Interviews: Talking 'No Normal' with Matt "Food" Ellis of Kill Lincoln

In just a few days, Kill Lincoln will be releasing their fourth album No Normal. The album captures the band’s kinetic energy perfectly as they blast through 11 tracks full of killer riffs, spirited horn lines, whirlwind drumming, dynamic vocals, and lively shoe squeaks in just over 24 minutes. The band explores mental health, existential dread, the impact that the pandemic has had both personally and on society at large, and the need for community with lyrics that are cathartic and impossible not to sing along with. No Normal will be available everywhere via Bad Time Records on September 27. Kill Lincoln will be touring the US in October and will be playing their album release show at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC in November.
Punknews editor Em Moore caught up with saxophonist and vocalist Matt “Food” Ellis to talk about the new album, the evolution of the band’s songwriting process, Mike Park writing a song for the album, Riker from Star Trek, and so much more. Read the interview below!

This interview between Em Moore and Matt “Food” Ellis took place over Zoom on September 18, 2024. This is a transcription of their conversation and has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The album cover for No Normal features a collage of photos that your drummer Tyler has taken on tour. Do you have a favourite memory that is captured in these photos?

Oh man, there’s a lot there. I particularly like the upper left-hand corner. It’s all of us playing various sports and we’re all real bad at it. [laughs] That section of the album art makes me laugh every time. All of those pictures hold great memories for me as well as the rest of the guys for sure. There’s a lot to look at on there.

It’s so cool, there’s so much happening!

Yeah! [laughs] It was a pretty cool idea. It’s reflective of our time together, not only in the last 4 years but over all the years as a band. It’s a good collage of all of our memories. I think it’s pretty neat. For those who have been listening to us for a while, you’ll see past members featured in some of those photos as well. It’s a good compilation of our time.

You recorded this album at District Recording with Ryan Perras exactly 4 years after you recorded Can’t Complain there. What was it like going back after 4 years?

This is our pattern, every 4 years we gotta go back to San Jose and record with Ryan. We said “no normal” but I guess this is normal. [laughs] Just a little normal, as a treat.
Ryan has done a lot of work to his studio so being there was quite different. His recording space has been fully renovated and looks nothing like it did when we first recorded there during Can’t Complain. But arriving at his door and being in the same part of town and everything definitely brought back a lot of those memories from Can’t Complain. The experience was better than Can’t Complain because Can’t Complain was at the beginning of the pandemic and we felt very unsure, a little scared, and if I’m being honest, a bit rushed to get that project done. This time, with No Normal, we felt at ease and very comfortable with what we were recording and the timeline we had.
Ryan is a great person to hang around with and spend many hours with in a studio so that definitely was a plus. It was nice. We really like recording with Ryan and certainly like what he’s done to his studio. I hope when people hear No Normal they will understand where we were at emotionally and mentally when we were recording. We did a lot of work in that studio over the week we were there. Hope it all got through.

How do you feel you’ve grown as a band and as a person over those 4 years?

For me, I think exponential growth is the way to describe it. Can’t Complain was our first real release in a long time and that fueled a lot of different performance opportunities for us as a band. Anytime you’re on the road or away performing with the same group of folks you come together in different ways to get the job done and that only solidifies the more you do it. I think these past 4 years have been very busy for us. If I had to put it into terms, I’d say it’s like re-connecting. We’ve always been connected in a way, but it’s just connecting in a different way to be able to perform the way we have been over the past 4 years. It’s been nice. I feel rejuvenated for sure.

Being on the road must really deepen those bonds.

Absolutely! I know we don’t get around as much as a lot of bands out there but the things we do together on the road, the shows that we play, and the other bands we play with, it’s a really great experience for us as musicians and as fans of ska and punk music. Playing with bands like Big D and the Suicide Machines and Mustard Plug and countless other bands that we grew up listening to, to experience that together…you really can’t put a price on that. These are times I’ll never forget. I’m so happy to get to do this sort of thing.

You sing a lot more on the record. What inspired your decision to do that?

I’m not really sure. [laughs] Sometimes when me and Mike sit down to write tunes, he has more of a broader concept of what a song should be and what part should go where. Sometimes he’ll just look at me and be like, “You write a verse here and sing that and then I’ll come in with a chorus”. That’s just how it has worked. I don’t mind that writing style at all. I think it’s very easy for me to get behind something like that. We decide what we wanna sing about, what the song’s about, and then we just come up with our own elements to add to that song. I guess I came out a little more vocally on this album than most. It’s just one of those things, you find a way to express yourself on a particular project and that’s how I did it. We all have our own little thing that we add to each song. I think it’s nice to hear those differences between Mike’s voice and my voice and CJ’s voice and the way we play our instruments differently but together.

Everyone’s identity is there.

Yeah. I think that really came to fruition with Can’t Complain and over the last 4 years we developed more and more together as a group. Obviously, that comes with performance and figuring out where we lie on stage with each other. We’re trying harder nowadays to make music that sounds like we would play it live. There’s not a lot of studio magic involved. When we’re writing we try to come up with parts that are indicative of our playing styles in a live setting. That’s another thing I hope comes through for people when they hear the full album. [laughs]

There’s a lot of energy to it. You can hear Drew’s shoes too, that was great!

Yeah! That was a moment of genius in the studio, I’d say. [laughs] It was like a lightning bolt like, “We gotta get Drew on this album!”

How did you record it?

It was a little bit of construction. We had a floor mic and then overheads and we told him to go at it and do his thing. [laughs] I thought it came out pretty well. You know what you’re hearing when you hear it.

On this album you’re talking about everything you’ve gone through in the past 4 years with the pandemic and mental health but in a previous interview, Mike said that you were revisiting ideas from 10 years ago as well. What were those ideas?

The way that Mike, in particular, writes is he’ll come up with a riff or a chord progression, do a really rough recording of it, and keep it in a file on his computer for later use. I do the same thing. I use my phone’s voice memo and I’ll sing out a horn part into it. I look like a fucking crazy person. [laughs] We’ll have little bits and pieces of things from years ago that we’ll revisit from time to time. There were a couple of things in No Normal that came from relics that he had sitting around. It’s probably stuff that’s so old that I don’t remember it anymore. [laughs] We dug into the past a little bit to help our way forward. It’s good to keep things like that around because you never know when you’re going to use them. I’d say we’ve developed a pretty distinct writing style now. A lot of those old riffs and chord progressions and stuff, they can just kind of plug in and it can complete a song for us if we’re having a tough time or something. It’s good to have a library to visit. [laughs]

How do you feel your songwriting has evolved?

For me personally, I definitely feel like I’ve gotten better at writing for trombone. I’m not a trombone player, so at first it was certainly tough for me to be like, “Oh this isn’t too far of a stretch for trombone so let’s put that in there”. But this time around I was definitely more conscious of what is possible to play on trombone accurately and efficiently every time we play it. That’s definitely been a growing point for me.
I think also grooving with the way Mike writes has made songwriting more fluid between the two of us. Back when we were actually doing demos and writing for the album, we did a lot of writing remotely. He would come up with chord progressions and send those over to me and then I’d sit on the couch and figure out what would sound good. We would just be sending these things back and forth to each other. There wasn’t any point where I disliked anything that he sent me. It all sounded good to me and I could always hear something within those chords. I think our bond as composers has strengthened. It’s really nice. I never really had that connection with someone before so it’s good to have that now. I feel more complete as a musician to have a songwriting partner that I really jive with.
Before we were doing rough demos and stuff like that, I went up to Mike’s place and we just sat around in the basement and hashed out ideas. He’d be playing something on guitar and I would play something on my sax and we’d feel out what direction things were going. Even in that very formative instance, I think something was there and we could bring it out between our instruments. It’s cool to be able to do that. It was definitely a bit of a time crunch because we set the recording deadline first and then we were like, “Oh shit, we’ve gotta write music for this!” [laughs]

A good motivating factor!

A good deadline will put you in motion pretty quick. We wouldn’t have done it that way unless we knew that we could do it. When it comes to creating music we knew we could hash it out and it would be fine, like whatever comes out is the way we’re gonna want it to sound. It worked out.

There’s a song written by Mike Park on the album called “Coming or Going”. What was your reaction when he reached out about writing a song for the album?

Oh man! [laughs] It was very surreal. Mike Park and Mike Sosinski have had a relationship together ever since Mike was living out in California. They didn’t live very far apart and Mike Park is a part owner in the recording studio that we recorded at. So we’ve had that connection with Mike Park but for him to offer to write us a song…[laughs] It was so crazy! I’ve said this before to several people and I’m sure I’ll say it again, if somebody had told me back when I was 15 or so that I would be mingling with these people that I’ve been listening to for so long, I wouldn’t believe you. It’s all very surreal.
Mike Park sent us a little demo that he recorded on his voice memo app on his phone with just him and his acoustic guitar. It was a very rough recording but everything was still there, you knew it was Mike Park. It was a very Mike Park song. I remember the first time listening to it, I was like, “Oh shit! I hope I don’t make this sound awful for him!” [laughs] It was a great honour for sure because Mike is a wonderful composer and songwriter. We were ecstatic to have some of his material on our album. It’s really nice.

The video the band posted on Instagram of Mike Park in the studio while Ume was recording vocals for the song and holding up a frog statue is great.

That was a great conflict for Ume at the time. He was in the middle of recording vocals for this wonderful song that Mike Park wrote and the whole time his idol was holding this thing that he’s deathly afraid of. It was like good and evil coming together, I guess. [laughs]

You played the flute during the opening of that song. What was that experience like?

That is my flute playing, for better or worse. [laughs] So when we got the first demo from Mike Park, we decided to do our own sort of thing with it. The way the song sounds on the album isn’t necessarily how Mike’s original demo sounded. We decided to take it and make it more Kill Lincoln, I guess. Kill Lincoln is pretty weird so I was like, “Let’s make a weird intro for this!” I essentially just took the main horn line from that demo and I was like, “What if we do a silly trad thing at the beginning of it?” [laughs] When we re-recorded that song, Mike laid down a more trad ska, rocksteady intro for it and I was like, “Flute’s pretty stupid, let’s do that!” Not to offend any flute players out there! I mean my flute playing is stupid, just to clarify.

Don’t lose your flutist audience.

Right, I don’t mean to do that at all. I don’t want to alienate any flutists. I just hold the flute, I’m not a flutist myself. [laughs] We had this trad intro and I was like, “Let’s do flute on it”. In my very limited knowledge of recording programs and stuff, I was like, “Let’s put some weird delay and reverb on it”. The demo version that we recorded is even worse because I don’t know what I’m doing with any kind of sound effects at all but I had that idea and I wanted that idea to be expressed. I think it came out about the way I imagined it in my weird head. [laughs] We were like, “How do we do it our way while still paying homage to Mike Park?” The demo started out more trad so we wanted to stay true to that and not completely dismantle his composition here.

“Planted” closes with a sample from the “Music Store” episode of Check it Out! With Dr. Steve Brule. How did the sample come about?

We always found the Steve Brule character really funny. For years we’ve found that absurdist humour entertaining at the very least. We were like, “What’s something that’s just off the wall that we can put in there?” There’s one particular episode where Steve Brule goes to a music store or something like that, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen that particular skit. We thought it was fitting. There’s a dichotomy when you’re doing this sort of work and you’re a musician writing your own music. It’s like, “I feel very fulfilled doing this sort of stuff and I hope people listen to it but at the end of the day, does it really matter if anybody listens to it at all? I’m still happy that I wrote it and it’s out in the world”. It’s a silly thing that also has more of a deeper meaning. [laughs]

Getting existential.

Right, that is Kill Lincoln at its core. We’re existentialists here. [laughs] It was just kinda funny and also rings true for a lot of musicians in general like, “Ah music, what would the world be like without it? Who cares”. That’s it, put it on my tombstone.

Musical tombstone.

Perfect, that’s the way of the future I’m telling you. [laughs]

Who needs AI when we can have musical tombstones?

It’ll be just a hologram projection or something.

Like Star Trek. There is a ska connection because Riker plays trombone. It all comes together.

I have to vent just for a second. I’m a big Star Trek fan and I absolutely hate that Riker plays trombone. It bothers me to no end. I tried to rationalize it in my brain and I don’t think it sounds very rational when I describe it to people. [laughs] There’s something about the actor making the motions of the trombone and the trombone sounding completely different. It’s like, “Something’s wrong here!” and it’s not jiving right with my brain. That’s my rant, it’s over. [laughs] We all have a hill to die on and that will be mine.

What should he have played then? Or do you think he shouldn’t have played anything?

I don’t think he should play anything. His character doesn’t really fit that image to me. He also talks about being a big jazz buff and I’m like, “Man, there’s no way you’re a fucking jazz dude”. Something about it just doesn’t fit, maybe it’s me. I’ll take it up with Gene Roddenberry in the afterlife. [laughs]

What music do you think Riker would actually listen to?

Yacht rock. I could see Riker being a soft rock, yacht rock kind of guy. Not my favourite genre. Not to say that Riker isn’t an interesting and unique character, I think he is, it’s just some things are a little too off the wall for me with his character. But that might just be my perspective.

You need to have strong Riker perspectives.

How else are you gonna be able to judge society other than people’s Riker perspectives? [laughs]

Your video for “I’m Fine (I Lied)” was filmed by Rae Mystic at the Pie Shop in Washington, DC. What does this venue mean to you?

That has kind of become our home venue. We’ve definitely done some of our more intimate shows there. That’s come about in the last 5 or 6 years or so, maybe a little bit before then. It’s definitely been the longest-lasting venue we’ve played aside from Black Cat, which is our home venue when we’ve got a big show. When we wanna do something a little smaller, we have the Pie Shop in DC.
Back when things were cooling down from COVID, our first show back was at the Pie Shop. We tried to control it the best we could as far as limiting how many people were there because we wanted to be super safe with it, things were still a bit uncertain. We were really testing the waters. It’s a nice little place that’s stuck by us. The people who own it are really great and they always take care of us. We thought it would be nice to do a little video there to portray what it’s like to go to a Kill Lincoln show. Those smaller venues are where we cut our teeth and that’s how we developed as a band, how we harnessed the energy that we have. It really comes alive in small rooms like that. I think that’s evident in that video for sure. [laughs] It’s a nice place.

So many people are crowd-surfing in the video.

Yeah! It was tough because the recording process for a music video is hours long so you’re like, “Do I put in all my energy in the first half of this or save it for the back half?” Over the course of the day we were getting sweatier and grosser as we went on. We were like, “Well, this is how a show looks so it doesn’t matter if we’re gross and sweaty”. [laughs]

You’re capturing the authenticity of it all.

If you can’t make it out to a show, we want you to see that this is what it’s like. Leave that dance floor drained, that’s for sure.

You have more US tour dates coming up in October including supporting Less Than Jake and playing Fest and your album release show is in November at the 9:30 Club in DC. What are you looking forward to the most about these shows?

I’m very excited to get back on the road. We just came off a little run with Suicide Machines, Hey-Smith from Japan, and our good friends Bad Operation from New Orleans. I’m always down to play wherever so this is nice. It’s a nice way to tie up our year with Less Than Jake in just a few weeks and then a nice time at Fest. I know we took a year off so we’re definitely happy to be back at Fest. It’s gonna be a good weekend. Then we’ll be playing our little show at the 9:30 Club.

Very lowkey.

Just a little thing you know. If you’ve got nothing else going on. [laughs]

What’s the best food you’ve had on tour?

That’s a tough one. Eating on the road is difficult for sure. We do the best we can. Drew is a bit of a Google review hound. He’ll search out a good spot around the venue to eat when we get into town. We’ve had pretty good luck with eating on the road in the past few years. It’s definitely gotten better.
As far as a favourite, I don’t know, we have little restaurants we try to go to every time we go to an area. Whenever we’re in Michigan we try to go to this little diner called The Bomber in Ypsilanti that serves really great breakfast food. As long as I can wake up in time, we will try to go there. [laughs] Sometimes we have time for it and sometimes we don’t. We didn’t have time for it this last run out that way, unfortunately. We try to find little places that we like to go whenever we go.

It’s good to have those go-to places so you’re not scrambling at the last minute.

Absolutely. Otherwise, we’re up to the mercy of Drew’s Google reviewing. [laughs] Which isn’t bad, he does a good job.

Into the unknown but with confidence.

Right, we have enough information in our hands nowadays so we can make an informed decision.

Which part of No Normal are you proudest of?

Nothing tangible. I’m more proud of the fact that we were able to write this album within a deadline, have it sound as good as we possibly can, and actually perform the songs. [laughs] I think that’s what I’m most proud of, how we’ve fallen into this position where we can do this sort of thing. We can write songs that sound like us and we can play them live. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. [laughs] Just to write songs that we can play and that people like to hear. That’s my favourite part of No Normal.

Do you have a favourite song off the album to play live?

We’re just getting into all of that now. We want to have more of these songs available to put into our set, certainly for our November album release show. We’ve played around with a few tunes in rehearsals and stuff. “I’m Fine” is definitely the most fun to play. I don’t have to concentrate too hard on playing a horn line or remembering lyrics or whatever. It’s just a fast, fun tune. We’ve been playing it fairly regularly since we released the single. By now it’s in the groove and it’s pretty set in how it sounds.