EAN HERNANDEZ

photo by John Puschock

EAN HERNANDEZ

I always start the interviews off by asking just about the history of your love for music, how you first recognized that it was going to be something important for you in your life, maybe as an outlet or just maybe even understanding at a young age it was something that you loved or that was important to you. Do you have any recollections of that?

My parents started me on piano when I was five. Then I did that, took it halfheartedly, and they jammed me into trumpet when I was, I suppose, in the eighth grade, seventh grade, something like that. None of it really ... I did it. None of it really resonated with me. My father had an old crummy acoustic guitar laying around. I don't know what it was about that thing, but I picked it up and started playing it, and I just wanted to play it all the time. I thought it was the coolest thing. I thought acoustic guitar, electric guitar, nylon string guitar, anything that even looked like a guitar was the neatest thing.

I remember going to my trumpet lessons at this music store near where my parents lived, and this poor sad bastard had to teach me how to play trumpet. I really didn't try. I was the worst student. I would just go in there and stare at these, probably in retrospect, these completely shitty no name weirdo guitars in the early '80s at this goofy music store, and I just thought they were the coolest thing ever. I had a cassette tape that I just had made off of the radio with songs like "Layla" and "You Really Got Me" and "Rock You Like a Hurricane", and junk like that on it, and for some reason, the sound of the guitar, and those riffs, and that all just really sunk into me, and the guitar became the thing that Ean brought with him everywhere. 

It's just, engaging in a way that only a teenager could really be, and I was just hooked. It wasn't like there was some girl saying hey, if you play the guitar, I'll go out with you, or like there was some cool guy in my school who played guitar, or anything. It just spoke to me. That's probably silly. It was just really interesting to me. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I think it's an important distinction that you made about the fact that you were hooked, and it didn't take any kind of social opportunity or social component in order to reel you in, it was the music itself and everything that went with that.

Yeah, and it wasn't piano, and it wasn't trumpet, and it wasn't jazz, and it wasn't any ... It was a guitar. I don't know why.

Rock music specifically, right?

Yeah. I poked around with blues like everybody in the '80s did. It was rock music, hard rock music. Punk wasn't ... It's a little more on tap these days. At that time, you had to be a pretty rare kind of person to really even come across punk, especially living in some kind of unimportant city like Seattle. That just wasn't something that we were hearing.

Heavy metal, hard rock radio, that was what there was. That big guitar sound, that's what I gravitated to.

Did you watch MTV very much?

My parents didn't have MTV. I would see it in dribs and drabs at my friends' houses, and of course I thought it was the coolest thing ever. There's guys there playing guitar. What an incredible thing. Plus, in that time, the early '80s, the stuff on MTV was incredible. It was what, like the "Video Killed the Radio Star" guys, it was Tommy Tutone and Men At Work, and all this weird British second wave ska, and not like ... I think later it was a lot less interesting. It was a lot more about game shows and million dollar videos and guys with a lot of fancy cars and champagne and all that kind of stuff, which didn't appeal to me at all, and didn't have guitars.

But that early '80's phase, it was just rock and drums and guitars. It was this neat time in music, in retrospect.

How did you come to discover and research bands on your own and get to know your favorite bands, your first ones, and stuff like that?

A lot of it was dropped on me. You heard the Rolling Stones and stuff like that on the radio. My parents had Beatles records. I think anyone whose parents were born, were alive, they had Beatles records and stuff like that. I think the real moments where music maybe, where I really started to go "Wow, this is interesting" - a lot of it happened in cars, actually. It was a big thing at that time to have a car. I didn't have one, but I had some friends who had one, had cars. You would hear music in the car, and my friend Frank said hey, man, you listen to Led Zeppelin, right? I was in a muscle car.

I've heard of Led Zeppelin, I don't really know it, and he put on "When The Levee Breaks" or something like that. I was like, "Whoa". Mind blown. I'll never forget, Jennifer, this gal in my high school I was buddies with, she had somehow borrowed her dad's Firebird, or some impossible '80s or '70s muscle car. She said, "You know Van Halen right?" I go, "Not really." She put on Van Halen I, and fast forwarded to Eruption. I just remember my brain just igniting. Totally going, "Holy shit, how can you do this?" This is unbelievable.

Those bands like that - Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Van Halen, they sparked an interest to delve deeper and hear more Van Halen and more AC/DC, which at a point, runs out. Much of that stuff. That's where ... I found there wasn't a lot of stuff that satisfied me the way that that music did. That teed me up for punk, because punk is endless rat holes of weird things to follow down and listen to and learn about.

I didn't figure that out until quite a bit later. Those bands got me into that hard driving, heavy music, and left me wanting more, because I remember, I had every AC/DC record ever, or tape, because we had tape recorders.

I said, "I'll get all their records." It seemed like I was beating a dead horse a little bit, and I couldn't quite figure out what I was doing wrong. I loved that stuff, and I want to hear more stuff like that. Gosh, I had run out of it. What was I going to do now? It was a great tee-up for punk, because punk (came) to the rescue.

Since you had been playing guitar pretty much since the beginning of your discovering that you really liked rock music and this is a passion that's forming, and becoming more of a focus in your life, there's a question that I come to a lot in the interviews, which is when did you say, "I want to do it, I want to write my own songs, I want to be a songwriter or I want to try it, or I want to start a band?" What was the moment where you committed to that idea?

This is going to be really sad, this is so sad. My parents relentlessly discouraged me from making my own music. There's multiple examples, but probably one of the best ones is my dad had a video recorder, a home video camera. My friend Tom and I, I had a crummy Ibanez Roadstar II guitar and a little shitty PV amp, and he allegedly could sing. We wrote a song. It was a dumb song. We thought we were so cool, and we spent a lot of time making sure we looked good in our video. We videoed ourselves doing it.

My mother's like, "You can't just do a song. Doesn't work like that." You're not going to be the Beatles, that kind of thing. My dad had played dance bands in the '50s, doing standards and very light jazz. My mother was not really musical. I don't think for them, the idea that you could sit down and make a 31 song album called Do Not Mock Satan! with all the ideas that go through your head. You're like, "These are my songs. I wrote these, these are my ideas, this is my joke, these are my neuroses, these are my current thoughts. This sounds good to me, and fuck you if you don't like it, or awesome if you do."

They were like, "You're doing it wrong, you're not good enough, you're never going to be good enough, you should learn to play real music," which meant playing other people's music.

It took me meeting punk people to break that.

Yeah. That's really sad.

I played in cover bands in high school. Cool guys played in cover bands, because you could play the songs people knew. No one was really there to tell you differently.

I'm familiar with that prevailing idea that playing in a band meant playing to be successful, and to be successful meant you had to play other people's songs. That was the only way you're going to get paying gigs at least.

Which is utter shit. Playing some crappy wedding or some horrible fucking bar out in the suburbs, for $25 or $100 or whatever, has got to be the shittiest definition of success I've ever heard of. You could drive a pizza truck during that time and make more money. You could just yodel in your front yard and have more artistic satisfaction.

It's such crap. When you're a kid, you don't know this stuff. Nobody is there to tell you, "Okay, think about that, that's completely bullshit." I had to figure this stuff out on my own.

You probably had more reason than the average person to be discouraged (considering) your parents. Your dad's coming from a musical background, so you figure he probably knows at least a little bit about what he's talking about, because he has experience.

He's a pretty convincing guy.

When you get negative feedback at a early age, it's not easy to bounce back from that, I feel like.

No. Especially when it has to do with something personal and creative.

At the end of the day, one of the things I wish I could've told myself when I was 30 and 25 and 19, 15, 12, is people will tell you you can't do things, and they're fucking bullshit. Nobody wakes up the first day and is great at guitar. Nobody. Or songwriting, or singing, drumming, or asking a girl out on a date, or any of that. Nobody is great naturally at that stuff. Some people take to it quicker than others, but working hard at things, really hard at things and dedicating yourself, that is how you get good at something. If you just do that, barring some ... There are cases where people are just so profoundly untalented that it's never going to work, but barring that third sigma kind of situation, that's how you do it.

I didn't know that. You could easily be forgiven, I think, growing up at that time, thinking that successful people were born, or maybe today it's the same way, I don't know. Successful people are born, talented people are born. You're not going to get there. Relentlessness actually really pays off.

Let's fast forward a bit  - you were saying you'd found a crowd of people who could introduce you to punk and this other mindset of being independent, doing this creatively for your own satisfaction, having a community. Did that steer you towards wanting to start a band and try it again?

Yeah, I played in a cover band in high school, played AC/DC and Van Halen. Did that. We played those songs. "Wild Thing" and "Louie Louie", all the things you're supposed to do. We had a great time. They're good buddies still today, actually. No, I don't know if you've heard of... What town are you in?

I'm near San Francisco.

Have you ever heard of a town called Spokane, Washington?

Yeah. I've heard you mention it in Sicko songs.

Yeah. Denny's from there. I know a lot of people from Spokane, because I went to Washington State University, which is maybe an hour south of there, and the furthest east of Washington. Spokane is a real blue collar town, not a real wealthy town. I have read that it is the poorest whitest city in America, I don't know if that's true. I read that in a book about Spokane. I always think of Spokane as a place where people maybe weren't handed a lot of high quality diversion. Probably you weren't going out on your dad's sailboat on the weekend, kind of thing.

I met a bunch of Spokane people at WSU, and they were so good at making up fun with music. They were like, "I'm starting a band. We're going to make a flyer. We're going to book a show." Maybe the band is you and your two friends with the worst amps ever, and your flyer's black and white photo copied on a eight and a half by 11 and maybe your show's in a basement, but they made it happen.

They did it. There was this thriving scene of these ... It was pretty butt rocky. I guess, at the time there was metal and metal crossover and hardcore, there was all this mish mosh, mid-'80s. Those guys just dove in and did stuff and made stuff happen and found an abandoned place to put on shows for three weeks until they got thrown out. Handed out handbills to all their friends at the high school, and whatever.

They had a real "Just do it", a true DIY attitude. I was just puzzled by how ballsy they were, to just step up and do it. I thought, I couldn't do it. They just had an attitude, and I believe that it's born out of, there's nothing much to do, people don't have a lot of money. I don't know if that's true, but that's in my head. They just damn well got up and did it. It was incredible. A lot of those bands were horrible, but they were intensely creative, and they just made it happen.

I met these guys that had long hair, and I had long hair, I'd seen them at a couple parties in my sophomore year of college, and went to watch their band practice. I realized very quickly, two things: One, they were just writing songs, they were making up songs. They couldn't really play that good, and their singer wasn't any good. It didn't matter, they were just doing it. The other thing was, they were playing some songs that were really, really good songs. I remember this very vividly, playing a bunch of songs, yeah, yeah, yeah, then they played this one song, I said,"That's a great song, you guys wrote that? That's incredible." The singer says, "No, that's Rise Above by Black Flag."

I'm like, what's Black Flag? These guys gave me the mid'-80s sheet dip on Black Flag, Dinosaur Jr., Soul Asylum, Husker Du, all that stuff. That was really right in my bailiwick. I didn't know it until that moment. They gave me that, and they were my people, they're my friends, they were awkward intellectual punk DIY guys. I just stumbled into them. I'm still really good friends with those guys today. They opened me up to this whole world, opened this whole world up to me. 

That is where it caught on fire. That was where I realized, "Holy shit, there's all this incredible music that actually really speaks to me." You don't have to be Eddie Van Halen to do it. You don't have to be beautiful, because there's Bob Mould, D. Boon and people like that, and everybody is making a band and just creating things. That was eight tenths of my college career, was just getting stuck into that.

That's where it really took off. I think at that point, I was pretty well hooked. My main concern at most times was, "What band am I in? What songs are we writing? What gigs are we doing? What new idea are we going to do?" And that took over my life, maybe in a lot of ways through the present. Certainly, all through my 20s and early 30s.

Do you feel like having played in a cover band and having a rudimentary guitar background gave you a little bit more confidence because you had some chops to play and you could get in where you fit in, and write your own rule book, as far as how you wanted to enter being a musician?

Yeah. I guess the butt rock and the covers gave me enough to be able to play okay enough. I was not a good guitar soloist - I was never a good guitar player, really. Particularly not at that time. It gave me enough to be able to speak the language, and then when punk came, that stuff didn't really matter. You just played to your ability, and there was a kind of music for you. There was music that was incredibly technical and difficult, there was music that was super simple. Somewhere in between those two was a safe place for you to be as a budding punk musician.

I give the piano and the shitty guitar and the butt rock and the cover band, all that stuff, that was all teeing it up. Then this very short period of a couple months, in 1988, lit everything on, brought it all together and opened a new world and lit everything on fire. That was where all this stuff started. That's where it really got started.

At the time Sicko started, the aesthetic that you guys had, the poppy, punk pop sound, it wasn't the thing at the time. It was something you all did very well, from the beginning, and it was clear that you were nailing that style. Where did that idea come from that you wanted to play that way?

I had mostly been in hippie, folk rock bands and stuff through college - just mercifully not documented. Punk was increasingly becoming appealing later in college. There's a radio station, KCUU, where we got a lot of exposure to that. The good grunge was really more punk. Dumb grunge was really more metal. That division was happening already in '89 and '88. I guess maybe having failed at yet another arty hippie band, some friends and I decided to start a punk rock covers band. We were playing Black Flag and the Lemonheads, whatever. Mudhoney and I don't know, oh yeah, The Angry Samoans. Big Black, and this kind of stuff.

We were doing that. That was a lot more fun than playing hippie jam music. It was a funny band, we dressed up stupid and played these frenetic shows, and people wanted to slam dance. It was super fun. That seemed to be better than trying to be The Grapes of Wrath or Indigo Girls or something. It was a very minimal conversation. Denny and I went to college together. Denny's sister's boyfriend, a total Spokanimal, said, "Yeah, I want to do a pop punk band." Denny had said, "Yeah, I think it might be cool to do a pop punk band." At the time, I remember thinking, I'd swear to you, I remember thinking this, 1989, yeah, '89, '88, I was thinking to myself, "You know what would be really cool? What might be cool is a bit more metal version of Nirvana." The only Nirvana record that was out at that point was Bleach.

Which actually, a billion bands did and it was horrible. I'm glad I didn't fall for that. I don't really have the hair for it, anyway. He's like, "Yeah, we should do pop punk." What that meant at the time was pretty much Husker Du, Fastbacks. Oh, and Green Day had 39/Smooth out. That was really an anomaly of music, those bands. People didn't really play like that. Fastbacks are still doing the '70s since the '70s. Green Day were doing something super obscure, and nobody knew about it. Grunge was picking up. And, there's a band called Cringer. That's it. And there's a band called The Mr. T Experience, but that was the full extent. The rest of it was like, I'm listening to Nice Strong Arm and Sonic Youth, I don't know. Those weird, Dinosaur Jr. and all those not quite punk, not quite metal, not quite pop, not quite this, not quite that bands, that happened at the late '80s, which was a great period of music. That was everything we were listening to. Then there was this couple of these little goofier, littler more poppy punk bands. Punk was very out by that point.

That appealed to us. It wasn't macho, it was sensitive, it was vulnerable. The guys in the band were awkward and goofy and singing about girls. That is not what people were doing in the music that was really taking off. Alice in Chains and Soundgarden, all that kind of stuff. Which was very macho, meathead. That's what everybody in Seattle was into in 1990 when we moved back here.

I just never... I don't even like football, man. I never resonated with that kind of macho mentality. It's just not me. I really gravitated towards that (pop punk) stuff. We thought we were pretty cool playing that kind of music in a city where everyone's flipping their hair and... all of that macho shit. It was perfect for a wimpy kid, at that time, and that's certainly who I was. It was also, and this is so hysterical considering today, where it's at today. So weird.

It was ultra cool, ultra secret hip, only the cool cats got this stuff. This was for weirdos in the inner sanctum of a secret society, that actually cared about this kind of music. Had the Sweet Baby records, stuff like that. Everybody else was like, "Dude, why aren't you moshing to Mudhoney?"

Oh yeah, that was ... I was 11 or 12 when all that stuff was happening, but I could sense the whole Sub Pop (Records) and the rise of that sound was a major thing to contend with for any band living anywhere near Seattle.

A lot of it's great music. Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam fucking eat a dick as far as I'm concerned. It's the worst music ever. Mudhoney, that's great. First two Soundgarden records. If you don't like Ultramega OK, you got to go back and listen to it, because it's a good record. First, actually every Nirvana record, but the first one (Bleach) is ridiculously good.

There was plenty of cool bands... Mutiny,  Gashuffer - it's not fair to really put Gashuffer in with grunge, but...

Yeah, they were in there.

How could you not love the Melvin's? They literally went out and invented a sound and then turned it into their own business that they have run for 40 years. They went and created a whole thing that never existed and people love them for it, and they're out there working it today. They were just so cool. There's a lot of really cool stuff at the time, I don't want to make it all sound bad, but there was certainly a groundswell of really stupid stuff. Really uninteresting, just, I don't know ...

What I always thought of it as, is commodity culture. You could just put on some saggy pants and a big t-shirt and a floppy hat, go check in at the whatever, the grunge show and feel like you were living the lifestyle for an evening or an hour or whatever. It just to me was all really hard to buy into, it was very dark and too sexy. All that stuff. I just was so turned off by it.

Yeah, we were in this weird little world, and it was ultra cool and ultra hip for a very brief period of time.

I want to get into the craftsmanship of Sicko songs and stuff eventually, but one question that I've definitely wanted to squeeze in, and maybe this is a good time, is just to ask you about the way that you guys operated and putting things out through Empty Records and staying local in your scene and everything, to me, I felt like the caliber of your music and the spirit of your music and just the whole package of Sicko as a band, could've easily fit on a Lookout! or one of these labels that would've put you out there as one of these contenders for what's synonymous with the pop punk sound.

There's Screeching Weasel, and then there's Sicko - to me, the quality of the music and everything was totally up there.

I think it was. I agree with that. I think we tried ... There's some duds, but we were not phoning it in. I think there were a lot of bands that did just find a sound and phone it in, to be fair.

Yeah. Were you ever ambitious to the point where you wanted to be a part of that and ride that wave, or was it just like oh, we're doing our thing, and this is ...

Our big ambition was to get a single out on Empty, because Empty was the cool thing in Seattle. We did that. Then it just kept going. We became friends with Blake. He's one of my dear friends today.

Anyway, I think about this, not a lot, but on again off again. I think what happened there is, more than anything, we just had no idea what we were doing. We were really just clueless and a bit arrogant. I think we fell into the mix when rock and roll. What would Tim Yohannan or Calvin Johnson say? Is this really punk rock enough? We fell into that trap. In retrospect, it's garbage. Those people were serving themselves. They provided a valuable service, but ultimately they were serving themselves more than anything else.

I read a great article that said a legion of people did nothing with their artistry because they're worried that Calvin might not think it was punk rock. "I think Calvin is the greatest, I love his music so much." We bought that MRR stuff hook line and sinker, at least I did. I think Denny did. John's a little smarter, he's always been the smart one. Maybe a little trusting of that. We were like, "No, never going to sell out."

Today, the concerns of the punk community are very different. There's a great punk bar where I live called The Kraken, it's a fricking pirate themed punk rock bar run by really nice guys, frequented by a really great set of people that are just... what a great audience - it's a great place to hang out, and it's practically a punk rock club. I love the place. Their primary concern I think is inclusiveness, what we think of mainstream liberal inclusiveness around LGBTQ, about genders, about people of different races, that's really what is on their minds. Which is great, and is a pretty big step forward from shit like the tours and all that stupid stuff we were doing back in the '80s.

At the time, in the '90s, in the punk world, there was one big concern. It was, "Are you selling out or are you not selling out?" There was all this implication of your politics, your character, and your tribalism around that. It would've been pretty humiliating and pretty ballsy to step out of that. That was part of it.

Then, I think if I'm honest, laziness was a big piece of it. We really didn't like touring. Have some fun touring for four weeks, six weeks, even eight weeks. We didn't want to work hard. We had a lot more fun playing good shows in Seattle that we didn't even have to book, hanging out with our girlfriends, having good hair. That was... we didn't want to work hard. It was so much easier to do a shitty computer job and make five times more money, and just go to four shows a week and have a nice apartment and a cute girlfriend. That was way easier than living in a van for a year after year after year. We didn't want to do that.

To say that it was all just about our ethics or something, is pretty privileged attitude. Pretty privileged bullshit. I think there was some ethics, some easy to subscribe to ethics when you're college educated, highly employable, but really, I think there was equal amounts of just dumbness and ... I'm sure Josh and Eddie would agree.

My impression is that, since you guys recorded at Egg Studio with Kurt (Bloch), and had a Fastbacks connection (something that I noticed when reading the liner notes). I thought, "All right, they're already living in a cool town, they're on Empty Records, it's a cool label." I maybe thought that in a sense, you could be satisfied enough with that. That looks pretty cool on a resume, for anybody.

I think there's something to that. It wasn't like we were hungry for more. It was awesome, it was fun. It was cool. There's a certain beauty to just making art for art's sake. I've certainly embraced that, the last 10, 15 years of my life. I think there's an element maybe, to be slightly more serious, I think it was easy to ... I found it to be frightening to be trying to take what is my favorite hobby that I love so much and I'm so passionate about, and turn it into a job that you get bitter about.

I think there's a certain, again, it's a privilege thing. I have the privilege of walking away from some band job that paid me $16,000 a year, because I've got a bunch of college degrees, I come from a well-heeled family, and I work in a field that pays well, all that kind of stuff. It's easy... I guess, we dabbled in a gentlemanly way, and we didn't have to take it that seriously. We had lots of other alternatives. Did the fun bits, and when we got tired of it, we went onto other things.

Hearing you say that makes sense to me as a fan of the band, because the feelings that your songs evoked to me, were just the lighter side of being in a band like that, having fun and songs that were funny, songs that were clever, songs that were thoughtful, but it wasn't laden with heavy emotion or heavy anger, or trying to ram it down your throat or prove a point or something. That lightness the way it came across to me is just more impressive, really, because it was like, "These are great songs, they're well written songs, the lyrics are clever," - but you could tell that you guys weren't trying too hard. That element of Sicko - I love that.
That is what made it really great to me, because the songs ... I think a different group of people could come together and work very hard and would not be able to create and craft songs that were as catchy and as cool and as good. You guys, just a combination of your personalities and your circumstances, made it happen in a unique way. Like what you just were talking about, confirmed that.

We had a lot of fun with it. We worked really hard. I think the one thing you can say of Josh, Denny and I is - we were talking about this the other day - it's hard to find people that want to be professional about music without being a professional. Those guys always showed up ready to work, always showed up with good ideas, and it's so hard to know with drummers, I'm sure you've seen this. (Josh) writes a drum part. He's not back there jamming, doing fills. He's thinking about the song and he writes the drum part in it, it's exactly the same way. Every single time.

To the point of with Sicko, it's weird, I've never had this in any other band, where someone drops a note, and the other two look at him, there's this little look, and he's like, "Fuck you, I know." Because you know every single note, every single beat, every single chord, every single riff. There was this real dedication to doing art well. I think I've been in a lot of bands where people just show up and get loaded, ham fist through it. There was a real pride of, I guess, pride of workmanship or something like that with it.

Yeah. Definitely comes across.

We're all to one degree or another, well read, educated, politically informed, voting ... Josh particularly is politically active. But it always felt disingenuous to me to stand on a stage and lecture people about politics, or worse, do some sort of value signaling by saying things that (the listeners) were supposed to, "I'm so this, anti-Reagan, man." Then everybody's anti-Reagan. I always thought that was just cheap. It's like being pretty or something. You're not really selling your art, you're selling something people came there already with. I don't think there's... it's not that impressive.

Okay. Let me get into the actual songs and the songwriting part of you, specifically. Also, in the context of Sicko, because that was a band where there were two people writing the songs. You're known for also switching up instruments during the set and taking on different roles. That interests me too, because to me, there is something distinct about being the singer/bass player that's different, than being the singer/guitarist, and vice versa. There's something distinct about being the front person rather than the support person. Bands that split the songwriting evening, it seems like you have to be able to pull that off...

It's hard.

Very few bands can do that. You guys did. 

It's not easy. Even in that, it was hard. There's a lot of tension about that, back and forth. I think it's better. I believe that ... It started out easy, he and I both played guitar and we needed a bass player, and we didn't want to have four people in the band. We just traded. We both played bass, we both played guitar, we both sang. We both wrote songs. I wasn't going to be anybody's bass player. Denny wasn't going to be anybody's bass player. We were willing to be the other guy's bass player, so that we got our half of the set each.

Also, we really, this is totally true, we took inspiration from Beat Happening, which we traded around instruments. Heather sang, while Calvin played drums. Calvin sang while Heather played drums. Brett played guitar a lot. I didn't sing a lot of songs. That multi-instrumentalism was a pretty common feature of the kind of bands that were playing in in college, jam sessions we were having in our houses when we were early out of college and all that. It was very natural for us to do that. Denny being a monster musician, and me just being very driven, we tried to get good at it.

Of course, naturally, there emerged a competition, who wrote the better song. He was pushing me and I was pushing him. I think that can be a little uncomfortable at times. It also encourages people to be on their toes. It also creates two different sides of the story. It all sounds like Sicko, but Ean's songs sound different from Denny's songs, and vice versa. I think there's a ... In a way, it's mechanical. It's like look, if I've got 10 songs and three good ones for an album, and he's got 10 songs and probably four good ones or five good ones for an album, and we put 14 of them on the album, you're minimizing your crap. You're maximizing your quality.

That just pays off. Also, it's different. It is interesting to watch someone else be up there doing that, watching the guy who was just the front man be now the support role. That all, I think, at first, it was ego and I don't want to let go of being this, and I don't want to just play somebody's bass. There was a little bit of that, but then in the end, it ended up being a nice trade off, two guys that were really willing to put in the work to write a lot of songs. I always just loved it when I get to play bass, because I would get done with the pressure, Ean's playing guitar and having to sing and having to stay in tune and harmonize, all those things. Then I just get to play bass and bounce around and pose and do silly stuff. Just sing a few backing vocals here and there.

That was having done my bit, I was willing to ... I was relieved to recede into being a bass player. It worked out. It started out just, Beat Happening does it, then it ended up being a signature piece for us.

I think there was a very remarkable compatibility in the way that you guys both wrote songs. Each of you had your own distinct songwriting personality. It worked well together. There was no ... I don't know, nothing felt interrupted on a Sicko record. Everything flowed and everything was a cohesive sound. In the whole process, did you pick up on things that Denny was doing that you then began to incorporate into your own songwriting or anything like that?

Denny, he's the genius songwriter. Josh was the killer player. Denny's also a killer player. I was hanging on for dear life through most of that. I remember saying to myself, I wonder if there are people that are better than me, who'd push me harder. Boy oh boy did I get it with those guys. They were both shredder metal musicians before they'd gotten into punk. Punk was a walk in the park for them. I was a crappy guitar player that got into punk. I was constantly catching up to them. Which was great, it made me 10 times a better player.

I would say for sure, Denny is one of my biggest influences. He had really good taste. He had the first Superchunk record. I don't even know how he did it, really. I know he got a lot of exposure working at the radio station, but he just was keyed in and he had really good taste, and he understood how to do it. ... At first, he wrote a lot of dumb songs that never made it on the record. Then he hit this weird stride where he said, you know what, I'm going to write more pop stuff. He was writing this Pegboy, harder, yo ho ho, East Coast shit. Naked Raygun. I don't know. It wasn't very convincing.

I was struggling as well, this was in our very early first year. Then he hit on the idea, I'm going to write more pop songs. Then he just started fucking knocking them dead. "Count Me Out", "Broken String", "Any Road", "Where I Live", he wrote all these just... "Sprinkler", all these songs were just, Jesus dude. Just monster songs that were pop.

He'd gotten away from that more macho shit and it really suited him. I don't know, it really worked. He shifted into that, and I was like, "I'm going to write a song like that." I started copying Denny. I had my own influences, my own thing too, but he was a great guy to watch, because he kept me on my toes. I don't know if I kept him on his toes or not. Probably not. He was a huge influence for me. Yeah, definitely.

Then, his music. He's like, "Hey, listen to this. Not that record, this record." I'd be like, "Oh, that's great." I learned a lot from those guys.

You guys did bring so many different influences and experiences of listening to different types of music into the band before you even started the band, whereas now, there are plenty of bands playing pop punk who only really draw inspiration from other bands that play the exact same thing. There's this whole culture of worshiping the Ramones, and there's a whole culture of worshiping even bands that are much lesser than the Ramones, in terms of talent and influence and everything. There's this set aesthetic that I think would be very appealing to some people. Even me, included. There's certain trappings of the aesthetic that I really related to.

I see it more as a invitation to try writing the songs, because here's a template you can use and just see what you can do with it. The unfortunate reality is that people don't veer very far off the formula, whereas a band like Sicko, you couldn't call it anything but great pop punk, but it's not ... It doesn't sound like it's derivative of something else, necessarily. At least not in the typical way, you know what I'm saying?

No, I know what you're saying. I love that you're saying that, by the way.

If it's derivative of something, it's something that's at a much higher level, you know what I mean?

Yeah. I think maybe one thing ... I always thought of us, this is going to sound ridiculous. This is before emo and all that happened. I always thought of us as putting the indie rock in pop punk. I was listening to Sebadoh and going, "Yeah, there's some of this that could fit into my record." Listen to Bob Mould, "This could fit into my record." It's making it a little bit pop, a little bit of indie pop, little bit of Beat Happening, a little bit of The Crabs, a little bit of the Pounding Serfs, a little bit of this, a little Mecca Normal, little just weird stuff that was purely pop. I thought of the band as such a roarer. Josh with massive drums, Denny with massive bass or guitar.

It was a big loud sound. It didn't matter how plinky you were trying to be, you were going to be loud and ballsy, but I always felt like we were throwing that stuff into it, and not just doing punk by numbers. Putting in just, those kind of influences. I think also, I think we were doing at the time, we were listening to a lot of '70s punk. Listen to the Clash and listening to Stiff Little Fingers and the Undertones, Jam, Fall, those kind of bands that are ... Maybe not so much The Fall, but those kind of bands that were that older sound. I remember playing it for people and saying, yeah, we're punk metal. Yeah, what's that mean? People thought hardcore, whatever.

Then actually, what we were playing is, they're like oh, you're fucking doing '78 stuff, '77, '78. We were huge fans of that stuff. That was not normal for people to want to play that stuff in 1990. That was, maybe people were still doing hardcore, but they weren't doing Stiff Little Fingers kind of stuff.

There was that. I guess maybe also, you just have to bear in mind that the influences of pop punk at that time were not so gelled. Pop Ivy was a thing, almost entirely unto itself. People were like, what the fuck is this? Cringer, which struck me as always a huge influence, the Primitives, Jesus & Mary Chain, and coming up with pop punk. Mr. T Experience with all those witty lyrics, and funny stuff on TV shows.

That stuff was not gelled into this formula, and I don't want to rip on any bands, but there's a lot of bands that're really formulaic.

Oh yeah, sure.

I've always thought bands that sound just like the Ramones were weird. It's just strange. Why would you try to sound just like the Ramones? I try to write a Husker Du song and have it sound like some weird Sicko thing, but I wouldn't try to sound just like Johnny Ramone.

We were being influenced by the stuff that was going on at the time. You can hear that in later records. We got off track, I think there's some songs where "You're listening to too much NOFX," and it's just ... That's stupid. Why are we doing that song? (NOFX) is easy to pick on because they really got old. There are places where you can see we wrote songs, like, "This is a Liz Phair song. This is a song that's like us, thinking about Exile and Guyville." We were being influenced by the punk, as well as the contemporary hipster music of the day, as well as the '70s stuff, as well as, I don't know, trying to being cool indie guys.

It wasn't so, it just wasn't so formulaic back then, it wasn't so, "This is how you do it." It wasn't such a "Everybody's been in a Screeching Weasel cover band" kind of world, which is what you have now. There's a lot of great bands, but there's a lot of uniformity.

Yeah. I think people maybe find a comfort in that somehow. It does breed a lot of mediocrity, unfortunately. What I like about what you're describing is, that you're allowing your influences to be sprinkled into what you're doing, but you're not overly concerned that what you produced sounds good enough to be compared to that, or whatever. You're allowing your own personality to still come out. That's pretty cool.

Yeah. It's a easy thing to play something that people know. It's back to being in a cover band. You play a song that sounds just like the Lillingtons.

Yeah. There are plenty of bands that do that.

People will love it, because people love the Lillingtons. They will probably not take you too seriously, because there's already the Lillingtons, but that's easy...

I don't know if you follow the Lillingtons, but their most recent record is one that a lot of people hate, because it's too different than their established sound.

Oh is it? I don't have that one.

Yeah, it's a very different sound, you should check it out. It's really something.

What's it called?

It's called Stella Sapiente. It's got a very moody atmosphere and there's a lot of lyrics about conspiracy theories and the occult, masonry and all kinds of weird stuff. It's a very ambitious album. It's not what you would expect.

Oh cool. Okay.

It's not what you'd expect. It's actually, I think it's probably their best one.

Wow. That's really interesting. Yeah, I just picked them out of the blue-

They're a great example of one, including myself, very influential. The thing about Cody as a songwriter is, he's a really great songwriter, but his delivery is almost comparable to Shel Silverstein as a writer. Yeah, he's writing these simple poems, but they resonate so much. There's so much greatness contained in it. It's much more than the sum of its parts. It's much more than just the simple rhymes that he's putting together. There's a depth that people, they like it for that reason, but they can't get it out of themselves, I guess, when they're trying to recreate something similar.

Very special skill that those guys have, to be able to... There's not a lot of songwriters like that, that can just reach into somebody's mind and resonate like that. Yeah, it's an incredible thing.

It's back to what you said about being able to speak the language. I think songwriting is a form of communication, more than anything else. It's pretty cool.

Oh, something I wanted to bring up, it's jumping off topic a little bit. Something that has been a traditional in pop punk, and one that you guys definitely had your own take on it, was using comic cartoon art on the album covers. What that says to me, about a band, is that there's a special not taking themselves too seriously quality, but there's still an attention to detail and an attention to aesthetic that is pleasing and that gives a feeling of completeness, and allure, in a unique way, that pop punk is for some reason, that's one of the hallmarks. The way that you guys did it was different.

Like a lot of things, there's some coincidence, but there's some intentionality too. Denny was dating this gal named Meghan Kelso, and she is a local pacific northwest comic artist, and big in the comic scene here. She's very, very talented. She actually did the cover of our first demo, which is then also on the Mutant Pop Retrospective, she drew that little guy.

That one, yeah.

She knows all the, she knew all the Seattle comic glitterati. This fellow named Jason Lutes, we were thinking, let's get maybe, have a comic person draw it. We could've done anything for the cover. We thought, maybe we should have a comic artist do it. I'm a big comic book collector. I love the idea of a beautiful piece of art. I agree that it's this not taking yourself too seriously thing, and that's always how we tried to portray ourselves. I like the idea of showcasing local talent, and we tried to do that throughout the history of everything we've done.

I can't imagine. I'm having a hard time thinking of what we done that wasn't by local artists, whether a photographer or a comic artist or something. Jason had been in a car wreck or bike wreck, and he had a broken leg and needed money. We were doing this seven inch, and Meghan ... We said how much money should we give him? Meghan said, I'm sure he'd be happy with $50. We gave him $50, poor bastard. He did that first seven inch, which has been on every t-shirt that we've done since. We've certainly recouped our $50, many, many times over. It's an incredibly beautiful piece of art.

I actually, I'll show you, hey, watch this.

Oh, okay. From the archives. (Ean brings out the original artwork for the debut Sicko 7")

Yeah. It just happens to be sitting here. He'd just gotten out of design school. Here's the original artwork, with a overlay with the red cell overlay. Which people don't do anymore, but this was back in the old days. This was supposed to be blue. The people at the printer didn't understand that, and they said, it's supposed to be red, so the record was red. The red is just a red that they use in design, to say knock this out, or put color here or whatever.

They used that as the color.

It was supposed to be a blue cover, but I think red worked great. Anyhow, he did that. We liked the idea of caricatures. Put us there, and people could see who we were, but also not make it too, can't see every pimple. That's where it got kicked off. Then, it was such a great piece of art that we had him back for the second one, and then the third one, he wasn't available. We went to a guy, another local artist named Pablo Griggs, and then for the fourth one, we went to Joe Newton, who was the drummer of Gas Huffer.

Oh, okay. I never knew that.

I believe in the idea of albums as art, pieces of art. A beautiful piece of art. It's not just a vehicle. If I just want to get the song, I can download it off of YouTube or whatever.

I guess maybe in the long run, we stumbled into it. It's also, I think it's a real reflection of our dedication to the art form of the album, as a piece of art entirely, a packaging with a liner note and a colored vinyl, and a cover that was loving made by someone who cares. That, to me, is all ... That's part of the experience of buying a record. It's a stupidly romantic notion.

No, I relate to it strongly. I would just add a little personal note, that I always associated comics, especially the underground comics, with the punk mindset and the same as songwriting and making albums. The way the comic artist is expressing himself or herself, it's in a lowbrow format, but they could be expressing anything that they want, and it could be deep, and it could be resonant, the same was as a novel and the same way as a film. I always thought it was cool that they would choose to do it that way instead. That's how I feel about punk rock. You can write songs that are timeless, you can write songs that have resonance and that people will remember for decades, and you chose to do it as a punk rock song rather than something else.

That's why I always thought that Sicko was a band who probably could've capably played other styles too, and maybe more pretentious styles if they wanted to, if you guys wanted to. You stuck to playing this fun relatable style of music, and did it in a way that was very inspiring.

It's the music we like, at the end of the day. It's like this, what I still listen to, Denny and Josh listen to. We listen to a lot of music, to be fair with that. I've come back, gone to other styles, and come back, and this is the one I just, I have so much more fun with, actually. This is to me the most fun style is pop punk.

Let me ask you something about being a musician, being a family man, a husband, a father, trying to fit it all into your lifestyle, because I know, I just found out just through our chat that you're married to someone who is also a musician, plays drums in a band.

Yeah.

How important do you think that is, in terms of the context of your relationship and the time that you would need to spend on your hobby, and having her understand your passion and so forth, and how you communicate that to your kids as a parent?

Yeah. No, I'm very lucky in this regard. We met through music. I met her at a show she was playing at. We have a lot in common. I guess over time, you grow together. There's one thing that I think that is a real struggle for a lot of couples, is when you're in your 20s, your early 30s, something like that, there's certain aspects to relationships which could get you carried away. You're pretty interested in that person, for example, on a physical basis. That's a pretty powerful emotion and can really make you feel positively about that person. As you know, you have kids, kid or kids, I guess.

I have one.

You get a little older, to living life and a house payment and a job, a cat that wants to be fed at five in the morning, kids, whatever. All this kind of stuff. I think a lot of people end up going, who the hell is this person? If you don't have anything in common with them, other than the fact that you had a really intense physical connection, and liked going to the same bars, when you were 26, it can be tough to go through the tough times of putting down a little kid who's having a hard time going down, or getting up early, or just taking all mom's attention and all that.

I have found that probably the biggest thing that keeps us interested in communicating and together, is that we're both so interested in music, we talk so fluidly about music, we are always showing each other new music we've found. We played in many bands together. I'm always thrilled to go see her play. She was a really kick out of watching me play.

It's been a little bit of glue for us, that other couples, if I was coming home to some girl playing, I don't know, Joni Mitchell records and Ani Difranco, I'd just be like, I don't know if I can even handle that. "Who are you?" This girl, she likes punk music, she gets herself jazzed up for a show by listening to the Hives, Vini Vedi Vicious. She gets it. You can ignore that I think when you're younger, to a certain extent, but going on, the older you get, that stuff really counts for a lot.

Also, I think, and you alluded to this earlier, having permission to get out and ... I'm in a band practice from 6 or 7 PM to 9 or 10, 11 PM, two nights a week. Because that's what I like to do. One night a month, at least, I'm playing a show, and I go out at least one or two, or three other nights a month to shows. She never questions it, because that's what she does. Sometimes I'm the one at home with the kids, which is great. I love to get kid time in.

She gets it. A buddy of mine where I work, jazz bass player, and he's had to drop it, since he had little kids, because his wife's position is that - she's not wrong - is that any time he's away doing that stuff, she's stuck managing two very energetic little boys. That's a lot of work for her, and it's unfair. He's had to literally stop being a musician and his bass is in the corner with his bass amp, and he's not playing.

I'm really lucky in that, she totally gets it, and frankly, is doing the same thing. Like I said, it's also just a thing that you connect on later in life, once some of the massive hormones of your 20s, maybe slightly dropped in volume. It's a really, it's a lucky thing for me. The guy who plays bass in my band, we were talking about this the other day, his girlfriend loves pop punk.

That's cool.

He's in his late 30s, she's in her mid to late 30s. She's at the same shows with him all the time, that's what they want to do.

Wow.

He's like, I'm so lucky. There's eight girls that like pop punk at our age left. They're all done with it, or whatever. This girl chose him. It is a lucky thing to be able to be in a relationship with someone who shares your passion, especially one as such a dude passion as this.

Right. That's really cool to know that you have that freedom. You have a partner who can relate in all the right ways and all the important ways. Do you feel like your kids are musically inclined or interested as a result?

How old's your kid?

He's two.

One of the things, once they get a little older, that you start to notice, is that if you are too excited about them doing something, they start to think it's not cool. I'm really careful about that. Both my kids do piano. One of them was doing guitar for a while, she didn't really like it. She pulls it out now and again. One of them is always at the piano fiddling around and coming up with little songs and things. I think she sees me doing that, and she's doing that. Her and her little friends have a band that they've formed.

Nice.

Called the Soda Pop Girls, which I think it's funny, considering the soda punk stuff in my life. They have little songs like Beach and whatever, Kitties, and stuff like that. She has little chord progressions, all in the same key, all the same four chords, one after another. You're like, "Jesus, change the key." She's not quite got there yet. She has a natural inclination towards feeling out music beyond the music education stuff. She has a natural inclination towards it. I hope that she'll take that further.

Her sister is maybe more, she's a good sight reader. She's really good in performances, because she gives no fucks about anyone. She just plays that piano and she doesn't give a shit if there's one person or a thousand people (watching). She bangs out her piece. She's not as interested in noodling around, but she's just finished kindergarten, so I don't know if that'll come up in the next couple years.

There's elements of it. I don't think I've seen anything yet, and I wouldn't expect to. The really crazy devotional stuff comes when you're in your teens. They could get there. There's elements of that, I guess, a long way of saying.

Yeah. That's interesting though. I'll wrap it up with just a few typical questions. At this point in your life, are you still ambitious about songwriting? Do you still have goals as a songwriter or things that you want to accomplish, and projects that you want to complete?

Yeah. Every couple years, I get a new band that I want to do. For the last couple years, it's been with Date Night with Brian and ... I just had idea of doing alternate tunings, like Sonic Youth. I'll send you the record of that too. I wanted to do that, and I did enough of that. We recently cut that off, and now my new goal is to really get a really good pop punk band going. We have a demo, and we're going away for a weekend of woodshed, and looking to get into the studio later this year.

Yeah. That's exciting.

I guess where I'm pushing myself on this, is we're doing three parts. It's a three piece band, we're doing three part harmonies a lot.

That's challenging.

It's super challenging and super fun and interesting. I guess the challenge maybe, that's one big challenge. Also, just getting fast and good, which is a challenge. I don't really care if we ever tour. I think maybe I should take those guys on tour a little bit, so they don't feel too neglected, so they don't feel like they're missing out on some kind of experience, but for me, the thing I love the best is to get good and go and play a gig in your local town with your friends and have a great night, and have a few beers. To me, that's the best thing.

Getting to that, again, getting back to that, maybe even where people know a few songs, that's really the goal. Maybe also to be more of a guitarist, be able to do more leads, maybe also to be more of a really deliberate and thoughtful songwriter, where I'm writing songs that connect with people, not just what I was thinking this morning. I think it's ... That was definitely a lot of Sicko stuff ... There was so many songs. We wrote over 100 songs.

There're times when I look back and I think, who is the audience of that song? Who was I trying to say what to? Who was I thinking was going to really connect with that jumble of words? I've tried to become more deliberate about songwriting, and thinking about how chords fit together, and thinking about real songwriters. Reading books about songwriting, and writing quality lyrics and not just saying the same lyric over and over again. Writing things that will connect with people, and they would identify with.

Those are the little challenges I'm putting to myself. I don't give a shit if I never go on tour again. I love it when someone buys my record, I don't really care if people buy my record though. It's not a, those goals ... That musical success stuff is not, it's really more about the art at this point.

Yeah. That's great. Those are all very worthy goals to me. The craft of songwriting's an endless pursuit.

It really is.

There's so many different ways you can go. I definitely relate to those areas that you've touched on. The lyrics, connecting with people, having that deliberate approach. Wow, I really look forward to hearing whatever's next.

Yeah.

I want to just ask if there are moments looking back on Sicko that you're particularly proud of and accomplishments that you have achieved as a musician that you are proud of, and that you feel very satisfied with? Whether it's a song, a album or an era of your musical career, is there anything like that, you want to reveal?

That's an interesting question. I'm really proud that we got to tour internationally. I was really proud to hear myself on the radio, that was great. I still get a kick today when someone, and you're so kind to say this stuff, I just get a kick today, when someone says that they liked what we did, and it meant something to them.

I always think about this one, this is weird. We were touring, I don't know where we were, somewhere in the southeast or something like that. We got to the show ... Yeah. We got to the show, I remember where it was. I remember where this was. Okay. We were in Reno, it was in Reno. We went to Reno, played with a band called Zoinks, I don't know if you remember them. We were playing in the basement of some old casino. Zoinks played, me and Denny were standing in the audience and was watching them. They were like, "Yay, Sicko's in the house!" People started (chanting), "Sicko, Sicko." We were standing on the audience. I remember just looking at ... It was the silliest thing, I remember looking at Denny and I just get this big smile, and he had this big smile. I just remember thinking, it's so nice that people like this, that this thing that we tried to do good, that for some people, it was good.

That sort of thing happened here and there, but that experience jumps to mind. It's touching people, I guess. The people cared. You did something and said something and thought something and made it into this thing, and then it went out to somebody, and somebody received that, and it meant something to them. They're thankful.

That's just a really proud moment, to have been able to do that, and to have touched somebody with your art, I guess.

Yeah. For what it's worth, to me, Sicko was a band that was very consistent, consistently good throughout its run, the albums always sound great. The musicianship was great. Definitely a cut above the typical pop punk style, I guess and songwriting was always great. Album covers were always cool. There's just a coolness that I associate with Sicko that is a bit more rare, because being in a band like Sicko, I think your destiny was to be an underrated example of the style, you know what I mean?

Yes.

There's something to that, that I think it's worth it for you to hear it from somebody. That's something special unto itself. You might not be in the Rolling Stone top 10 list of pop punk, but you're on a lot of people's top 10 lists who really love this music, and who really think about it and have carefully considered everything that it means to them. For what it's worth.

That's kind of you. Thank you.

Another thing I want to just point out is that, I didn't hear Sicko until 2008.

Oh really? Wow.

I've been a punk fan for 25 years or more, but I played in a band, and the guy that I played in the band with is from the pacific northwest, he's from Oregon, and he's like, "Check out this band Sicko, they're really cool and I think you'd dig them." Yeah, I would've never known. You guys became one of my favorites. It's just interesting, because in the age of the internet and everything, you never really know when you might become someone's favorite band again, way later after the fact.

Yeah. We were not... the timing of Sicko was great for being too cool for school, being cooler. You grunge heads are stupid, we're cool. That was great. We were really well timed for that. We quit in 1998. Maybe a little bit, you'll read about this in the liners when I send you the record, but a little bit of what was going on was, there was the Warped Tour, the Van's Tour, and stuff like that. We were like, "Who are all these people? Why are they all wearing the same t-shirt of Misfits and the Ramones and the Clash?"

I didn't even know about Hot Topic at that time. We were like, "This is not our cool little club anymore." This has become culture, broad culture. That felt weird. Punk was, '80s punk rock was underground and weird, and for freaks and misfits. It felt weird that that was all going on. I think, and we ducked out to a certain extent, to a complete extent, around the time that things ... Green Day broke in the early '90s, but there wasn't Blink 182 and Sum 41 and Jimmy Eat World, and my God, whatever else. All that stuff didn't really happen until around the time I think, maybe just before the time we knocked off.

I think it was probably destined to not get really heard by a lot of people. We also didn't really do any of the things that you really should do to make people hear you. Staying on the same small label for the whole history of the band, not really promoting it, not really touring very much. All the wrong things. I guess it's not really surprising to me that more people didn't hear it. I do wonder sometimes what I'd be like. My buddy from grade school was in a band called Sweetwater. I don't know if you've ever heard of them.

They were contemporaries with the Stone Temple Pilots and that sort of pop grunge stuff. A B-version of Pearl Jam. They went and got on Sony, and then toured the world. Did huge festivals. When they do play now, they sell big halls out, and ... They did two records, they got dropped both times. Total major level disaster story. I think if we wouldn't've been quite so precious and persnickety about not selling out, and would have pushed a little harder, that kind of stuff, maybe, I don't know, maybe we'd be the Atari's today. I'd still be doing a regular job.

I don't know. Sometimes I do wonder where it could've gone. In a sense, I also like not having ruined it by pushing it too hard. I don't know.

I have to agree with you on that. There's a cost for everything in life. I don't think that Sicko was ever tainted at any point by some ill-fated decision or chasing some pipe dream to something like that.

They say it in the pure art world, which is nice, in a way.

Yeah, for sure.

Doing that now is what I love to do. I love, I'm putting out Denny's new band's record. I'm going to have to ... We sent out the test pressings last week, early this week. We're going to have a vinyl in the next three or four weeks. Nothing makes me happier than putting out a cool record for somebody whose music I respect and that's just awesome, man.

To me, the art, that's where it's at. Getting paid is easy, do a job, go to work, come home, blah blah blah blah blah. Doing the art is what really floats my boat.