You (or someone you know) asked, so...
I'll see myself out
Tomorrow is Bandcamp Day, our now monthly (?) holiday where for fleeting moments throughout the day, your feed is filled with bands and links and music stuff that’s not reflective of our global garbage fire. I love it and hate it at the same time.
Worriers hasn’t released anything special for the holiday, but tomorrow is different!
If you’ve bought You Or Someone You Know on Bandcamp, or if you buy it tomorrow, you’ll be sent a link to a song-by-song commentary track where me, my bandmates and producer John Agnello listen to the album front to back. I explained the whole thing last week, if you missed it. It’ll come in both audio and video formats, just for folks through Bandcamp Day.
Below I’ve answered a bunch of questions y’all sent me when we were getting ready to make the commentary track. While a bunch of questions were answered in our conversation, these weren’t, so I’m letting them live in this email newsletter. For you!
But first, here’s a few things I’d like to recommend checking out, if you’re interested in celebrating Indie Musician Summer Solstice:
Nervus - What If The Problem Is You
I think this was released for the LAST Bandcamp Day, but whatever. Nervus put out a killer album Tough Crowd last year and this two-song EP is a great companion to the seething rock’n’roll from some of my favorite folks in the UK. It’s very Juliana Hatfield meets The Hold Steady meets hating cops. It’s worth your £££ AND it’s name your own price.
Mal Devisa - Vicious Nonbeliever
I’ve mentioned Mal Devisa on here before, as I was generally just blown away with Deja’s voice and ability to totally crush a solo performance. This album is a bit of a departure into more complex and beat-heavy arrangements, produced by DJ Lucas, and it rules. It just came out at the end of May and I hope I can check out a Mal Devisa performance of these tracks once we can hang out in rooms with each other again.
Oceanator - A Crack In The World
Bass-heavy guitar-driven indie rock is very often my jam and Oceanator totally fits the bill. Elise Okusami, the force behind the band, is great at writing some really heartfelt grunge. This is just the first track off of the new record Things I Never Said but you can pre-order the whole record now.
Now here’s some things folks asked via social media about Worriers / music that I’m answering here!
Q: What kind of gear do you use?
I play a Fender Coronado II through a Sovtek Mig50 into a Musicman 210 cab. That is the one electric guitar and one amp that I own. I used to have a Vox AC30 which was amazing but way too heavy for me to carry up and down stairs to my old apartment in Brooklyn, so I got a Mig50 that just happens to be very small and also has a cool wooden handle built right into it. It has both a “main” and “volume” knob so it basically has overdrive built right in, so I don’t really HAVE to use pedals to get the basic sound that I like. My guitar is semi-hollowbody and I really like the resonance there, but I’d also love to get a Thinline Telecaster one day ::cough:: waves at Fender ::cough::
Q: What comes first in the writing: the music or the lyrics?
BOTH! I tend to get a lyric and melody stuck in my head at the same time, and that starts me down the road to an actual song. I usually form things around that, or a general melody, or at the very least a vibe and a beat for it. It’s all kind of the same thing. I find it really difficult to write just the music if I don’t have some basic lyrics going, and I tend to not write more than a line or two of lyrics without music already in mind. I was recently on a live episode of the Gear Club podcast hosted by John Agnello along with my buddies Jeff Rosenstock, Chris Farren, Laura Stevenson and Mikey Erg, and we all take turns talking about our songwriting process, if you’d like to hear more about that!
Q: Have you ever played any of your songs in a different format or instrument? Aside from just doing an acoustic set.
Yes! Sort of! I’ve started writing songs on piano, though they’re not necessarily meant to be recorded that way, and I’ve done piano/keyboard versions of some of our songs. Hopefully at least one of those will be out in the world later this year. I try to make the solo versions actually be different arrangements, with a different vibe to them, so there’s that too?
Q: I love this album! I think the songs sonically sound huge and I’m curious of that was one of the goals going into recording or if that just happened organically?
Thank you for thinking the new record sounds “huge”. I just wanted to make a big rock record, and while there are obviously “bigger” sounding rock records out there, this was another step in that direction for us. I’ve had comments from a couple people who had never seen us live before that they didn’t realize we were such a loud band, and I’m psyched that this record captures the whole two-guitar band “thing” in the way that it does. I think there’s something very “when our powers combine” about me, Nick, Mikey and Frank that happened on this record and I think that’s what you’re hearing. We brought some new things from the record into our live show that I can’t wait to get out there soon.
Thanks folks! If you want to hear more where that came from and from all of my bandmates too, go grab the record on Bandcamp by tomorrow!