McMenamins and the Rustic Charm of Band Of Horses

I never write about my hometown, partially because it’s trite, and partially because I’ve only recently begun to realize the things that make it unique. In the time since I moved away from Oregon in 2018, I’ve gained a new perspective on the place where I spent the first 25 years of my life. 

For starters, where my family lives in Portland is far enough out in the suburbs that it shouldn’t even legally be considered “Portland” on the postal code. My childhood home is about ten miles away from downtown Portland proper; too far for any sense of culture or nightlife, but just close enough to reap the benefits of Portlandia if you really wanted to make the effort.

I have plenty of favorite bars, restaurants, and attractions in Portland that I’d recommend to someone visiting from out of town, but I also have an equally long list of lowkey personal faves. When I get homesick for Portland, I’m typically missing my friends, family, and childhood home, but when I think about the creature comforts that lie 1,257 west of me, I often think specifically of McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern. 

For those not from the Pacific Northwest, McMenamins is a chain of local, family-owned brewpubs that are primarily located in rehabilitated historical properties. They own restaurants, music venues, hotels, theaters, and more. Each location is decked out in a distinct handpainted style that artists have dubbed "historical surrealism." They also brew their own beers, ciders, wines, and coffees. The food itself is good-to-great pub fare, but usually the experience itself is worth the price of admission. 

While some Mcmenamins are in highly populated downtown areas or attractions all their own, many are found in slightly off-the-beaten-path locations, and Rock Creek Tavern might be the best example of this. 

Described as a “secluded outpost” of the McMenamins chain, the Rock Creek location is hidden away in the countryside of Hillsboro. It initially used to be an old repurposed barn house, but that location burned down in 2002. A new building was erected years later in the image of its predecessor, even going so far as to use timber from two local barns in the rebuild (one of which dates all the way back to the late 1800s). 

The Mcmenamins’ website accurately describes this location as a “rustic lair,” and honestly, I’m having a hard time thinking of a better two-word descriptor for it. The building is creaky, dark, and has a deep smell of cedar. The outside is covered in moss and surrounded by local fauna for an authentic tucked-away-in-the-forest pub feel. There’s a pool table, shuffleboard, and even giant wooden mushrooms that glow softly for the perfect woodland ambiance. 

When I picture Rock Creek Tavern in my mind, it instantly conjures up a perplexing mixture of comfort and nostalgia, which is how I imagine lots of people feel about a random bar or restaurant from their hometown. The big difference is that Mcmenamins often feels cool enough to warrant those rose-tinted goggles. I visit almost every time I return home, and it always lives up to my memory. 

The kicker about this location, and what’s most pertinent to this site as a music blog, is that McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern also features live music performances every night around 8 PM. This means that sometimes you’d be wrapping up your dinner or just sitting down right as a group of dudes sauntered in, hunkered down, and started busting out instruments. It’s honestly very DIY, a modest setup with an amp or two tucked away in a corner near the entryway of the building. 

Music would flow through the place each night, and you never knew what you were going to get. Some evenings it would be a suitably-folksy banjo-led stompfest; other times, it would be a group of four dads laying down one seemingly never-ending twelve-bar blues lick. No matter the genre or arrangement, it was always an experience, and the live music is a real wild card benefit that came with dining there. 

This location is about 15 miles outside of downtown Portland, so it’s out of the way for most people but only a stone’s throw away for my family and me. The Grimes Clan would often venture to this location for a burger and a brew a handful of times each year for most of my young adulthood. It took us far enough out in the country that our phones didn’t work and (especially before the advent of smartphones) always felt like we were being transported into another world. 

If you’re curious what the place looks like, you can scroll back in my Instagram a few years to see a picture I snapped while looking down on the band’s setup from our table in the upper balcony. You can really tell the vibe, from the low-light stained glass to the two dudes in suede hats setting up instruments. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been there, but looking at that picture, I can practically taste the Cajun Tater Tot seasoning and dark, chocolaty Terminator Stout. 

This combination of senses isn’t something I’ve been able to replicate anywhere else. Rock Creek Tavern is a one-of-a-kind combination of sights, smells, flavors, and sounds that can only happen in a Mcmenamins. That’s why I get homesick for this specific restaurant; it’s a feeling I’ve spent a good chunk of my life fortifying, replicating, and memorizing. While I haven’t been able to visit McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern lately, one thing I have been able to do is listen to Band of Horses.

It’s not like I’ve seen Band of Horses play at ​​McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern (they’ve almost always been far too big of a band for that sort of gig), but the group’s first two albums are incredibly nostalgic and personal to me in the same way that ​​McMenamins is. Maybe it’s just a byproduct of when I uncovered their music (and how powerfully “The Funeral” has been used in countless movies and TV shows), but I would consider both Cease To Begin and Everything All The Time to be some of the best alternative records of the 2000s. On some level, this feels like a bold claim for a decade whose alternative music is primarily defined by groups like The Strokes and The White Stripes. Band of Horses came at the tail end of that era and just barely preceded the overbearing folk twee of groups like Mumford and Sons and Lumineers. 

I couldn’t stand that “Hey-Ho” bullshit, and not just because those songs so quickly became synonymous with Subaru commercials and the overall “hipster” movement of the 2010s, but because of how well Band of Horses perfected the same formula just years before. After all, why would you listen to a watered-down approximation when you had the real thing right there? 

There’s an underlying earnestness to those first two Band of Horses albums that makes them feel like something more than just standard “alt-country” fare. Sure they jangled, had some twang, and were known to use a banjo here and there, but that by no means should put them on the same playlists as groups like Of Monsters and Men. And no slight to any of those bands, if you like em, you like em, but I simply object to the fact that Band of Horses often gets unfairly lumped into the same category retroactively. 

In the time since their newest single, “Crutch,” I’ve found myself revising the Band of Horses Discography. I’ve found a renewed love for the grungy Why Are You OK, I’ve reveled in the warm shores of Cease To Begin, but most of all, I’ve found myself gravitating towards the band’s debut album Everything All The Time. 

The group’s first LP is a modest ten-track collection of songs released on Sub Pop Records in 2006. This was the first and last album to feature three of the band’s founding members and saw the group recording new versions of five songs off their Tour EP from the year prior. To this day, Everything All The Time is a downright stunning debut. It suffers from a bit of “Mario 64 Syndrome” in that it came first and contains what’s far-and-away the band’s most popular song, but that doesn’t mean the deeper cuts are worthless, in fact, far from it. 

What’s most impressive about this album is how well it acts as an introduction to this band and their world. It isn’t front-loaded, and it isn’t over-produced; it’s just 36 minutes of beautiful, rustic, folk-flavored indie rock. 

“The First Song” kicks the record off with a beautiful sway and ascendant melody that warms the body and soul. The lyrics are Christmas-adjacent (a huge plus for someone like me) and counter this sense of seasonal wonder with a more profound melancholy that often comes part and parcel with the holidays. This leads directly into the snappy one-two-punch “Wicked Gil” and “Our Swords,” the former of which is a vibrant drum-led track and the latter of which possesses a bouncy bassline that is counterbalanced by violent imagery.

At a certain point, these first three songs all feel like an onramp to the main attraction of Side A: breakaway single “The Funeral.” As mentioned above, this track has been used in everything from skateboarding video games to the 2012 Rihanna vehicle Battleship. You’ve probably heard this song at least a dozen times without even seeking it out. To this day, it’s still the group’s biggest hit, racking up about 200 million more plays than their second-most-popular song on Spotify. “The Funeral” may be a little tired, but does that make it any less impactful? Absolutely not. The song begins with a downright iconic guitar riff and solitary vocal delivery. It then beautifully layers elements on until the entire thing becomes a pressure cooker of remorse and sorrow. The track explodes into an outpouring of catharsis with the first chorus as the full band joins in, masterfully turning the intensity up and down as the song calls for it. It’s undoubtedly the band’s masterpiece; my only dig against this song is that it’s most people’s sole experience with the band. “The Funeral” is a certified hit; it’s Band of Horses’ “Fade Into You,” the exact kind of big alt-pop crossover that groups like this needs to achieve success and name recognition early on.

After the grandiose pinnacle that is “The Funeral,” the group winds down the first half of the record with “Part One,” and here is where Everything All The Time gets truly fascinating to me. “Part One” is a gorgeous and aching love song featuring velveteen guitar and some of the most gentle drumming on the entire record. It’s precious, confessional, and reserved, especially coming in the wake of a big swing like “The Funeral.”

Flip the record over, and you’re immediately greeted with a stomping barnburner in “The Great Salt Lake,” an ode to the largest inland body of saltwater in the Western Hemisphere. This leads to a downright hootenanny on “Weed Party,” a bluegrass banger that’s about exactly what you would expect from the song title. Kicking off with a titular declaration of “Weed party!” followed by a hearty “YEE-HAW,” it’s hard not to instantly absorb the infectious enthusiasm of what could easily be the album’s most high-energy cut.

The final three tracks are something of a depressive comedown that’s guaranteed to follow in the wake of staying up late the night before spending all your endorphins having a good ol’ fashioned barn hang with all your buddies. While this run of songs is a little slower and sadder, I love it for the pensive contrast that it provides to everything that came before.

Specifically, “I Go To The Barn Because I Like The” is one of my favorite songs on the record, second only to “The Funeral” or “The First Song,” depending on the day. This cut begins with the same reserved acoustic guitar found in “Part One” and finds lead singer Ben Bridwell accompanied by whisper-quiet harmonies courtesy of guitarist Mat Brooke. As the narrator brokenheartedly explains, “Well I'd like to think I'm the mess you'd wear with pride” the track begins to sprawl outward with a gorgeous pedal steel twang by the second verse. The narrator eventually concedes “you were right” over a bed of lonesome hums. The drums, bass, and second guitar all jump in for the hook where single words and phrases are uttered with patience, weaving together a story of forgiveness and redemption.

Outside
By your doorstep
In a worn out
Suit and tie
I'll wait
For you to come down
Where you'll find me
Where we'll shine

It should be clear now that I love this song quite a bit. “I Go To The Barn Because I Like The” really feels like it’s a hidden gem tucked away in the back half of the tracklist, much like McMenamins Rock Creek Taven. In fact, this song has always strongly evoked that sense of place in my head whenever I listen to it. The fact that it’s so beautifully written and deploys one of my favorite instruments of all time is just a bonus.

From here, the band crafts a five-minute banjo-led slow build in “Monsters” and wraps things up with a minimalist campfire tune on “St. Augustine.” Just like that, a mere 36 minutes and seven seconds later, you find yourself on the other side of Everything All The Time. You’ve journeyed from the estranged holiday season of “The First Song,” been swept up in grief on “The Funeral,” eased your mind with the natural wonder of “The Great Salt Lake,” and gotten stoned in the countryside with “Weed Party.” You hit the comedown and found some sense of inner peace with the final three tracks and now find yourself rolling back to civilization… at least until you start it all over again from the top.

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.

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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. 

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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. 

My Favorite Type of Song

I just found out that one of my all-time favorite songs is about jerking off. 

Ever since I first heard the twangy guitar plucks of “My Name is Jonas” pouring out of Guitar Hero III as a teenager, I’ve been enamored with Weezer’s eponymous blue album. Over the course of the intervening decade, the band has been a constant source of edgy adolescent tunes, ironic memes, questionable artistic decisions, and unexpected comebacks. It’s not like I’d never heard of Weezer by 2007 (I’d heard “Beverly Hills” on the radio and “Island In The Sun” in a movie or two), it’s just that I didn’t know the band was actually, well, you know, good. 

Once I gave The Blue Album a listen in full, I “got” Weezer almost immediately. The ever-shifting mixture of Cars-esque power pop, feel-good surf tunes, and pop culture geekery were beguiling to my teenage brain. I got to become familiar with iconic singles like “Say It Ain’t So,” “Buddy Holly,” and “The Sweater Song,” all only my own, devoid of hype, expectations, or over-exposure via radio play. With lyrics that referenced X-Men and idolized (arguably) the least-cool member of KISS, I could tell this was an album tailor-made for a teenaged Taylor. More importantly, I could tell it was better and far more artistic than songs like “Beverly Hills” had led me to believe. 

For me, the cherry on top of The Blue Album came in the form of its final track. After nine songs of catchy hook-filled power pop, the group wraps the record up with the absolutely epic eight-minute closer “Only In Dreams.” This song blew me away the first time I heard it, and it continues to blow me away every subsequent time I listen to it. 

“Only In Dreams”  begins with a solitary bassline and light cymbal taps. An acoustic guitar joins in, then a snare. An electric guitar starts plucking away, and suddenly the entire band has taken up the melody without you even realizing it. After about a minute, a remorseful Rivers Cuomo enters the track and quickly establishes the stakes: “You can't resist her, she's in your bones / She is your marrow and your ride home.” He soon continues, further illustrating how omnipresent this figure is, singing,  “You can't avoid her, she's in the air (in the air) / In between molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide.” Suddenly a whir of distortion kicks up, and the entire group bottoms out into a swaying, distorted borderline-shoegaze riff. 

Over the course of a verse and another couple of choruses, the lyrics paint a picture of romance, dancing, and adolescent clumsiness. Cuomo sings the title seven times, then lets the riff do the rest of the talking. The lyrics wrap up about four minutes into the song, and the back half of the track contains a beautiful, cresting instrumental that rises and falls with the power of a post-rock song. It’s a commanding display of emotion, musicianship, and artistry… Then I found out it was about nutting. 

That’s right, the song itself is meant to depict a dream where our hero is meeting this unnamed woman, dancing with her, then, you know, getting it on. This means the back half of the track; the build-up, the rises and falls, the constantly-beating drum, are all meant to be an auditory depiction of the narrator achieving climax. Hmm.

See, I’ve always liked this song for its format more than anything. It spends the perfect amount of time telling a compelling (if not a little vague) emotional story. Then, the band begins this instrumental jam that flows so seamlessly from the narrative. You don’t even realize how long this instrumental passage is until the song finally comes to a close, and you look down to see that eight minutes have passed. The song is segmented into these two beautiful acts that tell a story and then allow you, the listener, to fill in the rest. It’s about as creative and interactive as music ever gets. 

It took me until very recently to realize that many of my favorite songs share this exact same format. Perhaps two of the most famous examples would be “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” by The Beatles and “Transatlanticism” by Death Cab For Cutie. Both of these songs begin with simplistic instrumentals followed by a relatively straightforward bout of lyrics. Most importantly, both pieces are capped off with an instrumental back half that repeats the same measure over and over again to an almost hypnotic effect. In the case of The Beatles, “I Want You” is practically the template for Stoner Rock as we know it today. The song features a sludgy, slow-moving, and distorted riff that could perfectly accompany the slow-paced head bobbing of any given doom metal show. Meanwhile, “Transatlanticism” is a piano-led ode to long-distance relationships that begins with a remorseful delivery and dream-like logic. The song gradually builds underneath a repetition of “I need you so much closer…” before erupting into an instrumental that repeats the riff for four minutes straight because it’s that damn good. 

My point is, this is a style of song that’s more pervasive than we probably realize. It’s not just songs that are “long,” it’s songs that are long and winding and intentionally leave this vast wordless space for the listener to project their own feelings, thoughts, and experiences onto. 

Sometimes they are conceptual like “Maggot Brain,” where an environmentalist spoken-word intro leads to a soul-rending two-part guitar solo. Sometimes they are skillful shows of musicianship like Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun,” where rapid bursts of guitar feedback emulate the sounds of guns, helicopters, dropping bombs, and other Vietnam imagery. 

Sometimes an artist sneaks it into the album in a way that’s subtle yet impactful, like Angel Olsen’s “Sister” or Soccer Mommy’s “Yellow is the Color of Her Eyes.” Sometimes the artist intentionally draws attention to this style of song by having it open an album as Japanese Breakfast does with “Diving Woman.” Other times, the artist will choose to close the record with this brand of winding instrumental stretch like the aforementioned Weezer, or even something like Jimmy Eat World’s “Goodbye Sky Harbor,” where the song’s lengthy 13-minute coda is either loved or immediately skipped over depending on who’s listening. 

Bands like The Antlers seem to craft these kinds of songs effortlessly. Songs like “Rolled Together” and “Endless Ladder” aren’t even that long but still have enough room to properly unfurl. Across the board, the examples are truly countless. There’s “Black Oak” by Slaughter Beach Dog, “Runaway” by Kanye West, “Drown” by Smashing Pumpkins, “Phone Went West” by My Morning Jacket, and hundreds more. These songs are all incredible and often my favorites of their respective bands. I’ve spent the better part of the last two years compiling these types of songs into one long, genre-free playlist on Spotify that I sometimes throw on when I can’t decide what else I want to listen to. This is just a format of song that clicks with my brain, and I really wish there was a term for it. 

One of my first instincts is to call these types of songs “jams,” but that evokes so many images of hairy hippies, tye-dye t-shirts, nitrous tanks, and ganja goo balls that the title becomes unappealing. Bands like Phish and even My Morning Jacket indeed go out of their way to transform their songs into “experiences” when played live, but given the types of songs that I’m talking about, the word “jam” feels almost dirty. I like the idea of following the twists and turns of a live performance; that can be an extraordinarily rewarding and powerful experience, I just don’t like what the word “jam” evokes for me (and I assume) most other people. 

I wouldn’t call “Transatlanticism” a jam song, but it undeniably bears many of the same qualities. Truth be told, what I’m discussing here is some mix of jam band tendencies, post-rock builds, and stoner rock song structures. I know the concept of “jamming” isn’t relegated to any one genre, band, or scene, but hearing it done well on-record is so rare. I can be listening to a random album like At Home With Owen and suddenly, halfway through, get hit with a seven-minute slow-burn like “A Bird In Hand” and be swept off my feet. 

This format is striking because they intentionally stray away from the three-to-five-minute verse/chorus/verse structure that many songs default to. A song like Pedro The Lion’s “Second Best” would never get played on the radio, regardless of what year it came out or how popular the band already was. Similarly, a cut like “13 Months in 6 Minutes” by The Wrens is pretty unlikely to be someone’s favorite track on the album. These songs are simply too long and too unwieldy for standard radio play, streaming binges, or music videos. They don’t lend themselves well to any of those formats because they’re meant to be experienced and taken in with a subconscious part of your mind working to fill in the blanks and flesh out the edges. 

That is what’s so great about these songs. They’re hypnotic. They invite you in and give you time to breathe, listen, think, and feel. They’re also ever-changing. Depending on where you’re at in life, you could take something totally different away from the instrumental as another listener. Hell, give it time, and the way you interpret any one of these songs will change based on what phase you’re at in your own life. It’s a Rorschach Test in musical form. 

Two of my favorite songs of all-time use this exact same format. First, there’s “Like A River” by Sharks Keep Moving (which I’ve written about in detail before), then there’s “Oh God, Where Are You Now?” by Sufjan Stevens (which I’ve also written about in loving detail over here). Shortly behind those two is “Only In Dreams” by Weezer.

You can see why I was so shocked to find out that “Only In Dreams” is about something as bodily and objectively-hilarious as ejaculation. I mean, the band doesn’t exactly play it for laughs, but I feel like that explanation kinda takes some of the mysticism away. Until you hear that exact commentary from the band, “Only In Dreams” could be literal, it could be metaphorical, it could just be weird poetry, but as soon as you know it’s about Rivers Cuomo pounding off, you’re just like “...oh.”

It’s like if you were in the middle of interpreting a deep meaning from an abstract piece of art from someone like Rothko or Pollock, and then the artist themselves came up behind you mid-thought and whispered, ‘this one’s about the time I shit my pants in a Taco Bell parking lot.’ You have no choice but to have reality come crashing down around you upon hearing that. The illusion is shattered, and all you’re left thinking about is low-grade meat, cold tortillas, and diablo hot sauce. While you were once finding some sense of existential peace in the art, now your mind is consumed by thoughts of your own body and its disgusting functions. 

An artist’s intent should not completely override your personal interpretation of the work, but finding out that the song’s creator had such an opposing message in mind is a little conflicting, to say the least. 

“Orange, Red, Yellow” by Mark Rothko (1961)

The doubly-funny part of this is that I know this type of song is not for everyone. If you’ve made it this far, I assume you probably enjoy this type of structure or, at the very least, are interested in where this is all going. See, I know these tracks are just tiring and overindulgent to some people, but what some might call long-winded, I call searching. What others see as boring musical repetition, I see as an empty canvas. What others interpret as masturbatory, I interpret as cosmically-affirming. 

At times, this format feels like the musical equivalent of a long take in film. André Bazin is a famous French film critic who has focused a great deal of his career writing about the realism of the “long take.” The long take is a filmmaking technique in which an individual shot has a much longer duration than the conventional editing pace either of the film itself or of movies in general. Bazin argues that directors use this technique out of a “respect for the continuity of dramatic space and its duration.” He argues that long takes are closer to how we as an audience perceive reality (i.e., unfolding in real-time) and, therefore, more impactful. It gives the viewer a personal choice of what to focus on, and it introduces ambiguity into the structure of the film. All of these concepts apply to music as well. 

Songs with this structure also have a strong sense of continuity. It feels as if we are being swept into the scenery along with the artist. As the listener, we have the choice to focus on the song as much or as little as we like. We can listen to individual instruments, pick apart the time signature, figure out how this melody flows from the lyrics, or just let our mind wander with the band as our guide. That’s powerful.

Ironically, much like the song format I’m attempting to write about, I don’t have much of a defined ending for this piece. Instead, I’ll opt to do something I never do and close this article out with a quote. I know that’s a bit of a cop-out, but it’s too relevant to this discussion for me not to include. In their recently-unearthed Oregon City Sessions, there’s a section where Portugal. The Man lead singer John Gourley discusses the band’s creative process circa 2008 and how they re-interpret their own creations in a live setting. In it, he simply explains,

“I’ve always really liked that droney… I mean, calling it ‘background music’ is not the best way to talk about it, but I love things like that. I’d love to do a record eventually where we can just go for ten minutes and do what a song needs to do as opposed to culling those points as far as the song structure goes. I think we should be a little bit more loose.”

Delta Sleep – Spring Island | Album Review

Growing up in Sacramento, California, I had a lot of friends in high school who were really into math rock. For some reason, there’s always been a vibrant scene there, and to this day, I still don’t really know why. My buddies were all into bands like Dance Gavin Dance, Tera Melos, and Hella. I was still deep into my Riffs Only Phase (think Metallica, Mastodon, Queens of the Stone Age), so, to me, this all sounded like repetitive noise. I just didn’t get the appeal. I felt like my dudes were too concerned with time signatures and looping pedals when they should be emphasizing the emotional side of virtuosity.

It wasn’t until I was in college that I found some math rock that felt made for me. I stumbled onto Battles while listening to my campus radio station (shout-out KSMC). The DJ played “Atlas,” and I was floored. My perspective shifted as I realized that math rock bands are still rock bands, but bands that like to do their rocking in a, well… mathy way. Real deep eighteen-year-old thoughts, I know, but are you gonna look at me and tell me that I'm wrong? Battles allowed me to dive back into the genre with a new appreciation and understanding of what I did and didn't like. I found that bands who tend to craft noodly riffs based on repetition weren’t really my thing, and what I was really looking for were bands making big choruses.

For me, Delta Sleep are the latter of these two points of view. You’re just as likely to see the Brighton cosiners on the bill for ArcTanGent as you are The Fest. The band’s approach to math rock is imbued with splashes of big tent indie, emo, and even some post-rock. Their new album Spring Island places a heavy emphasis on the bombastic indie rock portion of Delta Sleep’s DNA. These are songs meant to be shouted at the top of your lungs in the midst of a bunch of other sweaty people. 

Lead single, “The Detail,” utilizes tried and true start-stops to build up to a massive post-rock catharsis. “Planet Fantastic” is a charming and gentle ballad of sorts that ends with the band cutting out while a chorus of friends sings the refrain one last time, presumably circled around the mic, arms interlocked over each other’s shoulders. “The Softest Touch” features a midsection that belies the song’s title. My personal favorite, “Old Soul,” is a rowdy banger that features a bending guitar line reminiscent of Coldplay’s “Yellow.” 

Lyrically, much of Spring Island is concerned with anxiety and dread sparked by climate change. On “Spun,” frontperson Devin Yüceil sings about his fears for the natural world and how the seeming inability to do anything about them is driving him mad. Meanwhile, “Forest Fire” shrouds a love song with the terror of fire season, and “The Softest Touch” laments that global warming will melt the polar ice caps while we’re all convincing ourselves that we are making a difference. The group demonstrates Yüceil’s justified paranoia with a precise frenzy that a band can only be achieved through years of collaboration.

Spring Island is an impressive achievement. It’s intelligent, but it’s not soulless. It’s technical, but it also rips. I’m thankful that my friends never stopped preaching the gospel of math rock because I would not have found Delta Sleep without them.

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Connor lives in San Francisco with his partner and their cat and dog, Toni and Hachi. Connor is a student at San Francisco State University and is working toward becoming a community college professor. When he isn’t listening to music or writing about killer riffs, Connor is obsessing over coffee and sandwiches.

Follow him on Twitter or Instagram.

Snarls – What About Flowers? | EP Review

When I was in high school, my favourite album was Say Anything’s ...Is A Real Boy.

This is relevant, I promise.

After years of being obsessed with the pop-punk albums of Sum41, Treble Charger, and Avril Lavigne (did I mention how Canadian I am?) ...Is A Real Boy introduced me to the more sonically inventive and emotionally challenging world of 2000s emo. My favourite lyric was, “I’ve got these last twelve bucks to spend on you. You can take me anywhere your sick mind wants to.” I spent hours figuring out how to download, edit and assign that passage as the ringtone on my red Motorola KRZR.

Snarls’ new EP What About Flowers? is filled with these Ringtonable Moments™. It’s not hard to imagine my high school self swooning over lyrics like “I used to think that you were an angel. Only when you said the words that meant everything” and “Know the world doesn’t care if you feel alone. Into the flames we fucking go.” The band has found a way to tap into the beautiful earnestness of these emotions. It’s not the naivety of high school I relive when I listen to What About Flowers?, but rather the all-encompassing totality of feeling FEELINGS. 

It’s a beautiful sentiment and a delicate tightrope to walk. Luckily for us, the listeners, Snarls is the tightest they've ever been on this EP. Snarls’ debut album, Burst, was also super tight, but there’s something more happening here; it’s clear the band has spent the intervening year and a half honing their craft. Vocalist Chlo White describes it best when she says, “We’re in the ‘pressed flowers’ phase of our band, Burst was taking a fistful of glitter and throwing it, but this EP was more intentional.”

And this intentionality shows! Everything from the guitar solos to the drum fills to how the bass locks in with the vocals on lead single “Fixed Gear” feels deliberate and tells its own story. I could go on about White’s vocal performance both on this EP and Burst for days, but I think it’s easier that I share this notes app screenshot from my second listen through:

Even with this more intentional approach to songwriting on this EP, What About Flowers? isn’t without those signature bursts of glitter. While the first two tracks end with stuttering feedback and the sound of guitar delay settling, something interesting starts happening halfway through. Delay trails, echoed vocals, and synth textures are sprinkled into the back and foreground in a way that creates their own spacey crescendos and percussion. It all builds toward the lullaby-like finale on “If Only” and a gorgeous piano line that feels incredibly hopeful after the song’s exploration of heartbreak and isolation.

This is a lovingly crafted EP that perfectly showcases the talent and depth of a fantastic young band. I spent a long time trying to think of a perfect metaphor to accompany it. A thread of yarn unspooling, opening a present, a single heart-shaped kite in the sky. Something simple like that. But I think it’s this: What About Flowers? is the feeling of falling asleep on the bus on your way back to college after going home for thanksgiving for the first time since moving away. Is this *very* specific to my experience? Sure. But just about everything about this album, down to the collaboration with producer Chris Walla, feels like it was specifically tailored to make me feel nostalgic so just let me have this.

It’s been a difficult year. I mean, globally? Sure, yeah, I think that goes without saying. Without including too many details (and at the risk of turning this small portion of Swim Into The Sound into my diary, thank you, Taylor), it’s been an adjustment period. Dramatic shifts in work, relationships, and my living situation have brought me back to those days of the overwhelming emotions captured here by Snarls. That perennial Fall Feeling of knowing that spring and summer will bring beautiful new growth, but only after you’ve had to shed everything and plant yourself for the Winter. The interim of death and rebirth.

What about flowers indeed.

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Cailen Alcorn Pygott is a writer, musician, and general sadsack from Halifax, Nova Scotia. His band No, It’s Fine. also releases their album I Promise. today. Tell him how cool you think that is on Twitter @noitsfinereally and on Instagram @_no_its_fine_.