Tell us about:

Your latest single you have released:

David Wildman: It’s called “Boiling the Ocean.” It’s my fuck you song to the Internet, about the frustrations of how you have to twist and bend yourself into the medium in order to get the message out. It has what might be our catchiest chorus, and features an insane tribal drum part from our Keith Moon-influenced drummer Patrick Crann.

Your favourite lyric in this song:

“I’d slay the Internet because it’s standing in the way.”

Your favourite song that you have created that is an album track:

“Space Time Continuum” from our previous release, Life in Reverse. It’s one person’s sardonic personification imagining the endless unchangeable elements of the universe kind of thumbing their nose as they outlive us.

Your favourite song to play live:

“My Kind of Lie,” a song from our first album Stir Crazy. It’s a nasty high speed hardcore- style rocker about having an affair with the wife of a MAGA nazi, kind of a Trump-era update of “Give Me Three Steps,” except that both parties in the illicit hookup are lying to themselves and no one sees the situation for what it really is. It’s been our closer for a while, has a great stretch out section that drops down to just bass and drums, allows me to prowl the audience briefly, and always brings down the house.

The song that was the longest to write and why?

That’s a tie between two of them. One is “Shotgun Future” from Life in Reverse, which features Jay Raffi, our utterly unique and inventive bass player, channeling the funk of Larry Graham. We did it for a while in an earlier version of the band. But it continued to Evolve, with my thoughts of an impending future (“Staring down the future like the barrel of a shotgun/Like we don’t know if we’ve got one”) getting more specific and dire. I ended up driving everyone nuts by completely rewriting it in the recording studio at the last minute, but it paid off and became one of our best songs. 

The other is our recent single “Sweet Proximity,” which started out as a mellow, spacy acoustic solo song with an alternate tuning, morphed into a pop rock number during the pandemic but was never played, and then revamped into a rocker with Jim Foster our secret six-string weapon adding a marvelously dissonant guitar part and a bonkers solo.

Your most emotional track:

“Ghost on the Radio” from Stir Crazy, which is about hearing David Bowie on the radio after he died. I felt especially connected to Bowie because I had the honour of interviewing him in 2004 for the magazine I worked for.

Dream collaboration:

Well, Bowie or Tom Verlaine, but among the living I’d put in Colin Moulding from XTC and Richard Lloyd.

Describe the feeling you get when you walk on stage to do a show:

It’s a lifting feeling of unlimited possibility, and the confidence that wherever it goes, with this band, it will be a blast.

The hardest track to play live:

“Shell” from the Life In Reverse album. Vocally it requires being able to project with low notes, and then the last chorus takes everything up to the top of my range. Then the guitar part involves constantly sliding up the neck to the 9th fret without looking. I always try to play all my guitar parts without looking so I can focus on the singing and the audience, but this one is a bitch.

Essential items you always take on tour with you?

Toothbrush, laptop…

Describe your fans in three words:

Adventurous and fun-loving… 

A song by another artist or band you wish you had written:

“You’re Having the Time of my Life” by a great Boston band called Charming Arson. 

What we can look forward to from your band this year:

Lots of new and unique sounding music in the pipeline, more recording, and kickass gigs.

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