Puppy Angst: One Year of Scorpio Season

Dreamy, gazey Philadelphia rockers Puppy Angst celebrated one year of their debut LP Scorpio Season, hitting the road on an East Coast tour and releasing a vinyl edition to commemorate the occasion. Swim Into The Sound spoke with lead vocalist Alyssa Milman as they looked back on the genesis, recording, and touring of this creative and impressive contribution to indie rock. 

Milman was a founding member of bands Blushed and Past Life and has played as a touring member of Kississippi. They noted that touring with Kississippi and other bands has been a deeply generative experience, which helped shape and focus their sights on their own musical projects. 

“As of April 2022, Puppy Angst is my only band. It’s why I left Kississippi. Having those experiences on the stage as we played… definitely shaped me as a musician, in the sense that it taught me what tour was really like,” said Milman. “It was a whirlwind and definitely changed things for me. I had never played on a stage that big. It just [gave] me a bit of a hunger to have this band get to do that stuff, too.”

Puppy Angst is a rollicking rock outfit suffused with youthful energy and tenderness, nurturing both brashness and vulnerability. Milman described the sound as “like if Mannequin Pussy or Bully was a shoegaze band.” To my ear, it also recalls glam rock and pop-punk while being something entirely original.

The band’s grounding in the Philadelphia rock ecosystem is one of Puppy Angst’s great strengths. Every member in the band besides Milman is in other projects; drummer Eric Naroden is the frontman of In Lieu of Roses, synth player Pauli Mia is the frontwoman of Twin Princess, and bassist John Heywood tours with indie superstar Alex G. Guitarist Dan Leinweber played alongside Milman in Blushed, and makes ambient music under the name greenspace. “It is cool to have this intricate web,” said Milman. “A band family. Bands-in-law, as [synth player] Pauli would say.”

For Scorpio Season, Puppy Angst’s debut album, the creative process was a mix of gradual cultivation and rapid finalization. The songs were written slowly, starting in 2019 and continuing over the next three years. Lead single “Yellow Paint,” a catchy and dynamic song, which offers an early high point on the album. The revving guitars deliver energy and strength, while the warbling synths add a layer of gauzy beauty and complexity.

“‘Yellow Paint,’ as soon as I wrote it, I was like “this is the one. This is the greatest song I’ve ever written!” Milman adds, “It was one of those moments where I was like “I can’t believe I wrote that.”

Writing the album was as much a process of transmogrifying old songs as it was coming up with new material; some of the songs, like “Aftermath,” had been reworked from early versions performed with previous bands.

“‘Aftermath’ was a really fast [song], it fit the Blushed world of the surf punk, super quick, chaotic type of thing, which we do a lot of in Puppy Angst! But something about it felt wrong to just take the song that Blushed wrote and record it verbatim on our album,” said Milman. “To record it, I wanted it to be a new song while still honoring some of that old song, like put it into the Puppy Angst world while also not taking too much from what Blushed did in the past.”

In contrast to the slow and intricate writing process, recording was done in a flash, with the band eager to finish the record in time for an (on-brand) Scorpio season release. “We went into Headroom Studios, just me, John, and Eric. We got all the drums and bass done in a day and a half,” said Milman. 

Additional recording took place in the home studio of the sound engineer Joanna Baumann with the help of Dan Leinweber while Milman left for tour with Kississippi. “I was worried I just wouldn’t have the time or the creative energy to write all these guitar parts for an album, but I knew I wanted to have the bottom layers on it, to make it really textural, really lush,” said Milman.

“We finished mixing it in the summer of 2022 and put it out on October 24, 2022. So it was a long-winded process, but in the end, it was really quick,” said Milman. “I wanted it to be called Scorpio Season, I’d had this plan for so long… I wanted it to be for the fall and winter, I wanted it to match the season it came out in.”

The album indeed carries a punchy melancholy that feels appropriate for the autumn months; the album is colored with themes of both decay and renewal, a certain bitterness and pain, and is tempered with perspective and reflection. Even the songs that are by no means soft carry an unshakable vulnerability; on “Your Bones,” Milman sings, “I would’ve comforted you, I would’ve comforted you, but… you would never do the same.” The strong doses of anguish and abandon make the record feel at home in the darkest months of the year.

After the album’s release, the band embarked on an extensive tour, playing everything from college radio shows to two official showcases as South By Southwest.

“Our two official showcases were so, so much better than I ever could have imagined. Packed rooms! It was bizarre!” recounts Milman. “There were shows where the venue staff and bartenders were buying our merch. I was like, ‘You guys see so many bands! It’s so wild you would want to buy a tee shirt from us.’ That felt very affirming.”

The smaller shows were also memorable, with Milman noting that the younger audiences carry different (higher!) energy. “We played a really insane house show where Pauli was scared her beer was going to get knocked over by kids moshing,” Milman recalls, laughing.

Ultimately, the tour’s success has represented more than a good record; it represents a validation of individual and collective ambition, a deserved reward for Milman and the band’s dedication. In this way, Scorpio Season is a triumph, both personal and artistic.

“It’s been a really long process of realizing that I can put my own art, my creative pursuit first, it can be my first priority, and I can be all in on it,” said Milman. “Sometimes I feel like I’m making a fool out of myself. But then, on this tour, I was like, “No, the dream is happening! This is the dream.”


Elizabeth is a neuroscience researcher in Chicago. She writes about many things—art, the internet, apocalyptic thought, genetically modified mice–on her substack handgun.substack.com. She is from Northern Nevada.

Fauxchella: The Only Music Festival That Matters – An Interview with Conor Alan of The Summit Shack

If you’re a big enough music geek, you probably have a favorite music festival. Maybe you long for the bygone days of Warped Tour and its sweaty Monster-scented mosh pits. Maybe you’re a Chicagoan who is lucky enough to take their pick from Lollapalooza, Pitchfork Music Festival, and Riot Fest. Maybe you just have an affinity for whatever happens to come close enough to you. For my money, there’s no better music festival on Earth than Fauxchella.

Fauxchella is DIY music’s response to California’s biggest and most insufferable music festival institution. It’s kinda like that infamous pic of the crowd surfer from Title Fight’s 2015 Coachella set, but if every attendee was that crowd surfer. Taking place in the exotic, 30k-population college town of Bowling Green, Ohio, Fauxchella is decidedly smaller and much more exciting than the quarter-million-attendee festival from which it gets its jokey name. Centered primarily around emo and indie rock bands based out of the Midwest, Fauxchella is organized by the Summit Shack, a DIY venue that bills itself on Twitter as a “premier, high-end, all-media entertainment conglomerate (aka friends with a garage).”

The Summit Shack first opened its doors in 2017 as a house venue run by several members of the emo band American Spirits. After putting out a couple of EPs and farewell singles, American Spirits called it quits in 2019, yet Summit Shack remained. Select members of the group went on to found the awesome (and far less emo) band Half Kidding whose 2022 album, Bonk, is both underrated and underappreciated in the larger DIY music scene. 

The Summit Shack has been hosting incredible shows out of their garage venue for over half a decade, but the festivals are a different beast entirely. The first Fauxchella took place in 2017, billing itself as a day of “cookouts, comedy, and live music,” boasting a modest 12 acts ranging from musicians and standups to DJ sets. The second iteration occurred in 2018 and doubled the lineup to 12 bands, four DJs, and seven comedy sets. While still mostly contained to Ohio, this sequel also boasted a more prominent lineup that included the likes of Heart Attack Man and Sonder Bombs, increasing the show’s draw and star power from its first hyper-local incarnation.

The third Fauxchella took place in 2019, and this is when things really started to get wild. This was also the first Summit Shack event that I attended, having just moved out to Detroit the year prior. Fauxchella III had a lineup of Charmer, Origami Angel, and Stars Hollow, just to name a few. Little did I know it at the time, but these were all bands that would go on to define the next few years of my life and eventually become synonymous with the “5th Wave Emo” sound. 

With a 21-band lineup, a two-stage setup, a pre-show celebration the night before, and a post-show afterparty, Fauxhella III was a genuine event. I crossed state lines and got an AirBnb just for this show, it was that unmissable. At the festival, the energy was infectious; every band cranked out one incredible set after the other, all attempting to keep the energy from the previous act going. Quite honestly, it blew my fucking mind. Coming from the West Coast, witnessing this kind of Midwestern camaraderie and do-it-yourself ethos felt revelatory. It affirmed that I was in the right place and that these were my people. 

Around the same time in 2019, Summit Shack joined forces with Loonbase Studios, a DIY video production company dedicated to filming and documenting these shows. As a result, several of the sets from Fauxhella III (and each subsequent fest) exist online for all to see. This kind of documentation is rare for music of this scale, and a beyond-worthy effort to capture a moment in a specific music scene.

2019 wound up being a banner year for the Shack. In June, the venue hosted Swordfest, featuring a nine-band bill including Pool Kids, Mover Shaker, and more. In September, they put on DIY Prom, a 24-band affair that encouraged Midwest emo kids to recreate the prom they never had. These bigger, more festival-like lineups became buzzy events for Summit Shack, acting as big, scene-wide celebrations that drew fans (and bands) from all over the Midwest and East Coast. These fests became tentpole events that existed between strings of ongoing local shows that Summit Shack continued to host out of their garage. For a while, Summit Shack almost single-handedly made it feel like Bowling Green was the Place To Be if you were tapped into the Michigan/Ohio music scene.

As you could imagine, 2020 wasn’t kind to touring music or the Summit Shack. Aside from “Snowchella,” which happened in January, Summit Shack essentially went into hibernation when it came to routing touring bands or hosting these larger fests. The Ill-fated “Fourchella” was set to happen in April 2020 and fell apart for reasons that should be obvious. Not content to let COVID ruin their efforts, Summit Shack instead conceived of “Minechella,” a Minecraft-based celebration featuring a smattering of bands, including one set immortalized on the Origami Angel Broke Minecraft EP.

By 2022 things were once again full-steam ahead as Fauchella V happened in July with a staggering 33 bands, including personal faves Ben Quad, Carpool, Summerbruise, Riley, Seaholm, and Equipment. As with lots of these lineups, I suppose your mileage may vary depending on how much you’re tapped into the Midwest emo scene, but for a hyper-online fifth-wave fuck like myself, these lineups are pulled straight out of my Spotify playlists and last.fm grids. Always a nice mix of bands I already love and a handful that I’m about to love, Summit Shack continues to kill it with stellar shows that showcase the best our DIY community has to offer. 

This brings us to 2023. 

If I could describe to you the joy I saw looking over an early iteration of the Fauchella VI lineup, you could bottle that up and sell it for millions on the internet. Honestly, I don’t even know where to start with this lineup.

First off, you’ve got the aforementioned Ben Quad, aka purveyors of the Emo Album of the Year for 2022. You’ve got Equipment and Saturdays at Your Place who have each released two of the most exciting EPs of 2023 so far. You’ve got kids pushing the boundaries in fun and exciting ways like Newgrounds Death Rugby, Hey, IlY, and Cheem. You’ve got the Minneapolis legends NATL PARK SRVC and Dad Bod. You’ve got some of my personal album-of-the-year regulars with Carpool, Summerbruise, and Short Fictions. You’ve got bands that weirdly feel like “legacy” acts in relation to some of these, with fifth-wave groups like Dikembe, Charmer, and Michael Cera Palin. There are tap-happy rippers like Riley, Kerosene Heights, and Aren’t We Amphibians. You’ve got some certified ass-beaters like California Cousins, Arcadia Grey, and Smoke Detector. You’ve got local legends like Teamonade, Ellie Hart, and Half Kidding (the band, for all intents and purposes, hosting the event). 

If that sounds a little overwhelming, that’s because it is. It’s a 60+ band bill stretched over an epic three-day weekend from Friday to Sunday, all crammed into Howards Club H, the local 200-cap dive bar. 

Practically all of these bands have released something over the past three years. Some of them focused on tightening their screws and honing in on the things that make them different from their peers, others took wildly exciting diversions into exciting new territories. It’s easy to make jokes about Fauxchella being “Emo Twitter Fest,” but the talent packed into this lineup is far too diverse and exciting to be summed up in such a diminutive way. 

While some of these bands are several albums or EPs deep into their career, others have only made their presence known within the last six months or have a few public songs to their name. Regardless, I’d say many of these bands released career-defining work over the past year or so. Lots of these bands could fit under the sweeping distinction of “Emo” or “5th Wave,” but those terms have been made flexible enough to fit almost all of these bands. 

It’s an exciting time to be an emo fan. Bands of this scale move quickly and can pivot on a dime, but as someone who’s had nothing better to do than sit inside his apartment and buy things on Bandcamp Fridays for the past few years, this feels like an explosively exciting synthesis of a moment-in-time, all caught in a room in Bowling Green Ohio. What the fuck. 

While this lineup might seem pulled straight out of Spotify’s The Sound of 5th Wave Emo playlist, there are very many people behind this. One of the key figures behind the Summit Shack is Conor Alan, the drummer for American Spirits, Half Kidding, and resident of the Summit Shack. I sat down with Conor over Zoom to get a better idea of the Shack's history and how Fauxchella has evolved each time since its first incarnation six years ago. 


SWIM: First off, I’m curious, when you meet someone in the music scene, how do you articulate the Summit Shack to people? What do you lead with? Because you’re also in a band, you organize this whole fest, but you’re also doing regular shows out of the Shack. So how do you describe all of that succinctly to anyone? 

SHACK: I guess it depends on the context, but if I’m just vaguely describing the Shack, I call it a fest and video crew. The Twitter bio, which is more of a bit than anything else, is from Parks and Recreation: Entertainment 720, “premier high-end all-media entertainment conglomerate,” which, all jokes aside, isn’t too far off. The “premier high end” is a little subjective, but “all-media entertainment conglomerate” seems pretty succinct.

SWIM: I think that’s part of what attracts me to all of this. For the scale you guys are working on, it one hundred percent is, right? There are very few people documenting this type of music with as much production as you guys do. 

I’m super eager to hear you describe the inception of all this because you guys first wound up on my radar in 2019, which was a couple years into this, and I think comparing every Fauxchella to each other is pretty fascinating. But going chronologically, we can lay out how everything has grown, so if you wanna go all the way back to the beginning in your own words, I’d love to hear that.

SHACK: So basically, it would’ve been March 2017 when the first idea for it all sprouted. I had graduated college in the winter and had qualms about what I wanted to do with either my job or my hobbies. 

I took a trip to Los Angeles to visit with my friend Izzy for four days, and then I spent four days in San Diego with some family members. Just something about being in LA… like there wasn’t even a pivotal thing that I saw. It was more just the energy of everyone there.

I just kind of walked around LA cause Izzy had to work all day, so I was just killing time on my own and got to explore the city. When I had gotten back home, I realized there are so many musicians, graphic designers, rappers, producers, and DJs in Bowling Green, but there’s no collective that catalogs them all. I wanted to make it so that if you need a graphic designer or a song for something, you can reach out to this group, and they’ll have access to somebody. Just trying to make it so everybody could collaborate easier.

Once I got back to BG, I went to a DJ show at my friend Ashley’s house and ended up talking with Trey and Bails, who I had recently been introduced to through Dillon, who was the guitarist for American Spirits. Dillon’s friend was working on a mockumentary project about a music group, and she didn’t have a band to do it on, so we started American Spirits as a bit.

So me talking to Trey and Bails at that DJ show combined with the fact that we were starting up the joke band and actually jamming and having fun. We didn’t have any real intentions behind it. Eventually, we conceptualized Same Co., which is the Same Collective. Our motto was, “We are all the same.” It was just a perfect example of too many cooks in the kitchen cause we had anywhere from eight to 20 people all directly contributing to the creative direction of things. None of us had any clue what we were doing. Eventually, we just thought, okay, how do we turn this into something similar with a more direct goal? 

We had done a few ciphers where we would put on beats and have groups of people freestyle over them. Just kind of hanging out. Eventually, we decided that we would start doing shows out of the garage. We had originally cleared out the garage for Same Co. as a collective space, but it ended up being turned into a venue, quote-unquote, cause I dunno if you could quite call it that at the beginning.

Dillon was really the person who spearheaded both American Spirits and Summit Shack in the beginning. The first show out of the Shack was August 2nd, 2017, it was Awesome Job!, an amazing band from Toledo that’s not playing anymore, but they’re all in other projects. Then the first Fauxchella happened on August 11th.

Fauxchella Poster

SWIM: I love that the first Fauxchella felt hyper-local, where it’s basically all Bowling Green people. The fact that you guys had DJs and comedians in there made it feel like the scope was already wider than just “DIY Music,” even if it was all just acts from nearby.

SHACK: I’m trying to find when we transitioned from Same Co. into the Summit Shack, which was originally gonna be called The Leaky Tarp, but then Ian talked us out of it and came up with Summit Shack. Way better. Leaky Tarp just says all sorts of negative connotations. Who wants to go to a place with a leaky tarp? But one of the first shows we had rained a lot, so we had set up tarps and stuff to try and keep people dry. 

SWIM: Humble beginnings. 

SHACK: Yeah, yeah, and then Ian changed it to the Summit Shack, which was the best decision anyone made cause I really do love the name.

But what started as an idea for a collective turned into an event space turned into us throwing a joke festival, you know… Fauxchella, we didn’t think we were ever gonna do another one. We were just kind of flying by the seat of our pants.

SWIM: So you had no expectations, but then you did all these shows where touring bands started routing through. Was it hard to convince people to come to Bowling Green? Because you’re between Detroit and Cleveland, and you’re kind of smack dab in the middle of all these other bigger cities. So what was the process like for getting bands to stop there?

SHACK: November 2017 was the first show we had with a band from more than an hour away. American Spirits had started playing out and doing more shows cause we realized it was less of a bit and more, “Hey, this is actually pretty fun being in a band and actually playing gigs.” So we started doing more gigs and then started meeting more bands from out of town and more musicians in general. 

The first real out-of-town band that we had play was The Sonder Bombs in November 2017. They came and played their first out-of-town show as well; that was the first time they played out of Cleveland. And then February 2018, we did the American Spirits EP release show. The Shack is definitely less American Spirits now than it was back then, but in the beginning they really were operating side by side.

In February 2018, we had some bands from Columbus come, and then just slowly started having more and more bands. We had Equipment play their first show at the Shack in March 2018 with a band from Michigan cause they had a tour that fell through.

Then in April 2018, Dillon had planned this gigantic show, essentially a reprisal of Fauxchella. We had the Sonder Bombs and Heart Attack Man come and play. If you look at the poster for it, I believe it says, “Melted Purple,” which dissolved but was basically the first Teamonade set that ever happened. 

SWIM: Oh, whoa, that’s cool.

SHACK: Dolphin Coffin is the band Secret Space. They were unable to advertise cuz they were still signed and touring at the time, so they played a secret set. They were kind of like the Toledo sweethearts that were a step below Citizen in a way. They did a bunch of tours with Turnover and bands like that. 

But Fauxchella II happened at the Shack. We fenced off the whole yard cause we knew Heart Attack Man was a big band, and I had no idea. At this point, I was not necessarily out of the loop (because everything was still happening at my house), but I was mainly spearheading the DJs and the comedians. 

Fauxchella II Poster

Dillon and Bails were really into Microwave, Prince Daddy, Oso Oso, those kinds of bands, so they were the ones who were super into that genre of music. I was coming out of being super into electronica, so I was still spearheading that side of things.

Fauxchella II was the last one we did at the house, and it was pretty much Dillon still kind of leading everything. Dillon was doing the Spirits booking and the Shack booking. I was just more like, ‘Yeah, I’m cool with this happening at my house, and I’m cool with being in a band.’

SWIM: You had told me that before Fauxchella II, you had kinda gone around the neighborhood warning people, “Hey, we’re going to play this show.” What was the response to that? What was that process like?

SHACK: I wrote a page-long letter that I handed out to each house in every direction three houses out. So the next-door neighbors, the next-door neighbors to them, and the next-door neighbors to them all got a letter saying, “Hey, we’re hosting this little mini-festival that we’re doing at the house on this date.” At this point, we’d also been kind of ramping up and doing more shows throughout the week. But we gave everyone this paper saying here’s all of our contact information, here are all of our phone numbers, here’s all our names and everything like that. Then said if there are ever any issues, please call or text one of us.

SWIM: Not 911. 

SHACK: Yeah, exactly. It was a one-page letter that essentially boiled down to, “Please don’t call the cops.” But the neighbors were all super cool, besides a few sound complaints here and there throughout the years. I got a civil citation for “rambunctious behavior,” a noise complaint, what have you. I was in the blotter. I screenshotted it and posted it on Twitter, people thought it was funny. 

Various noise complaints

SHACK: Fauxchella II was really where we got on the map for a lot of people because of Heart Attack Man.

SWIM: Looking at it now, even just them and Sonder Bombs, that is already huge. And then with Fauxchella III, it just feels like it’s always been exponential. The first one was so local, then you guys stayed Ohio-based but got these bigger bands that were about to release really significant albums onto stuff like Gami and all that, which is like its own world. It’s pretty crazy to look back on a lot of those lineups. So you guys had, what, a year between that and Fauxchella III? So what was the intervening year like from April to April?

SHACK: Looking back at the Facebook Events, we were doing one, maybe two shows a month, and then Fauxchella hit, and then in May 2018, we did three shows, all out-of-town bands. June 2018, we only did two, but multiple Michigan and farther-out Ohio bands. July 2018, we only did one show, but it was kind of like a pivotal moment. We hadn’t really been taking donations super well at these shows because we didn’t know DIY ethos.

July 2018, Taking Meds and Expert Timing played the Shack on a Tuesday. I had no idea what I was getting into with either band, and now I am absolutely infatuated with both. They were from Florida and like New York, and it was really the first time that we booked bands from not in our region. And not only did we book them, but they reached out to us.

They played with American Spirits cause we’re putting ourselves on shows just cause it’s our house. There was also this band Mecha G, which was like a live-action Godzilla roleplay band. They played songs and did sketches that told the story of Godzilla. They had a fight, and one of the dudes got his face busted open and was bleeding everywhere cause they were wrestling. It was a fever dream in the best possible way. That was definitely a turning point for working with out-of-town bands.

At this point, Dillon had kind of taken a step back from doing Shack stuff and American Spirits booking. But I was just like, “This is fun. I like doing shows at my house. I like being in a band. I wouldn’t mind continuing to do this.” So I was like if Dillon’s not gonna do the booking, I guess I will. The summer of 2018 and fall of 2018 is when I started to weasel my way into the booking world.

I immediately booked a DJ show for my birthday and had a cool band called Hello Luna come through and Two Hand Fools, which is members of Heart Attack Man. We did like a huge benefit show at the house. We did a rap show. Then November 2018, we did Short Fictions and Equipment with Outside and American Spirits. That was my first time meeting Alex Martin, who gave me a whole blast into what it means to be doing shit like that.

SWIM: I love Alex, I’m sure that’s a good inflection point, too. Sounds like that meeting imparted a lot of knowledge about how this booking stuff works.

SHACK: Yeah. Alex was doing it a lot at the time. Then Alex started sending me bands. December 2018, a month after Short Fictions, Origami Angel played their first show at the Shack, and it ended up being in the living room. It was Saturday, December 29th, and it was -10° outside, so we couldn’t do the show in the garage. We ended up doing it in the living room, and the PA system broke, which created the never-ending self-fulfilling prophecy that something will go wrong at a Gami Shack show.

Around the same time, in December of 2018 is when the Shack got on Twitter.

SWIM: …And that’s its own world of emo bands and interactions. It’s kinda self-contained in a weird way, but also a networking thing too. Is that when you guys started to conceive of doing Fauxchella again? 

SHACK: Yeah, it was basically just like, okay, well, what if we did another Fauxchella? How would we do this? This is when I started going to a lot of shows. I went to go see Charmer perform, and I was looking at the bands that Origami Angel was doing stuff with, and I was made privy to Stars Hollow. We had done some shows in Michigan, so I became privy to the Seaholm folks and started getting my feet wet in the Michigan scene meeting all the people up there.

February 2019 has one of my favorite stacked bills, Future Teens, World’s Greatest Dad, Teamonade, Spirits, and Kiddo. Just kind of solidifying that we’re working with like actual good touring bands. 

Fauxchella III Poster

SHACK: April 2019, we did Fauxchella III. We did a pre-party the day before that was kind of keeping the tradition of Ohio bands; it had Waving back when they were still called Waving & Waving Goodbye. Shitty Neighbors, which is the Little Elephant people. Biiitchseat, that’s when we first met Biitchseat. Discount Nostalgia who are like a classic BG band. Ship & Sail from Michigan.

The following day was when we had Shortly, Charmer, Stars Hollow, Forest Green, Sonder Bombs, Origami Angel, Teamonade, Snarls, Equipment, American Spirits, Absinthe Father, Seaholm, Baseball Dad like…

SWIM: Crazy.

SHACK: Yeah. I’m actually taking it in cause I’m establishing the timeline for myself too, and I don’t understand how I got all these bands to play. 

SWIM: Well, partly it’s probably just messaging people and being like, “Hey, this is happening on this day, do you wanna play?” At a certain point, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of people that then are like, “Oh, all these other bands are playing? Yes.” I’m sure that it’s just shooting your shot a lot-

SHACK: That’s literally all it’s ever been. It’s funny because, on the E Word podcast when American Spirits were on the Freshman Class, they referred to Fauxchella as “Emo Twitter Fest,” and by God, how right they were because I’m pretty sure I DM’d all these bands on Twitter. I’m pretty sure that’s how I handled most of the booking, and still do a lot of the booking, is through Twitter, which I’m sure some people fucking hate.

SWIM: I remember talking to Haley Butters from Absinthe Father after their set at Fauxchella III, and at that point, This Band Fucks was still a thing on Twitter. And I was like, “Yo, love the music, love This Band Fucks,” and Haley told me, ‘If I were to make a fest, this would be the lineup of the This Band Fucks-approved bands.’”

It’s interesting to see how that stuff solidifies over time too, and what sticks around long enough, like Gami where they’ve put out multiple EPs and albums and then become symbolic of a larger thing like fifth-wave or whatever. 

SHACK: Crazy ass lineup. Yeah, it was Twitter Fest through and through, and there are tons of Easter eggs on the poster. Like there are members of every single band from the Summit Stage hidden in the background.

SWIM: Who does the posters? Because it looks the same as Fauxchella II. 

SHACK: Taylor Wilkes did a lot of the OG Fauxchella posters. When we did Fauxchella II, we had the people from Lord Whorfin and No Culture, who were doing their own music documentation live session kind of thing down in Columbus, come up and film Fauxchella II. We didn’t even do that in-house at all at the beginning.

LOONBASE LOGO BY Taylor Wilkes

SWIM: Was that what led to Loonbase then? Were you guys like, “Oh, we could buy some video equipment and do this”?

SHACK: ​​Trey (vocalist for American Spirits) and Kate (vocalist for Half Kidding) had always been into photography and videography and, through Bowling Green, had made really good friends with Matthew Rao, Chance Duffy, and Taylor Wilkes, funnily enough, who I met seven years prior when I was working in Insomnia Cookies. It's just really weird. BG’s a small town.

SWIM: I remember going to Fauxchella III and seeing the cameras and stuff, and this already felt very established. You guys are filming all of this stuff, and in my mind, that was synonymous, just because that was my first Fauxchella, too. I was like, “Oh, okay, obviously this is a longstanding thing. They’re on the third one, and they’ve got this whole video thing going on.” So just coming from the outside, it felt like this was a legit operation.

SHACK: I guess that might be how we fooled people, that it looked official. The first Shack video that came out of Summit Shack and Loonbase Studios was Cliff Notes Episode One with Former Critics. This got put out on June 1st, 2019. So we must have done the Fest filming first and then forayed into doing video stuff for touring bands. Cuz we originally started with like the interview sessions, and then the Fauxchella III videos started coming out right after that. So, yeah, Fauxchella III was really when we merged with them fully.

SHACK: When we made the switch from II to III and all these bands started saying yes, I was like, ‘We can’t do this at the house.’ That’s when we made the switch to Howard’s and started that relationship.

SWIM: So Fauxchella III is kind of this huge point where it was a lot bigger bands, and you guys realized you had to go somewhere else. What was that process like for getting to Howard’s?

SHACK: There are really only two or three venues in BG that ever really had a history of doing shows besides the random house spots; it was Howard’s and Clazel. Clazel was more of a nightclub kind of vibe, same with Liquid. But it just made the most sense to do Howard’s because it was a dive bar. We’re fresh outta college, throwing house shows, you know what I mean? So, yeah, a dingy dive bar is fucking perfect.

SWIM: Yeah. You got pizza right across the street, it’s the best.

SHACK: Yeah, it was close to the house; it just made the most sense, given the limited options we had. We reached out to Steve, who’s the owner and the sound person usually, and he was super down for the idea. The weirdest part about Fauxchella III is that even being at Howard’s and having all these up-and-coming bands on it — the whole thing was still free admission. Fauxchella III didn’t cost anything.

There was a whole discussion about the switch cause we loved doing shows at the house. We hadn’t done any shows at Howard’s yet. It was tough for all of us to kind of reconcile losing that because it was all we knew. Moving the festival to Howard’s was, in a way, losing some of what made Fauxchella Fauxchella.

The garage can realistically only fit 60 people max, and that’s sardines. That’s why I got really good at listening to bands from outside the garage. If the show was small enough that I could go watch the band, I would, but in a lot of cases, I’d open the door, look inside, see hell, and just be like, “I’m cool out here.”

It's kind of wild ‘cause the Shack is so small; it’s just a two-car garage. That’s it. We’re really not working with any space. But, man, it didn’t take much for the shows to feel huge. I think that’s what played into a lot of the notoriety of the Shack and the crazy shows, it’s ‘cause the space was so small. If those shows had taken place at Howard’s, they wouldn’t feel packed at all.

We had some of the best people come into the gigs, you know what I mean? The first era of the Shack as it evolved was just mint. And it was honestly mint up until COVID. I’m sure you’ve seen PUG Fest, right? 

SWIM: Yes, yes. I’m hoping to be there this summer!

SHACK: I guess PUG Fest is essentially DIY Burning Man 3. Mica from Something Missing came down and played a Shack show when they were still a teenager. They recently graduated college and apparently started DIY Burning Man because of the Shack.

SWIM: Oh, that’s so cool.

SHACK: PUG Fest is working with a way bigger venue that’s 800-900-cap and can work with way bigger bands. The fact that something like that started because of what the Shack did is mind-blowing. Cause again, I still have no fucking clue what I’m doing. I find bands I think are cool, I find people that I think are cool, and I smash ’em together and see what happens.

SWIM: It’s something you can really only see in retrospect, too. Who would’ve guessed that mashing those random people and bands together led to so many fucking cool shows and music? 

You don’t really see all that shit until years down the line, and you’re looking back. Looking at all these shows, even on the Facebook Events page, you can kind of see how one thing led to the next. Speaking of which, what came after Fauxchella III?

SHACK: Oh God. Yeah. We went fucking ham after Fauxchella III. Holy shit. I can’t believe my roommates were cool with all this. So, yeah, after Fauxchella III, I was jazzed. We made the switch to Howard’s, and we were really sour about it, but it really came to fruition pretty well. So I decided to book eight shows in May. The skyrocket is insane, and they were all at the house, which is wacky to think about.

There were seven shows in June, and then there was Sword Fest. Jack (of Mover Shaker) called me and was just like, “Hey, I’ve got Pool Kids, Mover Shaker, and ****** for this random Wednesday in June,” and I was like, I already have four touring bands, but I would do it if you can convince everyone else to do it. For some god-forsaken reason, everybody was down. 

SWORDFEST POSTER

We booked and promoted it relatively quickly; we had like a month, I think. Probably still our coolest promotional thing that we did was the video with the fake Final Fantasy RPG, but putting stupid DIY jokes as the moves and stuff like that. I still think that we peaked in terms of promotional ability right there.

So Fauxchella III hits, and I start booking a stupid volume of shows at the house. Then Sword Fest hits, which just kind of fell into our lap. Then right after Sword Fest, we took the Shack team with Equipment and American Spirits to New Jersey and helped L.E.A.D. DIY throw Strobeless

Ellie Hart was like, “What if we did a fest in Jersey?” And I was like, “Okay, hell yeah.” And then Ellie and Hannah did most of the work. They had a dope team of people in New Jersey that I had the pleasure of meeting and liked working alongside to help throw the show. Yeah, the lineup was actually kind of crazy as well. 

L.E.A.D. DIY Strobeless POSTER

Then, from Sword Fest and Strobleless, I was just like, ‘Well, we might as well do a fest in the fall.’ You know? We did one in the spring, and we did one in the summer, what if we did Fallchella?

We joke tweeted about DIY prom, and people really latched onto it for some reason. So I was like, fuck it, I guess it’s DIY Prom — fuck Fallchella.

SWIM: It’s hard to describe from my perspective. I keep coming back to 2019 because I just went to this random festival in April, cause I was like, “Oh, I like Origami Angel.” And then to follow Summit Shack over the course of that year, and, holy shit, you guys just keep doing all of these gatherings. I was like, damn, the Midwest is fucking cool. 

SHACK: Somewhere in the middle of that, we did our two-year anniversary show with Barely Civil, The Weak Days, Teamonade, American Spirits, and Mess

Then in September, we didn’t do any shows except for DIY Prom, which was 24 bands and six comedians. And this was also American Spirits’ last show.

SWIM: Oh yeah, you guys capped it off! I just remember everyone chanting your name cause it was like, “You fucking did this Conor.” You guys had just finished playing your last set, and it was just very heartwarming.

SHACK: I’m pretty sure I visibly broke down on stage. It was very touching.

DIY Prom Poster

SWIM: So that gets us up to Snowchella almost. 

SHACK: We had DIY Prom in September 2019, and then this is a very pivotal moment. Friday, October 4th, Summerbruise played the shack for the first time… And then played the Summit Shack way more times after.

SWIM: Aside from American Spirits and Half Kidding, is there a definitive “Summit Shack Band”? Could you even boil it down to one?

SHACK: There are four bands that I would consider Shack bands who aren’t members of the Shack. I think it’s Equipment, Teamonade, Discount Nostalgia, and Summerbruise. Discount Nostalgia was our first local band that really played the Shack a lot. They were just really good homies of ours and an amazing band. Then Teamonade because they got their start at the Shack. Equipment became a Bowling Green local after they played the Shack for the first time. Then Summerbruise essentially became a Bowling Green local from multiple hours away. 

[The two of us digress, discussing mostly-defunct Midwest bands, then get back to the timeline]

[We had] DIY Prom in September, then all of October did a bunch of shows. November did a bunch of shows. Oh, that’s when Cliffdiver played the Shack in November 2019. Jess, a friend of ours from Cleveland who had come to many Shack shows over the years, messaged me and was just like, “Hey, there’s this band from Oklahoma. I really want to play at your house. Can I book a show there?” And it turned out to be fucking Cliffdiver, pre-pop-off, and they just played to like 30 people in the Shack.

Capo Fest and Sled Fest both happened in the summer 2019 and winter of 2019. Those were both fests in Chicago that we didn’t really help out with, but we were very good friends with the people running it, and Half Kidding played. I remember Addie asking for tips and stuff like that. They didn’t need any help. Addie had that shit on lock.

SWIM: And that was what led to “Bella,” right? Again, another example of a domino effect.

SHACK: Yeah, that’s where the Half Kidding song “Bella” came from. It was Capo or Sled, I can’t remember which one.

Saturday, December 21st. Equipment EP release show, Invite The Neighbor’s 50th podcast with Gami, Cheem, Parkway & Columbia, and In A Daydream. Jesus. There are some wild videos of the Shack going bonkers for Gami cuz that was post-Somewhere City. Quippy was really just starting to catch cause Madrigal had done really well, so people went bonkers for both bands. That was also my first exposure to Cheem, who I just booked a tour for.

Madrigal EP Release Show Poster

We did the New Year’s show. Bunch of shows in January. We did Showchella on January 25th, 2020, and it went fucking awesome. Really crazy lineup again. Sonder Bombs, Mover Shaker, Short Fictions, Plans, Teamonade, Gray Matter. She/Her/Hers, Snarls, Weak Days, Sweet Peach, Punch Drunk, Summerbruise. Former Critics- Yeah. Holy shit. Yeah. 

Snowchella Poster

So this was, this was definitely in the primo era where I had started filling in for bands. So right after DIY Prom is when I filled in for World’s Greatest Dad at Fest. Which, again, just catapulted me into like, “Yeah, this is sick, I wanna keep doing this, this is awesome.”

Then the Teamonade, Summerbruise, Half Kidding Tour, which was one of the only things Half Kidding did before COVID. There was Equipment, String Machine, Biitchseat, Summerbruise, for the Scratchy Blanket album release at Leapfest. So it’s like oozing Shack vibes with some of the bands that they got on it. Leapfest in Pittsburgh was on February 29th, literally 12 days before everything shut down, so I guess that is technically the last fest we helped out with.

SWIM: Yeah. I remember you guys had announced Fourchella, And at that point, I had moved to Denver, but I bought a ticket. I was like, “I’m coming back for this!” and was all stoked. You guys had announced it, and then the rest of the world happened and had to pull the plug. I feel like you guys did make lemons into lemonade with all the Minecraft stuff a little bit.

Fourchella Poster

SHACK: Yeah, prior to when things shut down in early to mid-March, we had been playing like a bunch of Minecraft, just on a realm in the Discord. The Discord was Ian (who lived at the Shack), Kate (who also lived at the Shack), Trey, Matt, Chance, Joey, and Serg. Marco from Kiss Your Friends and a number of other people from Michigan all hopped on to help us build everything. In less than a month, we made Minechella, and we did it on the same day that Fourchella was supposed to be: April 17th and April 18th. 

We literally had a chat called “minechella lol” because, at that point, it was just such a goofy concept. The process that we went through to record everything was streaming to Twitch, but also streaming in Discord so that we could have Chance flipping between Discord screens of the people that were the “cameras” for the fest.

So we essentially made it so the festival could be multi-camera, and we could switch between different shots. We had some people who were working on aesthetic shots and some people who were documenting people jumping around and the music playing and stuff like that. 

I’m sure if I went back and watched, it would be incredibly clunky, but we had a month, and none of us had ever done anything quite like that before. That was just an enormous team effort: 30–40 people all chipped in to make that happen.

Fourchella Minecraft Poster

SWIM: And at the time, no one knew when we were gonna be able to see shit again. So it was a godsend really to have something that communal translated digitally. And I do think all that effort showed in the end product.

SHACK: I’m looking at the Facebook event, and the description literally says, “We doin’ it big on Minecraft. 4/17 to 4/18, 1:00 PM to midnight.” That’s all it says.

SWIM: Say no more.

SHACK: Doing it big on Minecraft, that’s so goofy. Then that extended into the Shack Craft Monthlies. Beach Bunny submitted an acoustic set for one of ’em. It was Beach Bunny, Save Face, Sonder Bombs, and Short Fictions.

We did Origami Angel Broke Minecraft. I’m assuming that was in either late April or early May. The server went down, again, continuing the tradition that something will go wrong at a Gami Shack show. Oh yeah, at the Equipment Madrigal release show, the soundboard crapped out. So Origami Angel was already two for two breaking Shack shit, and then the server goes down for Minecraft.

Ryland, I think a day or two before Minechella, decided to completely revamp the set they were gonna do and did the kind of like lo-fi remixes.

SWIM: Yeah, I remember you posted the text, and they were just like, “Yo, can I, can I do a dubstep set?” And you were like, “Yeah, sure.”

SHACK: At that point, I was like, literally whatever anybody wants to do, we’ll showcase it. In a weird way, it’s kind of returning to the Same Co. roots of just whatever you have to showcase, this is a platform for it.

SWIM: And now it’s cool that set is documented on that EP basically as it was presented. And that’s such a cool document of a terrible time in the world, but it’s at least something good. 

SHACK: A silver lining. 

SWIM: You pulled all that out of 2020 and got back to it by last year, which is so fucking cool. After burnout and COVID just wreaking havoc on everyone’s mental health, then it’s just like, “Okay, at what point is it safe to start planning something like this again?”

SHACK: October 2021 was our first show back, and it was with Summerbruise, Carpool, Equipment, and Half Kidding at Howard’s. At this point, everybody had moved out; Lisa and I live here alone now, so we did all of our shows at Howard’s from that point on. 

SWIM: Keep your space.

SHACK: December 2021 through April 2022 were very sparse. We did so few shows, and most of these were Ellie's shows. This is when Ellie started working at Howard’s cause at some point over COVID, we all drove to pick up Ellie from Jersey and moved them to Bowling Green, and now Ellie is more of a local than I am. 

June 2022, Ellie booked the Weatherday, Michael Cera Palin, Oolong, Summerbruise, Waving, and Brown Maple show. And then Fauxchella V. I’m trying to figure out when we were just, “Yeah, we’re back.”

Fauxchella V Poster

I wanna say we probably started booking Fauxchella V like six months out, so realistically it was probably January 2022 when I started. I remember I sat down with everybody and I was like, “Okay, we have to decide if we just wanna say fuck it.” Like yeah, there’s still COVID, tours are still getting canceled, all of this stuff is still happening… But if we’re gonna get back into it, we need to do it now, or I’m gonna move.

Not necessarily holding everything ransom, but I was just, I can’t live in Bowling Green anymore if I’m not gonna do Bowling Green stuff. You know what I mean? Lisa and I were considering moving somewhere else, and I was considering just sucking it up and getting a job job and actually just being a career person. But that’s not fulfilling. I was gonna be depressed as shit doing that, and I knew that. And since getting back into the swing of things, I’ve definitely kind of reconfirmed for myself that I wanna expand on this in one way or another.

We did Fauxchella V once again, just like DMing bands on Twitter. But at this point, like almost everybody that I had reached out to is at least somewhat aware of the Shack.

SWIM: And it feels like the reach is farther than ever for Fauxchella VI. You’ve leaked various incarnations of that lineup to me, and this is probably the biggest one yet.

SHACK: We’re doing three days: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It’s like a 10-hour day, a 13-hour day, and a 9-hour day. We’re having Damb come out, and kind of help be an organizer with Ellie and me, along with JJ from JJ’s Bar and Grill and X-Ray Arcade. 

SWIM: And it’s still at Howard’s too, right?

SHACK: Yep. Still at Howard’s.

SWIM: Paid now. 

SHACK: Yeah. Fauxchella III was free, and then Sword Fest was $5. DIY Prom was, I wanna say $10 or $20. Snowchella was $10 or $20, and then Fauxchella V was $30 presale, $40 at the door. 

SWIM: Man, inflation for real. 

SHACK: True. 

SWIM: But, also like an incredibly small price to pay to see like 30 bands really.

SHACK: I mean, we’re really keeping the whole dollar-per-band guarantee alive. I think we’ve got 60-something bands and we’re gonna do $60 for a full weekend pass.

SWIM: Okay. Last I had was like 45 on the list that you sent me, so I, yeah, I need a new lineup.

SHACK: Yeah, I love to do stupid shit. I go in assuming that they’re all gonna say no, and then they all say yes, and then I have way more bands than I anticipated.

SWIM: I think that’s the theme of this whole interview, really.

SHACK: I like shooting shots just for the sake of shooting shots. And every party was interested, and I was just like, okay, this was like a goofy pipe dream. 

Michael Cera Palin and Dikembe are doing three days around Fauxchella. The Riley!/Ben Quad tour that just happened mainly happened because of them both being on Fauxchella V last year. Just so many little things that all domino effect into these crazy ideas that I now have for the future. 

You know, all in all, the past month and a half, it just feels good to be back. Fauxchella V really kicked me back into gear a little bit. It kind of kicked me in the butt, and then starting booking with Fauxchella VI.

Cheem posted about needing a tour booked, and I was just like, ah, I’d book a tour for Cheem. And it was like their most successful one yet! The leg Seaholm did with Riley was their most successful tour yet. And it’s just kind of blowing my mind that it’s working.

Cause, again, the theme of it all is I have no fucking clue what I’m doing. Like, I am like flying by the seat of my pants at all times and just learning in the process. I’ve been very lucky to have a team of people with the Shack and a team of people doing this all across the Midwest that have offered all sorts of tips and advice and knowledge to help make these things not only feasible but productive and run well.

And, you know, even since we started charging for the fests, all of the money after covering overhead goes back into the bands. So it is like truly what people put in is what bands get out of it. 

Your Life in a Grid: An Interview with the Owner of Tapmusic.net

If you’re a music nerd on Twitter, you’re probably familiar with the deluge of images that get posted every Friday. A funky little 5x5 grid depicting the 25 albums that its owner listened to most over the last seven days. Sometimes people post a 3x3, other times a 4x4, but regardless of which combination they choose, the ritual and cadence are still the same; share what you’ve been listening to over the past week. It’s called 5x5 Friday.

There are a few different sites that can generate a collage like this, but the most popular is one called Tapmusic.net. The website is barebones, centered around a primary homepage with a singular function: to generate these charts. 

When you visit the site, your eyes are most likely to be drawn towards the giant header near the top of the page proudly announcing “Last.fm collage generator” in big, 70-point font. Beneath it reads something of a mission statement: “Because what's the point in listening to music if you can't let others know?” The following sentence instructs the user what to do in a perfectly efficient way, with only one word of pride poking through the otherwise modest explanation. It reads, “Use our generator to create astonishing album collages based on your Last.fm charts!” And astonish us they do.

Every week, thousands of users flock to this website to type in their last.fm username and watch as Tapmusic renders an image that feels like a musical summation of their week. Sometimes the results surprise us; other times, they're perfectly on-brand. Either way, for a certain type of music geek, this weekly repetition has become a sort of hypnotic ritual. You made it to Friday? Time to celebrate with a chart! End of the month? Make a chart for the last 30 days! Trying to claw your way through the dregs of December? No better way to kill some time and send off the year than a big chart depicting the last 12 months!

There’s something endlessly fulfilling about this practice. If you listen to enough music, seeing the results of your listening habits splayed out in a perfectly lined-up little grid every week is practically guaranteed to release a splash of serotonin in your brain. And when people “like” your chart? Forget about it. Sometimes they spark discussion, sometimes an artist will retweet it, and sometimes your friends will clown on you for a bizarre record that made its way onto the last row. Anything can happen on 5x5 Friday.

At the beginning of 2022, I committed myself to a year-long Twitter thread dedicated to housing my monthly charts. There’s something incredibly satisfying about scrolling through that thread and seeing my own little year-in-review broken down month-by-month like that. To see my music journey over the past year on little squares all lined up like toy soldiers in a box. To see my life in a grid. 

Tapmusic.net is a vital cornerstone of the online music community. An endlessly-renewable resource that allows anyone with the right accounts linked up to see their music taste in an instant snapshot. Weekly charts are a fast way to sing the praises of the artists and albums you like, transparently showing what the user has spent the most time listening to over the past week. It’s a celebration of music and a visually appealing way to show people what you like. 

These grids also allow one to engage with other music fans almost instantly. Oh, you post your weekly chart on Twitter too? Odds are we could kill a good 10 to 30 minutes talking about music together if we ever met in real life. Odds are you’re a pretty solid follow. Even if we run in completely different circles, you’re probably at least a little bit of a music nerd like me. 

The very first iteration of Tapmusic, circa 2011

Since 2010, Tapmusic has served a growing userbase, helping people share their listening habits in ways that few other platforms do. And all of this is free, funded mainly off a pay-if-you-want donation system. 

The About page describes Tapmusic as “the web's premiere site for generating collages based on last.fm user history” and credits exactly three people. Or should I say three usernames. It lists, “The core team is comprised of silverhawk79 (administration, generator), AntaresMHD (generator), and xzwqt (design).” Each name links out to a corresponding last.fm page and nothing more. That’s how you know you’re dealing with real-deal music fans. 

Tapmusic is a part of so many people’s weekly music routine, yet little is known about it other than the occasional update pinned to the top of the home page. I recently reached out via Tapmusic’s contact form to see if any of the creators would be interested in talking to me about the site’s history. The owner of Tapmusic, Aaron Hudspeth, quickly responded and was happy to sit down with me to discuss everything from his own music taste to what possible things lie ahead for the site. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like behind the scenes of a niche online music fan fixture, then you’ve come to the right place. 


SWIM: First off, how would you describe your music fandom? What kind of music are you into?

AARON HUDSPETH: I’m kind of all over the place, but I tend towards the heavier side of things. Thrice and Gojira top my charts, but I’ve also got a soft spot for Modest Mouse and The Cure. I try not to be a music snob, but I can be extraordinarily picky about finding new music to listen to.


SWIM: You’ve been using last.fm since 2006, what’s your history with that platform?

HUDSPETH: Honestly, I signed up because of 4chan. Back in the day, I was very active on the /mu/ (music) board under the name ‘Wait, what?’ (some people may still recognize that name!). I kept seeing threads posted about a site called last.fm and how it could track your music and give you recommendations, so I was intrigued. It did help me discover new music and make quite a few friends, and I’m glad I found it.


SWIM: The “About Us” page says you started Tapmusic back in 2010. What were the early days of this project like?

HUDSPETH: The early days were about as barebones as it could get. I was in an IRC chat with some other folks from 4chan, where I ended up meeting the creator of the original 3x3 script, Daniel (credited as AntaresMHD on the site). I offered to host the script on my server, which was otherwise sitting unused, and I created a quick n’ dirty interface for it. It was extremely basic, literally only an option to choose the time range and enter your username. The name Tapmusic actually came from a failed project from my early college days, where me and some friends thought we could create the next big music-based social media site. It ultimately went nowhere, but I kept the domain name for a few years juuust in case and ended up using it for this new collage site.


SWIM: How many charts does Tapmusic generate in an average week?

HUDSPETH: As a conservative estimate, I would say anywhere between 40,000 to 50,000, though that number spikes very heavily near the end of the year – on Dec 31st, there were over 28,000 generated in one day!


SWIM: What’s your day-to-day interaction with the site (if at all)? 

HUDSPETH: The site itself is mostly self-sufficient, but I check in on the server at least once a day to see if any updates need to be installed or to check if anything looks like it is out of whack. Downtime for the site is extremely limited, as I keep a close eye on any potential problems and try to mitigate them before they become any bigger.


SWIM: How much music do you listen to, and how often do you use Tapmusic to generate your own charts?

HUDSPETH: I listen to music constantly in one form or another, but admittedly I don’t generate many collages of my own through Tapmusic – maybe once a month, just to get a broad overview of what I’ve been obsessing over.


SWIM: From the outside, you seemingly run this entire thing by yourself with minimal outside support or influence. Do you consider yourself DIY?

HUDSPETH: I would say so, yeah. I have resisted running ads for pretty much the entire life of the site, and only very recently decided to partner with an ad company to help with costs. I am very vigilant about making the site as user-friendly as possible, so I want to make sure any advertising is unobtrusive.


SWIM: Back in November, you posted a message that you were taking a break from monitoring the site for your wedding. How’s married life treating you?

HUDSPETH: Honestly, it’s been about the same as pre-married life! Not that that’s a bad thing – we had been together for nine years before deciding to finally tie the knot, so not much changed in terms of our relationship. 


SWIM: When did you first decide to add a donation button to the site, and what have the results been like over time?

HUDSPETH: I believe it was about 7 or 8 years ago, and it was around the time I was able to modify the basic 3x3 script into a larger 10x10 version. At the time, our server was not nearly powerful enough to handle everyone generating a large collage like that constantly, so I decided I would make it a somewhat more exclusive feature to avoid overloading the site. Over time, donations have allowed me to upgrade the server to be more and more powerful.


SWIM: You recently made some Premium-only features like 10x10’s available to all users, so it seems Tapmusic is growing and “performing” well. When did you guys decide to implement this change, and why?

HUDSPETH: After discussing it a bit with Daniel and evaluating the performance of our current server, I decided that it would be able to handle the increased load. It was a fairly recent decision, put into place at the end of November 2022, actually. On top of that, I had recently acquired a (much) higher-paying job and didn’t feel right continuing to ask people for money to help with server costs. I’m not in this for any sort of profit, I just like providing a service for people to enjoy.


SWIM: Are you aware of the Topster Guy? In the past year, he’s posted some
questionable conspiracy theorist messaging in the sidebar of his site, which, when contrasted with weddings and adding features, has led some people to some people consider him your “Wario.” Do all you music website guys know each other in real life?

HUDSPETH: I’m aware of him but don’t know much about him aside from his views – I very purposefully avoid using Tapmusic as any kind of a platform for my views because it doesn’t seem like the time or place to try and force it on anyone else. I have been contacted a few times in the past by people who are building their own collage sites, and I have helped them with advice or bits of code, but other than that, I don’t think I’ve been in contact with any other music website folks.


SWIM: The site is charmingly barebones, but a recent update claimed that you’ve been improving the service and plan on rolling out new features soon. Anything you can tease or let us know at this point? Will the site be getting updated more regularly in the future? 

HUDSPETH: Yes! We are planning to make the collage page a bit more feature-rich, with integrated sharing tools and easier downloading. We also aim to implement a feature that will generate a text-based list of the albums in the collage as well, similar to Topster. We are also looking into bringing back artist-based collages, as, unfortunately, I had to remove that functionality a few years back due to changes on last.fm’s end. It may be making a return at some point!


SWIM: Do you view the site’s current straightforwardness as a design principle or just a byproduct of when and how it was created? 

HUDSPETH: I view it as a design principle – I want it to be as easy to use as possible, with a very quick load time. People get frustrated if a site takes too long to load or has loads of popups or other distractions, so I like to keep Tapmusic clean and fairly sparse.


SWIM: What’s the long-term plan for Tapmusic? Any final thoughts? Charts forever. 

​​HUDSPETH: Perhaps an app! Or a Discord bot? I plan to keep the site running for as long as humanly possible. I also want to thank everyone who has used the site over the years and shown their support – I literally could not have done it without you. Thanks!

HTML – Righteousness Endures Forever | Album Review & Interview

I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately. My own death, the death of my parents, the deaths of my friends and the people I love. When I really get thinking about it, the totality of death just feels so all-consuming. It's endless and inevitable. It’s a heavy thing to have on your mind, but sometimes sitting in those thoughts is the only way through. 

As long as I can remember, I’ve also always enjoyed albums about death; Carrie & Lowell, Psychopomp, Tunnel Blanket, Springtime and Blind, just to name a few. I think it’s fascinating to hear someone articulate their personal understanding of grief in such a public forum. 

There’s something beautiful in hearing an artist you admire grappling with their own version of the same things that are weighing heavy on your mind. There’s something comforting in hearing that journey and those learnings summarized in a condensed album-length format. There’s also a strange peace of mind in knowing that something so gorgeous as any of those records can come from the loss of a loved one.

I don’t want to romanticize death, but it is a fact of life. It’s something we all brush up against at some point, and it’s a topic that people shouldn’t shy away from. HTML’s Righteousness Endures Forever is the latest in a long line of death albums in which I have found refuge. Pitched by lead singer Travis Verbil as “a dad-rock record about my dead dad (but chill though),” the release is heavily inspired by 70s singer-songwriter fare but also acts as a clear continuation of the emotional indie rock sound found on 2018’s Topmost Grief.

Album opener “How to Grow Muscle” begins with far-off bird chirps and a Jeff Tweedy-indebted acoustic guitar riff. Much like the opener from last year’s Unmake Me, this song grounds the listener in the physical space where our narrator is about to lose their loved one. With a first line of “outside the room you died / there were gold sunbeams and gardens green,” HTML waste no time jumping straight into the topic, immediately letting the listener know what type of album this is. The song describes the horror of walking in on your father having collapsed on the floor and the frantic thoughts and actions that go into the following minutes. It’s harrowing and morbid but also beautiful. 

Knowing that Verbil has made it through this experience, processed it, and turned it into the beautiful piece of music you are now consuming gives a sense of relief that makes the recounting palatable. Rather than let this loss render him inconsolable, Verbil uses it to make a statement about impermanence–eventually arriving at the ironic conclusion that there’s a serene finality to be found in this kind of loss. 

After something as heavy as this opener, “Queens Blvd (Drunk Moonlight)” adds some unexpected (but much-needed) levity to the affair with a cocky instrumental fit for strutting around Queens wrapped in your favorite jean jacket. After some good-natured borough-on-borough shit talk, initially-innocuous lyrics like “I will never let your buds die” begin to shine through and take on a whole new death-tinted double-meaning upon repeat listens.

The album’s upbeat streak continues with both “Reservation Cigarettes” and ​​“Reapin’,” the former of which has a boppy acoustic groove and bouncy drum pattern while the latter bears the album’s most distorted guitar lick and catchiest chorus. Perfectly-placed bells give “Reapin’” a sun-soaked Sam’s Town-era Killers feel. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say Springsteen, but the two might as well be used interchangeably here. Evoking a religious-flavored viral tweet, Verbil outlines, “Reapin’ / I don’t like reapin’ / I much prefer sowing / So I sow” in one of the album's most singable moments. 

Throughout the final three songs, HTML flips back into a more somber and introspective tone as Verbil shifts perspective to focus on his relationship with his mother, his late father, and eventually himself

Album closer “Light Hypertrophy” ends the release on an overtly happy note as Verbil sings, “I’m glad I’m alive / Oh, I’m glad I never died / I’m glad, I’m glad I’m alive.” Hearing these words as the period mark on the end of an otherwise grief-filled album only reinforces that good can be pulled out of the depths, making the journey worth it. 

After reiterating this affirmation of life, Verbil shares a condensed version of the process that led him to this optimism in the wake of his loss. In his most heartfelt delivery, he sings, “Lately I’ve been thinking / The hole that you left / could be where the light comes back.” He then pauses for a beat, letting the sentiment soak into the air before adding, “into my life.” 

As these words wash over the listener, the release ends with more bird chirps, a lovely full-circle moment that acts as a reminder that life keeps moving. Much like those first chirps of birds in the morning, the record stands as a testament to beauty coming after darkness.


I sat down with HTML vocalist/guitarist Travis Verbil and lead guitarist Brian Mazeski to discuss their artistic process, death, and the creation of the band’s stellar sophomore record.

Photo by Hannah D’Arcy

SWIM: You describe the album as having a 70s-era singer-songwriter “dad rock” vibe first and foremost. What artists or albums most directly inspired this sound?

BRIAN MAZESKI: Travis had the idea to put together a sort of “inspiration” playlist while we were writing/ideating the album, and it was filled with both actual 70s music (Van Morrison, Dylan, Dr. John, Paul Simon) but also more modern singer-songwriter tunes. A lot of these artists and albums I had only heard in passing, but I started to listen to them more and more, just to have it all rolling around in my head while we were writing the album. I’m not sure any of that influence comes through explicitly on the album we actually wrote, but I do think that influence helped inform our decision-making, in sort of a “what kind of lead would Van Morrison want on this track” sense. And Travis would also use some of these influences for direction on certain instrumentation; if I were stuck writing a lead guitar part, he’d say, “think Van Morrison hazy seventh chords,” and somehow that would help. 


SWIM: Righteousness Endures Forever represents a bit of a genre pivot for HTML. How do you view this record in relation to your previous work?

BRIAN MAZESKI: I think a big aspect of the genre/tone shift for me is that I think about music and writing music much differently now than I did when we wrote our first album. Back then, I wanted our songs to stand out for their complexity and technicality (which I still admire in artists/music), whereas writing this new album, my sensibilities aligned much more with Travis’s, and we both sort of locked into this goal of writing a free-wheelin', groove-oriented album of songs that all hit the ground running and could be arranged/played a number of ways and all sound good. That being said, I think we have a certain style (guitar tone sensibility, for instance) that is common to both albums, which is really cool given how different both projects are.

TRAVIS VERBIL: Going into this record, both writing and recording, I was on a really sprawling Dylan kick and tried my best to divorce my thoughts on production and genre from songwriting. It was extremely freeing. We were able to tear down a lot of walls we built for ourselves. I think our best work comes when we tend to think of genre as window-dressing. 


SWIM: Given that the album is about your late father, the songs get into heavy topics and imagery. How do you go about writing and recounting things like this through your lyrics?

TRAVIS VERBIL: It didn’t feel particularly hard or uncomfortable to recall those moments to write; I already had gone through them a million times in my head. Between the living and the writing, the writing was certainly easier.


SWIM: You’ve tweeted before about
being your own audience which is the creative philosophy I most respect at this point. How did you arrive here? Similarly, given that this record is so personal to you, who do you think this record is for?

BRIAN MAZESKI: One of the things I love about being in a duo with Travis is that we have a kind of litmus test method between the two of us such that, if we’re playing around with a song or an idea, if we both love it then we love it and the seal of approval ends there, and if one of us is lukewarm on it, we can usually play around with it more until we fix it or scrap it. But at the end of the day, we both want to make music we love, and we rarely make decisions based on how we think something is going to be perceived (I've definitely been guilty of that in the past, though). Nowadays, I think we both share the view that if you make art for and from yourself, you’ll find your tribe out there who dig it. 

TRAVIS VERBIL: It’s been a long road, but I’m glad we arrived here. I feel like people get in your head at a young age and will try to be the arbiters, the proprietors of capital-c Cool or capital-s Style. Brian and I have been playing in bands together, playing a lot of different genres, since we were literal children. And in that time, the only times I have ever felt fulfilled or spiritually nourished, whatever you might call it, is when I feel like we’ve been true to ourselves and our shared sensibilities. In that vein, I feel like this record is for anyone that enjoys it, hopefully as much as we do. 


SWIM: I love the cover art and feel like it perfectly captures the feeling of the record. Who took this photo, and why did it feel right to use it as the cover?

TRAVIS VERBIL: Thank you! I took the photo— it’s actually the view from my childhood bedroom window. And before you ask, yes, I grew up in front of a cemetery; that’s an extremely Queens thing. This photo was taken in 2017, I would guess. It’s the spot where my dad began planting a vegetable garden just weeks before he died.


SWIM: Between the title of the album and Reapin’, you evoke quite a bit of religious language throughout this record. What's your background with religion, and how does it factor into this collection of songs?

TRAVIS VERBIL: I had a Catholic upbringing, and a lot of that stuff just lingers in my head— especially when I think about death. There’s no real rhyme or reason to it. It’s always there, though.


SWIM: Sonically, it feels like the record has two modes: quiet, subdued folk tunes and explosive full-band bombast. Was this a conscious decision or just a byproduct of your songwriting process?

BRIAN MAZESKI: That’s a really good question, and I think you nailed it with the second bit about the songwriting process. Every track on the album came directly from an initial rough demo Travis sent via voice note, usually just him playing an acoustic guitar. For some of those tunes, we knew that “the song,” meaning the essence of what made it good or unique, was that it was loud and distorted and driving and quick, whereas for other tunes, we felt that “the song” was just Travis and the guitar, with maybe some ambient piano, and nothing else was needed. For the more subdued songs, I think we took our cue from classic songs we loved that are relatively minimal (either overall or maybe in the sense that they are drumless or more open rhythmically) and tried to be conscious of realizing/acknowledging what makes a song complete and what it actually needs versus what we can pile on in the studio. 

Photo by Hannah D’Arcy

SWIM: I love the little ways you chose to round some of these songs out (the bells on Reapin’, the harmonica on NY Cowboy, even the bird chirps that appear throughout). I’d love to hear about the decisions that went into these little flourishes that appear across the album.

BRIAN MAZESKI: I am so glad to hear you dig those little details! I think we’ve always been interested in auxiliary percussion/instrumentation, dating way back to the first album Travis and I made years ago (we used bells and a ukulele and even some of Travis’s theater group members as a backing choir), but for whatever reason, I personally felt inspired to explore auxiliary percussion much more for this album. I really wanted these songs to groove and for people to feel the groove and bop their heads. I found myself thinking about being back in the high school percussion ensemble, playing all these shakers and guiros and bongos, and thinking about how so much of the music I love (both older and modern) takes full advantage of these tools (“Do It Again” by Steely Dan, for example, or the congas on “Patience” by Tame Impala) and that we should do the same if we want to make music that really grooves and makes people feel the rhythm. 

As for the bird sounds, I was inspired by Travis’s vision for the album and wanted to go all-in on it; when we would talk about the sequence of songs on the album, he said the first track, “How to Grow Muscle,” is like the sun rising on the first day of summer, everything is lush and growing, and so I decided to throw some bird sounds at the beginning of one of the later demos and fortunately, we both liked it and decided to keep it for the final mix. Many of the songs on the album (as I understand them, and what I admire about them) are about a specific moment and feeling, and I felt like a small detail like bird sounds would go a long way toward transporting a listener (I hope!). There are dark moments and aspects to some of the songs and the album in general, but at the beginning of “How to Grow Muscle,” we want the listener to feel like they’re listening to the beginning of a new summer day. 


SWIM: You haven’t released any music since 2018’s Topmost Grief, and death isn’t exactly something you can plan for in advance. When were these songs written, and how did this album come together?

TRAVIS VERBIL:  It all came together very organically. In December 2020, just about six months after the Father’s Day when I discovered my father had passed away in the night, I broke three different bones in my foot in a freak accident. I ended up going on worker’s comp, and my boss (​​a songwriter himself) called me and told me to write an album to pass the time. I ended up staying with my sister for a few weeks since my apartment was a walk-up, and I started messing around with her acoustic guitar–the same one I taught myself on when we were kids. 

I started writing one song a day and sending them to Brian. I started on New Year’s Day; I think that’s when I recorded the first demo for “How to Grow Muscle,” and by the end of the month all of the songs were written. Brian created arrangements for all the songs on the GarageBand app on his phone in the Winter, and he would send them to me, and we would talk about leads, drum parts, you name it. 

There was an issue though— we had, essentially, already written most of the follow-up to Topmost Grief, an album we were calling Heaven II. We had to make a creative decision based on the moment, and, for a lot of different reasons, we decided to shelve Heaven II and go full-speed ahead with Righteousness

It was the right call. We were in the studio that spring, started recording on weekends, and were finished by late July. We decided to sit on the record because we both envisioned it coming out at the beginning of the summer and decided that a Spring 2022 release date was best.


SWIM: Twenty minutes is pretty lightweight for an LP, but Righteousness feels like it has enough time to tell a complete story. How was it to assemble this collection of songs? I’m curious if there was any whittling down on your part, or did these seven songs just make sense?

TRAVIS VERBIL: We had some songs that didn’t make the cut for us. There were songs called stuff like “Rosemary,” “My Cup Runneth Over With Junk,” “Death House,” one called “The Last of the Coffee Grounds,” and a handful more that didn’t do it for us. Some of them we really liked and some of them we liked less. Brian and I came to the consensus we’d rather have a very tight set of seven than release a record with songs we didn’t think were our absolute best. I was also very inspired by summer 2018 when Kanye put out a new seven-track record he produced every Friday. I really dug some of those records, mostly Pusha T’s DAYTONA, and thought that we could similarly get away with a seven-song tracklist.


SWIM: Were there any other albums or pieces of media (about death or otherwise) that helped you through your personal experience with loss?

TRAVIS VERBIL: I kept going back to “Real Death” by Mount Eerie. I have this very funny memory of making my girlfriend and sister listen to it in a hotel room before going out on the town in South Beach, Miami. Talk about a pre-game!


SWIM: Queens, NY plays a central part in the identity of this record and your band. How do you see that physical space coming through in these songs, and why is that important?

TRAVIS VERBIL: I feel like I spent some of my earlier years wishing I had a Brooklyn demeanor, Brooklyn sensibilities, all that. I wasn’t being true to myself. I’m a Queens guy;  I’m a 7 Train guy, a chicken-over-rice guy, a white sauce and hot sauce guy, a Let’s Go Mets guy. We wrote these songs during the one year of my life I lived in Brooklyn, and as much fun as I was having, I definitely missed Queens. And the more I wrote about my dad, the more I missed Queens. Just like the genre stuff I said earlier, I really felt like making this album so unapologetically Queens was fundamentally important in Brian and I being true to ourselves.


SWIM: The final song speaks for itself and ends the album on a bright, optimistic note. What’s one thing you hope people take away from this album as a whole?

TRAVIS VERBIL: The response to this record from our friends and contemporaries has been unreal. All I could hope is that people are excited for what’s next. 

A Message to The Haters: Raven, The Acid Bath Princess of the Darkness on Being Emo, Growing Up Online, and What To Do When Nobody Gets the Joke

Originally published in Emo Trash, March 2021 

We have a New Years’ Eve tradition on the internet. Every December- sometimes in May, or August, or October, any time we need a laugh- a 5-second clip makes its way around social media. It’s a video of two girls wishing us a happy new year, decked out in period-appropriate ‘00s goth makeup and lamenting about how much they just don’t care about the holiday.

It’s 2008, almost 2009, and they announce it with little enthusiasm. In the short clip that’s usually shared, there’s a moment of doubt about just how much of the video is a joke. After all, we were like that once, adamant that wearing liquid black eyeliner on our lower lash lines was a good idea and that Tim Burton’s art was just really really cool, okay? 

The video, A Shout Out From Tara and Raven, is a parody that feels close to home. After making it clear that 2009 means nothing to them, they go on to address their “haters”, list off their likes (being goth, Edward Cullen, MCR and AFI) and dislikes (preps, jocks, and of course- haters), to wish us a “crappy new year” as MCR’s “Disenchanted” plays in the background. They remind us that they are Raven, the Acid Bath Princess of The Darkness, and Tara, before signing off. 

It’s the third upload on their channel, xXblo0dyxkissxX, and would have remained lost to the internet had it not gone viral in recent years (It’s worth mentioning that the video currently has 66k likes and 6k dislikes.) Before the two went out with an unintentional bang, they uploaded more videos, including one titled A Message To The Haters, where the two of them blink silently at the camera for four minutes while Ashley Tisdale’s cover of “Never Gonna Give You Up” plays on a loop. 

Behind xXblo0dyxkissxX was a girl named Sarah, who recently admitted to making the videos with her sister as a joke. Now 31 and a professional dominatrix, she’s spent the new year dealing with surprisingly positive reactions to a misunderstood YouTube persona, and figuring out what to do next. Her Twitter bio proudly reads “Fake emo turned adult emo;” we talked about how she ended up there.


How did you get into emo music when you were younger, and how or why did you revisit it as an adult? I feel like a lot of people have really funny stories about the moment they were like, oh my god- this music is scary, but I'm into it. 
When I was emo as a kid I never wanted to call myself emo- I was goth. At the time, this was around 2002, nobody really wanted to be “emo”, I guess. Goths were tough and emos were whiny and angsty and stuff, and I was angsty. I lived in a small town in east Texas, and I think that if I were open about, you know, being emo, people would have just called me goth anyway, there wasn’t that much difference in subcultures there. 

I did grow up in a home where my media was heavily censored, so I wasn’t really allowed to listen to my own music. If I wanted to listen to something, it had to be like, screened through my dad. One time, for example: Linkin Park was a somewhat safe band, for some reason, and one time my dad had printed out some of the lyrics, one of the lines was talking about “walking on eggshells” or something, and my dad sat me down and he was like, “Do you really feel like this?” and it sucked, it really sucked, because I wanted to listen to all of this stuff, and I couldn’t really do it. I was already this kid who, like, wasn’t allowed to watch pg-13 movies….it was very over-protective. I don’t really remember what got me started on the music, but I did have friends with more normal parents and a more normal access to music, and they would share things with me. 

I do remember that in 5th grade I went to this science based summer camp, one of the counselors wore a Dead Kennedys shirt. I didn’t know what Dead Kennedys were, but I just remember thinking, “holy shit, this guy is so fucking cool.” After that summer camp I did start wanting to explore a little more, explore that side of myself. I do know that because everything I ingested was so censored and so limited I didn’t have as wide of a range of exposure as I do now. There is a little part of it that makes it more exciting, in a way.

You get a chance to do it over again!
Yeah, yeah! So, how I got back into it: Tara is my sister. We made the videos to make fun of ourselves for our own emo phases. The videos were my idea, I convinced her to play along. After my emo phase from 12-14 I started getting more into punk. After I got into AFI, I started going back and listening to their older [heavier] albums, but to go from Sing the Sorrow to like, the Casualties and Rancid, especially when you’re fifteen...it’s embarrassing. You start to become a little embarrassed at what you used to be like. 

So, I wanted some sort of career in comedy, YouTube was new, I’d spent some time on 4Chan, I was familiar with trolling. I wanted to troll people, so I convinced Tara to create these characters that made fun of our former selves. At the time, even though we weren’t emo, we still had our fair share of mental health problems; I’ve been depressed and anxious for as long as I can remember. 

After Tara and I stopped filming together, we went off to college, we started doing these rock-outs in the car. We only go to see each other once a year, and it started out as a joke, like, remember those videos we used to make, wanna scream along to Good Charlotte together? So that started out as a joke, and it became one of those things that I started doing on my own as a form of comfort, just putting on the music and listening to it. 

I got started again through Good Charlotte’s first two albums. Those were like a security blanket for me, and I recognized that it was so weird that I was going back to something that I had once been so ashamed of. When I was 21, 22, I had this car that only had a cassette player, and I scoured Ebay until I found those Good Charlotte albums on cassette; I needed them SO badly. So I had my Good Charlotte cassettes mixed in with my Dead Kennedys, I had some Henry Rollins spoken word stuff...it was something I started listening to whenever I was anxious to calm myself down, and it was really comforting. 

That gave way to me exploring other things I liked at the time, and it gradually progressed into an acceptance of “emo.” I started jokingly referring to myself as an adult emo around 2016, and it wasn’t until 2018 that I started to embrace it. I guess the simplest way to explain it would be that I went through an emo phase, was super embarrassed about it, made fun of it, returned to cheesy pop-punk, and slowly grew into an adult emo. I think a lot of that just came with personal growth, just this personal acceptance that I am a very emotional person, and this is the music that I relate to. 

“Emo” used to be kind of an insult.
Oh, yeah!

It’s funny now, but we all took it super seriously back then! I was definitely emo in high school, but if anybody called me that, I’d get really offended. Kids used to get really hung up on social stereotyping, but you don’t really hear people using that language anymore. 
Yeah. 

I remember one time, this must have been 2007, my friend told me, “Robin, you’re skinny so you could be a prep, but you’re just too weird.” and I was like...what does that mean? I know you’ve said your emo phase was more when you were younger, did you notice or take part in any of that stuff, or were the rest of high school pretty normal for you socially? 
Oh, no. I was always the weird one, hands down. To give some examples: In third grade I didn’t have any friends to hang out with during recess, so I just hung out and talked with the teachers….I wanted to be a Herpetologist when I was a kid, I had a glow in the dark Albert Einstein shirt, I was bringing snakes to show and tell. I was never cool, I was never the one that people wanted to hang out with. I’d come to school on Monday and realize that like, all of the girls in class had a sleepover that weekend except for me. I just wasn’t cool, ever. I think that my emo phase, my goth phase was sort of an attempt at protecting myself- but even then, I was the first mall goth at my middle school, so I got made fun of for that. 

Even when I was out of my emo phase, I turned into a weird theater kid. I spent most of my time in high school just writing, writing sketches, writing stories, doing dumb funny shit with Tara, filming videos with my friends. I didn’t have a very normal teenage experience in that I didn’t date, I didn’t go to parties, I spent a lot of time just being creative and being weird and just enjoying all of it. There was a time in college where I fell into a group of nerdy friends, and they were all cooler than me, they dressed better than me, and I thought things would be different if I shopped at Express. So, I shopped at Express, and it didn’t change anything!

Do you think that you and your sister would have received a more positive response if you were making those videos today? TikTok is popular, we have more people, more young women doing front-facing camera comedy. 
Without a doubt, for so many reasons. I think that culturally, things have changed considerably. This also ties into a point about emo: Culturally, a lot of things have changed. I think that younger people are a lot more empathetic, young people are a lot more progressive. They know that you can’t make fun of someone for being gay, they know that you can’t make fun of someone for, you know, being autistic. There’s just so much more basic human decency there. 

Social media as a whole was still pretty new, and especially on YouTube, it was a lot easier to hide behind this separate account and you’d get away with it, but now, youtube is owned by Google, you use Google to sign into everything, it’s a lot harder to get away with that stuff, because your account is tied to so many things. With my generation anyway, we grew up with the internet but it wasn't always there, whereas younger generations grew up with the internet and social media always being there. They were all really new and really exciting when I was a teenager, but because they’ve grown up with these things, they’ve been taught that you don’t get to be a dick to people on the internet. 

Something that I’ve noticed, for example: Azer, a brief costar in our videos, uses they/them pronouns. In the comments section of Instagram or wherever, someone will say something about Azer and use the wrong pronouns, but someone else will reply to that comment and go “hey, just an FYI, they use they/them pronouns!” and then the other person is gonna reply and go “Shit, I didn't know, I’m so sorry!” We would not have done that on youtube in 2007. 

As a whole, mental health has become less taboo to talk about. If people aren’t comfortable talking to their friends in person about their anxiety or their depression or whatever, they can still talk about it online, and I think because people talk about it online more, it normalizes it; it’s okay to have feelings, it’s okay to be an emotional person. So, that brings me back to my point, about emo being cool again. 

Did your online presence extend elsewhere during that time, or was there more of a safe distance between you and others? Did you ever become close with anyone that way when you were younger? 
Yeah, totally. As a not very popular child, all of a sudden being able to meet people online, that was great. I made a friend on Xanga when I was fifteen, we’re still friends, we still talk to each other every now and then….I had multiple MySpaces, I was a pretty early Facebook user. “Raven” was my only real attempt at having a channel. 

Youtube was a lot different back then; you had your flash animations going around like Salad Fingers, you had people uploading their own little skits. Did you have any favorites, as someone making your own content? 
I remember YouTube in 2005, I discovered that there were old music videos there. I didn’t have cable growing up, my media was really censored. When I was fifteen or so I found music videos on there, and that was what really stuck out to me as being like, the most magical thing. There was a period of my life in 2005 where I would watch the music video for the Smashing Pumpkins song “Today,” every day before school. 

That’s a good start, that’s a good one. 
Yeah, yeah! I had like, the lyrics printed out and on my wall. I was talking to one of my friends about this, she was mentioning how YouTube was such a different place back then. The few sketches we could think of were all produced by men. A question she asked me was, “Who was the first woman you saw on youtube being genuinely funny?” We noticed that in those early days, if women were on youtube, they were being laughed at, not laughed with. 

Videos that went viral at the time, they were reinforcing that stereotype that women are emotional, and this is why it’s so funny. An example that we thought of was the Cara Cunningham “leave Britney alone” video. We realized that it got so much traction because here was a person being emotional, and also queer, and not being straight was a bigger thing then, too. So we talked a lot about how homophobia and misogyny led to “leave britney alone.” 

I was looking back through some of those comments, and I know you’ve probably talked about this a lot- but people were really concerned with you being “cringe”. It seems like most of the people who left nasty comments were also the ones who didn’t get the joke, and even then, they were weirdly angry about the idea of a couple of goth kids goofing off in front of the camera. What is so bad about being cringe? Is there anything else embarrassing you did as a teenager outside of youtube? 
I don’t consider my youtube channel embarrassing. I was doing it as a joke, I was doing it to troll people. I think the cringe comments came a little bit later. The initial comments we got were a lot more aggressive. Do I think things would be different today? Yes, I do. I think that some people really didn’t...there were definitely some people who got the joke. We got a number of comments from people who were like, oh my god, you guys are hilarious, this is comedy...The comments that I remember, though, before that, there were a lot that were unnecessarily violent. There were a ton of comments telling us to kill ourselves, that we should have been aborted, Azer was subjected to so much homophobia. I think that because we were young people- and I looked considerably younger than I was- there was also ageism coming into play. Kids aren’t really given an opportunity to be funny unless they’re being funny for other kids. 

I think a lot of that has changed, but back then, people saw those videos, I’ve got a natural intensity, so they assumed. I knew what to do and say to piss people off, and it worked! I was expecting comments more along the lines of, oh my god, ya’ll are posers, you call yourselves goth but you listen to Simple Plan. Instead, people saw young women...at the time, emo kids, alt kids, mall goths, they were everyone’s punchline. You combine all of these things, and it elicited something really vile and hateful from so many people. It was one of the reasons why Tara and I wanted to keep everything a secret for as long as possible. 

There’s a difference between “your jokes aren’t funny” and “oh my god, you are everything that’s wrong with society, go kill yourself you fat, ugly bitch,” and we were getting those comments every single day. What started out as something funny at first, over the course of ten to twelve years, if you’re exposed to that, it starts to become more personal. 

A large part of why we didn’t want to come forward was because we stopped reading the comments a long time ago. We didn’t pay attention because we didn’t want to see that shit again. I only came out in the first place because people had begun to link Raven to my dominatrix persona, Petra. Over the past few years, people would approach me and ask me if I was her, but because I made my character so much younger than I was, it was easy for me to deny it.

That’s got to be complicated, that makes sense. 
Yeah, so for the past twelve years or so, I was under the impression that we had created something that I personally thought was hilarious, but nobody thought was funny at all. Because the comments were so negative, I just assumed that if anyone linked the two, it would be like 2008 youtube all over again, that my work accounts would be spammed with all of this shit. Why would I allow any of that to permeate this persona that I’ve crafted for work- a persona that’s supposed to be this, like, all-powerful woman? 

I assumed that coming forward would be really bad for business. I was expecting to have to lock down social media until everything blew over. Towards the end of December 2020, there had been this sort of mystery surrounding Tara and Raven, this sort of internet manhunt trying to find out who we were. I was worried that if I didn’t out myself, that somebody would dox me in ways that were really damaging to me, but they wouldn’t have known what they were doing, because they were so caught up in that excitement and wanted to get that pat on the back. So, I came out as a preventative measure. I had no idea that I would be this well received, I had no idea that people liked the videos, that they thought I was funny. 

For the past twelve years I thought I’d created something that I thought was really funny, but nobody else thought was funny, and they hated it so much that they thought I should kill myself because of it! To be met with all of this positivity and interest and be told that people have liked my videos for years and they’ve thought I was funny for years, that’s such a weird mindfuck.

I think what’s so endearing- I hadn’t seen the other videos before, what always got me about the New Years’ video- you almost can’t tell if it’s a joke or not, and I’ve always enjoyed it because we were like that. We were all like that at one point, and then we started to get embarrassed. I’m glad they’re still up, they’re nice to look back on.
That’s really good to hear, I never thought that people found them so relatable. It’s been really cool to hear stuff about this, and to hear that people really related to my characters who were based on me, and who I used to be. It’s comforting.

In a lot of those videos you two address those people in character when you refer to “the haters.” Did it help the two of you navigate it, was it helpful to laugh at it, or was it just part of the script? 
Truthfully, we were doing it because I was trying to incite some sort of flame war. I was trying to troll these people back! I wanted the videos to go viral, I even put them on 4Chan and I was like, “Hey, get a load of these guys, how embarrassing! Look at these nerds, trying to pretend that they’re goth!” The people who we addressed [in the videos] were real people. This was before the comments started to leave the damage that they did, I’d see them and I’d go “Tara, we gotta reply, we gotta make them even more mad, this is what we gotta say…” 

One of my favorites is the rickroll video, you really can’t get more 2008 than that. Whose idea was it to make that video?
4Chan was very upset about the Ashley Tisdale cover. 4Chan was super pissed about the Ashley Tisdale cover. I went to Tara and I said, “Look, this is a big deal on the internet right now, we gotta do it, just trust me,” and so we did. I definitely don’t understand how people saw that and still thought our videos were real. 

What’s a trend from the 2000s that you love and would want to come back? 
This is what I want: I want the original hot topic back. I want Hot Topic to be scary again, I want the old font, I want it to look like a cave when you enter, the old Hot Topic smell. I want parents to still be afraid of Hot Topic. Did you ever write on your jeans in Sharpie, or was that just me?

I wrote on my shoes in Sharpie a lot. 
I wrote on my shoes and my jeans in sharpie, but- truthfully, I want the old Hot Topic back. 

True or false: Have you ever written fan fiction?
No, I have never written fan fiction. 

Damn. 
That was something that I just...I never did. 

You know, that’s probably...that’s good. Good for you. 

You can keep this one PG-13, but: What’s the funniest or strangest thing someone has said to you within the context of work?
I’m so desensitized to my job that I forget that a lot of things are shocking to people. With the video I made at the beginning of the month, I just ended it with “Yeah, I’m a professional dominatrix” because they’d flooded my work accounts already, it was old news. I forgot that it’s a very exciting thing to a lot of people. I got so many comments after releasing that like, “What the fuck did she just say in the last second of the video?!” I thought they were excited about the old footage I was going to release, but they were really excited about my work….I forget that things that are funny to me are super shocking to other people. 

Someone I have an arrangement with, he’s this punk dude, and I know that punks and people who are really into music are very proud of their tastes in music, they’re very proud of the fact that they have a good taste in music, and I know these things because I am one of those people. I once wrote in candle wax, “I <3 KID ROCK” on his back. It took up his whole back, and I took a bunch of pictures, and he died, it was so fucking funny. He was like, “How could you?!” 

See, that’s funny! That sort of leads into my next question: Do you think there’s any connection between who you were as a young person making those videos and the work you do now, in terms of creativity and being able to laugh at yourself? 
Yes and no. There are similarities, that mostly stem from having a psychological understanding of people, and being able to improvise. The New Years’ Eve video was probably the one that was the least improvised. For the most part, things were improvised, and we knew we could do really ridiculous shit and not break character. 

Because of the trolling, there was the psychology of knowing how to get under people’s skin. With being a dominatrix, for example: everything is so individualized, you have to be good at honing in on those things really quickly, you have to get inside their head. Like with trolling people, you have to pick up really quickly on where they’re coming from, and even if you think you know, you might not actually know. You just have to have that awareness of other people and where other people’s thoughts come from. There’s definitely some crossover between the two personas. I definitely love laughing at people and cracking dumb jokes. Using comedy to mindfuck people is great. 

You mentioned on Instagram that you want to do more comedy writing. What are some of your ideas? Do you want to make more videos, or try something different? Do you even know? 
I really don’t know at this point, because again, this whole reception has been so unexpected. I came out two weeks ago, and I really wasn’t expecting any of this at all! I was going into it with the expectation of things going poorly, I would retreat into my online hermit cave and wait for it to blow over. For so long, I’ve subconsciously not given myself permission to explore these interests. The YouTube comments definitely had a lot to do with it, but as I got older, the stigma that came with being a sex worker got in the way. 

I signed up for improv classes in 2016 and dropped out because all of these questions came up. what happens if someone recognizes me....it raised all of these weird questions that I didn’t have an answer for. People still lose their jobs for this stuff, you know? “It doesn’t matter how funny I am because I’m not presentable.” I never gave myself permission, but now I’m realizing that maybe I can make this work. 

All of that has been very liberating, and I’m very privileged that I can say that, because most of the time, that is not the case for sex workers. People would ask me what I would do instead, and now all of a sudden I’m getting permission from all of these people that I can do that now. I want to try everything! I’ve got so many things that I want to explore now. 

I feel like nowadays people are more receptive to the weird. Eric Andre gets naked every single time he performs. He gets naked, and that’s his thing, that’s what he does. 
Yeah! Yeah, and that’s really exciting. 

Do you think that, between navigating youtube and your work, is there sort of a spot for girls to be weird online? Are there any positives at all? 
Yeah, and like I said earlier, there will always be people who are going to be dicks. I’m very protective of young people, it does bother me that young women, young people period can still be subjected to so much cruelty. I think that things are changing- even if there is still that cruelty, women and nonbinary, queer folks, people who aren’t straight, white cis males, will be subjected to much more scrutiny online, but I think that things have changed a lot since 2007, and that there is more of a place for people to be weird. 


At 27 years old, Robin Green is still emo, wants to know if her Meez are doing okay, and may or may not have pictures of Gerard Way saved on her phone. You can find her in Bellingham, Washington, and on Twitter at robinelizabth