Hey Smiling Strange
I talk mostly music but also really whatever interests me. Guests most of the time. Please sign up for my fantasy football game at klubhouse.gg
Hey Smiling Strange
Wild Pink
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Special treat with thanks to Fire Talk Records, I have John Ross from Wild Pink to come chat about his new album, cool babysitters, and sitting in front of the tv playing guitar.
Wild Pink's new album, Still Coming Down. is out now! Go check it out wherever you get music and go see him on tour.
Who is a non-special guest? This is John Ross from Wild Pink, uh, which uh Firetalk Records actually set this up for us, uh, which is great. I, you know, they reached out to me. Usually I'm the one reaching out to everybody else. I was super pumped because Firetalk Records is one of my favorite uh what is that called? Record label, nailed it. Uh one of my favorite labels that I listen to regularly. I got into them from Robber Robber, but they sent me uh John's new album, Wild Pink's new album, and I have not stopped listening to it this week. I'm taking a little week off from posting constantly because my hands hurt. I got carpal tunnel syndrome. But this has been great. I'm back to just walking around the neighborhood just listening to music, not sharing my thoughts with anybody, but I'm excited to share them with you. John, how's it going?
SPEAKER_03It's going well. Thanks for uh having me. Or I guess thanks to Fire Talk.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, let's go. We'll call it a sponsorship. I want to say that I'm sponsored by something. So far, all my sponsorships have just been me sponsoring myself for other little projects that I'm doing, which you know, uh I'm an entrepreneur, I'm an industrious man, I guess.
SPEAKER_03Yes. How do you pronounce your last name?
SPEAKER_02My last name is pronounced Ross, right? So we have like this you're Ross R-O-SS. I'm Ross R-Oss-E.
SPEAKER_03When you add the E, is that where's the surname? Where does it originate?
SPEAKER_02It's Italian. So the story that I tells my my grandfather, uh, his father was the one that immigrated to the United States of America. It was R O S I. Bad handwriting. They wrote it as R-O-SS-E. Uh, my grandfather was born Anthony Rossi, so Tony Rossi, and he died Thomas Ross. He started going by his middle name, and then he uh pronounced Rossi into Ross because he wanted to anglicize it because he was, you know, into business and all that stuff. Uh and I just it's one of those old American stories of like a guy comes here, you know, my mom's side of the family, they're from Poland. Her dad wouldn't let anybody speak Polish in front of my mom, even though everyone in the family did, because they just wanted everybody to be, they wanted them to assimilate so badly.
SPEAKER_03Uh that's a shame. And look at where we are now. Look where look where all that assimilation got us.
SPEAKER_02I know exactly. That's my mom's biggest regret, is like she always tells the story. Are you a baseball fan at all?
SPEAKER_03Yes. Yes.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Do you know Carly Strzemsky?
SPEAKER_03Uh I know the name.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, he was a very famous Red Sox player, right? And he came and he was just doing like batting practice, my mom's hometown when she was growing up, and everybody's standing around trying to get his attention, and my grandfather, Chet, goes up to him and just starts speaking to him a mile a minute in Polish. And Yastremsky spoke Polish as well, and the two of them just talked for like 35 minutes. My mom talks about that like it was the greatest accomplishment any man has ever achieved in history. She's a huge Red Sox fan.
SPEAKER_03So what what year or decade are we talking?
SPEAKER_02Oh, I have no idea. My mom's stories always have uh this was uh Yastremski's probably 70s, you know. I think seventies. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Okay. That's very cool.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I love it. It's also just, you know, my mom tells it to me every time we go to uh a baseball game. It's been a while. I've been out here on the West Coast for about 10 years now. Where are you right now?
SPEAKER_03I'm in New York City.
SPEAKER_02Oh, nice. My brother and sister both live there. They talk about it every time we all hang out, and I'm the only one that never lived in New York City. How long have you been in New York?
SPEAKER_03Uh I've I've been here about 17 years now.
SPEAKER_02Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_03Um I'm from Florida, but I've lived here longer than anywhere else.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. That's a weird spot to be. It's like I'm from this place, but this is the spot that had I guess it's not like a majority, it's like a plurality, right? The majority seat in Congress.
SPEAKER_03I think it's wherever you wherever you spend your formative years.
SPEAKER_02Would you say the last 17 years of your formative years?
SPEAKER_03No, I think my age 10 to whatever.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_0320 were were for me. That's why Florida, no matter how long I live here.
SPEAKER_02Florida Boy at Heart.
SPEAKER_03Florida Boy at Heart, yeah. Wait, but where where are you?
SPEAKER_02I am in Portland, Oregon. I've been here since about 2016.
SPEAKER_03Uh Clackamas County.
SPEAKER_02Clackamas County. Or I think Multnomah County. Uh technically, but it's Portland, so I'm up uh if you've been to Portland, I'm up in North Portland, so kind of by the river, by Vancouver, Washington. Uh I don't know.
SPEAKER_03I'm always taken aback at how beautiful that city is when I'm driving into it. A lot of bridges, a lot of steel bridges. Kind of has a Pittsburgh vibe to it.
SPEAKER_02Pittsburgh is a very similar comp. I I just visited Pittsburgh two years ago. I went on a little tour with uh my friend's country band, and it Pittsburgh definitely feels like East Coast Portland. Very similar.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's got the hills too.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Um I I only went in the summer and it was like it was beautiful. There's forest everywhere. Uh, and then the people were super friendly. The shows that we got to see play were were really fun. It seems like it's got a nice little music scene. Do you spend uh any time out there?
SPEAKER_03Just uh in both locations, uh Pittsburgh and Portland. I'm only ever there on tour, although my drummer just moved to Pittsburgh.
SPEAKER_00Nice. Um what's your drummer's name?
SPEAKER_03His name's Dan Keegan.
SPEAKER_00Nice, Dan.
SPEAKER_03And he lives out. I want to say the inner the the um the area is called Arlington. Sure. This means anything, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Sure. That sounds right. That sounds right. Nice.
SPEAKER_03What was your friend's band?
SPEAKER_02Uh, this is a band called First Rodeo. So uh a buddy of mine, uh, I think Nathan Tucker used to play in a band called uh oh my god, what is it called? Is it Cool American? I should know this. I know this thing. Uh but they were on Fire Talk. Uh oh, no way. And uh they broke up a couple years ago, but he has a friend that lives out here, uh, my neighbor and and friend Tim, friend of the pod, and they get together every couple of years and just like record a country album just for fun. It's like it's kind of like a Sergeant Pepper's thing where they just pretend they're somebody else and make an album, and then they put a band together and then go on a little tour. We did a West Coast tour about four years ago, two years ago we did a little East Coast tour. Uh, I played drums last time we did went, my wife played bass. It was a ton of fun. I haven't really been to the East Coast much. Touring on the East Coast is so much easier. Jesus.
SPEAKER_03So your mother's from Boston. Yes. Oh, you grew up in Oregon?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, no, no. I grew up uh in Boston. I was there for about 20 years, went to school in Connecticut. So I've been in New England for about 25 years, and then uh I moved to Austin, Texas for a brief minute, moved to Portland, Oregon, kind of uh on a whim. I I like lived in my car for a couple months and was just driving around looking for a place to land and ended up out here, lived in a hallway for two months, and have peaceful life together, and now I'm not going anywhere. I I my wife's a local, so wow, great. Yeah, it's fun.
SPEAKER_03Nice.
SPEAKER_02What uh brought you to New York?
SPEAKER_03I wanted to be a film composer. Oh, so uh like working like film and TV, and um I loved Thomas Newman. I still love Thomas Newman soundtracks. Um he scores like uh a lot of Sam Mendez movies. Um he did American Beauty, which was like a big one for me growing up. Um so I was like, I really wanted to do that, and I moved to New York, and I s I got a job working for uh Cameron Winner's father. Oh I was I was writing music for um TV commercials, TV promos. Um I was like a staff composer and um yeah, that's that's that's I I moved in New York and did that and eventually kind of like washed out of that job and worked a lot of odd jobs while I kind of started writing my own music. Um I I walked dogs and I worked at a film lab and um did all kinds of stuff.
SPEAKER_02That's awesome. Real quick, I remember the name of the band was Strange Ranger, Cool American.
SPEAKER_03Oh, Strange Ranger, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Strange Ranger, yeah. Nathan Tucker played drums in Strange Ranger. Cool. His band was called Cool American. So I'm just a dumb guy, you know. Same. I just I just play a smart guy on reels. That's all I do, is I look smart on camera. In reality, very dumb. It's very yeah, yeah. But that's uh that's awesome. I talked to do you know the band Idaho?
SPEAKER_03Uh I I like that band a lot.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, oh awesome. But one of my favorites, one of my early podcasts I got to talk to him, and he kind of did the opposite. He started off writing music for Idaho, and then a friend of him is like, hey, you should try applying for this job like scoring films. Uh because if you've listened to Idaho, it's very atmospheric. He was kind of a natural fit for it. And that's where, you know, that was his career. Idaho never really took off. Uh, but he made pretty good money making movie um making music for Hollywood.
SPEAKER_03Has he scored any films we might know?
SPEAKER_02Man, I didn't even remember the name of my friend's band that I toured with. I I'm sure he mentioned it. Uh I just nouns, man. I can't remember nouns. It's just concepts.
SPEAKER_03You know? They're tough, yeah. Yeah. Pictures. Pictures are good.
SPEAKER_02Pictures, general vibes of things. You know, I can tell you stuff people did. I just can't tell you what their names are.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Uh but so have you been playing music your whole life? Did you start playing music back in Florida?
SPEAKER_03Um, yeah, I started playing when I was like 12 years old. Um my dad got like a squire electric guitar, and it kind of just sat in the living room, and for me and my brother and him to like play, maybe take lessons, and I I just kind of I eventually took it in my room and it was like my guitar. And um, I took took guitar lessons for like a year, washed out of that, yeah, and um became deeply obsessed with Nirvana.
SPEAKER_02Oh, that's awesome, man.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02What uh what hooked you with Nirvana? What was the first song where you're like, oh shit?
SPEAKER_03Um It was probably all apologies. I had a a very cool babysitter named Amy who would she brought over the CD of in utero, and she played bass, she was very cool.
SPEAKER_02That's incredibly cool.
SPEAKER_03And it was she hung her bass strings on her wall. I thought that was so cool. Did not just didn't even understand what was going on. But she was like, you can listen to this, you can like sit next to the CD player and listen and look at the booklet and take it in, but you cannot listen to number four, which is the song Rape Me. It's like if I hear you play that, you have I'm turn um, you have to change it. She was like very strict because she's the babysitter.
SPEAKER_02Um responsible.
SPEAKER_03Very responsible. Um that record set me down the path of of Nirvana. That was like my first love.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And then then my my first CD I ever bought was um From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkaw.
SPEAKER_01Oh, dude, you went straight straight to the deep cuts.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, well, it was um I'm I'm like dating myself here, but I I guess it had just come out. Or around that time. So it was like it was like in stores, you know. Um and I bought a Muddy Banks t-shirt, or would maybe was gifted it for my birthday or something, and I still have it somewhere. It is, I mean, if you were to like sneeze around it, it would break apart. But I I love it so much.
SPEAKER_02That's awesome, man. Uh, first off, shout out cool babysitters, because the second you said that, yeah, Amy, awesome. I kind of I feel like uh I've never really thought about it, but the impression the cool babysitter leaves on a kid, we had a babysitter, obviously can't remember his name, but he would he came over, and my brother and I have been struggling for weeks to try to beat the water temple in Ocarina of Time, and he beat the water temple for us.
unknownCool.
SPEAKER_02And I I I don't think I've ever held anybody in higher esteem in my entire life than this like 16-year-old kid that beat uh the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Times Water Temple. I just I thought he was the smartest man that has ever lived and the coolest person of all time. So that's a big deal.
SPEAKER_03What what's what's the console that that was on?
SPEAKER_02That was Nintendo 64.
SPEAKER_03Nice, yeah. Did you play Goldeneye?
SPEAKER_02You know what's weird is like that was the one of those games that I never really got into. I've never really been much of a first-person shooter guy, but I find Goldeneye fascinating. Like the story of the development of it all is like they they had a team working on Donkey Kong Country, and then they had this backup team that was kind of forced into working on Goldeneye, and these people had never worked on a game before. And so one of the parts that makes Goldeneye so memorable is that instead of building levels for first-person shooters, they just reconstructed actual structures from the movie and like actual blueprints of houses. So one of the reasons that people like love Goldeneye is that like there's rooms that are serve no gameplay function, they're just like an office space, and so it feels very like real and uncanny in a way that modern first-person shooters like are never gonna feel that way. And I I love that.
SPEAKER_03That's that's uh really cool. I um I I was uh my sister took me to see that movie in theaters, dating myself again here, but um we we were like playing Goldeneye multiplayer with like Yeah, the split screen. Four-way really exciting.
SPEAKER_02Oh, it's the best, man. So you got uh I'm assuming older sister, your younger sister probably didn't take you to a James Bond movie.
SPEAKER_03Much older. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Much older. How much older?
SPEAKER_03Uh she passed now, but she was like, she I guess she's probably she would be like in her maybe 50 or so now. Like she's she is she was much older. Um but yeah. For my birthday, she would always take me to a movie or something.
SPEAKER_02That's awesome. I uh my sister is 10 years younger than me. I'm the middle child, so my brother's even older than her.
SPEAKER_03Well, that's a good spread.
SPEAKER_02It's not bad. And like I remember specifically taking my sister to go see like The Mortal Bones or something like that. It was one of her like middle schooler books that she was reading, got adapted into a movie, and it was just absolute slop movie, but I've never seen somebody so excited to see a movie in my entire life. She was pumped, riveted from start to finish. And so I'm just like sitting there watching this bad movie, and it's like one of my favorite memories with my sister because she was like, she was it was that perfect age where eventually she was gonna get old enough to realize that that was uncool to be that caring about something, but she fucking loved it, and I love that memory, so I'm sure your sister probably felt the same about James Bond going to see the movie from the video game you were just playing.
SPEAKER_03That's very cool. That's very much cool babysitter territory.
SPEAKER_02Very that's what the much older sibling kind of is. It's just cool babysitter vibes the whole time. I did a lot of cool babysitting where I'm just like, you guys can eat whatever you want. Like they're not gonna pay me. I'm your brother.
SPEAKER_03Who is it more satisfying for you as the cool babysitter or to have a cool babysitter?
SPEAKER_02Whew, uh definitely to have the cool babysitter. Like when you are the cool babysitter, you do you are aware that you can mess something up, but like when you are in awe of the cool babysitter, that cool babysitter is simply a god amongst men. You know, this this woman that showed you Nirvana, she changed the course of your life.
SPEAKER_03She did.
SPEAKER_02And you still, you know, it's like who has that high esteem of of who do you hold in that high esteem other than you know, mythical figures?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, you know, we had another babysitter named Michaela, and her father, they were German American, I guess. They that's good. They brought a piece of the Berlin Wall.
SPEAKER_00Oh, sick.
SPEAKER_03A little little crumb of it to us. Yeah. That's somewhere at my parents' house.
SPEAKER_02And that's where you learned uh about the uh defeat of communism by the glorious capitalists, right?
SPEAKER_03Yep.
SPEAKER_02Yep. It's all been uphill ever since then, right, baby?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. That's why we assimilate.
SPEAKER_02Exactly, exactly. That's cool, man. Uh so you're listening to Nirvana as uh to try to emulate the cool babysitter, obviously. Nirvana, I think, is one of those great bands to start off with because uh I don't know, they they do the fundamentals so well. He writes a like, you know, my brother's always been this big promoter of when he was like teaching me what he knew about music, he's like, if you can play something acoustically, that's how you know you've written a good song. It's not just the guitar pedal effects. And yeah, he did that when he was playing Nirvana's Unplugged to me to show me that Nirvana was, you know, awesome or whatever. And it worked, you know. I I'm a little brother, I'm gonna like whatever he likes. But I feel like Nirvana's a great place to start just because Kurt nails so much of like what rock music should be about, all a lot of the fundamental stuff. How did you start to branch out from there?
SPEAKER_03From there, my my brother, my older brother had a friend who gifted him like a he like made like a a bootleg tape compilation of Primus songs.
SPEAKER_02Oh, wow, you went hard.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so from Nirvana, I got really into Primus. Um I kind of just took that tape from my brother and played it to death. Um so kind of when that and Primus was my first concert. Um Bucket had opened, Incubus opened.
SPEAKER_00Dang!
SPEAKER_03Um and um I had a cassette tape of Queen's greatest hits from my dad.
SPEAKER_02That's a good one.
SPEAKER_03And um I yeah, I'd say from like age 12, it's like just been rock music. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I love the mix of uh Primus as the older brother rock band and Queen as the dad rock band. Like I feel like those are two you know Primus is a phenomenal my older brother, my older cousin gave me this mixtape of a bunch of Primus songs because it's like who else is gonna show you Primus? You're not gonna get you're not gonna stumble upon it. I mean, I I heard Primus for the first time in the South Park intro song.
SPEAKER_03Oh yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that was my first introduction because I uh I was that cool kid that would stay up late and watch uh South Park as much as I could.
SPEAKER_03That's very cool.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, uh what's funny is like you you're you listen to a lot of rock music. You've mentioned a lot of like very rocking bands. Uh when I listen to your stuff, there's like a a it seems like a sizable country vibe in there as well. Is that new? Is that something you've always been flirting around with or what?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, no, I um I got really into the pedal steel around our like second album and um met Mike Brenner, who lives in Philadelphia. He's like a lap steel slash pedal steel uh guru. He's just like he's amazing. He played in uh Magnolia Electric Company back in the day, and um kind of started you know touring and playing shows with him sitting in with us, and I think that really kind of shaped the sound a lot early on. Um I do I do like country. Um I feel like I'm definitely uh I'm writing new songs now and decidedly not country ones.
SPEAKER_02There's also like I feel like there's just a large amount of uh I guess alt country. Magnolia Electric Company has like a a they're like I I feel like they got their recognition when you know Jason Molina was around and played, but like the influence is now kind of reflecting how good that music was when it came out. A lot of the zoomers uh nowadays love you know alt country type stuff. Yeah. Uh there is like a I no one's coined the term for it yet that I've heard that I think is gonna stick, but there is this sort of like element in indie rock right now that is like slide guitar indie rock with like Wednesday being like a prime example of this where they're they're blending these elements of country. And to me, part of that kind of reads is this like I don't know, it just it got ignored by indie rock for 10 15 years. Nobody really wanted to touch it, they didn't want to be seen as like the country guy. And now it's like, yeah, no, no, no, this actually sounds really cool, especially when you mix it with the more hard, you know, blending country and nirvana is actually a fucking seamless blend. It sounds cool.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. That said, I'm I'm like I I the Yeehaffication of Indie Rock was fun. And I I'm like was an early progenator of it. Like there we have pedal steel on like yoke in the fur going back to like 2018.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03But I feel like it's kind of I I want to hear other sounds.
SPEAKER_02This is the curse of the early adopter, right? Like if you find it early, which he did, generally it tends to be found by the people that are making music, right? You're out there exploring with different sounds, you find something that sounds good, then it kind of catches on and becomes a little bit more mainstream. But the people that like started bringing it back into the mainstream that have been doing it, like you said, you know, 2018. Now we're going on 2026. But for a lot of the listening public, they've only started really listening to this in the last two or three years. So you just kind of have to wait out for them to also ask, hey, what's coming next? What's coming next? I feel like that's low-key a curse of being an artist. Is that like the artist, the the song itself, the poem, the movie, is trying to capture the moment as it currently exists. But the moment as it currently exists isn't really going to be understood until the future, when then you look back on it. So it's almost like you are existing. Like as you're writing new songs right now, just by trying to capture what 2026 feels like, you're kind of playing in the future a little bit, if that makes sense. This is my this might be a little much.
SPEAKER_03No, no, totally. And I feel like it takes so long for a record to come out that even for the artists, it's like it's you know, the songs that are coming out on on Friday for me are like they've been around for two years now, you know.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And probably uh when did you like when was the first song of that album? When did you start writing it?
SPEAKER_03Um, probably the fall of 2024.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's a long time, man.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02It's a long time for the first time.
SPEAKER_03Making movies, I think making movies is probably the worst.
SPEAKER_02Oh, easily.
SPEAKER_03It takes so long, you gotta get so many people involved.
SPEAKER_02It's you know, from conception to execution, it's at least like a five-year process, which I I'm fascinated by, you know, right now, 2026, I make a lot of short form content. I talk about this a lot. Like, we live in uh what I've heard referred to as the dictatorship of the now, right? That like there's so much information being created instantaneously. You've got live streams, you got people making TikToks, reels, or whatever. I know that the videos that I make within two weeks, for the most part, are irrelevant. They don't really matter. And this is something that's existed in other places as well. For the most part, it's what people kind of like about sports. Sports matter because this game matters, but then next week will be another game, and last week's game kind of doesn't really matter that much anymore. Unless it was phenomenal or something like that. But like movies are now competing with an audience that demands a responsiveness that the slow movement of the development of a movie, uh I don't I I'm interested to see how Hollywood kind of rectifies that contradiction, you know?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Yeah, and the fact that um people move on so fast from things, like you just said. Like how do you justify putting all that well, money for Hollywood in that case, but just time and I don't know. I I don't know what what to do about all that. Besides become very good at making reels.
SPEAKER_02Honestly, I you know, uh I don't know what to tell people about that, because it's like on the one hand, it does seem to be a necessary part of the industry part of it. You know, to get people's attention, you kind of have to meet them where their attention is at. And if their attention's on these short reels, you are you can do it without making reels, without being on TikTok, without being on Instagram, all that fun stuff. But you are fighting against your audience as opposed to fighting with the audience. Whereas in 1960, all you had to do was get something on the radio because that's where the audience was. So it's like there's gonna be positives, there's gonna be negatives to it. My goals are always just to try to figure out, you know, without any judgment, just what is right now. Sure. But I like making the reels and stuff like that, because it's like this is my way of understanding what the now is, but also, you know, whatever. I'm fucking I'm decent at him. I'm good at it. People like it. So that's why they do it, you know? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03I I wish I was better. I'm jealous.
SPEAKER_02I'm jealous of you, man. I'd much rather I I made uh I made a real at a Cameron Winter concert. I saw him play, uh, I saw Geese play at a festival recently uh up in Boise. Have you ever heard of uh Tree Fort?
SPEAKER_03Yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah, great festival. You've played that? Yeah, and and I think we'll be there again soon.
SPEAKER_02Nice. Uh let me know, because uh it it low key is kind of a uh Portland musician uh pilgrimage. Like everybody has a lot of the smaller bands come out of the Portland Seattle scene. So usually I've got a couple years, I've played a couple different shows. Uh my wife's played in a couple different bands that have played there, so we always kind of show up. It's a really fun festival if anybody's thinking of going.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Have you been to Picathon?
SPEAKER_02I just was at Picathon. They invited me to make content, but it was great. I uh hung out with uh, you know, Hudson Freeman.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I'm I'm aware of him. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02I got to meet him. He's been on the podcast. I get to meet him, I get to meet his bandmates. We hung out and talked in person for the first time. Uh, and it was great. He was a really nice kid, and the festival is awesome. It's it's really a labor of love. They they put so much into Picathon.
SPEAKER_03It's so cool.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Pacific Northwest got some cool stuff, you know. We're not we're not totally lame yet, but we're kind of lame. It's alright.
SPEAKER_03Uh, I guess uh well when Nirvana was going on, it was like the center of the world.
SPEAKER_02That's one of the things I think about um a ton, because one of the read about or whatever, it's just sort of this idea of the development of America as a civilization coming into its own, right? That it's a very young, you know, obviously there's been people here for a long time, but this concept of America as like a civilization state, in the same way that like China is a civilization state, Russia is a civilization state. Uh but like within the American emergent civilization state, there's this even smaller section called the Pacific Northwest that is developing a culture, it's developing roots of a culture. And like one of the important ones is Nirvana. Before Nirvana, there really is no artistic representation of the Pacific Northwest, and now all of a sudden that DNA of like alright, garage rock bands, aggressively DIY music culture, uh, and like grunge music, you know, the it still reverberates a ton in the Pacific Northwest. I think that it it has like an importance to the the genealogy of the culture up here.
SPEAKER_03That's a good point. Yeah, it's a young country and an even younger part of a young country.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. It it might be, I don't know. I I go back and forth in my head, what's the youngest part uh culturally in the United States? It's probably like the New Mexico, West Texas area that like that there just really hasn't been a ton going there. When you think about that area, what do you think about? You think about nuclear bomb testing, uh, the Manhattan Project, and then Breaking Bad. And I was like, oh yeah, Breaking Bad. But like I feel like that's one of those things that's like it appears to be a coincidence, but isn't really. It's just the fact that Breaking Bad is set in New Mexico and was a cultural touchstone, I think it's just sort of a signal that this area of the world is also starting to develop some culture in the cultural imagination, and it's being reflected because a show like Breaking Bad is part in part popular because it talks about New Mexico. That you know. I think uh Eddington is also set in New Mexico, right?
SPEAKER_03Oh, I didn't see that.
SPEAKER_02It was good. It was good.
SPEAKER_03Is Hayden Pedigo from West Texas?
SPEAKER_02That's a great question. Uh I think he might be.
SPEAKER_03He's the uh he plays instrumental guitar music.
SPEAKER_02Oh, I think I've heard this guy. This guy's been recommended to me by a lot of my more well-listened uh viewers or whatever. I I I need to I need to get into him more.
SPEAKER_03He's great, and I want to say he's from West Texas, so maybe like an uh an indie head.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I feel like Texas, uh, have you heard the band uh Stillwater?
SPEAKER_03I don't think so.
SPEAKER_02They got a very cool, very Texas sound. They're like kind of a a slow core band. They got this album, God's gonna grant you a million dollars, and are God's gonna give you a million dollars.
SPEAKER_03Oh, oh, oh. I that album title has been in my head ever since I first read it. That's the best name for a record.
SPEAKER_02It's uh they're like they're touching on some I always kind of view good musicians as being something of an antenna, and we can talk about your music writing process as well, but like it's not necessarily that you're creating a new sound, you're just uh attaching form to something that already exists out there, and I feel like this sound of like desolate Texas in an indie rock form, they're giving it that form, and their song Atavan, I honestly uh one of my top like five favorite songs, maybe of all time. They're phenomenal, and I feel like they're just touching on something that like it feels almost important to listen to that album, or at least to me, because I'm a huge dork. But you should definitely check them out. Also, yeah, in terms of your music writing process, how do you feel like how do you feel like you come upon a song that you're like, yeah, this is actually one of them? Because I'm sure, like most musicians, you can sit and play guitar for hours. How do you know like this is a song versus this is just something I'm messing around with?
SPEAKER_03Um wait, what's the is it still water?
SPEAKER_02Still water, right?
SPEAKER_03One word?
SPEAKER_02Shallow water, shallow water. I do that every fucking podcast.
SPEAKER_03Shallow water, I I can't ask you that. You can't remember.
SPEAKER_02I've done this with that band so many times that I genuinely need to issue them of apologies. Shallow water. Shallow water, my god.
SPEAKER_03Okay, I I'm saving this.
SPEAKER_02Um absolutely, man.
SPEAKER_03My writing process is like very boring and mundane. Beautiful. Yeah, I I have a a wife and a toddler, and I wait until they go to bed at night, and then I sit on the couch and watch a movie on mute for an hour or two, and I I try to do that every single day.
SPEAKER_01Oh, that's awesome.
SPEAKER_03And just try to write that way. Um to your point about like what if it's a good idea or not, like I almost feel like the musical idea is arbitrary until I have a lyric idea, which is so hard to come up with now. Um I just try to write down as many one-liners and thoughts as possible in a Google Doc that I can like look back at. Um but musically I think that like if it's not really fun and exciting to play and listen to immediately, then it's like it doesn't have the sauce.
SPEAKER_02I always uh my wife and I go thrift store shopping a lot for clothes, and there's this idea that we've like finally realized because if you do that, you end up buying a bunch of stuff you never really wear. If you don't love it in the store, when you get back home, it now has to compete with your favorite shirts and your favorite pairs of pants and stuff like that. And I feel like that's kind of similar when you're like when you're writing a song and you're just fucking around during a session. Uh if you don't immediately love it, love it, love it right there, like when you start turning into a song, it now has to compete with hey Jude, you know? Yeah, that's like fighting for attention with the greatest song. So if you don't absolutely love it right now, what are you asking your audience to do? You know, make room for it in their heart, you know?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. I think the litmus test is like if I'm if I get obsessed with it or not.
SPEAKER_02I love that. You know. Oh. I love the idea of sitting and watching a movie and like the visual cue, you know. Your brains are our brains are wired to try to make sense out of stuff that we're seeing. So just sitting on mute watching a movie and and playing around it with a guitar, I'm gonna try that out. I've never I usually just sit down in the basement with nothing going on. Uh, what kind of movies do you like to watch for that?
SPEAKER_03Uh The Mummy. The Mummy with Brendan Fraser, uh Lord of the Rings trilogy. Um The Town. Of course. Um The Burbs. This Tom Hanks movie called The Burbs. I've never heard of that one. It's incredible. Um yeah, just like movies that I've seen a thousand times before that are like it's kind of just like comforting to like I it doesn't it's like just the right amount of distraction. There's something about this, it's like there's like this balance of distractedness that lets me kind of get an idea going.
SPEAKER_02I like that because uh I do a relatively similar thing. Sometimes I gotta like I I wanna go like take a nap, you know, you're just tired or whatever. Uh and I have a couple of YouTube videos that I've watched a thousand times before. Uh specifically, there's this guy, Matthew Matos, who's does video game reviews or whatever. They're like in-depth, they're very dry, they're very boring, and I've already heard them a thousand times before. If I don't put that on, though, when I put my head on the pill, I'll be thinking about like, oh, I wish something was entertaining me right now. But if it's something that's too entertaining, I can't fall asleep. It has to be that perfect blend. Exactly. Where your your mind can actually then go think about something you actually want to think about. In your case, you want to like play guitar. I love that as an idea. Uh I want to try that because that that it does feel sometimes like there's this abrupt, like, okay, I'm gonna play guitar now. You know, I'm gonna go.
SPEAKER_03Right, right. It's like a serious you like put pressure on it. Like, this is my time to do this or whatever, but the Goldilocks zone.
SPEAKER_02I mean, you talked about having a guitar uh in the living room with your brother and your dad. It's like back then you probably didn't think about it too much. It's just whenever you're like, oh cool, I'm gonna go play the guitar. Yeah, but now you're a musician, it's so important that you play the guitar. You know, all of a sudden it becomes a different thing.
SPEAKER_03No, you gotta get back to the guitar in the living room.
SPEAKER_02Exactly, you know. I love my favorite uh description of songwriting is uh Jay Maskis from Dinosaur Jr. He describes it as fishing, you know? You just sit around.
SPEAKER_03That's great.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Isn't that awesome?
SPEAKER_03Because I I also feel that way that like you fish a thousand times. This maybe these numbers don't add up, but like you fish a thousand times, but catch a fish like once or twice, you know. Yeah. You probably catch more fish if you go fishing a thousand times, but you sit down to to to write a thousand times and probably yeah, once or twice something happens.
SPEAKER_02Well, you know, what I love about that analogy is that like the people that love fishing aren't the people that love catching a fish. They're the people that love sitting in the boat.
SPEAKER_03Yes, you know? That's right. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Or watch the movie.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. You found a way to love sitting in the boat. You sit in the boat, you have the guitar out there, it just becomes kind of natural, and then, you know, it lets something it lets something resonate. It honestly, like, you get into somewhat of a one of the reasons I love playing guitar, love playing music, is you get into somewhat of a meditative state. It's like driving, it's just enough activity to like let you kind of zone out a little bit.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02And then the beauty of guitar is like maybe you find a lick that's just super fun to play or sounds cool, and it kind of shakes you out of that meditative state, and now you're like, oh, this is something cool, and now you're you're just geared up for it, you know?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, and I think that when you find when you come across an exciting idea, it like builds on itself very quickly. Where like if I you get excited about an idea, all of a sudden you have the words for it, and then you're really efficient, then yeah.
SPEAKER_02I find words to be easily the hardest part. It's always what I I like try to like put off uh until the end. For years I never sang on anything I recorded just because like I hated the sound of my own voice, which is funny because I never shut the fuck up.
SPEAKER_03Uh but everybody does.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. It's something you get it's what uh one of the things I love about uh Kirk Cobain and and uh John Lennon. They both kind of hated the sound of their own voice, and it's like, dude, they have the coolest voices I've ever heard.
SPEAKER_03I know, you know? I know.
SPEAKER_02Uh but uh how do you go about you know trying to find lyrics? I know you you talked about writing down little one-liners. Are you kind of guy where it's like, well, I really like this line? What's the song that that line would fit in? Or are you just trying to fit uh more like I want a word that it doesn't necessarily have to tell a whole story, but it does have to fit the mood of the song right now, you know? Which one uh I don't know, how do you tend to write it? I don't know.
SPEAKER_03I think that um finding words and syllables that sound good with what I'm playing is equally as important as like a deep story with it. Like if it if the words sound musical and maybe they're not even immediately making sense, uh that's like that's worth exploring. Um yeah, I don't know. I think that um I like to write about things that are not just like my feelings, you know.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And nothing.
SPEAKER_02I like that too. Uh one, if you just write about yourself all the time, it it it starts to just get repetitive. You know, you there's yeah.
SPEAKER_03And uh I don't think it's exciting to listen to.
SPEAKER_02No. I always uh I talk about uh you ever listen to that band? It's like uh an arco folk punk band, Ramshackle Glory, uh Pat the Bunny, Wingnut Dishwashers Union, all the same guy or whatever.
SPEAKER_03Uh I'm not not familiar, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well he talks a lot about uh all of his songs basically follow the same thing where it's like he talks about uh how he kinda hates himself, how he kinda how he definitely hates the government, but he loves his friends. And I've always thought like so many people write about the first two where it's like, oh, I'm feeling bad about myself. That's his genre music. Oh, I I really hate this political thing, and they'll they'll be so into the political message they kind of don't worry about the song. The reason Pat the Bunny is music, is art, is poetry, is that last part where he goes, but I really fucking love my friends, and that part where it creates this contrast between love and hate, I feel like that's what makes his music interesting. Whereas other people sometimes it's like, ah, this is preachy, this is kind of mopey, something like that. I don't know.
SPEAKER_03Uh no, that's cool.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, alchemy of music, man.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02The other part, too, uh, is just I I think of the two different types of lyric writing, is like Billy Corgan, I like to call bumper sticker lyrics. He just says whatever word fits with the guitar part and the blend of those two things together. It's like that's what music's for. It's blending music and words into a uh an emotion. Versus the John Darniel Mountain Goats, like, I'm gonna tell you a short story, so every word is like very important and bears weight on the story itself.
SPEAKER_03You seem to be yeah, go ahead. No, no, you go ahead.
SPEAKER_02I was gonna say you seem to lean more in the uh Billy Corgan camp of like whatever fits the music, man.
SPEAKER_03I think that's more so that's where I'm I'm like moving towards that, but like I've definitely had like long ass wordy songs too, you know. Um but I think both ways are real.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely.
SPEAKER_03Um but I should probably jump off soon to do this band camp thing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no problem, man. You want to shout out uh uh any plugs you got coming out? You got an album coming out, any uh shows and stuff like that?
SPEAKER_03Uh Still Coming Down comes out on Friday. I don't know when this comes out, but Friday, August 21st, Still Coming Down is out everywhere. Uh we'll be on tour in the UK and the EU in September. And then starting in October, we'll be on tour around the US. And you can find tickets at wildpinkmusic.com.
SPEAKER_02Nice, man. Yeah, if you're in Portland, hit me up, man. We'll uh I will. Absolutely. Alright, uh, dude, go everyone go check out that album. Go check out Wild Pink, go follow him on Instagram, all that fun stuff. Everybody hates uh plugging their own stuff. Um thank you so much for your time, man.
SPEAKER_03Appreciate it. Thanks a lot.