Latest / The BlackSheep Podcast: Presented by HM Magazine / Joshua Porter: Showbread | Furnace Fest 2023 Series

Transcript

Joshua Porter: Showbread | Furnace Fest 2023 Series · The BlackSheep Podcast: Presented by HM Magazine

• 0:26
  Turning over and into eruptism. Today we have Josh Quarter with us from Showbread
• 0:33
  and Showbread is one of those bands that has been in my life for almost
• 0:37
  twenty years now. I still remember when Nihilism came out back in was that
• 0:42
  two thousand and four. I still remember seeing like the Mouth, like like
• 0:46
  magazine video and all the other stuff that came out in two thousand and four.
• 0:50
  I remember still watching you guys on Steel Roots. Do you remember Steel
• 0:53
  Roots? Josh, Yeah, you're the only one that said that they remember
• 0:57
  that yet. That's crazy. Everyone else is like, I don't know you're
• 1:00
  talking about. Yeah, we actually had a we released an album on Steel
• 1:03
  Roots Records prior to being signed a Tooth and Nail. Yeah. Yeah,
• 1:11
  Well those good people at Steel Roots are the people that introduced me to Show
• 1:14
  Brad And that was almost twenty years ago in two thousand and four, and
• 1:17
  so I got a part of my life for a while and you didn't even
• 1:19
  know it. Oh man, I'm so grateful. That's so cool to hear.
• 1:23
  And steel Roots that's the name. I didn't think I would I would
• 1:25
  hear today. Do you have positive for negative thoughts about that? Oh?
• 1:30
  I don't have anything bad to say about them. Yeah, it was you
• 1:34
  know, it was like a record label, but not really a record label,
• 1:38
  so the illusion of wow, we've been signed when it was so small
• 1:44
  scale that it hardly made any difference. But seeing a little logo for a
• 1:49
  record label on the back of your CD jewel case wasn't exciting. Things really
• 1:53
  released those in two thousand and two, Yeah, for sure. We had
• 1:57
  a friend Dan Cooke who was signed to my Space Records, and I think
• 2:04
  I think they might have just like only side one or two other bands in
• 2:07
  there, like now we're not gonna do records. He broke it. He
• 2:12
  broke the my Space Records machine. Surewood was that bad. If you're listening,
• 2:17
  Dan Josh, I still remember, and we'll want to get into Showbread
• 2:22
  history here in a second, but I still remember one of the funnier things
• 2:25
  I've seen at a concert. So Cullen and I grew up in South Dakota,
• 2:29
  so really the only time that we got to see bands like Showbread was
• 2:32
  at the Life Light Festival, and this would have been like maybe two thousand
• 2:38
  eight. I'm got seen. I was definitely like in middle school, and
• 2:42
  I think Age of Reptiles had like had just been maybe Fear of God had
• 2:46
  just come out. It was either twenty eight, two thousand nine, one
• 2:47
  of those years, and you guys played, And I still remember that year.
• 2:53
  It was extremely hot and extremely dry, so all of you know,
• 2:58
  it's in the middle of the field, so it's like super super dusty.
• 3:00
  And I remember at one point you made a comment about how all of our
• 3:04
  boogers probably look brown. And when I was like thirteen or fourteen years old,
• 3:08
  Harv Rold, that was at that time, I thought it was the
• 3:10
  funniest thing I'd ever seen or ever heard from the stage. I thought that
• 3:15
  was hilarious. Well, you're welcome for that. You know, my steady
• 3:20
  diet of adolescent renn and stimpy humor, I guess, followed me into adulthood
• 3:24
  and made me Why would someone think to comment on the color of boogers from
• 3:29
  stage? But it does sound like something I'd say, and I bet it
• 3:30
  was true. It was, oh, certainly true for me. I know
• 3:35
  that. Well, show Bread for me was my first band show, Is
• 3:39
  that right? Yeah? I was. I went to Lifelight with my with
• 3:47
  a family friend and his mom was like super super I wouldn't say a fundamentalist,
• 3:55
  but you know, just very strict about her beliefs and everything like that.
• 4:00
  And I was trying to get my friend to go with me to go
• 4:03
  see show Bread because I was a big fan. And we walk over there
• 4:10
  and of course his mom is still with us, and she says, you
• 4:13
  are not going to be watching homosexuals play on stage. And I was like,
• 4:18
  I don't. I don't think they're gay, and they're like She's like,
• 4:20
  no, they definitely are. Look at how they're dressed. So but
• 4:25
  she she actually saw us there at the festival, yeah, and she immediately
• 4:30
  pulled us away, and I was like torn up by it. Oh man,
• 4:34
  I'm so sorry to hear that. I want to I wonder what it
• 4:39
  was the outfits or something. I think it was the outfits, maybe like
• 4:42
  a little bit of makeup. Oh yeah sure, yeah, jeans are too
• 4:46
  tight? You know, he need your fingernails. Yeah. She was protecting
• 4:48
  you, man. Yeah. Yeah, my heart is has been forever protected.
• 4:54
  I guess did you did you end up saying show Bread at some point
• 4:57
  after? You never have? And that's why I'm okay, great, Yeah,
• 5:02
  maybe we can come up to the northern plains very often. So well,
• 5:05
  geez, now it's our fault. Well, you know, between fundamentalists
• 5:11
  and uh and just showbread beats. I guess when you dress like said,
• 5:15
  you can't go up to the great planes out often, that's true. Yeah,
• 5:17
  we kept getting run off by your worried moms. That's right. I
• 5:24
  still remember at that Life Light show back in again it was either two thousand
• 5:28
  or two thousand and nine, and the way you guys ended the set was
• 5:30
  you like slowly like put instruments away, and eventually you got to the drum
• 5:36
  set and you're like slowly putting like a symbol away, and then the high
• 5:40
  hat away and and whatnot. And I just remember thinking, this is the
• 5:43
  coolest way to end a show ever. I've never seen a show end like
• 5:46
  that before. And I think my cousin who was next to me, who
• 5:49
  was like not into that music all at all, Like he was so he
• 5:53
  was like, you know, we grew up in South Dakota, so he
• 5:55
  was like in the like country and pop and all that kind of shit.
• 5:57
  And I still remember him like watching has happened and being like this is the
• 6:01
  dumbest thing I think I've ever seen in my life. And I'm thinking this
• 6:04
  is maybe the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life. So anyway,
• 6:09
  to each their own, I guess right, yeah, I remember, I
• 6:11
  remember what you're talking about. And it was like a kind of a summary
• 6:15
  of the Showbrett Ethos in a nutshell, because part of it was, if
• 6:20
  you like the cool influence, which was, you know, came from Nirvana.
• 6:27
  Nirvana used to end sets with you know, upwards of ten minutes of
• 6:32
  feedback and drones and destruction, and it was riveting. You could watch these
• 6:39
  old sets, you know that in particular, they have a famous set called
• 6:42
  MTV Live and Loud from the in Utero era that concludes with a rendition of
• 6:48
  their song Endless Nameless, and then they break everything. But it goes on
• 6:51
  and on and on until like there's two band members left, one band member
• 6:57
  left, and Kurt's still up there kind of tinkering with things. And it
• 7:00
  was just such a strange, meandering way to intersect. It felt like kind
• 7:02
  of inconclusive and strange, and we liked that. And then the other aspect
• 7:08
  of it was, you know, less Nirvana and more like Andy Kaufman comedy
• 7:13
  experiment was the other kind of thing with Sherbet Ward It's like, how how
• 7:16
  much of this will people tolerate? And how long can we stretch a gag
• 7:23
  before it becomes or lapses from being funny into being confusing confusing and then ultimately
• 7:30
  neither not funny or confusing, just lame, especially when set. Yeah,
• 7:36
  and we thought that that was an interesting thing to tinker with, So it's
• 7:40
  fun to be reminded of that. I kind of forgot that we did that
• 7:42
  on that tour. You know, I did see a lot of people copy
• 7:46
  that almost directly after Well. You know, I'd like to say that we
• 7:50
  could take some credit for that, but maybe people were borrowing from some of
• 7:54
  our same influences. I do remember that there were a lot of bands and
• 7:59
  peers of ours that would be surprised by our willingness to embrace gags like that.
• 8:05
  There was a year when we came dangerously close. We had been given
• 8:09
  a very good spot at a festival in Illinois called Cornerstone that was essentially the
• 8:16
  well, well, I'm assuming maybe some listeners there's not a listener on here
• 8:20
  that doesn't Cornerstone. Okay, great, then you guys are familiar, and
• 8:24
  by you guys, I mean you the listeners which is a big deal.
• 8:26
  Is the Lollapalooza of the Christian music industry, for better or for worse.
• 8:33
  And we played it for years and years and years, and we're given a
• 8:35
  wonderful time slot one year that we had been looking forward to for a very
• 8:39
  long time, and we started to entertain the possibility that we might because I
• 8:46
  think that they had given us up to ninety minutes, which is not something
• 8:48
  that we would have used. We never played that long, and we're like,
• 8:52
  well, what could we do with ninety minutes? And we started to
• 8:54
  wonder if we could act out the entire screenplay of Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey
• 9:01
  from start to finish, like play the audio from the film and essentially pantomime
• 9:05
  the film on stage, because the third act of Bill and Ted is a
• 9:09
  musical third act and it concludes with the kiss song God Gave Rock and Roll
• 9:15
  to You, So at that point we would actually play the kiss song God
• 9:18
  Gave Rock and Roll to You, and that would be the end of the
• 9:20
  whole set. And we started to rehearse it. We started to like assign
• 9:26
  roles and oh, we could do this and this, and then someone in
• 9:28
  the band had the maturity and wherewithal to actually snap out of it and go,
• 9:33
  wait, this has gone too far. We can't actually use our time
• 9:37
  slot for this ridiculous idea, that a joke that would only be funny to
• 9:43
  us, and there's a waste of resources. But that was the kind of
• 9:46
  philosophy that kind of hung in the air over the Showbread Project the whole time.
• 9:52
  There was I don't mean to make it sound like it was a joke
• 9:54
  band, but there was a certain willingness to push how little seriousness one could
• 10:01
  hold in a project that seemed really serious, if that makes any sense.
• 10:05
  You know, it was like an art rock band. But we'd do Bill
• 10:09
  and Ted. We use our night, you know, our big time slot
• 10:11
  at the big festival to do Bill and Ted. That would have been hilarious.
• 10:16
  That's one of my only regrets these days when I look back on the
• 10:18
  Showbread Project, is that we didn't. You should have done it at least
• 10:20
  once. Who would have been the undertaker Guy Death? I wanted to be
• 10:28
  Death. I advocated for the Death role, but they were like, it
• 10:30
  makes more sense that it was me and Ivory and our other singer. We
• 10:33
  should be Bill and Ted. That you know, that seemed to be the
• 10:37
  obvious carry over, but people were arguing over who got to be Death and
• 10:41
  who got to be If you've seen Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, there's a
• 10:45
  two Martian characters, both called station and everybody wanted to be Stationed. So
• 10:50
  obviously we were gonna have to facilitate multiple roles each and we had like a
• 10:54
  notebook where we were mapping this all out, and it got it got further
• 10:58
  than it should have, but ultimately did not come to fruition. So aspect,
• 11:03
  you guys are gonna do that, right, So I would be lying
• 11:07
  if I didn't if I said that we didn't make that joke. It was
• 11:11
  just a joke. But right away when they invited us a second time,
• 11:15
  somebody said, you know, we have to do this time as Bill and
• 11:16
  Ted. But no, we're not doing Bill and Ted. Let's talk about
• 11:22
  the early history of Showbread. I know it was I think it was it
• 11:26
  your brother Is Patrick your brother by the way, yes, yeah, So
• 11:30
  I know it was initially started by Patrick and another guy in the band,
• 11:33
  and it was like, you know, two church guys, Southern Baptist dudes,
• 11:37
  and I think, like I've even seen on Wikipedia that like they eventually
• 11:41
  got kicked out of playing at the church because it was like too satanic or
• 11:43
  whatever. Yeah, but yeah, you want to talk about some of those
• 11:46
  early years of like how you guys formed and eventually got like ten guys in
• 11:50
  a band that wanted to play together. Yeah, The easiest way to wrap
• 11:54
  your mind around it is that it's one of those projects that probably should have
• 11:58
  been all five different things, but we just kept the same moniker over this
• 12:05
  project that evolved to the point that it no longer resembled its previous shape at
• 12:11
  all, and we just continued to call it Showbread. Davey listened to a
• 12:15
  lot of folks who were in bands for a long time. They'll say,
• 12:18
  well, we actually started with this project, but then it changed genres or
• 12:22
  we changed lineups, and so we started a new thing. Showbread was the
• 12:26
  name of my brother's idea for a worship band, or I guess, like
• 12:31
  an alternative worship band, which was a popular thing in the late nineties on
• 12:37
  the heels of Delirious five. Yeah, exactly, and Third Day was kind
• 12:41
  of leaning into like a Black Crow's influenced worship kind of thing, and we
• 12:50
  weren't necessarily into that genre of music. We you know, like we're teenagers
• 12:56
  in the nineties, so we were, like I said, early into more
• 12:58
  like Nirvana, the kind of Seattle movement that had taken over mainstream rock music
• 13:05
  in the nineties. But this seemed like a possibility for us to be able
• 13:09
  to play music we didn't haven't. We lived in the rural deep South,
• 13:11
  We had no access to any kind of scene to speak of, and we
• 13:15
  learned to play instruments to you know, a Green Day record. So can
• 13:18
  I ask a quick question about that? Yeah? You know, I keep
• 13:24
  hearing a lot of these really influential Southern Christian metal influenced bands that say that
• 13:31
  there was no scene to speak of. But there's a an absolute plethora of
• 13:41
  really influential Christian metal influenced bands from the South, especially Georgia. How was
• 13:48
  there not a scene? I just I'm always like flabbergas and when when bands
• 13:54
  say this, because looking at it, even like three years from nineteen ninety
• 13:58
  eight, let's say it. I mean, there's so many bands in that
• 14:03
  area that we're just killing it. Yeah, I think that the answer is
• 14:09
  twofold. One is that we were also disparate. You know the topography of
• 14:15
  Georgia as such that you have a major city in the northern side of the
• 14:20
  state in Atlanta, which was the closest thing to a cultural hub that Georgia
• 14:26
  had to offer. We were in the southeast corner of Georgia, close to
• 14:31
  Savannah, which has become apparently like a desirable place to live since I lived
• 14:37
  there, But at the time this was like backwards Georgia, swamp Georgia,
• 14:43
  and and we lived like a half hour from civilization. That's not hyperbole.
• 14:48
  I lived on a dirt road and had to drive forty five minutes to like
• 14:52
  go to the movies or the mall or something like that. So there's no
• 14:56
  access to any kind of cultural currency or cultural relevance. It's everything that you
• 15:01
  get. You get from early in my early teenage years MTV, and then
• 15:09
  that eventually changed to finding of all things, a Christian subculture of what we
• 15:18
  might describe as like India or punk rock music through Tooth and Nail Records.
• 15:22
  And that was a super analog process as well, because there was this is
• 15:26
  a pre internet era, so that meant ordering a male mail order catalog,
• 15:33
  getting like a pamphlet that would describe the kind of albums that are on it,
• 15:37
  and then having to wait six to eight weeks for you know, your
• 15:39
  ninety pound Wiss record to come in the mail, and then going out into
• 15:43
  a rural world in which this is again not exaggeration. There was one other
• 15:48
  kid in my high school that was into punk rock music. One and we
• 15:54
  stood out. We were like that, you know, like we had mohawks
• 15:56
  or whatever. It was just the two of us, and everyone kind of
• 16:00
  knew it, like, oh, and they didn't know what that was.
• 16:02
  They'd say, like, what is punk rock music? But I don't even
• 16:04
  I'm not even sure what that means. And so I think that one of
• 16:10
  that was just like we were far away from Atlanta. We were we said,
• 16:14
  we're from Savannah, but that's just because that's the closest actual city.
• 16:17
  We're far from Savannah. And I think that there were a lot of young
• 16:22
  artists that were coming of age in a similar situation where sure, we're in
• 16:26
  the South together, and we're even in some sense in Georgia together, but
• 16:30
  we have no access to one another. There's no connection through the internet,
• 16:33
  there's no connection through a scene. And so in throughout high school, when
• 16:40
  I first started going to shows, and my friends and I that had found
• 16:45
  each other through church and punk rock music, would travel four to six hours
• 16:52
  for every show that we went to, and we did it several times a
• 16:56
  month. We would drive up to Atlanta four hours away, down to Orlando
• 17:00
  four hours away to see Zeo or to see MxPx, and it was such
• 17:07
  a routine for us that we just took it for granted. We'd we'd find
• 17:10
  out about these shows and say, okay, well everyone get ready to not
• 17:15
  have any sleep, and we'd get in a van together, drive all the
• 17:17
  way down, drive all the way back the same night. And that was
• 17:21
  the world that we took for granted. And can I just say something around
• 17:23
  like that, is there are with you guys being from Georgia and a lot
• 17:29
  of other especially like Solid State bands were coming out of the South obviously,
• 17:33
  and a lot of them have like similar stories where it's like we were church
• 17:37
  kids, were from the South and we ended up like learning about Tooth and
• 17:40
  Nail Records. What's interesting though, is Tooth and Nail Records is not from
• 17:44
  the South. They're from the West Coast. So it's really interesting that here's
• 17:48
  this record label that was like prime for all these weirdo kids in the South
• 17:52
  who were growing up in the Bible Belt, even though Tooth and Nail Records
• 17:56
  isn't from there, So it was like this record label that like regionally didn't
• 18:00
  make sense for it to be on the West Coast. But then fortunately they
• 18:04
  got into the ears of all these kids from the Bible Belt, and that's
• 18:07
  part of the reason why you think a lot of it really exploded, especially
• 18:11
  like Tooth and Nail and Solid State, like and all of those bands coming
• 18:15
  out of that world and now all of a sudden they're signed to Tooth and
• 18:18
  Nail and Solid State. But it's really interesting that like Tooth and Nail started
• 18:22
  geographically in a location that doesn't really make sense for given the bands that came
• 18:29
  up through Tooth and Nail and Solid State and the kids that were really influenced
• 18:32
  by those bands. Yeah, totally. And the fascinating thing about it when
• 18:36
  I reflect on it now, is that our journey into what someone might describe
• 18:42
  as like credible obscure music went kind of the opposite direction of what a lot
• 18:51
  of other people's experiences are. Meaning I know a lot of people who maybe
• 18:53
  grew up in Southern California or who did grow up near some kind of cultural
• 18:59
  hub and they found out about cool punk rock music that would never be played
• 19:03
  on mtvor or on the radio. And then they learned about what seemed to
• 19:08
  them like a generic, off brand version in the Christian music industry, and
• 19:15
  they kind of were like, oh, this seems inauthentic or disingenuous. For
• 19:18
  me, it was the other way around. I only had access to the
• 19:22
  world of mainstream rock music through things like MTV and my radio station, and
• 19:27
  because I was a youth group kid and would go to my local Christian bookstore
• 19:33
  to find music, and because my parents were like, yeah, it'd be
• 19:37
  nice if you wanted to listen to something that came from the Christian book store.
• 19:40
  I mean, they weren't like necessarily forcing it on us or imposing on
• 19:44
  on us, but they were definitely encouraging if we demonstrated any interest in like
• 19:48
  Christian music, and and through that go into like a hole in the wall
• 19:53
  like mall Christian bookstore that's you know, as small as like my office and
• 19:59
  having a conversation with the dude that's like, oh, you like the Green
• 20:02
  Day record Dukie, which everyone did at the time, it was like one
• 20:04
  of the biggest rock albums that the world had seen. He's like, you
• 20:10
  should try this record, and he and I bought a copy of mxpx's first
• 20:14
  album, Pokanacha, and it was immediately apparent that this was more punk rock
• 20:19
  than Dukie was. It was faster and more aggressive and like abrasive and and
• 20:26
  whoa, it felt like you had discovered something really subversive and unique. And
• 20:30
  inside the liner notes of Pokanacha, you know, Mike has a Rancid T
• 20:34
  shirt on or some you know, Muri has a no ex T shirt on
• 20:40
  itself. And based on that, I went back to the record store and
• 20:42
  bought a Rancid record and bought a NOFX record. So I found my way
• 20:47
  into bands like Misfits and Black Flag through the Christian music industry. And to
• 20:53
  me, honestly, because I've had found Tooth and Nail records in this unique
• 21:00
  creative melting pot of and especially the first generation, Tooth and Nail would have
• 21:07
  you know, what we might call indie rock bands or first wave emo bands,
• 21:11
  hardcore bands, metal bands, punk rock bands, and like industrial,
• 21:15
  goth industrial. It was such a spectrum of music. The same label that
• 21:21
  had MxPx and Living Sacrifice had joy Electric, and to me, it was
• 21:26
  just all interesting. I didn't necessarily discriminate, like, oh, this is
• 21:30
  not punk, you know. It was just like, Wow, this all
• 21:32
  seems to belong to a unique family of really inventive, creative music, and
• 21:38
  I would find my way to other bands through them. It didn't seem to
• 21:41
  me like, oh, Growths, it's a generic offshoot. It seemed to
• 21:47
  me as credible as the other bands, and I liked and I applied to
• 21:51
  them all as you know, like influences and the stuff that I wanted to
• 21:53
  make, and I think maybe a lot of young musicians were doing the same
• 21:57
  thing. So eventually we would find each other. Eventually, you know,
• 22:02
  in the early two thousands, as we started to travel and play regionally before
• 22:07
  we even went on tour, but would start to you know, travel out
• 22:11
  of state or play in cities beyond Savannah. We found Ludacris who would become
• 22:17
  Norma Jeane, or we would find yeah, the bands that now people like
• 22:21
  you guys are describing. It's like these are noteworthy bands that all seem to
• 22:26
  come from the same area. But for the longtime, we didn't even know
• 22:29
  that we were in the same place. I have a conversation with the guys
• 22:33
  in Emery, for example, not realizing that we were down the road in
• 22:37
  a certain sense from one another, having the same experience a feeling like isolated
• 22:41
  and rural and disconnected from culture. And so we both were finding our own
• 22:47
  ways into punk rock music and making bands, and then now here we are
• 22:49
  as adults talking about it, even though we had no idea that we were
• 22:53
  short drive from one another at the time, the world felt a lot more
• 22:57
  disconnected at the time. Yeah, that's an interest. That's such an interesting
• 23:03
  perspective. I think it also was the exact same kind of feeling for a
• 23:07
  lot of Christian music listeners, especially for alternative music. Like Mason and I,
• 23:14
  we definitely bonded over the fact that there were these Christian bands first that
• 23:21
  got us into a lot of the secular stuff as well. I mean,
• 23:26
  we found it to be just as just as authentic as the mainstream stuff.
• 23:30
  Well, and not only did it feel like we were alienated in terms of
• 23:34
  like other peers because we didn't listen to like mainstream music, but also like
• 23:40
  even the alternative punk kids were also like suspicious of us because we listened to,
• 23:45
  like specifically Christian alternative stuff, so it really felt like, oh,
• 23:48
  I really have nobody to connect with. So when I found that Cullen really
• 23:52
  liked that, like tooth and nail solid state stuff, I was like,
• 23:56
  Oh, this is like literally one other person in our twenty thousand person town
• 24:00
  that actually likes this, Like there's nobody else that likes this music. Yes,
• 24:03
  and so I'm gonna immediately becomes friends with this person because nobody else is
• 24:07
  going to be interested in the same kind of music as I am. Yeah,
• 24:11
  So it really it like, really I think formed that bomb because not
• 24:14
  only is it that we're listening to like alternative punk stuff, but also specifically
• 24:18
  that it's Christian and nobody is listening to that. Yeah, it's like a
• 24:22
  several layers of niche at that point, and so the likelihood of finding someone
• 24:27
  to share that with you it's such a rare and beautiful thing. So I
• 24:30
  understand that completely. Yeah, and I felt the same way. That's why
• 24:33
  the one kid that I knew at my high school that was also punk rock
• 24:37
  became the drummer of our band. There you go, There you go.
• 24:41
  Well, let's talk about some of those early years then you guys were you
• 24:45
  were talking a little bit about you know, you're you're starting to tour,
• 24:47
  you're eventually getting out of Savannah, even getting out of the state and doing
• 24:51
  some tours. I know you guys released a few records before you were signed
• 24:55
  to Tooth and Nail, but you want to talk a little bit about some
• 24:56
  of those early years before Tooth and Nail, and then we can talk about
• 25:00
  those Tooth and years. Yeah, the pre Tooth and Nail era. You
• 25:07
  describe it as their being albums, and it's true, that's what we called
• 25:10
  them too. But it's such a it's such a strange thing for I think
• 25:15
  certain listeners, or certainly modern listeners to wrap their minds around, because in
• 25:21
  the like punk rock culture, it was just not that unusual for someone to
• 25:25
  be like, oh, we have six new songs, let's record them crappily,
• 25:30
  you know, like at our friend's house and either press them on a
• 25:33
  seven inch or if you don't have access to that kind of luxury, like
• 25:37
  on CDRs at the time, which is kind of like the early two thousands
• 25:42
  equivalent of you know, seventies and eighties punk rock seven inches, and so
• 25:48
  we would actually just find a friend who had equipment. This is again a
• 25:52
  pre garage band era, so that was semi rare go in his garage record
• 25:57
  the whatever six or seven songs we had just written in some cases ten,
• 26:03
  and make artwork at home, like with like actually cutting things out and you
• 26:08
  know, like a serial killer of making a ransom note. And then we'd
• 26:11
  rent a CD burner, which at the time was a giant device, and
• 26:18
  just burn CD after CD after CD, which took like an hour each one
• 26:22
  to do, and then with a sharpie right you know, the album title
• 26:25
  and show bread and take them to shows and either give them away or sell
• 26:27
  them for a dollar or something that would hopefully fund itself. And so after
• 26:33
  being signed to a big record label and having records that are actually produced and
• 26:40
  have a budget and everything, people will often press me for, oh,
• 26:45
  how do we get access to these early recordings. I'm like, you really
• 26:48
  don't want them and not in it, like, oh, I'm so embarrassed.
• 26:51
  I'm just like, they'll they'll be unfulfilling to you. It's like going
• 26:53
  back and listening to Misfits B sides. It's like, it might be cool
• 26:59
  to hear what this song sound alike, but It also sounds like it was
• 27:00
  recorded in a garbage camp, so there's only so much you can get from
• 27:04
  it. But at that time it was it was super exciting. It was
• 27:07
  like this. That was when we did discover some semblance of a scene.
• 27:12
  There were more and more punk bands in the Savannah area coming out of there's
• 27:19
  an art school in Savannah, and there's another college town in Semi nearby,
• 27:26
  and so there were more and more young punk bands that were finding one another
• 27:32
  or that were kind of adjacent to it. We used to describe everything as
• 27:34
  like, oh, it's a hardcore band, so it belongs to kind of
• 27:37
  the same family. Or there were even ska bands and that kind of thing.
• 27:41
  And for the first time ever, it's not just like five weirdos that
• 27:47
  somehow managed to find one another and share records, but like, oh,
• 27:49
  there's another band and they actually kind of want to do the same kind of
• 27:52
  thing that we do. None of these other bands that we had found at
• 27:56
  the time were like Christian bands or playing in churches or anything. That we
• 28:00
  were the youth group kids who had found punk rock and wanted to be a
• 28:03
  punk rock band. These other bands were just they had no connection to any
• 28:07
  kind of religious affiliation to speak of. But nobody treated us any differently,
• 28:12
  and nobody thought it was weird. They were just like, I don't know,
• 28:15
  I mean, they like misfits like we do. So we would play
• 28:21
  at the same shows, and we befriended these people, and there was a
• 28:22
  real sense of like I mean, scene sounds like such a cliche term to
• 28:27
  use, but there was a real sense of camaraderie and we knew one another,
• 28:33
  and we often would play at each other shows and go back and forth,
• 28:36
  and and of course everything for every band at the time was building to
• 28:41
  whether or not we could get signed, whether or not we could go on
• 28:44
  tour, and when at that time, especially with the kind of music that
• 28:48
  we played and in the world in which we were participating, the aspirations to
• 28:53
  be signed and to go on tour. And this is really not some kind
• 28:57
  of put on or virtue signal. It had nothing whatsoever to do with any
• 29:03
  kind of profit or any semblance of like, well we'll make a career out
• 29:08
  of this. It really was just like the next logical step, like if
• 29:11
  we could get signed, then we could play more shows, because we really
• 29:15
  really liked to play, and it just seemed so far fetched to me that
• 29:21
  the idea of a career band, and we when we toured for two years
• 29:26
  before we ever signed to Tooth and Nail, and we toured by going home
• 29:32
  working menial jobs to save up enough money to eat and then immediately heading back
• 29:36
  out on the quit the job, head back out on the road, use
• 29:37
  up the money that we saved up to eat. The touring would essentially pay
• 29:41
  for gas and van insurance, come back work the menial job some more.
• 29:45
  And everyone loved it. It was and we were at the right age to
• 29:48
  do that kind of thing. We were all like eighteen nineteen years old.
• 29:51
  But there was no like, man, I got to make a job out
• 29:53
  of that that it just seemed like a pipe dream, you know. But
• 29:57
  we loved Tooth and Nail. Tooth and Nail had been the the label that
• 30:00
  introduced us to the world of music in which we were participating in a really
• 30:04
  meaningful way. So that was kind of always our if we could just get
• 30:07
  signed to Tooth and Nail, and then we did, I can't. I
• 30:11
  can't still did that happen? Well. Stephen Christian is the singer of a
• 30:18
  band called am Berlin, who was also from the South. Can you believe
• 30:22
  this? Just keep bringing this. Yeah. He was at the Tooth and
• 30:26
  Nail headquarters, which is a real thing, recording his band and Berlin's debut
• 30:33
  record, and one day out of boredom, he asked if he could sift
• 30:37
  through the demos that had been submitted to Tooth and Nail, which at this
• 30:41
  point had become kind of a staff joke. There's this giant bin of cassette
• 30:45
  tapes and CDs, and they had conceded long ago that no one's ever going
• 30:51
  to actually listen to these things, but there's probably still somewhere online you could
• 30:53
  find an address to mail a bad demo. So he went through them all.
• 31:00
  He listened to every single demo one by one. Wow. And he
• 31:04
  his story is his words, not mine, that ours was the only one
• 31:08
  that was okay. Yeah, yeah, he said. I mean he was
• 31:15
  much nicer than that. But I think that that I'm sure it wasn't like
• 31:18
  an incredible It was like, you know, it came out of that era
• 31:21
  of us being a local band in Savannah and we had just mailed it to
• 31:23
  Tooth and Nail and hadn't heard anything from months. Of course that you know,
• 31:26
  nothing came of it, but he went to the brass at Tooth and
• 31:30
  Nail and was like, I really think that this band is interesting. We
• 31:33
  should have them send us some more stuff. So he reached out to us.
• 31:37
  We sent some more stuff, and the word that we got back from
• 31:41
  the gentleman who would eventually become our A and R director at Tooth and Nail
• 31:47
  and would go on to Found and Furnace Fest, a guy named Chad Johnson.
• 31:52
  He watched a VHS tape of us playing and concluded that it couldn't be
• 31:56
  real. He said, I just don't it just seems like the whole thing
• 32:00
  because they were like seven of us and we wore matching outfits and it was
• 32:02
  extremely frenetic and chaotic, and he was just like, I just don't see
• 32:07
  it being an actual band. It seems like a gimmick. Or he likened
• 32:12
  it to the Locust if anyone remembers the lower He was just like, it
• 32:15
  just seems like a kind of a kitchy thing. And so that was that.
• 32:20
  But then I think the following summer or even a summer later, we
• 32:24
  were playing at Cornerstone Festival and Stephen Christian went and got Chad Johnson, who
• 32:31
  was a and R director at at Tooth and Nail Records, and Brandon Ebel,
• 32:35
  who was the CEO, and dragged them figuratively speaking to the Showbread performance
• 32:39
  because he's like, I really think we need to go watch this band.
• 32:43
  I really think it's going to be great. They watched our set and were
• 32:45
  convinced that it was not an act. They could, I guess discern some
• 32:51
  kind of authenticity in it, and I got I had no idea that they
• 32:54
  were there, that Stephen krist I don't. I don't think I had met
• 32:57
  Steven yet, so I had no idea what was happening. But I got
• 33:00
  off stage and was shaking hands with Brandon Eble, and I understood who he
• 33:05
  was and recognized him because you know, that was a label that we loved
• 33:07
  so much. And he was like, wow, man, that was really
• 33:09
  amazing. And so it was almost like the movie version of getting signed.
• 33:15
  You know, they someone dragged him to see us play and they were just
• 33:19
  dazzled, and before we knew it, we had signed a Tooth and Nail
• 33:22
  Records. We signed after we had signed the actually physically signed the contract.
• 33:28
  The following week, we're on a plane to California to record with Sylvia Massey,
• 33:32
  who had produced records for Tool and Prince and Johnny Cash and Ship.
• 33:37
  Then as soon as we had finished those recording sessions, flew to New York
• 33:40
  City to film a music video for our first record. So it really felt
• 33:45
  as if, like, oh man, I was just kind of hoping that
• 33:47
  we could continue to tour, and now it feels as if we've suddenly overnight
• 33:52
  become a real band. It was beautiful. I don't have anything any cynical
• 33:58
  punchline. It was just an amazing time. Well, it sounds like Stephen
• 34:00
  Christian is a great uh is a great person to have on your side,
• 34:05
  No kidding, man. He had a lot of influence at that label,
• 34:07
  probably so because he you know, he made a lot of hits for them,
• 34:10
  So apparently he had enough influence that they were like, fine, well
• 34:15
  go, I'm sure there's lots of quote unquote up and coming acts to watch
• 34:17
  at Cornerstone circa two thousand and two or whatever. It was, so thank
• 34:23
  you. See. I've thanked him since then, but you know, I
• 34:27
  guess I can't say it enough to whom we owe our very careers. All
• 34:34
  right, So those were like kind of at least that's the beginning of Tooth
• 34:37
  and Nail. And again that's kind of when Cullen and I discovered you all,
• 34:42
  and you guys had a number of albums on there that were just unbelievable
• 34:45
  albums, you know. I think No Sir is probably probably the most famous
• 34:52
  show Red album, would you say, like or at least like probably biggest
• 34:55
  fan favorite, but certainly like Age of Reptile is incredible, obviously interacted a
• 35:01
  nervosa, and like Fear of God. I mean, those were all like
• 35:05
  albums that I remember every time there was a new album cycle when you guys
• 35:07
  would you know, pure volume and seeing stuff on Steer Roots and like you
• 35:13
  know, music videos coming up on YouTube, and like I just remember like
• 35:15
  just being so hyped during those time frames, just because I loved every album
• 35:19
  that you guys were putting out at the time. It was just really a
• 35:22
  really exciting time and it was in that age like that, at least for
• 35:25
  me, it was in that age where you just like everything is brand new
• 35:28
  music. Everything that's coming out in Tooth and Nail you're loving, and so
• 35:31
  it was just a really exciting time and Showbread was like very central to that.
• 35:35
  You know, obviously there's other bands like Under Oath and Norma Jean and
• 35:37
  all those bands are a part of that experience for me, but Showbread is
• 35:42
  certainly in that kind of core group of bands that I was just always excited
• 35:45
  about with all of those releases. Man, that's awesome. Thank you for
• 35:49
  telling me that. That's super encouraging and and oh it never gets old hearing
• 35:53
  that kind of thing. What about kind of those years after Tooth and Nail,
• 35:59
  because I know what, Chad started to come and live and you I
• 36:00
  think you guys were uncome and live for like an album or two, and
• 36:05
  so you're around that time. Yeah, kind of talk about some of those
• 36:07
  like post Tooth and Nail years, Like where were you at at that point
• 36:09
  in your careers. I'm guessing like a lot of people are starting to have
• 36:13
  like families, and touring is getting a lot more difficult than just being like
• 36:16
  in a band is just a more difficult effort, and so I'm guessing like
• 36:20
  that maybe is a kind of like part of that part of the career of
• 36:24
  Showbread. Yeah. Yeah, because the influences that steered the Showbread aesthetic,
• 36:34
  we're so wide and varying that at its core it was always a punk rock
• 36:38
  band, but people could describe it with any number of genre monikers. It's
• 36:44
  like, oh, it's this, or it's this, or it's this.
• 36:45
  And we liked the idea of every record being its own kind of genre and
• 36:52
  every record having its own aesthetic presentation, so that it never felt as if
• 36:57
  we had repeated ourselves, and we liked the idea that that would be to
• 37:01
  some extent alienating and divisive. That felt exciting because we as fans loved participating
• 37:07
  in the conversations and arguments of other bands album cycles, where a record comes
• 37:12
  out and one of your friends just hates its guts, but you're like,
• 37:15
  what, you're crazy, this is the best one. That's part of what
• 37:17
  it means to be like a fan and to engage meaningfully with art. And
• 37:22
  we wanted to be a band that provided an experience like that to listeners,
• 37:25
  like, it's not necessarily that important that everyone loves every new album, but
• 37:30
  to give people a conversation, something to argue about, to create something that's
• 37:34
  provocative both aesthetically and kind of like ideologically was really interesting to us and what
• 37:42
  made us punk rock. I think if we were, and so that followed
• 37:47
  us throughout their tooth and nail trajectory, but the influences were becoming more grandiose.
• 37:54
  You know. In the beginning, it was like, if you ask
• 37:58
  us what influenced us the most, we'd say Refused and misfits, and and
• 38:04
  rightfully so, and that I haven't changed my mind about either of those things,
• 38:07
  but that it was. It was pretty like we wanted the a band
• 38:08
  that sounds like this. We felt as if, like many people, the
• 38:13
  shape of punk to come, the Refused album had left like a hole in
• 38:17
  the artistry of punk rock music and there was nothing that kind of followed it,
• 38:22
  and so we shamelessly would say, like that was our inspiration. We
• 38:24
  wanted to carry that torch and create something that was similar but of our own
• 38:30
  design. But then, as soon as we finished the first proper record,
• 38:34
  the Nihilism record, that was no longer interesting to just repeat ourselves and make
• 38:38
  another Refused inspired album. So we started to draw on older influences, well,
• 38:44
  how does show Bread make an alternative rock record with hooks in it?
• 38:47
  And then you know, after that it was like, well, what would
• 38:51
  it look like if we drew on our influences from like David Bowie's Berlin Trilogy
• 38:57
  and Nine Inch Nails and then you get anorexia nervosa. So we always gave
• 39:00
  ourselves permission to like access the entire palette. We had a rule in the
• 39:07
  studio that, you know, you can't say, how would we do this
• 39:13
  live? Because that kind of stifled creativity, and you can't say, but,
• 39:19
  oh, people aren't gonna like that. You know, it had had
• 39:22
  to just be in the moment as like, oh, you know what,
• 39:24
  And that way we could draw from a really rich library of influences, and
• 39:29
  some of them became like, well, clearly they were listening to a lot
• 39:31
  of Bowie on that record, But then and on other ones you can like,
• 39:35
  yep, this is the refused record or whatever. But because of that,
• 39:38
  and because the palette kept getting wider, the production got big. And
• 39:43
  I don't mean to oversell it, Showbreed was always a small band, and
• 39:46
  even in our place in the in the music industry, our little niche of
• 39:50
  the music industry, we were never like giants. And you're describing like bands
• 39:53
  like Norma Gee and under Oath. Those are like the big, big bands,
• 39:55
  and we were kind of on the smaller side of that, But we
• 39:59
  had gotten ourselves into the kind of position that requires a certain amount of quite
• 40:06
  frankly funding and then pageantry to be able to pull off what we want to
• 40:12
  do with authenticity, meaning like it no longer made any sense for us to
• 40:17
  treat ourselves like a diy punk band we needed. It takes a lot of
• 40:22
  money to make records, and it takes a lot of money to stay out
• 40:24
  on tour, relatively speaking, because we're a small band, so bigger bands
• 40:29
  are probably like, you're crazy, you toured for nothing. But we were
• 40:34
  more and more interested and kind of pushing the envelope and going further and further,
• 40:37
  and it became kind of untenable to maintain the pace at which we were
• 40:45
  evolving, And that happened simultaneously with the beginnings of the decline of the music
• 40:52
  industry, with the advent of piracy. Had always been a thing because I
• 40:58
  think even before we had gone on tour, I had Napster in Lime Wire,
• 41:01
  so those things, but they were on the fringe. They weren't necessarily
• 41:05
  household names and not you had to be semi tech literate to understand what Napster
• 41:09
  was and how to work at peer to peer programs and that kind of thing.
• 41:13
  But then that became increasingly available so that we'd meet on the even from
• 41:16
  Nihilism on, we constantly met people who would just tell us like, oh,
• 41:22
  I pirated the record. They would use that language, but I downloaded
• 41:24
  it because I wanted to see if I liked it before I bought it,
• 41:27
  you know, that kind of thing. And we'd be like, well,
• 41:29
  that's great. Yeah, that definitely affects whether or not we'll be able to
• 41:34
  continue doing this. But there was a sense of like, this is where
• 41:38
  the this is the writing on the wall, this is where the whole thing
• 41:42
  is going. And at first it felt like, oh, we can fight
• 41:44
  against it, maybe we could stop it and encourage people to value art and
• 41:47
  all that kind of thing, and that just wasn't going to happen. So
• 41:50
  eventually it just became like, well, this is just where things are going.
• 41:54
  I remember when I got my first invitation to a beta version of Spotify,
• 42:00
  which I believe it was European to begin with our Swedish and so,
• 42:07
  and when I saw the Spotify interface for the first time, this is circa
• 42:12
  two thousand and nine or ten or something like that, I was like,
• 42:15
  yeah, this is that. That's that. That's checkmate on the on our
• 42:21
  of the world that we had known, which is you know, like you're
• 42:23
  getting faxes from the record labeled that's like this week you sold this many records
• 42:29
  in LA and this many records and but this is going to become a thing
• 42:31
  of the past. So the last tooth and nail record that we were contracted
• 42:35
  to make was an album called The Fear of God, and we you know,
• 42:39
  we did it to we We didn't have to compromise anything. We'd made
• 42:44
  it exactly the way that we made wanted to make it. And the numbers
• 42:47
  came back on the on the first week of sales, and it felt as
• 42:52
  if like, oh, does is a record label relevant anymore? It felt
• 42:57
  almost like I think we could have done that by ourselves. There was when
• 43:00
  we first got signed. There was like such an obvious dichotomy in that situation
• 43:07
  I've described a minute ago, and from not being signed to being signed,
• 43:09
  it's like, whoa, the whole world is open to you now. But
• 43:13
  at that point, we had toured and we had released records, and we
• 43:15
  had some that sold good and others that sold less, and it seemed as
• 43:22
  if like, I don't know, like, is this something that we need
• 43:24
  to do? I mean it, like, can we do this by ourselves?
• 43:28
  Is it time to bed I y again? We opted to not renew
• 43:30
  our contract with Tooth and Nail, and a friend of ours, Chad,
• 43:35
  who was also at Tooth and Nail, had organized some kind of experimental infrastructure
• 43:39
  to give records away for free around a shared ethos, and it was it
• 43:46
  was in its infantile stages of develop maybe even embryonic. He was just like,
• 43:52
  I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm just gonna try to try
• 43:54
  this thing. It's an experiment. Do you guys want to try it too?
• 43:58
  And we said, man, I guess so. Like it wasn't necessarily
• 44:01
  man, we came together around this vision. It was more just like everyone
• 44:06
  at the time was trying to figure out how music was going to work in
• 44:09
  the in the years to come. And this was in the same era where
• 44:13
  I think Radiohead and Trent Resner were the first to kind of pioneer the pay
• 44:17
  what you want kind of models, And I think, wasn't it my chemical
• 44:22
  Romance that came out with they came off an album? I believe that was
• 44:24
  free totally. Oh yeah, they actually ended up having more money come into
• 44:30
  their pockets through donations than they had if they would have gone through a record
• 44:36
  label or something. Right, maybe it was The Killers. It was one
• 44:37
  of those two bands. I don't know why. Yeah, same same basic
• 44:42
  band. It felt as if everyone was kind of throwing darts at the wall.
• 44:47
  They're just like, I don't know this, trying a free model,
• 44:50
  pay what you want, stream it whatever, and and so that was our
• 44:55
  dart at the wall. It was like, I don't know, let's give
• 44:58
  it away for free. We did, like the first record that we did
• 45:00
  as as a completely free download. We made the tour completely free as well,
• 45:07
  which was really difficult to book. Was we had to gamble with booking
• 45:10
  agents and venues and say, we're going to ask people if they want they
• 45:16
  can give money, they don't have to, will forfeit a guarantee and hope
• 45:22
  that this thing kind of evens itself out and there's enough for both of us
• 45:25
  and there was. It ended up being, you know, and we were
• 45:30
  never like a band that, like you profited or so in light of what
• 45:36
  I've gone on to say with my career and stuff, the accusation that I
• 45:38
  sometimes see thrown at myself is like, Wow, this guy he just wants
• 45:42
  to protect his pockets or something like that, And I'm like, I have
• 45:45
  yet to profit from any of my creative endeavors, so he might have to
• 45:50
  protect his break evening. Yeah, exactly exactly. But that was the free
• 45:54
  tour was the closest that we've come to like, Wow, this was financially
• 46:00
  profitable. That money just went right back into the band and making records,
• 46:04
  not not to me or to anyone else. But we could also see that
• 46:07
  it was not sustainable long term, you know what I mean. It felt
• 46:09
  like a gimmick. It felt like a blightning in a bottle, like it
• 46:14
  this worked for now, we probably can't do this again, and so we
• 46:20
  leaned more into like, well, what do we want to do creatively while
• 46:23
  we have time left to do it. It felt to me a little bit
• 46:25
  like I don't think I would have said this out loud because it was a
• 46:29
  scary thing to admit, but it felt a bit like I don't think that
• 46:34
  the Showbread project is going to be able to maintain itself long term at this
• 46:37
  point when it takes you know, tens of thousands of dollars to make a
• 46:42
  record, and that money is no longer accessible to bands of our size,
• 46:46
  and we don't have the resources to come up with a third option. At
• 46:52
  that time, I just don't know how it's going to work. And and
• 46:55
  like you observed earlier, we at that point had some of us had gotten
• 47:00
  married, and so now there's a reason to not be on tour all the
• 47:04
  time, whereas before there was just like I don't care, Like, let's
• 47:07
  just be out on the road all year long. It doesn't make any difference
• 47:08
  to me. So we, you know, kind of attempted two of our
• 47:15
  most experimental records that were both free records. One was called Who Can Know
• 47:20
  It? And one was called Cancer, which is the science fiction rock opera
• 47:23
  and uh, and those were both for me, just like, before we're
• 47:28
  done, I just want these two in our discography. I was playing the
• 47:30
  long game. I was like, I want one record that's bizarrely not like
• 47:35
  the other records, so that it'll give you know, the people to be
• 47:37
  like I hate that one album or that's the only one I like is the
• 47:43
  piano ballad record? You know, I always think that that's so funny when
• 47:45
  bands that like Kiss has a disco record or it's just like that one record
• 47:50
  in your discography. And then the idea for a sci fi concept record had.
• 47:55
  I had written it down literally before we got signed, and called it
• 48:00
  and everything, and I kept pitching it to the band over the years and
• 48:02
  they're like, this is so ridiculous. You want to make a glam record,
• 48:07
  and I'm like, it would be so cool. I could never get
• 48:10
  them to come on board with the idea because I was like, and it
• 48:13
  would have to be about aliens and we'd have to be like a pretend band
• 48:17
  for you know. It was like Ziggy start Us for me and everything.
• 48:22
  Yeah, the whole the whole thing. I was going to get him to
• 48:23
  come speak out, Well, now you can actually bring real aliens. I
• 48:27
  mean, I know now that we know now that we have definitive proof of
• 48:32
  the aliens now, so that the the end of the indie era or the
• 48:37
  second indie era of Showbread was kind of like, let's say these last few
• 48:43
  things we'd like to say before it's over with. And then a few of
• 48:45
  us met over launch one afternoon and said, it can become one of these
• 48:50
  bands that like is semi active and everyone forgets about which is probably gonna happen
• 48:57
  either way, or we can end it on purpose and like on our own
• 49:01
  terms. And so we decided to make a record called Showbretta Show Dead and
• 49:07
  to have that be kind of a definitive statement, again borrowing from the refused
• 49:12
  influence of proclaiming the end of your own band and you in your sort of
• 49:16
  seminal master work at the end there, and that alleviated a huge weight.
• 49:21
  It felt as if like there was no longer this big burden of understanding every
• 49:27
  aesthetic decision that we made in light of our entire discography. And I hate
• 49:30
  to word like legacy sounds so pretentious, and we didn't really think that way,
• 49:35
  but we did think big picture, but just saying like, I,
• 49:37
  let's just make one more for fun, and let's get old guys from the
• 49:40
  band to come back and be in it with us. It felt as close
• 49:45
  as we could have got to the first era of the indie band, when
• 49:49
  it was just more just about like, oh, here's ten songs that we
• 49:51
  wrote. You made a cool part, you made a cool part, let's
• 49:53
  record it together. So that felt like an appropriate conclusion to that era of
• 49:59
  the band. And then show Bred is show Dad kind of has an asterisk
• 50:05
  next to it now it does. Yeah, yeah, it's because it's not
• 50:08
  really truly the last show Bred album, which is interesting. So, yeah,
• 50:14
  you want to talk a little bit about this new album that came out
• 50:15
  this year, and yeah, like some of the impetus behind it and why
• 50:21
  maybe it's really you know, show Bred is show Dad is really not the
• 50:23
  last show Bred album. I know, what a foolish decision to name your
• 50:28
  last record that if you're not fully committed to being dead. And I will
• 50:31
  say at the time that that was not in like some kind of you know,
• 50:36
  obstinate, closed off kind of way, like, oh, we'll never,
• 50:39
  under any circumstances reunite this band, But it just felt to me as
• 50:44
  if it was satisfyingly concluded, and I really did not have like a game
• 50:50
  plan, and I don't think anyone else did either, Like, but then,
• 50:52
  but then, you know, we'll do this kind of thing. And
• 50:55
  I know revivals are all the rage and all that, but a few of
• 51:00
  us that still live in the same area, myself, my brother Patrick,
• 51:05
  and Mike Jensen, who have all been in the band since like two thousand
• 51:09
  and one, We live down the street from each other and spend time together
• 51:15
  regularly every single week, and we started to make music together for fun with
• 51:21
  no not show Bread, and it's like, oh, I kind of got
• 51:23
  an idea for a song, you want to work on it. And we
• 51:25
  made a little studio together. Because now these resources are readily accessible and I
• 51:30
  can do more on my laptop than you know what we used to have to
• 51:34
  do in someone's basement for hundreds of dollars. We started to dink around with
• 51:37
  music and we made a project called The Bell Jar. And there was a
• 51:42
  friend of ours that we had invited to sing on the Showbread a show Dead
• 51:45
  record or names Whitney to Pauli, who's just a gifted vocalist, and we're
• 51:49
  like, oh, you can sing, and you're a girl that's novel,
• 51:52
  come sing on our record because there was a part that we thought would be
• 51:54
  befitting her voice. And she sang on a couple of songs, and we
• 51:58
  realized during that collaboration that she was not just someone who could sing good,
• 52:01
  but she had really interesting ideas and she was you know, was kind of
• 52:05
  giving input into those tracks that were like, Wow, you're actually really fun
• 52:09
  to collaborate with and I didn't even know she liked that this kind of music
• 52:14
  or anything. So we invited her into the studio and so let's make music
• 52:19
  together and made a project called the bell Jar and released an album called I
• 52:23
  Infest Therefore I Am, which is really confrontationally unlistenable, like dance punk music.
• 52:32
  I think it's awesome, but it's definitely in that category of decidedly not
• 52:36
  for everyone, you know, that kind of thing, and it was just
• 52:39
  for fun, like I don't know how many people listen to it or even
• 52:42
  care that much about it. It was just like, what would it be
• 52:45
  like to be a dy band now? Not a ton of money, not
• 52:47
  a ton of resources. I'm not going to go out and tour for this
• 52:51
  thing or spend money to promote it online. I don't At that time,
• 52:52
  I hadn't even been on social media for years and years and years. So
• 52:57
  we just put it out into the air and continued to make We had such
• 53:00
  a fun time making music that we continued to do it, got back into
• 53:04
  the studio together to work on another Bell Jar project, just for fun.
• 53:08
  But the more that we allowed ourselves to do whatever we wanted on that subsequent
• 53:16
  recording on end those subsequent recording sessions, the more weighty the project seemed to
• 53:22
  become. That first record that the bell Jar record felt to me just like
• 53:27
  a fun record. It's like experimental and wacky and off the wall, and
• 53:31
  I didn't feel like it needed to be some kind of definitive statement or anything
• 53:35
  like that. It was just it was fun. And the more that we
• 53:38
  started to write, even without lyricism or anything, it just felt like,
• 53:42
  whoa these are? This is taking a shape that's way more interesting than I
• 53:45
  thought it would be and less novel less like a kind of a cookie side
• 53:51
  project, and it feels like there's something of importance in it. At that
• 53:55
  same time, I was writing a book that would become deaf to deconstruction,
• 54:02
  and so I was sitting in the stories that I was working on every single
• 54:07
  day from my own life and just and what I was trying to communicate through
• 54:13
  the across the pages of this book. So that's where my mind was as
• 54:17
  I would come into these recording sessions and hear what were just instrumental tracks,
• 54:22
  like a kind of free flowing collaborative anyone can play anything and just throw ideas
• 54:30
  and they would start to take shape. And but I was hearing the ideas
• 54:32
  that I had been sitting in all day as I was manuscripting this book.
• 54:37
  So as soon as I started to actually write lyrics, they were all coming
• 54:40
  out of my story that I had put into this book, and it was
• 54:45
  really personal and kind of painful and strange. And and then I had three
• 54:51
  songs and they were all the same subject and then I had four songs and
• 54:52
  they were all the same subjects. So I started to see understand the whole
• 54:55
  thing as like a concept record. And we had layered onto top of it
• 55:00
  all kinds of heavy guitars and drawn from the Showbred palette way more than the
• 55:05
  bell Jar palette. And at some point, as we sat in the studio
• 55:08
  and we're listening back to tracks, we were like, this sounds way more
• 55:13
  like a Showbred record than it does a bell Jar record. In fact,
• 55:15
  we've departed so much from the bell Jar toolbox that it doesn't seem like the
• 55:21
  bell Jar at all. And at that point, as soon as somebody said
• 55:25
  it sounds more like a Showbred record than a bell Jar record, this sounds
• 55:30
  like a really cliche thing to say, but it struck me that it was,
• 55:35
  you know, like I was like it is. I think it is
• 55:37
  a Showbred record, as strange as that sounds, in its philosophy and its
• 55:42
  astatic and in what it naturally came to be. And and honestly, the
• 55:49
  only difference it made to us was that, like, you call it one
• 55:52
  thing or the other, which is a strange way of putting it. But
• 55:54
  to me it felt it would have felt disingenuous to call it the bell Jar,
• 55:59
  even though it was the same people who played on the bell Jar album.
• 56:01
  And the people who are in the bell Jar are in Showbread, and
• 56:04
  the people who are in Showbred are in the Bell Jar. So it's almost
• 56:07
  like the Descendants and all you know, they're two like punk bands that are
• 56:12
  essentially the same band, but they have a different mascot, And so that
• 56:16
  the Descendants could be all and all could be the Descendants and their kind of
• 56:20
  share iconography. That was already the situation we were juggling with the bell Jar
• 56:24
  and with Showbred is that some people are like, well, what is it?
• 56:27
  Because I look on stage and I just see members of Showbred playing this
• 56:30
  wacky punk rock music, like, but we're not show Bred, We're the
• 56:32
  bell Jar. And we embraced the idea that it was a showbred record and
• 56:38
  finished it imagining it as a showbred record. And as soon as we made
• 56:43
  that decision and gave ourselves permission to understand it that way, it really released
• 56:50
  the remainder of creative energy around the record. And it went from like,
• 56:54
  Oh, we're kind of dinking around and whoa, this is getting heavy,
• 56:58
  to like, now there's a vision for the album, and we understand what
• 57:01
  that vision is, and you know, like we committed to capturing it.
• 57:07
  And we would sit in the studio listening to Whitney and I would like be
• 57:10
  going over lyrics and collaborating and she would sing, and we'd listen, sit
• 57:15
  there and listen and feel like, geez, some of this feels so heavy
• 57:20
  and some of it feels like so vulnerable and personal. And the last track
• 57:30
  on the record, in particular, is a song called Funeral Dirge for everyone
• 57:34
  You've ever known and everyone you haven't, And Whitney, who is this beautiful
• 57:39
  like almost gospel e voice, was singing the lyrics to the whole song and
• 57:45
  one take as the rest of us sat across from the studio with headphones on,
• 57:47
  just staring, you know, at the booth as she sang, and
• 57:52
  when she finished, we were just like, geez, you know, it
• 57:54
  felt like that, it felt something that I'm not saying, like, wow,
• 57:58
  we made a masterpiece. I just meant us to us personally, it
• 58:00
  took on real significance and and that significance felt best represented as Showbread. So
• 58:08
  no, Showbread is not show Dead technically. Now we're more like Schrodinger's cat.
• 58:13
  It's like we're in a constant state of being maybe simultaneously alive and dead
• 58:20
  at the same time depending on who you ask, sort of like Feinstein.
• 58:24
  Yeah, yep. So one of the things I find interesting about this new
• 58:31
  album is obviously it's in conjunction with your book, and it's sort of in
• 58:36
  a way was sort of a secretive album, Like it was one of those
• 58:38
  things where I think you had to have the book and like type in this
• 58:42
  code or whatever to get access to the album. And yeah, what was
• 58:45
  kind of their reasoning behind trying to make this sort of like a secretive or
• 58:49
  maybe not secretive, but like a very exclusive listening experience of an album Wu
• 58:53
  Tang Clan. I had hurt. I've been reading for years about a Wu
• 59:00
  Tang album that there exists only one physical copy, and this is the only
• 59:06
  way anyone can access or hear the record at all. So I think,
• 59:08
  as I understand it might have changed, but the record would travel to museums
• 59:14
  and people would go and put on headphones and listen to the Wu Tang out.
• 59:15
  There's only one of them. It's the only way that you can get
• 59:19
  to it. And I always thought that that was such fascinating, that's so
• 59:21
  brilliant. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I loved it. I love that
• 59:22
  idea of like, oh man, what's on that thing. I'm not even
• 59:25
  a huge Woutang fan, but I was just like, I want to know
• 59:28
  what's on that album? And since the book was are the record rather was
• 59:36
  so married to the book thematically in my mind because I was writing it out
• 59:39
  of the same headspace. I then kind of intentionally braided it together. And
• 59:45
  for a couple of reasons. One of them is that when you write a
• 59:49
  book that's part memoir and part like theology, I think that I probably take
• 59:53
  some creative risks along the way, But at the end of the day,
• 59:57
  it's a it's a nonfiction book, so there's you can only go so experimental
• 1:00:02
  without losing the audience to confusion. But on a punk rock record, you
• 1:00:07
  can take a lot more risks. You can embrace satire and metaphor and symbolism,
• 1:00:12
  and you can make yourself a character in the story, or you can
• 1:00:15
  kind of like abstract yourself from the story and narrate as a fictional version of
• 1:00:20
  yourself. There's just a lot more room to experiment and be creative. And
• 1:00:23
  that was exciting to me for there to be some kind of companion piece that's
• 1:00:28
  a little more abstract than the often literalism of Christian nonfiction. So I wanted
• 1:00:37
  the two to exist in some kind of shared universe, which sounds superpretentious,
• 1:00:40
  but I wanted them to if anyone was interested to receive both of them simultaneously,
• 1:00:46
  as almost like a companion piece. There's a book and there's a record,
• 1:00:51
  and it really wasn't And again, you know, like the record was
• 1:00:54
  for free through this code and everything, so it wasn't like a marketing gimmick
• 1:00:59
  or a thing like that. And I still have not profited from the book
• 1:01:01
  either, so it's not like it was some kind of marketing ploy. But
• 1:01:07
  I liked the idea of it. I wanted to recapture some of that magic
• 1:01:10
  that we were talking about, you know, earlier on in the show,
• 1:01:14
  when it's like when you guys came together as a friend as friends and you
• 1:01:19
  started to share music interest and oh you like this band out like this band.
• 1:01:22
  I'm sure there was probably some of that, like but have you heard
• 1:01:24
  this and one of you hadn't, so now you have this exciting new like,
• 1:01:28
  dude, my friend gave me this record, and I wanted to recapture
• 1:01:31
  some of that. Like someone told me that if you look at the end
• 1:01:36
  of this book, there's a secret website and you know that that, like,
• 1:01:39
  oh wow, I found something and it's part of another project, and
• 1:01:45
  what does that mean? And like for there to be some level of mystery
• 1:01:47
  to untangle, rather than we dumped another record onto Spotify with a billion other
• 1:01:54
  bands that dumped records onto Spotify that day, and you know, maybe that's
• 1:02:00
  hopelessly romantic or pretentious. I don't know, but the idea of it being
• 1:02:05
  something unconventional was exciting to me. So we in the acknowledged acknowledgements of the
• 1:02:10
  book, there's a secret website with a secret password, and if you went
• 1:02:15
  there, it would open to a page that would download the album with a
• 1:02:19
  small disclaimer that explained that it was designed as a companion piece to the book.
• 1:02:22
  Of course, we understood that people could possibly share that outside of reading
• 1:02:25
  the book, which is totally fine, and we figured at some point we'll
• 1:02:30
  probably share it with the rest of the world. But for right now,
• 1:02:34
  while this thing is new, while it's new to us, we wanted it
• 1:02:37
  to kind of exist in, you know, a more secretive space than it
• 1:02:43
  would at some point when the rest of the world had access to it.
• 1:02:46
  And it was interesting, you know, right away, there's of course people
• 1:02:51
  who are finding it because they'd not only read the book but finished they finished
• 1:02:54
  the whole book and find that thing at the end, so it actually read
• 1:02:58
  the acknowledgements. Yeah, and read the knowledgements, and so they're like actually
• 1:03:01
  in that frame of mind when they enter into the album, and they're like,
• 1:03:06
  whoa, Okay, this is a different angle. And you know,
• 1:03:07
  it's the subject matter of the book is so divisive that it may or may
• 1:03:13
  not be speaking their language. They might be super ticked about the record or
• 1:03:15
  the book, or one or the other, and that to me was also
• 1:03:19
  an interesting possibility. And then you eventually inevitably have people who are like,
• 1:03:23
  what, No, I'm not going to read this book, but I would
• 1:03:24
  listen to a new Showbread record, and they're like, what the heck is
• 1:03:28
  this? What is it supposed to mean? And so it inevitably repeated the
• 1:03:32
  same cycle of the Showbread controversy machine, which is that the Showbread aesthetic utilizes
• 1:03:42
  so many so much symbolism and so many different genres of communication, Like some
• 1:03:49
  of it's super straightforward, but some of its satire, and some of it's
• 1:03:52
  pretty abstract, and it borrows imagery from all kinds of different things that you
• 1:03:57
  might not traditionally find on a you know, a Christian rock record. That
• 1:04:01
  the thing we ran into very early on with the very first record were people
• 1:04:06
  who were super ticked about the album but weren't really engaging it in a meaningful
• 1:04:11
  way. They're kind of like skimming the surface if you like or and then
• 1:04:15
  sure, of course you can find stuff that seems really outrageous and maybe even
• 1:04:18
  if people who think that you're just a bunch of homosexual was playing on stuff
• 1:04:23
  fairly based on tight ants or whatever it was at the time. Yeah,
• 1:04:27
  so you skim exact, Yeah, you skim the surface in some kind of
• 1:04:30
  superficial way, and sure I would, I would concede there's something there probably
• 1:04:34
  to alienate or to offend a certain kind of audience member. But traditionally that
• 1:04:40
  was usually relegated to kind of the you know, the evangelical politicide or whatever,
• 1:04:45
  the kind of CCM world that expected a certain thing out of the Christian
• 1:04:49
  music machine, and when they didn't get it, we're like, well,
• 1:04:53
  what the heck is this? This feels dangerous or you know, there's no
• 1:04:55
  worry, I'm letting you watch these homosexuals or whatever that that kid's mom said.
• 1:05:00
  And now it was coming out of us at us from a different angle,
• 1:05:03
  which was like, this is outrageous and offensive, and not because it
• 1:05:10
  feels to left of center in the Christian music industry sense of the word,
• 1:05:15
  but it felt like it was offensive to an entirely new audience. And often
• 1:05:20
  because it seemed to me based on conversations I've had, it's like, well,
• 1:05:25
  I don't know that you're actually fully engaging it, but you are looking
• 1:05:29
  at the kind of what's on the surface, and yes, finding something that
• 1:05:32
  seems offensive there. So it felt to me as if it appropriately completed that
• 1:05:36
  cycle, and I had to let go of the I don't know what does
• 1:05:43
  it mean. Does this mean that we're still a band? Does it mean
• 1:05:45
  that we're not broken up? Will we make another Does this mean that we
• 1:05:47
  could make more music as Showbread or have to play more as Showbread? And
• 1:05:51
  we eventually conceded in the studio like, ah, just let's not worry about
• 1:05:56
  all that crap and just say, like we all agree that this is a
• 1:05:58
  Showbread record, and we did, and we'll figure out anything else after the
• 1:06:02
  fact. So I remember when the book came out and like, you know
• 1:06:08
  that again like the album thing, and I still remember, like knowing the
• 1:06:12
  world that I'm in, a lot of people were like kind of upset.
• 1:06:15
  And one of the things that I think about that's interesting with show Brett is
• 1:06:20
  like, you know, like you have never shied away from that kind of
• 1:06:23
  controversy, and it does seem like as if like some of the ways that,
• 1:06:28
  like some of the titles on the song, or like some of the
• 1:06:30
  chapters in the book, or even just like the book title itself is like
• 1:06:33
  sort of a poking of the bear, like you're like you know that there's
• 1:06:36
  going to be some sort of reaction given like the titles of some of these
• 1:06:40
  things and what that surface level is Now, I don't think like a title
• 1:06:45
  of the book or a title of a chapter or title of a song necessarily
• 1:06:48
  means that that's what it is, right, And so I think there is
• 1:06:51
  something like deeper there. And I just remember like people kind of getting upset
• 1:06:55
  about it, and I still probably am like more on the side of people
• 1:06:58
  that probably were upset about it, but I also like, I'm like,
• 1:07:00
  this is what showbread does, Like I don't know why, this is like
• 1:07:03
  sort of surprising, even if you disagree with it. This is this is
• 1:07:06
  not to be surprised, to be surprised by. Yeah, yeah, And
• 1:07:11
  I get all that. I think that when I when I was receiving the
• 1:07:15
  first waves of people that I don't I don't mean to make it sound like
• 1:07:20
  people were just like ringing my neck every single day, but you know,
• 1:07:23
  I entered back into social media after having not been not even looking at any
• 1:07:28
  of those websites for years and years because I'd written a book and wanted to
• 1:07:32
  tell people about it. And most of the people that would say anything to
• 1:07:39
  me are going to say nice things, because you know, that's just how
• 1:07:42
  that works. A lot of people that are like, hooray, you did
• 1:07:45
  a good pat me on the back and all that, and that's fine,
• 1:07:46
  and I don't I don't mean to make light of that. I sincerely appreciate
• 1:07:48
  that, but there are there were people who would express some level of disagreement,
• 1:07:53
  ranging from I'm super ticked and you suck all the way to hey,
• 1:07:58
  man, I don't know how I feel about this, and what do you
• 1:08:00
  have to say for yourself? You know, which is completely understandable, and
• 1:08:04
  especially since I'm the one who's making these provocative things that you know, I
• 1:08:12
  knew that a book called Death to Deconstruction would warrant some amount of pushback it,
• 1:08:17
  just like I know that writing a song called sex with Strangers is going
• 1:08:21
  to offend some people in the Christian music market when your band is has been
• 1:08:26
  so outspokenly Christian all along, or an album like Annarex. Exactly what you've
• 1:08:30
  said, we understood, and I understood that. It stands to reason this
• 1:08:35
  will be could be misunderstood, or it could be understood and people just won't
• 1:08:41
  like it. I don't mean to say suggest in any way that just because
• 1:08:45
  someone disagrees it means they don't get it or that you know, they're stupid
• 1:08:50
  or something like that, because I understand that there are people who totally get
• 1:08:55
  it and they have engaged with it meaningfully and they just don't They just don't
• 1:08:59
  agree or they don't apreciate it, and that's that's totally fine. That doesn't
• 1:09:01
  like keep me up at night or anything like that. I think that what's
• 1:09:05
  always been most interesting in art to me is creating something that can simultaneously alienate,
• 1:09:17
  challenge, and in some sense edify the participant, you know, And
• 1:09:25
  whether that's like ideologically or esthetically, you know, Like I like the kind
• 1:09:29
  of albums that from the outset are like WHOA, what the heck is this?
• 1:09:33
  And I'm offended or I'm disappointed that they change their sound or I don't
• 1:09:36
  know why this is in here, but then forces me to engage in it
• 1:09:42
  with it in a meaningful way, and then often come around and be like,
• 1:09:45
  man, I had no idea upon first listen, but now this is
• 1:09:47
  one of my favorite records or favorite novels or favorite films. That kind of
• 1:09:51
  thing. I like to be, as you know, the listener or the
• 1:09:58
  viewer or the reader. I like to be challenged and to be in a
• 1:10:01
  certain sense put off a little bit. That's what's most interesting to me about
• 1:10:08
  the art that I like the most. So I've and you can argue that
• 1:10:11
  I don't do it well, and maybe you're right, but that's what I've
• 1:10:13
  attempted to do with the crap that I make. You know, Yeah,
• 1:10:16
  I remember again like there being some level of pushback, and and it very
• 1:10:20
  well could be from people who completely understand the book, like you mentioned.
• 1:10:25
  And one of the things that I think there was an assumption about was that,
• 1:10:30
  like you don't really get the like deconstructionist story or whatever, which maybe
• 1:10:33
  to some degree that is true. Maybe I don't know, But what I
• 1:10:36
  will say is it's like this isn't coming from like a person like Mark Driscoll.
• 1:10:41
  Let's just put that right, Like you're not like the theo dude bro,
• 1:10:45
  at least in my experience, have never been like the theodu bro.
• 1:10:48
  Like you literally have a song making fun of John Piper, right, Like
• 1:10:51
  You've never been that kind of person. So it's not as if like you
• 1:10:56
  aren't a person who in some way, shape or form doesn't have some level
• 1:11:00
  of empathy of somebody who's like quote unquote going through deconstruction. Well, no,
• 1:11:04
  that has always been like the way I like, the way I interpreted
• 1:11:08
  the book was even if like you have some sort of like ideological or some
• 1:11:11
  sort of disagreements about it, it's not as if like you're coming from a
• 1:11:13
  place like Mark Driscoll would be yes. And I understand that the title of
• 1:11:17
  the book creates an obvious barrier to people understanding that. So the way I
• 1:11:24
  designed the book is I wanted to you know, someone asked me in a
• 1:11:28
  well meaning, like gracious conversation, like, dude, why didn't you just
• 1:11:30
  call it like death evangelicalism or death to like right wing Christianity, Because all
• 1:11:35
  that stuff's in the book too, Why didn't you just And that's honestly,
• 1:11:40
  what I've made most of my creative career all about is is the critique of
• 1:11:45
  things like fundamentalist religious thinking, critiques of politicized evangelicalism. And I mean I've
• 1:11:53
  made record after record like that, I've written novels all about that. This
• 1:11:58
  is the first thing that I've aid that that kind of relocates that examination or
• 1:12:04
  that critical examination on a different constituency of spiritual thinking. And I designed the
• 1:12:13
  book so that, like Okay, the cover or the cover with the title
• 1:12:16
  on it is like, what the heck is that supposed to me? And
• 1:12:19
  I feel I feel personally confronted by that. And then the first sentence of
• 1:12:24
  the first chapter in theory is disarming because you realize over the course of the
• 1:12:30
  book that it's actually a story about my deconstruction. You know. The critique
• 1:12:35
  that I got early on because I called the book Death of Deconstruction, was
• 1:12:41
  you don't know anything about deconstruction. You didn't really deconstruct, and you know,
• 1:12:45
  like your your story of deconstruction is somehow illegitimate because if you had truly
• 1:12:53
  deconstructed, then you wouldn't be where you are now, which is I'm a
• 1:12:57
  pastor of a church, you know, and I'm still a Christian and all
• 1:13:00
  these things. And and honestly, a lot of that critique, at least
• 1:13:04
  that's been come back to me, is from people who would tell you they
• 1:13:11
  didn't they didn't read the book, or that they don't they have no interest
• 1:13:14
  in reading the book because they don't like it, or they don't like me,
• 1:13:15
  or that kind of thing, which is again totally fine. But I
• 1:13:18
  wanted to create something that was like when the guy asked me, why didn't
• 1:13:21
  you just call it death to evangelicalism, death to right wing Christianity, because
• 1:13:27
  I go after all those things in the book. And I said, you
• 1:13:30
  know, I've done that. I've done that record, I've done that book,
• 1:13:33
  and I think I've been very very clear about it. I wanted something
• 1:13:36
  that felt a little bit more like, whoa, what is that supposed to
• 1:13:41
  mean? And if you do, you know. And I'm not saying anyone
• 1:13:45
  has to, like they're not obligated to read my book or anything, but
• 1:13:46
  if you do read Death to Deconstruction, it's hinted at in the first sentence
• 1:13:51
  of the book and comes to fruition by the final lines of the book that
• 1:13:55
  what I mean by Death to Deconstruction is probably not what you thought it was
• 1:14:00
  when you heard the title for the first time, and that it's taken on
• 1:14:03
  a different kind of meaning altogether. And it's out of my story, you
• 1:14:08
  know. And I'm not saying like it's my story therefore it's everyone else's objective
• 1:14:12
  truth or anything like that. I just mean that, you know. I
• 1:14:14
  had people early han being like, prove that you're deconstructed. I'm like,
• 1:14:17
  I don't know. I don't know how I would prove such a thing.
• 1:14:19
  Do you want to see my journal or something like that, You want to
• 1:14:23
  talk to some witnesses. I understand that people's you know, spiritual experience differs
• 1:14:29
  from person to person. I just think that that's just the way that I've
• 1:14:33
  made stuff. It's usually pretty confrontational and usually or at least attempts to be
• 1:14:40
  provocative. You could argue that I'm not good at it, but that's what
• 1:14:42
  I'm trying to do, and not because I'm interested in making people upset or
• 1:14:46
  making people mad. That's just the kind of art that I like, so
• 1:14:49
  I try to emulate it. You know, No, I totally get that,
• 1:14:53
  and again, like I think for people that really read the book,
• 1:14:56
  and again not to say that I like fully agree with everything that you see
• 1:14:59
  in the book. No you did, Yeah, you fully agree fully,
• 1:15:00
  and I wrote the endorsement. But but what's interesting is I even though people
• 1:15:09
  really associate me with that world, I think I actually probably have more critical
• 1:15:13
  critiques than what you at least explicitly name in the book. And that's why
• 1:15:16
  I think is really interesting is even though people probably associate me with that world,
• 1:15:19
  I think you're less critical of that whole world than I actually probably would
• 1:15:24
  be. And and I'm not the one that wrote a book called Death of
• 1:15:27
  Deconstruction, so I just find that really interesting. Yeah, I did too
• 1:15:30
  for that automat at you for all of this, and I'm like, actually,
• 1:15:33
  I'm kind of associated with it, and people look up to me for
• 1:15:35
  whatever reason for it, and I probably am more critical than you are.
• 1:15:40
  Yeah. And the book, you know, it's even the hood's called what
• 1:15:45
  it's called is not. Yeah, I think people understandably assume that it is
• 1:15:49
  going to be a driskly type thing or some kind of angry pastor rant about
• 1:15:55
  people just the sissies and they need to toughen up and be Christian or something
• 1:15:59
  something than like that. I just say, like, well, I usually
• 1:16:01
  put the word death and half the stuff I make, so it had to
• 1:16:04
  go in there somewhere. Its basically your last name for a while too,
• 1:16:08
  So yeah, exactly exactly. It follows me everywhere I go. But I
• 1:16:13
  think, you know, to be fair, I have heard from a lot
• 1:16:15
  of people who don't necessarily agree with all of or even maybe in some cases
• 1:16:21
  most of the book, But who who weren't ticked at all? Who you
• 1:16:26
  know who are just like, yeah, I get it. I get where
• 1:16:27
  you're coming from, and honestly I agree with a lot of the points that
• 1:16:30
  you're making. I probably would end up on a different conclusion than you do.
• 1:16:34
  And that's not to say like, oh, everyone who's mad has no
• 1:16:38
  real case. I just mean that the outraged or the idea of the outrage
• 1:16:43
  can be misleading sometimes. Yeah, totally. In fact, the thing that
• 1:16:45
  I probably that you've done recently that I'm like, oh, I don't I
• 1:16:50
  don't really understand that, even more so than the book was what you said
• 1:16:54
  up Furnace Past a couple of years ago about like being Christian is like kind
• 1:16:58
  of the most punk rock you can be now or whatever. That to me
• 1:17:01
  is more confusing than the whole book. If you tell me more, tell
• 1:17:06
  me more. One of the things that's really interesting about my story is I
• 1:17:11
  never had the sort of like reject religion phase. I went from like obviously
• 1:17:15
  very conservative Christianity, as we've talked about, like grew up in the tooth
• 1:17:17
  and nil world and everything. I was totally in that world, even really
• 1:17:20
  got into like Piper and all of that, and then immediately starting college that's
• 1:17:26
  when I like discovered like Brian McLaren and Nadia Boltsweber and Rachel hald Evans and
• 1:17:30
  all those folks, and then I was like, oh, this is like
• 1:17:32
  the kind of Christianity I've been longing for, but I didn't know it existed.
• 1:17:35
  I had no idea it wasn't if I like knew it existed, and
• 1:17:39
  like I tried to protect myself from it, I just genuinely had no idea
• 1:17:43
  any kind of Christians like that existed. So I got myself really immersed into
• 1:17:46
  that world and really developed like a really a passion for like continuing to do
• 1:17:51
  that kind of ministry. And so I went the whole seminary route, like
• 1:17:56
  got two seminary degrees and am now currently working at a seminary. And so
• 1:18:00
  I'm very much in that world. I'm in the theological world. I'm very
• 1:18:03
  much in like the ministerial world, the seminary world. So I'm like very
• 1:18:08
  into that. But I never had the sort of like I'm rejecting religion face,
• 1:18:12
  which I think a lot of people go through. And so I still
• 1:18:15
  feel like more Christian than I've ever been. And yet I also totally understand
• 1:18:21
  why somebody who grew up in let's say, like fundamentalist, evangelical type of
• 1:18:26
  Christianity, would say, you know what, I really don't want to be
• 1:18:29
  a part of any religion anymore, at least in this point in my life.
• 1:18:31
  Like I actually would understand that, fully understand that my story just happens
• 1:18:35
  to not be that. Yeah, and so so what I hear something like,
• 1:18:40
  oh, to be Christian is to be punk, Like that's the subversive
• 1:18:43
  thing in the world. I think to a certain degree, Like, yeah,
• 1:18:45
  like there's a certain kind of Christianity that I think is super punk and
• 1:18:47
  super subversive, and like I want to be a part of that kind of
• 1:18:50
  Christianity. But I also don't think like you have to be a Christian to
• 1:18:54
  be a part of that subversive and kind of that subversive punk kind of world.
• 1:19:00
  Oh yeah, maybe that's not at all what you meant by that.
• 1:19:02
  But just from like the blank statement, that's where I was confused by.
• 1:19:05
  No, I totally understand that, and I wouldn't. I wouldn't disagree.
• 1:19:09
  I don't think, you know, I'm not I don't think that to be
• 1:19:14
  subversive at all requires Christianity and or to be like, you know, a
• 1:19:18
  moral person or any of those kinds of things. I think that what I
• 1:19:23
  said at Furnace Fest, which I think you've summarized, well, I don't
• 1:19:28
  remember exactly, but I said something to the effect of I think I commented
• 1:19:31
  on the phenomenon of what we might describe as deconstruction but for lack of or
• 1:19:36
  if you want to use a different word, people who were Christians and then
• 1:19:40
  aren't Christians anymore, because that's become a wallpaper of the the you know,
• 1:19:45
  the world of our our band and other bands, other people in bands,
• 1:19:49
  and our fans. You know, like a lot of them grew up in
• 1:19:54
  kind of a youth group world or a world where they were listening to Christian
• 1:19:58
  music and identified with the idea of other Christian bands. But then these bands
• 1:20:00
  stopped being Christian, or they stopped being Christian. And so for the first
• 1:20:04
  time in many years, we had re entered the world of our band and
• 1:20:11
  felt, in a lot of ways like an exact re entry, because the
• 1:20:15
  bands that we toured with and the bands that we were on a label with
• 1:20:17
  were all there at this festival, which was a beautiful thing. We had
• 1:20:20
  a wonderful time and it was great seeing these old friends and everything, And
• 1:20:25
  in the in the moment, I think that, and this is something that
• 1:20:29
  I had thought about ahead of time. It was not unusual during Showbred's touring
• 1:20:34
  career that I might go on on stage about what we think about Jesus,
• 1:20:41
  and it was not unusual for us to not say anything serious, you know,
• 1:20:44
  just kind of wacky stuff. And in the set, so I felt
• 1:20:46
  as if, you know, I was prayerfully considering, like, if there's
• 1:20:50
  something meaningful that what I would argue the Spirit of God has for me to
• 1:20:56
  say in this kind of environment, then I would like to be open to
• 1:20:59
  that. So that was something that was on my mind before we got there,
• 1:21:02
  and in the moment that was what I felt, as if it was
• 1:21:06
  meant to be an encouragement to a certain type of person that feels as I
• 1:21:14
  had felt at a certain time in my life, discouraged by what feels like
• 1:21:19
  not just a breakdown in a certain expression of Christianity that one might argue is
• 1:21:26
  not even an authentic expression of Christianity, but what feels like a breakdown in
• 1:21:30
  the church with a capital see, you know what I mean, in the
• 1:21:32
  historic Christian movement. And to say that, you know, I think one
• 1:21:36
  thing I did say was like, I mean these things that I'm saying now
• 1:21:41
  more than I met them in two thousand and four songs about Jesus and what
• 1:21:45
  it means to be Christian, because we just played the Nihilism record, and
• 1:21:48
  I wanted to communicate that, like some you know, I'm I'm still here
• 1:21:53
  for anyone that has in it that, for anyone that would attach some kind
• 1:21:57
  of meaning to that, or that thinks that that's a any kind of significance,
• 1:22:00
  because it would be to me, you know, I'm encouraged by that
• 1:22:03
  kind of thing. And I didn't mean at all to suggest that, like
• 1:22:06
  the only way to be clearly, the only way to be punk is not
• 1:22:10
  necessarily to be Christian, because some of our best punk bands are not Christian,
• 1:22:14
  and some of them are anti Christian. It's right, but I do
• 1:22:16
  I mean as and someone online afterwards I saw it was like Josh went full
• 1:22:21
  youth pastor they were like he might as well have sat in a chair backwards
• 1:22:26
  because they thought it was so lame or something like that were cringey, which
• 1:22:29
  is fine. I honestly laughed at that, but I didn't mean to be
• 1:22:31
  like, well, it's punk rock and follow Jesus, but I did.
• 1:22:34
  For me, That's always been what I attached to the significance of punk rock
• 1:22:40
  music is that I wanted to figure out what it means to follow Jesus of
• 1:22:44
  Nazareth. Who's drawing power to me in the beginning was his subversiveness, that
• 1:22:50
  it seemed to push against the status quo in every meaningful way of my life
• 1:22:56
  as someone who's kind of wired for rebellion, and I've so I found in
• 1:23:00
  Jesus not the you know, the the political figurehead that the world of my
• 1:23:06
  upbringing saw, but I saw, like, you know, the subversive Jesus.
• 1:23:10
  And I was like, I want that in the same way that you're
• 1:23:13
  talking about, like you know, that period out of conservative Christianity into these
• 1:23:16
  other voices and you're like, cool, this is this was what makes sense
• 1:23:19
  to me or what speaks to me. I saw that in the in the
• 1:23:24
  subversive Jesus and just needed them. You know. I didn't have the language
• 1:23:29
  or the theological education to populate words, you know, like around that or
• 1:23:34
  ideas or anything, but I knew that's what I wanted. And I saw
• 1:23:36
  that same thing in punk rock music, that deliberate pushing against the status quo
• 1:23:42
  and the rejection of like a herd mentality and group think. We have to
• 1:23:46
  think this because this is what everyone thinks. And to me personally, I
• 1:23:53
  felt like it was important, it was important to me in the moment to
• 1:23:56
  express that. I I felt as if there is still something beautifully subversive and
• 1:24:01
  rebellious about faithfulness about like I've I have decided that I will continue to follow
• 1:24:08
  Jesus. And you know, I obviously there was that dude who said I
• 1:24:12
  was a full youth pastor or something like that, and I'm sure that a
• 1:24:15
  lot of other people were rolling their eyes. I understood that that was going
• 1:24:17
  to happen, and you know, that happened to me back in the early
• 1:24:20
  two thousands when I talk about Jesus on stage, and and that was pre
• 1:24:25
  you know, like seminary degree or anything. So now I guess I could
• 1:24:29
  say on paper, I know what I'm talking about. I'm doing air quotes
• 1:24:31
  if you can't see me, and people are still rolling their eyes, which
• 1:24:35
  is totally fine. But then there were people who would come up to me
• 1:24:39
  afterwards with tears in their eyes and be like, man, what you said
• 1:24:44
  like invigorated my zeal for life, and so, you know, like there
• 1:24:47
  was like to experience that kind of solidarity with someone who feels detached from youth.
• 1:24:54
  They're like a mile away on a stage and you're in a crowd singing
• 1:24:57
  these old songs that you liked when you were in high school, and some
• 1:25:00
  dudes like, I'm still in it with you, and they were like,
• 1:25:02
  okay, I won't give up. That felt to them like an encouragement to
• 1:25:08
  stay the course. And that's all I was after. You know, I
• 1:25:11
  understood that it's like it's not for everyone. If if you hear this thing
• 1:25:14
  and you're like, that's so lame, I just like songs from nihilism,
• 1:25:16
  That's totally fine. It's not for you. It'll be over in you know,
• 1:25:20
  another two minutes of talking part and we'll play stabbing art to death.
• 1:25:26
  But if it is for you, then I hope that it finds its way
• 1:25:30
  and it's meaning in a meaningful sense into you. And it seemed like I
• 1:25:33
  don't mean to say like, wow, I changed everyone's life, but at
• 1:25:35
  least a handful of people confirmed that it was like, oh, that is
• 1:25:39
  what I needed to hear. So sometimes you just it's like art in general,
• 1:25:45
  you you feel like this might be lost on ninety percent of the audience,
• 1:25:48
  but maybe ten percent we'll under will receive it in a meaningful way,
• 1:25:54
  and then you put it out there and see what happens. Yeah, I
• 1:25:57
  mean I feel like I resonate with a lot of that, again being somebody
• 1:26:00
  who I feel more Christian than I've ever been, and maybe to some degree,
• 1:26:05
  like in two thousand and four, when you're preaching about Jesus on stage
• 1:26:09
  or whatever, and now here you are in twenty twenty at Furnace Best in
• 1:26:13
  twenty twenty, and you're saying these same things, and you're like, wait,
• 1:26:15
  I feel feel like more like I'm trying to follow Jesus more than I
• 1:26:18
  ever have, even back from two thousand and four. And so that's the
• 1:26:23
  way I've like felt too. And yeah, like even though like politically and
• 1:26:28
  theologically I've completely changed since like two thousand and four for myself, right,
• 1:26:32
  and even though in a lot of other Christians, mostly like kind of fundamentalist
• 1:26:36
  people would think that I'm not a Christian at all, even though I feel
• 1:26:41
  more Christian than I've ever been. And so it's just really interesting, like
• 1:26:44
  how people perceive words like that and even though, like I think, I
• 1:26:48
  really resonate with like a lot of what you've said, and I'm one of
• 1:26:51
  those people that feels like, hey, I'm just as Christian, if not
• 1:26:56
  more Christian, than I've ever been, and this is like something that's really
• 1:26:58
  meaningful, and I want to like spread that good news in the world.
• 1:27:02
  And yet like my theology is completely different than it wasn't. Yeah, yeah,
• 1:27:08
  I get you, and I feel the same way. I feel as
• 1:27:10
  if I think that maybe the stuff that I make and so few people are
• 1:27:17
  paying any attention, not to absolve myself of responsibility, but I'm not you
• 1:27:21
  know, some kind of like household name or anything like that. But the
• 1:27:25
  few people that catchwind of the things that I'm doing or resonate it with,
• 1:27:30
  resonate with it in any kind of way, whether that's you know, they
• 1:27:33
  don't like it, or they do like it, but it has some kind
• 1:27:35
  of stickiness to them. I feel as if sometimes what I most want to
• 1:27:42
  say is, you know, if you feel personally attacked by a punk rock
• 1:27:48
  record or something like that, I have before. You know, I've listened
• 1:27:53
  to music and been offended by it, and sometimes that means that I'm like,
• 1:27:57
  oh, man, this this artist is calling me dumb or something,
• 1:28:00
  you know, or other times I'm like, this doesn't apply to me.
• 1:28:03
  They I think they think they're critiquing me, but I don't think they're critiquing
• 1:28:06
  me. So you know, when I was in high school, I was
• 1:28:10
  a Christian and I was listening to Antichrist Superstar by Marilyn Manson on repeat,
• 1:28:15
  and it didn't bother me at all because I was thinking, like, yeah,
• 1:28:17
  well, he's kind of criticizing the evangelical machine, and I don't really
• 1:28:23
  think of myself as belonging to that at all. So go for it,
• 1:28:27
  mister Manson. You know, I feel as if there's something about allowing ourselves
• 1:28:32
  to experience offense and to grapple with what it means, and maybe at the
• 1:28:41
  at the end of that experience, what you decide is this guy's full of
• 1:28:45
  crap, and I'm not going to listen to what he says. But what's
• 1:28:48
  the interesting thing about art, or the thing that most compels me to art
• 1:28:54
  and to be an artist, is that possibility that you cannot just caudle and
• 1:28:59
  play people and or even not just encourage and build them up per se,
• 1:29:04
  but also challenge or rebuke or convict or offend, and I would rather make
• 1:29:13
  something that does all those things than doesn't really say much of anything at all.
• 1:29:20
  Well, we've already talked about Furnace FST a little bit. You guys
• 1:29:24
  played in twenty twenty, didn't play last year, but you're playing this year.
• 1:29:27
  So let's chalk. Let's chat a little bit about this year. And
• 1:29:30
  by the way, for listeners, if you have not yet bought tickets to
• 1:29:32
  Furnace FST, please go get some tickets so you can see show Bred and
• 1:29:36
  see all the unbelievable bands that are going to be playing at Furnace FST this
• 1:29:41
  year, So please go do that. So, Josh, let's talk about
• 1:29:44
  Furnace FST. Obviously you played No Sir Nihilism last time. Is there like
• 1:29:49
  any expectation of what we can maybe here this year? Like, have you
• 1:29:54
  been thinking about that yet? Are you're not even close to thinking about set
• 1:29:57
  lists and what you want to play? But yeah, what what is it
• 1:29:59
  that can expect? Oh? I made the set list a long time ago
• 1:30:02
  because you got to get these guys practicing, or you don't know what's going
• 1:30:05
  to happen. The hilarious thing about playing Furnace Fest the last time we did
• 1:30:11
  it was that that group of people hadn't played together in years and years and
• 1:30:15
  years, and some of them, you know, hadn't played like those songs
• 1:30:20
  at all, and even longer than that, so we I had no idea
• 1:30:26
  what to expect. I was like, I have the easiest job because all
• 1:30:28
  I have to do is remember lyrics and yell them. Especially for Nihilism.
• 1:30:31
  I don't even do a lot of singing, and my singing has always been
• 1:30:34
  kind of touch and go. But I was like, I just show up
• 1:30:38
  and yell stuff, so I've got it covered. All I have to do
• 1:30:42
  is listen to the record and be like, right, that's where those words
• 1:30:44
  go. They have to remember how to play guitar and drums and everything.
• 1:30:46
  And so when I showed up to rehearsal, I had just had my third
• 1:30:51
  kid like a week before, so I came late to rehearsal, and when
• 1:30:56
  I got there, they were already like into the groove of it, and
• 1:31:00
  I was like, Oh, thank god, they sound good, because I
• 1:31:02
  was like, I don't even know if we're gonna be terrible, but they're
• 1:31:05
  all such gifted musicians and they've immediately kind of situated themselves back into their roles
• 1:31:12
  and played wonderfully and by the girls feel like for them, or at least
• 1:31:14
  for them, like does it almost feel like kind of riding a bike where
• 1:31:16
  it's just like you. It must not have played like an instrument for a
• 1:31:19
  while, but like you do it for a couple of minutes and all of
• 1:31:23
  a sudden it all comes back. I think they certainly made it seem that
• 1:31:26
  way, and some more than others. But I mean our drummer from the
• 1:31:30
  first two records in particular, the guy named Marvin Riley. I really don't
• 1:31:33
  mean to sound I'm sure everyone says this about their drummer, but that dude
• 1:31:36
  is probably the best drummer that I've ever experienced in my life. We've had
• 1:31:41
  lots of drummers. I've seen lots of amazing drummers. He's just so incredibly
• 1:31:45
  gifted. And I was worried he lost it or something, you know,
• 1:31:48
  because he hasn't been doing music anything for years and years and years and years.
• 1:31:53
  He plays video games and he works at like a nuclear power plant.
• 1:31:56
  And he picked him up and started twirling his sticks around again, and I
• 1:32:00
  was like, man, he's it's just like a it's an inn egg gifting
• 1:32:02
  for him, and we had such a wonderful time just being around each other.
• 1:32:08
  And last you know, it's those kinds of you have, those kinds
• 1:32:10
  of friends where it's like we haven't seen each other in ten years, but
• 1:32:12
  now we're laughing at all the same inside jokes. But I gave them a
• 1:32:15
  set list, honestly, almost immediately after we were invited to play. And
• 1:32:20
  it's not just playing an album from top to bottom. There's a variety of
• 1:32:25
  things, and which requires that some of them learn songs that they didn't necessarily
• 1:32:30
  even play on. But that makes up kind of like a robust representation of
• 1:32:35
  all these different eras. So I don't know how it's going to go.
• 1:32:39
  My hope and prayer is that the same the history repeats itself. I show
• 1:32:42
  up to the rehearsal and these guys are locked in, ready to go,
• 1:32:46
  but there's a certain amount of unpredictable chaos that makes it interesting and keeps us
• 1:32:51
  laughing. I was like, man, I hope everyone's practicing fitter, hope,
• 1:32:57
  So, but can we expect no shirts again? I don't know.
• 1:33:00
  It was a good question. It was hot that I mean I went,
• 1:33:05
  and then you know, one of our friends is live text and our other
• 1:33:09
  friends back at home like pictures of the show, and my wife, my
• 1:33:13
  wife who was home with our newborn, was just like, oh my god,
• 1:33:16
  shirts off already, people trying to act like they're not old and out
• 1:33:19
  of touch. So but we're going for it, man, I'm committing.
• 1:33:24
  Once I'm there, I'm committed. I'm committed to the performance. Are you
• 1:33:27
  going to be around the whole weekend? I think I'm just there for the
• 1:33:30
  day that we play, which is I specifically asked. I started bothering Chad
• 1:33:35
  Johnson when because he had threatened to invite us again. He's like, I
• 1:33:39
  really want to get you guys to come again. I think that some of
• 1:33:41
  the other organizers at Furnace Best are probably not showbred fans, but Chad is.
• 1:33:45
  So Chad's like, we really need to get my friends to come play.
• 1:33:48
  And I was like, listen, if you ask us, it has
• 1:33:51
  to be on the same day as ninety Pound Woss because it stands the reason
• 1:33:55
  that I might not be able to be there for the whole thing, and
• 1:33:58
  that's the only thing I want to be able to see. The ninety pounds
• 1:34:00
  reunion. So other than that, I don't care when you stick us.
• 1:34:03
  It can be at a bad time slot. It just needs to be on
• 1:34:05
  the same day. And when he invited us, he literally sent the text
• 1:34:09
  that said, can you play on Saturday? In parentheses it's the same day
• 1:34:12
  as ninety pounds. Wow, Chad listening to his dear friends. Yeah,
• 1:34:17
  I appreciated it. We actually we interviewed Jeff a few weeks ago and from
• 1:34:21
  ninety pounds, and he's just a delightful human in kind of similar he's I
• 1:34:27
  think he's in Seattle, but not too ternally far from you. Yeah.
• 1:34:30
  Yeah, he and I have spoken over the years. I mean, like,
• 1:34:32
  I'm a ninety pound was megafan, so I've bothered him ever since I
• 1:34:35
  was, you know, a teenager or something. But we actually just were
• 1:34:40
  on the phone recently because I get to sing a song with ninety Pounds at
• 1:34:45
  Furnace Fest. Now, oh nice. Yeah, so, yeah, my
• 1:34:47
  teenage dreams are coming to fruition finally, as as both you finally meet in
• 1:34:53
  the music industry, Josh, that's right. Yeah, by singing with a
• 1:34:56
  band even more confrontational than Chobret and probably even less popular, but not to
• 1:35:04
  me, not to you, not to you. Well, Josh, let's
• 1:35:09
  get to your top five most influential albums. I would imagine a refused album
• 1:35:14
  is gonna be in there. Sounds like maybe Misspits might even be in there.
• 1:35:16
  But yeah, top five most influential albums of your life. Okay,
• 1:35:23
  I just want to put a disclaim. I don't know what everybody else says
• 1:35:25
  on this part this. You asked this to everybody, right, it's right,
• 1:35:28
  and they all just give you an answer. They all just stay start
• 1:35:30
  spitting out albums. Does it ever seem as if it's like premeditated or do
• 1:35:34
  they usually just kind of go like, oh, it's probably gotta be this,
• 1:35:36
  gotta be that, which you're a little bit of both. Some people
• 1:35:40
  are like they've thought about this question before, even before we ask them,
• 1:35:44
  and so they kind of are already they're ready to go. And some people
• 1:35:46
  are like, I'm just gonna say the five first albums that come in my
• 1:35:49
  mind, right, okay, so full disclosure inside baseball, Like I found
• 1:35:55
  out about this question a moment before we hit record, so I was given
• 1:35:58
  some notice, but my mind has been elsewhere since then. That's right,
• 1:36:01
  And I do like, have a list of top ten records of all time,
• 1:36:04
  but you specifically said not necessarily your favorites. That's right, most influential,
• 1:36:10
  and that's a very different question. So I'm I'm going semi prepared and
• 1:36:15
  semi off the top of my head and trying to be honest about it,
• 1:36:17
  because you could probably say all kinds of cool sound and crap, but it
• 1:36:20
  wouldn't be the truth, you know. What's so most influential? I think
• 1:36:25
  I would probably start with Aerosmiths Get a Grip Interesting, which was like the
• 1:36:32
  first rock record that was truly mine. My dad bought me a copy of
• 1:36:38
  it on cassette tape from Walmart, and he was a big Aerosmith fan,
• 1:36:42
  and I asked if the singles were on the radio at the time, and
• 1:36:44
  I asked if I could have it, and he said, and I quote,
• 1:36:47
  don't tell your mom, and gave me a copy of of Get a
• 1:36:50
  Grip and I listened to it top to bottom over and over and over again.
• 1:36:56
  And I still really like it, and that kind of informed, like
• 1:36:59
  my man, rock and roll music is exciting and aggressive, and so Get
• 1:37:04
  a Grip left a huge lasting impression on me, and I still like it
• 1:37:09
  a ton to this day. Yeah, I definitely like some of the bigger
• 1:37:13
  hits of Aerosmith, even though it does feel much a lot like my dad's
• 1:37:16
  music. It is. It's dad rock, for sure, but there's a
• 1:37:19
  certain timelessness to the Aerosmith classics, you know, totally. I guess after
• 1:37:25
  that, i'd say, and this is probably something a lot of people say,
• 1:37:28
  but Weezer's sophomore record, Pinkerton. Yeah, Pinkerton or like Blue Album
• 1:37:32
  are probably the most common between with Weezer albums. Yeah, to me,
• 1:37:36
  I mean to be a stereotypical fan, those are the only two Weezer records
• 1:37:42
  for me personally, not that I have any issue with them evolving and changing.
• 1:37:45
  But when Pinkerton the Blue Album was such a huge thing that we everyone
• 1:37:53
  I knew had a copy of it. We played it religiously. When Pinkerton
• 1:37:56
  came out, I remember sitting in a room with other friends, putting the
• 1:37:59
  disc in and hitting play, and immediately the rest of the room was like,
• 1:38:02
  dude, this sucks. They were like, it's so low fi and
• 1:38:06
  abrasive, and WHOA, what is this? What happened to the polished power
• 1:38:11
  pop of the Blue Album? And I was smitten. I was like,
• 1:38:15
  this is the coolest thing that and maybe one of the only very few like
• 1:38:19
  what I would call a perfect record in every way top to bottom, and
• 1:38:25
  so much of the Showbred catalog. If you if someone had a dollar for
• 1:38:29
  every time we've said in the studio, you know, like Pinkerton, they'd
• 1:38:32
  be a rich person, so they'd have more money than Showbread to ever made
• 1:38:38
  exactly. So that's inarguably one of the most influential things. That's two.
• 1:38:43
  I think. Third I'd go with Refused, the shape of Punk to Come.
• 1:38:48
  That's definitely mentioned quite a bit. Yeah, and I don't mind being
• 1:38:53
  on that bandwagon, honestly. It was one of those good Yeah. The
• 1:38:56
  first I saw the video first for a New Noise late night on MTV two,
• 1:39:02
  and it felt like my friends and I turned around and looked at each
• 1:39:05
  other and we're like, yeah, that was one of the coolest things I've
• 1:39:09
  ever seen. We'd never seen and we were already versed in punk rock music
• 1:39:12
  and they were on Epitaph at the time. We were big listeners to Epitaph
• 1:39:15
  punk bands and had not had no you know, knowledge of Refused. Went
• 1:39:20
  out the next morning to buy the record from our nearest record store, and
• 1:39:28
  that, you know, it shaped the way that my band sounded for years
• 1:39:30
  and years and years, and we're still stealing stuff from Refused all these years
• 1:39:33
  later. They're so good, so so good. I would love for them
• 1:39:38
  to play for ne Tess. I don't know if that would ever happen,
• 1:39:40
  but god, they're such an incredible band. Also, can we just talk
• 1:39:44
  about for a second, how it's so interesting that two very influential punk hardcore
• 1:39:49
  bands both came from Sweden, Refused and Blindside Yeah around the same time too,
• 1:39:56
  like that, that's a really odd thing that both of those bands came
• 1:40:00
  up at the same time and both influenced the same genre of music. I
• 1:40:02
  find that really fascinating. Yeah, and that that second Blindside record in particular,
• 1:40:08
  that was a huge rotation thing in the show Red world as well.
• 1:40:11
  A thought crushed my mind. So beautiful, beautiful bands, beautiful record.
• 1:40:16
  Can't deny its influence. How did that did? Three? That's three?
• 1:40:20
  Three? Yup? Two more? Two more? Okay, the fourth I
• 1:40:24
  would probably do the Flaming Lips, the soft bulletin. Oh, okay,
• 1:40:31
  I have the Flaming Lips. I've been listening to since nineteen ninety three,
• 1:40:35
  and I bought a copy of Transmissions from the Satellite Heart when they had a
• 1:40:41
  single called she Don't Use Jelly on the radio and thought it was quirky and
• 1:40:45
  interesting. This is when like quirky alternative bands like Pavement and Weezer were kind
• 1:40:49
  of making a name for themselves in the world. So I was a fan
• 1:40:54
  and bought every Flaming Lips record because kind of weird, aggressive, psychedelic pop
• 1:40:59
  alternative and the Yeah, I don't know how many people care about the story
• 1:41:02
  of the Flaming Lips, but they lost to keep band member and kind of
• 1:41:05
  had to reinvent themselves, and they came out with a record call The Soft
• 1:41:09
  Bulletin, which is suddenly deviates from the psychedelic rock format and becomes this kind
• 1:41:14
  of symphonic meditation on death. And it's one of the most beautiful, heartbreaking
• 1:41:19
  records and one of my favorites and one of my most influential records. You
• 1:41:26
  don't necessarily hear it on all the show bet stuff other than the album Who
• 1:41:29
  Can Know It, which was our attempt at trying to capture what the Flaming
• 1:41:31
  Lips do. Ye Colin would really love that pick. He loves the Flaming
• 1:41:36
  Lips. It's probably one of his favorite shows he's ever been to. I
• 1:41:39
  think he talks about it quite often. Yeah, the Flaming Lips live experience,
• 1:41:44
  especially at a certain point touring for the Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the
• 1:41:48
  Pink Robots, was something that I could drag. I've seen him a few
• 1:41:53
  times and I would drag friends who did not like The Flaming Lips. I'd
• 1:41:56
  be like, if you come, I will. I will make a bet
• 1:42:00
  that you will say this is the best show you've ever seen. And they'd
• 1:42:01
  say like, it's not possible. I hate that band, I don't like
• 1:42:04
  that guy's voice, I don't like the songs. I'm like, just take
• 1:42:06
  the bet, what do you have to lose? And they'd come to show
• 1:42:10
  with me, and afterwards, every single one I be like, that was
• 1:42:12
  the best show I've ever seen. The spectacle of it was incredible. Yeah,
• 1:42:16
  all right, last one. Last one is easily nine inch nails The
• 1:42:21
  Downward Spiral. Oh okay, And I have a tattoo on my neck of
• 1:42:28
  the the art that was printed on the CD of The Downward spiral, which
• 1:42:31
  is a coiled up millipede. I don't have any other band tattoos which no
• 1:42:38
  one recognizes. But when I go to a Nine Inch Nails concert, I'm
• 1:42:41
  like royalty. I'm passing through the crowd and people are like, yeah.
• 1:42:45
  It was a friend of mine let me borrow a copy of the album in
• 1:42:47
  nineteen ninety four, and like you, I was kind of existing in this
• 1:42:51
  conservative Christian world where Nine Inch Nails was extremely taboo, and a friend of
• 1:42:58
  mine was like, oh dude, you got it, but you gotta hear
• 1:43:00
  this. You got to listen to this. It's wild and this is pre
• 1:43:02
  punk rock, and I only knew about, like, you know, my
• 1:43:06
  dad's rock music, alternative music that was palatable and accessible, like Weezer and
• 1:43:11
  Green Day, even though that was a little more offensive. But you could
• 1:43:15
  play when I come around for your parents and they wouldn't freak out. And
• 1:43:18
  he gave me a copy of the record. I took it home. I
• 1:43:20
  went for waited for everyone to go to sleep so no one would hear me
• 1:43:24
  in my room listening to this thing. I put on headphones and I listened
• 1:43:27
  to the whole thing from start to finish, sitting in front of my stereo
• 1:43:30
  with the CD book in my hand, and as cliche is a sounds for
• 1:43:34
  a musician to say, it fundamentally re oriented what I think about music in
• 1:43:40
  my mind, the idea of what an album can be, what songwriting is
• 1:43:46
  that it is single handedly the source of my enthusiasm for transgressive art, art
• 1:43:53
  that's offensive or shocking, and the idea of the album as like an experience.
• 1:44:00
  Just track one, track two, track three, and to this day
• 1:44:03
  probably my favorite album of all time, if not The Downward Spiral, then
• 1:44:08
  nine Inch Nails the Fragile as the other. So that album has shaped me
• 1:44:13
  not only the most, but infinitely more than any other record. And I
• 1:44:18
  still can play it from top to bottom sitting in front of a stereo and
• 1:44:21
  be enthralled easily. Well, you know, if Showbred ever does release another
• 1:44:28
  album, maybe you need to write and record it in the sight of a
• 1:44:32
  where somebody's been murdered, because I'm looking here right now. Downward Spiral was
• 1:44:36
  written where the Yeah, yeah, allegedly he didn't know that when he bought
• 1:44:45
  the house, but but yeah, how would you not know that? Yeah,
• 1:44:47
  I know it's funny. It's a funny kind of urban legend. But
• 1:44:50
  yeah, even the idea of the way that it was made, all that
• 1:44:54
  contributes to the aesthetic for me, And of course I didn't know that the
• 1:44:56
  first time I put it in, but you know, like I'm like a
• 1:45:00
  Nine inch Nails super fans, so I like obsessed over all these details and
• 1:45:02
  the minutia of each recording experience and what you know. He was most influenced
• 1:45:09
  by Bowie at the time, especially like the Druggie Berlin era Bowie and the
• 1:45:14
  David Bowie album Low. But I didn't know about those things at the time.
• 1:45:17
  I got them through Nine Inch Nails, And for me, the downward
• 1:45:23
  Spiral was my Low, my David Bowie's Low. That was how I found
• 1:45:27
  out about this other world of profound, immersive concept artistry that's also like aggressively
• 1:45:35
  confrontational and subversive and and taboo. Love it, Love it. Well,
• 1:45:43
  that's a great list. Obviously, you can very much hear that stuff on
• 1:45:45
  Showbred, like, you know, whether it's refused Nine inch Nails, even
• 1:45:50
  a little bit of flamy Lips, like you can kind of hear all of
• 1:45:53
  that throughout all of Showbred's discography, which is really cool. Thanks man.
• 1:45:57
  I take that as a huge compliment, and thank you for having me and
• 1:46:00
  having this wonderful conversation. You've been so delightful and kind and gracious and everything.
• 1:46:05
  No, Cullen didn't started off as if like we would get friends.
• 1:46:09
  But I think at the end we can say that we're good. We're friends
• 1:46:12
  now. Yeah. Absolutely, I was like, Oh, I didn't know
• 1:46:14
  we were going to have to fight, but no, it was wonderful.
• 1:46:15
  Thank you for having me. I sincerely we can still fight if you want.
• 1:46:18
  No, at this point it would be a put on. I feel
• 1:46:20
  too good about everything. Josh, what do you want to plug? Obviously
• 1:46:26
  Ferness Fest is coming up here soon, you guys will be playing there,
• 1:46:29
  But yeah, what do you want to plug? Well, you know,
• 1:46:31
  I continue to I continue to write books and make music and lots of different
• 1:46:38
  I don't want to borre everybody with all these details, but I have a
• 1:46:41
  bunch of like active projects that spill out different kinds of music. And I
• 1:46:45
  have a book coming out later this year called With All Its Teeth, Sex,
• 1:46:48
  violence, profanity, and the Death of Christian Art, which is kind
• 1:46:54
  of a book all about the value of offensive art and the Christian tradition.
• 1:47:00
  Do you talk a little bit about piss Christ? The opening prologue of the
• 1:47:04
  book is about piss Christ. Oh, I love. I took one of
• 1:47:08
  my seminary classes. I did an art history class. The seminary workout is
• 1:47:11
  like really into arts stuff. So I wrote a like a whole script about
• 1:47:16
  pis Christ and actually made like a YouTube video about it. But yeah,
• 1:47:18
  that's so cool. Yeah, I'd love to see that. Yeah, that's
• 1:47:20
  awesome. So I continue to make stuff. I've got a couple of novels
• 1:47:25
  that are coming out next year as well. I keep everything at Joshua sporter
• 1:47:30
  dot com. So if the book about a book called Death to Deconstruction sounds
• 1:47:35
  too alienating for you, or maybe that sounds like exactly the type of thing
• 1:47:39
  you'd like to read, there's that. But I also make other stuff.
• 1:47:42
  So there's something for everyone to hate in my library of output. I mean,
• 1:47:48
  between both of us, there's no shortage of hate treads. So love
• 1:47:53
  it, love it, anything else you'd like to plug? Yeah, other
• 1:47:58
  people don't realize that. But there's a scene. And here's something that a
• 1:48:03
  lot of people do know about me, as I'm a big Jurassic Park fan's
• 1:48:08
  I mean age of reptiles, of course, age of reptiles. Yeah.
• 1:48:10
  I've been a big dinosaur fan since childhood, really into paleontology, and I've
• 1:48:14
  raised my kids as such. Jurassic Park was like my Star Wars when I
• 1:48:17
  was ten years old. But what people don't know is that they actually hosted
• 1:48:24
  kind of a sweepstakes for the final Jurassic World film, Jurassic World Dominion,
• 1:48:28
  in which a random person could be selected, win the sweepstakes, and be
• 1:48:32
  devoured by a dinosaur. In the movie, they don't know that I won
• 1:48:36
  that sweepstakes. And there's a scene during a raptor motorcycle and a motorcycle chase
• 1:48:44
  with the Trossa Raptors through the streets of Malta in which a rogue Allosaurus breaks
• 1:48:49
  free of its constraints and eats a man off of a segue very quickly.
• 1:48:54
  In the background, that man is me, Wow, what an unbelievable story.
• 1:49:00
  What like, so you won the sweepstakes? Like what when? Did?
• 1:49:02
  When did this get film? I'm not like the biggest Drastic Park fans,
• 1:49:04
  so like, what what year would this been? Well, Durrassic World
• 1:49:08
  Dominion was one of the first movies to resume production during the COVID. Oh,
• 1:49:13
  so it's like very this is very recent. This is right fifteen years
• 1:49:15
  ago. Okay, yeah, super recent. And uh and so I had
• 1:49:19
  to do it a lot of it, you know, digitally, but they're
• 1:49:23
  there. Is it like, is it all like special effects stuff or did
• 1:49:26
  you like was there some sort of like animatronic dinosaur that like I wish I
• 1:49:30
  could say it was an animatronic but no, Unfortunately I posed on a segue
• 1:49:35
  in front of a grain screen and the rest is movie magic. Wow.
• 1:49:41
  But yeah, an unbelievable story. Wow. If you weren't famous from that,
• 1:49:45
  then certainly you're not going to be famous for anything else, exactly making
• 1:49:49
  hardcore music. This is my last chance. This is my last chance of
• 1:49:53
  notoriety. Maybe maybe you'll be in Barbie two. That's what I'm hoping.
• 1:49:58
  Yeah, I hear that they're looking for more kins. There you go.
• 1:50:00
  Well, if I when I think of Kendall, I think of Joshua Porter.
• 1:50:03
  That's what people keep telling me. That's what they've told me in my
• 1:50:05
  whole life. So well, I love it. Well, Josh we're looking
• 1:50:10
  forward to seeing you at Furnace Bass. We'll be at the festival of the
• 1:50:13
  whole week so on on Saturday, at some point, hopefully we run running
• 1:50:16
  into each other, give each other a big hug, and we'll talk shit
• 1:50:19
  back. It's awesome, Thanks dude, and thanks again for having me.
• 1:50:21
  It's a good time, ye