Some bands spend years trying to find the right chemistry. For Softjaw, it seems to have happened almost instantly. When songwriters Dustin and Tanner joined forces, they discovered a shared love of melody, hooks and all the little details that turn a good pop song into a great one.
Their new album, Love Can’t Kill You, is packed with the kind of effortlessly catchy, beautifully crafted songs that remind you why power pop is such an irresistible genre in the first place. There are plenty of familiar influences, but Softjaw never sound like they’re simply looking backwards. Instead, they’ve found their own way of making those timeless ingredients sound fresh and exciting.
In fact, Love Can’t Kill You is one of those albums that will help define 2026 as a great year for power pop. We caught up with Dustin and Tanner to talk about songwriting chemistry, the art of making a great song even better, avoiding the nostalgia trap and the joys and frustrations of recording an album themselves.
When did you realise that Softjaw could write genuinely great pop songs? Was there a particular song that made you think you were onto something?
Dustin: I had a couple songs knockin around before I met Tanner. One of them was “Don’t Go Walking Out”. I was definitely leaning in a more power pop direction but didn’t have anyone to hash them out with. Once Tanner came along we both started writing and things just seem to click right away. It’s a rarity to find your musical counterpoint so effortlessly.
Tanner: I met Dustin…that’s about it lol. I’ve kind of always been in a collaboration when it comes to music so when we met and shared influences I got a pretty good idea of what Dustin was going for and that got me super excited to start working that influence into my own songs for the band. The influence is mutual i believe and the combo of our approach seems to be workin out.
With two songwriters in the band, how does a Softjaw song usually come together? Do you bring in finished ideas, or do songs take shape together?
Dustin: It’s happened a few different ways but typically one of us has a song pretty much figured out. Then we all get in a room and give it a spit shine. I think we will attempt to be more collaborative for the next record.
Tanner: Usually Dustin writes an amazing song that breaks my brain and then i try and match it but never really get it, wherever it lands seems to be close tho and we go from there. my favorite times are when we show each other a song and we get telepathic and it falls right out. Thats straight up magic.
How do you make a good song even better? What do you tend to change between the first idea and the finished recording?
Dustin: For me personally it’s the little hidden gems you can sneak in. A special chord, a witty lyric, an unexpected key change, a change in time signature. The trick is doing it without people noticing. Don’t be flashy!
Tanner: I honestly have no clue. refer to Dustin on that one lol. I usually pour out my guts and call it pollok.
Your influences are clear, but Softjaw never feels like an exercise in nostalgia. How do you find your own voice while drawing on music you love?
Dustin: We have a pretty wide collective palette I think. We also try to steer clear of anything being too on the nose. If it’s a carbon copy we might as well be a cover band. The hope is to add some originality. That’s how music evolves.
Tanner: I think you gotta feeeeeel it maaaaaan. I was just trying to rip off the “deface the music” record by utopia… WHERE DOES THE WORLD GO TO HIDE?!
You recorded Love Can’t Kill You yourselves. Did that freedom make it easier to get the songs exactly where you wanted them, or harder to know when to stop?
Dustin: The recording process wasn’t too painful. I tried to mix it and drove myself insane. We eventually brought in Wyatt Blair for mixing. I was able to take a deep breath and see the finish line once he started sending mixes in. He’s got the magic!
Tanner: I don’t have too much experience in a studio so i gotta give it to Dustin on this one. its best to trust the person behind the wheel.
Sydney’s The Low Priorities have arrived with Dice, a debut album bursting with jangling guitars, infectious melodies and classic Power Pop energy. Drawing on decades of friendship and a shared love of guitar-driven pop, the band have turned what began as a modest EP project into a full-length record that’s already attracting attention well beyond Australia. We caught up with Dan Keary to talk about the making of Dice, the band’s musical influences, Sydney’s thriving guitar-pop scene and what might come next.
Dice is your debut album. How did The Low Priorities come together, and how did these songs develop into the record we’re hearing now?
We’re all old friends who have played with one another in different bands on and off over the years.
About a year and a half ago, we had the idea to start a band specifically to play songs with a power pop feel. We thought that if we recorded a few songs as a self-released EP, it might be a good calling card to get some live gigs here in Sydney. While we were making those recordings, Dave wrote another batch of songs so we’d have enough for a live set. We got excited enough about them that we thought we may as well record all the songs and release an album rather than an EP.
So the album was done before we’d actually played any live shows.
There’s a real sense on Dice that you’re drawing on a long tradition of melodic guitar pop while still making it sound like your own. What were the musical touchstones for the band when you were making the record, and how consciously were you thinking about finding your own sound?
You’re absolutely spot on in referring to a long tradition of melodic guitar pop.
We’ve been playing together in bands since the 1990s and have spent many years sharing our love of music and enthusing about hundreds of different artists and records. The common thread of what we love is guitar-based bands with memorable, melodic songs. While making the Dice album we really enjoyed drawing on these inspirations, sometimes several within the same song. We’d often find ourselves talking excitedly all at once about bands like The Who, Blondie, Elvis Costello, The Nerves, Guided By Voice, Badfinger…to name only a few!
We wanted to make a high energy, catchy record that was clearly inspired by these and other great bands, but which still had a sound that was a unique blend of our own voices and playing styles. We weren’t looking to reinvent the wheel, but hopefully to create something with its own identity within the guitar power pop tradition.
There’s clearly a strong guitar-pop and power-pop tradition in Australia, and Dice has already been mentioned alongside that history and the current Sydney scene. Do you feel part of a wider Australian guitar-pop community, and are there bands from that scene — past or present — that you feel particularly connected to?
Yes, we’re certainly fans of a lot of the bands that people would associate with classic Australian power pop, such as The Hoodoo Gurus, Sunnyboys, The Stems, The Someloves etc.
In terms of the current Sydney scene, there’s still plenty of great guitar pop artists and bands like Bryan Estepa, Hoolahan, The Pyramidiacs, and The On and Ons playing regularly and everyone knows each other either directly or indirectly.
We did an album launch gig in Sydney in August and have another Sydney gig in mid December. Next year we’ll be looking at playing some more shows with other like-minded bands both here in Sydney and hopefully down in Melbourne.
The album has been getting some really strong reactions since its release, including the description of Dice as an “exemplary” power-pop record. Has the response surprised you, and have you noticed it bringing new listeners, contacts or opportunities your way?
We’ve been really happy with the response so far. We were confident we’d made a really good record so were always hopeful it would be well received but, yes, we’ve been pleasantly surprised at the airplay and positive reviews its been getting both here in Australia and in the US and Europe.
We’ve made quite a few new connections in different countries and there’s also some opportunities for some overseas shows next year and hopefully we’ll be in a position to confirm these shortly.
Dice is out now, and the songs are no longer really yours — they belong to the listeners. What does it feel like to let your first album go into the world, and is there a particular song you’re especially curious to hear people make their own?
That’s a nice way to put it – that the songs now belong to the listeners. We’d like to think that’s the case because that’s how real music fans perceive the songs they love – as their songs – and hopefully there’s enough people out there who have formed or will form that attachment to our songs.
We wanted to make an album on which every song could stand up on its own and hopefully we achieved that, so that every song could potentially be someone’s favourite.
We’ve been promoting the title track “Dice” as the main track, as we think it best captures some of those classic power pop elements we love – jangle, melody, power etc – but equally, there may be sonic or lyrical elements of other songs that people can relate to.
As long as we know there’s people out there enjoying the album, we’ve achieved what we set out to do.
2026 keeps looking more and more like the year of the Power Pop resurrection, Bandcamp is writing about it, Shindig! Magazine is writing about it, and I can’t help myself, I need to list the Power Pop albums I have been listening to the first nine months of the year.
A few of these reviews started life over on Chiming Back, back when that was still where I kept my notes on this stuff. That blog is done, but the records aren’t, so those write-ups found a new home here instead.
So no, this isn’t a ranking, and it’s not trying to be definitive or comprehensive. It’s a batch of albums I genuinely can’t stop playing, offered up for no better reason than that I love this genre and these are the records currently proving why. More than twenty of them now, as it turns out, once I actually sat down and counted.
Make of that what you will. Here they are.
Lex Bauman: The Dangerous Game
The punch line of Sweet Sweet Music Blog is “Let’s Put the Power Back in Pop.” And if you don’t know what that means, please listen to Lex Bauman’s new album, The Dangerous Game. Better yet: put on the classic debut albums of The Beat and The Romantics, and then The Dangerous Game.
It will take you as high as a Power Pop kite can go.
It took me to a height where, as a 56-year-old, I honestly thought “While We’re Still Young” was about me.
Music City: Welcome to Music City
After one listen, “Pretty Feelings” already feels like a song that’s always existed. Not just because the melody slips into place so effortlessly, or because its themes are timeless, but because it carries itself like a hit, in the same way Adam Schmitt, Matthew Sweet, Fountains of Wayne, or Teenage Fanclub made hits in the ’90s. Instantly familiar. Effortlessly melodic. Impossible to resist.
Music City’s immaculate pop sound, strong enough to invite comparisons to The Lemon Twigs or Mod Lang, yet clearly its own, has therefore, perhaps conveniently, been described as part of what Shindig! Magazine calls the revival of the Third Wave of Power Pop. It’s a helpful tag, but Conor Lumsden’s songwriting reaches beyond neat categorization. The Irish-London songwriter draws as much from the shimmering brilliance of ’90s power pop as from its ’70s architects, The Raspberries, Big Star, and the rest of that sacred lineage.
And then something quietly remarkable happens: “Pretty Feelings,” which at first feels like the song, becomes just one great track among eleven others. Welcome to Music City doesn’t lean on one obvious single. It thrills because of its consistency, because of its depth of craft.
If we don’t collectively catch on, this record has all the ingredients of a future cult classic, the kind whispered about in the same breath as Phonograph or 12 in a Room.
Mod Lang: Borrowed Time
Mod Lang are a four-piece out of Detroit who channel the melodic rush of The Raspberries, the aching jangle of Big Star, and the John Lennon side of The Beatles, and somehow make it feel like it belongs firmly in the here and now. There’s nothing self-consciously innovative about what they do. Instead, they chase something far more elusive: the perfect pop song. Not as an exercise in nostalgia, not as museum rock, but as a living, breathing pursuit.
This is retro without kitsch. No wink, no quotation marks, just heart, hooks, and a belief that chiming guitars and skybound choruses still matter.
“What I Can’t Have” and “In Advance,” the opening one-two punch of Borrowed Time, take things to another level entirely. The confidence. The momentum. The sheer exhilaration. These songs don’t just sparkle, they surge. Long live Mod Lang.
The Goods: Goodbye Summertime
Goodbye Summertime is the follow-up to Don’t Spoil The Fun, one of my favorite records of last year, and it builds on everything that made that album so good: instantly gratifying guitar pop with melodies that grab you right away, but an emotional depth that only opens up the closer you listen.
Rob Good’s lyrics are the heart of it, direct, honest, unafraid to sit in vulnerability. The title captures a very specific kind of bittersweetness: change that hurts a little even when it’s leading somewhere better. “Wing” is the rawest moment on the record, written fast and recorded just as fast, in the middle of feeling it. “Ginger Rose” pushes Good into an unexpected falsetto that adds a whole other emotional layer, and “Waiting,” just voice and guitar, proves that a song doesn’t need length to leave a mark. Sometimes the small moments carry as much weight as the big ones.
Bleu: Sargeant Pepper Grinder
On Sargeant Pepper Grinder, Bleu turns grief into something bright, melodic and deeply human. It’s both a tribute to friends who are no longer here and a celebration of the people, memories and small moments that remain, wrapped in the kind of irresistible melodies and harmonies that have always defined his songwriting.
What makes the record so striking is how openly it sits with two conflicting feelings at once, genuine sorrow and real joy, side by side, refusing to cancel each other out. Bleu produced and mixed it himself, obsessing over every detail, and it shows: this is a record built as a lasting, tangible tribute, and it never once slides into sad-sack territory.
Rob Bonfiglio: The Over Under
The Over Under is the kind of album that keeps revealing itself the longer you sit with it. I liked it immediately, but months in, it’s become one of those records I return to when I need to reset. Bonfiglio wrote, recorded and mixed nearly all of it himself, whittling down a batch of some twenty songs to the ones that carried real weight, and the closeness of that process is audible everywhere. “Need You Know” is the emotional core, quietly vulnerable and built around a riff with a Fleetwood Mac-ish pull; “More Pure Than Gold” is its sharper, angrier counterpart, more political and more urgent. Both come from the same instinct: write what actually needs saying, and trust the songs to find their own shape.
A View of Earth From the Moon: Rolled Over Like A Wave
A View of Earth From the Moon is Jonathan Fickes’ band, and ever since 2017 I’ve been endlessly returning to Closer to a Ghost. “One Thousand Miles Apart” and “Distance Runner” still find their way onto nearly every playlist I make. Despite the long gap between releases, Rolled Over Like A Wave delivers exactly what you hope for from a follow-up: razor-sharp yet instantly accessible Power Pop songs filled with vivid reflections on the past, on why those memories can still matter in the present, and sometimes the other way around.
But this is far from a purely melancholic or nostalgic record. “Every For Free” and “Looking Straight Ahead” sound like the voice of someone fighting for change, or simply trying to scrape together fifty bucks. The urgency that drives opener “Emerson and Henry David Thoreau” never fades. These are not songs casually tossed together. They are stories that clearly needed to be told.
Albums like this are what keep Power Pop alive, fresh, and relevant. And if I end up being the only person who prefers Rolled Over Like A Wave over the latest records by The Lemon Twigs or Uni Boys, I’ll gladly stand by that. Power Pop doesn’t need more ’70s soft-rock nostalgia to stay relevant. It needs conviction, edge, and a sense of purpose. Rolled Over Like A Wave has all three.
Mopar Stars: Official Researchers Of The NJ Devil
Mopar Stars are built to hit. The songs hit hard and the hooks stick fast, but underneath all that noise sits a genuinely sharp eye for the small contradictions of everyday life, good days next to bad ones, a little optimism curdling into bitterness, just getting by next to wanting more. Where the band’s earliest demos were buried in cassette murk, Official Researchers Of The NJ Devil opens the sound up: bigger, clearer, unpretentious, but still every bit as physical.
Songwriter N-A-O built these tracks to be immediately memorable and let the rest of the band find their own parts around them, and you can hear that trust paying off. This sounds like a band that came up through Hüsker Dü punk and carries that same Replacements-style restlessness, never forgetting how satisfying it is to hit hard. No surprise the first pressing sold out fast.
Stephen Egerton: I Think You’re Overthinking This
The title alone is good advice, and the record follows through on it. Ten songs from the Descendents/ALL guitarist that never once strain for effect. This is craftsmanship with personality, not craftsmanship for its own sake. The flow from one track to the next feels effortless, melodies stick without announcing themselves, and every so often a chorus lands with exactly the punch you didn’t know you were waiting for. Sometimes that’s all you actually need.
The Legal Matters: Lost at Sea
Lost at Sea is The Legal Matters’ fourth album. Keith Klingensmith, Andy Reed, and Chris Richards had already refined their signature sound on 2016’s Conrad. That was the record where I fell for their harmonies, and I haven’t fallen out of love since. Those voices intertwine so naturally, serving songs that carry a distinctly ’70s sensibility, where everything revolves around melody, craft, and the quiet grandeur of the composition itself. No excess. Just the song.
That devotion to the beauty of the song isn’t lost on Lost at Sea. But when you hear the bite, almost the venom, in the guitar on “Everybody Knows,” you immediately sense that something has shifted. There’s an urgency here that wasn’t as pronounced before. The world is boiling, after all, and perhaps a pure L’art pour l’art, a song for the sake of the song, approach no longer feels sufficient.
At least, that’s how it sounds to me.
And strangely, that evolution feels beautiful. Without abandoning their core values, those luminous harmonies, that reverence for melody, The Legal Matters push themselves into different territory. Maybe even more relevant territory. For days like these.
Jesus Christ Taxi Driver: Taxi the Rich
When I first heard “Have It,” the opening track from Taxi the Rich, I couldn’t share it with the Power Pop community on Facebook fast enough. It sounded like a song that could just as easily have come from The Knack as from XTC. Others picked up on echoes of Sloan’s infectious energy and the quirky brilliance of Panorama-era The Cars.
That same creative tension runs through the album’s remaining ten tracks. Along the way, Jesus Christ Taxi Driver also taps into the sharp-edged indie funk sensibilities of bands like Yard Act and Hot Chip, creating a sound that feels both familiar and refreshingly contemporary. It’s a remarkable balancing act, a band that seems to hold the future of Power Pop in their hands, even as they insist on calling themselves a blues band. Or a violent rock band. Don’t let them fool you.
Local Drags: Cool If We Split?
“Hell is in the doorway, blocking light,” sings Lanny Durbin on the highly punchy, melodic “Highbeams,” one of the standout tracks on Cool If We Split?, the new release by Local Drags on the excellent Rotterdam label Stardumb Records. Durbin masters the classic mix of dark lyrics with catchy melodies and sparkling guitars, delivering a power pop masterclass that not only stands out today for its quality, but would have triumphed just as proudly in the 90s, one of the genre’s heyday periods, thanks to its shared sense of urgency and vibe with the most beloved bands of that era.
If you’re a fan of bands like The Shazam and Splitsville, to name just two examples, you’ll recognize that same level of quality when listening to Cool If We Split?. I get the sense that Local Drags is flying under the radar, which is remarkable, because the catalog Durbin is building is outstanding, and Cool If We Split? is a new high point.
Daniel Romano’s Outfit: Preservers Of The Pearl
Like Sloan, Daniel Romano’s Outfit might just be the best band in the world right now, and Preservers Of The Pearl makes that case without breaking a sweat. This is a band completely in tune with itself, forged through countless live performances into something tight, instinctive, and utterly alive. Power Pop songs the way Power Pop songs should sound: to the point, energetic, dangerous, and catchy as hell.
Hurry: Zoned Out
Hurry’s Zoned Out carries that scruffy, hooky warmth that made Nada Surf so easy to love, but the Teenage Fanclub blood runs even closer to the surface, and not just because Gerard Love himself shows up on “Moving After You.” Ten songs in, nothing here is rushed or overworked, just guitars that jangle exactly as much as they need to and melodies that land without straining for it. It’s the kind of record that sounds effortless because the effort went into knowing what to leave out. A quietly excellent addition to the year’s Power Pop pile.
The Greenberry Woods: It’s All Good, Sugar…
Just under a year after Mobtown by Splitsville, the Huseman brothers return with It’s All Good, Sugar…, the latest album from their other band, The Greenberry Woods. It’s an equally pleasant surprise, because twelve good songs in a row is something worth stopping to appreciate, in a world where thirty-second snippets are apparently enough to make a hit.
Not here.
What you get instead is craftsmanship, melody, and a healthy dose of mischief. Pop music has thrived on that combination for as long as it has existed, and The Greenberry Woods make it sound as fresh as ever. It’s All Good, Sugar… could just as easily have been released in the 1990s, and within the world of Power Pop, that happens to be one of the highest compliments imaginable.
Timeless is another. It applies here too.
The Greenberry Woods sound like masters of melodic songwriting, effortless hooks, and the kind of album that reminds you why you fell in love with Power Pop in the first place.
Salieri & The Turnspit Dogs: The Katzenklavier
Corey Landis has built something genuinely singular here. Experiment and melody in a long-distance relationship that works. Wayne Coyne and Mark Oliver Everett are fair reference points, as much as the young Elton John is, but this is its own world, one where the jester holds up a mirror and makes you question what you thought you understood. A tour de force, an artistic and intelligent statement, overwhelming in its beauty and urgency.
Cut Worms: Transmitter
Transmitter is Max Clarke’s fourth full-length album as Cut Worms, produced by Jeff Tweedy of Wilco. I’ve been a fan for a while now, and the reason is simple: Clarke sounds like Paul McCartney paying tribute to Buddy Holly. In my world, that’s about as high as the bar goes. Vulnerability and bravado intertwined so naturally it feels inevitable, like they were never meant to be separated in the first place.
The Well Wishers: Expected Outcomes
“I like a lot of different kinds of music, but the songs I love most are usually torn apart by a guitar after about two and a half minutes.” That used to be my answer whenever someone asked what I was into. I’m not sure it’s still entirely true, and I’m not sure it happens on every track of Expected Outcomes.
What I do know is that the guitars take center stage throughout all eleven songs. The tone, the playing, the power chords, the seemingly endless stream of punchy melodies. It’s absolutely fantastic.
So if someone asks me today what I listen to, my answer would probably be: “I like a lot of different kinds of music, but the songs I love most are usually torn apart by a guitar after about two and a half minutes. And right now, I’m listening to Expected Outcomes by The Well Wishers a lot.”
The Jimmy C: Pretending To Be A Person
Fifteen songs, and Jamie Coghill goes absolutely all over the place with them, country-tinged one minute, seventies rock swagger the next, a stretch of quirky sixties pop, a detour into something almost proto-metal, and none of it apologizes for the whiplash. Diversity wins out over stylistic consistency at every turn, and it should be a mess, but it isn’t, because the one rule that never bends is that the song is king. Whatever genre Coghill is trying on, the hook always comes first. Criminally under-known, and a genuinely fun record to get lost in.
The Maureens: Don’t Give Up
The Dutch live music scene overflows with cover bands, while the airwaves are dominated by party pop sung by fresh-faced young artists celebrating little more than a night at the local pub. The Maureens are the antithesis of all of that. No trend-chasing, no pub anthems, no calculated appeal to radio formats, just classic songcraft, chiming guitars, and melodies rooted in the golden age of guitar pop.
Don’t Give Up contains thirteen tracks, one meticulously crafted gem after another. Handmade, thoughtful, deeply human. No grand statements, just sincere and personal stories told with warmth and precision, melodies that linger long after the album ends. It’s earned them a home on Spain’s Meritorio Records, which makes perfect sense: few places in Europe have championed Power Pop as consistently or as passionately as Spain.
There’s something bittersweet about that for Dutch music fans. The Netherlands has produced brilliant guitar-pop bands, Johan, Daryll-Ann, Moss, and now The Maureens, yet so much of it remains hidden in plain sight. Thankfully, I found them. I hope more listeners will too.
The Creepy Jingles: Against All Opps
Six tracks, no wasted motion, and a title that doubles as a mission statement. Against All Opps comes from a band that clearly couldn’t care less about trending. “You Don’t Trend” says as much right out of the gate, and instead the record spends its short runtime chasing hooks that stick on the first pass. Titles like “Throw Me in Some Rice” and “Funhouse Mirror” hint at a band with a sense of humor that never gets in the way of the songcraft. It’s a small, slightly odd, thoroughly likeable record, hidden in the sweet sweet melodic jangle jungle where it belongs.
Kiwi Jr.: Blowin’ Up
Four years after Chopper, Kiwi Jr. return with Blowin’ Up, and the Toronto band’s restless jangle-and-garage charm hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just more open, more confident, more lived-in than before. That didn’t happen by accident. After years of moving from record to record without much of a break, the band finally let themselves stop, write, throw things away, and figure out what still excited them about playing together. Ten years in, they know each other’s strengths well enough to steer with more confidence and take a few real risks with arrangements and time signatures, without ever overthinking the process. Putting themselves on the cover for the first time feels like the right, old-school way to mark that shift.
You wanted the best. You got the best. The coolest band in the world. The Nerves.
Fifty years on, The Nerves somehow still sound urgent, sharp and impossibly cool. The Los Angeles trio of Jack Lee, Peter Case and Paul Collins left behind only a small body of officially released music during their original lifetime, but their influence and reputation have only grown with the years.
Now a new release from Third Man Records opens the archives and tells a much bigger story: 29 songs drawn from across the band’s brief but extraordinary existence, assembled from studio recordings, living-room tapes and live performances.
We spoke with Paul Collins about digging through 50-year-old tapes, the small miracles that made the collection possible, working with Third Man Records, and why new generations continue to discover The Nerves.
This is an incredible overview of The Nerves: 29 songs bringing together recordings from different periods of the band. What can we expect from this collection? Are there recordings or versions on it that you’re particularly excited for people to hear?
Yes I’m very excited for people to hear this record. It has the best recordings of the songs that we were working on from the time period of 1974 to 1977. All of these songs would have been a part of a Nerves album had we been lucky enough to make one.
They are all recorded versions either in studios or in living rooms but mixed properly, except for the songs that were recorded Live at The Starwood. The sound quality is just fantastic because we were able to find the source tapes to practically every single song on this record so it’s it’s really the very best of The Nerves.
How did the idea for this particular release come about? Who first had the idea to bring all this material together, and when did Third Man Records become involved?
Well it came about when we realized that it was the 50th anniversary of The Nerves and Jack Lee’s daughter Cynthia was managing his estate after he passed away and she really wanted to do something to commemorate her father’s Legacy.
I do believe that Jack had asked his daughter if she could try to get Third Man Records to put this record out for the 50th anniversary. He knew about the label and about Jack White. Cynthia was really very instrumental in speaking to them and when they heard that there was the possibility of making the record they asked if both Peter Case and myself would be involved and of course we said yes, at which point they said we’d like to hear what you guys want to do. When they heard the material they agreed to put it out and then it just snowballed from there.
They did an absolutely incredible job mastering all the the songs and organizing the archival material and they put together an absolutely stellar package. A double album on red swirl vinyl and it couldn’t be any better for a 50th anniversary release for this band.
It must have been an enormous job to put this collection together. How much searching and digging was involved in finding the original recordings, and were there any discoveries during the process that surprised you?
Yes there were a lot of Small Miracles involved with getting all these tapes for the record. Some of them were in storage bins in Redding, California there were some in Los Angeles there were some here in New York. We would find these boxes of tapes, some of them were marked some of them were unmarked. They have been sitting around for 50 years so we didn’t know whether the tapes would be completely corroded or if they would be usable. When we transferred them we were sitting on the edge of our seats not knowing, and finally when the transfers came back it was amazing the music was in pristine condition and it was just fantastic!
The biggest surprise was when I found a cassette that I had transcribed for a release I did a number of years ago called The Best of The Archives In Another World. On that tape was a live session done in the very beginning of The Nerves on a realistic tape deck of me, Jack and Peter playing I Need Your Love and Paper Dolls and One Way Ticket. You can really hear the band as we were in the beginning, how we worked up all the songs. I was playing drumsticks on a phone book, Peter was on his Hoffner bass and Jack was playing his Rickenbacker. That’s how we worked up the songs. It really gives you a bird’s eye view of how the band formed way back in the beginning. Also a friend of the bands sister had recorded The Nerves at The Starwood. She has the tape recorder in her purse! She left the purse with the recorder in her closet and found it 50 years later!
And then there’s Third Man Records. How did the relationship with Third Man come about? And what does it feel like to see The Nerves’ music given this kind of new life by a label like Third Man?
Like I said Cynthia is really responsible for the initial conversations with Third Man Records. Once they agreed to do it both Peter and I and Cynthia spoke with their head of production Dave Buick in Detroit and Dave orchestrated everything at Third Man and with with their art Department headed up by Roe and the mastering which was done by gentleman called Warren. It’s all in-house at Third Man. Everybody knows what everybody’s doing and there was a lot of excitement about the project. There was a lot of tender loving care put into every aspect of the project. The mastering and the artwork, it was all done with the utmost of care.
After all these years the little band that could, is, and Third Man is taking us to a huge audience. A much bigger audience than we have ever been able to reach. There will be a whole new world out there that will get to hear The Nerves and that is very exciting and very satisfying!
It’s almost incredible that, after all these years, there is still so much interest in The Nerves based on such a relatively small number of released songs. Young generations keep discovering the band. How do you explain that The Nerves have always remained so genuinely cool?
To me personally I think the reason why The Nerves has endured all this time is because we spared absolutely no amount of time or energy in trying to be the absolute best we could be. We aspired to be as good as we could possibly be, and we would not give up until we thought we had achieved that.
I learned so much in that regard, by working with both Jack Lee and Peter Case, and what it takes to try to climb all the way to the top.
The Release Date for Best Collection is October 23, 2026
With Sell Their Souls, Jeremy Porter and The Tucos have made what may be their hardest-rocking record yet — but that doesn’t mean they’ve abandoned the hooks, twang and power-pop instincts that have always been part of Porter’s songwriting.
After close to four decades of making music, Porter still seems far more interested in what comes next than in settling comfortably into a particular sound. We caught up with him to talk about the heavier edge of Sell Their Souls, taking unexpected turns in the studio, the songs that proved hardest to crack, and why continuing to move forward remains essential.
Sell Their Souls has a particularly tough and swaggering sound to it. There’s a great mix of power pop, punk, rock and alt-country, but to my ears the balance feels a little heavier and rougher than on some of your earlier work. Was that something you consciously wanted to explore, or did the songs simply take you there?
Hey there – thanks for having me Patrick and thanks for those kind words! Yea this is probably the most “ROCK” album I’ve ever done. I’ve been into metal and hard rock since I was 9 years old, and my love for that stuff has only grown. We listened to a lot of metal and hard rock at my house during the pandemic, and I suppose it was bound to seep in a little deeper than it had before, but it wasn’t calculated.
I write constantly and it’s all over the place, as you sort of allude to, but the focus is on quality of song over genre of song. The feel or vibe – heaviness, twanginess, popiness, mellowness, whatever – that all comes into play when we’re deciding which songs to record, and especially when sequencing the record. That sequencing part is really important to me – that the album flows well from song-to-song and overall. This is when I start to think about things like “ok after these 2 heavy songs we need to take it down for the next track…” or “those two songs sound too similar to be next to each other…” stuff like that. So I guess, to answer your question, it wasn’t calculated, but it was something that’s always in play throughout the project.
Change the Rules really struck me as a tour de force. It moves through different tempos and moods, and the arrangement keeps opening up as the song progresses. How did that song develop, and did you know from the beginning that it was going to become something bigger and more elaborate?
Thanks! Yea that’s one of those harder-rocking songs that starts to get a little proggy, for us at least, and kind of sets this album apart from our previous work. It came together with that intro riff, that I think is sorta Drive-By Truckers-ish, then the hard-rock chunks in the verse, so none of that is a big departure for us, but I’m always looking to do something different, something we’ve never tried, and switching to 6/8 time for that middle section and especially hiring a real string section and composer to do that orchestration is WAY out of our wheelhouse. The idea for the strings came in the demoing stage, might have been Gabe that brought it up. So we did a primitive string arrangement with synthesizers on the demo, which was fun and helped us decide… is this cheezy? Does it rule? Do we care? Just one of those things to make the song stick out, get out of our lane and take new chances in the studio, and see what happens! I’m so glad you dig it!
The Real McCoy is my favorite song on the album. It seems to bring together so much of what I love about The Tucos, while your vocal feels particularly pure and direct. I also love the way the music seems to be all over the place while the relationship in the lyrics seems to be going in much the same direction. What does that song mean to you, and how did it come together?
It’s so fun for me to put out a record and hear what peoples’ favorite songs are. You’re the first one to even mention that song I think! I brought it in and we struggled with the arrangement and the feel of everything except the verse, which fell in very naturally. We had two big issues – it was too long, and the chorus wasn’t enough of a hook. Well, we cut a chorus out and replaced it with the bridge, so it was at a better length. Then at one point before we demoed it we were at The Loft, one of our favorite studios here in Michigan, working on something else and talking to Tim Patalan, the main guy there who’s been a big part of everything we’ve done, and I asked him about the chorus, told him we were struggling with it, and he just knew right off – “you gotta go full-STONES on it!” so we did exactly that, because Tim knows his shit, and it made the whole thing just work. It’s still the longest song on the record, and I get heart palpitations when songs approach 4 minutes, but I like how it turned out. Hope Jagger gets his ears on it!
You’ve been making records and playing in bands for more than three decades, and you’ve moved through punk, alt-country, power pop, solo work and The Tucos without ever seeming particularly interested in staying in one lane. At this point in your career, do you still feel like you’re searching for something, or have you reached a place where you’re simply comfortable being Jeremy Porter and letting the music take whatever shape it wants?
Closer to 4 decades bud! But yeah, that’s a loaded question, isn’t it? I’m always searching for something, always looking at what’s next, how I’m (or we’re) gonna make it different, better, fun, exciting… but I’m also always just me, so it’s gonna have some hooks and it’s gonna have some lyrics that hopefully mean something to or provoke a response from somebody, and it’s gonna be guitar heavy and we’re hopefully gonna get out of the song and off the stage before we wear out our welcome. I don’t think the lane shifts are that drastic, they’re all on the same highway anyhow, though it’s a fairly wide swath of heavy/distorted amps and spacious/acoustic guitars, and all points between, I guess.
Id’ guess that most singer/songwriters and touring musicians aren’t particularly comfortable with their own self-image, in their own skin, or whatever. I’m not much different. Putting myself out there with lyrics, performances, writings, even social media posts – yea, I can’t say I’m comfortable with any of it, except probably the performance part, which, when going well, is where I am at the most peace. Or maybe “peace” isn’t the right word, because rock and roll isn’t supposed to be peaceful, but let’s say content. It’s a difficult line to tread these days, trying to get your stuff out there while presenting yourself the way you want. I’m so far from an expert at it.
You’ve said that Sell Their Souls is your favorite thing you’ve ever done — while also admitting that it’s probably too fresh to know where it will ultimately sit in your catalog. That made me wonder: after all these years of writing, recording and touring, what does a record have to do now to make you feel that you’ve moved forward? What are you hearing in Sell Their Souls that tells you you’re not simply repeating yourself?
Well, context is probably important here, because I’m not sure when or where I said that, but I think it was in the context of…the newest thing is SUPPOSED to be your favorite thing, and if it isn’t then you did something wrong, yea? But yes – these things have to have some time behind them before I and talk about them objectively. But I am proud of it, and I do think it’s good.
I think a lot of what we talked about above speaks to why this record isn’t just a repeat of previous albums, just like I don’t think Dynamite Alley was or Candy Coated Cannonball before that. I remember when we were making Don’t Worry…It’s Not Contagious, our bassist at the time Patty said he felt it was basically Above the Sweet Tea Line part 2 – not a big enough departure, not enough new ground. I don’t necessarily feel that way, but I did take it to heart and put more effort into working harder on doing new and different things from that point on. It started with songs like “Put You On Hold” and “Dead Ringer” from Candy Coated and remains with songs like “Real McCoy” and “Rosencrantz” and “Change the Rules” off the new one.
It’s important to me to keep moving. Existing in this rock and roll world is more or less my life, and doing it for so long now is – in itself – some level of success for me, but without moving forward – new ideas, new directions… it would just turn into work. I could probably make more money and get bigger accolades playing in a tribute band or doing covers gigs, but I’d just as soon wash dishes or work at Taco Bell at this point.
The Nits have been one of the most innovative Dutch pop bands since the late seventies. Innovative not because they have spent nearly five decades chasing novelty, but because they have never stopped reinventing themselves. What began as a sound with strong echoes of Kraftwerk moved through New Wave and Art Pop and has, by now, arrived somewhere in a landscape of ambient storytelling.
In terms of creativity and carefully directed spontaneity, I sometimes think of Talking Heads and David Byrne, only without the funk. There is a similar refusal to settle into a recognizable formula, a similar sense that every album should somehow create its own little world. I could also point to Joe Jackson and his restless drive to explore new musical territory, but comparisons ultimately miss the point. Because what makes Nits so interesting is precisely that they don’t really sound like anybody else.
And perhaps that is because they may be the most European pop band there is.
Their music doesn’t have its roots primarily in American blues, jazz or rock & roll. Its foundations lie just as much in the European avant-garde, classical and art music, and, inevitably, The Beatles and The Kinks are part of the equation too, as they are the inspiration for all good pop bands. But even more than in the music, their European identity reveals itself in the lyrics. Nits songs are populated by people going to a play in Helsinki, taking a train to Switzerland, living behind the Dutch dikes, or discovering that in the Netherlands every little boy is expected to join a football club, including the ones who would rather not.
Those are just a few of the subjects that appear on In the Dutch Mountains, the 1987 album that marked the band’s commercial peak, at least here in the Netherlands, and perhaps its artistic peak as well. Because as much as I love many of their songs, I don’t think they ever made a better one than the album’s title track. Not necessarily because it is their most ambitious or adventurous song, but because everything that makes Nits unique seems to come together in those few minutes: the melody, the melancholy, the strangeness, the humour, the unmistakably European imagery and that peculiar ability to turn something very ordinary into something almost mythical.
This blog isn’t meant to be a complete history of Nits. There are plenty of places to find one, and after almost fifty years there would be far too much ground to cover anyway. I mainly want to share my enthusiasm for a band that, I am convinced, could appeal to a much larger audience than the one that currently knows them.
And I want to do that through three of my favourite Nits albums.
They are not necessarily the three albums I would recommend as an introduction to the band. If you don’t know Nits at all and have become curious, there is the excellent compilation Nits Hits. Better still, there is Urk, their magnificent 1989 live album. Start there and you get something close to a map of the Nits universe as it existed at the end of their most celebrated decade.
But my own route leads somewhere else.
TENT is the 1979 debut, and on it you hear a very different Nits to how they sound today, a band much more inspired by Kraftwerk than by the Sex Pistols. A few years ago, Nits decided to revisit their earliest records and perform the first few albums live in their entirety. During rehearsals they made an amusing discovery: it had seemed like a great idea, until they realised that the songs were considerably more complicated to play than they remembered.
And perhaps that tells you something important about TENT. The New Wave you hear on the surface may sound angular, immediate and relatively simple, but underneath it is music that is surprisingly intricate and layered. Nits were already thinking like arrangers rather than simply like a New Wave band. In that sense, TENT belongs alongside the records by those more ambitious bands that, while the seventies were still coming to an end, were already busy inventing the sound of the eighties.
And then, then comes Ting.
Released in 1992, Ting feels like the moment when Nits decided to remove almost everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary. Even the title sounds like the record. Ting: the sound of a raindrop, perhaps, or a bicycle passing by, but above all the sound of a piano key being struck.
The piano on this album is extraordinarily clear. On a first listen, its sound may occasionally bring to mind Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert or Philip Glass’s solo piano music. I don’t mean that Ting resembles either of them musically in any straightforward sense. It is the physical quality of the piano that creates the association: the touch of the keys, the space around the notes, the way every tone seems to exist for a moment on its own before disappearing.
And that space is essential to Ting. Where other bands might have filled it, Nits use it as an instrument. Songs seem to emerge from silence and retreat into it again. Small sounds suddenly matter. A note, a voice, a piece of percussion, a pause: everything has weight precisely because there is so little competing for your attention.
It is a remarkably restrained record made by a band that, by then, had already proved how much it could do. Ting is interesting because Nits chose instead to show how much they could leave out.
dA dA dA, from 1994, is probably Nits’ most solid album. And by solid, I mean solid in the way Crowded House’s songs and albums are solid: always good, always distinctive, seemingly effortless and built to last. If you stretch that comparison a little further, then Whales of Tadoussac is the album’s Don’t Dream It’s Over. But the difference between those two titles already tells you how limited the shelf life of that comparison is. Crowded House may be a useful reference point for the craftsmanship, but Nits remain far too peculiar to stay inside it for long.
That becomes increasingly clear in the album’s second half, where the band’s more adventurous, artistic side gradually takes over. The songs become less straightforward, the atmosphere stranger, and the record starts moving into territory that could only really belong to Nits. It is also here that Day and the Night, my personal favourite, appears, tucked away in the second half of what I consider one of the high points of their entire oeuvre.
For those of you who have somehow remained unaware of Nits until now, I wish you a very happy journey of discovery. There is almost fifty years of wonderful, strange and unmistakably European music waiting for you.
On Sargeant Pepper Grinder, Bleu turns grief into something bright, melodic and deeply human. The album is both a tribute to friends who are no longer here and a celebration of the people, memories and small moments that remain. Wrapped in the kind of irresistible melodies and harmonies that have long defined his songwriting, these are songs that don’t shy away from loss, but refuse to surrender to it either.
We spoke with Bleu about writing through grief, the strange kinship between sadness and power pop, obsessing over songcraft, and why Sargeant Pepper Grinder has ultimately become a memorial to friendship.
Sargeant Pepper Grinder feels like a very personal record. You describe it as an upbeat meditation on death and a celebration of friends who are no longer here. Was making the album a way of dealing with those losses, or did the songs simply become the place where those feelings naturally ended up?
Making this album was definitely a way of “dealing with” (processing, mourning, etc.) several very deep losses. Writing songs for my own artist project has always been a form of therapy for me, but many of these songs were a particularly palpable example of that. The recording process then became a way to commiserate, heal, and deepen connections with my friends who are still here, many of whom were also very close to Ducky and/or Alex “Scootch” Scutro.
Power Pop has always had this wonderful ability to hide sadness inside bright melodies and beautiful harmonies. On this album, though, the emotions feel particularly close to the surface. How do you find the balance between making something musically joyful and allowing the lyrics to be genuinely painful or vulnerable?
That seeming dichotomy is a hallmark of some power-pop that I’ve always loved. Just as humor helps many of us get through painful experiences, exuberant and tuneful music can help lift us from the valleys of crushing loss. I’ve also learned through therapy that two conflicting feelings can legitimately exist at the same time, and I think that juxtaposition brings a deeper meaning to life. But the main reason this album contains so much of that kind of thing is because I wanted to write music that Ducky and Scootch would’ve liked, and neither gravitated to sad-sack songs!
You’ve always been an incredibly melodic songwriter, but on this album the melodies sometimes seem almost deliberately at odds with what you’re singing about. Do you ever start with the emotional weight of a lyric and then look for a melody that gives it some lightness, or does the music usually come first?
When I write for “BLEU” (“me songs”) I almost always start with lyrics, usually a title with a concept, starting with the hook and moving on from there. In the case of this record though, that was obviously in service of conveying some pretty heavy emotions. I think “melodic songwriting” is just part of my DNA, but there’s certainly plenty thought (craft) that goes into melodic shape and in particular melodic-rhythm, and these songs were no exception. Even when I’m writing something heavy and the emotions are flowing, I can’t help but work the songcraft.
You produced and mixed the entire album yourself. Did keeping that process largely in your own hands matter to you, especially with material this personal?
Yes and no. I’m very open to collaboration, and worked with many talented songwriters, musicians, engineers, and Atmos mixers on this album, most of whom I think would agree that they weren’t particularly “over-produced.” But there was no way I wasn’t going to obsess over these songs, and producing and mixing it myself meant I wasn’t unnecessarily bothering other people (haAa!)
Looking across the songs on Sargeant Pepper Grinder, there’s a real sense of finding joy in people, memories and small moments. Did writing these songs change the way you look at those things, or perhaps make you appreciate them differently?
I look at this record now as a memorial. I truly wanted to create a tangible and (hopefully) long lasting tribute to Ducky and Scootch, as well as a heartfelt and healing expression of grief for myself and others. But yes, working on this record was very much a path to creating joy, memories, and small-moments – with my friends and family who are still around.
A Chiming Back interview, finding its new home at Sweet Sweet Music Blog.
Karla Kane describes her songs as windows. Small ones, carefully made — you look through them and find yourself inside a world that is unmistakably hers: botanical, seasonal, slightly haunted, and shot through with an unexpected warmth. On Concerns of Wasp and Willow, the sixth album by Northern California’s The Corner Laughers, that world feels more fully realized than ever. Released on Big Stir Records on March 27, 2026, it is a record that begins in a small detail and pulls slowly outward — like a camera finding its frame.
The band — Kane (vocals, ukulele), Khoi Huynh (bass, piano, guitars), KC Bowman (guitars, keyboards) and Charlie Crabtree (drums) — have been crafting their literate, handcrafted folk pop together since the early 2000s. Concerns of Wasp and Willow arrives five years after their pandemic-era Temescal Telegraph, and finds them doing something quietly courageous: releasing something tender and precise into a world that seems to reward neither.
We spoke to Karla Kane about windows, details, and what it means to let a record go.
Your songs feel built from very small, precise details — both lyrically and in the instrumentation. Is it a way of writing, or a way of seeing the world?
I suppose songwriting is a reflection of a way of seeing the world — songs are like little windows. Often my songs seem to start from a small detail and then expand outward, like a camera pulling to a wider shot I guess. We definitely do try to put care into the details.
Listening to Concerns of Wasp and Willow while the world around me seems to be getting louder and cruder — I wonder, how does it feel to release something this tender and precise?
With so much going on in the world, and so many important issues, sometimes it feels a bit silly to even spend time on something like this, or to hope it reaches anyone. But on the other hand, in terms of a louder and cruder world, we’re proud to release something more gentle and thoughtful, too. It might not get much attention but we hope those it does reach will feel it is worthwhile.
The artwork has such a distinctive, immediately recognizable language — it feels like it inhabits the same world as the songs. Is that unity between music and image something you consciously pursue? Or is it more that you tend to draw people around you who feel the same things?
The artwork was created by our dear and brilliant friend Jennifer Rae Atkins, who is currently based in the Netherlands, and I’m so glad you see it as inhabiting the same world as the songs.
I called the songs windows earlier on and I think of the album cover as a visual window into the sonic world of the album, absolutely.
It is something we consciously pursue — I shared not only some of the songs themselves with Jennifer as she was working on the art but also some ideas and imagery that I felt were key.
And then she worked her magic to bring it all to visual life!
Your songs feel like glimpses into the way you see the world. And then you bring them to the rest of the band. How does it go from there?
Yes, whichever of us is the songwriter (me in most of the cases on this album, but there is also a song by Khoi written with our friend Helen Luker and one written by KC) has a demo with the music, lyrics and any production ideas.
Once it’s in the studio with the band, it is further refined and evolves into something more, with all of our fingerprints on it.
The first reviews are coming in. Do they still reach you — or does a record feel finished and separate from you by the time it’s out in the world?
They often do reach us. We’re very thankful for the folks who take time to review and share our work and to Big Stir Records for doing so much to build community! It doesn’t feel separate from us at this point — later on we will get some distance from it, perhaps, but for now I feel very closely connected to it.
As published on the Chiming Back blog on December 1st, 2025.
For this interview with Australian power-pop treasures Icecream Hands, all five members — Marcus, Smiley, Doug, Dave, and Charles — joined in, each taking on one question. The result is a warm, funny, thoughtful conversation about songwriting, survival in a shifting music industry, and the stories behind their latest album Giant Fox Pineapple Tree.
Listening to Giant Fox Pineapple Tree feels like stepping into a warm bath — absolutely wonderful. How challenging is it to stay true to that sound and never compromise on the quality of the songs, the very thing that keeps the bathwater at just the right temperature?
MARCUS: To be honest, it’s no challenge at all really, because the song is everything to us. As a band we are remarkably agreeable about what makes a great song, and with the good fortune to have such incredible songwriters as Charles and Doug, we always have a stack of solid material to choose from and work with. Having played together for so many years now, we just naturally work to our strengths as a band. It’s fair to say the songs always come first, and then we build the sound around them. The sounds and details of production are also very important of course, and we do put a lot of time and thought into that part of the process. But there’s not much point in doing that if the songs are second-rate — that would be like lukewarm bathwater.
You’ve seen the music industry transform completely since the early days of the band. What’s the biggest change you’ve had to navigate — and successfully overcome — in recent years?
SMILEY: The biggest change has been the way music is consumed today. There was a time when you could realistically hope to make a living from record sales, and touring was mainly a way to promote your music — a way to get in front of people rather than your primary income stream. But with the arrival of music-sharing platforms and, ultimately, streaming services, the whole dynamic shifted.
Napster landed in 1999 and introduced the idea of getting music for free — or close to it — through MP3 peer-to-peer downloading. That changed consumer behaviour forever. What grew out of that is today’s streaming landscape. Services like Spotify offer little to no return to the artists whose music they rely on; that, and their unethical support of military AI, is why you won’t find Giant Fox Pineapple Tree on Spotify.
These days, if we want to keep making music, we need to sell out our shows and encourage our fans to buy vinyl, CDs, and digital downloads directly from us or through Bandcamp. We also now handle our own distribution, including international releases. The traditional record-store pathway has fallen back onto the artists themselves — it’s become a bit of a cottage industry.
That said, we’ve moved with the times, and the proof is in the pudding: our recent chart success, cracking the ARIA Top 40 Albums and the Top 10 Australian Albums charts. If I’m not mistaken, we were the only truly independent release in there. Sweet as!
“Now I hear the baby crying” in “Do Ya Feel It” is such a powerful line; it pulls you straight into the story. When you first write a line like that, do you immediately know it can carry the narrative, or does it not work that way?
DOUG: Thanks Patrick. Songs always arrive in different ways for me. It’s usually a melody or a chord pattern that comes along first, and I need to try to get a feeling or an idea into the music. I do tend to struggle to find lyrics that I think are good enough to carry a narrative.
I do tend to want to write words that sound good when they fall out of the mouth, and don’t worry too much about what they mean, as long as they can evoke a feeling.
Funnily enough, that particular line was the only real thing I had. It just kinda popped into my head and it felt good, but it kinda begged the question: “Whose baby is this anyway? And why is it crying?”
I often defer to Charles on these things and asked him if it was a dumb line — I didn’t really know what it meant — and he said, “No, it’s the best line in the song!” So it stayed, and I just had to imagine some kind of scenario in which it could make a little bit of sense.
At the end of the day the song is quite nonsensical really — it’s just about finding a bit of light in the struggle and knowing that better days can come.
Giant Fox Pineapple Tree has just been released and the first reactions are coming in. Do listeners still surprise you with the way they receive the songs — or do you surprise yourself when you revisit the record?
DAVE: You know that wide-eyed, joyous expression people get when you say “Here, try this” and they take their first mouthful of something absolutely delicious that you’ve spent a long time in the kitchen preparing? It’s a lot like that!
The reactions I’ve had from friends, fans, and countrymen have all been really positive and enthusiastically wide-eyed and joyous. One always hopes that everybody will enjoy the fruits of one’s labour, so the responses I’ve encountered to Giant Fox Pineapple Tree have been very satisfying indeed.
I can’t exactly say I’m “surprised” when I listen to this remarkable body of work, as I’ve known each of these songs since they were pups. And honestly, even the home demos sounded bloody fantastic to me! Having said that — Icecream Hands always keep the element of surprise up their sleeve. You just never know what’s coming next!!
I think “Don’t Let the Party Fade Out” has a touch of Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel’s “Make Me Smile” — and I mean that as a genuine compliment. Is that kind of comparison easy to accept, or does it get frustrating when journalists try to put you in a box or reference world-famous hits just to show off their own taste?
CHARLES: I love it when journalists talk about me! And you, Patrick, can show off all you want if you mention “Make Me Smile” and a song of ours in the same sentence. I love that Steve Harley song and the recording of it — as a kid that song had such an exciting “quick, drop everything and race to the radio and turn me up” quality about it. The intro, the pauses, the bup bup bup bup backing vocals, the guitar solo, the Dylanesque delivery — so I love the comparison. I think our recording is also exciting — the drumming, the chord progressions, the lyric, the piano and bass parts, the harmony vocals, and then the guitar stings at the very end. So, many thanks for the compliment; keep them coming, please.
Rob Bonfiglio’s The Over Under has been out for a while now. I liked it immediately, but after listening to it for a few months, it has become one of those go-to records I return to when I need to recalibrate or reset. It’s the kind of album that reveals more of itself with time.
What makes it particularly striking is how personal it feels: Bonfiglio wrote, recorded and mixed the record largely on his own, following the songs that carried the most weight and trusting his instincts along the way. Months after its release, he remains remarkably close to the album and proud of how faithfully it captures what he wanted to say.
We spoke about the vulnerability of “Need You Know,” the sharper edge of “More Pure Than Gold,” the decision to make the record mostly by himself, and why connecting with listeners ultimately matters more than recognition.
How does The Over Under feel to you now that it has been out for a while and you’ve had some distance from making it?
I felt from the beginning that this record reached a lot deeper than my previous releases. I went into the recording process with maybe 20 or so tunes, and it became clear which ones carried the most gravity.
My recording and mixing process happened concurrently. I’d go on a hike or a drive and listen back to a day’s work to determine where to go next. It all added up to literally thousands of listens.
Even after completing the album, I can still listen through from beginning to end and feel a sense of cohesion. I can honestly say there are very few things I’d have done differently with this album. It still rings completely true to me. I’m really proud of the way it turned out.
“Need You Know” feels like the emotional heart of the album to me. It’s a beautiful, very vulnerable song. Do you remember where that song came from, and did you know while writing it that it could become such a special song on the record?
Thank you so much. “Vulnerable” is a great descriptive. My writing cycles happen in waves and usually bear five or six or more songs at a time. This came out of one of those batches. I don’t recall the initial inspiration beyond the riff that repeats throughout, which always had a Fleetwood Mac-ish vibe to me.
I do recall being satisfied with the simplicity of the form. The lyrics happened pretty quickly and seemed to really get to the point of how I was feeling.
“More Pure Than Gold” feels like the musical and lyrical opposite of “Need You Know” — it’s sharp, angry and quite political. What was your state of mind when you wrote that song? Was it something that came more from the heart, or more from the head?
Without expressly saying so, I think the sentiment of this song is pretty obvious. I like to think all good songs come from the heart, with the head to guide them along. Much of the lyrical content of this song came out in a free flow, and much still stands true, unfortunately.
You made The Over Under largely on your own, even though you have friends and family around you who are, to put it mildly, pop royalty and could probably have helped you make the record. What made you want to do this one by yourself?
I’m a textbook introvert. I really considered doing this album with a larger ensemble of players, but one thing led to another and I just ended up doing it all myself. It was easier to get from point A to point B quickly, and things just sort of snowballed from there. All creative decisions started and ended in my head.
That said, I did have a little help from my daughter Lola on “Blame This” and a great pedal steel player named Xandy Chelmis on “Fade Away.”
I’ve read some really nice reactions and reviews of The Over Under, and I’m sure you have too. Recognition must be nice, especially after putting so much of yourself into a record. Or is there something else that matters more to you when you look at how the album has been received?
I’m incredibly grateful for the kind words and genuine reactions to this record. Yes, recognition is important for sure, but maybe less so for the ego nudge and more for the acknowledgement of being able to share something that resonates on a human level.
