transcript of the plastic constellations and p.o.s.

hereafter follows the unedited transcript of my interview with p.o.s. and the plastic constellations. it's a pretty long one, and i'm not gonna claim it hangs together or anything. plus, there are probably misspellings and nothing's formatted. it's the really real!

Q

Stef: Shut up, dude.

Aaron: Um, Junior high, right? You [Stef] were in 9th grade, we were in 8th grade. Stef was in a punk band.

Stef: I had switched from North Junior High to Hopkins West Junior High. I went to North the first two years (7th and 8th grade) and met Kai [Benson of Swiss Army, aka Marshall Larada of Doomtree] between 8th and 9th grade and switched schools just so I could hang out with Kai. I had to wake up at like six in the morning, take a city bus downtown and then take another city bus back way out the fuck there just so I could hang out with Kai.

Aaron: Him and Kai were in a band called Om and we, as younger kids, had seen you guys around.

Jeff: I remember the first time that we ever met Stef: you [Aaron] and I were in study hall and you [Stef] were in study hall …

Stef: What happened?

Jeff: We were writing- Aaron and I met in 7th grade (like the first day of 7th grade) and we both decided that we liked Sonic Youth at the same time. So that was our friendship. And we would just write band names on the white board, just so we could make a list of all the bands that we liked. Like Sonic Youth, Pavement, etc. And you [Stef] were there and I can’t remember what the conversation was. Something was discussed.

Q

Stef: They had a freaking 7-inch out by then.

Aaron: It was a little unspoken rivalry ‘cause there was a talent show and not all the bands could get in and Om got to headline and we were pissed. ‘Those damn ninth graders!’ They were the most popular band in the school.

Stef: These guys were coming up though.

Aaron: We did get to headline the [next one].

Jeff: That was vindication.

Q

Jordan: It’s always been that. That’s why it’s such a weird-ass dumb name.

Stef: That’s where I got P.O.S. from, too- Om. You know, when you’re in a punk band, you think of your punk rock name. They all have cool punk aliases. Kai picked P.O.S. for me.

[Apryl Elektra comes in and discusses her dad’s desire to paint Stef]

Stef: In the first Om full-length, we thanked ‘Those Little Bastards TPC.’ These guys made a documentary which heavily features a part that’s just a section about how much everybody hates [Om]. [laughter] We actually used a section of their documentary to open up our full-length, [a part] that was like, ‘I fucking hate Om.’ [laughter]

Jeff: We’d ask questions like, ‘How much do you hate Om?’ You guys were the first band that was actually out there doing stuff. You weren’t playing the Entry at 14, but all the talent shows, parties …

Stef: We played the Entry when I was … 15? With Sarahteen and Trilobyte.

Aaron: You guys had a posse of a couple bands that you always played with.

Stef: Yeah, lots of bands that turned into other bands. I think Falcon Crest came out of some of the bands we played with. KMB Communique …

Jeff: Wait, who from KMB was in those bands?

Stef: 21 Hats for 21 Heads. That was KMB Communique. Swiss Army …

Aaron: I don’t know if you’ve heard of a band called Soundgarden [laughter].

Q

Stef: I was 14 or 15 so, 1996?

Jeff: We were in 8th grade, so yeah.

Q

Stef: I was so jealous of these guys: They put out a 7-inch and we put out a tape.

Aaron: That cost us so much money.

Jeff: We’ve now sold through all 200 copies now.

Isaac [Gale]: I think I’ve got number 1.

Matt: Yeah, but we made like five number 1s, though.

Q

Stef: That was pretty much Kai and Mike Mictlan from Doomtree and Crescent Moon. We all played a friend of ours’ birthday party. Oddjobs played that birthday party and I talked to Crescent Moon about what he was doing. And I had heard local hip-hop from the Headshots tapes, but I didn’t put together that they were from the same scene. And Crescent Moon gave me a mixtape. Marshall (Kai) was already really into Bjork and electronic stuff, so it was pretty much right there the whole time. And then I’d rap a little bit with Mike at school.

Aaron: You had that boombox.

Stef: Yeah, I brought a boombox to school; my girlfriend at the time had a boombox and when we got to school she’d let me take it out of her car. So me and Mike would make beat tapes and just rap between classes.

Jeff: Do you remember doing Sethtoberfests?

Stef: Dude, Sethtoberfest was where it really happened.

Jeff: It was Matt on drums and me on bass and then you and Mike rapping over us playing the whitest funk.

Aaron: The Whitest Funk would be a good name for a band.

Jeff: Was there a name?

Matt: Rhythmatics.

Stef: The Rhythmatics! That was the first show! At that point, me and Mike had seen each other around but we had never really talked. We both knew that we rapped, but we played Sethtoberfest and I was freestyling with this guy Dave that I was Cenospecies with and Mike just starting rapping, too and it just happened. We set up a show at the Depot in Hopkins.

Jeff: It’s owned and run by Hopkins High School for teens to have an alcohol- and smoke-free place to hang out.

Stef: We just thought it was the dorkiest shit in the world, and it still kind of is a little nerdy, but it does a lot of cool shit. We played and that place was packed, from like the front of the stage to out the door. Just screaming and really happy. Crescent Moon showed up and rapped. That was our first rap show- our first for real rap show. My old group 2-3-7 played one show at District 202. We didn’t have any songs at all. We had two choruses …
Jeff: There was a chorus?

Stef: We had two! And we freestyled for like four hours with a 20-minute intermission.

Aaron: I’m so pissed I missed that. I was stuck at my girlfriend’s house and she was saying, ‘I’m too sick to drive.’

Stef: I remember me and Mike had never really hung out; we met at Sethtoberfest and just decided to do a show.

Q

Aaron: Well I was hanging around with Stef a lot then when he first started making beats and they were working on the Cenospecies record.

Stef: This dude would come over like twice a week and we’d watch these awesome buddy-buddy movies like brothers-in-the-woods and shit like that and he’d always fall asleep.

Jeff: He’s still like that. 25 minutes into the movie, he’s asleep.

Aaron: But I was really, really, really into hip-hop at that point. That’s what I first started listening to when I was growing up and then I got into alternative rock for a million years, and then I got insanely back into it. And Stef was like, you listen to so much shit, why don’t you just buy an MPC [sampling drum machine] to make beats?

Stef: And he bought this Roland Remix Station for like $200. And he called and said, ‘Come over and show me how to use this,’ and I looked and it and was like, ‘You can’t use this.’ It’s one of those really elaborate four-track sampler things. But I was like, ‘This is cheap; you’ll probably be able to work something out on it and if you don’t like it, then it was still cheap.’ And as soon as we sat down and tried to use it, it was like, this is not gonna happen.

Aaron: So I went back and got the real deal. He came over for a day for like three hours. We went to Cheapo, he showed me how to sample and chop shit up. The basics. And then like months down the line I came with a CD of beats.

Stef: And all of them were better than anything I’d ever made. Seriously, dude- like overnight- was the best producer I ever met.

Aaron: I remember that Bodyrock song was the first beat of mine that you ever rapped on and I was like, yes! Finally someone’s rapping on my beat! And then we’ve just been doing it ever since then. Four years now?

Q

Stef: I kind of had a jumpstart on it because Building Better Bombs, when me and Isaac [Gale] first started it was me and him playing guitar and a drum machine. I programmed all the basslines and the drums and additional sounds but right into the drum machine. It just made sense, like, we’ll add this on top of it and we’ll do vocals, but the rest of it is on here. So when it came to making beats, it was pretty much the same process. Like, pick all the melodies and then you add drums behind it, and then you rap over it. It kind of felt like putting together songs the same way. That’s why if you listen to a lot of the first beats from the False Hopes Mega and the first False Hopes [series of shorter CD debuts by Doomtree members], the beats are godawful, but they sound like a band playing. They sound stupid, but they sound like a band playing. And I loved it until this dude [Aaron] really started making bangers and shit. That made me think, maybe I can try not doing that. I pretty much wanted every beat that I had to sound like A Series of Sneaks, the Spoon record. That was my plan, because they’re so choppy and they ride so hard and completely random and all over the place.

Aaron: And I want every beat to sound like Jay-Z. And it’s still like that to this day.

Q

Aaron: All the beats that I made for Stef’s record- he put the pressure on me hard for this record. Because he called me on tour- from the first Atmosphere tour- and I was all excited because Stef’s getting bigger and he’s going to put another record out and maybe I can get some beats on there. And he called me and said, ‘Dude, I’m almost done with this record, but I want you to get a couple beats on there’ and I was like, ‘Are you serious?!.’ [laughter] He said, ‘I need you to mail me a package while I’m on tour so I can write to some stuff.’ So in two weeks, basically all the beats that are on that record [were done], and that’s the greatest moment as a music producer, because that never works.

Stef: Really quick, we should mention that the song with me and Craig Finn [‘Safety in Speed’] was produced by Lazerbeak and in the liner notes it says it was produced by me through some error between me and Marshall, who designed it, and Siddiq [at Rhymesayers] when he was doing the final check. But that should be in big-ass print that he produced that track.

But this record … I started writing the record completely on accident. I just got picked up by Rhymesayers and I was trying so hard to get a re-release for Ipecac [Neat], to like getit out there. And Siddiq was so hellbent on just putting it in the catalog. He said, ‘It’s already done. You made that record. Make another.’ And then four days later I had half a record. It just totally [flood noise].

Q

Stef: It wasn’t even trying to make a record at the time. Cenospecies broke up and I had no real intention of doing a solo record or anything like that. But then, a couple years went by and I had 16 songs and I was like, this is like a record, so let’s just wrap this up and make it a new record. But I came into Audition actually trying to make a record. I feel like it works more cohesively as a record: it fits its title and does all that stuff, where Ipecac is kind of like a compilation of stuff I’d been working on. And it comes off like a record because my life didn’t move very much for three years. I was working at Rick’s, I was writing at Rick’s, I was pissed off. So upset all the time. I wrote that whole record in the bathroom of the strip club where I was a men’s room attendant, not making any hourly, being nice to assholes everyday for tips. I’d just sit in the corner of the bathroom in a black suit writing rhymes. Black slacks and a black buttondown. After the first year I’d roll up the sleeves and wear a black bandana to keep my dreads back because they didn’t like my dreads. They were horrible and not maintained. My hair looked like shit. I just saw a video of myself at the 2004 Warped Tour and I can’t believe how bad they were.

Aaron: For beats, my process is … I just buy a ton of records and I just have to listen to all of them and take the best moments of them. Layer stuff in with keyboards and other stuff.

Q

Aaron: I usually just make beats the way I hear them and they’re usually pretty simple, like three and a half minute beats like with choruses. And then I give it to an artist and if they like and they want to use it, then we sit down [and work it out]. Stef is so easy to work with because he has his ideas and he knows what he wants and then we just change it up. Like the half-time part came earlier in the version I gave him, and we wanted to wait on that, so it came later. Things like that. But not a whole lot of things change, unless the rapper really wants to do stuff with it. But it’s so easy because Stef knows how to make beats, too so he see it from that level. It’s a lot easier than someone saying, ‘I want to spit for three and a half bars here and do a chorus for 17 and a third bars.’ So it worked out real well. And a lot of rappers rap songs and it’s just a verse and a chorus and nothing changes, but he does such a good job of writing songs as a rapper. And they have dynamics and they go in and out and they climax and that helps with my beats, too. Where we position certain instruments and where they come in.

Q

Aaron: It’s fun. No one’s going to tell me they think that bassline is a little too complicated and you should change it. I’m making everything.

Jeff: That sounds kind of specific. [laughter]

Aaron: You write for a band and it’s awesome, but it’s a different experience, because everything you think of, you put into it. So it’s a different dynamic.

Q

Stef: There is a bunch of that [samples from local bands] that’s really hidden on the first record. There’s samples from just absurd ludicrous places that I don’t even want to say. But really painfully obvious stuff that you’ll catch if you’re listening for it. But the new record I really wanted to have a blues feel when I started making the record. I just sampled Howlin’ Wolf and shit like that. And it just wasn’t working; it didn’t feel right at all. I pretty much did immediately skip to things that I thought about, but didn’t want to try, the first time around [on Ipecac Neat]. I used that Baxter sample on the first record [on ‘Kidney Thief’]. But I figured I’d just do the same thing, take the 7-inches and then play them for the bands that I sampled. So like the Killsadie thing is a super-blatant sample. I was actually trying to come up with an idea for a Minneapolis vs. Minneapolis compilation where I get local bands and local rappers to cover local bands and local rappers. That’d be fun. Just a little appreciation because there are so many bands that brought me up, locally. Even if we couldn’t find what we were looking for on a national level, we could go to a Killsadie show at the Foxfire. See a couple bands that kick ass and then see Killsadie, with their whole black-suits-and-ties thing.

Jeff: I don’t know if you were going to get back to the history stuff, but it’s really important to talk just briefly about the Foxfire. That’s why we’re a band. That place was only around for two years, but in those two years it touched so many people. So many bands.

Stef: But that’s two years of four or five bands every single night. Bands that never would have had a chance to play.

Jordan: We were there like two to three times a week.

Stef: I was there every day; I worked there and even when I wasn’t working I was hanging out there. What the fuck else am I going to do? If you’re underage and you want to go downtown, where the fuck else is there to go?

Aaron: Thinking about it, it’s really insane it was on that block. Looking at downtown now, how did that even happen?

Jeff: That place was like the catalyst for us turning from a band that played our friends’ parties to like a band that played shows. I don’t want to say professional, but that’s part of it, too.

Stef: Whether any of us actually lived in Hopkins- did any of us live in Hopkins? [Aaron raises his hand] I never lived in Hopkins, but Hopkins High School had a huge history. It made Minneapolis take a look at what was going on in Hopkins, because every time Om played, every time Plastic Constellations played in any showcase the place was full of people.

Jeff: And it was not just our friends. That was the big change. It was more than just Seth.

Aaron: When it finally started doing really well for us, we had a spot every month and we played. We didn’t even have to flyer really.

Stef: It was on the Foxfire calendar and that was enough.

Aaron: It was such a crucial blow to everyone when it ended.

Jeff: I feel like for three years after that it went down to nothing.

Q

Stef: At the Drive-In said the same thing when they played the mainroom [at First Ave].

Jeff: Did anybody see that show with At the Drive-In?

Stef: That was my first time seeing them and it’s still pretty much the best show I’ve ever seen. So many really amazing shows there. Jimmy Eat World played there. Papa Roach played there. I’m not a big Papa Roach fan, but they played there opening for Two-Ton Crutch the day their video debuted at #7 on TRL. I made sandwiches for them and went home and was like, ‘What?’

Q

Jeff: Well, we got welcomed into the bar scene.

Aaron: It’s sad to say, because when you’re growing up, you always say I’m going to be doing All Ages shows for life and all that stuff and once you get older, you get a beer and you go to a bar.

Stef: I totally don’t agree. I would play a ton more All Ages show if it was possible.

Aaron: I’m not saying we wouldn’t do it; I’m just saying we don’t know the little teeny spots.

Stef: I miss basements more than anything.

Aaron: 1021 and Foxfire ended right around the same time.

Jeff: We played the last show of both those places.

Aaron: And those were our two spots. You go and do the basement shows over in Dinkytown.

Jeff: It’s a big huge apartment complex now.

Stef: So many amazing shows [at 1021]. Song of Zarathustra. Locust.

Aaron: It isn’t the same as it was, but I don’t know the extent of what’s out there right now because I don’t really research it or I’m not involved in it as much.

Stef: The fucking Alamo House: [Buildin Better] Bombs played there for New Year’s and seeing that house was amazing. There was kids out there you never see, which is the same thing. It’s over on East Hennepin. We played there and there were all kinds of young-ass kids there, all kinds of punk rock kids you remember from the shows. We’re totally playing that shit again; that shit was awesome.

Jeff: I want to do a show at the Church.

Aaron: That’s right on 26th and Chicago.

Q

Jeff: I have an office job, but literally, half an hour a day if not more combined, I’m literally visiting our website going, ‘Holy shit. I can’t believe we’re doing all that.’ It’s exciting, man! It’s the kind of thing you dream about when you’re 14 and going to Hopkins West Junior High School and now we’re doing it. It doesn’t feel real.

Stef: I’ve been on some pretty fucking fresh tours and this is the one that I’m stoked about the most. Because it’s my first [headlining] tour.

Jeff: It’s cool that Sims is going.

Aaron: It’s weird how all this happened. For us, we finally just let our guard down and were not expecting anything and that’s when stuff actually works out. Does that make sense at all?

Stef: That makes perfect sense.

Q

Stef: Best thing ever. I got the list of 10 things I want to do before I die, and I’ve checked off four or five of them already and one of them was to make a song with the Bouncing Souls guy. Seriously and I met those guys on the Warped Tour. And Sean [Daley, Slug] put me at the poker table with Lars from Rancid everyday. And right at that poker table is where some of the Bouncing Souls guys would hang out and I was talking to the bass player a lot, just talking about fan stuff and I found out that Greg [Attonito] who’s the singer, had caught a couple of my sets. He’d just been walking by the hip-hop tent. I heard about that and got the bass player’s number in New York and I called him and I said, ‘Hey, is there any way I can get Greg’s number from you?’ And then I sent Greg a version of the song with me singing the parts I wanted him to sing and he was into it. He played it for the band and the band was into it. And that’s just how it worked.

And Craig and I had been talking about doing a song for a long time. Me and Craig and this guy [Aaron] might make a record together. Last time he was in town we talked about it. We have to start doing that. And Maggie from Digitata: I’m just a huge Digitata fan so that worked out good. That song with Mike is a song that’s been through some revisions but was actually intended to be on Ipecac. So we just wrapped it up.

Sean! Yeah I was just stoked to make a song with fucking Slug, dude! We made two and they both turned out to be good. And we made two more and we actually have an idea for a project called Hotels which is the two of us making songs in hotel rooms.

Jeff: And one of your [Aaron] beats Slug is on, right? Just as stoked as I was to hear my friend Stef rapping with Slug I was like, ‘Aaron has a beat that Slug is on!’

Q

Jeff: [Stef] sang on like three or four songs. He helps us with the niceass gang vocals; we often need another voice in there to fill it out. Sometimes Aaron and I aren’t strong enough; we’ll write parts that we can’t sing, like in higher octaves.

Stef: I helped them demo Mazatlan and I love that recording of the record. I thought it was the shit, but my tastes are a little too dirty and punk.

Jeff: We played that for people and we were really into it, like I gave it to some people who were interested in putting out Mazatlan, when we were trying to find a label. And I was so proud of it- I was just thinking they’re gonna come back and say, ‘Yes, we’re gonna take it.’ But a couple people were like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know; the songs are good, but it sounds a little dirty.’

Stef: I was so into how dirty it was. Even to this day, I listen to [John Tranberry’s] version except for ‘No Complaints’ and ‘Keep It Live.’ In my iPod it’s the Tranberry session plus my version. And you were rapping a bunch.

Aaron: We tamed it down a bunch. Stef helped me; he was the vocal coach on Mazatlan and he came through and gave me tips on delivery and stuff like that.

Stef: The Cenospecies record has a Plastic Constellations record sample, too. The connection’s been there for a long time.

Q

Aaron: We quote Sims because he quoted us and on the record I’m making with Mike [Mictlan]- I gave him the idea that- I made a beat and I did some lyrics that I’d written [for the last song on] our record, go with this. So he changes it a little bit, but he raps some of our shit. Lyrically, I respect these guys and they’re like giants to me, so we take from each other.

Stef: Doomtree and every band related with Doomtree in some way, there’s always been crossover. Sims used TPC lyrics and Swiss Army lyrics. I used TPC lyrics and Lifter Puller lyrics. TPC used Sims. It’s really super-obvious. It’s the way it should be; it’s obvious to the point where everybody knows.

Aaron: I’ve always been really intrigued with lyrical- where you take just a little teeny thing from something else and some people get it ‘cause they’ve heard it and I think that’s really cool. And I think we all like that. So when it’s your friends, you don’t have to worry about someone coming at you like, ‘You mutherfucker!’

Stef: That’s what I was worried about when I sampled the Song of Zarathustra and Killsadie songs ‘cause I’m barely friends with Travis and I’m barely friends with Knol [Tate, formerly of Killsaide, currently of Askeleton]. I don’t really know anybody else in those bands.

Jeff: Dude, we hung out with Knol for like six hours in Ohio.

Q

Stef: I’m gonna see if I can get a Jay Clark [formerly of Killsadie, currently of Pretty Girls Make Graves] remix, actually. I haven’t talked to Jay yet, but I hear he’s been making remixes for people.

Q

Jeff: It’s good that we had to wait in a lot of ways. I think when we talked to you before we were kind of bummed. It’s really for the best because it really gave Frenchkiss the time to put some resources behind it.

Aaron: I think we all kind of stepped away from it after we were done but I was just listening to it last week and I still think it’s good. I’m just glad we got to make an awesome awesome record.

Isaac: We were listening to it on the way back [from Madison] and we listened to Mazatlan, and the difference between the two is amazing.

[general cheers for Joe Mabbott]

Stef: I’ve been trying to figure out how we can get a City Pages or Pulse feature about Joe Mabbott. He makes- in the last four years, in the top ten lists of the records, he’s always got at least four of them. He’s the shit. He’s so good.

Jeff: We’ve been trying for years to make an album that really was us and we’ve come close, but I feel like this record is us and without Joe it wouldn’t have happened.

Jeff: It’s also the way it was written because Mazatlan was written over like three years because we weren’t doing shit. We wrote like three songs over the course of 2003, I think. And Mazatlan came out and this Frenchkiss thinig started happening and we were like, ‘Oh shit. We have to write ten songs in like six weeks.’

Aaron: We had like sheets of timelines. Everybody get out your timeline.

Stef: This guy is such an organized dude; he keeps Doomtree held together. I don’t want to give anybody [sole] credit, but dude handles his business.

Q

Aaron: It’s a double-edged sword because it’s such an awesome thing to finally make a cohesive record that you can listen to all the way through that we think works, but then when it came time, even on a small level, to pick a single to send off that’s going to get reviewed by even ‘zines and stuff, we were like, ‘We don’t know, man; listen to the whole thing.’

Q

Stef: It’s freaking brilliant. I can’t get over how good this record is.

Aaron: The balance- me and Jeff have always just kind of done our own thing and throw it into a song, but somehow this time we collaborated more. And it’s awesome; I’m so excited about it.

Stef: I know Beak, and I know that you have some pretty drastic ideas of conceptual-

Aaron: I wanted to call our record Dragonslayers.

Jeff: You actually pushed on me a couple of times.

Stef: I’m really into Crusades. Not The Crusades, just Crusades.

Q

Aaron: I think we took it to almost an extreme. I really liked- I’ll give Craig Finn as an example- I love how he ties stuff in: you get pieces from other stories and stuff. And I think we took it to an extreme of, ‘This is gonna be one huge story.’ I say the same line at least three times on the record.

Jeff: Aaron wrote an actual arc that the songs follow. So like, ‘When we come out of the instrumental, it’s on a beach somewhere.’

Aaron: It was an entire movie in my head.

Q

Stef: The difference between the Hold Steady and the TPC approach is Craig draws from life and then adds to his stories with characters, whereas Aaron is just flat-out taking Plastic Constellations and Doomtree and giving us all swords. It’s a really cool approach.

Q

Jeff: Track 5, ‘Sancho Panza,’ actually is about my wife. It’s my version of a love song, actually. But I knew that I couldn’t stop using we, so I made it about the two of us. Obviously my wife is a big part of my life, but our relationship’s changed a ton since the band started really deciding that we were gonna go for this and we both- this was after our friend Matt Davis died [in 2003]- I think all of us had this realization that you have one chance basically to do something and so she’s been totally supportive. She plays a huge part doing the website. Allison.

Stef: Me and Allison used to be in a band together.

Jeff: Allison played bass and Stef played drums.

Aaron: That’s how Jeff fell in love with Allison!

Stef: [He said,] ‘That’s what I want: a punk rock bass-playing girl.’ Man, I wish I could write a good love song.

Jeff: If a rapper writes a happy love song, you lose your mystique.

Stef: But that [‘Sancho Panza’] doesn’t come off like a normal love song. And I wish I could write a positive, happy love song that doesn’t come off so dark. There’s the ‘The Kill In Me;’ the only girl song on my new record is about chopping her head off and burying it in the back yard so we can sleep. [laughter] It takes all kinds.

Jeff: I’m waiting for Atmosphere’s next record after Slug find love to be like the happiest record ever.

Q

Stef: First of all, my record is dedicated to my uncle [Melvin Dortch] who passed. That song ‘Paul Kersey to Jack Kimball’ is about my uncle. On his girlfriend’s birthday, he walked across the street to buy her a birthday card and got hit by a car and then hit by another car and dragged 100 feet and killed and nobody stopped and nobody’s been arrested or caught. The whole first verse of that song is about how pissed off I am- it’s pretty much written to that guy, whoever it was and the second verse is about how nobody gives a fuck about anything anymore. That you can feel okay killing somebody and not turn themselves in. And ‘Paul Kersey to Jack Kimball’ is a direct reference to Charles Bronson in the Deathwish movies. His name is Paul Kersey and when- it’s kind of ridiculous- but in the first movie where his wife was raped and murdered and the second movie where his daughter is raped and the third movie where his best friend’s wife is raped and murdered- it’s kind of ridiculous, but whenever something really horrific happens in his life he changes his name from Paul Kersey to Jack Kimball and pulls out his gun and gets vigilante. So that’s a super-obscure reference, but I dedicated my record to my uncle and Charles Bronson and Matt Davis, also. Charles Bronson just because me and Turbo Nemesis have a really good relationship with Charles Bronson. Like from how horrible and chiseled his face is to the way he flat-out changed his life. He was a coal miner until he just decided one day [that] he wanted to be an actor. He just up and left his job and became an actor. He didn’t start making the Deathwish movies until he was like 47. I make reference to Charles Bronson a good 30 times on this record and I mention Bronson on Ipecac four or five times, too.

Q

Stef: I don’t know where it came from, or why, but it just feels like important parts of the song to me. You can’t just- especially when some of your songs come off so abstract on the first or second listen- if you can give a run down of where your head’s at while you’re recording it, it gives more real life to it. One thing as a performer and as a rapper especially- not so much as a musician, but as a rapper- the posturing of the rapper has to be completely buried. Rappers, a lot of rappers do their best to look as cool as possible and sound as cool as possible and hold the mic just so and make sure their adlibs at the beginnings of songs are so, like, keeping their image held together. All that stuff. To me, I’m gonna put the jokes that my friends are gonna get in that stuff. I want that part of my life out there as much as I want my lyrics out there. If I’m working with a different engineer than Joe, that I don’t like, I’m not gonna be calling him out, but I definitely refer to Joe and talk to Joe on the record between every song. If the take turned out good, chances are if I talked to him before the take started I’ll just leave it on there. It just feels more realistic to me. It’s a good way to create whatever story or create whatever energy you’re trying to create with the song but still keep it grounded in real life. It’s got to be.

Q

Stef: That’s one thing- I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately for this next record- and everybody’s like, ‘What’s up with punk-rap?’ There’s still people that don’t get it. There’s nothing to get. If people were uninformed and read my bio, they’re gonna be like, ‘This dude likes horrible music,’ because everybody knows that you can’t mix rock and rap. It doesn’t work and it sounds stupid. It’s not the actual mixing of the elements of music, it’s the feel behind it: it’s where you’re coming from. That’s the stuff that mixes. If you listen to my record and don’t think, ‘This is a punk rock guy,’ it doesn’t sound like a punk rock record; it sounds like a rap record. That’s just how it is. And these guys are kind of the exact opposite. They’re a very great rock band that just happens to have some of those elements.

Jeff: I think you make a good point when you say there’s nothing to get. There’s people who- I don’t know why; maybe people grew up differently than us or are older than us- but they think there is something to get. And so, we got called out for our last record calling us white-boy rappers and shit and rap-rock. 311 was mentioned in several articles and we were like, ‘What the fuck?’

Aaron: We’re getting that now when we tried to make a cohesive rock album this time and stopped with some of the rap stuff and now we get called mall-punk.

Jeff: Is what Pitchfork said. And the guy who wrote it loved it! But you couldn’t tell. He called it mall-punk! It happens.

Aaron: But we’re not used to getting reviews beyond our local press.

Stef: I’m about to get pegged as rap-rock. It’s gonna be real bad this year. The biggest feature that I have coming out is in Alternative Press and that already is going be like, ‘Why isn’t this kid king of the Warped Tour?’ ‘Cause I’m a rapper! That’s why.

Jeff: Listening to your record, I’ve said to a couple people, ‘Okay, this is the record that was just waiting to be made.’ You know what I’m saying? Like, okay, yup. I don’t really know how to put into words what I’m trying to say. Somebody was gonna make this record and you did it first. And you’re gonna do it better than anyone else.

Q

Aaron: Sample the records that you have. And Stef sampled the records he had. That’s what he had. All the records I have are indie rock records so all my beats have indie rock drums.

Q

Aaron: Ten years down the line think what stuff is gonna be like.

Jeff: We’ve toured a lot in the last year and a half, we’ve been to a lot of places, but I feel like Minneapolis is pretty unique in stuff that’s going on. You go to other cities and stay at someone’s house and look at their record collection, there’s usually one or the other. Maybe there’s some.

Stef: In Minneapolis, you can have a bill that’s Doomtree and TPC. You can have a bill that’s like the Fuck Yeahs and Brother Ali and people won’t blink an eye. If you try to do that in Chicago … like there was a Dillinger Four/Atmosphere/Sage Francis show in Chicago and there was like fights and shit. People had no idea what the fuck to do with it.

Q

Aaron: We’re at a point where we don’t really know what’s gonna happen next. We have no idea. We know what our record sounds like, we don’t what people are gonna think.

Jeff: We’re all in a similar position in that we all, like right at the same time, finally have two established labels behind us. So we just kind of make out shit, hand it off to them and see what happens.

Stef: And Doomtree is playing such a gigantic part in everybody’s like as a crew. Like I can’t imagine anything better than what it is right now. Everybody’s pieces are finally falling together. Everybody’s getting it. If that’s me or TPC or Sims or Mike or Dessa or pretty much anybody. Everybody’s got it- everybody’s got the pieces falling into place.

Jeff: I feel like there’s people all over this city doing creative stuff. Everyone’s supposrting everyone. Shit’s happening.

Q

Stef: 2005 was the first year of my life where not only did I not have a job, I didn’t borrow money from my mom. She let me know that.