Tom May (The Menzingers) is So Fucking Proud of Rodeo Boys

Tom May is a vocalist and guitarist for the Philly punk band The Menzingers; Tiff Hannay fronts the Lansing, MI, punk band Rodeo Boys. Tom produced Rodeo Boys’ latest record, Junior, which just came out this spring on Don Giovanni. To celebrate, the two got together to catch up about it. 
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Tom May: I was talking to Greg [Barnett], who’s in the band, and Greg said he went to a barber in Detroit the other day who was trying to make himself into a local icon, and instead of doing small talk, he just asks everybody the same questions. But he changes the questions up every month. So I thought maybe we start with one of those — just a straight up Q&A.

Tiff Hannay: I love it.

Tom: OK. “If you could anthropomorphize any animal, which one would it be?” Greg said dolphin, which I thought was pretty good. He said, “Because we need to own the sea, or just get a little bit of representation out there.”

Tiff: We need to make sure that we’ve got some eyes and ears out there. I feel like dolphins, though, of all of the animals… aren’t they as smart as people?

Tom: Definitely smart. There’s all that trippy, psychedelic research that they did with them.

Tiff: I’d like to give some human characteristics to a dumber animal, like a possum.

Tom: Possum would be pretty good. I feel like playing the types of shows that you and I have played over all these years, we’ve run into the human form of possum many times. For some reason, my mind went to squirrels, because I’m on a squirrel kick. I really like squirrels these days.

Tiff: They’re so aggressive. 

Tom: You’re right, they’re aggressive. Something about them though, they’re cute. The ones in South Philly are very tough looking… Do you know what I read, on my squirrel tip? One out of every six squirrels, or some shit like that, doesn’t bury nuts. It just follows other squirrels around from a distance and then steals theirs.

Tiff: Woah. It’s a mooch!

Tom: Yeah, it’s like the capitalist squirrel. The bastard.

Tiff: They’re capitalizing on the labor of others. Well, there you go — the squirrels have human characteristics.

Tom: [Laughs.] It’s solved. Alright, let’s get to the next one: “Pick a human from history to interact with aliens.” Any human, as our ambassador.

Tiff: Well, I vote you.

Tom: Oh, thank you!

Tiff: Because you’re gonna give me the tea. You’re gonna tell me what’s up with the aliens.

Tom: Totally. I wouldn’t be selfish, I promise. I wouldn’t sell out the rest of humanity or anything like that.

Tiff: Yeah, I trust you to have a solid interaction with them, and then to bring some information back to me. And I feel like if you think it’s going to be too scary, you just won’t tell me, and that’s fine.

Tom: That’s true. I would do that. That’s, I guess, where you get into moral quandary area — maybe that’s why we aren’t told everything about it already right now…

Tiff: What about you? Who are you sending to go talk to them?

Tom: I don’t really have a good answer. You know what Greg said? It was pretty good — Robin Williams.

Tiff: I mean, he was kind of an alien.

Tom: That’s true. 

Tiff:. Didn’t he play Mork?

Tom: Yeah, he did.

Tiff: No, but I vote you. I think that’s probably the best move for humanity, to send you up there to liaison.

Tom: That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in a long time. [Laughs.] So maybe we should talk about music stuff. I heard something — and correct me if I’m wrong — about your songwriting process. Do you play video games in between writing songs to keep your mind moving?

Tiff: I’ve never. No—

Tom: [Laughs.] Goddamnit. 

Tiff: In the attic, I have basically the teenage boy’s bedroom that I’ve always wanted, and that’s where I write all my songs. And up there, I have a Super Nintendo, and I’ll play a lot. Doty [Rodeo Boys’ bassist] will come over and we’ll play, and then we’ll play songs in between, do some writing and stuff. But I feel like if I were to do it in between, I would just get so distracted. Like, if I’m writing, even if I just look at my phone for a second to look up a word or something, I’m just fucking scrolling.

Tom: I learned from Brad Cook, who produced our last record — he has all these cool little tricks that he does, and one of them is, if you have this super active brain, he puts on another screen above where the the Pro Tools and shit is that is just playing something without sound on in the background the entire time, so that you can kind of do micro breaks from your deep focusing. It keeps everybody in the room engaged and joking about the thing. So at home, I have an old computer monitor, and I put it up and just start putting on nature bullshit from YouTube on the side. And it’s made me better at writing songs — or, at least, made me more efficient at writing.

Tiff: Actually, I have done that. I have a VHS player up there too, and I have a couple of old hunting VHS tapes that I’ve gotten rom the thrift store, and I’ll put those on while I’m writing. And that’s helpful. But I need to home in right now. Writing feels like witchcraft to me. I’m sure you’ve experienced it where it’s like, I didn’t write that song. The devil did. You know what I mean?

Tom: Sure.

Tiff: Like, It just came out of me and it’s my favorite thing I’ve written. But when I actually sit down, it’s really hard to harness specific techniques for writing. And I would like to develop more practices around writing, because I was talking to Laura Jane Grace and she was giving me the advice to just write all of my lyrics first. She was like, “If you sit down and you’re just jamming around, you’re not going to come up with new chord progressions. They’ve all been done. But if you start writing lyrics…” Do you have any techniques that you use for writing?

Tom: Oh, totally. The idea of what you said, like a “written by the devil” kind of situation — I totally have experienced that, whether it’s the Jungian shadow or some shit. I’ve definitely written things that I don’t remember writing. You could call it subconscious, or you can call it a download or whatever. And then I’ve had songs that were hyper conscious, that were very much thought about for months.

But that’s really interesting that Laura Jane Grace said that. I think that is such a good idea. It’s not something that I would live or die by, but some of our best songs were definitely written lyrics first. There’s a couple that we had started as poems, there’s one that I had started as a letter to someone. Recently, my songwriting thing has been getting out of guitar a bit, so I’ve started to write with synths or arpeggios or even drum beats.

Tiff: I think that makes a huge difference. Because… I do think that there is an ether that you can tap into. And if you are well-practiced and you’re doing it often, you can tap into it a little bit more easily. Because there will be times where I’ll go months and months without having a single song idea, or even be thinking about writing, and then something will come to me and I’ll write an entire song in one day. And then I’ll feel really creative. And maybe I’ll even start a couple other song ideas that same day. So, I’m romantic when it comes to that stuff. And then I think, like you said, there are things that you just think about and you work on and you focus on. I would say we did that with some of the songs on the record. And I think that you get better at doing those types of things when you’re practicing all of it more often. It’s kind of like a meditation practice or something. 

But the thing that you said about using other instruments — I find that that is so helpful because when I pick up a guitar, I don’t know what it is — I just play an E major chord. Just every single time I pick up a guitar, it’s the same. I don’t know if it’s just weird muscle memory of, And here we go, the same riff.

Tom: That’s so funny you say that — that was one of the reasons why I was changing, I play the same things. Usually a cowboy G. But I was thinking just yesterday while listening to one of the bands we’re on tour with soundcheck, that 15 years of touring and soundchecking and hanging out with guitar players, it’s like Groundhog Day. Because every time the guitar player picks up the guitar, they’ll play the same riff to to begin the soundcheck.

Tiff: Caleb [Shook, Rodeo Boys’ guitarist] plays “Crazy Train” every single time. I’ll try and mix it up a little bit. But I feel like there’s nothing worse than doing a sound check and then you mess up a riff or something. You’re like, Ah, stupid! And it’s just the sound guy. He doesn’t care.

Tom: He doesn’t know what you did yesterday. But, you know, I’m not dogging doing the same thing every time, because it also ends up becoming a ritual, and then it becomes a superstition eventually. Not that I’m a superstitious person, but there’s a comfort in, This is what I did yesterday.

I’m really glad you said one thing about songwriting, and that’s practice. I am very fortunate in that I’ve really finally realized what it takes when it comes to practice, whether it’s working with other people, like working with you guys to make a record or making our own Menzingers records, or learning how to use certain software instruments. All these times where I’ve gotten home from tour and been like, “I’m not picking up my guitar for however long” — you realize that the more you sharpen it and the more you practice it, the better you become at it.

Tiff: The easier it comes to you to come up with different ideas. I agree with that in a big way. But I also feel like there’s times where if I’m going after it every single day, after a while I’m just like, There’s nothing here. You know what I mean? I need a break from it to make it feel fresh and new again. And then I always feel the most inspired when I get back from tour. Or when we got back from making that record, that was so inspiring. 

I actually have a question for you. 

Tom: Let’s get it.

Tiff: So, Tom produced our record, Junior, that just came out. I have my own favorite songs, and then songs that I’m like, Man, I wish we had given this one more attention because I think that it it could have been better or different if we had the time. And so I want to know what you think about that.

Tom: I’m not driving down that road. First of all, the songs came out incredible the way that they were. And what we had to do in the time was even better and more than I thought we were gonna do. And working with John [Hoffman] was incredible. John was a master, and everybody in the band fucking crushed it.

Tiff: Dude, and how cool was that space?

Tom: It’s so cool. The Lodge in Dayton, Kentucky, if anybody is wondering. It’s just a very, very cool space with incredible vibes. But, yeah, looking at this track list — there’s nothing that I would change. Because there will always be something. It’s not necessarily making the perfect version of these songs. Breaking a record is like you’re painting a painting, but you only have a certain canvas, you only have a certain amount of paints, and you only have a certain brush. So you can go back and be like, “Damn, I wish I went to fucking A.C. Moore and got the fucking brush,” but you’re stuck. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s a great thing. So we had the amount of time that we had and you guys worked so hard. No one fucked off in any way. No one fucked up and it came out great. 

Tiff: This comes up because I was listening to “Venus Fly Trap,” and I was like, Man, there’s something that doesn’t translate about it on the record that translates live. I cannot put my finger on it, but when we play it live, it feels really deep and meaningful and powerful. And then when I listen to it on the record, I’m like, Ah, skip it. I don’t want it. I can’t figure out what it is. So I was like, I wonder if I ask Tom that if he would agree, or if he would just be like, “Nah, songs are cool, man.”

Tom: Nah, songs are cool, man. [Laughs.] I will say, I have not heard you play them live. We definitely have a bunch of songs where I’m like, This feels so good live and it didn’t translate when we went and did it in the studio.

Tiff: I always thought people were just being pretentious when they would say that. But then recently, going on tour with more bands more often and listening to their albums once all the songs have been ingrained in my head after being on tour with them, I’m like, Oh, these are so much better live. The difficult task is trying to get the big live sound on record.

Tom: Yeah. And I think a lot of it is framed by what types of bands we are and where we play, because learning about electronic musicians, the live is… not an afterthought, but the live show is a translation of what the real thing was, and that was the recording. Whereas for us, we start out live in the room, and then you try to capture that in the recording. And then you end up doing a who’s-the-man-in-the-mirror situation by recreating the live thing from before the recording back to live again. 

Tiff: And the tempos change.

Tom: Always, tempos change.

I want to ask you about the Trans Am. So, you have this incredible car — I’m not a car guy, but in Michigan, I think you kind of have to be. It’s so beautiful. And the story behind it is so unreal, and you’ve been working on it for so long. It’s in the music video [for “All-American Man”].

Tiff: Yeah, I did some donuts.

Tom: You also took me ripping around Lansing, and it was sick. I don’t think I ever did a burnout before. 

Tiff: Oh, dude, I’m glad that I could be your first. So, it was my dad’s car. He bought it I believe when I was a baby. He was always working on it, but it was something that he’d work on slowly. And then he got sick and passed away when I was 15, and it just kind of sat there for a long time in my mom’s garage. But he had bought so many different parts for it, just would order parts nonstop, because he was trying to rebuild it to take it on the Woodward Dream Cruise that happens in Detroit. And then after a while, I think my mom needed space in the garage, so then it sat outside for a long time and the body got kind of rusted out and the paint faded. Eventually, she asked me to save it. So I took it home and I searched for a long time to find somebody who would even want to take that project on — because a lot of the body shop guys are doing insurance jobs on modern vehicles, where you just buy the new part and put it together. I asked a lot of people, and there were people that would be like, “It’s gonna be 50 grand.” And I’m like, “Well, alright, fuck that.” 

But the guy I found, Luke, came over and checked it out, and he was so into the story. He had to replace a ton of metal on it because the floorboards were rusted out. So he did all the body work and then repainted everything, and placed the bird and did all the meticulous details. And then he ended up doing a bunch of other stuff to it — he helped me replace the brakes and the radiator and the gas tank. He just did all this stuff that he didn’t have to do, but he did for free for me. 

Tom: Unreal.

Tiff: Really hooked me up. Dialed Auto Works. So, the car’s up and running. It’s still going to be a project that takes [a lot of work] — it’s very expensive now to replace certain parts. So there’s things that I’m working on still. The interior is not done, but I did all the upholstery and the seats myself and painted all of the vinyl interior pieces that are in it. It’s just such a badass car, and it’s very special to me because it’s my dad’s car.

 

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Tom: Exactly.

Tiff: I drove it out for Mother’s Day to meet up with my mom and my sisters, and they were all crying about it. And when I saw Lexi, my cousin who does all of the music videos that we do, she was like, “Let’s use the Trans Am in part of it.” And I was like, “Let’s do some donuts.” And then when I saw it in the music video, I started laughing so hard because it’s just so funny to me.

Tom: It’s so sick, the way it’s lit. It’s so fucking cool.

Tiff: Dude, every time that I get in there and do a burnout or do donuts or whatever, I just ear-to-ear smile. It makes me so happy. Simple pleasures.

Tom: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think that’s a great way to wrap it up.

Tiff: Hell yeah. Tom, you inspire me. I appreciate you. That time that we had together at your house and then at The Lodge is very special to me.

Tom: Oh, my god, thank you so much. I love you so deeply. And I miss the Boys. And I’m so fucking proud of what you guys did.