Latest / The BlackSheep Podcast: Presented by HM Magazine / Clint McManaman: Subseven

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Clint McManaman: Subseven · The BlackSheep Podcast: Presented by HM Magazine

• 0:30
  Today we have Clint from Sub seven. Uh, this is a really cool
• 0:34
  interview for Colin and I. Sub seven Obviously you guys never got like to
• 0:38
  the levels of fame that we would have hoped for, and maybe you guys
• 0:42
  would have hoped for, But certainly Sub seven was a band that Colin and
• 0:45
  I, I mean Colin, I would say it was probably one of those
• 0:48
  first bands that we've bonded over, you know, certainly Blindside and like Norma
• 0:51
  Jean, but seven, Sub seven was one of those bands early on in
• 0:54
  Colin and I's friendship. We just would hang out listening to to Free to
• 0:59
  Conquer all the time. So this is a really special interview for us,
• 1:03
  mostly because Sub seven is like one of those bands that kind of like mark
• 1:06
  our relationship, like calling and his relationship. So super excited to chat with
• 1:10
  you. How are you doing today? Good? Good, Thanks for having
• 1:12
  me. It's yeah. I've been watching for a few months and kind of
• 1:15
  seeing it was Josh Porter's interview that really kind of connected me over and I
• 1:21
  was like, oh, this is awesome and started following you guys, and
• 1:23
  I think that's how our conversations kicked off. So oh yeah, yeah,
• 1:26
  really cool so, like I'd spent a little bit of time with Josh way
• 1:30
  back in the day after Sub seven. We were working with a nonprofit.
• 1:34
  I was doing documentary film work, and we went to India and we kind
• 1:38
  of hung out in India for a couple of weeks together, and I got
• 1:42
  to know him and his brother and a couple other guys from the band.
• 1:46
  That's awesome. That sounds like a blast. Yeah, that's good company.
• 1:49
  That's good company to be with, right, Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
• 1:53
  Josh Josh seems It's funny because you know, like Showbread was one of those
• 1:56
  bands that was like always kind of like try to be like goofballs when it
• 1:59
  came to interviews. But like, if you ever talk to Josh at least
• 2:02
  now, maybe maybe it was different or maybe it was same back then,
• 2:06
  but he's so sincere and so thoughtful, and it's funny to like think that
• 2:10
  their interview style, at least back when they like in their heyday, they
• 2:14
  were just like always trying to be as like ridiculous as possible. Yeah.
• 2:17
  Oh yeah, So I don't know if you got like any sense of hanging
• 2:22
  out with Josh where he like still has those moments of being like really ridiculous,
• 2:27
  or maybe he's like always thoughtful now, but anyway, I always find
• 2:30
  that really funny. Yeah, we were younger then too. This was probably
• 2:34
  ten years ago, maybe maybe longer actually, I can you know, COVID
• 2:38
  time kind of messes everything up, so he kind of lose like, yeah,
• 2:42
  track of really how much time has passed? But yeah, we yeah,
• 2:46
  and that's why I was drawn to those guys in general. Just just
• 2:47
  super lighthearted and like not lighthearted, but I think just like chill and fun.
• 2:53
  And then the work that we were doing there was very important and they
• 2:59
  were very sincere about that work. So just seemed like very genuine, genuine
• 3:04
  dudes in general. So yeah, let's call it love it. Let's talk
• 3:07
  about the history of Sub seven and how you get involved, maybe even before
• 3:12
  we actually talked about like Sub seven and the early part of that, those
• 3:15
  you know, the early years like early two thousands. How did you just
• 3:19
  get in music in general? What what inspired you to want to start being
• 3:23
  a part of a band. Yeah, I grew up Wes and I both
• 3:28
  grew up in Southwest Oklahoma, really the majority of the band did, and
• 3:32
  Wes and I went to the same high school, same junior high seen high
• 3:37
  school, and there was I think for me it was you know, I
• 3:43
  grew up in a very conservative Baptist upbringing, and I would say around the
• 3:49
  age of probably I was fourteen. It's so funny to think about to kind
• 3:54
  of think about this stuff again. But I hadn't played a musical instrument or
• 3:59
  anything up well. I played piano, but I wasn't really serious about it.
• 4:01
  My parents were just like, you need to learn piano. My grandma
• 4:04
  knew how to play piano. She was very talented, and she was in
• 4:09
  a gospel band with her like eight brothers and sisters back in the day.
• 4:15
  They played once with Johnny Cash at a small church like Arizona. Yeah,
• 4:19
  just kind of wild, like my grandma's story of you know, she's probably
• 4:26
  thirteen, fourteen, and she walks up to Johnny Cash and introduces herself and
• 4:30
  he's like, hello, little girl, you know, and just kind of
• 4:31
  in his voice, you know, and like she remembers, she I remember
• 4:35
  telling me that. And so music was always kind of a thing. Like
• 4:40
  when I was at my grandparents, my grandma would send me on a lap
• 4:44
  played country songs, and so I grew up around like a lot of the
• 4:46
  older kind of western country western stuff. But I never really got serious about
• 4:51
  music until I was fourteen and we were the church I was with. We
• 4:58
  were in Omaha, Nebraska, and we were on a mission trip, which
• 5:01
  really was just us passing out flyers for a church plant in Omaha, Nebraska.
• 5:06
  But one of the older kind of high school people that they were driving
• 5:12
  the car driving around, one of the seniors he puts Nirvana in the CD
• 5:16
  player and I had never heard this before. I had never heard a lot
• 5:20
  of things, just growing up in a very sheltered, kind of insular,
• 5:23
  kind of kind of upbringing, and I didn't know what I was hearing,
• 5:27
  but I knew I wanted to learn more and I wanted to do whatever that
• 5:30
  was happening. I wanted to be a part of something like that. And
• 5:34
  that was the hook for me, was I didn't know who Dave Girl was.
• 5:39
  I didn't know who Nirvana was. And actually, so it was ninety
• 5:42
  four, that would have been ninety four to ninety five, kirk Oa Main
• 5:45
  had already passed away. So like I was like way late to the game
• 5:48
  Nirvana, right I was. I was just kind of learning about it.
• 5:53
  But I came home and I was just so stoked to play drums. I
• 5:56
  needed to figure this thing out because it sounded incredible to me and so many
• 6:02
  things. It just kind of clicked. It was really strange, it was
• 6:04
  just kind of clicked. And so that was the thing that clicked for me,
• 6:09
  was hearing that. I came home and I started saving money that summer
• 6:14
  doing just doing odd jobs, and I bought my first drum kit. I
• 6:18
  had no one to play with, though. I was just like, I
• 6:20
  want to figure this out. And that is what kicked it off, I
• 6:25
  think for quite a few things. Wes at the time was had played guitar
• 6:30
  and we were like we were friends because of basketball, we played sports together
• 6:34
  and but we didn't have any musical connection or anything. And I was like
• 6:40
  hooked on figuring out how to start a band. And we started talking and
• 6:46
  he was he had just gotten his license that next summer, and we he
• 6:49
  was like, hey, man, I'm going to go to Oklahoma City.
• 6:51
  There's this place called the Outer the One Cafe or no, it's the Outer
• 6:55
  Cafe, the Outer Cafe, and it was a place for the kind of
• 7:00
  like smaller kind of punk rock shows, and he was like, you want
• 7:03
  to go and I had to beg my parents to let me, for one,
• 7:06
  just go anywhere with anyone. But it was also like going to Okahoma
• 7:11
  City from where I lived was like a two and a half hour drive,
• 7:14
  so we would even say like, we're going to the city when we would
• 7:16
  go Tokahoma City, right, because I just lived out in the middle of
• 7:19
  nowhere. And that was I remember we went to this small venue and it
• 7:26
  was miss Angie, Cosmos Express and Soul Food seventy six, three bands I'd
• 7:32
  never heard of. But I remember standing in the front and there was probably
• 7:38
  a couple hundred kids there just kind of, you know, having a great
• 7:41
  time. And I remember just standing in the front like a statue, just
• 7:44
  staring at the drummers, just like focused in and I was like, you
• 7:47
  know, just trying to like just observe and like learn, And that was
• 7:53
  kind of where it all happened. That ride home. I was like,
• 7:57
  West, when you start a band. He was already kind of playing some
• 8:00
  stuff at his church, and I was like, I don't know what I'm
• 8:01
  doing, but we're gonna figure it out. And that kicked it off and
• 8:03
  so and my parents, you know, for me, that was like the
• 8:07
  thing that like got me interested, and that was like my parents are in
• 8:11
  anything. Really, my parents were like they didn't understand that I was.
• 8:16
  I was waking up in the morning, like you know, six am,
• 8:18
  to go into the barn and play drums up until I had to go to
• 8:22
  school. And then I would come home from school, do my chores,
• 8:28
  do farm chores, you know, because we had like we had cattle,
• 8:31
  we had farmland, we had all this stuff, and I would do all
• 8:35
  the things and then I would go into the barn and just play drums until
• 8:37
  I just, you know, it was time to go to sleep. I
• 8:39
  was just I was infatuated. I love that they were in the barn with
• 8:45
  like potentially other animals or whatever, right, Like yeah, it was like
• 8:48
  it was actually the perfect setup, you know, being in the middle of
• 8:52
  nowhere, trying to figure out how to play drums and wanting to just and
• 8:56
  really there was no neighbors, right, so I could just allow as I
• 8:58
  wanted and yeah, and so that's what I did, and it just kind
• 9:03
  of that's where it all kind of started, and slowly it turned into sub
• 9:07
  seven when we went to uh, when we went to college, did you
• 9:11
  guys also practice in that barn. We practiced in the garage West had like
• 9:16
  also had this. We called it the Extra Room. It's actually one of
• 9:20
  the first songs that we wrote as a band was a song called the Extra
• 9:22
  Room. And that was that was like in town. We would show up,
• 9:28
  but we can only play certain you know, during certain hours, because
• 9:31
  he had neighbors next door. And it slowly progressed to where we just moved
• 9:35
  everything back out to the barn and that's where Sub seven that's where we did
• 9:39
  pre production for the EP. Like our producer from La came out and like
• 9:45
  hung out in the barn. Had some really great video and photos of like
• 9:48
  it was so cold that we had to have this like a one of those
• 9:54
  like kerosene heaters kind of blowing in the background. So a lot of the
• 9:58
  like rough tracks that we were recording had this kerosene heater in the background just
• 10:01
  blowing. But it was so cold and that barn and but we did it,
• 10:05
  and our producer was like, what have I gotten myself into? Like
• 10:09
  we have to we have to get you guys out to LA and do this.
• 10:13
  These guys are country as hell. Oh yeah, absolutely, oh yeah.
• 10:16
  We were so green. I mean, it was. It was and
• 10:20
  this was like kind of like in the beginning of college. So first two
• 10:24
  years of college, we're forming a band. Our We we met our bass
• 10:31
  player Reid kind of in that time, and we were a three piece and
• 10:35
  we started playing shows and then we added Smokey. He was our first guitar
• 10:39
  player. He's the one who but he wrote most of like what you hear
• 10:43
  on the EPR or a majority of that, like he wrote Emotion and dirt
• 10:46
  Roads and was a huge influence on the on the band, and and part
• 10:50
  of really kind of us changing, Like I should back up a little bit,
• 10:54
  like our first name because Wes was we both were really influenced by Tooth
• 10:58
  and Nail bands. The Ball magazine. That was like our hook, you
• 11:01
  know, that was our hook into culture. Getting those magazines delivered. Oh
• 11:07
  gosh, I just remember getting those in the mail and it was just like
• 11:09
  Christmas, like, yes, finally, like I have some you know,
• 11:13
  to to kind of pour over and and that and so five Iron Frenzy was
• 11:18
  like a huge influence in the early days. And West was like one day
• 11:22
  He's like, hey, man, I think I got a name for our
• 11:24
  band. And I was like Okay, what is it? What do you
• 11:26
  got? He was like, seventy three cent Rampage and I was like,
• 11:31
  that sounds a lot like five Iron Frenzy. He goes, yeah, but
• 11:35
  I think it'll work. I think it'll work, and I was like,
• 11:35
  all right, let's go for it. So the beginning it was seventy three
• 11:39
  cent Rampage. We had T shirts made and stickers and we just wow.
• 11:43
  And so fast forward to college and smoke He's like, we need to change
• 11:50
  the band name. He's like, he's yeah, He's kind of like,
• 11:52
  it's so funny because we were so rough around the edges, and Smokey was
• 11:56
  and still is this like very polished, like discipline the guitar player with the
• 12:01
  name like Smoky. That's not what I would imagined. But it just was
• 12:07
  very much like, you know, we got to get serious about this,
• 12:11
  and so we did, and we just we started playing anything that we could
• 12:15
  play, and and that's and then things got really serious. About two years
• 12:20
  in. We had a manager, and our manager was the same guy who
• 12:24
  was the manager for Pillar, and so we had this kind of connection in
• 12:28
  the very beginning with some of the bands on Flicker Records, and then Pillar
• 12:33
  of course, and that that really opened doors for us to start thinking about
• 12:39
  maybe maybe we're you know, if we get serious about this, we can
• 12:43
  we can go on tour and do the thing we want to do. And
• 12:46
  so that's that's kind of where it all kicked off, and from there it's
• 12:52
  it all just kind of is a blur. So many things happened in that
• 12:54
  like twenty four, twenty years ago. Actually this month was when yeah,
• 12:58
  we were least Free to Conquer and actually it was in April I think,
• 13:03
  but it was like around this time that we're gearing up to do all that
• 13:05
  stuff, and we were recording the music video for Emotion. Actually it was
• 13:11
  the EP. I should back up. The video for Emotion came out in
• 13:15
  two thousand and four, somewhere in there, so it's cool it's somewhere in
• 13:18
  that time time is yeah. Yeah, Free to Conquer came out in two
• 13:20
  thousand and five, so yeah, yeah, so the EP comes out in
• 13:24
  two thousand and four. We recorded the music video for Emotion in downtown Oklahoma
• 13:28
  City. We had signed a flicker like just a few months before that.
• 13:33
  I got married like right around that same time, and life was happening.
• 13:39
  I mean just so many things were going and we went to LA and recorded
• 13:43
  the EP, and in that time, Smokey decided he was like, I
• 13:48
  don't want to be I don't want to tour. I don't want to do
• 13:50
  any of this kind of stuff. We're like, wait, what what?
• 13:52
  Like we had already the serious one, Yeah, exactly, we had just
• 13:56
  we had recorded this like rough demo and every anything else, and so we
• 14:01
  were like now searching for our like we needed another guitar player, and we
• 14:05
  ended up getting two other guitar players, so j K and Caleb who joined
• 14:09
  the band who everyone knows is sub seven. They joined the band around that
• 14:13
  time, and we signed on the dotted line and went and did the thing.
• 14:20
  So in quick college all of our parents, you know, parents are
• 14:24
  not super stoked about that college. Did you go back to college? I
• 14:31
  did not. I did good move, good move. Yeah. You know
• 14:37
  what I find really crazy about this is, you know that was like the
• 14:41
  start, but that was also pretty near the end. Do you want to
• 14:45
  kind of talk about like why, ye, why things broke up? I
• 14:48
  mean, I mean see this was like this for me and Mason, this
• 14:50
  was like the big disheartening thing was like this band, this band is so
• 14:56
  good, and we we want to keep getting more music like this because it's
• 15:01
  it's exactly what we what we wanted. I would go so far as to
• 15:05
  say that I think that Free to Concker it was like one of those albums
• 15:09
  that's perfect, Like every single song is an absolute banger. So I've been
• 15:15
  I've been waiting twenty years for, you know, a follow up. Yeah,
• 15:18
  that's a good question, I think, you know, I think that
• 15:22
  there's there are quite a few things I would think about in that kind of
• 15:26
  span of time that happened. Everything happened really fast. We went kind of
• 15:28
  from zero to sixty in a really short amount of time. And we were
• 15:35
  wanting it. I mean we we definitely we were hustling for it. And
• 15:39
  I think that, like I can remember that summer before we signed with Flicker,
• 15:43
  we played we played this. It was like a the Battle of the
• 15:46
  bands in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and Tooth and Nail Records is there, and
• 15:52
  one of ours is Syria, and all these labels that we knew and wanted
• 15:54
  to be a part of were there, and we played the thing and it
• 16:00
  was great and we ended up like winning the thing, and and it was
• 16:03
  like we're kind of riding the high and it was like, Okay, what's
• 16:07
  next. And then right after that, we went to Cornerstone and played Cornerstone
• 16:11
  for the first time and had the absolute worst show I can remember, at
• 16:17
  least from my perspective. It was like, damn it, we did not
• 16:18
  do good. I remember what went bad with that show. I think we
• 16:22
  well, it was a couple of things. I think we were. For
• 16:26
  one, I think we were not well rested as a band. We had
• 16:30
  just been going and going and going, and we had troubles with our van
• 16:33
  when we got there. The van actually broke down, and you know,
• 16:37
  Cornerstone, it's like triple digit heat. You're just like, it's it is
• 16:41
  what it is, and I feel like we there was that. There was
• 16:45
  also a huge anxiety on the vand to perform well. I remember playing and
• 16:49
  looking out and I saw Brandon Ebel from Tooth and Nail in the crowd,
• 16:53
  and I saw Chad Johnson and a few others that I that I knew from
• 16:56
  that kind of world of Tooth and Nail, and I just, you know,
• 17:00
  I felt like, oh man, we're just off. Like I just
• 17:03
  knew we were off, and I don't you know, you never know,
• 17:07
  you never really know. These are just things that like I just my personal
• 17:11
  thoughts of it kind of like the way I saw it happening going down was
• 17:14
  like we weren't tight, we were kind of all over the place, we
• 17:17
  weren't really ourselves, and we were playing for quite a few people who just
• 17:21
  didn't know who we were. So the crowd like the that like wasn't it
• 17:25
  wasn't clicking, and it just felt like a very off shows, like of
• 17:27
  all the shows, why this one? Why now? You know? Kind
• 17:30
  of thing. And we had been talking with Tooth and Now and stuff,
• 17:33
  and our manager had been talking with them, and there was like conversation about,
• 17:38
  you know, what would it looked like for Step seven to be on
• 17:41
  the label. But then also we're talking to Flicker, We're talking to a
• 17:44
  few others, and so we signed the deal with Flicker eventually and we just
• 17:51
  went and it was like we recorded our first we recorded the EP, we
• 17:56
  recorded some music videos, We did our first tour which with East West and
• 18:00
  Sky Harbor and then uh and then Pillar took us out on tour, which
• 18:06
  was super good for us, Like that was us project A six and Pillar
• 18:11
  that's a lineup. Yeah, I think falling Up was on that one's Yeah,
• 18:18
  it was a good it was a good time, and that really like
• 18:22
  like that just opened the doors for us in huge ways. That was It
• 18:27
  was a long tour too, It was like two months or something like that,
• 18:30
  maybe two and a half, so it was a it was like we
• 18:33
  broke it up into two halves and and I think there's there's just for me,
• 18:38
  it was heaven. It was like everything I wanted, Like I was
• 18:41
  having the best time. I also was, you know, financially, I
• 18:45
  was doing freelance on the side as a designer, so like I had my
• 18:48
  side hustle and I could go anywhere. And for me, it was like
• 18:52
  play music, get off stage, GHO, sit in the back of the
• 18:56
  van, do some freelance design work, and then like you know, I
• 19:00
  was actually making a little bit of money here and there for some of the
• 19:03
  bands that we were touring with and then other people we knew, but for
• 19:06
  everybody else, it was like reality hit pretty quick that they some had homes,
• 19:11
  some had cars, some had responsibilities of just like financially needed to be
• 19:17
  met. And I can't really speak for those guys, but I just know
• 19:21
  from the things that I could see like it was I think it was a
• 19:23
  strain on the band in general, and so you can kind of see like
• 19:29
  doing multiple tours. We did another tour with Pillar and and then Project took
• 19:33
  us out on another tour, and I think, what And then we did
• 19:37
  Free to Conquer kind of in the middle of all that, and I remember
• 19:41
  were recording Free to Conquer and but kind of midway through we had to drive
• 19:48
  back to Tulsa and play a festival with Blindside was at and a few others,
• 19:52
  and I remember just being everybody was kind of like tired. Everybody was
• 19:56
  kind of worn out. And reality is like a that like hindsight's always twenty
• 20:02
  twenty. But I think if you could have told us at the time,
• 20:04
  just take a time out, like maybe just take like a couple of weeks
• 20:07
  off or maybe just take like a month off and like give yourselves a break
• 20:11
  to kind of absorb what's happening right now, take care of some responsibilities kind
• 20:17
  of like and then let's reconvene and see. But the label was like go
• 20:21
  go, Go go, and our manager was like go go go, like
• 20:23
  do things like you got it. We have We had things to do.
• 20:26
  And that's that's the kind of the way it is. I mean, we
• 20:30
  with most bands, and I think that I feel like, honestly, I
• 20:33
  think we're just weren't ready for that at the time. I feel like we
• 20:37
  just there was a lot of outside pressure for individuals. And I remember around
• 20:41
  the time of we played Warp Tour, played a couple of days on Warp
• 20:44
  Tour, and I remember our bass player just being like, I'm done.
• 20:48
  I'm kind of oud of this, like I'm just and this was like,
• 20:51
  you know, two thousand, like early twenty five, so Free to Conquer
• 20:55
  is just about to hit, like just about to be released, and yeah,
• 21:00
  and so going, okay, so what do we So what do we
• 21:03
  do? What are we gonna do? And then once that was like he
• 21:07
  said that, and then Jacob or other guitar guitar player was like, yeah,
• 21:11
  I think I'm I'm not really cut out for touring. I don't or
• 21:15
  I don't why don't want to tour or something like that, And so then
• 21:18
  you have the three of us left, and then then you start to kind
• 21:19
  of figure out, well, what's next. And you know, we added
• 21:23
  a couple of members at the time. We added Sean and Evan uh To
• 21:29
  to play like kind of because we had other tours coming up, we had
• 21:33
  we were talking with at the time. This would have been one of those
• 21:36
  tours that I think would have blown the door open for us. But we
• 21:38
  had we were talking with Paramore to go on tour with Paramore, like a
• 21:44
  European tour with Parmore, and like that would have been that would have been
• 21:47
  like one of their first Yeah, that was right, right, Yeah,
• 21:52
  exactly. Wow, So that's two thousand and five. Yeah, I mean
• 21:56
  like Haley would have been like sixteen or something, I mean she would have
• 21:59
  been so yeah, it's somewhere back and then and it's just, you know,
• 22:03
  these are things that like our managers like, hey, this is what
• 22:04
  I'm there are people I'm talking to you, here's what's kind of coming up.
• 22:08
  And then everything kind of started to break and so we and in the
• 22:15
  breaking away that like people were just burnout, like straight up burnout, and
• 22:19
  I'm just going this is awesome, Like I'm just I'm just having my life.
• 22:22
  And I think Wes was too. Wes was Wes was also kind of
• 22:26
  like, you know, we're just gonna make this happen. We're just gonna
• 22:27
  make this happen. This is what we want to do. And I know,
• 22:32
  just like no, no dissing those other guys, Like I think in
• 22:34
  where we're all still really tight, Like I was just saying kind of before
• 22:37
  we kicked off, like I we've been in a group chat for the past
• 22:41
  decade or more, just kind of talking about life, you know, everything
• 22:45
  that's kind of going on. We're all parents now and we all have real
• 22:48
  jobs and all the things. What's the what's the group text name? Is
• 22:52
  it like some sort of sub seven reference. I think it's called now it's
• 22:56
  been changing, it's I mean, look it's it's changed a couple of times.
• 23:00
  I love these by the way, they're always they're always good names.
• 23:03
  Right now it's pretty it's Dad's with the z dads of the band. That's
• 23:08
  our, that's our. But but I think, yeah, I think that
• 23:15
  like that's you know. In our last tour was like we did two weeks
• 23:18
  with Striper, which was the weirdest thing ever. And yeah, it just
• 23:26
  was so weird, like they had decided to come back again and when it
• 23:30
  is one of their many kind of comebacks, and there's Michael Sweet's son was
• 23:34
  like had heard of us and was like, Dad, you need to get
• 23:37
  this band open for you you know, kind of like this will maybe bring
• 23:41
  some some of the youth out to you know, to Striper shows. And
• 23:47
  and there we are playing like House of Blue, Chicago and all these really
• 23:51
  cool venues was with Striper and it actually turned out to be like it was
• 23:55
  really it was really kind of wild. Like it was. It was fun
• 23:57
  and weird and nothing I ever thought we would be doing, but there we
• 24:02
  were, and so yeah, so I think and then it just kind of
• 24:07
  you know, so we we recorded, we we came back to Oklohoa City
• 24:11
  and we decided that like we'll do we'll do one more music video. We're
• 24:15
  gonna do a music video for hold On, and we we we set up
• 24:22
  this the shoot at the Green Door in Oklahoma City, which is was a
• 24:26
  really cool venue back in the day that we all we all loved and we
• 24:30
  invited. You know, it was like there was probably four or five hundred
• 24:33
  kids that came to the show, packed it out, and we just we
• 24:36
  we shot the video. But then we announced on the stage that night,
• 24:38
  we're like, this is also our last show and we're gonna play one last
• 24:42
  set for you kind of this is the last one and did that and then
• 24:48
  and then yeah, and then just and it's all kind of a blur,
• 24:51
  Like it's weird, like we all kind of just went our separate ways.
• 24:53
  Like I got really heavy into like doing design work and joined a bunch of
• 24:57
  nonprofits and start a nonprofit, the Heart Support dot Com that like I started
• 25:03
  that that was actually born out of time and sub seven. Jake from August
• 25:08
  Burn's Red he runs it now. So if you go to an August Burn's
• 25:11
  Red show, you'll see Heart Support stuff everywhere. But that actually started in
• 25:15
  the back of the van on tour with Pillar just kind of you know,
• 25:21
  learn like hearing things from from kids that came to our shows. You know,
• 25:25
  they would just kind of dump on us, like all the things that
• 25:26
  they were kind of like, you know, your song spoke to me in
• 25:29
  this way or that way, or I'm dealing with self injury or I'm dealing
• 25:32
  with suicide or I'm dealing with whatever, and being a kid from you know,
• 25:36
  Podunk, Oklahoma, not knowing really how to like respond to that,
• 25:41
  going like, well, what can I actually what can I actually do to
• 25:45
  like kind of respond and help? And so heart Support was born out of
• 25:48
  that, and I started selling t shirts on MySpace and just donating it to
• 25:53
  like hotlines back in the day. So this is like just you know,
• 25:56
  teen hotlines or suicide. I just didn't know what to do, but I
• 26:00
  wanted to do something. So fast forward a few years and parts support dot
• 26:03
  Com started and it became like a legit nonprofit and ran that for a few
• 26:08
  years as well. So so yeah, so that's a I think most people
• 26:14
  know that, but that's kind of yeah. I've only known it as like
• 26:17
  a yeah, like August Burton's Ride kind of Jake sort of thing. And
• 26:19
  I didn't have any idea that that actually started from you. Yeah, so
• 26:23
  the so of the tattoo on my wrist here, oh yeah, that's awesome.
• 26:27
  Yeah, and that was that was also connected to you, like after
• 26:32
  music, because of all my connections with nonprofits and things of that nature.
• 26:37
  I was doing freelance, but I went to work as a as a creative
• 26:40
  director for Triple X Church at the time, so I was there. Guy's
• 26:45
  got a marijuana business. Now, he's got he's got a lot of things
• 26:48
  going on right now. He's a trip. But but Craig Craig and I
• 26:55
  had met a long time, like kind of in music, and he was
• 27:00
  like, I need some help with design. I love your design work.
• 27:02
  And that opened up a ton of doors for me to go forward and really
• 27:06
  step into being a designer and doing all that. And that's also where I
• 27:11
  was able to start Heart Support. So we we we moved to Grand Rapids,
• 27:15
  that's where that's where Trip Like Church was located at the time. I
• 27:18
  played drums at Mars Hill, so Rob Bell's Mars Hill Church played drums there
• 27:22
  for a little while after after sub seven, uh, and then his brother
• 27:26
  John, rob Bell's brother John, and I and Craig really poured a ton
• 27:30
  of time into launching Heart Support and we did a tour with the guys in
• 27:36
  Family Force five, the Heart Support Tour, and Spoken was on that tour
• 27:41
  as well, and yeah, and just kind of just did that and that
• 27:45
  was, you know, a ton of fun and and but then eventually,
• 27:48
  like I just kind of stepped away from from all of that, Like I
• 27:51
  really stepped away from like nonprofit land, from churches and all that and just
• 27:56
  got really focused in on design. And that's kind of what I've been doing
• 27:59
  the past. I guess decade this year, actually, yeah, wow,
• 28:03
  do you have your your own like a name for your for your design company.
• 28:07
  So I did. For when I first started, I was freelancing.
• 28:10
  I freelanced and then I for about five years and that was like doing anything
• 28:15
  for bands. I wanted to work with bands quite a bit, and I
• 28:18
  worked with nonprofits. And that's how Josh and I from showbre I kind of
• 28:22
  cross paths was doing. I was doing anything creative. I would just say
• 28:26
  like, yeah, I'll go I'll go shoot that video, I'll go make
• 28:30
  an animation, I'll do whatever. It's just kind of like hungry to make
• 28:33
  stuff. And so so that's where that's kind of where I started. And
• 28:37
  then about about ten years ago, actually this year, I started focusing on
• 28:41
  product design and just focusing on like software design, and I really loved creating
• 28:47
  things that within that kind of the crossover of technology in general, and heart
• 28:51
  support was was a big part of that. Tea was like we had an
• 28:55
  online kind of chat, you could chat with the counselor that kind of thing.
• 29:00
  That's I love that kind of that crossroads of really good design but with
• 29:03
  technology that was like moving people and connecting people. So still kind of you
• 29:08
  know around the MySpace time of things is kind of when that was so yeah,
• 29:15
  so yeah, and then that that's kind of where I got really serious
• 29:18
  about I'm going to be you know, I want to I want to create
• 29:22
  things that and so now today, like I'm working for a company called Transient
• 29:26
  Labs. So it's like transient Labs dot x y Z, and it's focused
• 29:29
  on it's a platform for creators in the web three space, so just creating
• 29:33
  a space for people to make art of all types and kind of as everything
• 29:38
  is kind of evolving in that space, it's a lot of what we're working
• 29:41
  on right now is like tools for musicians artists of all types to be able
• 29:45
  to you know, put their art out in the world and in a decentralized
• 29:51
  way and to have control over their their money, their income, the royalties
• 29:55
  and and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, I love that.
• 30:00
  You know, You've got a lot of creative endeavors and it sounds like life's
• 30:04
  been quite fulfilling. Sub seven. Do you do you have a craving to
• 30:11
  get back behind a kit or to play in a band again? Like that
• 30:15
  is that a creative outlet that you wish was fulfilled? A little more.
• 30:19
  Yeah, I think you know it was you get like like in twenty fifteen,
• 30:23
  we actually got back together and we did a ten year reunion show and
• 30:30
  that was all of us at that time. We're itching, We're just like
• 30:34
  we miss it, we miss it, and so I was like, let's
• 30:37
  do a show. Let's do like a you know, get back together and
• 30:40
  play, and we did. Like it was it was a ton of fun.
• 30:42
  It was like two and a half hour show where we did at because
• 30:47
  Step seven. You know, a lot of people don't know like our early
• 30:49
  stuff was very fast paced punk rock, like No Use for a Name and
• 30:56
  Melancholin and Face to Face that was our Those were like our you know,
• 31:00
  first kind of influences and a lot of that came from Smoky and then we
• 31:03
  kind of try we kind of moved into kind of the more scream of email
• 31:06
  stuff and then kind of dabbled a little bit and some of the like hardcore
• 31:10
  post hardcore stuff and really kind of Free to Conquer kind of landed in this
• 31:14
  more like kind of indie rock kind of thing. So we were kind of
• 31:17
  like we had like phases as a band, and I think that like that
• 31:22
  was that was all of us going, hey, let's give us a shot
• 31:25
  have some fun. And it was a ton of fun. I mean,
• 31:26
  we played all that different eras we brought all the members back, we kind
• 31:30
  of had at one point there was nine of us on stage and just had
• 31:34
  a ton of fun at the Green Door where we kind of did our last
• 31:37
  music video, and that was that was kind of the last time we we
• 31:41
  tried to get together. Kind of In between that, there were some side
• 31:45
  projects that we did where we were just kind of playing around and seeing what
• 31:48
  would happen. And it's one of those things too, like after like after
• 31:52
  StEB seven broke up, we got we got back together and it was like
• 31:57
  Jake and Caleb and self and then Jake's brother on bass, and then a
• 32:04
  friend of ours named him on vocals. So Wes was doing his own thing.
• 32:07
  He'd moved down to Texas and was kind of doing a solo thing,
• 32:08
  and so those of us that were still in Oklahoma got back together and we
• 32:13
  recorded this record under the name Versa, and it's some of the best stuff.
• 32:16
  Like it's it's like this is what subseven would have would have sounded like
• 32:21
  had we stuck it around for another you know, another record. It was
• 32:23
  like kind of all in us, but it came out in this band called
• 32:28
  Versa, and so it was so good, but none of it's been released
• 32:31
  ever. It's just kind of like we have heard this and yeah, yeah,
• 32:36
  just rough demos and it just it was so much. I feel like
• 32:40
  it was again. That's why I look back at when we broke up and
• 32:44
  we quit, had we just taken a time out, had we I think
• 32:46
  had better guidance around us of like, you guys are green and you're new
• 32:52
  and this has been a lot. We're going to take a time out and
• 32:54
  we're going to help you kind of develop a few things and write songs better
• 32:59
  and YadA, YadA YadA. That would have been huge for us, but
• 33:00
  we didn't have it. It was more like we gotta go, We gotta
• 33:04
  make money, We got tours to do to fulfill things of that nature.
• 33:07
  And I think that's if we could have And I don't think we had the
• 33:12
  We don't. I don't think we had that in us at the time to
• 33:14
  like know that we did. We just knew like go go go as well
• 33:17
  were just we want to play music, we want to be on tours,
• 33:22
  and we burned ourselves out, and I think had we been a little bit
• 33:25
  more calculated or had better leadership around us to go take a break, you
• 33:30
  would have probably seen a better a better band in general, a third record,
• 33:34
  maybe more. And I think we just we just didn't know how to
• 33:37
  handle it, to be quite honest. And we weren't even really like that
• 33:40
  pressured. I mean again, we didn't even like reach mid level status.
• 33:45
  We were still kind of trying to figure out like what we wanted to who
• 33:49
  we're gonna be, and trying to make a name for ourselves. I think
• 33:52
  we're just at the beginning. I feel like quite quite often when I think
• 33:54
  about that time. And so now it's like I've played in bands since then
• 34:00
  a little bit. You know. I still have the drum my last drum
• 34:04
  kit I ended up selling, like I had like five or six strum kits
• 34:06
  at one point, and I sold most of them to go buy a power
• 34:08
  book and start my freelance work, you know. And so I still have
• 34:13
  one kit left, and it just sits in the basement and it's got dust
• 34:15
  on it, and I don't really play much. It's so funny, like
• 34:20
  I think about it, playing would be fun I would love to play again,
• 34:23
  but touring just makes me tired. When I think about touring and like
• 34:27
  all the things that go into touring, I just go, eh, I
• 34:30
  don't think. So maybe that's why the Beatles did it. They just but
• 34:36
  they are the Beatles, they can do that, I suppose absolutely. Yeah,
• 34:40
  So, Clinton, one of the things about Sub seven that I've always
• 34:45
  thought, and maybe you've had this thought, maybe other people have told you
• 34:50
  this, but there are very few vocalists where when I hear their voice,
• 34:55
  I'm like, that's exactly that person I think of, like Jeremy Enik from
• 35:02
  Sunatia Real Estate I think has a very distinct and unique voice, or some
• 35:07
  others certainly, But when I think of Sub seven in Wes's voice, I'm
• 35:13
  like, I just absolutely think he has such a unique voice. And did
• 35:16
  you get a sense early on, even when you're playing, you know,
• 35:21
  just like as like a bunch of friends or whatever, did you get a
• 35:23
  sense early on that, Wow, this guy is really talented and has such
• 35:28
  a unique sounding voice. Because that, to me, stre like that when
• 35:31
  I hear Sub seven, that's what I immediately think of is how unique his
• 35:37
  voice is. And then obviously you guys are good songwriters. You've got like
• 35:39
  obviously you're a great drummer, great guitar work. But when I think of
• 35:43
  Sub seven, I think distinctly of Wes's voice just sounding different than lots of
• 35:47
  other voices. Oh. Absolutely, absolutely. He set us apart on so
• 35:51
  many things, and he he was always willing to try anything. So we
• 35:58
  you know that that's what was. You know, if you look at our
• 36:00
  discography and and all these like different styles that we tried, we tried everything,
• 36:06
  and he was always about it. He was like, I'm going to
• 36:08
  figure out how to scream, I'm going to figure out how to seeing higher,
• 36:13
  I'm going to figure out how to like seeing faster. We even,
• 36:15
  gosh, we even tried rap rock at one time. I remember, way
• 36:19
  in the early days, like yeah, yeah, this is even pretty pillar.
• 36:23
  This was like this was like I was just like, we tried everything,
• 36:30
  and so that's I think for sure. I think there's something about like,
• 36:35
  not only that, but Wes was always great at connecting with people on
• 36:38
  stage in a very genuine manner, and that's why I feel like so many
• 36:43
  times and it's really what drew me to him as well as a as a
• 36:46
  you know, as when we were in high school. Just like his charisma
• 36:51
  and connecting with people and really caring about people where they are, observing the
• 36:55
  room, observing people's lives, what they were going through, and the way
• 37:00
  he wrote about all kinds of different topics and the way that he did super
• 37:05
  creative and I think about like that that's why so many shows I remember we
• 37:12
  would spend sometimes a couple of hours three hours afterwards just talking with kids and
• 37:17
  people from all walks of life about all kinds of things. And it was
• 37:22
  Wes's work. It was Wes's like voice and you know, his his lyrics
• 37:28
  that were connecting with people, And that to me was like we have something
• 37:32
  here, like we you know, and we we have something that's like recognizable,
• 37:38
  and let's try to like keep going. You know. I think we
• 37:44
  were all kind of in that. But I think at the same time we
• 37:45
  were also like very fragile and we needed we needed like, like like I
• 37:52
  mentioned, we needed some some you know, leadership around us to kind of
• 37:57
  guide us on things. But absolute I think that that's I always kind of
• 38:02
  bring it up. It's like listening to him. There's only been a few
• 38:07
  bands where I go like, it's kind of reminiscent of his voice, but
• 38:13
  he definitely has this like trademarked sound, you know. Yeah, yeah,
• 38:20
  I'm sure you guys don't like necessarily regret a lot of things. You guys
• 38:25
  did what you could, but it does feel like there was a lot left
• 38:30
  on the table. And it sounded like, you know, when you were
• 38:32
  talking about kind of the history and the breakup and everything, how you sort
• 38:36
  of alluding to that where it was like, i mean, a few of
• 38:39
  you sounded like it sounds like you certainly still would have like been willing to
• 38:44
  tour, and it sounds like Wes was even wanting to and you obviously you
• 38:47
  even made some other music with some other projects, and so it's just it
• 38:52
  sounds like there was just like stuff left on the table. And do you
• 38:57
  ever kind of regret that you weren't able to just kind of fully capture that
• 39:00
  moment, especially knowing that that sound, that sort of emo punk pop,
• 39:06
  whatever, like whatever you want to describe it, like that sound was,
• 39:08
  especially during that time, was becoming a big thing, and it just feels
• 39:13
  like there was there was there was room for potentially, you know, not
• 39:15
  to say you were gonna get to paramore status. But there was definitely a
• 39:20
  lot of potential there where you could have you know, been a band plane
• 39:22
  on warp tour or whatever. Right, like, does it feel ever where
• 39:24
  you're like, god that that could have potentially happened? Oh yeah, I
• 39:28
  mean there was there was. You can ask my wife. There were like
• 39:30
  probably a couple of years maybe three after we broke up where I didn't I
• 39:37
  couldn't watch like movies about I couldn't watch documentaries about bands, or I couldn't
• 39:43
  like go there. It was like I was still kind of mentally in that
• 39:46
  space of like it didn't work out, and she would be like, oh
• 39:51
  no, we can't Like I didn't I couldn't watch the Johnny Cash movie with
• 39:54
  with Joaquin Phoenix, for example, because I was so like that that movie
• 39:59
  is just so silly to talk about. But that's those kinds of things like
• 40:02
  really would like put me in a mood and I'd be like, man,
• 40:06
  we were like, you know, just the what if because and there was
• 40:09
  a lot of there's just so much effort that we were all kind of putting
• 40:13
  into that thing too that like, like I mentioned it, and also when
• 40:16
  when we did the vers a thing, like I got to we all of
• 40:22
  us really writing these songs that like these were like and this is what was
• 40:24
  kind of in our back pocket. This is what was going to basically like
• 40:28
  Iron Out, you know, kind of like the EP we did and then
• 40:30
  the Free to Conquer. That third record was really going to be like our
• 40:35
  second kind of full length. Felt like, okay, that that was it,
• 40:38
  and yeah, we got to scratch that itch. But you know you
• 40:42
  kind of you do kind of go there sometimes and wonder. But I think
• 40:45
  at the end of the day, it's like I also was done, Like
• 40:49
  I was done when when Wes was done, I was done. It was
• 40:52
  like I didn't have any kind of like for being I didn't want to be
• 41:01
  a studio drummer. I didn't want to play in other bands. Really,
• 41:06
  I didn't really want to go tour again. It was like very mission driven.
• 41:09
  I was focused on it's a drumming is a thing that I do for
• 41:14
  this thing that we do called SEB SEB, and the reason that we do
• 41:16
  it is because this or whatever, right, And it was like that was
• 41:20
  the focus. And when the focus was kind of like, well, it's
• 41:23
  done, I resigned to the fact that like I think I did that and
• 41:28
  now I need to Now I'm going to turn this corner and go do design
• 41:32
  and that has a purpose and it has this kind of like this very much
• 41:37
  like mission driven like purpose fill. That's really a lot of kind of my
• 41:42
  drive is like why am I doing this? I need to have some kind
• 41:45
  of like character chase or some kind of thing to go after or some kind
• 41:50
  of like thing to build or whatever. So for me personally, there are
• 41:53
  there were moments where I immediately after I had to kind of deal with it.
• 41:59
  I had to come down off that high of like especially going somewhere every
• 42:05
  you know, being in a band and like like that to me was that
• 42:08
  was. I loved it. I absolutely loved like us going all the time
• 42:13
  and like meeting new people and exploring new places and all that. But when
• 42:17
  when like I said, when I think when Wes was done, I was
• 42:21
  done. I was like, Okay, we did the thing, We did
• 42:22
  the thing that we set out to do, and we got as far as
• 42:25
  we could have gotten. And I'm just going to be like happy that,
• 42:29
  Like we still talk to each other, we're still friends. We didn't blow
• 42:31
  up, you know, we we we had a ton of fun with it,
• 42:36
  and slowly I kind of accepted it, you know, and then like
• 42:39
  it also helped too that I had my other I had my own life going,
• 42:43
  you know, I was married, I became you know, a dad
• 42:46
  the same year two thousand and five that Free to Conquer Drafts and life was
• 42:52
  was moving on towards dad life and all that was kind of starting, and
• 42:55
  so yeah, it I had like other things going on. I think if
• 43:00
  I was only buried in music, like or not buried, but like just
• 43:04
  only focused on music, then it would have been much harder if I didn't
• 43:07
  really have any other like things going. But I was kind of stoking fires
• 43:12
  all around, you know, trying to nail. So yeah, I think
• 43:15
  there's if there's anything that can be said, it's said. It was a
• 43:21
  beautiful thing. It's a beautiful moment of your life. But you you've just
• 43:25
  lived a fulfilling life and the sounds of it, like everything that you've wanted
• 43:30
  to do creatively you've had the ability and the chance to do, which is
• 43:35
  not something that like ninety nine point nine percent of people out there can say
• 43:38
  that's just that's such a cool thing. Yeah, yeah, I definitely think
• 43:44
  I definitely feel that for sure. I think that it's a huge privilege to
• 43:46
  get to do what we did. You know, we got to we got
• 43:50
  to quick school and go and play music and tour and do all these things
• 43:54
  and uh, you know, have fun. And that's what I want for
• 43:58
  my kids. I want my kids to kind of from me. It's like,
• 44:00
  you know, some people like go spend a year in Europe and you
• 44:02
  know, do whatever before you go to college or whatever. Like that's kind
• 44:06
  of what that was for us. We do kind of find ourselves. We
• 44:10
  get to play with all these bands that we loved. I mean, I
• 44:14
  you know, getting to go into with Project A six was like it's a
• 44:17
  huge dream of mine. I remember we we we got to open for Pod
• 44:25
  and Blindside and mx PX and Denver where the Nuggets play, and I remember
• 44:30
  going up on that stage and going like like absolutely huge, Just what's the
• 44:37
  imposter syndrome of like, you know, belong on the stage like we don't
• 44:42
  and it being like one of our best shows, and just so many like
• 44:45
  little things like that where I just go, yeah, like that kind of
• 44:49
  scratched the itch. That was like the thing for me was like getting to
• 44:53
  do that. And and then now like these days hearing like from fans people
• 45:00
  that know us, just when you guys can get back together, Like if
• 45:02
  you go to our Facebook page, you know there'll be there'll be stuff like
• 45:06
  when you guys gonna come back together? And and when are you guys gonna
• 45:09
  play again? And all that kind of stuff. It's just kind of fun.
• 45:12
  But like, yeah, I think just really thankful in general, just
• 45:15
  got to do something like that, you know, absolutely, well, hopefully
• 45:20
  hopefully you can get to uh Furnace Fest. Yeah, yes, have you
• 45:24
  been waiting for a call? No, well, let me ask this.
• 45:29
  If you were to get a call, do you think that the rest of
• 45:32
  the guys would be on board too? Oh? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 45:37
  I think they definitely would. Yeah, I think if there was there
• 45:38
  was a I think it would definitely be a conversation. Now, who would
• 45:43
  come to that to watch us? I don't know, Like I don't know
• 45:45
  if anybody really remembers this after all this time, but I think I think
• 45:50
  you'd be surprised. You'd be surprised. Lots of bands have reunited at Furnesfest
• 45:54
  thinking that exact same thing, and then they realized, wait, that entire
• 45:58
  shed is filled up right now? Like what's going on exactly. Yeah,
• 46:02
  I don't know, man, be fine. Well, so twenty fifteen was
• 46:07
  the last time you guys played. That's nine years ago now or almost nine
• 46:12
  years ago, and so we're getting closer and closer to it being that was
• 46:16
  ten years ago, and so that means we're getting closer and closer to twenty
• 46:22
  years ago that Free to Conquer came out. I mean, is there any
• 46:24
  sort of itch to do anything, whether it's like a furnace fest type of
• 46:29
  thing or any other kind of shows, or is there even maybe something beyond
• 46:34
  that where it's like a creative itch to like maybe make something again or whatever,
• 46:37
  Because I think we're like in a day and age where yeah, twenty
• 46:39
  years ago, it probably feels pretty unlikely that you can get five people to
• 46:46
  creatively figure something out but and make that happen, Whereas now, like you
• 46:52
  get people that are in a band and they're all across the country and they
• 46:55
  can like send files to each other really easily, and where we see that
• 46:59
  more and more now we interview bands all the time where the band members are
• 47:02
  all across the country and and you know, writing a thing here or there,
• 47:06
  and it's like, all right, can you riff off of that or
• 47:07
  whatever, and then all of a sudden you get a song. It seems
• 47:10
  more and more likely that that could be a thing. And also it doesn't
• 47:14
  mean that you have to like quit your full time job to do it,
• 47:16
  and it doesn't mean that you're gonna have to like be away from your family
• 47:20
  for months and months on end. So I'm curious, like, is there
• 47:22
  any sort of itch knowing the possibility that it's easier and easier to make music,
• 47:28
  especially when you're miles and miles and you know, however many miles apart
• 47:34
  that you are from other guys in the band, or release the versus stuff.
• 47:37
  Yeah right, yeah, yeah. I think we've actually talked about a
• 47:43
  couple of years ago, we talked about really seeing Free to Conquer as like
• 47:46
  a vinyl record, maybe like doing you know, new artwork or something for
• 47:51
  that. There's also some tracks that weren't released on Free to Conquer that never
• 47:57
  saw the light of day, So there's some things there that kind of fun
• 48:00
  to like put out and see what happens. The versus stuff would be.
• 48:05
  We wrote, gosh, I think we wrote like fifteen songs something like that,
• 48:10
  and we we played those songs for we played like four shows, and
• 48:16
  yeah, that stuff would be fun too, Like I, yeah, there's
• 48:20
  there's definitely like the things there. Have we talked about that lately, No,
• 48:24
  we have not, And I think that it's I would say, like,
• 48:28
  it's not an impossible thing. I think that it might be interesting to
• 48:32
  see if there's anything there for me. I think it'd be rad if we
• 48:36
  did re released Free to Conquer, you know, and we on vinyl and
• 48:40
  just kind of put it out there just for fun and do short run and
• 48:44
  see what happens. I think that would be that'd be kind of like one
• 48:46
  of those kind of low, kind of easy to kind of do things,
• 48:52
  you know, yeah, just kind of see what would happen. So we
• 48:57
  if you look at our Facebook, like right after we did the ten year
• 49:00
  reunion, we started to play. We started to play again, and we
• 49:05
  started to write music again. And then we had like a terrible, terrible
• 49:09
  thing with Caleb's, our guitar player, his son was killed in a car
• 49:15
  crash, and it put everything obviously in new perspective. Everything. It shook
• 49:24
  us up tremendously as a as as a group. Uh and but it it
• 49:30
  put us on pause too for music and I think we definitely tried. We
• 49:35
  definitely tried. You can see on Facebook, you'll see some of the the
• 49:38
  posts where we're kind of teasing different little track, little kind of nuggets of
• 49:45
  things here and there or track listings or whatever. But it was one of
• 49:50
  those things where we definitely tried, and then that that tragedy happened and then
• 49:55
  we just, I don't know, it feels like it kind of knocked the
• 49:59
  windown of our selves in a way that like we we just never came back
• 50:02
  to it. So that was tenure. That was, however, many years
• 50:07
  ago. I mean, who's to say it could potentially come back, you
• 50:10
  know and be a thing. And that's why I think a lot about like
• 50:14
  maybe it's just as simple as re releasing you know, Free to Conquer or
• 50:19
  the EP and Free to Conquer together. You know, there's you know,
• 50:22
  you have, you know, kind of two different versions of Game of Love.
• 50:25
  You have emotion from our first from EP, which was like really the
• 50:29
  track that kind of like got the most I think traction and attention for us
• 50:35
  as a band. But yeah, I'm not saying I will not say that
• 50:38
  it's never gonna happen, because I think that that's I think stranger things have
• 50:43
  happened, so I love for it. Yeah, that's a killer. We're
• 50:46
  all about it. I mean I would love to see Free to Conquer,
• 50:49
  especially on vinyl. I would. I'd buy that in a heartbeat. Same.
• 50:55
  Well, are we ready for the top five most influential albums of your
• 50:59
  life? Yeah? Okay, this is this will be really tough. I'm
• 51:05
  sure most people say that. I can definitely say that, you know,
• 51:08
  going back to first time hearing Nirvana, when I heard sells like teen Spirit,
• 51:15
  that was kind of what setted off for me trying to play all those
• 51:17
  songs. Absolutely, I would, I could. I can't deny that.
• 51:24
  The first time I heard DC talks Jesus freak Out. Yes, you know,
• 51:30
  that was not going Oh wow, okay, you know especially I mean,
• 51:34
  honestly, it sort of is like the Nirvana, or at least that
• 51:37
  song in particular, is like the smells like Teen Spirit for a lot of
• 51:40
  us, not just just culturally, but also the sound, you know,
• 51:45
  that kind of grunge punk sound is going on, especially in the drum work.
• 51:49
  I have a question for you guys on that. Do you think anyone
• 51:52
  who was like in that like Christian world or slightly Christian adjacent world. Maybe
• 51:58
  do you think that they had like that jfk assassination moment, like where like
• 52:04
  you will remember that moment forever. Oh yeah, with Jesus Freak, because
• 52:08
  I certainly I remember exactly where I was I heard that for the first time,
• 52:13
  absolutely same thing, Mason, did you, I mean, I feel
• 52:17
  like Jesus Freak? Might I mean, Colin, You're two years older than
• 52:21
  me, so maybe I don't know if like that would have made much of
• 52:23
  a difference. You also had a sister that was like a few, like
• 52:25
  quite a few years older than us, so I wonder if that, like,
• 52:29
  but I was the oldest one in my family, so Jesus, Like
• 52:31
  I knew of Jesus Freak, I knew of DC Talk, but my first
• 52:35
  introduction any of that music was Reliant K and switch foot Right, And I
• 52:38
  still I do remember the day that I saw Meant to Live on like MTV
• 52:45
  two or FUSE or whatever, and then probably also seeing like be my escape
• 52:51
  with Reliant K. I remember seeing those music videos and quickly realizing like that
• 52:57
  just sounded like there's something about the lyrics that were just different. And I
• 53:00
  remember my my babysitter at the time, and I was I was probably like
• 53:05
  nine years old or whatever, maybe ten years old, and and I remember
• 53:07
  I had like the summer babysitter and she uh she she like grew up in
• 53:12
  the church that I grew up in and everything. And I remember asking her,
• 53:16
  I'm like, is there something I should know about these bands that are
• 53:20
  like different than the other, like Blink one eighty two or whatever, and
• 53:22
  she was like, oh, yeah, these are Christian bands. They're playing
• 53:25
  at like a festival called Life Light Festival and Zoo Falls and it's all Christian
• 53:29
  bands, and you know, so on and so. Like I realized at
• 53:31
  that point, oh, I can listen to music that my parents are going
• 53:36
  to accept me listening to. And it's also not like Newsboys or whatever.
• 53:39
  It's also not lame. Yeah, oh yeah, that's that's one of those.
• 53:45
  And I think I'll never forget when I got Project eighty six, it
• 53:51
  was drawing Black Lines from Project A six. Yeah, I remember playing that
• 53:54
  in my bedroom and my mom came in because I, I like lived in
• 54:00
  a home where like if I couldn't bring certain music into the house like or
• 54:05
  I would be grilled, you know. I would, so I had to
• 54:08
  like, you know, it became like you know, contraband for me,
• 54:12
  and I had to sneak certain things in. And I remember a friend like
• 54:16
  West going you know, protect a six is a Christian band, Like you
• 54:19
  could totally play that at your house. I was like, all right,
• 54:24
  okay, I'm gonna give it a shot. And I remember playing that.
• 54:27
  My mom came in and she was like she saw that. She had one
• 54:30
  of those disc players where you could see the CD spinning in there and it
• 54:31
  was like red and black and it just looked very like, you know,
• 54:35
  it was just you're hearing the project and it just looks like it's you know,
• 54:38
  for her, it was like, you know, probably casting a spellamy
• 54:40
  or something. And I remember going, yeah, I'm a Christian band,
• 54:45
  here to read the lyrics. And she's like, you know, kind of
• 54:46
  okay, what okay, okay, and she's My parents slowly came around to
• 54:51
  it, my mom. My mom slowly came around to it, and they
• 54:52
  were they were huge Sub seven fans. But I had to like kind of
• 54:55
  hide stuff. You know. It's kind of like and that's where you know,
• 54:58
  a lot of this stuff was like like you like when I could find
• 55:00
  a band that was in that space of that I loved that I could kind
• 55:06
  of listen to without having to be, you know, concerned about am I
• 55:09
  going to get grounded or is this going to be taken from me and you
• 55:14
  know destroyed or whatever. That was like okay and so, and I got
• 55:19
  into all kinds of things, Like there were all kinds of bands I was
• 55:22
  listening to. It was just the Christian bands that I was able to kind
• 55:23
  of listen to in public. And you know, but I had like my
• 55:28
  my like my way of listening to whatever I wanted to. When I learned
• 55:31
  about the Misfits and when I learned about really any of like the punk rock
• 55:36
  scene in general. When I learned about any of those bands, I would
• 55:37
  get the CD or I'd have a friend burn a CD for me. And
• 55:43
  I had a secret stash of CDs in the barn. And the way I
• 55:46
  would listen to them is I had to like all the shenanigans always happened in
• 55:52
  the barn. I feel like every country parent should know about this. Back
• 55:55
  to the barn, and I remember like stashing all this music in the barn
• 56:00
  and then I would go drive the tractor because I had to do. I
• 56:02
  had to plow fields and stuff. I would sometimes in a summer, I'd
• 56:06
  be on a tractor for like up to eight hours, and so I would
• 56:08
  have my discman and you know, have my secret statf stash of music.
• 56:14
  And that was how I. That's how I. You know. So when
• 56:15
  I think about influential bands, I think about there were those Christian bands that
• 56:20
  like really opened the door for me in a lot of ways, that allowed
• 56:22
  me to kind of you know, that didn't influence me. And I got
• 56:24
  to go to these shows because you know, they had the label Christian on
• 56:28
  them. But then there's all these other bands that like I had to kind
• 56:30
  of listen to and secret up until I was in college, and you know,
• 56:35
  so it was like I remember one time I got the Off Springs.
• 56:38
  I can't remember the name of that record, the one with low self esteem
• 56:43
  on it or self esteem on it. And I remember bringing it home and
• 56:47
  I had to I bought it at Walmart, but I had to like hide
• 56:51
  it in my starter jacket and then I had to get in the van with
• 56:52
  my parents and I had to make it home and then I had to go
• 56:55
  into my room and like go out to the barn and hide it and my
• 56:59
  brother rat it. My brother was like, he's like a few years younger
• 57:01
  than me, and he was like, mom, he's like, brother has
• 57:04
  a CD that cusses. That was his like his thing was like it says,
• 57:07
  you know, And I remember going, I got a new I gotta
• 57:10
  get a new plan. I got to figure out how to like get around
• 57:14
  my brother now. And and I hope you beat him with your drum stare
• 57:20
  seriously, man. But that was it. And so you know, influential,
• 57:22
  influential records. And here's the thing too, like this, this is
• 57:27
  a whole thing we could kind of get into. I think you've talked about
• 57:30
  this with other with other guests as well, but just like what that kind
• 57:34
  of does to you mentally where you're trying to like go like his, I'll
• 57:37
  just I'll paint this picture. I remember the first It was my first semester
• 57:42
  at college, and the college had a small little kind of bookstore and they
• 57:46
  had a rack with CDs of like kind of top forty but then also kind
• 57:52
  of other things. Every once in a while. I remember walking to the
• 57:54
  food court seeing Defton's white Pony on that rack, and like immediately going looking
• 58:01
  at that and going and then listening to it in the in the store and
• 58:05
  going, oh my god, this is incredible. But then like I can't
• 58:08
  buy this, like I'm a college student, Like I'm old enough to drive,
• 58:13
  I'm paying rent, I have like responsibilities. I'm not living with my
• 58:16
  parents, you know that kind of thing, And I can fight for this
• 58:20
  country exactly. It's in the back of my head though. If you buy
• 58:25
  that, You're going to hell that kind of thing, you know what I'm
• 58:29
  saying. I paced back and forth three or four times outside the outside of
• 58:36
  the like little store, walking to the uh the food court and back,
• 58:39
  and I kept looking at that CD through the window, like should I buy
• 58:43
  it? Should UP buy it? What happens if I buy it? Like
• 58:45
  like on are my friends gonna think? Like, you know, like what
• 58:47
  what's Wes gonna say? West won't care? And then like going just just
• 58:52
  that mental like just trying to like make it okay. And I ended up
• 58:57
  going in and bought it. I still have it to this day. But
• 59:00
  man, that that record was huge, hugely influential to me. Hearing Abe
• 59:06
  Cunningham play drums the way that he does, and you'll hear and some of
• 59:10
  the stuff on step seven like it just it just was like, oh man,
• 59:15
  it's like Dave Girl, Abe Cunningham. Of course you know some of
• 59:17
  the old like led Zeppoint you took any of the kind of old school stuff
• 59:21
  like that kind of is in that lineage of drummers John Bonham and others.
• 59:27
  I would say definitely, you know up there, but there's you know,
• 59:30
  I would say that those and then mx PX was a huge influence. Slowly
• 59:37
  Going Away the Buffalo is probably one of my favorite records, probably not their
• 59:39
  favorite record, but one of my favorite of their records. And I think
• 59:45
  if I had to name a fifth one, this is kind of funny too,
• 59:50
  but this is so weird. But like Delirious's record, I don't know
• 59:52
  how you say it's delivery that record because like I think, there's it's not
• 1:00:02
  really maybe it's not really so much influential, just a record. I think
• 1:00:05
  a lot about is that in that time of kind of transitioning from being this
• 1:00:09
  kid at home in church kid and going into college and then being in you
• 1:00:15
  know, playing at church during that time. So I played in the church
• 1:00:17
  band and that was like a means of income back in the day, so
• 1:00:20
  I was making a little bit of money. That record comes up a lot
• 1:00:23
  because that record was that record kind of is what we all like, not
• 1:00:27
  we but like contemporary Christian music kind of copied, you know, oh yeah,
• 1:00:30
  became like YouTube and it was like it was kind of that that whole
• 1:00:34
  thing, and so you had all these songs that were similar to that.
• 1:00:37
  So I think a lot about that. I don't think it's like influential,
• 1:00:39
  but I think it's one of those things that, like I it was such
• 1:00:43
  a part of like the background of so much life in those kind of first
• 1:00:46
  years of getting out of high school and and all that kind of stuff.
• 1:00:51
  I mean, they honestly, they hold up, that's a damn good band.
• 1:00:53
  Yeah, yeah, I go. I know that there's like a whole
• 1:00:55
  stigma around like yeah, they're worship music or whatever, but they hold up.
• 1:01:00
  Oh yeah, no doubt, no doubt. But then yeah, it's
• 1:01:05
  does as well. You're right, absolutely, yeah. Face to Face is
• 1:01:07
  probably one of the other ones in Melancholin, Like those are bands that like
• 1:01:12
  I will always love you know, punk rock, yeah, dance. You
• 1:01:15
  know, I gotta say this, You're you might be the only person I
• 1:01:19
  know that is a punk rock fan that did not have access to punk shows.
• 1:01:24
  Yeah, I mean, like you from from the sounds of it,
• 1:01:28
  you know, growing up very rural Oklahoma, it doesn't sound like you were
• 1:01:30
  going to punk shows very often. Most people fall in love with the scene
• 1:01:35
  and the feeling they get in a punk show, and maybe less so with
• 1:01:40
  the records themselves, so that that part's kind of just wild to me.
• 1:01:45
  Yeah, it was huge, huge influence, and I think that it's funny.
• 1:01:52
  Another band I think a lot about it is Thursday And I remember hearing
• 1:01:57
  Thursday for the first time, and I remember seeing them. I saw them
• 1:02:00
  at Lawrence, Kansas at the Bottleneck and uh not Sparta, but yeah,
• 1:02:06
  it was Sparta, you know. Sparta was the other half of the Mars
• 1:02:09
  Volta played with them and that set like that it was Wes and In myself
• 1:02:17
  and read our bass player, and I remember that was like huge on a
• 1:02:22
  huge influence on us as a band, seeing them play me, seeing Tucker
• 1:02:25
  role play drums that night was also one of those like damn, like that's
• 1:02:31
  it, like that, that's the model, like you know, it was
• 1:02:35
  like the it was like a Dave girl moment for me, and so I
• 1:02:39
  think a lot about them. I think that it kind of get back to
• 1:02:43
  my point. I think if we had not heard, or if that scene
• 1:02:45
  had not showed up, we would have continued to be like a more pop
• 1:02:50
  punk kind of band, because Smokey drove a lot of that influence as well,
• 1:02:53
  and when he left the band, Caleb and Jacob brought some like more
• 1:02:59
  of the kind of screaming email, kind of post hardcore start to the band,
• 1:03:01
  and that shifted a lot of like what we were we were doing.
• 1:03:05
  So you'll hear like a song like at the Park, which is on our
• 1:03:07
  EP, which is total pop punk and a ton of fun to play,
• 1:03:12
  and then you'll hear like may Day, or you'll hear you know, Family
• 1:03:15
  Secrets or Vampire and those are like that's Caleb and really Caleb writing a lot
• 1:03:21
  of those kind of like moody type type songs, which I love all that
• 1:03:23
  stuff. But you know, you kind of switch guitar players out mid mid
• 1:03:28
  run and then you get influenced in new ways and then you kind of That's
• 1:03:31
  why I think our stuff is so kind of all over the place. It's
• 1:03:34
  really kind of hard to peg us. You know, they really Flicker had
• 1:03:37
  a really hard time marketing us. They really wanted us to be a sec
• 1:03:42
  and band, They really wanted us to go on tours with like Kids in
• 1:03:45
  the Way and some of the other bands on their label Pillar for example,
• 1:03:49
  and we just didn't fit. And I think that was another thing that really
• 1:03:52
  was frustrating. I think a lot about our career in general. We were
• 1:03:55
  on the wrong label. We should not have been on Flicker Records. We
• 1:03:59
  should have been on Tooth and Nail or Made by Ramen, or or Feel
• 1:04:01
  by Ramen or mono Versysteria or you know, we just weren't. We were
• 1:04:08
  this. We were like the misfits, you know, kids that just didn't
• 1:04:12
  fit with the glossy CCM stuff and you guys are too cool. They tried
• 1:04:17
  really hard to put us there, and we just we just didn't. It
• 1:04:21
  just wasn't us. And and so yeah, I think again, I kind
• 1:04:27
  of I kind of look back and you look things different, at things differently
• 1:04:30
  now, and it's like, you know, it is what it is.
• 1:04:31
  You just kind of like, go, hey, we gave a run.
• 1:04:34
  But I do think a lot about like decisions that we made that we just
• 1:04:36
  didn't know what we're doing. But we really really wanted to play music,
• 1:04:40
  you know, we really wanted to go tour. So man, uh,
• 1:04:45
  I can't I can't imagine just all the things that you'd have to be like
• 1:04:48
  trying to decide at such a young age. Yeah, I mean everyone everyone's
• 1:04:55
  starting starting a life. Oh yeah, trying to figure out what's the right
• 1:04:59
  thing to do and what you actually want to do. I just I like
• 1:05:03
  creates like a knot in my gut. Yeah, Clint, what do you
• 1:05:08
  want to plug? Obviously you've got like the design work, Yeah, what
• 1:05:12
  do you want to plug? Yeah? I was I would say, like
• 1:05:15
  right now, just I don't really have any music stuff. I kind of
• 1:05:19
  wish there was sometimes like a music project going on. There's personally, like
• 1:05:25
  you know, working on the stuff I'm working on for the future is a
• 1:05:28
  Transient Labs. So I think that's a space that I'm like, I'm really
• 1:05:32
  excited to be a part of and building things in that in that world of
• 1:05:35
  like empowering creators of all types to put their work out into Web three as
• 1:05:43
  things evolve in that space, and just helping to kind of craft that going
• 1:05:46
  forward. So yeah, I would say, like check out, check out
• 1:05:49
  Transient labs x y Z. If you're into creating art or of any type
• 1:05:56
  of music photography, you'll find some really cool stuff from like Germany co Ort
• 1:05:59
  and others on the that's like some incredible photography and artwork and things of that
• 1:06:02
  nature. So that's kind of the thing that I'm really focused on right now
• 1:06:08
  for this year. That's kind of like just helping to build some tools there
• 1:06:11
  and be a part of that community and as that continues to kind of grow.
• 1:06:15
  So yeah, that's cool. Great, anything else you'd like to plug?
• 1:06:19
  Oh yeah, so a little let me see here, I was gonna
• 1:06:23
  pull this up I have. I don't know if you guys knew about this
• 1:06:26
  or not. Going back to kind of my my roots as growing up on
• 1:06:31
  the farm, being a drummer on the farm kind of you know, I
• 1:06:34
  was in the f FA all that kind of stuff. I was the vice
• 1:06:38
  president of my FFA chapter by the way to Hell, Yeah, and so
• 1:06:45
  didn't do any of the you know, the milk tasting or testing kind of.
• 1:06:50
  Napoleon Dynamite didn't get really that. We didn't have a cow that got
• 1:06:56
  into the onion patch. No, like, yeah, but I just you
• 1:07:00
  know, it wasn't wasn't really into the whole like testing of the milk.
• 1:07:04
  But something that's kind of interesting that I don't know if you guys knew this.
• 1:07:10
  In rural drumming circles, there's a beat known to like her sheep more
• 1:07:15
  effectively than any sheep dog. Really. Yeah, I'm a rural drummer and
• 1:07:23
  I'm not I'm not familiar with this. Yeah, it's called the ba booms.
• 1:07:27
  It's like the booms and yeah, it's a technique that like I just
• 1:07:31
  learned about this. Like have you guys seen like Jeremy Clarkson's farm where do
• 1:07:35
  you know Rummy Clarkson? Now, okay, well he talks a little bit
• 1:07:41
  about it on that show. It kind of remains a closely guarded secret.
• 1:07:45
  But yeah, huh okay, all right, kind of marrying you know,
• 1:07:48
  being a drummer and you know being in that space. For me, it
• 1:07:51
  is like one of those like wow, is fascinating. Have you tried it?
• 1:07:55
  Have you tried it out? No? This is like I kind of
• 1:07:58
  wish I knew this. This is something I learned about, you know,
• 1:08:01
  recently, but like growing up on a farm, like just thinking about how
• 1:08:04
  many times I could have helped my dad, Like if I had just drunk
• 1:08:08
  kit on the back of the truck or the tractor or something, that could
• 1:08:11
  have been right, you know. So, so have you ever heard of
• 1:08:15
  the shepherd's note? Shepherd's note? That sounds familiar? So it's a it's
• 1:08:19
  an ascending it's an ascending note that sounds it almost has like an auditory illusion
• 1:08:27
  where it sounds like it's ascending forever. Oh, I think like Christopher Nolan
• 1:08:30
  does it in some like inceptions of it. Yes, So what would happen
• 1:08:35
  if you played the shepherd's note with the sheep herders beat a rhythm? That's
• 1:08:42
  what I want to know. Like do the sheep then just like instead of
• 1:08:47
  like walking towards you, do they sprint towards you? That's good? They
• 1:08:50
  just die? Yeah, they just like they just fall over? Like yeah.
• 1:09:00
  Is also does the does this like shepherd's beat? Does it work on
• 1:09:03
  any other kind of cat? Like? Does it work on cows? Does
• 1:09:08
  it? Does it get the cats? Finally? Is that the secret?
• 1:09:14
  Apparently? It's only it's it's like it's like the you know when like sonar,
• 1:09:18
  for example, sonar is at a decibel that like doesn't hurt sea animals.
• 1:09:25
  But if you're if you or I are any humans in the water,
• 1:09:28
  our brains would explode. Did you know that? Oh so sonar is on
• 1:09:31
  a level that like that makes it kill you. Maybe this is what it
• 1:09:35
  is. I don't know. Interesting interesting. Well, you know, if
• 1:09:42
  there ever is any new Sub seven music ever, I'd love to hear the
• 1:09:46
  this like Shepherd's Beat included at least at one song, right, I feel
• 1:09:49
  like I'll get sheep just so I can test it out. We got to
• 1:09:54
  do that for absolutely, absolutely that maybe that's the motivation we all need to
• 1:09:58
  make the next Steptet record. Happened? Yeah, doubt sure, Yeah,
• 1:10:02
  I heard some sheep you can get in that market. I bet there's not
• 1:10:04
  too many pop punk bands that are in the The Sheep a shepherd's market.
• 1:10:10
  I think you're right on. I think it's a it's a shepherd's market.
• 1:10:13
  We got to go after it. Absolutely. Yeah. It's incredible, all
• 1:10:15
  about it, all about it great. I mean they're willing to abandon ninety
• 1:10:20
  nine for one. I mean this is a dedicated audience. This is if
• 1:10:27
  if they're willing to do that, they're willing to listen to a Sub seven
• 1:10:31
  Shepherd's Beat song. I like your logic, so I'm all about that.
• 1:10:36
  Well, Clint, thank you so much for chatting about the history of subs
• 1:10:40
  of it Again. This is a band that Colin and I have been listening
• 1:10:43
  for years and years and years, and really again is one of those kind
• 1:10:45
  of few bands that Colin and I like first started our relationship, our friendship
• 1:10:50
  being a big fan of and listening to, you know to together back when
• 1:10:54
  they had the you know, like those iPods where you could put like a
• 1:10:57
  little splinter or splitter. Oh had jack thing. Colin and I used to
• 1:11:02
  use that all the time listening to Sub seven. So that's how that's how
• 1:11:05
  old sub seven is is you have not only iPod classics, but you had
• 1:11:10
  to have splitters for both people to listen to. Back back in the seventies,
• 1:11:15
  when you traded vinyl records back and forth, they called that trading wax.
• 1:11:19
  Jason and I traded wax as well, but it was real wax,
• 1:11:23
  your wax. So uh yeah, thank you so much for talking more about
• 1:11:28
  it. Clinton. Absolutely, thank you guys for bringing me on. This
• 1:11:30
  has been fun and I'm glad we finally got to do it. Yeah,
• 1:11:33
  for sure,