Interview: Swayze talks Swayze, The Simpsons, and St. Angry

In the wake of the release of their new EP St. Angry, I had the opportunity to do a quick chat with Justin, bassist of the Canadian band Swayze. We chatted about the one big thing on everybody’s mind, and a bunch of the smaller things that make St. Angry the EP that it is.

The following interview is lightly edited.

This is Jeff from TGEFM, and I’m here chatting with Justin from Saskatchewan skatepunks Swayze. Now, let me just clear the elephant from the room: why Swayze? (laughter)

Our first handful of shows were full cover sets, we did 90’s/2000’s punk stuff like The Lawrence Arms and Lagwagon and whatnot. We needed a name for the poster and just started Googling 90’s things to get some inspiration and came up with Swayze and something to do with Neopets. We told the promoter to pick one and he went with Swayze.

Holy shit, that is awesome. I was totally expecting some sort of love for Roadhouse or something… (laughter). I’ll double-dip here, and ask we here exactly are you from, and how long have you guys playing together?

Oh there’s definitely some love for Roadhouse.

We’re from the Saskatoon, Saskatchewan area in central Canada and we started up in 2014. Goddamn that was a while ago already.

Six years flies by pretty quick, eh? So, I see you’ve got two previous releases but, I’ll be honest, I haven’t listened to them yet. So let’s focus for a moment on St. Angry. I have a lot of thoughts on it (they’re all good, so you can relax a bit), but let’s start with what it’s like putting out a new album during a pandemic. What’s that like? Was this EP already in the works before everything went to shit? How much do you miss live music?

We actually started recording St. Angry in summer 2019 but we didn’t have it ready for release til things were just starting to shut down. We were sitting on the EP for a month or two to see if things would get any better and finally had to just say “fuck it” and release it.

I miss live music so fucking much. I order pizza from the Black Cat Tavern every so often and whenever I go pick it up, I just get this weird flood of memories of shows I’ve been to and played there. COVID numbers are pretty good in our neck of the woods so we’ll see when we get to go to a show again.

I certainly hope so. I’m stuck here in New Jersey, which got hit pretty hard at the start.

Let’s talk about your new release, St. Angry. I really liked this a lot when I first heard it, and that appreciation is only growing on subsequent listens. I know I referred to Swayze as “skatepunk” above, but I think that’s just an extremely loose classification as I hear a heckuva lot of styles on this album. Would you say that’s indicative of Swayze’s sound overall, or have you tried something different here?

Glad you’re digging it!

We’re all fans of a lot of different types of music and have tried to bring elements of those into the mix, but I’d say skatepunk or melodic hardcore are a good baseline for what we try to do. I think this time around we gave ourselves enough time to craft better melodies and workshop the tunes as a whole.

It definitely does sound very editorial, which (in my opinion) is the mark of true craftsmanship. There’s very little, if anything, that seems out of place, or poorly placed. A good example of this is “Trambopoline,” which packs a lot of genres into one song. Can you talk a little more about how that one came together and, if you could, where that name comes from?

That was one of the first songs we wrote for this EP. We wanted something a bit more riff-centric but tried to keep some of the ambient bits and poppy choruses we had on the previous album. We all get bored easily so the writing process is usually a matter of trying to keep ourselves entertained within a pretty standard song structure. As far as the name goes, 4 of the 5 songs on the EP are references to The Simpsons. I still wish all five were Simpsons related.

I’m so far behind on Simpsons references… I don’t think I’ve watched a new episode since…. shit…. 1998. (laughter). If I might disgress for a second, is there a reason or theme behind the Simpsons references, or is that just how it panned out in the end?

No real reason, just trying to beat good jokes into the ground. (Laughter)

Very Simpsons-ish…

I used “Trambopoline” as an example of how Swayze seamlessly switches tracks in a single song (and also is very reminiscent of latter-day Samiam in parts of vocals) but I think the EP, as a whole, dips its toes into a bunch of styles. “Portrait…” is an incredibly fast and short hardcore punk track, and would normally seem out of place. But with you guys, everything seems to work through the five songs. I wonder, did you have any tracks that you recorded, but didn’t make the cut on this?

Every song we had ended up in the EP but there was some reworking on “Portrait” specifically. Once we figured out the sequencing we wanted to go with, we had to cut out an intro that was just too similar to parts of “Large Island Iced Tea.” We knew it stuck out so there was some workshopping to make sure it fit in the tracklist.

Well, I think it shows. I rarely use the phrase “editorial” with bands, but it just sounds like this album was put together perfectly. I’m a bit surprised that a song or two which just didn’t fit in was left aside for  the time being, but I guess that just shows you guys know what you’re doing.

COVID aside, what, if any, are Swayze’s plans for the future?

That’s awesome to hear, though us knowing what we’re doing is questionable.

Future plans I hope include playing some shows again sometime soon. It would be nice to play these songs live before they’re old news. Other than that, we’ve got two new songs in the works. If live music isn’t an option for another long while maybe we’ll look into recording a split or something short like that.

Although I sincerely hope that live music becomes an option sooner rather than later, I’ll take a split. (laughter)

Anything else you’d like to add before we wrap up?

Be excellent to each other.

Did you just watch Bill & Ted 3?

Big time. It’s more applicable than ever.

Swayze’s new EP St. Angry is out now via streaming services. You can take a listen over on Spotify, or pick up a copy as a name-your-price download over at their Bandcamp page.