GRATH MADDEN

photo by Felix Strates

GRATH MADDEN

Having grown up in Northern Virginia, I have a sense of what Maryland must have been like as a starting place for exploring music and discovering songwriting. How did it come about for you? When did you realize that music was an important outlet in your life, and at what point did you decide to try writing your own songs?

Well, first of all, I’ve read ahead, and you have established a very complicated question maze here, wherein it’s kinda difficult to answer any of the first three questions (which are actually like 130 questions) without answering all three questions, so in sorta-answer to your first question(s); Baltimore had a great oldies station that occupied me until I was old enough to start buying rap cassettes, and, by the time I’d transitioned from the Juice soundtrack to Nirvana CDs via Columbia House memberships I would never pay for, my friend’s little brother had showed me that every chord on the guitar was the same and how to read guitar tabs off the old timey internet.  That quickly (d)evolved into me reverse engineering the songs I was larning into much worse songs.

You and I are both 80s babies, so I'm wondering if MTV had a profound impact on you as it did for me? Where were you going to seek out new music? Were there family members or friends who were introducing you to new bands and genres? How did you discover punk rock? Were there any transitional genres or bands that led you to it? Who was your first favorite band?

I always went to private schools where everyone either listened to Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead or Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead, so everything I knew about music until I was 13 or so came from MTV.  I discovered punk rock because MTV played the “Longview” video. I went to The Wall at Towson Town Center and bought the tape and came home and listened to it and was like “oh, this is punk rock,” and then I liked punk rock.  I was really obsessed with Nirviana, Sonic Youth, The Breeders and that whole end of things before that, so I was always kinda floating adjacent to it, but “Dookie” was definitely an a-ha sort of moment where I realized that entire albums could be catchy and good.  Before that, I basically just thought all bands had like one to three good songs per record and then just a whole bunch of stuff I didn’t understand to fill it out. So I guess Green Day was my first favorite punk band, but within a month or so of discovering them, I’d started down the Lookout rabbit hole.

Was there a particular moment when you began to gravitate more towards pop punk in particular? Which pop punk bands inspired you to have a go at writing in that style? Has pop punk been your primary songwriting style? When you were learning to write songs, had you played guitar for very long? How did you learn to play an instrument, and what provided the basis for your understanding of song composition?

Half-learning guitar and pop punk both happened at more or less the same time for me, so I would just sit down and learn how to play stuff by ear and scribble down my own sort of pseudo-tab version of how to play it.  The Ne’er Do Wells/Judy and the Loadies split on Lookout was one of the first things I realized I could figure out how to play along to, and I realized quickly after that that all pop punk songs were easy to play along to because all pop punk songs are the same.  That spilled into me making up my own nonsense almost immediately.

When The Steinways formed, had you any prior experience playing in bands? Did you have specific songwriting goals at the outset for The Steinways? What were some of your goals for the band starting out, and when did you begin to sense that you had a place in the pop punk world?

I was really shy and weird about showing people songs I wrote and even more so when it came to singing in front of people, but I had a pop punk band with three other friends for a couple of months right before and during the first couple of breaks at college called The Kevins.  We played maybe 8 shows and never recorded anything. It was very much a me-dragging-my-friends-along-for-the-ride-I-want-to-go-on sort of thing, so I doubt it would’ve gone on much longer even if we weren’t all going to schools in different states. Also, we were very bad. I also played in a “band” late in college with some friends called Steve McQueen that was intended as a grindcore band but immediately turned into us getting messed up and playing the same 3 note riff for five minutes at a time.  I thought I would find more like-minded folks in college, but it was the late 90’s, so it was already super not-cool to like pop punk. By the time the Stewinays started, I’d been writing songs for like 8 years or so and just really wanted to record one thing. That was my only goal with that band. After we finished our first demo, I would’ve been happy to call it a day. I was only 23 or 24 but felt like I was already way too old to be doing this, so I was initially looking at the Steinways as just a way to have some of these dumb songs I’d been writing recorded on something other than a hand held tape recorder.

In past interviews you've indicated that your move to New York had a lot to do with wanting to participate in the healthy pop punk scene that was happening at the time. Did you find that transition to be challenging? Who were some of the first New York musicians/songwriters that you linked up with? Which bands in that scene were particularly inspiring to you?

I was a major Dirt Bike Annie fanboy starting in college.  I had also internet-befriended this guy Lew Houston who lived in Pennsylvania, did a webzine type thing and was buddies with DBA, so more or less through him, I started to get to know those folks (Mikey was their drummer at that point, so that’s where I met him).  These were the first people I’d ever met in real life that were willing to have a conversation about Mutant Pop Records that didn’t involve making fun of me for being interested in Mutant Pop Records. I was more into seeing bands and buying records and writing about those things than playing or writing songs at that point, but the first Ergs 7” (which I heard a few months before I moved to NY) really made me want to start a band.  Mikey was the first guy I had heard write good pop punk songs that were super catchy without being as obvious and copy-cat-y as most stuff was at that point in time and prior. Plus, he was closer to my age, so you could tell his points of reference were a little more contemporary which was nice because the world only needs so many Dion and the Belmonts covers and/or Brady Bunch references. But, yeah, between those two bands, The Unlovables and the fact that there were clearly like 13 other weirdos in the area that were actually interested in this type of stuff (vs. 0-2 in most other parts of the country, it seemed), I was really excited to move up to NY.  

Is there a sense in which you do feel that you "missed the boat" based on the timing of your entry into the scene? It seems plausible that your songs could've ended up on Lookout! releases had you been born a decade earlier. How did you find a pop punk community once The Steinways began gaining momentum?

Not really.  I think it took me until sometime in the early 2000s to realize that every song didn’t have to be “[Girl’s-Name] Is [Doing-Such-And-Such],” so I’m much happier that I did stuff in a slightly less embarrassing (heavy emphasis on the “slightly”) time..  Also, so many of those guys from those decade-earlier bands are so insane in so many different ways, so I’m happy to not have had a bunch of smoke blown up my ass or to have not sold like 10,000 records once. I have enough normal person complexes as it is, so I don’t need “I’m a bitter weirdo because I think I used to be a big deal” on top of that.  And to answer your second question; the internet.

What was the ultimate effect of playing in a band where your bandmate was also your girlfriend? Was this something that impacted your songwriting in significant ways later on? I recall a description of the first Barrakuda McMurder album including that you had written songs in response to feeling "sad". Do you find that loss and pain your life has contributed to your ability to write better songs?

I feel like there are funny songs that are kind of good and then there are good songs, which 999/1000 times are about something being wrong, so I guess so.  Playing in a band with my girlfriend at the time was fine. I don’t think it’s something either of us would recommend, but it was more or less not-a-thing.

Something that's always interested me about your songwriting personality is your penchant for long song titles and very short songs. Often your songs begin without an intro riff, and there's an immediacy to your delivery that seems to have been very influential. Are these just natural tendencies that you have as a songwriter, or did you develop this style through a more methodical approach?

I think it’s fucking insane how long songs are.  I think the fact that most songs repeat parts over and over and over as a rule or a standard is also super dumb.  People have been writing this exact same song for like 70 years at least, so I sort of feel like we all have enough of an understanding of how it goes by now that everyone should just get to the fucking point.  I don’t intentionally write shorter songs; I just tend to naturally veer away from repeating parts. Some of that is due to the last few sentences and some of that is me not having a lot of confidence in what I’m making up.  But mostly, all the music I really like is brief and catchy and makes me want to immediately listen to the song again, and I’m always just trying to make music I’d like. I recorded the two Robot Bachelor albums with Luke from the Copyrights/Hospital Job, and he’s convinced me a few times to lengthen songs a bit by repeating a part or returning to a part.  Even though he’s been right and the song is better every time, my instinct is always that it’s a crazy thing to do.

Have you always recorded home demos? What is your process for composing, remembering, cataloging, etc. your song ideas? Over the years have you sensed an evolution in your own songwriting? When you revisit the old material, what are your impressions? You just released a large and seemingly complete collection of your pre-Robot Bachelor material - what inspired you do to this? That's a lot of tunes to upload onto bandcamp!

“For my ninth question, I have five questions for you…”  

1 - Yes.  For years I just used whatever hand held tape recorder or cassette boom box or whatever that I could find.  I probably don’t really “need” recordings to remember how things go anymore, but I definitely did then and still operate as if I do.  

2 - I bought a 4 track when I moved to NY and quickly realized I could plug that into my computer and record stuff on garageband.  I’d been writing songs for years at that point, but that really opened up a lot of stuff for me just cause I’d never really had a way to mess around with vocal ideas or guitar parts or anything like that.  I write songs like everybody writes songs in that I either have an idea or I sit down and make myself have an idea and go from there. I tend to think of recording the demo as “writing the song” cause it’s pretty rare that I have anything past an idea or two when I sit down to record something.  And going back to the short song thing, I think a lot of my songs end up that way because I sit down with an idea and I make that idea a “part” rather than a “verse” or a “chorus,” and I just add more parts to it until it’s over. As far as just cataloging ideas go, I record stuff into my phone if I think of something when I’m out in the universe.  I’ve also quasi-upgraded to a usb recording interface and a non-garageband recording software, but I still use garageband like half the time.

3 - Sure.  Not in any sort of epic sense, but I think the songs I write have gotten progressively better despite being more or less exactly the same.  I at least like them more, and that’s at least like 94% of the point for me, so I’ve noticed it even if other people haven’t. My sense of progress and evolution is tied up in shit no one else cares about.  Like no one in the universe would listen to the second Robot Bachelor album and think that the drums sound more considered and less garage-band-drum-loopy than on the first Robot Bachelor album, but that’s what I think because that’s the type of nonsense I am concerned with when I write and record things.

4 - Like anyone who’s ever recorded pop punk songs, I like some of the stuff I’ve done, am indifferent to some of the stuff I’ve done, and am horrifically embarrassed by some of the stuff I’ve done.  Lyrically, what can you do? Like, I’m the one that decided to write songs with girl’s names and weird personal details and insecurities littered throughout. Fortunately, someone else’s far more embarrassing musical history is never more than a stone’s throw away, so it’s fairly easy to stave of the shame of bad Steinways songs.

5 - I feel like my weird insistence on constantly changing the name of this one band I’ve been doing for 15 years has probably made locating everything I’ve done sort of difficult.  I mean, I’m fortunate in that I play a highly unpopular form of music and personally know most of the 100 people that are interested in things I put out, but it’s probably not a stupid idea to have everything in one place.  I won’t do any better of a job promoting this thing than I do with anything else, but it’s there.

Your sense of humor and public persona on the PPMB has always intrigued me - it seems that you take a very casual, understated position with regard to your own songs and contributions to the scene yet clearly you are recognized as a major contributor. You have many fans and the whole "Insub Fest" era may be best represented by the sound that you created which seems to have influenced many other songwriters. What's your take on that whole thing? Do you feel that the PPMB community carried the torch from the Lookout! era into the digital era? It always had a tight-knit, even exclusive feel at times. How did you see your own role in it?

I think the internet does a really good job of masking reality just enough that people can sort of paint whatever perception they like of how things were or are.  Insub Fests were nice momentary ego boosts there for a couple of years, but those were very isolated events. That message board certainly connected a lot of folks.  I met a bunch of people I still really like more or less through there, but I think at the end of the day it created just as much (if not more) confusion and weird feelings as it did anything else.  I think it basically forged a lot of realities out of misperceptions, the “exclusivity” of the whole thing being a good example. Ultimately, I think it started with a lot of folks that were teenagers through the 90s and had suffered through some brutally lean years, pop-punk wise, at the end of that decade, and as we all turned into 20-somethings, we started making better music and started learning to interact on the internet with each other at the same time.  That led to a lot of individual people doing and saying a lot of weird things, individually, but I think if there was ever really a group-think surrounding that message board it was the “I feel excluded” idea. I’m not sure there was a single person who felt included, and if they did, I’m not sure what it was they felt included in. I knew a lot of people that posted there in real life, and I was pretty fortunate in that the ratio of people being nice about my music to people being mean about it was generally in my favor, but I never felt like I was a part of whatever dark illuminati that people were sad and angry about all the time.  To be a bit less Debbie Downer about it, there was a ton of great pop punk music being made for like 5, 6, maybe 7 years there, and guys like Chris Thacker and Mark Enoch who maintained the message board(s) and set up the Insub Fests definitely made it 100,000 times easier for a lot of people to connect with each other and helped consolidate a big-picture small audience into a small-picture big audience. It was awesome to get to go play to a couple of hundred interested weirdos once a year instead of playing to Chadd Derkins who just wants to get on the train and listen to podcasts, and it was great to be able to make a record, post a sentence about it and know that 99% of the people on earth who would be even remotely interested would read that sentence.  I think the best records from like 03-08 at least rival my favorite Lookout things from the early/mid-90s, and I do think there’s MORE good stuff from that later period overall.

One thing that I've always admired is your tendency to continue cranking out songs in spite of it all. What would you say is your primary inspiration to be prolific as a songwriter? Do you think you'll continue writing songs throughout your adult life? What forms of relief or therapy does songwriting offer to you personally?

Well, I wouldn’t say I’m not going to write songs anymore because I like doing it, but aside from a podcast theme song I haven’t written anything for about a year now.  It took a really long time for the sheer novelty of “Oh, I get to record music” to wear off, so that was all the motivation I needed for years, and by the time I didn’t feel that way anymore, I’d learned that if I just booked a recording date or started a new band or had some sort of something in front of me that required songs, I’d suddenly have 10 ideas and write a bunch of stuff all at once.  I wrote most of the stuff on the 2nd Robot Bachelor album the month before I went to go record it, but that was last August, and I haven’t felt the urge to do anything since. I’m sure I’ll want to record something again some time in the next couple of years, but I definitely don’t see myself putting out much more music. And I definitely think that writing songs about bad shit makes me feel less bad about shit and more excited about writing a song, but that feels corny as fuck to say, so I’m going to tell people that you hacked this interview and typed this.   

One thing that seems to frustrate the pop punk scene as it exists now is this idea that there are many people (like yourself) who have explored pop punk far beyond the trappings of the traditional forms that people tend to obsess over (mostly the direct influence of Screeching Weasel and The Queers). The sounds that you and your friends have created are unique, and it seems like there's somewhat of a divide between the pop-punk "purists" who sort of keep trying to reinvent the wheel compared to those whose definition of pop punk extends into other realms of songwriting. Lemuria comes to mind. I guess my essential question is: Do you feel like you have much in common with the "average" pop punker?

Much as I’d love to take credit for crafting some new and unique form of music, I think we sound a whole lot like Screeching Weasel.  I’m not sure what the “average pop punker” is today or yesterday or in 2010 for that matter. I always feel like “pop punk” fluctuates pretty frequently between being considered a genre and being considered a stigma, and from my highly limited view of the world, it feels like we’re pretty firmly camped in the latter at present.  I feel like that results in most people hanging on either the uber-faithful-Ramones-and-or-some-other-band-core end of the spectrum or the “We’re like a weird version of something weird with a twist and another twist. And another twist. And those three twists all have at least two twists. And our drummer wears an Ergs shirt sometimes” end.  The stuff in the middle either doesn’t exist or is bad right now. I’m sure there will be another small clump of good bands to come along at some point, but as much as this stuff is cyclical, it’s not endlessly cyclical. Also, I’m sure there are a ton of great bands I don’t know anything about right now, so feel free to disregard every word I have typed in response to this and all other questions so far.

It's absolutely necessary that I ask this question: What is your honest opinion of heavy metal as a genre? Are there any metal bands that you are genuinely stoked on? Has metal music in any way informed your songwriting? What would it take to hear a Grath-penned metal composition? I've seen that Explorer melody maker! It's metal enough, dude.

Pantera and Type O Negative in Detroit was the first concert I ever went to, and “Some Kind of Monster” is a timeless cinematic treasure, but I’m not currently or historically a huge metal fan or anything.  I don’t know how to play other kinds of music, so if I wrote a heavy metal song, it would probably end up sounding like “Spike-A-Da-Punch” by The Proms somehow. That Explorer was a great guitar, but I threw it on the ground years ago, and it snapped in half.

As we wrap up, what are some of the musical accomplishments you're most proud of, and what are the remaining ambitions and goals you have as a songwriter? Do you feel that you have a lot more to say/contribute/learn as a musician?

I feel really fortunate that I’ve been able to make records and have people put those records out and that some people have liked them.  I’m grateful to have played a few handfuls of really fun shows, gone on a couple tiny tours, gone to Europe and to have met and played with a bunch of folks who I liked as a kid or a grown up or both.  Like I said, I don’t really have any immediate or long terms goals or plans or anything with music. My musical ambition was to record a couple of songs, and I’ve recorded those couple of songs a hundred times or so at this point, so I’m pretty set.