LWL Interview: The Bouncing Souls
From Episode #18

INTERVIEWED BY KRISTEN BENNETT

Kristen:  In your bio you were saying that when you first started touring and continued to tour that you got to play with a lot of your childhood heroes. Who were they?

Bryan: Seven Seconds. We got to tour with Seven Seconds and Youth Brigade together, which was one of the greatest moments of my younger life.

Pete: Captain Kangaroo. That was a great tour!

Bryan: Captain Kangaroo – wow!

Pete: Childhood hero! [laughter]

Greg: Descendents...

Bryan: Descendents, X, Bad Brains, Fugazi, Rollins...

Pete: Ramones...

Bryan: Ramones! Wow...wow, we kick ass! [laughter]

Pete: That’s pretty impressive!

Michael: Did we do that?

Kristen: A lot of punk bands were influenced by non-punk rock bands; do you have those types of influences for your music?

Bryan: Definitely!

Pete: Rock!

Bryan: Rock’n’roll! Any form of rock’n’roll, really. From Johnny Cash through to classic 70’s rock like, fuckin’ Pink Floyd, man... [looking at Pete]

Pete: Floyd dude!

Bryan:  Skynnard – fuckin’ Skynnard. I love some Skynnard...

Kristen: I mentioned this a little while ago but I saw you guys about six or seven years ago at the Rat.

Band: The Rat!!!

Kristen: That was an integral part of the Boston punk rock scene, and you were there for that, and you’ve toured a lot and seen a lot since then, and been back here a lot. How do you think the Boston scene has changed since you first started coming here?

Bryan: We caught that tail end of the Rat, which like you said was what we equated with Boston. It was like a perfect little place...dirty little shithole, low stage, you know what I mean? No barricade, kids right up front...it was where we grew as a band in Boston. And then we took it to the Middle East after that. Played the Middle East for a couple of years. And then there was sort of a period where there was like nothing.

Pete: There was a time where there was nowhere you could do a punk show in Boston. So you would play at a Knights of Columbus hall, or a rec center or something...shit like that.

Kristen:  We’re having that problem again now.

Bryan:  I tell ya, what’s up with fuckin’ Boston, man? The government here is harsh, isn’t it?

Kristen: How do you guys feel about the punk rock scene in general? Throughout the country in general, where do you think it is in the grand scheme?

Bryan: We try to always remain optimistic about it, you know? I believe that the spirit will always be there. There will always be dysfunctional families...there will always be kids at that certain age waking up and being like, “Everything around me sucks. I hate the jocks, I hate this, and I hate that, and I hate the mainstream bullshit...I hate everything I’m trying to be fed.” There will always be real punk kids. I don’t know what they’ll look like and where they’ll go, and what the bands will look and sound like, but I think punk rock will always, always, always be.

Kristen: So it’s more of a mindset?

Bryan: I think it will always be alive, and I think that...it’s a spirit, it’ll never die. I don’t know, I’ve seen some weird shit happen, for sure!

Kristen: Like what?

Bryan: I remember being sort of freaked out when it broke mainstream, but it was still having it’s own original identity as punk, kind of like, “Oh my god, a punk band got popular and they’re on TV, is this good or bad? Oh no!” And now, that seems mild...it’s been like 10 years since that happened and now it’s like fake punk bands, that aren’t even punk at all, have nothing to do with punk, but look punk, and it’s just one big...

Kristen: Marketing scheme?

Bryan: One big, giant marketing scheme. Boy bands, it’s the same thing. But I don’t know if people are aware of how fucked up that is...

Kristen: How do you feel about Rancid moving on to Warner Bros.? Is that something you would do in your career?

Michael: Are they on Warner Bros. now? They keep saying they’re on Hellcat. Cause a couple of years ago Lars was talking about how major labels are liars...

Pete: Every band has every right to do whatever they want to do, change their minds, do whatever, but we’re just gonna do it our way.

Bryan: We’ll do it our way, and we don’t waste our time worrying about what other people do too much.

Greg: When we first started out, I didn’t give a shit about labels, I didn’t care, and that’s what I try and remember about music all the time. I could give two shits about what anyone else does, or musically what labels they’re on, it’s all bullshit anyway.

Kristen: It’s just nice being able to make a living doing what you love.

Greg: Of course!

Bryan: Always! But people who do it a certain way give me something to believe in.

Greg: Exactly.

Bryan: And I’ll always have them. And the people who don’t, I don’t think about them. I don’t really turn on MTV and watch that shit. Frankly, it seems like too much garbage to weed my way through to find something – worth believing in, anyway! I don’t think I’m gonna find it there.

Kristen: Well you’ve got a new record out that you’re promoting now – “Anchors Aweigh”, and there are a couple of things I want to ask you about that: One, just the title – is it a casting off, or is it a moving forward? Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Bryan: It is both of those things. ‘Anchors Aweigh’ is the nautical term meaning to “weigh anchor” and raise the anchor and off you go.

Pete: It started as a song we wrote called ‘Anchor’s Aweigh’, and it kind of seemed to symbolize the whole vibe of the concept of the record, so we went with it.

Bryan: The record actually has that sort of a theme to it – not by planning it that way, it’s just kind of things that happened in our lives, during the writing of this record.

Greg: It’s definitely the underlying spirit of the band as far as people who – searching within theirselves, through their experiences, through music –really want to shake old bullshit and move on to a new adventure, and continue with that adventurous spirit, and not let it die. Because so many things in life will kill that spirit that we have. That’s how I see it, as Anchors Aweigh, the song and the title.

Bryan: The anti-stagnation. It’s that spirit, too! That spirit of being for one moment totally lost, having lost something, and right at that moment between that and whatever’s next, there’s that bold feeling of freedom mixed with terror! That ‘off the ground’ kind of feeling. But it’s a great feeling and it’s a great place to be. It’s like the beginning of something – it’s like a doorway.

Kristen: The style of music has progressed a lot in this record; it’s probably the antithesis of the way you’d want to describe it, but as a more mature album – is what I’ve read at any rate. What were the experiences that led you to writing this record and to making that departure?

Bryan: I don’t think we’ve ever done anything so sudden! Musically it’s just a constant evolution – we’re always trying to push ourselves. And as long as you’re not afraid to see whatever happens, as a result of it, just let it happen. Nevermind what it sounds like. Like, “Ugh! This doesn’t sound like a Bouncing Souls record! What’ll the kids think?” You just have to push yourself, and if you’ve got something inside that you gotta express, or you wanna try, just do it. You gotta have the guts to do it. I think it sounds like a Bouncing Souls record but it’s definitely everything we’ve ever been, but it’s expanded, there’s more to it, you know? Which is what I want to always do, is just expand.

Kristen: Along with your experiences.

Bryan: Along with your experiences! And in that way it is a more mature record, because it’s two more years of living. Hard living, in some of our cases.

Kristen: Do you write on the road, do you take breaks to write and work songs out? How does that process work?

Pete: The writing process happens all the time, we’re always thinking of stuff, or little ideas into a tape recorder. But to actually find times, like, “Ok, we’re gonna write for the next two months...”

Bryan: Between tours we’ll go to a jam room we have in Brooklyn, and between tours we’ll be like, “Alright, we’re home for like a month or two months, we’re gonna put ourselves on a five-day or six-day a week schedule.”

Greg: Somehow, we manage to miss all the new technology that comes out where you can actually record anywhere. We’re like, we gotta all get together in the jam room and press Record and Play on the box! [laughter]

Bryan: That’s what we do, we have this little Panasonic 3^rd grade thing, with the Play and Record buttons. And then, “Go!” and we play. [laughs]

Greg: Somehow it just seems to pass us! I don’t know why...it’s really interesting to me, but somehow it never seems to work out.

Bryan:  We have a little Twin Peaks thing! [imitates speaking into a tape recorder]

Kristen: Before I forget, I wanted to ask you about the artwork on the new album. Can you tell me about that?

Bryan: That front cover is just how I pictured the record to look like. Usually that happens somewhere around the end of writing all the songs. At first you’re concentrating on song by song by song, and after you have most of the record written, then you start going through the songs in your mind, and putting them into a certain order. You start shaping it to what a kid buying it – what his experience is gonna be. It’s somewhere around then that I picture what it’s supposed to look like.

Kristen: Do you do most of the artwork?

Bryan: I do, yeah, all the artwork.

Kristen: Including the tattoo?

Bryan: The tattoo, yeah, the shirts.

Kristen: Now have you always been an artist since you were young?

Bryan: I guess so, yeah. Vandal – more of a vandal than an artist, but yeah. So yeah, that’s just what I pictured the record to look like, and thought, “Aw, shit, I have to do an oil painting!” Cause I’ve never done an oil paiting, so I was like, “Fuck!” I’m a little more comfortable with a little black pen, doing these kind of cartoony type drawings. But that’s what it was supposed to look like, so that’s what I had to do, so I bought a bunch of oil paints, a canvas, and went for it.

Kristen: It’s interesting because it’s almost a metaphor for the development of the new record, just more layers. Because a painting necessarily has more layers, it has a lot more texture.

Bryan: Yeah, it needed to be, that’s why I think it fits the record. It’s a deeper and darker record, the lyrics are deeper and darker, the cover had to be deeper and darker. It couldn’t be something I could just draw, color in Photoshop. It couldn’t be an acryllic painting, it had to be the best, you know? So I think I pulled it off.

Kristen: If you never had to play another Bouncing Souls song, what would it be?

Bryan: [laughs] To never play it again?

Kristen: Yeah, to never play it again, is there “that” song?

Pete: We have a couple we don’t play anymore, probably.

Bryan: How about the ones we’ve never played? Those are some pretty bad ones! [laughter]

Pete:  We have some that we’ve played once, in the studio, and we’re like, “Ok, we’re never gonna play that one live.”

Greg: There’s one on “Hopeless Romantic” that we never, ever play live.

Bryan: The last song on “Hopeless Romantic”, called ‘The Whole Thing’.

Greg: Which is a pretty decent song!

Pete:  Which is a song that I would love to do live....

Bryan: It just happened spontaneously, there’s only one take of it. It wasn’t even a song, it wasn’t written.

Greg: It was the only time when...usually when we played songs live, we wrote them live to play them live, and we didn’t do that, so it wasn’t like a “live” song.

Bryan: Sort of a development, or experiment, or some kind of jam...some kind of weird thing. The song never actually broke out into a song, it just sort of built up and went down, built up...we were just sort of playing together. I think we were a little, uh...smokey. [making pot smoking gestures]

Kristen: Do you think you guys will continue to play together? I mean, are you just going to go until it doesn’t feel right? Or are you gonna be like, “I’m not gonna be 50 and still [doing this].”

Bryan: Yeah! We’ll just do what we want, period.

Pete: We’ll be a band as long as we have something to give. When we don’t feel that way anymore, I’m sure we’ll all know when that is.

Bryan: We don’t have to be like, 50-year-olds being like, “Oi! Oi! Oi!” I don’t know, chances are we’ll [still] be making music then.

Greg: And that’s what’s cool about music, is you really make your own rules with it. There’s no limits to it.