Nine Songs: Joyce Manor

BARRY JOHNSON: That was the first CD I ever bought with my own money. My mom worked at a bar that had this video gambling thing called Keno, and she’d let me play once a day or whatever. I think I won about 20 bucks, which, when you’re four or five years old, feels like a fortune.

So I decided I was going to buy a CD. I loved the Ace of Base songs I was hearing on the radio and bought The Sign. It’s still such a great record. I love that whole era; that Euro-pop moment, the early Max Martin stuff, they were pop geniuses. There’s also that dancehall influence running through it. It’s fucking awesome.

BEST FIT: At that point, was pop the main genre that you were listening to being so young? Would you say that pop influence still sticks with you today?

Definitely. I mean at that age, when I was four or five, I was watching a lot of MTV and VH1. And my mom was really into music too, so there was a lot of music in the house. My first musical memories are Madonna's “Like a Prayer”, George Michael’s “Faith”, and obviously Ace of Base.

What do you think clicked with you about pop songwriting at that time?

I love melodies and chord changes, I love fantastic songwriting, and I feel like that was all there with those songs. They’re just great songs.

Do you feel like being inspired by such consistent, melodic songwriting fed into what you’d bring to Joyce Manor later?

Yes, especially later on. I wouldn’t say I had a natural gift for writing memorable parts, but I was slowly developing my musical ability. The early songs that I was writing for Joyce Manor songs weren’t very complicated melodically. They were usually just composed of a few notes, something to still make them memorable, but catchy. It took me spending time doing more and more songwriting before I started using bigger melodic intervals. My ambition was limited by my musical sophistication.

I wish I could’ve written “Like a Prayer” or something like that. Only in the last ten years has writing more sophisticated pop songwriting, the chord changes, modulation and stuff, started to come more naturally. Maybe that’s out of wanting to surprise myself, or push into something that’s slightly more interesting, without trying to sound like, ‘Oh wow, how interesting.’ I think that kind of thing has to be deceptive to work. As soon as it sounds unconventional, you’ve done it wrong. You should only realise it’s unconventional when you really look at it. Early on, I relied more on intensity, because I didn’t have a sophisticated grasp on composition.

Given your early relationship with pop music, what would you say opened you up to punk, or hardcore music?

I’ve always been more interested in pop music than punk or hardcore. Most punk and hardcore I like is melodic or hooky. I’ve never had much time for completely unmelodic stuff. And I know that’s by design, for those bands to be really austere, and they have some really intense message about war that they don’t want to dilute with hooks or catchiness. Even with punk and hardcore stuff, I’m more into things that feel poppy. It’s what my ear likes.

There are certain sounds I don’t like, like metal, and any punk and hardcore stuff that goes too far in that direction. Even with the riff being a hook, I get super bored. It’s not enough to sustain a song for me, if it’s like five minutes. I might love the riff, but it loses me. But bands like Poison Idea had melodicism. Or a band like Red Cross, or the Black Flag era. And they were literally twelve years old, and it sounds like music written by feral twelve-year-olds. But it’s fun and catchy, almost like cheerleading music. There’s very little punk and hardcore that I like that doesn’t have that prerequisite.

It’s interesting hearing that distinction, especially when a lot of punk or hardcore uses that big, earnest wall of sound to get a point across, sometimes without worrying about sophisticated structures.

It would almost be too cute if it got catchy. They want the message to be really serious. It’s strange, because I really like Crass. I wouldn’t say Crass is conventionally catchy, but there are hooks there. That’s probably about as far as I go with punk that isn’t hook-driven. I do like listening to more experimental music that isn’t always catchy, though. It works a different part of your brain, and I think that’s good for me.

Transitioning from Europop to grunge rock, this is definitely a heavier pick. How did you make that big shift? What drew you to Nirvana?

When Nirvana came out, that was the first band I ever got obsessed with.

Since then, every few years I have some band that I fixate on. That happened throughout my whole young adult life, and even now. The most recent one is I got super into 100 gecs. It was all I wanted to listen to. I didn't crave anything else. When it was time to listen to music, I just wanted to hear 100 gecs. That's the past now, thank God, because it was kind of making me feel crazy.

But Nirvana was the very first band like that. I went to sleep thinking about Nirvana, I woke up thinking about Nirvana, I talked about Nirvana all day. Even with my mom's friends who were a little younger and into music, I'd be like, "Tell me what you know about Nirvana." It was pre-internet, so there's no way to go to the library and look up Nirvana. I’d be at the grocery store looking at magazines, just looking for any little piece of information.

Talking about being able to slip deceptively complex things into their music, Kurt Cobain was so good at that. I still love Nirvana a lot. I don't listen to them as much, but it was really, really formative.

"Sappy" is quite a deep cut, not typically the first Nirvana track people first stumble across. How did you go about finding it?

We had that compilation, No Alternative. It was for an AIDS benefit. My mom was like, ‘Oh, that's a good cause. I'll buy this.’ "Sappy" was on that, and it’s still my favourite Nirvana song. And I was always looking for anything that I hadn’t already heard. I was scouring constantly for more Nirvana.

And they were really good about exposing young people to a lot of bands, whether it's Daniel Johnston, or Meat Puppets, all kinds of stuff. They were a very world-opening band. Kurt Cobain really wanted to shout out the people he respected and shine some of the giant spotlight put on them on other talented people that he thought were deserving of it.

Was there something about "Sappy," rather than the big singles, that really resonated with you more?

I mean, I loved the big singles too, that's what drew me in. With Nirvana, I don't like their stuff that's as un-melodic as much, like “School” or something like that. But, if you were talking about Bleach, "About a Girl" for me is so great. The stuff that leans a little more Beatles-y in the changes, and "Sappy" is kind of like that. I love that strumming pattern.

I don't like when Nirvana gets like, ‘I'm freaking out, I hate myself, I want to die’, with this noisy barrage of my self-contempt. I like when you have just the edge of Nirvana songwriting, but in the more first-position open chord, like "In Bloom." It's a little more Beatles-y, but obviously a lot more influenced by SST.

That definitely seems to tie in with your appreciation for pop songcraft, it seems, especially noting a pop act as prolific as The Beatles as a point of comparison.

Oh yeah, I've been obsessed with The Beatles for a long time, but I got into Nirvana before The Beatles. When I was a kid, I wasn't really raised on The Beatles. My mom grew up with them, I guess a little later, she's more a '70s kid. But when I was a kid, she wasn't a retro mom, you know. She was listening to current music, so it wasn't like there was any Beatles in the household. I was listening to contemporary music at that time.

It’s said that Kurt Cobain struggled for a while to get a version of "Sappy" that he liked. With your approach to writing and recording, do you feel like you've struggled with that, or do you take a more straightforward approach of scrapping and trying again?

Oh no, with most songs, we have gone through a ton of versions, with a few rare exceptions. Sometimes you get it right the first time and you know it. But I write and rewrite and rework. There's a lot of different versions of "Sappy," this one's called "Verse Chorus Verse". I don't understand why that version is perfect, I guess they kind of struggled with that one, which I kind of get because it's such a great tune and you want to get it right.

The one you're familiar with is the one that's "right”, but sometimes you spend a lot of time with the version of the song as a listener, and then you come across an alternate version of something and you're like, ‘Holy shit, this is better,’ even though you're so used to the other one.

If you can break through that and find a version that you're not used to, that you actually think is better, that's crazy. I definitely write and rewrite and sometimes torture myself. Years later I'll go back and revisit alternate versions to be like, ‘Fuck, this one was better. We fucking blew it. We should have done this!’

AFI has gone through quite a few eras, with this track being a more raw, punk selection. What made it stand out to you?

When I was in elementary school, I had a friend, Ben Turk, and he had an older brother, Chris, who was a punk. He would play guitar in his room, he had stickers all over his door. Ben was kind of straight-laced, a nice kid, as was I. We were little kids, maybe fourth grade. His older brother was rebellious, listened to music loud and I was fascinated by him.

Punk had just started to make its way onto the radio around that time, it kind of broke in '94 with Green Day and stuff, for some reason I didn't really consider that punk though. I didn't really think about it as different than Nirvana. I just thought it was like, you got the Pumpkins, you got Nirvana, you got Green Day. It just was the stuff that's on the radio.

The kind of stuff that was a little faster, not really radio-friendly, was popping up, getting more popular with the rise of Warped Tour. I was aware of punk and interested in it. Chris was nice enough to let me go in his room, talk to him and listen to the not commercially friendly punk. It was super-fast. I think the environment of listening to it in his room, and him telling me about shows he was going to and crazy shit that happened at shows in the South Bay made it feel scary and exhilarating.

He made me a tape. One side of it was AFI, Very Proud of Ya, and the other side was Union 13. I wasn't as into the Union 13 side, but I was so into the AFI side. I would listen to it over and over again. That's what got me pretty much obsessed with AFI.

A few years later, Black Sails in the Sunset came out, and that's when I was really full on and drank the Kool-Aid. It was mysterious and kind of gothy, I was ‘What the hell are they on about?’ It's nonsense. But to a kid with a lot of imagination, it seemed really deep. I think I put a lot of my own confused feelings, I projected a lot of myself onto it, and then it seemed like there was a lot in there. I got a lot out of it as a result.

Like you said, when you get something that makes no sense to you, especially as a kid, you can see bits of yourself in it, you can create the meaning in a way.

Yes, because, I mean literally, they're singing in Latin, and there's a lot of nonsense. If you read it now, you're like, ‘This is not that deep. What is this fucking guy on about?’ But at the time, it was deep, dark waters of anything could be in there. It was awesome.

You also mentioned having that association of being in Chris' room and that exhilaration with it. It kind of fills in those gaps quite a bit too.

That was the initial, ‘Ooh, what the fuck is this?’ I was kind of scared of it. If you become punk, there's like, people get stomped out at shows. He's telling me about people getting beaten up really bad and jumped. I was like, ‘Fuck, I don't want that.’ But I was like, ‘This is kind of cool.’ I was such a little kid, but that's what opened that door to me, and got me into buying compilation CDs, like Punk-O-Rama on Epitaph.

I always had an affinity for AFI because I really looked up to Chris. I remained friends with Ben for a long time. I'd go over there and be like, ‘Hey, what's up, Chris?’ And Chris changed with AFI. He was really punk in the early AFI days, and then when AFI went goth, he had black hair and he went goth. I just did what Chris did. I was young. Chris was cool. He was really, really into music.

Later, in high school, I remember talking to him about Radiohead and stuff. We had this parallel journey where whatever he was into, I was like, ‘Alright, I'm gonna give that a shot.’ I ended up getting into a lot of things. The last time I talked to him, he was into cigarillos or something like that, nerding out about cigarettes. It was always fun to chat with Chris. I always really, really looked up to him, a really smart guy, really cool guy.

It's really lovely to be able to have that kind of influence and desire to explore music in that way, to have someone that can nurture you through that.

He was a couple of years older. What he's into is sort of a way to look down the line. We obviously had some similar tastes and grew up in the same suburban area, where those kind of people were pretty rare. He was more tapped into a music scene of some kind, but I was too young to have any of that. So it was this beacon off in the distance to see and be like, ‘Oh, well that looks so cool and fun and interesting, and I can't wait until I'm able to experience that.’

And now, having been in the hardcore scene, all of the things he's speaking about, I imagine it must be maybe less harrowing to think about.

No, I'm not scared of it anymore!

So, that’s an interesting one, because I had this whole ska detour. In middle school, I was obsessed with AFI, and the only other stuff I really liked was the Misfits and AFI cosign stuff. My mom had The Cure CDs, and they wore The Cure shirts, so I was like, "Okay, Cure is cool. Misfits are cool. AFI is cool." Everything kind of had to be dark.

There was a kid at my school that wore all black. I went up to him and I was like, ‘Yo, what's good? What are you into? Do you know Sisters of Mercy? I can't find that CD anywhere.’ He was like, ‘Oh, I'm not goth. I'm dressed like this because of Star Wars. Luke Skywalker in some Star Wars movie wears all black.’ I was like, ‘Oh, shit, really? I just assumed you were goth.’ He had boots and he dressed like Luke Skywalker. I was like, ‘What the fuck. What do you like?’ He's like, ‘I'm into ska.’

I was vaguely aware of ska but had no interest in it. It was so polar opposite from anything I was interested in, but I was curious – ‘This kid is a freak, and I love it. Whatever this dude is about, this is intriguing to me.’ So he let me borrow a couple ska CDs and it took me a little while, but I really came around to it. It was almost like a palette cleanser from all this serious stuff I was trying to listen to.

I was trying to listen to Bauhaus and stuff, and I really didn't connect with it. Again, it's not that catchy, it's not that hooky. It's really serious and doom and gloom. There was some Cure stuff I listened to, like Pornography, and at the time it didn't do anything for me. But then I'd hear "Just Like Heaven" and be like, "Oh, I love this. This is amazing."

I was wanting to like what the people that I admired liked and failing to connect with it. I was trying to find that through this kid that's dressed like Luke Skywalker, and he gets me into ska and I really connected with it against my better judgment. I was like, ‘Oh, this isn't really what I was looking for, but I kind of love this.’ I got really into The Mighty Mighty Bosstones.

I still think those records are great, really amazing songwriting and awesome lyrics that are not this poetically ambiguous, dark thing. They're very working-class storytelling, but really great storytelling and really great lyrics. It was stuff where I actually did know what he was talking about, and made me think about life and what people go through in a not vague, ‘apply your own meaning’ kind of way.

That was really good for me. My early high school years were spent getting really into ska, going to ska shows, and hanging out with really nerdy but more light-hearted, fun, sweet, approachable people, instead of trying to manufacture more misery than I even had, just because that's what I thought I was supposed to do.

I think it's nice to have encountered someone that invited almost a bounce in a different direction for you to appreciate what you were hearing, like you said, without getting all submerged in that doom and gloom sound.

Exactly. My early high school was spent initially going to ska shows, but the ska and indie rock scene, especially more Weezer-leaning stuff, those crowds kind of co-mingled. Needy indie rock and ska cross-pollinated, because I guess it was people with black, thick-rimmed glasses who hung out together - ‘Hey, you seem nice.’ It was definitely kind of dorky, but that was a really fun era. The beginning of going to shows and being a participant in a music scene was inadvertently through being really into AFI and trying to find someone else who was goth, but I took this crazy detour.

Which is kind of great. Just to feel like you found a sense of familiarity that actually wasn't familiar at all, and it completely re-routed you.

I mean, he was a freak, that guy. He's hilarious. He was really open-minded and curious about music. He got super into Korean rap in 2003, 20 years ahead of that. He was into K-pop, he was a really, really interesting dude, David. Major respect.

In terms of the structure with that Mighty Mighty Bosstones tune, or ska arrangements in general, what struck you?

They’re a really talented group of people. They are such good songwriters, those are really well-crafted, complex songs. There’s a lot of counterpoint rhythmically, Joe Gittleman, amazing bass player. The guitar player, Nate Albert, was a child prodigy, really, really young when he joined The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. He was such a ripper. He's an A&R guy now, he signed The Weeknd, which is a random trajectory, but he has talent, an ear, and is a great appreciator of music.

They were really into Pixies and Fugazi, and I can hear it in their music. A lot of third wave ska was pop punk with horns, but there's a lot going on with The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. It's great songwriting. I love the lyrics, I love the storytelling, and it's really fun and upbeat, but there is a kind of longing, it tugs your heartstrings too.

They would talk about their influences in interviews. They were pulling from a lot of different places, really successfully, to create something that is very uniquely The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. That was a band I discovered through getting into ska that I got really into, that I still, when I go back, I'm so glad I discovered this band and got super into it.

It's nice to be able to see that from a different genre lens. Moving through pop, grunge, up until something you wouldn't have expected. There's a consistency around what you're appreciating in music.

But I mean, Kurt Cobain is pulling from the Pixies. Mighty Mighty Bosstones are pulling from the Pixies. I don't know if AFI were, but maybe inadvertently. I love the Pixies, but maybe Pixies are pulling from David Bowie. I love David Bowie, so there's this through line with good music.

I would say that this comes from the AFI sojourn. I remember Jade Puget would wear a Morrissey shirt a lot. I remember trying to listen to The Smiths when I was really deep in my AFI phase, and it sounded like Renaissance faire music or something. I did not like it. I thought the guitar playing was arpeggiated, a type of playing that I just thought was… I didn't get it. It was so radically different from what I was listening to that it was totally over my head.

But we had digital cable at our house, and on the really high channels there was a radio station, an alternative rock one. They played "Everyday Is Like Sunday" and I felt like my life was changing. It was really weird. Like, ‘This is blowing my mind and speaking to me so directly’. I was so moved by it. It was like a before and after moment. I could feel it.

That would have been around the Mighty Mighty Bosstones time. I was aware of Morrissey, but I never checked out Morrissey because we didn't have those CDs in my house. My mom had The Best of The Smiths. But once that Morrissey song clicked, I became obsessed. I got Bona Drag, the singles collection that had that on it, and got obsessed with it. Then The Smiths clicked and I got super into The Smiths and Morrissey. It's been a consistently huge, huge, huge, huge influence.

What allowed you to appreciate Morrisey’s solo work over The Smiths’ back then?

It's a lot more straightforward. Johnny Marr is an amazing guitar virtuoso, but it's almost like it can sometimes sound like two songs are happening. Johnny Marr's guitar thing that he wrote, and then Morrissey puts a vocal on it. Sometimes it's transcendent and amazing and really special, and often it is. But sometimes it can be busy.

Johnny Marr was 19 when he was doing a lot of that stuff, so always being able to serve the song when you're 19 is a big ask. I sometimes think the arrangements and production on the Morrissey solo stuff is serving the song a bit more. It's not just shredding. There's quite a lot of shredding on The Smiths stuff, which really grew on me and I love. But Morrissey solo is sometimes what really hits for me.

You mentioned trying not to find yourself lost in lyrics that are dribbles of self-contempt when it came to Nirvana. With Morrissey, they can be very melancholic and intense. Do you find that you face the same issue when trying to enjoy his music?

It's different. The thing I was wallowing in, or attempting to wallow in as an eighth grader with the goth stuff, was a different kind of doom and gloom. Morrissey has so much humour. It was not the same feeling, and it was not the same indulgence, but obviously there's a part of me that was drawn to that. I think that was sort of a nice self-correction. I had a while where I was captivated by ska, which is fairly optimistic typically. Morrissey was kind of the nice Goldilocks porridge in the middle.

It is pretty rocking and pretty upbeat. I think a lot of people make it out to be more miserable than it is, because you think about a song like "This Charming Man," it's pretty euphoric and up and fun. I don't really think of that as this miserable thing. He gets that rep a little too much. But "Everyday Is Like Sunday," which is the first song that brought me in, is pretty mopey, but it's gorgeous too.

I guess it's a need for some sort of dynamic or contrast, where you're not just stuck in the mud, but you're able to see some way out of it.

It was hard left, hard right. And then that found me, that sort of calibrated me. Like ‘OK, yes, this is me. This is my lane.’

The mood captured in that song reaches out in a really interesting way. Do you feel that influenced the way you were able to write about place and emotion, with the dynamics that came into "Everyday Is Like Sunday"?

Totally. I think that's the first band, besides maybe Nirvana on this list, that you can hear in our songwriting. I could play you a Joyce Manor song and be like, ‘Who do you think that's influenced by?’, and it's a Morrissey rip. It's not that many degrees removed. I guess there's AFI moments too, but I might have to show you ‘This is why this sounds like AFI, listen to this AFI song, I'm doing a minor to a B which is very Jade.’ But yes, it's less glaringly an influence. I think there's a lot of Morrissey and The Smiths in Joyce Manor.

It's cool to be able to say that. Rather than having to explain where it's from, you listen and it's like, "Right, I can see that."

I think maybe that's from discovering it when I was a little older. When I first heard that song, it definitely felt like a life-changing moment, which is corny to say, but I can remember it still. I can remember exactly what time of day it was, what part of the couch I was sitting on, looking at the digital cable screen which has no video, the blue screen that says ‘Alt Rock Channel, 384’ or some shit.

I was totally having my mind blown, my jaw on the floor, thinking ‘I can't believe how beautiful this is and how great the song is, the strings and everything.’ I just loved it.

Coming away from Morrisey, this is a comparably less dreary song. How did you find yourself entering the Weezer phase?

The ska thing was this dorky thing with Converse, and girls with bangs and glasses and guys with polo shirts. At my high school, there were these drama kids and one of them had the Weezer logo on her backpack. I was drawn to that. I introduced myself, we became friends with them, as this little group of ska kids that was my group of friends, and then these drama kids that liked Weezer. They were sweet and nice and nerdy. That kind of piqued my interest.

I guess she was into emo, basically. She liked Weezer and The Get Up Kids and that kind of stuff. Whereas a lot of that stuff didn't resonate with me or didn't speak to me, I really got into Weezer. It started with the Blue Album. It took a little while to grow on me, because I felt like it was really slow the first time I listened to it. A lot of the music I was listening to was so hyped and fast. Ska and punk were really high tempo, so it took me a little while to settle into the more mid-tempo thing of Weezer. But once it got under my skin, I became pretty obsessed, similarly to the Nirvana thing.

I was going on the Weezer message board. I never posted on it, but I would read it. Rivers would post on there and stuff. I wanted to know everything. It was around the time of Green Album, which I was a little heartbroken by honestly, because I had gotten so into Pinkerton and Blue Album, the B-sides from that, tracking those down.

As the Green Album was being rolled out, it was an interesting time because I was really disappointed by it, I was really kind of like, ‘What happened?’ I discovered this great music, they're back together, they're going to put out new music, Rivers is taking a break from Harvard. Oh my god. "Hash Pipe" came out and I was so disappointed. I remember thinking, ‘They're just making this commercial bullshit now.’ But in retrospect, I do really like Green Album.

I really love "Falling for You,". I love the insane structure, insane chord changes. Great lyrics. That's my favourite song off Pinkerton. I could have picked any. Those first two records and all the B-sides are flawless.

How do you feel you consolidated that disappointment with the Green Album, if at all? Did you take some time to appreciate it later on?

Well, I was obsessed with Pinkerton. I listened to it over and over again. I loved that they were ten songs and all perfect. I really liked presentation of a record, short and trying to not to waste a moment. When Green Album came out, it sounded and felt really cynical to me, especially as Pinkerton was so personal.

I never really heard anything like that, except I guess Nirvana was kind of like that. But the details on Pinkerton, they’re singing, ‘I asked you to go to the Green Day concert, you said you never heard of them. How cool is that?’ It's so conversational. There are all of these little details. It's almost like his diary.

I was so moved by it and I related to it so much. I thought it was so brave to bare yourself like that. It really was great writing. Green Album felt like such a reaction to that, how that had gone, and he was so hurt. A lot of that has to do with stardom and getting fucked up by fame, and being a really sensitive person. The Green Album felt so impersonal with such a lack of detail, but I've come to appreciate it because there's some great songwriting on there.

I love "Photograph" and "Island in the Sun," but it's not really what I think is super special about Weezer. It was the detail that I was missing, and it felt hard not to take it personally as a fan who was obsessed with them, and was so excited, and it just wasn't what I hoped it would be.

BEST FIT: You got to connect through that detail. Do you feel like Pinkerton on the whole or "Falling for You" influenced how comfortable you feel about including details within your writing, or just sharing in general? It feels like it was such a significant thing for you to appreciate in Weezer's early work.

I think it made me want to be a little more brave. At that time, I wasn't writing songs. I got obsessed with Weezer when I was fifteen, and I didn't really start writing songs until I was eighteen. That was the benchmark, and it was a way off, my early songs were nowhere near any of that.

But I do think I wanted to write something that I felt moved by personally. I was really moved by the details in Pinkerton, so at some level I must have recognised that details are important, and specifics, telling a story and making something that's emotionally resonating and captivating. It's important to get specific.

To set a scene and to invite someone in to experience it?

Yes, it just does something. For a lot of the people I knew who were into that early emo of the early 2000s, Pinkerton was a masterpiece. Even though it was a flop when it came out, it was really held in high regard. I guess I have the kind of brain where I'm like, ‘Well, why? What's different about this than something else?’ Part of me must have picked up on the fact that it's the specificity of the songwriting.

With your next pick, by that point you were appreciating details within songwriting. Do you feel like that carried over into this track in particular?

Completely. It’s a complete flip. I did really bad in school, I got really bad grades because I was obsessed with Weezer and I didn't care about anything else. There was not enough summer school I could take to graduate, so they sent me to a continuation school. It's basically for kids who fight too much, or pregnant teens, or bad kids basically who are failing out of school.

I went in there with this indie rock sensibility, and it was kind of like jail. I was like, ‘This isn't going to cut it here.’ There were a couple people there that were more punk. I think it's a survival instinct. I knew about punk, and I liked punk, and I had kind of grown away from it, being more into Morrissey and Weezer. I guess I was really into The Strokes’ first record and reading NME and that sort of thing.

But when I went to this new school, I was like, ‘Okay, there are a couple of punk people here.’ I started hanging out with them after school and wanted to try to get into some of the stuff that they liked. I’d go through all of the bands that they liked, listen to them, and see which ones appealed to me.

There was a bunch of stuff that did not resonate with me whatsoever, but The Adicts were a band that I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is amazing.’ It was really simple and fun and catchy and authentic, like a lot of really great songwriting. So, there were a handful of bands from that short period of my life where I was hanging out with punks. It was really fun and a really good palette cleanser from the more indie rock stuff I was starting to gravitate towards. The immediacy and fun, the energy of punk was appealing to me again, due to circumstance.

Having to view punk almost as survival, getting into it to build a thicker skin… did that change your relationship with how you appreciated the genre?

Well, that was right around the time I started writing songs, and it was an easier entry point. Like, ‘Oh, I can write a punk song.’ And my friend Rick wanted to start a band. He liked The Adicts, he was into Crust and stuff too, which I did not like, but he's like, ‘Oh, I’m into Crass.’ So I thought that was cool. I liked more Oi! and clean stuff like Blitz and Cock Sparrer because it was more fun and anthemic.

I’d just learned how to play guitar, my friend had shown me a little bit of stuff, and I could figure it out and learn it and say, ‘Oh, we should cover this.’ That was such a really good way to start a band, and to play shows and stuff. I was in that phase when I started my first band. I didn't really take too much indie rock stuff with me, because that was so much more difficult to try to emulate as someone with very little talent. But the punk stuff was a lot more approachable.

It sounds intimidating to have started out in a punk band with indie rock as your main reference.

Well, I was the only one who was willing to be the singer, and I couldn't fucking sing. I can't do The Strokes. I can't fucking sing like this guy. With the punk stuff, you don't really need to know how to sing. If you're not good at singing, it's not that big a deal.

What was your local scene like at that time that you were starting out? Where do you feel that you fitted into it?

We were a punk band that had some ska parts, because I still liked ska. It was a ska punk band, but on the punkier side, with no horns or anything, some of our songs were straightforward punk. My friend Rick was the guy who was good at guitar, and he knew a drummer. He asked me if I wanted to start a band, and I did. I really had to tailor it to what he was interested in doing.

He knew people in L.A. that were doing these backyard punk shows in Compton and shit, pretty rough areas. They were these giant backyard parties where we could get shows. Then we would go out to Riverside and the Inland Empire and play. We got the gigs through MySpace, just writing people on MySpace and playing DIY shows as a ska punk band.

I got bored of it really quick, but it was a really fun beginning. It was my first time writing songs and it didn't seem that hard, it was fairly formulaic, but it was a really good confidence booster. Like, ‘This seems doable. I think we can do this.’ And I got my initial stage fright out of the way. It was super scary because I was the singer, but it was a really good growing experience.

There’s nothing from that initial batch of songs that I’m particularly proud of. It wasn't very ambitious. We didn't set out to be the best band in the world. It was, ‘maybe we can get on some shows and that would be fun’, something to go do.

Do you feel like that's where the boredom came in? That there wasn’t as much early ambition behind it?

At that time, there was no ambition to go further. It was just to see if I could do it, honestly. And it was my friend's idea. The earliest songs I did try to write were really ambitious. I was listening to The Postal Service and I was going to blend all of these really grand concepts. It was really good to have a friend be like, ‘Let's just start a punk band. I know a guy, he'll put us on a show.’ I was like, ‘Oh, fuck, okay. I could probably write those.’ So I did.

But the initial thing was these grand concepts of bands we were going to start, it was never going to happen. That's way too crazy of a jumping off point. It was more a fun way to pass the time to imagine what kind of band you could start if you were talented, which I wasn't. So it was really good that I went to that other school and started hanging out with punk people who had more realistic expectations of what they were setting out to do. It felt nice to be invited along. It was a nice little social thing, to go drink some beers and play a scary punk show in a rough area of California.

I can see where The Postal Service probably wouldn't have flown at that point.

The year prior, I was wearing a sweater vest and listening to The Postal Service. I showed up to this jail school, thinking ‘I'm going to get fucking killed with this shit.’ I was into Belle and Sebastian and all that. But I never stopped loving that stuff. I just couldn't present that way and survive jail school. It was jail school. I'm sure a lot of people that were there went to jail.

Jawbreaker existed within a similar space to Weezer, but they leaned more emo, what about “Chemistry” connected with you at the time?

I did get into Jawbreaker when I got super into Weezer. I knew that emo people liked Jawbreaker. I had seen the shirt, the ‘When it Pains it Roars’, the Morton Salt girl shirt. I loved that they used that imagery. I knew it was something that I would like.

I remember downloading some of their songs on Napster and I didn't get it at all. A lot of it was the way it was recorded. It was probably something off of Bivouac, like "Shield Your Eyes." I thought the singing sounded awful. I hated the guitar sounds. I didn't understand the song at all. I was like, ‘I can't believe people like this.’ It didn't speak to me whatsoever.

But when I was a little older, I gave Dear You another chance, and it grew on me like crazy. Talk about details. Blake's songwriting, he's a really, really great lyricist. That was like Weezer on crack for me, where I really connected with it and his songwriting really resonated with me, especially the fact that it had to grow on me.

They do have this sort of touch-and-go dissonance. There's a lot of ugliness in their guitar stuff, which harks back to Nirvana having that too. That's the side of Nirvana that didn't really speak to me as much. But I went all in on Jawbreaker when I was after that affair with punk.

Jawbreaker was a nice swinging back the other way into more literate, wordy, sensitive stuff, but still punk. Jawbreaker is pretty abrasive and atonal at times, it did it for me in the same way as the things I like about punk and Nirvana, but things I like about Pinkerton. I'm realising none of these things are very different. They're all kind of the same shit. Nirvana and Weezer and Jawbreaker are all in the kind of sweet spot for me.

But Jawbreaker was an acquired taste for sure. I had tried to get into it when I was younger and it was totally over my head, I didn't like it at all. But it eventually clicked for me and became a massively important band for me. Again, that's one I think you can really hear with Joyce Manor. ‘Oh, did you know those guys like Jawbreaker?’ It's like, ‘Yeah, no fucking shit. Have you heard it? Of course they do.’

It's so funny that you didn't vibe with them at all at the start, and their work is something that feels defined so clearly in your own music.

After seeing the merch, I was sure I’d like them. But I was super disappointed when I heard the music. I was just like, ‘Ew. Not for me.’ I think because a lot of the stuff I was listening to, especially like Weezer, was well produced.

A lot of Jawbreaker stuff was made before there was any money in punk, and they didn't have a budget. You can very much tell they were just recording with whoever, and it doesn't sound very good. So it was kind of hard for me to get past that. Dear You does, obviously it's Rob Cavallo and it's well produced. But some of the earlier stuff, I guess the one that Steve Albini did, it sounds good too.

With a preference for more seamless sounds and production, how did you get into the lo-fi feel of Guided By Voices?

Guided by Voices happened because when I moved out of my parents' house when I was 22, I moved to Long Beach. We lived in a house that didn't have internet. I thought that was cool. ‘Oh yeah, let's not pay for internet, we're broke.’ I got a library card and went down to the library and got a couple books. I went to the CD section and checked out Alien Lanes by Guided by Voices. I was like, ‘Oh, I've kind of heard of these guys, but I've never heard it.’

That really, really grew on me. The first time I put it on, it literally sounded like they were making the songs up as they went along and recording them in real time. I was kind of like, ‘This sounds like some drunk boomers jamming. I don't fucking get it. This is so critically acclaimed, this is considered a masterpiece or whatever. I don't get it.’

But a couple songs clicked with me, like "Game of Pricks" or "I Am a Scientist." They really got under my skin. The more time I spent with that record, Alien Lanes, the more kind of fucked up, weird, post-punky ones I started to crave. The more bizarre moments started to speak to me and affect me.

"Gold Star for Robot Boy" is a good middle ground where it's this beautiful, kind of sad little pop song, but it has this really out-of-tune violin on it or something. Just the dissonance and the homespun charm of it really was a new thing that I discovered in my early 20s that I think had a profound effect on my songwriting.

It's nice to be able to appreciate dissonance in a context where it doesn't feel off, and it's something that actually aligns and feels authentic. Like you said, it feels like they’re making things up as they're going, but it just works.

I think some of those songs, you could repackage them as really approachable and digestible pop songs. I really like that Bob Pollard would just kind of fuck them up a little bit, distress them with some uncommercial sound. I gained an appreciation for that by spending time with it. I'm better for it because it just broadened my horizons as a listener, and has remained very special and very singular.

Not a lot of records sound like Alien Lanes. It’s the way it jumps around from arty, post-punk stuff into something more British invasion sounding, into something super power pop. I really, really like his lyrics. I think Bob Pollard is an awesome lyricist. Maybe not so much in the way of The Mighty Mighty Bosstones with straightforward storytelling. It's more cryptic imagery, which goes more back to the AFI stuff.

But with Bob Pollard, he's a lot better. It was the type of thing where it doesn't really make any sense, but it makes you feel something. I think he writes great lyrics.