You painted the album artwork for Feral. What went into creating that painting?

It’s actually right behind me! [turns and points to the canvas] I’m back in school and I have one more semester. I’m earning a BA in Studio Arts which is a vague art degree. I wanted something that was vague because I didn’t want to get stuck in a specific position and I don’t even know what I want to do with my degree. I have been chipping away at it since 1995 so it’s time to finish it.

The painting was done as a final project for my Painting II class that was run by David Burke who is a prolific mural artist here in the Bay Area under the name Hungry Ghost. I knew I wanted to do something really big. I wanted to challenge myself to paint on a large canvas and I wanted to take my time with it. A lot of times with art, I’ll kind of rush through it. I still ended up painting the whole painting in one day. I put the image of the teeth on a projector and projected it on the canvas and chipped away at it without showering or really leaving this room. When we did the critique in class, the negative spaces at the top and bottom felt too plain so I went back and redid the top and bottom of the painting for about two weeks until I landed on something that was almost right back where I started, except it’s a little bit rougher and looks like either bandages or torn paper.

From the very start of recording the album, I had this image in my head that I wanted these clenched, angry teeth on the cover. We had landed on the title Feral really early in the recording process and I wanted something that felt feral. I kept seeing this image of teeth with exposed red gums. Pretty much the image I saw in my head is the painting. [laughs] I think I worked through a few different concepts for what the cover could be and went right back to the first idea. I think a lot of time with art, the first idea is the best idea.

Then you’re not overthinking or overanalyzing it.

Exactly. It happens with recording sometimes where the first take or the first version of the song you record is the best version and then you work it to death. It’s the same thing as lots of things, even baking I think. [laughs] People will overwork their dough and then they have a horrible spongy thing that nobody wants to eat.

What do you think the connection between visual art and music is?

I grew up in the era where physical media was how we consumed music so the layout of an album directly affected how you felt about the songs that you were listening to. A cohesive package where the art matches what you’re listening to is always really appealing to me. If you have a really great record and the art sucks, that’s kind of a letdown. On the opposite side of that, the art can be really good and the music can be terrible. [laughs] I feel like it’s important across the board. People need to stop using AI art for anything, ever. Except for maybe memes. Memes are fine, I guess, but I also don’t like the environmental impact so I feel bad every time I laugh at one.

The environmental impact of AI memes or of memes in general?

Just memes in general. The energy needed to create that with computing just feels wasteful but then I do laugh anytime I see something like a hairless Elmo running through a grocery store or Big Bird giving birth or whatever thing people have put into the AI. Those did make me laugh so I feel conflicted. I think laughter can be in short supply sometimes so it’s good to have that as well. [laughs]

You did pre-production for the first time on Feral. What was that experience like? How do you feel it impacted the recording process?

For the first record, No Faith, I wanted to keep expectations really low because I didn’t know what I was doing with the record. I just wanted to record a bunch of songs so we didn’t practice, we just went into the studio with a bunch of musicians that I trusted. Once we all learned the song, I would write down the chords on a piece of paper and then we would play the song once or twice. As soon as we got to a point where we were like, “Ok, that’s how the song goes!” we would just hit record and record it. The same thing kinda happened with Against the Rest. We had a drummer lined up and at the last minute he couldn’t do it and we couldn’t practice with the drummer that we used, Justin Amans. He just came to the studio, learned the songs, and then we recorded the album. This time, pre-production meant we went to a practice space and just played the songs. We got to a place where we were comfortable playing the songs and knew them before we went into the studio. It helped us record faster. This was also the first time we were recording with two guitarists and neither guitarist was me - I played guitar on both of the other records. That freed me up to just do vocals.

The biggest hurdle always ends up being my procrastination where I will wait until the last minute to write lyrics for certain songs for a bunch of different reasons. Sometimes life just gets in the way and sometimes I know what I want to write about but I feel awkward writing it. That was the case with the song “Grief” which is about dead friends. It feels like you’re being judged the whole time by the person you’re writing it for, especially when it’s a 19-year-old boy. 19-year-old boys have a certain sense of humour so you just hear them in the back of your head the whole time talking trash to you in a funny way. Then that feels weird because you’re writing a song about death and it’s a person who is gone. Sometimes that process can feel heavier than it needs to. At the end of the day, it’s just a song but you’re trying to put yourself into it and you’re trying to pay respect in a certain way. So lyrics always end up being the hardest part. I can write guitar riffs all day long, that’s no problem. [laughs] But the words always take the longest.

When I hear other people talk about their lyric writing process I get a little embarrassed sometimes because it’s so raw. Some of that rawness can come off as embarrassing like you’re seeing something that you shouldn’t see. Sometimes I would feel more comfortable if they’d kept it to themselves but I do feel it’s important to share that stuff so people can understand how to do it. From talking to other musicians like Joe Gittleman and Sammy Kay I feel like I understand that if I do it more then it’ll be easier. The more you write and the more prolific you are, the easier it becomes.

What went into your decision not to record guitar on this album?

It’s like bringing sand to the beach. Everybody there could already play guitar and I’ve played guitar on every record up until now. I just wanted to trust them to do it themselves without my intervention. I’ve known Russ - or Ike - since he was 15, I’ve known him literally over half of his life. I saw his band, the Blanks, play at Gilman when he was 15 and I thought they were great. He’s become a better musician throughout his life and getting to have him on this record felt really special. He brought a lot of very interesting chaos to the equation with stuff I wouldn't have played.

Nick is from the band Noise Complaint and he plays drums in that band so he’s kind of a new guitarist. I feel like that brings something that you lose once you’ve been playing guitar for a long time. He has his rudiments down but he still plays in a way that also feels chaotic. Those two guitars together - one that’s chaotic because of where he is in the learning process and one that is chaotic because he’s a very proficient guitarist - made this really cool mix of sounds.

It also freed me up to sing live. When we were tracking music I was in a booth screaming. I couldn’t go full blast right out of the gate because we had three days of recording ahead of us and I didn’t want to lose my voice right away. Some of those takes didn’t get taped but some stuff made it in and if nothing else, it affected the energy of the performances. Rather than them just hearing drums, bass, and guitars, the band also heard a vocalist so they could react and dig in a little more if I was digging in a little bit more. It had that live energy.

How would you describe your songwriting process?

For this album, Barry Krippene, the bass player, wrote every single song musically. He got sober a few years ago and it changed his outlook on life and creating art. He’s become extremely prolific. He was sending me all these demos of him sitting on the couch singing and playing an acoustic guitar. I was like, “These are cool but I can’t really tell what’s happening. It’s just chords and words. Can you figure out how to use digital recording software? Treat it like a 4-track”. He did home recordings back in the day and we’ve played music together for a very long time, since the very end of Link 80 and all the way through another band. He figured out digital recording and he uses it like a 4-track. He doesn’t try to use every bell and whistle in there. He records bass, drums, two tracks of guitar, and vocals and can send me a fully realized demo where I can hear what he’s hearing with the drums and with the bass. So much of ska punk music is all the parts together so when it’s just on guitar, it’s harder to make out. Now he sends me a demo probably every other week. [laughs] I get new songs and they’re all amazing. I’m really proud of him. For the first record, No Faith, I pretty much wrote everything. Against the Rest was both of us split 50/50. Feral is all Barry’s songs and I just added vocals to some of them.

You’ve mentioned before that you used placeholder titles as jumping-off points for your lyrics. How many of the titles on the record are the same as the placeholders and how many have changed?

“Quicksand”, “Her Story”, “Regress”, “Fare Share”, and “Drop of Water” are working titles that made it through, “Violence” was originally called “Law of 7”. One of the songs was called “X Billion” and one was called “The Sufferer”. There was a song called “The Loan” which is now “Debt Past Due” and the working title influenced what I wrote about on that song. “The Youth” was originally called “The Way”. The only reason I wanted to change it was because there’s already a song called “The Way” by a band called Fastball from the late 90s / early 2000s and “The Youth” seemed to fit more the drive of what the song is about. “Absolute Zero” was originally called “Absolute”.

I think when Barry makes these demos he just grabs a cool word especially when he hasn’t written the lyrics. I feel like if the word is a cool word then it’s like, “Oh yeah, I can vibe on that” and I can use that as a jumping-off point rather than just spinning my wheels and going like, “I don’t know what I’m going to write about!” The only rule I have for myself about writing songs is that the song can’t be about how hard it is to write lyrics because I think that’s the ultimate cop-out. It’s also such a woe-is-me sort of thing. If it’s hard to write then don’t write. Stop and go do something else. Your laundry is sitting unfolded, go fold it. It’ll come to you eventually.

Writing is hard because some words that you wanna use don’t sound good coming out of your mouth especially if you’re screaming. [laughs] Finding words that sound good, that you can get in during the course of the song, and also mean something and finding the ways to put them together so that they are going to sound “nice” when you’re screaming is challenging. One problem I had initially with the first record was writing too many words to the point where I didn’t leave myself space to breathe. That is an easy thing to forget when you’re in the studio and you can press stop and hit record again. When you’re out doing these songs live you need to have a spot to breathe. [laughs] I’ve figured out how to breathe through those songs and get the words out but when you’re jumping around and yelling stuff it’s easy to miss a line. It’s good to think about these things and how you’re going to get your air out.

If you’re not breathing then something’s up.

If you’re not breathing you’re going to pass out. Nobody wants to see anyone pass out on stage, that’s just scary.

In my opinion, one of the most powerful lines on Feral is “You can’t choose peace / Unless you’re capable of violence” which is on “Violence”. What was going through your head when you wrote this?

My sons take Aikido so I drop them off a couple times a week for class. My friend Philip is really into Aikido and is one of the parents who volunteers to teach classes there. He is a very calm, cool, collected guy and he said that line to me at one point while we were hanging out. He was like, “You can’t choose peace if you’re not able to defend yourself”. It’s not that they’re learning how to kick ass in this class, they’re learning how to stop a fight or how to defend themselves if somebody attacks them. Aikido is not a striking martial art.

It came from being self-reliant and being able to defend yourself. I think the best way to find peace is to be able to take care of yourself. I don’t deal with it very much in my day-to-day life because I’m so big and nobody really questions that I’m capable of violence so I don’t end up with the problem of people messing with me. But for people who are more diminutive and aren’t at that advantage coming out the gate, that’s their reality. There are people out there who will try to harm them. It’s important to be able to defend yourself.

In the Bay if someone gets mugged or if they get their window smashed, they’ll say that they “got caught slipping”. Somebody said that that’s sad because you can never really relax but it’s like, “You can relax but you can also always have one eye open where you’re aware of your surroundings”. You don’t just have your headphones on and you’re not just skipping through life looking like a target. You want to know where you are and respect your surroundings and don’t get caught looking like an easy target.

Constant vigilance.

Yeah. Which I think to some people maybe sounds exhausting but I think it’s just part of living in an urban setting. If you wanna enjoy all the perks of living in a place like the Bay Area where there’s a lot to be offered, there’s also a high amount of crime here and you have to be willing to deal with that and mitigate it as much as possible. Don’t leave stuff in your car because it’s gonna get stolen.

The three times on tour I’ve been robbed have all been in Canada. [laughs] In Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver we had the van broken into and had things stolen in all three cities. We just got caught slipping. If we’d taken our backpacks inside the venue, there wouldn’t have been anything for them to break into the van for.

Did they steal any gear or mainly personal items?

It was personal stuff. The funny thing about the first time is that it was the worst time. They broke into our van and all of our backpacks were in there so we lost film, cameras, personal belongings - things we couldn’t replace. We found some of the backpacks ditched in an alley and then years later a member of the band GrimSkunk found our trumpet player’s sketchbook in an alleyway and mailed it to him. There’s good people out there. Shoutout to GrimSkunk.

On “Regress” you talk about how society discourages us from feeling our emotions and encourages us to build walls up within ourselves and between one another. What’s helped you tear down your walls and express your emotions?

I think just being a parent. Barry wrote that whole song - he wrote the lyrics and the music. We come from a place where we both have sons and I think something that both of us are trying to do differently than our parents did is letting them know that it’s ok to cry and it’s ok to feel your emotions. One of my sons was having a hard time and we had just recorded this song so I was like, “Dude, we just wrote a song and the basis of the song is that it’s ok to cry!” He was like, “You’re lying!” and I showed him the song. [laughs]

It was good timing!

Yeah, it was great timing! Very fortuitous. I think another thing as a dad of sons is that it’s important to raise young men correctly so that they aren’t horrible monsters. So that one day we aren’t saying, “Hey, do you want to choose them or the bear?” and the bear isn’t such a good option anymore.

Dismantle the toxic masculinity before it has a chance to get in there.

Yeah, try to get rid of that as early as possible and not fall into those same traps that my generation did.

Making sure that younger people don’t make the same mistakes ties into “The Youth” too.

That’s another one that Barry wrote the lyrics to. I was really stoked on how that song came out. I have this really conflicted feeling about our country. I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve traveled to other places. I’ve really enjoyed living in California and living in America but it’s such a flawed country and there’s so many lies that we’ve told ourselves about our history. Working towards unlearning that stuff and realizing the real history of the country is important and we’ve been doing that while we also watch something potentially like the fall of Rome politically. I think a big part of the right’s push for “Make America Great Again” is wanting to put those blinders back on and to believe that we do live in the world that our parents told us we lived in. I feel like it’s easier for them to push it aside and be like, “Sure I’ve been shown these truths but I’m going to disregard them because I’d rather live in comfort”. I think that’s the wrong way to go about it. I’m not saying that we can’t continue forward as a country, we can, but we have to make our amends and we have to pay for the things that we did wrong. I think it’s important to pay land taxes to Indigenous tribes. I want to stay living in the Bay Area but I also feel badly that we displaced the Ohlone people and I think that if there’s a way to fix that, that’s the way forward.

Not sweeping things under the rug anymore.

I also think that we need to get all of these old people out of government from the bottom to the top. I’m at a point where I feel like I’m too old to make these decisions. [laughs] I want younger people to be in these positions of power because I feel like they have a better understanding and a better focus of where we should go next and how we should deal with these problems. I feel like my brain is old, outdated software and I’d rather have young people give their opinions.

924 Gilman Street is a collective and it’s run by the community and I’ve never wanted to sit on that board. I didn’t want to sit on it when I was younger because it was kind of cliquey and people were kind of mean but now that there’s a more even-handed approach, I don’t want to be on it because I’m old. I want a space like Gilman to constantly be run by the youth and I don’t feel like I’m at a place in my life where I would make the correct decisions for that venue. I feel like even an all-ages venue like that needs to be centered around the youth.

The actual reality of things would be represented instead of people trying to uphold how things “used to be”.

I feel like that’s a toxic thing. You see these old punks online talk about how kids don’t understand how it was and that punk should be dangerous. It was only like that because y’all were on drugs and from broken homes. It doesn’t have to be that way. We can evolve past that. I would say that it’s a fool’s errand to try to keep it that way.

I like that punk has become more inclusive and people are thinking about ADA access for venues. Shoutout to Tara Hahn from Half Past Two for really championing that. I feel like that’s important and it’s important to make spaces for different people. I feel like it’s for anyone to say, “Oh no, it was better when we were all mean and everybody was smoking cigarettes” is silly. How old are you Em?

I’m 25.

Ok, so you missed all of this. When I first started going to shows at 16, people were allowed to smoke in the clubs. You’d want to get right up front to see the band and there’d be somebody drunk up there with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The cherry of their cigarette would end up hitting your arm because you’re getting pushed around in the audience. You’d end up with a burn on your arm and then somebody would spill their beer all over you so you’d come home smelling like cigarettes and beer - I don’t drink, I’ve never drank - all because you just wanted to see music. Then your parents are like, “Where have you been? You smell terrible!” and you’d be like, “I know. I’m not smoking. I’m not drinking. Smell my breath”. It was pointless. You can’t have fun without drinking? You can’t have fun without smoking cigarettes? Horrible. So yeah, you didn’t miss anything, don’t worry. [laughs]

I like the safer spaces now. [laughs]

I prefer that. I don’t think that stage diving needs to go away but you need to know where you’re standing at a show if you’re going to be the one catching people. If you’re going to stand where people stage dive, understand that people are going to land on you. If you’re going to stage dive, realize you have to be under 200 lbs. I am way too big to stage dive. I will not stage dive ever again. I see people my size try to stage dive and it just topples the whole audience and I’m like, “What are you thinking?? You’ve gotta let the little guys with the bird bones do the flips! Let them land on top of the audience”. Nobody wants to catch somebody my size.

I know my place, I’m there to catch people or to help push people up. At Pouzza during Against All Authority’s set, I kept grabbing people and pushing them on top of the audience - because they were asking me to, I wouldn’t just do it to somebody [laughs]. It’s one of my favourite things ever to help them up. Somebody’s gotta give you a boost. My friend G from Suzie True and I were at Fest together and we saw Gel. I turned to G and I said, “Do you want to crowdsurf?” and they were like, “Yeah!” so I picked them up and threw them on top of the audience. There’s this great picture of them crowd-surfing during that set.

Every place needs the designated crowd-surfer-helper-outer.

Yeah! And somebody to help hold them up. I’ve definitely held 90% of a person’s weight on my head, shoulders, and hands while the rest of the audience struggles to get under them. I’m happy to do that as well. Gotta look out for people. Make sure they don’t land on their heads.

Everyone goes into the show in one piece and comes out in one piece. No concussions here.

No concussions, please.

You could take off your shoes to stage dive.

[laughs] Just have a little cubby you could put your shoes in at the side of the stage and then go retrieve them after you land. Your socks would get so gross though.

On the album you cover “Modern Medicine” by School Drugs. Why did you choose to cover this song in particular?

We picked “Modern Medicine” because it’s a banger of a song. [laughs] School Drugs was a band we became friends with on the internet and then we met them at Fest. We’re always trying to convert other bands to do ska stuff, especially hardcore bands, and they did an Operation Ivy cover. It was one of the ones that doesn’t have any ska in it, it’s just a straight-ahead punk song. I was taking a video of them and their singer Josh pointed to me and pointed at one of the microphones like, “Get up here! Sing this one with me!” At Fest I carry my microphone in my pocket with me so I’m not putting my mouth on somebody else’s. I handed my phone off to some random person in the audience, went and plugged in my mic, and of course, just launched into the song because it’s an Operation Ivy song, I know all of those! [laughs]

This year I hit Josh up and was like, “Hey, come on stage with us and do this song ‘Burn It Down’ that we have”. He was all prepped to do that and then we turned it on him. We had already learned and recorded “Modern Medicine” so he got on stage thinking he was going to play one of our songs and then he heard the opening riffs of his song coming out of the guitar amps. The look on his face was priceless when he realized that we pulled a fast one but that it was all going to be fine and we were going to play their song. We changed the second verse to a ska part because we wanted to show them, “Look, this part could just be ska and then it would be a ska song! Sure the rest of the song is a hardcore song but there’s a little ska part in there”.

I like hardcore a lot but sometimes it gets a little monotonous and the same could be said for straight-up traditional ska-type stuff. Maybe I just have a poor attention span. I want variety in my song. I want to hear a fast punk part and I wanna hear a ska part and I wanna hear a breakdown. That’s kind of why we play the music that we play. The funny thing is Barry sent me a demo of him recording the whole song without the vocals and I was like, “Wow, this sounds a lot like School Drugs!” and then he was like, “Yeah, it’s a School Drugs song”. It sounded like that new scary type of hardcore.

Super heavy stuff.

Yeah, but not heavy in a dumb chugga-chugga beatdown way. Scary in an “I’m rabid and out of my mind and climbing the walls” sort of way. I think Josh from School Drugs is probably my favourite front person in punk rock right now. I’m really excited about their new record. They put it out as in pieces across a couple 7-inches and now the whole thing will get collected as a full record. The best song on that is a song called “Feel Like Shit”. If we cover another School Drugs song, it’ll be that one. We’ve been talking about it. They’ve been talking about covering us and us covering them and doing a 7-inch or something. It’s just finding the time.

Ska and hardcore will find a way.

Absolutely.

“Debt Past Due” opens with a sample from the 1966 movie Dutchman and “Her Story” has a clip from Ghostface Killah’s skit “Revolution”.

Oh did he use it also? The “Her Story” sample is from an Angela Davis speech. Both of them are a little out of context for how they end up sounding on the record. Angela Davis is actually talking about a totally different thing in the speech - she’s talking about Black history - but that piece of dialogue sounded perfect for the song. I spent hours listening to different Angela Davis speeches trying to find a piece that fit the length of the song and was about women’s rights and the history of America. That piece fit so well that I was like, “I’m going to take it out of context and put it in here”. I don’t think Angela would mind because the song resonates with other things that she’s spoken about. Other quotes didn’t have the cadence to match the song and I had to pick a sample that was going to fit. I did have to edit the clip slightly. If I’d left it the way it was, the lyrics would have come back in before she finished what she was saying so I had to tighten it up just a little bit. All I did was take out some air, the content is the same. She’s still an active public speaker and she spoke in the Bay recently. I’d like to get a copy of the record to her at some point and see if she likes it and see if she likes ska. The thing I’m always interested in is who likes ska or who is even aware of ska.

The other one is from Dutchman and it’s rad that you found that. I took an online class at my school called ‘History of Black Theatre’ and I was really taken with that film and with another play called Esai's Table which is more current. The monologue at the end of Dutchman is really, really good from a poetic standpoint, and politically it’s pretty sound as well. It’s pretty violent in a lot of the imagery but the whole ending of that movie is gnarly and violent. I feel like the later side of that movie is where it holds interest for me. It’s a chilling movie to watch. I know it came out in the 1960s and some people would say, “Oh, you’ve had time!” but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. If anybody wants to take the time, go on YouTube and watch Dutchman. It’s a great film. It has a pretty wild story and a pretty wild ending. It’s definitely worth watching. I was trying to get Jer to also sample something from that same movie for one of their songs. I sent them the clip when I was working on the record and was like, “You’ve gotta sample this! I’m gonna sample it so if you want to sample a different part of it, that’d be rad”.

“Grief” has two samples of Nick Traina’s voice that you took from older Link 80 songs. How did you decide which lines to use? What does it mean to you to have the samples in the song?

I’ve been wanting to cut out Nick’s vocal and put it on a song since Link 80 did The Struggle Continues. I liked the idea of including him posthumously. I recently came into possession of the master tapes for most of 17 Reasons. The studio they were in closed down so I went and grabbed them. They’re in this archaic old format and I had to get them digitally transferred which cost me a couple hundred dollars. It was a bit of a painstaking process but I got them! I put them into the computer and listened to them and there was all this stuff from the 17 Reasons sessions that nobody’s heard since it got recorded. There’s alternate takes of songs and there’s weird buried things in there. You can hear Joey, the drummer, say, “I don’t know, sounded like shit to me!” before a song cuts off. On one song you can hear Matt Bettinelli and Adam P, the bass player, fighting. They finish a song and one of them’s like, “Oh fuck me? Fuck you!” and then it cuts off. They’re at each other's throats. It makes sense because they’re little aggro punk kids at the time, they’re like 15.

As I understand it, when Nick was tracking vocals maybe they’d been out of sorts and they decided they didn’t like how they sounded. So they came back and re-recorded and re-tracked almost the entire album by themselves before the rest of the band got there one day. There’s all these little snippets at the end of songs where you can kinda hear Nick for a second say something like, “I don’t know, I think that was good”. You can also hear him tapping on his chest like he’s getting himself hyped up for the song. One of the things you can hear is him going, “Uhhh, 3 and ¾ stars”. He’s basically giving himself a grade for how he felt like he did. I isolated that part because when you’re writing a song for a 19-year old you can feel them kind of cringing at your fatherly care for wanting to write about them so as the song is petering out we hid it in there where he’s going, “Uhhh 3 and ¾ stars”. [laughs] Like, “You guys did fine. It’s ok”. It was really interesting to hear all that stuff. I’d love to release all that in some way so everybody can hear it because there’s some really fun stuff in there.

I always wanted to sample him for a “let’s go” or a “pick it up” so I found one - I don’t want to say which song it is because it’s one that’s harder to find so I’ll leave it at that - and I was happy there was a little section I could grab that wasn’t from a better-known song. When somebody finally puts it together and goes, “OH it’s from this song” it’ll be that much more fun for that person plus there’s maybe a dozen people out there in the whole world who really care about this sort of nerdy minutiae that I care about.

It adds so much!

It does.

In the video for that song you visit Nick’s grave for the first time and you also visit Kiyomi Tanouye’s resting place at the Chapel of the Chimes mausoleum. Do you have any memories of your friends that you feel comfortable sharing?

Kiyomi was a cool hipster here in the Bay Area who was part of these scavenger hunt games that I liked to do called The Games of Nonchalance. Games of Nonchalance was this kind of ARG - alternate reality game - that led you all over the Bay Area and followed the story of a character named Eva who had an art collective in the ‘80s and then she disappears. There’s all this fictional subtext but Kiyomi was one of the big players of that game and that was how I got to know Kiyomi. Kiyomi was always going to fun events and doing weird things. When she passed away, she was at an event at a warehouse called the Ghost Ship. I saw earlier that day that she was going to different events and setting up a nail salon and painting people’s nails. It wasn’t her job, she wasn’t doing it for money, she was just doing it because it was fun and funny and unexpected. She happened to get caught in that fire. A lot of people died that night. The hard thing about that was I was actually with a bunch of the people that I knew because of the Games of Nonchalance at a different bar in the East Bay. I remember going home that night and hearing the sirens. I didn’t know where the Ghost Ship was at the time but it was right up the street from where I live. Had I known where the Ghost Ship was, I probably would have tried to stop by and say hi to Kiyomi on the way home which is chilling because that means I would have been there too.

The other nice thing about her was she was really thoughtful. She had just gone to Japan right before this all happened. My son’s favourite movie is Kiki’s Delivery Service so she went to the Studio Ghibli store and bought something for him which I never got because she passed away. She sent me messages online and was like, “Hey, I have something for your son when I get back!” I accidentally ended up making an audio recording of my son saying something about how he was going to poop on my head and that got sent to her. She was like, “What? I can’t make out what he’s saying” and I was like, “Oh, he’s saying ‘I want to poop on your head’”. So the last thing I got from her was, “Hahahaha”.

It’s weird because I knew Kiyomi and I knew Nick but did I know them? They weren’t my best friends in the whole world but they were still my friends and losing them was still hard. I visit Kiyomi a couple times a year because of how close she is and I had never visited Nick because for a long time, I didn’t know where it was. I knew it was south of San Francisco in a huge graveyard and it just felt too heavy. Once I knew where it was and I had a reason to go there I was like, “I’ll go there and I’ll film it for this video”. I talked to a bunch of different people about it before I did it because I was like, “Man, is this even a good idea? Is it weird? Well, I’m going to put on a suit and I’m only going to have my friend Gizmo filming the whole thing. It’s not like we’re taking a whole crew. I have a very specific intent of going. This is the perfect reason to go, as far as I’m concerned”. If roles were reversed, I would want somebody to come pay their respects in that way and document it. I didn’t go there and lip sync, I didn’t go there and dance. [laughs] I think that would have been a little bit too much. Gizmo was very good about keeping the filming really tight and under wraps so we weren’t disrespecting anyone. I was really happy that Gizmo has a drone and is very adept at using it because I feel we were able to get some really dramatic shots of the space. I was really happy that it was small and quiet so we were able to film those shots without being super intrusive or disrespectful to the space. He just shot it up into the sky and you couldn’t even hear it.

The weird thing was we ended up going on Nick’s birthday which was unplanned. We had just picked a Thursday because it was when Gizmo was going to be off work and it just happened to be Nick’s birthday as well so that was a really interesting thing. I was kind of thinking that there were going to be people there but there was no one there. That was a weird feeling, being the person who was visiting on his birthday with no one else there. I’d be interested to see how it would have gone if there had been people there. It’s a beautiful space and if I had a space like that for someone in my family I think I would be there more often. There’s a huge chunk of it that’s basically a private park so you could go there and have a picnic, maybe I’ll do that at some point. There is a little posted sign outside of Nick’s grave that says “keep out” but I just walked around it because I felt like I was there for a good reason. I can understand them not wanting people to just hang out in there but I feel like if you’re just going to pay your respects, then it’s fine. When I visit Kiyomi it’s usually with my friend Carolee and we usually bring burritos because it just feels like she would want that.

It’s like you’re still hanging out together.

Yeah, that’s how it feels. It’s in this space called the Chapel of the Chimes which is a huge mausoleum in Oakland that was designed by Julia Morgan, who is this really famous architect, and it’s beautiful inside. The last part of the Games of Nonchalance occurred there. There’s this really beautiful documentary called The Institute where Kiyomi talks about that experience. It’s a very special place to her. There’s where Kiyomi is actually interred and then there’s another space within the mausoleum where I think she would have preferred to be interred. Someone hid a diorama for Kiyomi in the space where she should be. She’s really in two spaces so every time I go there I visit both spaces.

You played Pouzza for the first time this year and this marks your first show in Montreal in 25 years. What was this experience like?

I want to go back so bad! I only got to have poutine once while I was there. Montreal feels a lot like San Francisco used to feel. It’s a very cool city. I feel like San Francisco has been over gentrified by the people who work in tech so a lot of the cool stuff has been turned into glass condos at this point. I’m sure Montreal has probably had some of that as well but I found it to be really nice.

I like the way people mosh at Pouzza. It’s not like circle pits in the States where people just go in one direction. People were going every which way and dancing in whatever weird way they wanted to. That felt fun. I felt really thankful that we played second and people showed up to see us. The band that played right before us and the band that played right after us played to almost no one so the fact that people rolled out and came to see us was really nice. I was really worried we were going to come all that way and nobody was going to watch us. I also learned that if you’re going to book an international flight you can’t have a connection, you’ve just got to fly direct because we almost missed our flight. That would have really been terrible.

That’s so stressful!

We actually missed our flight but they brought the plane back to the gate. They’d left four people behind from the connecting flight and they realized it’d be cheaper to bring the plane back than to have to book us on new flights and put us up for the night. If push came to shove and we hadn’t been able to book another plane ticket, we were in Toronto so I could’ve rented a car and made the 5+ hour drive to the show but I really didn’t want to. [laughs]

You’ll be touring the UK with Call Me Malcolm later this month, you have your album release show in September, you’re playing Fest in October, and you’re touring the US with Suicide Machines in November. What are you looking forward to about these shows?

All those shows look like they’re going to be good. I’m at a point in my life where I’d rather play a dozen really good shows than 50 mediocre shows. I see a lot of bands overplay where they’ll play too much. Sometimes they’ll play a show somewhere and you can see on social media that there’s nobody there and it’s just a bad feeling. I know that it’s exciting to play shows and that people missed it during COVID, but being a little bit more choosy about what you’re gonna do and trying to always make sure that every show is going to be worth your time and worth the effort is important. Even the most middle-of-the-road weekday show at some bar takes your energy. You still have to go there and set up and play the show and drive there and drive home and be out late. You wanna make sure that you’re not burning yourself out.

Sustainable touring.

Sustainable touring, exactly. I’m really excited for the UK. I haven’t been to the UK since 2004 for music and 2006 personally. It’s been a while.

Do you have something UK-specific that you always look forward to doing?

I’m looking forward to asking people in the UK to speak with American accents. It’s always really funny to me because they always end up sounding like they’re from the Midwest.

Have you ever heard a really good one?

I always make them say the same thing, “I drank a lot of beer tonight”. The last time I did this I was single so I’d be talking to a girl and she’d be really cute. I’d say, “Oh, say something in an American accent” and when they did it they would immediately look 25% less cute because they all of a sudden just seemed like they were from the Midwest. There was this dip - they’d say it and it would be like, “Ugh!” but then they’d go back to talking how they normally talk and it was like, “Ok, they’re cute again”. It was really funny.

You’ve said that when you’re on tour you try to go do escape rooms with the band. If you were designing an Omnigone-themed one, what would it look like?

Oh man, it would probably look like an old Taco Bell but painted black with skulls. It would probably look a lot like this room. [gestures around to a room filled with cool band memorabilia] I really like puzzles. I think that’s the main thing I like about escape rooms, I like those “a-ha” moments where you unlock things. We’ve gotten really good at them because when you’re in a DIY band you’re constantly just figuring out how to solve problems all day long and it becomes natural so when you come up against a problem, you just solve it and move on with your day without really thinking about it. Maybe in retrospect, you look back on it and go, “Wow, that was crazy that we just fixed that!” You blow a tire or a member of the band catches COVID or somebody misses their flight or an instrument breaks and you just figure it out as you go. We’ve gotten really adept at dealing with the problems as they arise. When we do escape rooms it’s like that goes into hyperdrive. Everybody knows their role and we all really enjoy it. We’ve probably done about 40 or 50 escape rooms as a band at this point. [laughs] It’s an expensive hobby though. Other bands go broke because they’re drinking or whatever, we’re going broke because we’re doing escape rooms.

Which part of Feral are you proudest of?

The whole overall vibe of the record. I like that we didn’t do a lot of bells and whistles this time. This is the first record that doesn’t have a lot of horns on it which was mostly because we have friends who play horns with us - Andrew from Flying Raccoon Suit, Jer and Emily from the Jer band, Ume from Kill Lincoln - who are all in their own bands. When you have to play a show with no horns, you’re missing an element of how the song sounds to people normally so I wanted to have a whole album of songs that had no horns. Now we need two guitars which I like live anyway, I think it sounds better. There’s way more awesome guitar players than there are awesome horn players so it’ll be a little bit easier to slot people in. Russ - Eichlers - won’t be able to tour with us all the time, he’s just too busy, but other people can play his parts instead. Guitars are a lot easier to transport than horns. If you break a guitar, it’s much easier to replace than a horn.