What’s your Waffle House order? How do you get your hashbrowns?

Oh, man. I have never gone to a Waffle House.

Oh, yeah? I am always there after a show, and I am always like, “Am I going to see the band? I bet I see the band this time.”

I will have to tell [guitarist] Caleb [Shook] and the others that we need to go to Waffle House. I am not sure if my stomach could take a meal after a show though. But we should make a plan to go.

What’s a song that re-wired your brain when you first heard it?

I don’t know if there’s any re-wiring this brain, but I can think of a song that just clicked for me: the song “Drain You” by Nirvana. The lyrics in that song have always stuck out to me. That’s when I realized that Kurt Cobain was a really good songwriter. Before then, it was just like, “Oh, yeah, he’s a good singer and the music is really good and he has a good voice.” But with that song, it was like, “Oh, he is in pain.” The line, “You taught me everything about a poison apple” is such incredible imagery and there’s all this medical imagery there. “Drain You” has that spookiness to it. That is the one that comes to my mind as just exceptional songwriting.

I remember reading a few years ago that Andre 3000 would record something in his memo app, then get into a flow and just start baby-talking lyrics into it so he could translate it later. I thought it was very cool that he used the word “translate.” Do you do anything like that? Take us through your songwriting process.

I have this rule with my friends: when I die, delete my Notes app. I have so many embarrassing things in there. I have so many voice recordings too: me just working through a melody while I’m driving, and it’s just gibberish and off key. But a lot of people do that: get a melody and turn it into lyrics. Some people like to write the lyrics first then work the song around that. I think that is a good practice and I have been trying that, but I have never really been able to. I just get a melody in my head, and then I’ll just start taking from whatever I have written in my Notes app, which is just a lot of single lines and little paragraphs and seeing if that fits. It’s probably not the best process, but it’s worked so far.

What do you do when you get stuck?

When I find myself playing the same chord progressions I feel stuck unless I pick up a different instrument and try something else. I think that’s why I want to try writing out the lyrics first and then working a song around that, but I haven’t been disciplined enough yet. I haven’t adopted it yet, but I haven’t abandoned it yet. What I usually find myself doing when I am writing a song is figuring out what it’s about as I am writing it. I will be thinking about someone or something and that’s when a line will come to me and then a couple of more lines will come to me because of that, and then I will pull a line from the notes app that I think goes well with.

If I were to take a single song and say, “Oh, that’s about this person or that experience,” there’s always a couple of lines in there that don’t fit. I just have them there cause I think they sounded good or whatever. There’s never a song that is just fully about one thing. That’s something I would like to practice on.

Do you see that as a limitation? Cause I think it sounds like punk rock.

Yeah, I don’t see it so much as a limitation. I think it’s the opposite. It would be a limitation to hone in on it. But, I don’t know, it just might feel more like a finished product at the end or like a more polished thing. I’m just really messing with songwriting.

It’s about embracing the mess?

Oh, I’ve embraced it. I just want to hone in on some skills and try some new things that will make it a little bit better. I wanna try what other people do and just to see what could make me a better songwriter. I feel like some people have their skill harnessed a little more, and I don’t feel like I do.

The songs write me, you know. I don’t really sit down and go, “Okay, let’s write a song.” I don’t know music theory. I don’t know what chords or keys I am writing in. I am just throwing things out there and it’s like, “Oooh, that sounds good. That’s what it’s gonna be.”

How did you learn guitar?

I got my first guitar at Christmas, I was about ten or maybe a little bit older. I didn’t know how to play it, and I just kept trying. Never took any lessons or learned anything. I would say, I know most open chords, but I don’t know any scales. I don’t know anything when it comes to things like, this song is in the key of whatever. Like, on a fretboard I know that the fifth fret on the E string is an A because it matches the pitch of the next string, but if you played a random chord, I wouldn’t be able to name it. I have just memorized the location on the fretboard.

It’s really interesting that you say that. I have a foot in both worlds. I used to play by ear when I started playing the bass, then I took some classes when I got to college, and there comes a point where learning scales is like being a mad scientist. You start putting things together just as experiments and it starts to become a different way of getting a melody or whatever. I never really mastered music theory or anything, but it can be hard when you are in a band and half of you know theory and the other half doesn’t.

That is the exact situation I am in. Our guitar player and our bass player both have a lot of knowledge and experience when it comes to that stuff. They never went to school for it, but it was a special interest, and they were both in a band together and come from that background. Then there’s me and my drummer, and we are like, “We don’t know anything.” Like, I don’t even know if my drummer knows things like, “Oh, that song is in 5/4” or whatever. We both just play what sounds good.

That’s a great dynamic though. It reminds me of Led Zeppelin where you have two guys that really know their stuff and two that are going off feel and sound. That creates an interesting dynamic, right?

Yeah, it does. On the last record, Caleb came in with a guitar solo and he was over-explaining all the theory behind it and the technique he was using. I was just like, “Um, I don’t like it. It needs to be more simple. I was thinking something more like a Dinosaur Jr. thing here.” And he came back with something that was way better. Like you can do theory all day long, but it’s not gonna be able to hit emotionally if it's not sound to begin with. I think that’s why people really like Nirvana and The Beatles. It’s simple, but it’s just so solid.

Can you take us through the evolution of Rodeo Boys?

So I started a band in 2014 or 2015 with a couple of friends, and we were doing a three-piece kind of thing. It was just kind of a hobby, but it was really fun. Then band members would move away or whatever. So I started a new band, looking for people who were more serious and were reliable. It was crucial just to find people who were pleasant to be around, and I can remember just going through a ton of drummers. And when it came to starting Rodeo Boys, when I started that project, it was something that I was putting a lot of energy into, but I wasn’t thinking it was going to go anywhere.

When the pandemic hit and everything was shut down, that’s the first time in my adult life where I had a month off of work. And my guitarist at the time, we had had a lot of conversations about what we could do to stand out a little more. We started writing most of Home Movies at that time – tracking it in my attic and in his bedroom closet. That record came out in 2023, but most of those songs were written in 2020. At that point, I was kinda over those songs, you know.

And that’s the evolution. As we started to get more and more committed to it, it became a viable career option. Now that I see what this could be, I can’t see a world where I could be happy without it.

What have you learned along the way?

Well, when I first started it was like, “Oh, this is great. You get to party with your friends and just leave when you want to.” You don’t make merch or anything like that, you just play shows. And as time went on: you show up early. You stay for all the bands. You stay, you know, until the end of the show. You sell merch. You respond to email. There’s just so much more to it. And if I had known that a little bit earlier, then maybe I would be a little further along a little earlier.

Is that some advice you would give new bands and artists?

A thousand percent. I think a lot of people will look at bands that are successful and wonder how they could make it when they’re just not that good. But look how much work they put in, you know. Did they eat shit and just keep doing it? The Linda Lindas, for example. They deserve every bit of success that comes their way. I am not lumping them into a category of bands-people-don’t-like or anything, I am just thinking about how much work they put in. We did a show with them, and they were so cool with us. They hung out with us a bunch and after their show – they didn’t have to do this – they talked to every single fan who wanted to talk to them. That’s putting the work in. That’s making those connections.

I feel that with Linda Lindas. I saw them with Green Day and Rancid, and after their show, they were in the pit during Rancid.

I went to that tour as well. We had just played a show they headlined in Cleveland, and the day after, they were in Detroit. They were like, “Do you want to come?” and we were like “Absolutly!” They are super rad.

Do you think newbies overlook this aspect of building networks and making friends?

You know, there’s just so much people have to focus on now. They have to make content, and that can make you forget about making these connections. These networks are…well, I don’t like that word. It sounds a little tech-y. A little capitalist. But it is about making connections.

Getting support-work is all about being reliable and being pleasant to be around. These bands want to know that you aren't going to embarrass their band, you know. You can’t be an asshole or something. A lot of the support tours we have gotten was because someone vouched for us and said, “Oh, yeah. Rodeo Boys are going to show up, and they’re going to put on a good show, and they’re going to be pleasant to hang out with.” That, to me, seems more important than blowing up on TikTok. There’s so much weight being put on social media content these days.

Do you think social media is overblown?

I mean, I’m a little old fashioned when it comes to that stuff.

I get that from you. I think it’s a strength. I mean, the way you went out and made Junior. You set out to make an album. I mean, I maybe wouldn’t put it into the category of “concept album,” like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, but, you set out to make a complete album. That might be a little old fashioned, right?

I like an album. I like a full album. And in today’s age, it’s kinda getting beat out of me. It’s like you can’t do The Wall anymore. I get hung-up on that. I like a full record with no skips, and we put a lot of time and thought into that.

When I listen to Junior, it’s almost like it has three acts: divided between this studio synthesizer sound that appears in three places. We hear it first in the intro, which ends with a sound that I can only describe as a tractor beam from a UFO. Was that purposeful?

Oh, my god! That’s exactly what we were going for!

And it’s right there on the cover too. There’s a UFO and some X-Files stuff..

There’s a bunch of ‘90s stuff. There’s a lot of Twin Peaks references there too. The intro in “It Is Happening Again,” that’s a Twin Peaks reference and the outro in “Bite the Bullet,” and that’s another one.

Oh, I didn’t even catch that, and I should have.

Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot there. I love all that kind of kitschy, campy stuff, and I wanted the cover to be that. It’s so cool that you picked up on that, cause that’s what we were going for. Tom May and I spent a couple of hours making that. Just playing around with this cool synthesizer he has. The band didn’t even know we were doing it. They came upstairs, and we were like, “Okay, we just made this thing. We hope you like it, but if you don’t that’s cool. We are sorry that we might have wasted a bunch of time on it, but we hope you like it.” And they did.

That’s great. And you return to that sound throughout the album, right? Cause we hear it again at the end of “All American Man,” don’t we?

Yeah. We use the synthesizer again there. When I wrote “All American Man,” that’s where all the alien themes started coming out. It’s about gender identity and trans-ness and stuff. And feeling alien. And it turns out, Tom May is a big alien guy. He is into all that: extra terrestrials, UFOs, close encounters. I mean, he even once had a whole podcast specifically about that stuff. So, we just dove into that theme pretty heavily.

It’s cool that you mentioned The Wall by Pink Floyd, cause another album of theirs that I love is Darkside of the Moon, and there’s all these callbacks on that album: certain melodies and certain themes. I love that, and so we started thinking like that: putting the songs in order and thinking about pressing a vinyl, which is another thing that you're not supposed to be able to do today.

Yeah, but it’s such a neat niche culture, that again seems really punk to me. Everyone is writing for these short TikTok bursts, and here you are making these long, thoughtful albums on analog.

It’s important to me. I am a very tactile, brick and mortar type person. I like going into a record store and talking to the owner and listening to stuff. The tactical nature of it all just feels very human and crucial. As we get into more digital, it’s just like everything is just files up in the air. And I am not immune to it; I am on all that stuff too. But as we get more and more digital, I am just not that into it. It’s not romantic to me, you know.

It’s weird cause you look at what the future was supposed to be like on Star Trek, and you see all the knobs and buttons and toggle switches to flick. Then we get further into the future, and it's about tapping glass and things that aren’t really there. But you guys are out there doing this thing that we are supposed to have evolved beyond.

People still like going camping. There’s something in human nature that is very analog.

And you return to this synthesizer sound again at the end. Where you and Caleb are doing this call and response guitar solo and it starts to sound a little like an old radio switching stations on a dial. There is something very analog there. Where did that come from?

I wish I had John here cause he could tell me exactly what we did. We actually ran that through an old tape machine to get those sounds. While he is playing, I am using dials and switches, and that’s all those sounds. It was going through tape. That was all done physically, live. We used a lot of tape on the album. “Crystal” parts one and two were all done on tape. Part two was one take with a nylon guitar on tape. We kept that raw, but Caleb and John did a little synth part.

And the end of the album was recorded live, just you turning dials and knobs?

Yeah, there at the end. That’s all live. We ran it through that tape machine, and I am using switches and dials, and Caleb is actually using guitar pedals through the tape machine to get those sounds. You can really hear that at the beginning of “All American Man.” Caleb is using a pedal with his hand. Where you hear it cut out, that’s him running a take through a tape machine, then using a distortion pedal. It’s super cool.

What was it like working with Tom May? I think this was your first time working with a producer ever. How did working with a producer enhance your process?

That was my first time working with a producer, and I will never go back. We met Tom cause we were on tour with The Menzingers, and he and I had a lot of the same hobbies and interests and stuff. It was great having someone outside the band who I could bounce ideas off of, who was committed to helping me make the best album I could make. I could say, “This is what I am committed to,” and I could say, “I don’t like this or that,” without having them be married to their ideas. I would love to work with a producer on everything I do.

This was the first full-length he had ever done. We did a lot of the pre-production at his house in Philly. That’s where he and I worked on “All American Man.” I had a version I wasn’t super happy with. It was just something that I was going to scrap. But he was like, “No. There’s something there.” The boys went to the bar, and he and I stayed in the living room. We just started working though it. He had some great ideas, like holding out that E and working out some of my lyric ideas. Phonetically, he was like, “What are you wanting to say?” It was a nice space. It felt like camp.

You joked on Instagram that a corporate music magazine would probably say of “All American Man” that it was the “masc version of ‘Pink Pony Club.’” I laugh every time I think of that, but there’s also a little kernel of truth there cause it is about queer, masculine identity in a mid-west setting. Could you take us through the song’s presentation of that?

So, we claim Lansing as our hometown, but we are all from smaller towns around there. I lived in a very small town near there… well, actually, I lived in the country outside that small town. And that town has less than 2,000 people in its population. There are very few gay people or trans people there. I can’t think of any who weren’t closeted. You don’t see that growing up, and so you think that it’s not a possibility. You don’t see yourself as an adult cause it’s not on display. And at that time there wasn’t a lot in pop culture, and what was there was mostly catered to gay men and very cis-gendered.

There’s more trans representation now, but for masc tans people or masc queer people, there’s not a ton of representation. There’s some sapphic, high femme representation but only when it appeases the male gaze. If you aren’t Laverne Cox, and Laverne Cox doesn't want to be the face of all trans people. She even said, “I have money. I have had work done. Not all trans women will be able to do that.” And that doesn’t make someone less trans, you know.

“All-America Man,” being a ballad and being a song that was very vulnerable…it wasn’t something that I wanted to do…But getting to play that on tour with Laura Jane Grace with a majority queer audience, where people could come up to me and talk to me about it, that’s why I did it. Music is so important to me, and people’s songs are so important to me. I would love to be the biggest band in the world, but it’s more important to get the songs out in front of the right people. That was what was so crucial about that tour.

That’s where your song shares meaning with its inspiration, the two-headed calf poem that went viral a few years ago. The farmer who discovers that calf is planning to exploit it, but that’s not the only meaning possible for that calf…well, it’s hard to put into words, that must have been an incredibly hard song to write.

There’s so many possible interpretations of that poem. I actually have goose-bumps right now talking about it. That poem makes me cry. When Tom and I were working on my lyrics, he kept saying, “Pull up the poem,” and I was like, “Okay, but I warn you: it’s gonna make me cry.” So, I pulled it up and read it, and it made me cry. And he was like, “Aw, I’m sorry, buddy.” And I was like, “Damnit!”

There’s so many interpretations of that poem. There’s the unconditional love between the mother and the calf. And there’s this part where the mother is telling that calf that the farmers are going to put it up on display in the morning – you know, like, you will be dead in the morning, but right now you are here with me, and tonight there’s twice as many stars in the sky. So beautiful.

The first time I saw it, a trans friend shared it, so I saw it in the context of, “You’re trans and people think you’re a freak or whatever, but you are really deserving of unconditional love.” And the country-ness of all of that. The farm boys don’t know you exist yet. There’s the Matthew Sheppard part of it. So, is this a story of the farm boys killing you because you are a freak of nature to them, but is there an interpretation where you are going to die from complications of your condition? There’s a lot of interpretations. And it hits on a really deep level.

“All American Man” is able to capture all of that. There’s something ineffable about this aspect of being on display in this environment, but somehow you and Tom were able to capture it in the lyrics.

Thank you. I really appreciate that. It is so much easier to explore things through art. I have been out as gay for a long time, but even now, when I think about asking people to use my correct pronouns, it’s – aaaah. I just don’t really want to make a fuss about it, you know. But with art, you can really explore the depths.

There’s a line in The Simpsons in an episode where Homer makes friends with a gay man, but the gay man doesn’t fit all the stereotypes. And at one point Homer is like, “This is America. We like our gays flaiming.” And being on display as trans or non-binary risks creating another box for Americans. Is this another theme in “All American Man?”

Yeah, America is totally like that. Everything needs to fit into a box, and if it doesn’t, they do not like it. I say, “they” but I mostly mean conservative people. Even some liberal people do it too. They think, “There’s this thing, and I need to understand it, so I need to put it into this box.”

Where I work, my boss and I have gotten very close, and I have changed his mind on a lot of things. He was raised conservative Christian, and he didn’t realize that half his crew is gay. But we just weren’t flaming. He didn’t know we were gay. He didn’t know we were anarchists. Anarchists aren’t just these lazy, blue-haired, attention seekers. It’s a blue-collar movement. It’s not lazy. Well, I mean, there’s a group in every bunch, obviously, but anarchists aren’t just lazy.

My boss started from a place of, “Oh, trans people all have a mental illness,” and it’s important to challenge that, but you don’t need to have them view you as this unique unicorn, you know. You can lean into stuff like, I like to fish and do tree work and stuff. It should be normalized and safe for trans people to do these things. Oh, man, I don’t even know if that answered what you were asking me.

No, I love where you went with that. Cause expectations of the cis-cultural norm can create these little boxes for trans people to get stuck in. Like, it’s totally possible for a trans woman to be very masculine and still be a woman. Like, not all women are girly-girls. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but some trans women don’t like make-up and love wearing pants, you know. That can be hard when all the pop culture representation of the trans experience is built around wearing the so-called ‘right’ clothes.

Right! Yeah. Me and my buddy were just talking about this. I guess I have gotten to a point of what I call gender-nihilism; where they/them pronouns feel good to me and masculine nicknames feel better to me than feminine ones. That’s where I am at. And I don’t know why it’s like, for most people – and even people in the trans community – like, “Now I am a femme trans person, I have to do femme things,” but a cis woman can do whatever and they are still a cis woman, right? So why do trans women have to be a specific way?

Just do whatever feels good for you. If I were a cis woman and I did all the stuff that I do – hunting, fishing, tree work, whatever – then, I would still be a cis woman. So, when I do these things it doesn’t mean I am a trans man. So, for me, unique authenticity is very cool and these rigid gender roles are just boring.

I wanted to ask you about “Sam’s Song” because it seems to have a similar move that “All American Man” has, where it rewards people for listening multiple times. As with many songs on the album, at first brush you think you are getting one thing, but you begin to realize that something else is going on after you listen a few times. In “Sam’s Song” you might think it’s a break-up song, but you begin to see it’s about grooming with lines like “I’ve finally come of age,” where it hits you that the song is something else. Can you take us through that? You wrote that with consent to use a friend’s diary entries, right?

I wrote that song with consent from a friend to use some of their diary entries as lyrics, after an 8th grade English teacher groomed her. There’s something of an epidemic in small towns where teachers take advantage of their students. The social studies teacher there also went to jail for something similar, so there’s something going on where that gets ignored. There’s a documentary called Keep This Between Us, that I recommend everyone to watch. The laws around teachers and stuff are actually pretty wild. The teacher didn’t lose his license for this, there’s a mark on his record, but he could easily teach somewhere else.

So, with that song, I remember my best friend coming forward and reading some of her diary entries, and I thought they were so memorable and meaningful, that I asked if I could put them into a song, and she said absolutely. The lines, “I’ve finally come of age, and you’ve come to” and “You can’t give back all the things you took, and I can’t find them anywhere I look” came from Sam’s diary.

And you put them into a rocker, where I think someone else might have thought to make it a ballad.

Well, it’s an angry song. It’s a vengeful song. Like, “You ruined my childhood, and now I am going to expose you and tell your wife." And every couple of years something comes up that impacts that trauma. Like, he has daughters who are the same age now as she was then. It needed to be an angry song.

And this was one you had pretty-much fully formed when you took it to Tom. What was like working that way as opposed to building a song with him?

There were a couple of songs where he was like, “Yeah, this is good as is. Doesn’t need anything.” I don’t think we changed anything on “Sam’s Song.” I think Caleb had all of his leads figured out. I was pretty straight forward, and it got a pretty great response.

But, I don’t know if you are on TikTok or whatever, but that was one of those songs where we had gotten some free credits, so we boosted it. And I wrote something inflammatory, like: “Send this to your abuser!” Like that line: “I wanna kill you, if it kills me.” And I tell you what, the hate I got from that.

TikTok. I hate that fucking app, man. It’s such bullshit. Now, every time we post a video or whatever, people post pictures of my face with, “Send this to your abuser!” The response was pretty overwhelming with support, but there was a lot of hate too.

It’s pretty weird that we are at a place in our culture where people feel comfortable supporting abusers…

You know, it wasn’t even that. It was more so, “What a bad take! How dare you tell anyone what to do about their abuse.” And, I was like, “It’s just a suggestion.” You have my permission to send this to your abuser. If you feel empowered to expose your abuser, then you should do that. But everyone online has to be so critical of everything. I can’t care, but then they attack your character or whatever. They say, “Chat GPT lyrics” and whatever.

What a terrible thing to say about lyrics from journal entries…

They don’t know anything. I can’t let it get to me. I shouldn’t read the comments. It’s not worth the time.

I saw you open live for Bad Cop/Bad Cop in Oklahoma City–

No way! Where at?

At a little place called 89th Street.

I love playing in those little places.

What is it that is so special about small venues?

I don’t know. It’s just much better than the big venues. Nashville is the worst. We have had a tough time in places like Boston, too. Places where people are a little too cool to, you know, get into it. Those little markets are the best. The crowds are much better. There can be something a little synthetic about bigger venues.

That leads into my question: It’s a cliche to say the best view of any punk show is from the stage, but what’s the wildest thing you have seen?

When we were on tour with The Menzingers, there would be this time where they would be sweeping up, and I always took a picture of the weirdest stuff that got left behind. There were a lot of bras. There would be someone’s broken glasses and there would be, like, a single shoe, but there was always a bra on the ground. As we get more into headlining, it will be interesting to see what the crowd brings. The crazy stuff tends to happen for the headliner. I want the crowd to learn our line dance.

You can teach us on TikTok.

Ha Ha, I try. But, yeah. It’s nothing special. It’s just the Electric Slide and we do it on the video for “All American Man.”

Your on-stage antics mirror what we might see in a punk crowd. At your show with Bad Cop/Bad Cop, your tumbling act with Caleb drew the attention of Bad Cop bassist Linh Le, who went out into the crowd and took pictures. Where does that kind of stage presence come from?

It comes from a lot of places. I just feel like, if people are giving you their time and their money and coming out to see you, you should make it interesting for them and put on a show. Once it’s time to perform, I get kinda possessed and really silly, and sometimes that leads to me doing something stupid, like falling into the drum kit and hurting myself or ripping the mic out or something. But it’s just a place to feel wacky and let loose.

And you were just lucky to get a partner in Caleb who is willing to do that stuff too?

Both Caleb and [bassist] Doty are all sorts of willing to do it now, but I think, at first, there was a little stiffness. But it’s just like, nah, man. You want to put on a good performance and you want to stand out. And, also, don’t you want to have fun? Like, there have been times when we played shows, and I was too stiff out there. I have played where we had a really tough crowd, and I just can’t look at them. I gotta try to get moving and try to work myself up through movement. If I am not moving, I will get out of the performance. I want to feel good. I want to get this out of me. I have been sitting in this van all day. And I need to have a good time. And if the crowd isn’t going to give it to me, then I gotta get that from the other band members. So, we start messing around on stage.

So you are playing off each other up there?

Oh, yeah. I mean, if I look over and I see Doty has just had a big burger and he is tired up there, I can’t let that slide. It’s like, come back to me. Let’s put on a show.

I keep coming back to your show at 89th Street. I was knocked out by it. At the end of the show, you do this thing that is very punk rock, you ask if anyone out there has a place you can crash. What do you look for in a good crash?

We are broke, right? When we get a chance to stay with someone, that has sometimes been the only way we have made money on the tour. On low attendance nights, nights where we know we didn’t sell much merch, we can’t stay at a hotel for 180 bucks, you know. That’s why our network of friends we have made along the way has been so crucial. We have made friends specifically because they offered us a couch, like my buddy Zack in St Louis. I did the same thing at that show, and he was like, “You can come crash with me,” and now we are homies.

You know, someday it will be nice to not do it. And there are nights when I would rather not have to stay up talking to someone I just met, I just want to sleep in a nice comfortable bed. But we make a lot of friends that way.

I think the most ideal situation is a sleeping situation when everyone has something like a bed, a couch, or an air mattress. No one has to sleep on the floor-floor, though that is not a deal breaker. The dream scenario is somebody’s got a dog, they made coffee in the morning, and we can go straight to sleep and just wake up, have coffee, tell them thank you, and be out of their hair.

What is it about having access to a dog when you are on the road?

I have dogs and, you know, you miss them when you are on the road. Petting someone’s dog when you are on the road..I mean, you don’t get a lot of physical touch when you are on the road.

You haven’t had any horrible experiences?

Oh, …um…I mean there’s been some. There’s been times where I was like, “We are staying in hotels from now on!” I mean, nobody has ever made us feel unsafe. It’s just like, “Oh, your house is very dirty” or you have got a roommate that makes us feel uneasy. Or there’s situations where it’s like, everybody has to sleep on the floor and there’s roommates that have to get up at 6am, and they trip over you. There’s things that will put you off.

You don’t get good sleep on the road. Like, my voice will blow out. And we might start to get a little testy with each other if we don’t get enough sleep. I gotta get at least five hours. Five hours is ideal. But there’s never been a situation where it’s like, “Boys, pack up. We gotta get out of here.”

No horror movie situations?

No, it’s usually just a roommate who is engaging with their partner really loudly, and it’s, like, they gotta know we can hear, right? Just stuff that is laughably bad.

Anyone ever make you breakfast?

Oh, yeah! Lots of people. Mark that down. If you are trying to coax Rodeo Boys into staying with you: we're big fans of breakfast.

I gotta say, I am happy to hear that. I am on the other side of 40 now. So it used to be, I could hear a call to crash on a couch and be like, “That’s smart. I hope they find someone cool.” But now I hear it, and the dad in me comes out, and I gasp.

There’s never been anything bad. I do remember thinking a few times that it might be dangerous doing what we are doing. But it helps to have the boys with us. There are four of us. And the punk community has always been pretty chill.

There’s a community aspect to it. Like, it saves money and it makes sense, but some of the experiences we have had, we just couldn’t have had if we stayed in a hotel. Those connections are crucial.

Going out to build that network…well..network is a corporatized word…but…

Yeah, I mean it’s necessary. It’s what you go on the road for. You are trying to build that fanbase, so that you can make enough money to where you can go out and play music more. It’s not like everyone I see is just a dollar sign to me, it’s building a network, building a fan base. And if I can do that well enough, then that means I don’t have to do as much tree work.

You are out there making money in order to make music, not making music to make money.

Definitely. There is no making music to make money unless you are TikTok famous or something. There’s no reverse.

Let me ask you about Artificial Intelligence, since that’s the big thing in my field right now. I am a writing professor, and people outside my field seem to think you can just push a button and get a song, but I am old enough to remember people saying that about the drum machine – that it would end making music, there would be no need for a human drummer anymore…

People still like to go camping.

Right. Like, I can see it being something that people who only care about the surface level of art getting into. But there will still be those of us who want to take some time with art and really build a connection, and we are going to keep coming back to humans making music.

It’s about authenticity, and it’s there even in pop music. Like, you can tell when an artist is working on something with only one writer and one producer. There was a great interview of Chappell Roan the other day, where she only has one producer, and they were sitting down and working out how to write a song. They had this story, and they were like, “Here’s the story, how do we build a song around that”? I don’t know the process that Katy Perry uses, but it can feel very inauthentic, like, “Oh, I wrote this song to sell to so-and-so.” I think that authenticity will always persevere, and you can’t get that authenticity from an AI.

Like, we want an AI that will do all the things we don’t want to do, right? Like do the dishes. Then we can have time for more fulfilling work, like art. But AI is being used to do things we like to do. I mean, it can be a tool. I use lots of tools when I am writing. I have a thesaurus. I will use that on occasion. Maybe there is a word I like, so I try to figure out how I can make that word work in this line or whatever. I see AI being used to make music, and images, and posters, and I just think it’s gross. I don’t think it will ever replace human art.

I think all art is about connection and community. That’s why humans make art and make music to begin with. Putting it into AI is going to fall flat. Or, at least, it will for me. I am not going to yuck anyone else’s yum, but if AI art connects with people, I don’t think those people were ever going to be core Rodeo Boys fans anyway. I mean, everyone is different and it takes all kinds, but AI just isn’t for me.

Yeah, and I think that’s the point of the music you make at the level you make it, where you can connect with others and build something, and I think you are doing that. In fact, I know you are. Cause I teach writing, and I will play your songs to students who are really conservative, and they will say, “I like that. I want to hear that again.” And then we will get into the themes of it, and they will go, “Whoa, maybe I want to think about things a little more carefully. I never thought of it that way.”

Really? That’s so cool. I think that is how we get through this. We have to have face-to-face conversations with people that we don’t want to have, but we have to have them, and we have to be patient. I have had a lot of hard conversations in my life with people who maybe didn’t understand trans people, or queer people, or anarchist movements. You just have to break it down, and be like, “Okay, you agree with this, right? Well, wouldn’t you say that this is like that,” or whatever. If you are willing to put in the work, you can change people’s minds. And you can help them grow. And I think that is our responsibility.

We have to wrap up, but is there anything you want to plug?

We are about to go on tour with Catbite soon, and you can see all our tour dates on Instagram. That’s the best way to support us. We are stoked to go on the road with them. I just want to encourage everyone to come out.