In the summer of 2011, Noah and I had been housemates for a year. He's one of my best pals, and I've always intended to support his musical endeavors. I don't know whose idea it was to do a split, but I was down. In fact, I needed to be doing more splits. At the time I was doing a lot of loud singing and loud screaming, and felt like I had a strong voice. Half my tracks on this are serious, and done with acoustic guitar. The others are weird and heavy, including a powerviolence song about my friend Garrett Oliver getting his drivers license. Justine did the cover art.
This is Super Famicom's punk album, and I was sick of everyone's crap. I 2011, I'd been living on the bottom for a good four years. I wrote some songs that I thought were funny, at the expense of a world I didn't like. It seemed like a lot of punks liked this album, and thought it was cool. It felt pretty neat while it lasted. You may have noticed how this album has two covers, one is on the far right of the above image. I don't know why I haven't used two covers for an album in the future, since I thought it was pretty cool, to do one just as a Fuck You to whomever isn't punk enough for me.
This is a weird cd I played on. Stiff Bindles was my favorite local band, and their members were my best friends. In 2010, they went on tour with The GAZE. For a while, I was borrowing a broken four track recorder from my friend Nick. It was the kind that let you record on four separate tracks at the same time, which was a huge plus. However, I only had two functioning microphones. So we recorded this with two mics. The band wasn't getting along with their bass player, so I played bass on it. I don't remember what bass it was, but I know it sounded pretty bad. It was really cool that they let me do the art, though. Later they made a tape that sounds better than this, and the only art on it was their band logo, and I still get ideas for album arts they could have had if only they'd asked me.
In 2010, the Winslows stopped playing together, and I pondered the idea of starting another pop punk band. I had song ideas that were riff-oriented, and wouldn't work with other groups I was playing in. Jaclyn moved to town from chicago and came by, at the advice of her boyfriend Josh. She'd heard I was the guy to talk to if she wanted to play in a local band. So we jammed, and she played really fast, and it was awesome. We got Garrett to play bass. I wanted to write songs that were really dark, while also being poppy. For months, I wore gym shorts, and the Gaze practiced like every day. I thought we were going to get huge, but eventually Jaclyn moved back to Chicago and I got busy with other stuff. These songs were recorded and mixed on Wilson's laptop, with cubase. I always wanted to try to do a better mix, with more familiar software, or at least get it less 'loud'. We also always played the songs more fast than good. I guess there's something admirable about that.
For most of the writing and recording of this album, I didn't have a working computer, countered with an excess of heavy music ideas. Some might say this album would have had more appeal, had it had less songs, and less songs that don't sound like the last eighty songs I'd recorded and released. Songwriters evolve, and that evolution happens within shorter time frames when you write as much as I. Too bad it took me so long to get good at drums, but what can you do? I didn't want anyone else playing on my album and trying to tell me how my songs should be played. The original tapes I put this release on were found in the dumpster of a thrift store. So punk.
The Winslows went on tour for a whole month, in two thousand nine. Before this tour, the only band tour I'd been on was with Lori Ann. We had a band fund, and a budget for eating meals on the road. We didn't have that with the Winslows, and I don't know what I expected. For those of you who don't know, being on tour with no money can be really bad for your self-respect. And for the sake of the team, and being fair, I kept going on band tours with no money. In fact, I owed it to the bands who were constantly helping me out a little bit with food, and what not. I owed more than my life was (fiscally) worth. On solo tours, I could at least sell a few cds and feed myself. With a band tour, it's often frowned upon to push your solo music onto people, making money for yourself instead of on behalf of your band of best friends. So I learned a few things on the Winslows tour.
As a band, we'd been finding our sound. The tour cd isn't 100% sick, but I think it's a definite step up from our tape. And I started to get an idea of what flavor of pop punk I wanted to make in the future.
Buy the Tape - Paypal $10 Stream it - YouTube Download it - Nextcloud In 2014, Dildozer made a full-length with some new songs an...
