Strike Anywhere

Now, contrary to popular belief, no one is imposing a political stance, nor beliefs and falsely informing theories in this case. Rather, producing something that is a rarity. Something that will make you want to understand what you are singing, believing, feeling. Something that will make you want more. Something that will hopefully strike a true passion in your heart as it has in mine. Ladies and Gentlemen.. Strike Anywhere.

V: The best music involves truth. Life experiences. Your music seems to be directed towards freedom from exploitation and/or manipulation. What influences the messages that you give?
T: I think that it is just a way for us to just achieve a personal catharsis with how unbalanced and unjust all of the mechanisms of production and culture are in the modern world. Coming from Richmond, VA, which is in the southeast, we're high bound by false histories and a very strange, ghostly haunt of very real exploitation.Those things come naturally to us. It would be different, but I'm sure our roots would be just as valid if we came from a progressive city.. but we don't. We come from a city where the newspaper's owned by tobacco companies where the largest enclave of the slavery system subsides. All of the Africans who were stolen came up through what is now a parking lot. An unmarked parking lot, underneath an interstate.. in the center of the city. All of the misery and insanity of that kind of history is washed over. I think there is a certain amount of combating this ignorance, and all of this static, that goes into why we were drawn to punk. Why we needed to make a stamp on it like other Richmond bands like AVAIL had done in the past. No matter where we live, no matter how much we get to travel, good people we get to meet and talk to, there is still a huge amount of injustice in the world everyday that comes spiraling out of the TV, and even haunts our dreams. As individuals, as living beings, we have to take a stand and we have to write things that are true. For our own sake. If that can help us connect with other people then that's awesome, too.

V: In doing so, are you attempting to educate people about it, or rather speaking your point of view?
T: I don't really hold myself on a platform like I could educate anyone. We have heard wonderful compliments from people from time to time that they have gotten fired up about an issue, or that we've spoken to them about something that's been haunting their mind; about conditions and/or lifestyles, oppression. Then they come back and teach me more about it than what I know. So, I think it's a two way street. We communicate about our own experiences. For instance, in a song. A two and a half minute punk song, with a breakdown. Trying to get a really full, foot noted, worked up, educational perspective is difficult. We wouldn't think that we could have the authority to do that. Just being able to speak truthfully is what we're about.

V: If I didn't care about politics, how could YOU make me care?
T: Well we would have to talk about what dissatisfaction you have with your life. I think if you scratch the surface of anyone, for even a little bit of time, you'd find a gaping hole where a lot of life and a lot of good memories should be. People spend so much of their time pleasing other people, standing in line on some kind of treadmill. Whether its private schools, academic tracks, getting into a corporate ladder, or even waiting in line at a temp labor place on a corner, in a bad part of town so they could feed their families across the border. There's every bit of room for people to understand and make connections with why they're not getting what they want out of life. I think people are a lot less superficial than society makes us out to be, people are a lot less isolated, and a hell of a lot less competitive than we're all taught to be. Buying into this illusion causes so much stress. If you could just reach somebody, and talk about why they're dissatisfied with their own personal lives, you can take that and expand that metaphor into why we all need to organize and change this rotten place.

V: In music today, I feel its hard to find something that sounds different. Something worth caring about. Something that you need to hear. What efforts do you take to defy that?
T: Having a production where you hear the cracks of the voice, the sweat on the strings, and the air between the drummer's hand and the snare drum. Those are things that are taken out of music by technology, and also by the quick rush to make it consumable. Art itself is becoming this product that's being sold at the highest frequencies to the most amount of people, saturating so quickly and then fading so fast. Finding, holding onto a CD that you love month after month, year after year, that's something that you need to hear has become rare and rarer these days. If we can make that CD for somebody, or for a group of people, that would make us really happy. I think trying to find vitality in music is really fucking hard.

V: I agree. I feel true happiness can be achieved through success. Doing what you love and doing what you gotta do, are two things that are often confused as one. Are you happy with what you're doing? Do you feel successful?
T: Yes and yes. But making sure that what you loved once, and put yourself on this path to do, is still what love now.. and finding out that if not, then how to make it so. There's no reason to just abandon something that doesn't completely work anymore. It's like putting a new engine in the old car. Putting a diesel, bio-fuel engine in the old car to make it more efficient, make it happier, is a better way to run then completely assaulting the earth you once planted in, and moving somewhere else. I think that's another condition of American life specifically. Everyone is out to reinvent themselves, forget their pasts, and remake themselves. There is something healthy about that in the short-term, but in the long run its allowed for such a scattered, diseased bunch of societies with so many things in conflict, in common, but not very many peaceful things in common.

V: I feel like this is something that refers us back to my other question. Wanting/Caring to hear certain music is something that can be felt through you being happy with what you're producing, while being true to yourselves.
T: As much as political punk/hardcore is possibly considered more popular, and some bands have taken it mainstream on a level now that it's never been, there are also a lot of reasons why personal feelings should be involved in hardcore. Talking about forbidden emotions and ideas, brotherhood and friendship, and family are really more important now than they have ever been. So we try to bring in both of those elements.

V: I feel happy and successful with what I'm doing with this site right now. Especially because it shows a huge reflection of myself. Many feel pornography exploits women and/or robs them of a certain virtue. How do you feel about that?

T: How do I feel about that? I definitely think the 'certain virtue' aspect is spurious reasoning based on a really high bound sexist prejudice Christian culture. But, I think in places like Canada or Europe there is a lot more of an open sense of what is erotic and honesty about our human species and sexuality and beauty. I think America has a long way to go in dealing with that in a way that is not schizophrenic or crazy. In my personal life, I've never felt comfortable with pornography.. until.. women-run sex positive websites crept up. And moving to Portland, where there are the most strip clubs per square foot than any other place on earth.There is a strip club as often as there is a neighborhood bar. Seeing the brutality in the illusion of the sex industry is horrible. It is definitely something near punk rock, that I try to be aware of, and as a male trying to fight for equality within our society. There is a lot of conditioning that happens on lots of small levels. We're not gonna know about Internet porn for a long time. We're not gonna know who is really gonna take the cultural steering wheel. Whether its gonna be the sex positive, erotic, women-run, counter cultural places or if it's gonna be the unlimited access to every craven and numb sexist fantasy. There's everything, ya know.. and there's too much of everything. I think, my point is, that there's a great deal of numbness and objectification in everyday life, about many things, including sex. But I think, if you can personalize it, and you can bring human sexuality,and the beauty of it, and the justice of it to the table with your strength.. and with your soul, then I think that is a point where we can start talking about changing and getting traction on all of the strangeness that passes for human sex in America.

(Smith and Garth have entered the backstage to pick up some shit. Gotcha!)



V: Well, now that there are three of you in here, tell me about some of your funniest moments while being on the road.

S: Haha, this isn't just one moment.. but many moments. We always leave Eric behind.
G: Yeah!
S: It's happened like four times. We left him in Gainesville once, for about six hours.
G: Yeah, we hadn't even realized he wasn't with us.
S: We actually drove for four hours before we had noticed he wasn't with us. So we actually missed a show that night because of it. We also left him without a jacket, and without shoes, during the winter in Northern California. At a rest stop, for about four or five hours.He had to call the police, get the police to call his parents, and his parents to call someone else to get my cell phone number. We didn't even notice he was gone. Then, I got a call from the cops and of course we had to go back and pick him up. We didn't miss a show that night, though.
G: Yeah..
S: Oh! Then once we left him at a gas station in Canada. While he was there, a girl propositioned him to have sex with her in the bathroom.

V: Uhhhh.. Uhhhh.. well while you're still here, what album are you most proud of?

S: The new one!!! It fucking ruuuulllesss.
G: Well yeah, since we just did it, the new one. Right now. Maybe in a couple years...
T: The new one.
S: Well, I mean, we've spent way more time writing the new one than anything else we've done. We wrote 'Exit English' in like.. 2 weeks. We hardly spent anytime writing it. I mean, it's still definitely good. We tried. But we tried REALLY hard with this one, and it better be the fucking best. If not, I mean that's all we got..
T: Right. Yeah, Yeah. It's all we got. We've got no regrets about this one. Ideas were taken to the fullest. Everyone got to bring something to the table. 3 years of writing songs.
S: We put our hearts into it, man. Songs were written.. then rewritten two or three different times. Parts of other songs, combining them. We trimmed every ounce of fat we could possibly trim.

V: Speaking of fat, you're releasing your new and very first album with Fat Wreck Chords this fall titled "Dead FM". What can we expect?
T: (giggles) It's gonna have, um, fast, hardcore/punk songs with anthemic choruses. A lot of people singing. Got all my band mates to sing with me! So that's great..

V: Even Eric?
T: Even Eric. On a lot of 'em. It's great. It's so great. For us, it's our best bunch of songs we've ever written. we wrote them all together. Everyone has guitar parts that they wrote, and we're feeling really good about our songs. It's been so hard to decide on our track order, things like a single.. or two, or three. Because every song is like our child. There are definitely songs about the war. The war on women. Songs about the war on homosexuals. Specific songs about hating what fundamentalist Christian right has been doing to culture for a long time, and religions in general. It seems to be a strange place to be an secular, suspicious, anti-religious punk band nowadays because it seems like Christian metal-core is taking over the earth. It's also strange because a lot of people in those bands are decent folks, but not only do they bring the anti-women's rights, high bound pro-republican Christian culture with them, but they also bring this "growing up in the gated suburbs", exclusively upper middle class Caucasians, with no sense of the real America. I know a lot of Christians who are Catholic workers, and just righteous people of faith who go into the ghettos and perform community work. They're not missionaries. They're just trying to live their faith. I have no quarrel with them. But with the rest of the people who are using whatever dietes, the names in these scriptures, to make the world collapse on itself, or to keep imprisoning women, we have no love for. There is a lot of discussion about this on the new record. But the music is awesome, there is a little more of a jangle. A little more sense of like, '79 UK punk and the Clash, as well as the Cromags, Bad Brains, everything that we love in one record. So, I hope you like it.

V: How does it differ from your previous releases?
T: In some ways it will be like 'Change is a Sound', which is like our Richmond and D.C. record with roots and dischord. 'Exit English' is our more expansive, introspective, possibly, although we didn't think it at the time, "metallic" record. This record is more of our universal punk.. I mean, we've been around the world twice. Things have changed so much since even 2003, when we wrote 'Exit English', so I think 'Dead FM' is gonna feel a lot more just inclusive. It gets to the point. I think every song is under 3 minutes. I think because we're all getting older, our tastes our expanding, that we've given a shout out to every era of punk that we think should be used as a songwriting tool. If anything, more people will put there arms around each other, sing along, AND mosh. (laughs).

Everyone keep your ear out for the new release 'Dead FM' this fall. It will blow your mind away. Special thanks to Thomas, Garth, Eric, Smith, Sherwood and Josh for the awesome fun-filled week. But most of all, for making this personal experience possible. You can check out more of Strike Anywhere at their upcoming website www.strikeanywhere.org or at www.myspace.com/strikeanywhere. Holla!