Feel Good Punks

Day 170. Year of Queens. On Tuesday night someone called us “feel-good punks.” It makes me smile to be called punks. We have a cajon and fiddle and sometimes a keyboard and we write pop songs. We talk about hooks and melody and making our songs accessible. But if punk is DIY and anti-establishment then - yeah - we want you to smile and be happy and have a fun night - and that is so f*cking subversive.

I listened to Love Will Tear Us Apart and was thinking about how we can own it. When the song gets played live by Peter Hook and the Light the audience sings along for the whole song. It goes beyond the original meaning, the lyrics, to a celebration of all that is post punk, to all the rain and moody lonely damp streets and the love of understated bass and drums and synth and heartbreak. Everyone sings along like the verses is a chorus too. Like everything about that song is a chorus. I want to have a song where everything is the chorus.

Day 171. Year of Queens. We are the worst/best. We want you to like our songs. We want to write the most poppy melodic catchy songs and never be cool. We want to have weird instruments and make sounds that don’t ever fit in. We want to be ourselves even if we fail.

We wrote another whole album. We wrote one album. Then we wrote another album and that was kind of a transition to finding ourselves. Now we have a third album of material and this is an even closer reflection. Closer to the truth. It is slowly coming into focus.