of being... And some of my friends and even myself, I played a lot of sports. I've always been into playing sports and working out and running and all this stuff, but I never identified with that stuff. So to me, the punk thing in the hardcore thing was way more coming from Dischord, Fugazi, riot grrrl, that side of it. So when I met a lot of those kids, I was just like, "What? You're Christian?" And I was really anti-Christian at the time, you know, it was like almost to a point where it was ridiculous.
Ryan: So was our caricature version of a ska band called the Skabortionists, you know? [laughter] Well, the other context I would give is that it was just after like the Tom Green Show and the emergence of Jackass too, which is hyper fucked up and masculine and it was like filled with antics and a lot of teasing and hazing culture, big time. So you'd go to school and the people who like the same music as you that you were just at the skate park with talking to would still also be like, "What's up, you punk rock loser?" But it's like, we're both into it. It was really perplexing at times. It just permeated everything to, like, that's what we would do. You would just be like, "Well, we're going to go fuck with people tonight." You know what I mean? And that was just us emulating the people that were older than us who did the same thing or did it to us. And we were younger, so definitely some of my friends were like, "We gotta amp it up, get the antics harder." Which didn't always pan out real well.
Jack: No permanent damage, though, hopefully.
Shawn: No... [laughter].
Jack: Shawn's like, "Not really..." [laughter]
Ryan: But then sort of around me playing in that band would be when I started encountering Shawn, although I would have seen bands he was in play because he would have been in college pretty much already at that point. And the school we both went to was about 30 minutes from my hometown, so it was pretty close. And one of the closer places to go for other shows. So that's kind of where our story probably started to overlap, when I was like a junior in high school more or so was when I think I started to actually get to know Shawn.
[The Skabortionists]
Jack: How did you guys meet? Do you remember your first meeting?
Shawn: Well, I guess I could go into a little bit of the background because really, this is kind of a critical point in that era of music for this kind of Iowa thing in general. I ended up going to the University of Northern Iowa, which is about 2 hours from my hometown and 30 minutes from Ryan's hometown. And when I got there, I was like... You know, and I had played in bands in high school, but we'd only played local shows and it was not overly ambitious yet. But I had this group of friends from my hometown and there was this generation of kids who had all gotten into music at the same time in that era in mid-'90s to the late '90s. I graduated high school in '99, went away to college. University of Northern Iowa is in the middle of the state, it's in this town, Cedar Falls. It's kind of in the middle of nowhere a little bit. When I got there, I was worried. The first weekend I was looking around and I was like, "I don't see my people," you know? I was ready to get out of my hometown and I was like, "Did I just end up someplace even worse?" I remember that first weekend, this girl who I went to high school with - we were friends, but she wasn't a punker and any of that stuff - she was like, "Sean, I think I found some kids that are like your people. They were jumping off a roof of a dorm into a dumpster filled with boxes, and they had skateboards and they're dressed really weird and they're acting really crazy and stuff." [laughter]
Jack: You're like, "Oh yeah, these must be my people!" [laughter]
Shawn: I was like, "Alright, okay." Then it's the first week of class and I was walking across campus and about like 50 yards away, I saw this person and we just walked right up to each other because we could just see each other out of the crowd. You know, it was just these two punks basically, which is how we identified at the time. So we walked right up to each other and it was just like, "What's up, man?" And that was this guy, Jeff Eaton, who's still a really good friend of mine, and he was from Marshalltown, Iowa, which also had this really thriving crop of kids into punk and hardcore, into the underground music of the time.
Jack: If this is the same person, he's the lead singer of Modern Life is War.
Shawn: Yeah, so that's part of the story, too, that evolves: he went on to be the singer of this band Modern Life is War, a really successful hardcore band. So it was pretty much once Jeff and I met, then my friends I came up with from Muscatine met his friends from Marshalltown and the Waverly people. We were going to shows pretty much every single weekend somewhere, so that's how we got to know Daren. I don't know if he came to every one, but he came to a ton of FSU shows and he would drive up the 2 hours from Des Moines in a car with a bunch of other kids on a weeknight to see some thrash hardcore band play or a screamo band play or whatever. And so that was just how it all connected. But it also was interesting because it's also what created the diversity and tastes and personalities that would lead Ryan, Daren, Andy Spore and I to go on to do weirder bands that we ended up doing. Andy Spore, I'll mention him, he was someone who was a couple of years younger than me from my hometown, who ended up being sort of recruited to go to the University of Northern Iowa. And so sometimes these kids would just go to college to be around people, to be in a band, maybe more than they were going to actually get a degree. It was really a special time and I think that Cedar Falls era, once we got the FSU house going and started booking gigs, that's that's when we started to really tap in and fully understand the DIY thing, not as something that we just participated in from going to shows and buying stuff for mail orders and things, but literally starting to live it as a lifestyle and where we're bringing in these bands that we were networking with and it was like, "Oh, they're doing it, so we have to do it." And it was definitely cooked in the mythology of, like, Henry Rollins, Get in the Van, things like that were definitely in our zeitgeist. But I think that dialogue of bringing in these touring bands and we're throwing our own DIY shows and then going to lots of them. It just was natural that we just started to form more serious bands. That was the whole goal, I know when Modern Life is War was formed, for Jeff it was like, “We're going to go on tour and we're going to like tour as intensely as we can and we're going to go out and do it and we're going to put out our own 7 inch and we're going to like go all out.”
[Hugs "Death of a Postmodernist"]
Shawn: For us, it was similar. Andy Spore, Benji and I had been in this band Sender Receiver, which was a band of the era, sort of a post-hardcore, screamy hardcore band with more indie rock leanings, just like bands on Jade Tree or Ebullition, things like that. That's what we were aspiring to. That band folded and we needed a drummer, and I just remember seeing Ryan around at gigs and we all thought that Ryan was the really cool younger kid. We just thought Ryan must be the coolest of all these younger kids.
Jack: How much younger are you, Ryan?
Ryan: Four years. I'm '85.
Jack: Shawn, you were born in '81?
Shawn: Yeah, I was getting towards later college and he's just getting ready to go to college. You were still in high school.
Ryan: I was going to say, yeah, I was in high school and we started playing in Hugs. And I do remember meeting you more formally at one of those UNI high school, like, screenprint days.
Shawn: Okay, yeah.
Ryan: I remember getting to know you there a little more than just seeing you at a show. But yeah, it's funny to me to remember that concurrently to starting Hugs I was still in the Skabortionists, you know what I mean? At the same time which, not to not to derail, but you mentioned in high school your ambitions were a little less formalized with bands. But Travis, if you remember, was driven, he recorded a couple of times and put out CDrs and played every possible show we could. When I look at it, a lot more shows than I would expect for being in a small town, driving all over Iowa and playing a lot of shows for a two year period, because it really was just, I think, two years. But it's funny that it overlapped with starting Hugs, you know? Hugs started, like we were saying before, I would have been a senior in high school and for me it kind of coincided with being more serious about playing music too. I started taking drum lessons finally because I hadn't. Like I mentioned, my friend Travis had shown me how to do that for the specific purpose of each song. He'd be like, "Here's what you're gonna play." And I was, as a senior, kind of like, "Oh, I actually like this. I'm going to take this more seriously," and got a drum set. And then that coincided with Hugs. And so for me, meeting Shawn and all those people going to lots of shows in Cedar Falls and playing in that band, it just fast-forwarded everything. It kind of moved me into a different world because I had all these people with more experience who pulled me forward a little faster. Hugs we did for two years, we recorded a couple of times and put out a couple records and did a short tour and a long tour. And then at the end of the long tour, it seemed like the music in the van was starting to change a little more. What we were trying to do musically started to not make sense as much with being a hardcore band. And also Benji wasn't as into touring, so it kind of fizzled out naturally as everyone's interests started to veer because we started seeing bands like Wives or things that were hardcore adjacent, but a little bit weirder. Some of that kind of stuff and being more into Load, that just kind of pulled it further out of just wanting to be that hardcore band.
Shawn: Yeah, and that big tour we did was brutal too because we had a tire break off while driving down the interstate. I mean, a lot of the early tour stuff was pretty, like... There were some good shows and we had a good time, but there was also just some trial by fire, rough, people touring DIY style without a lot of money and driving vehicles that aren't great. I think we barely made it back home at the end of that tour.
Ryan: I think that's true, yeah. The door also fell off the van, I remember.
Shawn: We had a tire break off while driving down the highway and then I remember we had to cut the short tour short and we just drove straight back from New York to Iowa City. It was just brutal. So it was understandable that Benji was kind of like, "Yeah, I dunno..." [laughter]
Jack: "Maybe I'm good on this."
Ryan: Well, I was 19, so I was just so down. Like, none of that even phased me. I was like, "This is so sick." [laughter]
Shawn: You just roll with the punches.
Jack: Yeah, "This is real, man! It's real."
Ryan: Yeah, exactly. I also would only eat, like, apples too, because I was trying to be weird, I guess. I don't know. But it all made sense to me. I was like, "This is exactly what's supposed to happen."
Shawn: Well, and I think too, something to discuss is, we grew up with this mythology about touring. When we came up, it was the [Henry] Rollins Get in the Van thing. It was like, "Touring is like this, it should be kind of this adventure." It was like we were ascetics, you know, training ourselves to starve in the forest or whatever, you know, for real.
Jack: People don't understand. Dude, Jeff [Witscher] and I did this three week midwest tour a year ago and Jeff, God bless him, you know, he can hem and haw about all this but at the end of the day, he's like, "Dude, you gotta put your reps in. They don't know what it's like out here." And I'm like, "Jeff, you're a fucking veteran of the torture tour, of course you love doing this."
Shawn: Jeff might have actually done more torture tours than anyone. And he did many with Ryan and I. We're like, "We're stranded again. Are we going to have to hitchhike home?" [laughter]
Jack: Totally! Like, day three. [laughter]
Shawn: Ryan and I - and then oftentimes Jeff - continued to do these tours that would sometimes just be disasters for another ten years or something beyond these Hugs tours. But like Ryan was saying, that was the time, too, I feel like Ryan, Andy and I were all already kind of growing out of it by the time it really got Hugs rolling. Because I was this digger, and I was constantly out there just searching, kind of casting my weird net as far as I could in whatever way I could, to try to find things. And I remember getting into the Load record stuff and then getting into Wolf Eyes stuff, you know, American Tapes, Hanson. And then Black Dice had the connection back to things like the Boredoms and Black Dice had this connection back to the hardcore stuff. But they had come out of that and, you know, Beaches & Canyons came out and around that time, all those records, all that stuff was really permeating and sort of bubbling out from deeper in the underground. We started to get cued into that and I started ordering these zines and comics from a store and gallery in New York called Little Cakes. And what was really interesting about that is that the person who ran it, Hanna Fushihara, had lived and went to school in Providence at RISD, and she had come up with all the Fort Thunder people and knew all those people. I was ordering a lot of their artwork, self-published DIY zine and comic stuff from her, and she was like, "Who are you?" Cedar Falls, Iowa.
Jack: "How do you know about this?"
Shawn: Yeah, exactly. So then we started talking and she was like, "Oh, you should send me some of your artwork." And then I had also ordered some records from Load, and I had got copies of that newsprint zine that used to come out, that... I don't know if I ever found out who exactly was behind it, but it was all those people that came out of the Fort Thunder thing, even the direct members of Forcefield or Fort Thunder, but people like Chris Forgues, the Paper Rad people, Paper Radio, Paper Rodeo, whatever it was called, zine was massive to me. When I got the first copy of that, I was just blown away and floored by it. I have all the copies, I have them in the archive. So that's something else. I mean, I'm sure other people still have them, but that was the first stuff where it was taking all these underground DIY music lifestyle things that we'd become saturated in and then combining it with the art school thing, combining it with this visual art thing. And Forcefield had been in the Whitney Biennial and, like...
Ryan: The Lightning Bolt moment too, I don't know if you touched on that, and the pervasiveness of that Lightning Bolt DVD, The Power of Salad.
Jack: Power of Salad, yeah.
Ryan: The Paper Rad stuff too, going to that website. And it obviously has the Providence connection at times for all those people. But it just really all started to pull in that direction. And then I will say there were a couple of other earlier weird bands that I think started tipping us too, even seeing Black Eyes. I remember seeing them. That had a big influence.
Shawn: Oh yeah, for sure. We were really into them.
Ryan: Yeah, I remember seeing them when I was a senior. So when we were in Hugs, I remember liking that stuff, pulling me in from having been so into screamo and hardcore and stuff and then just being like, "Oh, but there is something else going on here. Gotta look deeper."
Shawn: It just exploded. It just all starts to cook together. So really, that moment, the same time we were discovering noise music of that era, like Load and American Tapes and all that, we were simultaneously discovering all this historical music, and it was just all exploding at the same time. So it was kind of weird to think back about because it was pretty overwhelming, the amount of music we were probably taking in across all these different time frames and genres, and it just totally exploded.
Ryan: Yeah, well, and that has to do with that beginning of the internet that we've kind of spoken about. Because I went to college in 2003 and it was the first time I had... I mean, I had a computer with the internet for a couple of years in high school, but going to college, you've got the main line, it's actually fast and you've got Soulseek and AllMusic, so I would just go down the AllMusic recommendation or it's like, "Oh, you like Suicide? You might like this." And just then I'd just be able to download it and it really just accelerated hearing everything. It was totally shattering, you know?
Shawn: And that was kind of the crucial point where everyone was getting online, the accessibility was becoming more, but it wasn't oversaturated yet. So the kind of the pre-internet, maybe, socialization was still there where the networking could just flourish. By the time we started really touring, it had become a lot easier. But also people were still really, like... The engagement was still there in a way that I think is different now, you know? So it was just this really distinct moment where you had all these things sort of happening simultaneously and too, for me, doubling down on the visual art side of it, some of us who were also art students, I feel like for me, I really gravitated towards the direction we're talking about because of its parallels with visual art as well. Whereas the hardcore scene, that wasn't really as much of a thing or it wasn't as developed or it wasn't as expansive. But when, when we started listening to Black Dice and looking at the artwork those guys did and the world that they seemed to operate in, in New York, it was like, "This is everything we're like into all in one place." Because Ryan and I and Andy Spore - and I think Daren was very much this person too - we were all really interested in weird movies, we're interested in weird music, we're interested in weird art and the history of art. So that was the music that most represented it. I mean, you know, listening to Wolf Eyes back in the day, that music was, like... What was so cool about it was it was so low brow and so high brow all at the same time. And I think that's where we all came from too, because we were these aspirational artists, art school types, but then we were also working class, small town people. So when you listen to Wolf Eyes, it's like, "This makes sense to us." Because it felt like that's where those dudes were coming from as well. They were just older and bigger weirdos than we were, you know? But they had come out of these Michigan towns and were, like... Where it sounds like a B-movie horror soundtrack, but it's also infused with listening to free jazz and the art world or whatever. So that just expanded it all, you know?
Ryan: Well, they had some kind of DVD too.
Shawn: Yeah, I had it.
Ryan: Yeah, some videos that they had too that put the visual to it before we ever saw them live. And you're like, "Oh yeah, this has a challenging video aesthetic as well."
Shawn: I think we had the mentality too, and I think it was probably the mentality of a lot of the music we're talking about, of coming from the art school side of it, at least for me. I had the ambition that was like, "I need to be pushing at the boundaries for myself at least, whether I'm going to be able to push at the boundaries of whatever the larger artistic dialog is or artistic history is, that remains to be seen." And I still feel this way. I feel like it was necessary to be pushing myself at the borderline of what was comfortable. Essentially we had to push ourselves at the level of failure, basically. I don't know where that comes from, but that was just always what I was interested in. But it seemed like part of the music. We would listen to Suicide in the van and then we'd follow it up with Albert Ayler. A lot of that older stuff, like Sun City Girls or something, we felt like it was for its time and what it did, it was all like music that was pushing at the boundary of whatever the genre was or whatever the thing was at the time.
[Raccoo-oo-oon "Black Branches"]
Jack: So from here, what's the sequence from this era, I guess Hugs and then after you're getting into weirder, weirder music, and then Raccoo-oo-oon, which was you two, Andy Spore and Daren.
Shawn: Yeah, the origins of Raccoo-oo-oon. So I ended up graduating and around the time of I think the last Hugs tour, I was getting ready to move to Iowa City. Is that right, Ryan?
Ryan: Yep.
Shawn: Yeah, so right when we did that big tour, Andy was already in Iowa City because he had moved there to go to film school at the University of Iowa. And I was moving down there to go to graduate school. And again, really, I was just sticking around because I had a serious girlfriend at the time who was also in the scene and was a good friend of all of ours. So to stay with her and also essentially to stay around my friends, to play music or whatever, I ended up choosing to stay in-state to go to grad school. Andy and I ended up in Iowa City together then, and Daren had moved to Iowa City to go to college. And I remember Daren and I started hanging out a lot and we just started jamming. I think it might have kind of been Daren's idea, but he was just like, "Let's just jam and, you know, play. We're not going to just play guitars or whatever, we're just going to get stuff and jam with whatever junk we can find." Andy was around because Andy was dating my roommate at the time and Andy was one of my best friends. So Andy and I, I remember, were hanging out and we were hanging out with Daren a lot. Andy and I were basically every day watching some, like... Because we finally had access to a school library that had every great film ever made. We were also watching every heavy duty art film and world cinema title from history at the time. [laughter] So yeah, we just started jamming, you know? And it was sort of aimless originally. But in this little house I lived in, we were just jamming in the basement and then it just became clear, Ryan was living in Cedar Falls still, but it's like, "Yeah, this is actually turning into something and we have to get Ryan into this because he was the other..." You know, we're still good friends with him and by that point, he'd become a really good drummer. And it just made sense to try to get Ryan down and include him in that.
Ryan: Yeah, I still have the tape. You guys had recorded a tape. You played, like, one show, I think, and then gave me a tape of the songs and you're like, "Figure out parts." And then we just kind of moved from there.
Shawn: I don't even remember that.
Ryan: Yeah, so I have a tape that's just you guys. And how I always describe that band, too, is eventually it became four people who were trying to solo, basically almost four people trying to be the most active voice. So it became it became quite an interesting sound at times... [laughter]
Shawn: Well and too, the reason it got the goofball name, I think there's some things about that band that I think in certain ways don't hold up, but then in other ways is again a really indicative of the time and indicative of what we were really listening to, because I think we were trying to come from a place where, like, we were doing very serious music, but we didn't... And I think this has come up in other things, like Paper Rad, for example. They were really serious artists and obviously making something that was really good and really special for the time, but then there was this sense of humor about it, right? And even like Boredoms, if you listen to the Boredoms, they had that element or Sun City Girls, they had that.
Jack: So goofy, yeah.
Shawn: And so, yeah, that's kind of what we were trying to do with Raccoo-oo-oon and the name in the sense of this music is really serious, but also don't take it too seriously because also the way we thought about essentially appropriation is the product of who we are as people coming from Iowa is, like, we're just a product of consumerism. We're the product of absorbing things through consumerism, essentially. So whether it's from a library book or from a movie or whatever, everything is coming to us that we're into through this mediated thing. A part of it is we hung out in this shitty basement all the time, and there was this active group of raccoons that lived outside that house that we would see every night, hanging out on the porch.
Jack: Amazing.
Shawn: And part of it is like stemming from we were kind of trying to conceptualize that and the band, where we have these sounds and we're doing these things and we're supposed to be quasi mystical or psychedelic or something. But then that's also just a joke because it's absurd. And so that's kind of what we were trying to play with in that band. But in this era now, and reasonably so, that wouldn't make sense. But at the time I felt like that was kind of what we were trying to express. So even with the name, it's this ridiculous, kind of dumb name. I think a lot of our old friends thought we were dumb and our music sucked and it's like, "What the hell?" Or, "Those guys are so pretentious now." Or whatever. Because a lot of the people didn't get it, you know? And I think some of them came around to it, for sure. But we were doing Raccoo-oo-oon and Jeff and those guys were doing Modern Life is War. And that's a big shift, it's a huge gulf. So initially I felt like just the four of us were kind of the scene, you know? But I don't know. What's your reflections on that, Ryan?
Ryan: Yeah, that seems kind of the same or I think that seems accurate. You know, there were a couple other people in Iowa City into weird stuff, like Chris Weirsema, at that time.
Shawn: Alex Body is someone I remember.
Ryan: So there were some people also on that same trajectory but there was a big void there in Iowa City at the time. It was kind of different for me because I was in Cedar Falls, so the entire time that Raccoo-oo-oon was a band, I would drive the 2 hours on a Friday and we'd practice Friday and Saturday, and then I'd come back on Sunday and go to school, and just operated that way. So I was sort of a part of whatever the scene was there, but also adjacent to it a lot of the time too. It was kind of interesting at that point for me, kind of operating in two different worlds because Cedar Falls started to dwindle, it stayed kind of on the hardcore tip, but also people started to move away and there just became a little bit less and less going on over time. And I gravitated towards Iowa City.
Shawn: And then Iowa City started to grow again because we started to bring people in and book shows. And then Chris, who is somebody who Ryan mentioned, was someone who was into weird music and noise, and he started booking shows. So then it just slowly started to climb. Evan Miller was someone we became friends with who is really close to what we were doing, fit in our kind of crew. And yeah, I just started building in the same way, but it shifted from booking USA Is A Monster to booking a show with USA Is A Monster, Kites and Nautical Almanac, all in the same bill pretty quickly.
[Raccoo-oo-oon "Hundred Eyes"]
Jack: Can you think of any memorable tour stories or anything like that? Which is such a huge topic.
Shawn: It's infinite, man. [laughter]
Jack: Of course.
Shawn: I'll bring up one first and then Ryan, you should go and we'll link it back in with some of the other people we've talked about in this podcast. One of the first Raccoo-oo-oon tours, I think it was maybe the first, we had bought this giant Econoline van that was really crappy. It was terrible. And when my dad saw it before he left on tour, he was just kind of like, "Oh, good luck." [laughter] You know? I was actually in this public art exhibition in Baltimore that was put on by Hanna Fushihara, who I talked about earlier, Little Cakes gallery. It included people like Dearraindrop and Joe Grillo, people like that from that world, and it was these weirdo public sculptures. And I had actually had my sculpture in the van that I was taking to install at this show in Baltimore.
Jack: Oh my God. [laughter]
Shawn: And as soon as we left Iowa City, I remember Andy was driving and it was kind of like, "Yeah, hopefully we make it." And that tour had a lot of disastrous things happen. The tour ended with us breaking down in upstate New York at Lake George, the actual Lake George, and living in the woods. We had no way home literally because we were too young to rent a car affordably and we had all this gear anyways. But I remember when we were in Baltimore for a few days and our car broke down, it was breaking down on the way to Baltimore and I ended up on the phone with Hanna Fushihara. We talked and I was like," I don't know if we're going to make it, our van's already breaking down." And she's like, "Just go straight to Baltimore and call Twig [Harper] from Nautical Almanac. I'll give you a number, I think you could stay at their house." And this is before I had booked a show for them in Iowa City or anything. I called them and I knew their band, but we're intimidated, you know, we're younger and we're still a little bit green at that point in a lot of ways. So we drive to Tarantula Hill, which is where they lived, this warehouse venue, and end up staying with them. And I remember ringing the doorbell and Twig Harper coming downstairs and it was a really blown out part of Baltimore. A lot of it was amazing but also really intimidating. They're totally nice and it was amazing, they let us stay there, but we're also way younger than them and way more green to certain aspects of the scene we were starting to operate in. So it was just really interesting and super memorable. And I just remember Twig seeming like he was... And I'm tall, I'm 6' 4", but he seemed like he was seven foot tall, it was just, like... You know, he's just, like, the king of the weirdos, in a positive way, but also in a way that was intimidating. And they're this band and their vibe had this intensity to it. So we ended up staying there and then I got my stuff to the art show and we were in Baltimore for a few days and we met Joe Grillo from Dearraindrop, who I haven't kept in touch with over the years, but we were really into their artwork and thought it was amazing. So that was cool. And then we ended up playing at Tarantula Hill a few days later, which was originally planned, that was part of the tour. And on that tour was Men Who Can't Love, which is a crew from L.A. of all these L.A. younger dudes doing solo noise sets, and I didn't really know about him. I knew about some of the L.A. stuff. I didn't really know specifically about them because we had known the Wives/No Age guys and had become familiar with some of the L.A. stuff percolating at that time. There's there's other stories around this, but at that show a bunch of the people in Man Who Can't Love who had dropped off the tour and they're riding around in this little truck and Jeff Witscher, who we've mentioned, who's your good friend, Jack, was at that show and he was performing and I'll just never forget. And his brother Greg also played and then...
Ryan: I think Cole [Miller].
Shawn: Yeah, Cole played and then Matt [Sullivan], Privy Seals, played. And I remember Jeff's set being really intense. It was super short and really good. I've got Polaroids from that show, I think of everybody. But I remember talking to Jeff Witscher outside, and I just had this feeling, and I'm not, like... Whatever, I just had this feeling like, "I'm gonna know this guy for a long time. There's something about this where I'm going to know this guy for a long time." And we all know this, Jeff is a really charismatic person, he has a lot of charms. But you fast forward a year, or even less, and he's literally living in my basement. [laughter]
Jack: Yes!
Shawn: In Iowa City, which was wild. But I remember we talked to them and I remember Jeff and his brother talking about like, "Yeah man, we're going to go up to New York and we're probably just going to have to find jobs and stay in the truck until we can get enough money to get back to the West Coast." [laughter] We were in a dissimilar boat that much, but we had these plans, we were going to meet up with those dudes in New York and kick it, because we just got along with them right away and we're all around the same age. And I feel like we all kind of had this similar energy, although we were really nice to each other and those guys I think were all kind of brutal to each other. [laughter]
Jack: Trying to fuck with each other every step of the way. [laughter]
Shawn: Sabotage each other every day, you know? I mean, we would have our inner band spats, I remember Andy and I would butt heads sometimes, but I feel like it was more because we were weirdly like actual brothers in a way, and had kind of grown up together in a lot of ways. But yeah, they are in New York and we never showed up because we broke down in upstate and we're just stranded there and had no way home. And Ryan, did you almost get busted for panhandling?
Ryan: I tried to sell our t-shirts in the park. [laughter] And then the cops came. It was, like, 10 minutes later. It was like a parody where they were just like, "You can't do this." And I was just like, "Okay." [laughter] Yeah, it was a bleak one.
Shawn: During the whole time in Baltimore we had tried to get our van fixed and Twig just had us take it to an AutoZone parking lot where these freelance mechanics would work on stuff. So we got it fixed there a little bit, but this van was just fated for the junkyard, you know?
Ryan: Do you remember, though, Shawn, after that we got stuck in Baltimore again on the same tour with the van. And we stayed at the Talibam! guy's house. Do you remember that?
Shawn: I do remember that a little bit.
Ryan: It was so hot and they were remodeling it, so it was just torn apart. And we just sat on their couch, sweating. And the reason I really remember it is because we watched Even Dwarfs Started Small. [laughter]
Shawn: Yes!
Ryan: So it was driving us insane. And the other big thing was they had this dog that was on the most insane diet, or they just fed it raw chicken and garlic. [laughter]
Shawn: Oh, did Rick [Weaver] from the New Flesh live there?
Ryan: Maybe that's what I'm thinking.
Jack: Rick Weaver, yeah.
Shawn: And he went on to do Form a Log with Ren [Schofield].
Jack: One of the greatest bands ever.
Ryan: Yeah, it was just sweating on this couch in Baltimore in the summer with no AC, watching that movie and the dog just sitting there, breathing garlic. [laughter] Ugh, I could not eat garlic for a couple of years. [laughter] And then we still went on to break down in upstate New York. We were lucky, we called Shawn's girlfriend at the time, Sarah, and our friend, my roommate, also named Ryan.
Shawn: Good friend of ours still.
Ryan: Yeah. They went and picked up, I think, Andy Spore's parents' minivan. So two people went to somebody's parents' house they don't know, borrowed a minivan and drove 24 hours straight to pick us up.
Shawn: And then turned around and drove 24 hours straight back. [laughter]
Ryan: Also meanwhile, Andy and I were like, "Okay, well, what do we do with our van? I guess we could scrap it." So we find a scrap yard and we go and it was out of a movie: this guy on a tractor with a pistol on his hip and he's like, "Well, I'd love to give you some money for it, but," and then he said some some slurs that shouldn't be repeated, and he's like, "But basically the only thing that's worth any money are the tires." And so he gave us $50. [laughter]
Jack: You're like, "Yeah, yeah, I'm sure that you're being completely honest about it."
Ryan: So he gave us $50 bucks and we were just terrified. And then also we accidentally left our merch in the van, which was cool too. [laughter]
Jack: He's like, "Finally the big payback! The big cash-out for me."
Ryan: Yeah, but that was definitely a moment, that's for sure.
[Wet Hair "Endless Procession"]
Shawn: So Raccoo-oo-oon kind of dissolved. We're all still good friends, but it just... And that goes back to I don't think we had ambition, we wanted to be successful, but it was all kind of amorphous and it wasn't like we were interested in being rock stars or something. I don't know. So there wasn't a big ceiling, it was just more whatever.
Ryan: I think you just wanted to keep going, or at least I did.
Shawn: Yeah!
Ryan: It was just always like, "Yeah, I just want to keep doing stuff. I just want to keep making art, making music, keep playing. And just whatever, saying yes to it."
Shawn: Yeah, I'm not trying to overly virtue signal with that, but I think our expectations just weren't that big, you know? And so Andy moved to L.A. and the band kind of naturally dissolved. Daren was just kind of doing Daren stuff and doing solo stuff. And I had started doing Wet Hair solo and I just felt really limited doing it by myself and I didn't really enjoy making music just by myself. So it made a lot of sense to be like, "Well, I still hang out with Ryan all the time. He's still one of my best friends." I mean, if you're in a young band and you're looking for someone to be in a band with, the type that Ryan Garbes is, is a pretty good selection because he's really good at being chill, pretty much riding with anything that's going to happen. [laughter] He's super low maintenance on where he's sleeping, how many clothes he has, how clean he is, and he just really enjoys playing the drums and playing music. [laughter] So it was like, "Ryan's still here, let's just bring Ryan into Wet Hair." So that's how Wet Hair got going. And then through our own tastes shifting to evolve and the era evolving, that band from the origin of just the two of us to when the band later on with Justin Thye as the bass player, that band evolved a lot over the course of a few records. But we just kept doing it, we kept touring, we just kept throwing shows in Iowa City, we kept bringing people through. We just kept drilling down on all of it. And in a lot of ways it was completely a continuation of what we'd established with Raccoo-oo-oon, and then Night People was inspired by all this stuff we're talking about. You look at Wolf Eyes and they have Hanson, at the time [Aaron] Dilloway was in it, they had Hanson and then American Tapes, so all the members of Wolf Eyes had their own offshoot tape labels. So for us, it was a way for us to have more merch on the table on tour or be able to turn around a release, just a tour-only tape, because we didn't have money. We were just trying to get by on these DIY tours. So it's a way to have more merch on the table. But also it was like, "Oh, we're friends with Evan Miller, he's this great guitarist. He's like a good friend of ours, no one's putting out Evan's stuff. Let's just put out Evan's stuff." And that tape's on the table, gets in the network or whatever the distros at the time are. So it was just like that. And it was a pretty cool collective label. I remember maybe Andy Spore and I were maybe the helm of it a little bit more. Andy had his stuff, his he curated a little bit more. And then I had my stuff that I curated a little bit more and that's just how it started. And even in its origins, it was pretty eclectic. Andy had a side project called Meth Teeth, it was like his jazz group. Feel free to check me out any of this stuff, Ryan, because this is a long time ago.
Ryan: No, that's kind of right. I just remember it started to put out our own tape and then we just kept being like, "Oh, we can put a zine out or a DVD." Just kind of in the vein of the Paper Rad and Load stuff we liked, where it can contain anything we want. And it became a way to meet people and, like you said, release things for people we met on tour and then just kind of building that community and getting ourselves deeper in the scene. I feel like, too, it's obviously a good way to build connections with people, to release their tape and get closer. And then they helped us out with shows and we would be able to take the tapes out on tour and all that kind of thing.
Shawn: At the time, too, you had these really distinct regional hubs, right? And you had these towns and cities that had like their own vibe, you know, like we met you the first time in St. Louis and you were really young, but St. Louis through Ghost Ice and Josh Levi, had its own thing, the record store [ed. Apop Records] and stuff, it had a vibe. Or we'd go to Providence, which obviously had a real distinct vibe. Western Mass, George [Myers] and those people had a vibe. And Woods in New York City. There are these hubs, the scenes had a real distinct vibe. And most of those people had some kind of label or some kind of thing that was sort of disseminating out of those zones. So it kind of made sense for us just to do the same thing. We went from just putting out stuff that was in our orbit, to people were approaching the label and sending stuff in and we'd meet people that weren't represented at all. And there were just some things that ended up getting kind of popular, like Dirty Beaches. I think I put out maybe his first release, no one was really paying attention, it was sort of ignored. And then I put it out and people really liked it. Or becoming friends with Peaking Lights when they moved back to the Midwest. You know, just through certain things like that or the label kind of got natural momentum from being around and certain releases, so Wet Hair was really ingrained with that.
Jack: Yeah, and you were super prolific with that. You put out hundreds of tapes.
Shawn: I think it was 250 releases or something. And some of the tapes at a certain point, like... I remember Andy Spore in the Raccoo-oo-oon era had designed some of the dubbing set up. So we'd find these dual cassette decks and in the peak era there was a stack where it was, I think, nine or ten on one side, as A-side, and nine or ten on the B-side, as the B-side, and they're all chained together and would duplicate all the tapes that way. Well, I kind of wish, looking back, I would have just sent them to National Audio or whoever and got them done. [laughter] Because you end up with errors and then, like, you know...
Jack: Yeah, three out of the four tapes are good.
Shawn: Yeah, and I would feel bad about that. But we were silk screening all the artwork, it was all, like...
Ryan: So committed to the DIY.
Shawn: It was just so personal in this weird way.
Jack: You guys both eventually ended up moving to St. Paul, Minnesota. And I'm curious, if you want to talk about individually what you guys have been up to artistically and everything.
Shawn: I'll let you take this one first since I've been kind of talking a lot.
Ryan: Sure, yeah. Well, Wet Hair just kind of ended up falling apart and coinciding with maybe challenging times in me and Shawn's lives also. So Shawn ended up moving to Minneapolis with a friend of ours, Josh, who already lived up here. And it sort of started an exodus.
Jack: Is that Vegan Bad Boy?
Ryan: That's Vegan Bad Boy himself, yep. [laughter] So he was one of the initial poles, a real magnet. Although, Wet Hair ended, it kind of ended up that the whole band and a few of our other friends ended up moving up here, but Wet Hair ended. So I just started living, basically chilled out because I was pretty jaded for a while from all the touring and stuff. And then kept recording music, always. So I did a bunch of solo music for the first few years that I lived here and then eventually kind of started wanting to play music again with people and getting back into the drums. So I've done a few little projects in the last few years, but in the last year I've gotten really back into playing again and have been playing with a couple of friends casually. And then I'm in a band called Trix, that's kind of a synth and Wire/Feelies-ish band. That's kind of the gist of it. It was a sort of natural progression of hitting the thirties and, you know, life taking over for a minute, but never completely stopped doing anything. But in the last two years, COVID refocused it into being a really enjoyable pursuit again. I put out a record with Moon Glyph in 2020 and that was a really long recording process, a solo tape and something I was really proud of, but also kind of felt like a natural button on some of my solo work. And then with the end of COVID, it felt like a really good transition into just playing again. I'm kind of more re-enthused about playing music than I have been in a long time.
Shawn: Yeah, is there anything else you want to say, Ryan, before I give my little spiel?
Ryan: Oh, no, that kind of sums it up for me.
Shawn: I reflect on this a lot because it's interesting how, say, the first ten years of being in bands and underground music and doing all that stuff went by so fast, but then the last ten years where I sort of became inactive for big stretches of it, seems like less time, but also more time somehow. The whole time frame of it all gets really skewed. But I think it's the intensity we went at when we were younger, up until the end of the Wet Hair era, I think was just not sustainable, ultimately, because the intensity, the pace, was just kind of a lot ultimately. And basically what happened to me is, on our last Wet Hair tour, we went on a tour with Merchandise, a band from Tampa, Florida, friends of ours we'd gotten to know through the networks of whatever, underground music. Dave [Vassalotti] and Carson [Cox], good friends, I still consider them friends and keep in touch with Carson for sure. But that band was kind of breaking at that point, they were getting really popular. So we did the tour with them, but I was just kind of... Honestly, it was falling apart at that period of my life. I didn't really know it yet, but I was just super burned out in personal ways and then also artistic ways and touring and I just kind of unraveled during that tour. And that tour had some really amazing moments and some really personally psychedelic moments. And also just the amount of energy I had put out in touring and with the label and all these things up to that point just couldn't be sustained. So I just stepped away entirely. I basically moved to St. Paul, bought a house really cheap at the time and just wound down Night People here. I mean, Ryan and I obviously stayed good friends, kept hanging out. I basically just had to take a step away and refigure out my life and deal with becoming more self aware and mental health stuff and just just understanding the last ten years, too, you know. And so, yeah, that's basically what I did. I kept collecting records at an intense pace. That didn't quit. Spent a lot of time sitting in my room, listening to reggae and dancehall records. And from that I was kind of like, "Well, I'm kind of feeling like I want to do music again, but this is this music I'm influenced by now, I'm really interested in, but I'm how how could I do that appropriately and not in a lame way and not in this shitty appropriation way?" And it sort of came about organically. I met my friend Derrick Maxwell, he had been living in New York and he'd moved back, so he was just like, "Oh, I want to build this custom sound system and then start DJing a little bit." And it eventually led to us creating our own productions. So it just sort of organically happened for me to end up doing music again. It's also cool, for me, Ryan and I don't make music anymore together, but I feel like we're just as good a friends as we ever have been.
