Pick up some Skyline Chili, make a few friendship bracelets and grab your buds as Midwest Friends Fest is returning to the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky area for its sophomore year. Midwest Friends Fest is once again taking over the Southgate House Revival in Newport, KY.
The 2-day festival with multiple stages and amazing national and local acts like Signals Midwest, Cinema Stare, The 1984 Draft and Tooth Lures A Fang will take place from 30 & 31 May with tickets available here.
Avery Benter, Boy Bandicoot, has joined TGEFM to discuss this year’s festival for this installment of our MWFF interview series. Check it out below and we’ll see you at the bonfire in the woods!
Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview! What should our readers know about Boy Bandicoot; your history, your mission, your sound?
Of course. I’m always excited to chat about it!
So Boy Bandicoot was more or less born out of an insatiable need to be writing and creating. I’ve played in a few different bands for the last decade or so, and always was writing my own ideas on the side but never really saw an avenue to share them. I began writing music with the intention to start my own thing in 2022 just after a short tour with my friends Abby Holliday and Seth Findley (aka moony) and I was just so insanely inspired by hearing their work and playing with them that their encouragement, and some reassurance and encouragement from my friends back home convinced me to give it a shot!
In regards to a mission, I’m a very self conscious person and have a tendency to be very self-critical. But I want Boy Bandicoot to be my creativity with no hinderances and no rules holding me back or framework to keep me from trying something that may veer into new sonic territory. I try to write about serious topics and aspects of my life, while also trying to never take myself too seriously. Music is such a blast to create and produce and I hope that the folks that hear it and connect, feel the joy and passion that goes into making it.
I’m not sure how to describe my sound because I feel like it’s evolving as I go, but some of my favorite bands are The Strokes, The Voidz, Relient K, Young the Giant, Idles, Djo and a mishmash of hardcore bands from my high school years. So I guess my music must be what pops out of the end of that weird conveyer belt of influences.
You are gearing up for Midwest Friends Fest in the coming months, what does the festival circuit mean to artists like yourselves?
I have only had a couple festival experiences so far since I started Boy Bandicoot. But I absolutely love the community nature of a festival. With MWFF, I’m SO excited to see and meet a bunch of local artists that I’ve known of, enjoyed and admired for so long but our paths have never crossed! I love Cincinnati and I’m always so proud of the Cincinnati music scene so I’m stoked to be a part of this!
What does Boy Bandicoot have planned for us beyond MWFF?
I’m working on finishing up my debut full length record right now! I’ve released 4 singles from it and hope to announce and start pushing toward a release window soon! I’m very excited for this project. There’s a lot of insanity in these tracks and I’m so ready to share them with the world.
What have been some of the most memorable moments or experiences with the band so far? What’s been the most unexpected? The weirdest?
One of my favorite things I’ve gotten to do so far was a co-headlining tour I got to do with my friends in Trauna and moony in 2023 that we called “The Introducing Tour” we all just played in one another’s bands so we were just a 5 person supergroup that swapped positions from set to set. It was tough but so much fun and so rewarding!
The most unexpected… hmmmmm well, for the first year or so that Boy Bandicoot existed I was living in nashville, and whenever I would have a Cincy show, which I would automatically be so excited for, I would get sick and lose my voice almost completely on the day of show. It happened like 4 times and I just had to do my best to power through.
Regarding live sets, what are you most excited to bring to the Midwest Friends Fest audience? What do you want the attendees to say about your set when they tell their friends about you?
I’m real excited for the MWFF set! We’re playing a couple songs that we’ve never played live before, which is always so scary but so exciting! We’re gonna leave it all out there and I just hope people have as great a time as we will, and I hope they love what they hear!
We’ve all got a few, what is your biggest regret? A gig you turned down,advice you didn’t take, what one thing do you wish you handled differently as a musician?
My regret is honestly waiting so long to just start doing this. For the longest time, I couldn’t let myself believe that my art would be worth anyone’s time. With age and time I learned that it doesn’t have to be. It’s worth my time and that’s enough. If folks hear it and connect with it, that’s beautiful and such a huge bonus!
The punk, ska and indie scenes have almost always been at the forefront of inclusion and diversity within the music scenes. The flipside of course is that the gatekeeping in the scene is also very prevalent? Why do you think the genre brings in such a welcoming community and is so happy to let everyone in and also seems to shut the doors so quickly behind themselves?
I can’t speak for the scene necessarily, but I know that music fully shaped me. My friends, my environment, my self worth, So much of it was tied to music. Music is such a communal creature. Being in a room full of people, who are all there for the same purpose and united in similar tastes is unlike anything else I’ve experienced.
This festival is all about friendships and music. What do you value most in friendships amongst yourself and your stagemates?
It is so important to me to foster safety, acceptance and understanding. It can be so exhausting and alienating to feel like you have to put up a front or be disingenuous to yourself in order to belong in a community, and you shouldn’t ever have to. I want to know and be known by the people around me. I wouldn’t be doing any of this if it wasn’t for some of my closest friends giving me the encouragement and feedback I needed to be and believe in myself and my music!
Boy Bandicoot is from Cincinnati. I thought the city was only known for amazing chili, a dog-obsessed racist baseball owner and the greatest rollerblading movie of the 90s featuring Jack Black and Seth Green (Airborne), but MWFF is proving the city is home to some amazing artists. What’s going on in Cincinnati that led to so much of an
overabundance of great music In the scene lately? How does the area feed into the music you are writing, if at all?
I love my lil city. I’m Cincy’s biggest cheerleader. you can ask all the people I tried to drag back up with me from Nashville.
Cincinnati is a hidden gem and honestly, I’m fine with it being a little hidden! I spent about a year and a half in nashville, and I met a lot of wonderful people that I love and I’m always so excited to see when I’m there, but there was something in Cincinnati that I always ached for. And it took leaving to realize all of the things I appreciate about it. There’s something truly special here. The music scene, the art scene, the film industry, coffee shops, restaurants, bars, parks, all of it kicks ass! It’s hard not to be inspired in Cincinnati, where everywhere you look, talented and creative people are making beautiful things. And I appreciate that Cincinnati can feel a bit small-town ish at times! Running into people out and about at coffee shops and bars, it just makes me feel even more connected to folks and my home.
The world has been going through some shit over the last few days, weeks, hell, decade. What impact, if any, have the cultural and political landscapes of the last few years had on your music or the live scene in general?
Absolutely. During the writing process of most of my songs, I don’t really know what I’m writing about until halfway through or so. I just write what feels right, and generally that means that whatever is swimming around in the ole dome leaks subliminally into the lyrics, even If I don’t realize that’s what I’m yapping about until later. It’s incredibly difficult to look at the state of America right now and not just want to write incredibly angry protest songs, but if I set out to do that, it turns out pretty cringy (trust me I’ve tried). So instead, I write something like “Protagonist,” “Listening,” or “Delirious” and try to give the anger a little bit of levity, maybe a side of sarcasm, which is more genuine to my personality anyway, but still allows me to wrestle with those heavier topics.
What album or band or significant singles made you go “Yeah, this is what I want to do” Not just an influence but who or what was the catalyst? On the flipside to that one… Who are some non-MWFF bands on your radar that TGEFM readers may not know about, but you think they should?
Albums: Angles by The Strokes, 22 A Million and i,i by Bon Iver, mmhmm and FANSD by Relient K, Virtue by The Voidz, DECIDE by Djo, The Act by The Devil Wears Prada
Non MWFF Bands: Coastal Club, Abby Holliday, moony, Distance Sprinter, The Doozers, Trauna, Almost A.M., Chester, Maggie Miles, I could go on and on
I don’t know if you’ve heard about this newcomer by the name of Taylor Swift. Her growing fanbase trades friendship bracelets. If you made a bracelet for MWFF, what word or phrase word you put on it?
“Let it rip” for sure
Post show jam session in a large, empty field. What song are you singing around the bonfire? (Pardon my playful biases, but everything I know about the Midwest comes from shitty movies and songs by the Kinsella Bros. so I assume everyone playing here has spent some time at bonfire parties in the fields off some lonely county road)?
If I’m at a bonfire, I’m chowing down on s’mores and petting my pups, but if someone absolutely forced me to rip a tune, whether ironically or unironically (it’s hard to tell at this point) it’s probably gonna be “My Own Worst Enemy” by Lit
Midwest Friends Fest is a smorgasbord of fantastic acts. Which bands are you most excited to see?
It is very hard to pin down, because I’m just stoked for all of it, but I’m SO stoked for Mall Witch, Manor Gates and Bear the Moon who always rule.
Thanks again!
Bad Dad (occasionally called Ed) has been on the periphery of the punk and punk-adjacent scene for over twenty years. While many contributors to this site have musical experience and talent, Ed’s musical claim to fame comes from his time in arguably the most punk rock Blockbuster Video district in NJ where he worked alongside members of Blanks 77, Best Hit TV and Brian Fallon. He is more than just an awful father to his 2 daughters, he is also a dreadful husband, a subpar writer, a terrible dresser and has a severe deficiency in all things talent… but hey, at least he’s self-aware, amirite?
Check out the pathetic attempts at photography on his insta at https://www.instagram.com/bad_dad_photography/
