Arenas formed in 2023 and Truth Come Alive is your debut album. How did the band come together?

Michael: Me and Chris are from Winnipeg and we’re brothers. We grew up playing in bands in different iterations. In our first ever iteration Chris was the singer and we were 12 years old. We have hidden tracks somewhere of us as kids. I think our first band was called Shredasaurus Rock.

Chris: Yeah.

Michael: We’ve been playing together our whole lives from Winnipeg to Toronto. This version of what we’ve been doing happened when I worked with Kelly on a film shoot. I met him on that shoot; we were hanging out the entire time and talking about things we do artistically. Kelly is a filmmaker and makes scores for films so we were showing each other tracks. Then his buddy Charlie, me, and Chris all got together and started playing. Charlie was really busy so we started searching online and found Camila through a Facebook post, I think.

Chris: Yep.

Michael: So it kind of amalgamated and that’s sort of where the sound comes from. We’re all from a little bit of a different place but we’re trying to speak the same language. We just found each other. We stumbled into each other over time.

You recorded this album at Palace Sound. It was produced by Graham Walsh and mastered by Justin Perkins. How did you decide who to work with? What was the recording process like?

Michael: I grew up a huge fan of Graham’s band Holy Fuck. I was talking with a buddy about in a dream scenario who I would get to work on this album and I started making a list of who would be the best engineers. Keeping it realistic and Canadian I was like, “I’m not going to go to LA and pay $100,000. Who can I really get who lives around here?” That buddy went, “I’m pretty sure Graham Walsh lives up the street!” [laughs] We were like, “No way, it can’t be that simple” so we tracked down his email. We had a few pots on the stove but that was our Day 1 like, “That would be cool to get Graham Walsh!” Then he was a very awesome guy who was very down. He’s like that with a lot of bands and he’s really, really good to work with.

Kelly: Born Ruffians and July Talk were a huge help in connecting us with Graham as well. Just getting Graham to listen to our demos and wrapping his head around it.

Chris: You’ve done film work with July Talk right, Kelly?

Kelly: Yeah. Mike acted in Blackberry with Steve Hamelin, the drummer of Born Ruffians.

Michael: That was fun. We sent Graham an email and it was like, “Eh, that’s not gonna work”. [laughs] Then I messaged Steve just saying, “Hey, can you send Graham a message?” And he very nicely did. That speaks to how kind they both are. Graham and Steve were both super down. July Talk and Born Ruffians were huge helps.

Chris: We liked Palace Sound a lot too.

Michael: Palace Sound was great! That’s usually where Graham works out of so that’s how we got connected there. Justin Perkins is Graham’s friend and he was very, very easy to work with too. It was a nice match.

How would you describe your songwriting process?

Michael: That is sort of a mixed bag. I’ll come with a riff and some lyrics and stuff like that and we build from there. I’ll usually start the seed but I have more of a rudimentary understanding - I don’t know what chords or notes I’m really playing so I turn to these guys and it literally feels like they talk an alien language around me. It sort of gets into a different world that way. I feel like if it was just me, the songs just wouldn’t be what they are.

I really respect how much these guys bring and it’s all a very unique process. Kelly comes from a film score world so sometimes - not all the time - it’s this ethereal, spacey sound with a bunch of pedals. Camila has a background of Paramore and hard rock bands from growing up in Chile - I'm only speaking for her here because her voice is gone. Me and Chris are coming from stuff like Neil Young and The Weakerthans and all these Winnipeg bands that we loved growing up. We grew up wanting to be Sum 41 and stuff. There’s this weird mishmash of Canadiana with the broader scheme of making music and letting go of your expectations with it. It doesn’t have to sound like a Canadian song you’ve heard before, but it does represent that same feeling.

Chris: As a drummer, Mike approaches the guitar from a very rhythmic place so a lot of what he does, and how he tries to articulate the riffs he’s writing to us, is about the rhythm with the right hand and how you move it. Since he only knew the major barre chord shape for a few years, he accidentally plays major chords instead of minor chords and he’ll put diminished chords in without knowing what they are. It makes for very original sounding riffs that you would not have written if you were thinking about what you were doing.

Michael: Original sounding is the nice way to put that. [laughs]

Chris: They sound great! But those are sounds that don’t exist in the theoretical structure all the time, at least not in modern rock or pop.

Michael: This album is an amalgamation of songs that I’d written in high school and it’s sort of our first real project putting out a lot of material. Since then we’ve written a lot more and written stuff I’m really proud of. It’s almost trying to represent an old idea and it’s becoming something else already. We’re very excited to get it out so we can start doing what we’re feeling in ourselves now. Some of these songs are high school songs for me but I still love them. It’s funny that way.

Chris: Process-wise, Kelly and Camila like to spend a lot of time at home working on things. Kelly, because you do film stuff you like to layer a lot. You sit at home and lock in for a couple hours at a time.

Kelly: Yeah, for sure. I’m not a super talented improviser on guitar or anything like that so when they come to me with a new riff like, “What are you playing on top of this?” I’m like, “I don’t know. Give me 6 days”.

[laughter]

Chris: He pulls like 12 pedals off the wall that you’ve never heard of and starts plugging them into each other.

Kelly: [laughs] Yeah.

Michael: Kelly showed me one of his solos once and it was like a Frankenstein solo. It was chopped up little notes from different solos and he practices that. I was like, “That’s crazy!” I would never think to do that because that’s a bit more engineering than I’m used to. There’s something about me in the moment that’s like, “If I can’t get it on this take then it sucks! If it’s not here then it’s not here and I’m not even trying”. It’s impressive to see Kelly come in with a bit more mechanical approach like, “No, this is it. It just had to form itself”.

It’s nice when everyone has a different way of working but it all meshes together.

Michael: Totally. You have to work to make it mesh but it does if you work at it. It’s a bit of a paradox that way, but it’s good.

Chris: You’ve always gotta be trying to open up and understand what everyone else is doing which I think is a good practice for a musician to do.

I believe “Quitting” is the oldest song on the record, is that correct?

Chris: Maybe “Doki”.

Michael: Yeah, maybe “Doki”. It’s the second track. Me and Chris wrote “Quitting” and “Doki” in our first attempt at this when we were back in Winnipeg. “Quitting” is about my workplace unionizing. I thought it was pretty badass. Winnipeg has kind of a small-town mentality so we were getting on the news, it was a little bit of a press scenario. I thought it was sort of funny to hide it behind that I was - and still am - smoking a lot to cover up for anxieties and different things in the world. I thought it was a funny difference that way.

“Doki” was originally a video game called Doki Doki Literature Club. Crazy game!! I swear to God, I didn’t sleep for like four straight days. I don’t know why but it just stuck with me; how scary it was - it is a horrifying, horrifying game - and how smart it was. It was such a well done idea for not only a game but a piece of art. Writing “Doki” I was like, “I’m gonna write a love song from the perspective of a serial killer”. Basically, all the lyrics are supposed to be creepy. It’s supposed to be a scary, hiding-in-the-bushes type of feeling but also something catchy like, “What am I singing along with this for?” That’s what I was going for.

We put those songs first to signify that’s where we started from with a lot of these tracks. Those were even on our old EP. People really like it which I’m so happy about, that’s really nice. We got some messages like, “What happened to that old EP?” And I was like, “I had no idea anyone even listened to that stuff, that’s wild!” Those tracks definitely signify a bit of an older place of songwriting for us. I think we all love those tunes. I don’t think anyone has a problem with them.

Chris: Camila made “Quitting” a lot better.

Michael: That’s very true.

Chris: When she showed up, that was the first song that she really put her style all over. She wrote that riff on the last chorus and she encouraged us to write the entire outro.

Michael: That’s a great point as to how the band has changed too. Even in the old EP version, the writing comes from a point of The Weakerthans where the song just ends at a 10. We started at a 1 and ended at a 10. During one of our songs, Camila said, “Can we play this quieter?” And we were all like, “What are you talking about? Play this quieter?” And she was like, “Yeah, because that way when we play the loud part it’ll feel more impactful”. We were like, “What is going on here guys?” We had a hard time wrapping our heads around it.

Chris: It was a good idea!

Michael: It worked well and it was a very clear thing to do. The fun slide-y parts and stuff were all Camila.

I was looking for some references and I was like, “It can’t be Doki Doki Literature Club!” I’m so glad it is! Is the song title “Fleens” referencing the little green guys from the Logical Journey of the Zoombinis?

Michael: That’s insane that you got that! It very much is!

Chris: We couldn’t get the rights to play that little audio clip at the start of it where the guy you have to make pizzas for in the earlier challenge yells, “You’re not fleens!” [laughs]

Michael: It’s very fun, it’s a great game. Me and Chris played that growing up. We wanted to open with that audio track because that audio track is so iconic. For me, “Fleens” is about the passing on of your nostalgia and your childhood so there are a bunch of video game references. It’s like, “Can I still enjoy my old self and be my new self?” I really think video games are one of my favourite art forms. I love the way that they tell stories and I love being able to play a movie or even just relax and play something mindless. There are a ton of video game references throughout the whole album.

I think it was also spurred on by the moment of AI writing music so we were going for, “How can we reference technology vs. authenticity?” That’s what we tried to do by juxtaposing the acoustic track to the swelly, cinematic electric track right after it. I thought no one would ever get that so I’m glad that Zoombinis has had a real, lasting impact on people. Next up is Math Blasters. We’ll find something else dark and nostalgic.

Chris: I was recently trying to find this game that I used to play. It was a Carmen Sandiego game set in Egypt but I haven’t been able to find it. There was a wall with hieroglyphics and it was a puzzle I couldn’t figure out. I’d love to find that game.

How do you feel you balance nostalgia with growth?

Michael: I think people lean on nostalgia as a bit of crutch which I am doing - I think that’s kind of the point of it. But like Chris was saying, I don’t know what I’m doing on guitar and I think there’s an honest effort on our side of this being our first album. I think the point of perfection in the technology side of stuff and the nostalgia side are sort of one in the same of trying something new and yearning about old video games. We would record and we would have old video games playing on the projector and there’s so much new technology based in what we’re doing. We’re using a new, cool projector to play a game that I used to play on a TV the size of my phone. [laughs] There’s just so much going on in the world now where the nostalgia is baked in and they’re selling it back to you.

There were times in the album’s songwriting when I was really fed up and I think I was sort of talking directly to that feeling. I don’t want to have to just sell this nostalgia back. This experience that I’m having right now with having trouble with this part is the authentic, human part of the process. It balances out through us messing up, making stuff up on the spot, playing video games on a projector, and getting distracted. [laughs] That was the most fun part.

Kelly: Yeah, it doesn’t feel deliberate. It feels like that’s just how it came to be. We definitely recognize it as nostalgic but never force it into the songwriting process.

Chris: On that note, we recorded the album mostly live off the floor. We didn’t track it. I mean, we added some guitar and vocal overdubs after but for the most part, it was live off the floor so whatever happened at that time, you take it.

Kelly: Perfectly imperfect. [laughs]

Michael: I don’t even know what our genre is but it feels like the imperfection is part of the genre. Hopefully, you can’t make this through commercial AI and stuff like that. [laughs] I say that walking into the fire, I’m fine.

Kelly: I recently tried to run one of our songs through AI software to remix it. We were howling at how impressive it was but also how it changed the sound into something completely different.

Michael: It’s very The Man like, “You don’t get it”.

Kelly: It was validating because we were giving AI what we are and it still doesn’t know.

[laughter]

What did it sound like?

Kelly: It sounded poppy.

Michael: Early Fall Out Boy but not the good stuff. I’m talking dirty early Fall Out Boy, like early EPs. It was very random. It doesn’t understand what form is so it just goes, “Verse into chorus into a second chorus into a bridge into the first verse again” and you’re like, “What is happening, man? Where am I going?” [laughs] It really just takes you for a loop.

Chris: We might release it someday.

Kelly: The wild thing about it was it was the exact same tempo and had the exact same chords but it was a completely different song. [laughs]

You just need to keep feeding the AI your stuff to break it.

[laughter]

Kelly: Yeah, a revolution. We’re working against it.

The revolution brought to you by Arenas.

Michael: Ooh, that’s got a ring to it.

“Oh Honey, You’re Burning” is one of my favourite songs on the album. What’s the story behind it?

Michael: “Oh Honey, You’re Burning” was one of the later tracks we made and lyrically what I was trying to do was have one or two points on the album that referenced each other. I was trying to come up with more ideas for these tunes and that one spoke to me the same way “Quitting” did. I was - and still am - very fed up with the way the workplace works. I think it’s absolute bullshit. I wrote it when I was working in the film industry and with even the best of shoots, your hours are awful; you work like 20+ hours straight. You just work. They buy your life off of you. I’ve done shoots for 6 weeks and Kelly’s been on them for months and months at a time where they literally pay for your life and you drive for them or whatever they need you to do.

I think the whole song is about how much society has been ripped away over time. The music we get to ingest is just corporate plants. We all know this and it’s not like I don’t like Sabrina Carpenter. I love these pop girlies and stuff, but we’re sold the same garbage all the time. We know we are. We all know nothing’s changed.

I think “Oh Honey, You’re Burning” spoke to a climate change idea, spoke to the fact that people riot and burn stuff down when they’re upset, and it spoke to your mom talking to you when you’re sick. There was this whole authority-to-person exchange and I was like, “That’s angering and interesting”. There are a lot of lines in there that are questioning what we have to look forward to in this life where we just elected Doug Ford for a third term. [laughs] You get upset and write a song about it.

Chris: We do one day hope to sell out though.

Michael: I want that Apple money!

[laughter]

Camila: I think I called that song the evolution of Arenas once because it’s new in comparison to “Quitting”.

Michael: Yes! It was also one of the first songs - if not the first song - that I think we all really wrote from the beginning. I brought the riff and we built it together. That’s surprising to hear that’s your favourite track! Sometimes we’ll play these things and be like, “No one’s gonna like this one!” It’s so weird that you can get so in your own head about how people are going to perceive the music and it’s not really up to you.

Chris: It is impossible to understand what your music actually sounds like.

You relate to it a certain way and once it’s out in the world, everyone puts their own stories and spins on it.

Michael: Yeah. It’s almost like trying to recall an argument from a year ago like, “What’s that song about? Damn, what were we arguing about, man? Was it the Leafs? I can’t remember”. It really is nice to have these songs coming out because I feel like these feelings have been sat on for so long. People finally do get to interpret them now and that’s fun. We haven’t had that before.

Kelly: For the longest time, I hated the song “Truth Come Alive”. It was my least favourite song and it was just because I couldn’t play it very good and I still can’t play it very good. [laughs] It’s a riff that Mike came up with and it’s custom to how he plays guitar and I could never really nail it. For that reason every time we played it I was like, “I’m the worst guitarist in the world!”

[laughter]

Kelly: And then we recorded it and I listened to it and was like, “Oh, this is one of my favourite songs now!”

Chris: I like that one.

Kelly: I still hate to play it but it just goes to show that I know nothing about the value of these songs. [laughs] I just know my own personal experience with them.

Chris: I think you conflate your personal experience and what you expected it to be with what it ended up being. If you don’t have that and you’re a new listener, you’re hearing it for what it is and none of its history matters.

Do you each have songs on the album where your relationship to it changed like Kelly with “Truth Come Alive”?

Chris: I didn’t like “No Reason” and I still don’t really like “No Reason”.

Michael: Chris will be the most harsh critic! [laughs] He’ll be like, “It’s bad. I don’t like it”. He’ll just say it like that and I’ll be like, “What? That’s one of our songs!”

Chris: It’s no secret, everyone knows that I don’t like “No Reason”. [laughs]

Michael: It’s funny because I have to talk him down like, “No, come on man, let’s play the song. It’s gonna go well, I swear!” [laughs] I’m sure all of us have had that. It’s funny because when we were going into the writing process we were all really pumped about the songs - like “Oh Honey” - and feeling like, “Oh, this one’s going to come together” but when we listened back we were sort of like, “Oh, this isn’t what we imagined. It sounds a bit more homey. We wanted it to sound big and have it be a giant moment on the album”. It’s not that we don’t like it. Songs just exist out of nowhere so when you hear them in your head for the first time and you have to translate them to four people, you’re basically speaking in these broken-up languages to get one thing done. Everyone wants to have their input and tweak stuff too. That’s sort of the coming together of the whole situation.

Chris: On the flip side, I thought “6/8/1” was ok but now I really like “6/8/1”. I think that’s one of the best ones we did.

Michael: True. With some of these songs being from my high school days, of course, I’m gonna feel differently about them now. Ironically the message of “Truth Come Alive” has changed for me. The lyrics can stay the same but the song’s message is totally different. Before, it represented a breakup and it represented the more emotional high school feelings of nostalgia and college stuff. Since then, it’s like this is about family and how easy it is to realize that things don’t necessarily get easier.

The song itself can take on a totally different meaning without changing the lyrics at all. I think that affects how you play it and how you hear stuff. One other thing that affects it is when you hear it in your life. Maybe you’re having a good week or a bad week and the song resonates with you for those reasons. It’s just trying to bottle that up and give it to people. That’s the hard part.

Your video for “Quitting” was directed by Shea Oracheski and the story is told in a really cool way. How did the idea for the video come about?

Michael: Shea’s the best! He’s a buddy of mine from college and he works on a bunch of animation stuff. He absolutely rocks. We met when I was 18 or around there and since then we’ve wanted to work together. He moved out to Vancouver so it’s been a decade in the making of us being like, “We should make something one day”. He visits from Vancouver here and there, so he was here and we were planning on doing a video for “Quitting” over text. He’d been listening to the album since we’d made it, pretty much.

“Quitting” was actually based on one of his old videos from the Humber days. He had this idea where he was coming home and a water jug was falling over and picking itself back up; he just had these repeating elements. So we were spitballing the idea. Again, I cannot sing his praises enough because his brain is so collaborative. He was so down to work with all of us and get our input. There was no point where he was super sacred about the process. The ideas we had like, “We want the camera to move at this point and we want this and that”, he had thought about all of that like a chess move six moves in advance. It was really, really easy.

The first shot of the day was the shot where we panned over to us in the yard so that when we panned back, it just locked in place so we could just film there for the rest of the day. He thought of things that we never would have thought of to begin with. We needed something for that outro sequence, so him and I just messed around for a day. I was like, “How fast can we get this video? Can we get it a month from now?” And he was like, “Yeah, for sure!” A week later he was sending me almost finished copies of it. He works like a madman. I cannot recommend him enough. He’s the coolest! He works with a ton of people like Phum Viphurit - a Thai artist - and Haley Blais, and he did parts of a video for Remi Wolf. He’s been doing great stuff. Everyone work with Shea, he’s the best!

The colour scheme for the outro of the video references the album cover art and the art for all the singles.

Michael: Exactly! He was like, “It also would be really nice if this also referenced this” and I was like, “Yeah, that would be really nice!” It’s almost like a 5-star chef walking in and cooking you a nice meal. The idea of “Quitting” is that it’s not “I’ve quit” and it’s not “I’m going to quit”, it’s being in the process of quitting. If you are in the process of quitting then you haven’t quit, that’s the irony of the sentence and of the word itself. The idea is that you’re constantly living the same thing every day and the little ads phasing in over us are referencing that it’s sold to you. It was a little bit of a metaphor meets, “How simple can we make this? How can we do this in a day?” Shea rocked it out, he’s the best.

You’ll be playing your album release show at the Monarch Tavern on March 15. What are you looking forward to about this show?

Kelly: I’m looking forward to seeing and hanging out with my friends. I feel like I haven’t seen my friends in a while and I have to play a concert in order to convince them to come out and hang out with me. [laughs] You gotta do what you gotta do.

Michael: It’s very birthday party-esque, it feels like inviting friends for a celebration. A bunch of people who helped make the album are coming and we’re excited to see them. There’s been a ton of people in this process from photos to helping with videos. Also, there are a ton of buddies coming through to support and be awesome.

It’s also the very first show we’ve played since releasing any of these songs. The last show we played was at the Houndstooth on October 2, I think, so before our first single off this new thing came out. I’m excited to see if people resonate with it. It’ll be a fun celebration with friends and half science experiment to see who liked it. [laughs]

Chris: We’re pushing ourselves to do more with this set. We’ve had a team of friends who have been so loyal and supportive. They have come to probably 6 of our shows each so we want to mix things up and give them a show they haven’t seen before. I’m excited about that. It’s also the first time we’re going to have t-shirts!

Kelly: And the T-shirts have our name on them.

Michael: Unlike the last batch, which did not.

Kelly: We were selling plain T-shirts at our last show.

Michael: Plain white T-shirts and no one bought them.

Chris: This is a useless thought but what does the band Plain White T’s put on their shirts? Do they just sell pain white Ts?

Michael: I mean, they ruin them.

Chris: They write “Pain White T” on a plain white T?

[laughter]

How would you describe the indie rock scene in Toronto?

Michael: The indie rock scene is super cool. I think the fun part of the Toronto scene is that it’s so mishmashable. You’ll go to an indie rock show and there’s an electronic artist - it can go from any genre from heavier to lighter around the indie rock basis. There’s tons of indie bands that don’t fit a specific genre which I love. I think that’s the cool part of it. Right now it feels like it’s in a bit of a renaissance from the pandemic. I remember feeling so claustrophobic in the city during the pandemic because so much was shut down so having it back now feels a bit more like it’s getting back to that 2015 prime when Toronto was really on top of the world. [laughs]

Kelly: A lot of these musical projects were born out of the pandemic like people were locked in their houses and they wrote an album and now they’re touring those albums. It’s cool to see. I feel like there’s a lot of new stuff coming out of that because they were less influenced by live music and were more influenced by building something in their bedroom. That’s cool.

Michael: Spots like the Houndstooth have been great for fostering a nice community. I feel like places like that are really important for that type of feeling. There are a few people who work really hard to make a scene. There’s a lot of people who care and try to make Toronto a cool city and they succeed.

Chris: Deanna does a lot. Violet does a lot at Houndstooth.

Michael: Roach and Burner are sick. Silks put out a sick album, it was so dope. There’s a ton of different stuff to check out.

Which part of Truth Come Alive are you proudest of?

Camila: The way the album’s structured really makes sense to me. I think that’s one of the things I’m proudest of for sure. The fact that we made sort of an intro and sort of an interlude. The overall experience of listening to the album is what I’m most excited about for people to go and hear. I feel like it’s an album on its own, it’s not just single songs. For sure there are songs that we feel more confident and happier about than others, but I think overall it’s a good 35 minutes of music. People should definitely attempt to listen to the whole thing in one sitting, I think that’s how you’re going to get the full experience of Arenas.

Michael: That’s a pretty good summary. I remember telling a friend after we made it, “I’m pretty sure there’s something for everyone on it”. You might not love the whole album but you’ll probably like one track even if you don’t like us. I felt proud about that and like Camila was saying, it’s an album that’s not just a bunch of singles. It’s got its own identity.

The name Truth Come Alive started to embody how hard it was to make an album. I thought it was gonna be easier and it was like a snake in the grass like, “This is maybe not as easy as I thought and these are maybe different songs now”. Camila’s point is a great point. I think the fact we made an album is the coolest to me instead of us just bashing out whatever songs we could. [laughs]

Chris: It is hard to make an album.

Michael: It’s pretty hard.

Kelly: I thought it was pretty easy. You just show up and noodle around and someone hits record and that’s it. You call it a day.

[laughter]

Kelly: I’ve been a mostly solitary musician my whole life and collaborating with these three was great. We got through it pretty seamlessly, aside from Chris and Mike butting heads every so often. We are all pretty agreeable and understood what we were making. That’s what I’m the most proud of, my personal step forward in being a musician and collaborating on something like this.

Chris: I think “6/8/1” is the best song on the album. That’s the one I’m really happy with and one that I’d show somebody first. I love the cat video. I think everyone’s happy with the cats.

The cat video is so cute! Did you have a favourite moment with the cats?

Michael: Everyone in the band has a cat except for me. My girlfriend, Lauren, shot the video. She’s a filmmaker too and we were thinking about what we could do. We were like, “Why don’t we drive over to everyone’s house and film their cats because everyone loves cats?” I’m a huge cat fan. Lauren and I are both allergic so the days were kinda brutal. We were sneezing and crying and it was bad BUT it was very worth it. I love cats. I’m burying my face in them for parts of that video. Camila has Frankie at home, her little scrappy girl. Chris has Scribbles, who’s the most flighty cat. We could only get very quick shots of him.

Chris: In the video I hold him for one second and he’s kinda hunched over. I couldn’t even grab him, he was too scared.

Michael: Kelly has two cats, Bobo and Donut. They were both very happy and excited to be in the video. Then we had some friends who had very cute cats so we were cat-sitting. It was really a Cat Week / Cat Month for us. The ironic thing is we made it and ran a couple ads to see how it went and we got so many responses in the comments of people being like, “CATS! I like cats!” We were like, “We do too! That’s kinda the point of the video”. [laughs] They would respond later like, “Oh, the song is ok”. So they came back to the ad. It was very odd correspondence. [laughs] Cats do wonders, they are the best.

Does anyone have anything that I didn’t ask that you’d like to add?

Michael: I’m excited to go play shows and show people the songs. I love that making music has started up again and we’re writing new songs. We hope that people resonate with this stuff because we want to give more of it. We have more in the chamber already and I’m sure Camila will want me to send more demo notes after this interview but I’m not gonna do it. I’m gonna wait to write it. Come see us live! [laughs]

Kelly: Come to our show on March 15 and stream our album.

Chris: Buy a shirt.

Kelly: Tell us you love us and we’ll keep making stuff.

Michael: I had a comment on our video the other day that said, “Close enough, welcome back Cody Ko” and I thought it was one of the best burns I’ve ever heard in my life. I’m welcoming more comments from people who are getting it, I love that, it’s very nice. [laughs] It lights a fire under your ass, it really gets you going.