Month: July 2026

The Goods: Finding Hope in Goodbye Summertime

Posted on by patrickdonders

The Goods return this September with Goodbye Summertime, the follow-up to Don’t Spoil The Fun, one of my favorite albums of last year. Released by Dandy Boy Records, the new record builds on everything that made its predecessor so memorable: instantly gratifying guitar pop packed with irresistible melodies, but with an emotional depth that reveals itself the closer you listen. Much of that comes from Rob Good’s lyrics, which are remarkably honest, direct, and unafraid to be vulnerable.

Ahead of the album’s September release, I spoke with Rob Good about the emotions behind Goodbye Summertime, writing some of its most personal songs, and what lies ahead for The Goods.

Goodbye Summertime is such a melancholy album title to me. Was that the state of mind you were in when you wrote these songs, or is it more the atmosphere you wanted to convey?

It’s a melancholy album, really. It does have a lot to do with the state of mind I was in when writing it. A lot of the album is about change, and although change can be good it can also be painful, and you can mourn the loss of what you had to leave behind to get to a better place. But saying “goodbye” to something also means saying “hello” to something new, so it may be tinged with some sadness but there’s optimism in there too. To me, the title Goodbye Summertime captures those bittersweet feelings.

“Wing” is a song I keep coming back to, especially because of the lyrics and the line about asking someone to take you under their wing. It feels very vulnerable. Was that your intention when you wrote it?

“Wing” is definitely me at a vulnerable moment. The lyrics are very direct and honest. Sometimes in my writing I’m just trying to express a feeling that’s difficult to put into words, but in this case I was being more autobiographical. A lot of the songs on this record were written really quickly, in heightened emotional states, and then recorded right away. This is one of those songs. I don’t know about the intention because “Wing” just kind of spilled out – I think I needed to write it at that moment.

On parts of “Ginger Rose” you sing noticeably higher than usual. As a listener, that has a huge emotional impact on me—not just because it sounds beautiful. Were you deliberately trying to add an extra emotional dimension, or did the melody simply lead you there and require you to sing in that higher register?

When I’m writing, I just try to follow the melody where it wants to go. I don’t think I necessarily set out to write a song where I sang in falsetto, but as I was feeling my way through the chords it just seemed to take me there. I can remember around the time of writing “Ginger Rose” I was obsessed with several songs that featured a falsetto vocal – “Here There and Everywhere” is an obvious touchstone, but also “Tell Me Have You Seen Her” by the Chi-Lites and “How Deep Is Your Love” by the Bee Gees – so that influence must have crept in. I do love a falsetto vocal, and it was fun to explore that part of my voice.

“Waiting” feels quite different from the rest of the album. It’s just you and your guitar, I assume. Because it’s so brief, it feels more like a short story than a full novel—to use a slightly clumsy comparison. What made it such an important piece of the album as a whole?

I like that comparison! “Waiting” was just a song-fragment that was rattling around in my head, and that seemed to be all that it wanted to be. I think it’s okay for songs to be short. Sometimes you just have a snippet of a melody and it somehow feels complete – like if it were any longer it would somehow lose something. Tony Molina is obviously the master of this. I also love Pink Flag by Wire and of course “Your Majesty” at the end of Abbey Road. Not that I was explicitly thinking about any of that when I wrote “Waiting,” but I’ve just always found that short songs can be really impactful and beautiful. As far as its importance on the record, over the course of an album I feel like the little moments are just as important as the big swings, and “Waiting” is just one of those little moments.

When is Goodbye Summertime being released, and what do the next few months look like for The Goods?

Goodbye Summertime comes out on September 16, and our record release show is on September 11 at Little Hill in El Cerrito, CA. Then, starting September 24 we’re heading out for a European tour with Joel Cusumano. We’re currently looking at visiting Germany, Spain, France, Belgium, and the UK, and maybe a couple other places too.

Flipping the Script: How Adversity Shaped Skeletons

Posted on by patrickdonders

Sometimes the best records are born from the worst circumstances. After a frustrating battle to restore his previous album to streaming platforms following a false accusation of artificial streaming, David Woodard channeled that anger, urgency, and renewed sense of purpose into Skeletons. The result is his rawest and most immediate collection yet—a record where power pop hooks meet punk energy, and where vulnerability is worn as proudly as defiance.

Skeletons has quite an unusual backstory. What happened, and how did you arrive at a sound that leans just a little more toward punk than power pop?

Two months after releasing Everything Belongs, I got an email from CDBaby telling me Apple Music had removed the album for irregular streaming activity. They listed bots, fake accounts, and playlist manipulation as possible infractions. None of which I had done.

CDBaby told me to contact Apple Music directly. Apple Music told me they only deal with distributors. I went back to CDBaby. They ghosted me. For weeks. I tried social media. I filed a BBB complaint. I watched my weekly streams drop to zero. Eventually CDBaby replied, reiterated why the album had been removed, and closed the case.

So I reopened it. Filed another BBB complaint. Kept pushing. A few days before Christmas they agreed to resubmit. The next morning it was back.

I tell this story because the system is designed to make you give up. If this happens to you, don’t. Keep pushing.

As for the sound of Skeletons, that story starts a couple of years earlier. I randomly picked a music documentary one night and landed on Filmage: The Story of Descendents/All. I had never heard of the Descendents. I watched it eight times. Listened to their music constantly. Fell down the rabbit hole of everyone they influenced. Even travelled to Chicago to see them.

I grew up in the suburbs in the late seventies and eighties. Punk was happening but I was too young and too removed to get it. So, I feel like I am living my musical life backwards. Discovering at 57 what I should have found at 17. Skeletons is what that sounds like.

On the title track, you really go for it vocally, making the performance feel incredibly powerful yet also very vulnerable. Was that contrast intentional, or did that tension simply emerge naturally as you were recording it?

I don’t consider myself a vocalist. I spent twenty-five years playing with people who were real vocalists and learned what I could from watching them work.

When I stepped out on my own, I had to make peace with having a limited set of tools. I have some range (I can squeeze out a high A# if I must), and I like what my voice does when I am pushing hard. There is something that comes out under pressure that I find more interesting than anything I produce when I am comfortable.

For the studio-philes, I also switched from a condenser mic to a dynamic mic for vocals. Condenser mics reward control and precision. Dynamic mics reward commitment. For a rawer record it made sense.

The vocal on Thus Far is probably the best example. The inspiration was a YouTube video of a street band in the UK performing U2’s With or Without You. The singer is just singing his guts out on a street corner. Everything he has. Perfectly imperfect. I wanted to chase that feeling.

Whether you call it power pop or punk pop, the music lives and breathes through irresistible hooks and catchy choruses. It must be a wonderful feeling to write a sad song where all those elements come together so perfectly. What does that feel like as a songwriter?

You have to have songs people want to listen to. That’s it. Nothing saves a record full of songs no one wants to hear.

I’m grateful I can do what I do. Modern technology is remarkable. A guy in a room in Nashville makes a record and someone in Sweden finds it and plays it on their radio show. That still gets me.

And when someone tells you a song meant something to them, that’s the whole reason you pick up the guitar in the first place. Every musician reading this knows exactly what I mean.

Given the way this record came together, I imagine there was an even stronger desire to prove yourself and make sure people heard it. Did you feel that, or was it still most important simply to make the record you truly believed in?

The initial impulse was about flipping the script. I had been accused and effectively convicted of something I didn’t do. That is a peculiar kind of shame and embarrassment. The quickest antidote I could think of was to get something new into the world as fast as possible.

The irony is that urgency probably helped the record more than any deliberate artistic intention could have.

Everything Belongs was me trying to be edgier, and I like what I did. But looking back I was reaching for some low hanging fruit of politics to feed a sense of discontentedness.

With Skeletons the urgency and discontentedness was personal. I wasn’t trying to sound productively maladapted. I just was.

David Woodard and the band sound absolutely huge on Skeletons. How did you achieve the sound you had in mind?

Less was more. That’s the honest answer.

Fewer takes. Less processing. More economy in the sonic space. The blueprint is basically two guitars, bass, and drums. The vocal harmonies are sparser with more duets than trios and less stacking. Everything that remains is working harder.

A lot of this was unintentional. Recording fast to flip the script on a bad situation produces its own kind of serendipity. Some of the things I like most about this record I didn’t plan.

Paul Collins on 60 Minutes of Power Pop: From the Stage to the Screen

Posted on by patrickdonders

On Sunday, April 6, 2025, Paul Collins played at the new dBs here in Utrecht. He had promised “60 Minutes of Power Pop” beforehand, and that’s exactly what we got: in a blistering one-two-three-go rhythm, he blasted through nearly all the classics from the first two The Beat albums, along with a handful of gems from The Nerves. Collins was the undisputed King of Power Pop, urging his much younger backing band on with infectious energy, never letting the pace drop for a second.

Next to me, I saw my two sons, aged 21 and almost 23, watching it all with big smiles. During “Hanging on the Telephone,” a spontaneous family dance broke out, and for a moment, we found ourselves in Power Pop heaven.

What an amazing night!

That Utrecht show was just one stop on a unique tour in which Collins performed with different backing bands. The entire adventure has now been captured in a wonderful documentary, following the tour from rehearsals to performances around the world.

I spoke with Paul about how the film came together, what it was like working with so many different musicians, and why the project has already been attracting attention from film festivals. He also shared some exciting news about an upcoming release celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Nerves.

How did the idea for the movie come about?

Paul Collins: I was in Mallorca after I did that show for Paco, and one morning I said to myself, “I really want to document this. I want to let everyone know that I did it.”

I thought it was a tremendous undertaking, and I really surprised myself with how well it turned out.

I’d collected clips that people had posted about the different shows, so I thought I would use those as the basis for putting everything together. One of the clips was done by the filmmaker Tom Fleming, and it was of a very high quality. So when I got in touch with him, I thought I’d ask, “Do you want to help me make this into a film?” His immediate answer was yes, and I’m so glad that he did, because I think it turned out great.

60 Minutes of Power Pop is such a great concept. Did the idea come together all at once, or did it evolve over time?

Paul Collins: Yes, it all came together at the same time.

I was thinking about how I could improve the shows, which is something you’re always doing. How can I make it better? How can I get people to come out?

And it just came to me in a flash. Why don’t I just do the best songs by The Beat and The Nerves? There are so many, and that would be non-stop power pop!

Just one great song after another.

So that was the inspiration for everything. Once I had that, everything else just snowballed.

In the film we see you performing with a number of different backing bands, and it all seems to come together effortlessly. I imagine organizing that must have been quite a challenge. How did you make it work?

Paul Collins: I surprised myself with how easily it fell into place, although I knew each time I was taking a tremendous gamble that it might not work out.

I vetted the bands as best I could. Toyozo I knew from Japan, and I knew he was serious about this music. I had total faith that he would come up with two guys of the same caliber, and they were amazing. We really could have done it after one rehearsal. After the first rehearsal, I said, “Wow, it’s done.” But we did the second one just to be on the safe side.

It was more or less the same thing with every band. The Manikins, again, I vetted them. I saw that they were touring, and they were from Switzerland. The Swiss are famous for being very meticulous. Once again, when I showed up, they had everything locked down, and it was really amazing. I gave myself a number of days in their hometown. They put me up in a very nice place, so I got to hang out there. We had a buffer in case there were any problems, but we really didn’t need it.

It just kind of went on like that. The guys in France, The Sutles, were the same way. I did two rehearsals with them, and we were really ready to rock. We were supposed to do more shows, but unfortunately two of them got canceled. One of the clubs closed—those kinds of screw-ups.

I loved playing with them. I was really hoping we could do more shows, and hopefully we will in the future.

The same thing happened with the guys in California. That was another case where a club owner sent me a video of them doing “Working Too Hard,” and I got in touch with them. They immediately said yes, and I went out there. Again, I had a buffer. I think I was there for almost ten days, just hanging out with them.

That was really a lot of fun. I stayed with Dustin and his family, got to know his wife and his kid, and we did it Long Beach style.

We had time to do a couple of rehearsals, but basically I didn’t do more than two rehearsals with any of these bands, including the guys in Mallorca. We’re old friends.

The film is currently being booked for several film festivals, and there already seems to be a lot of enthusiasm from festival programmers. Why do you think it has struck such a chord with them?

Paul Collins: Well, it’s been a real eye-opening experience submitting to festivals because of the way they go about things. You have to submit, and then you have to wait a long time before you find out whether you’re even in.

So far, we’ve been lucky. We’ve been accepted in Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, and, most recently, Tokyo, and we’re hoping for more.

We’ve also submitted to Barcelona, the Woodstock Festival here in New York, and the Long Beach Festival, so hopefully we’ll get some more acceptances.

To date, the only showing we’ve had in a movie theater was in Los Angeles. A bunch of my friends went, Tom Fleming went, and Softjaw went too. It was great. They saw it on the big screen, and everybody loved it.

That’s the caveat, though, because getting accepted into a festival doesn’t always mean your film gets screened. They can only show a certain number of films.

So the second tier is finding out whether they’re actually going to show your film, and we’re still waiting to hear about that from some of these festivals.

At a certain point, we’ll just turn it over to our own platforms and let everybody see it.

We have a two-year license to do that, and we will.

Looking back at the past few years—the touring, the recording, and now the film—what keeps you inspired and gives you the energy to keep going full throttle?

Paul Collins: That’s the easy part. What keeps me going is that I love it.

This last show, The Best of The Nerves and The Beat, is also coupled with the fact that Third Man Records is releasing the 50th anniversary edition of The Nerves on October 8, which they’ll be announcing soon. It’s a double album with all those great songs.

We included some of the Breakaways songs along with the Nerves songs—everything from the vintage 1974 to 1978 period. We found the source tapes, and most of it is studio material, so the sound is incredible. It’s a great document of the work that Jack Lee, Peter Case, and I did.

So it’s a great impetus to go out there and perform this stuff.

The last show I did here in New York was my best show in New York in many, many years. We played TV Eye, it was sold out, and the audience was just fantastic. There were people like yourself with their kids, people on first dates, young kids, older kids—kids my age. We’re all kids.

So it’s a very nice situation now. The people who follow this kind of music, and the people who follow my music, are great. It’s just wonderful. Without sounding corny, it’s a loving crowd, and I really enjoy it. It gives me a tremendous amount of satisfaction to be able to do it, and I’m happy with the place I’m in now.

I’m able to do what I do, and I have no trouble surviving these days, so it’s all good.