MidWest Friends Fest: The One With Middle Out

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. 

Michigan’s Middle Out (Punkerton Records) 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!

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Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview! What should our readers know about Middle Out; your history, your mission, your sound?

It all started out as a COVID project by Matt – Writing songs, demoing them, and sending them to DJ. They had worked together on projects years ago, and still wanted to do something together. After DJ also sent some of his own demos, they began going back and forth and eventually decided to put a band together. Dan was added in after an initial drummer didn’t work out, and here we are today! Our sound can be described in a lot of ways and it depends on who you are talking to – It can be really subjective and we’ve gotten a smattering of different comparisons over the years – The Copyrights, Four Year Strong, even Dear Landlord have been cited by people. But overall, the shared vocal duties and lyrical content pull inspiration from fest-adjacent bands like The Lawrence Arms, a lot of the heavy and catchy guitar leads can be attributed to The Flatliners and the anthemic choruses can be compared to Hot Water Music. Us coming together with our tastes and proclivities just make a good mix.

You are gearing up for Midwest Friends Fest in the coming months, what does the festival circuit mean to artists like yourselves?

Festivals rock. It’s like having 10 good shows concentrated into one or two days. The number of people, the number of bands, everyone always having a good time, everyone wants to be there, there’s even so much to do and experience outside of the bands playing. We played a couple Detroit local fests last year and a couple that we toured around, namely a Punk Rock Bowling after-party in Las Vegas, and FForest Fest in Illinois. They were the bookends of a tour we did, and they definitely made it all worth it. There’s just the feeling and attitude at festivals that isn’t always present at stand alone shows, ya know? Anyone who attends Riot Fest, or Pouzza, or The Fest can attest to this. There’s a deeper sense of comradery at festivals than at stand alone shows.

What does Middle Out have planned for us beyond MWFF?

We are nearly done rehearsing and selecting the new songs to be included on the next record(s). We’re torn between doing a couple EPs, a split or two, or just saving it all for another LP? Matt and DJ are constantly writing and demoing new songs to bring to rehearsals, so the content is there, it’s just us having to whittle down what we want, what works, what doesn’t – It’s a good problem to have. Outside of that, we have numerous Detroit shows coming up, as well as some travel for festivals, and we’re still getting everything post-August booked up. We promised ourselves that this year and beyond we would be very selective with the shows we agree to, and we feel the ones we have on the horizon are exceeding our expectations. Can’t wait to fill out the rest of the year!

What have been some of the most memorable moments or experiences with the band so far? What’s been the most unexpected? The weirdest?

2024 was a banner year – ‘Memorable’ doesn’t begin to describe it, but for all of us, that year will be hard to top. We shot all these great videos, which so many people were involved in, released our LP to incredible acclaim, our release show was jam packed, we got to play some truly amazing shows and festivals, toured with great bands, made lifelong friends. All in all, the most memorable experience with the band has to be playing an absolutely packed Punk Rock Bowling After Party show in Las Vegas. Getting to fly out and experience that whole thing, then jumping into an RV to tour right after – Great feelings that will be hard to top.
As far as unexpected, we are continually amazed that our 2024 LP did so well and continues to do so well. We managed to get hooked up with a great label (Punkerton Records) to put it out and it has just been getting a level of attention we didn’t expect. We made it onto numerous ‘best of’ lists for 2024, people all over the world are listening, we get shout outs from Europe, Australia, South America … Who would’ve thought that this COVID project would turn into something so impressive?
Look, if you’re in a band, you should have a really high standard for ‘weird’. Musicians are weird people. Punk rockers are weird people. FANS of punk rock are weird people. Nothing shocks us anymore haha – But, as any band can tell you, there’s always pointlessly stupid inside jokes between you. That being said, “Snake Girls are weird”.

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?

We want our energy to be felt. We LOVE playing live – Our favorite part of being in a band (of which there are many parts) are those 30 minutes we get to spend on stage.  Festivals are great because it’s a mix of bands and fans watching and we want them to feel the energy we’re putting in, and perhaps just have that rub off on them, too. Hopefully seeing us is enough to want to snag our record, or just come up to us to say hey after the set. We’d want them to say “I want to see what these guys will be doing next”.

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?

Yeesh … That’s a hard one. Can’t really pin down exactly one thing? I mean, we’ve been very adamant about coming together and making decisions as a team so we don’t end up having regrets. So many things are out of your hands, like we didn’t get selected for this show or festival or whatever, and that’s a bummer, but we can’t say those are ‘regrets’. You just gotta keep pressing on, look forward to things you plan and try your best.

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?

Punk rock, Ska, Hardcore, Metal, Indie … at the end of the day, all of us? We’re all residents on the island of misfit toys. I think we have seen or experienced some hardships and don’t want those to befall others, so we open up the community. Now, not to say there are some elitists who will be gatekeepers, but they’re a minority and don’t often get far in their venture, at least in our experience. No tolerance for intolerance, as they say. 

This festival is all about friendships and music. What do you value most in friendships amongst yourself and the bands you share stages with?

Honesty, integrity, kindness, reliability, inclusion, never taking yourself too seriously. 
This is really not asking a lot of anyone, at all.

Middle Out is from Detroit. It’s such an interesting, diverse and generally under-appreciated place that has bred so much amazing music (Motown, MC5, The Stooges, Eminem and Suicide Machines for starters).  Why do you think the area churns out so many brilliant musicians and songwriters? How does the area feed into the music you are writing, if at all?

Detroit, and Michigan as a whole, has been through A LOT, especially over the past … I dunno, 60 years? We were once the peak of American economic life, then lived through the worst of its downfalls. We’re still feeling that fallout all over, but if nothing else, we are resilient. When there are hardships bestowed on an entire community, art gets made. Struggle creates revolutionary ideas that often manifest into music. So many musicians and their words were a response to the hardest of times. Being a Detroiter, you have, at minimum, one older family member who worked at a now defunct auto plant at some point and saw their entire livelihood stripped away. This anger gets turned into art, and when this happens en masse, it’s no wonder so many resonate with the message.

Tell me a little bit about the self-titled you dropped last year?  What was going on at the time that helped kickstart the process?

We love our debut LP – It was the culmination of writing songs for several years (even during the recording of our debut EP), throwing loose ideas around and letting them form, really a full effort from the whole band. We tracked for a week at Bricktop Studios with Andy Nelson in Sept 2023. He’s mostly a hardcore/metal guy, which definitely played in our favor – Pulled out the best performances from us. The record would not be what it is without him.
All in all, we had just been figuring out which songs we wanted to put on an LP for a long time, made the plans and just pulled the trigger. Nothing in particular for us to ‘kickstart’ it, except our own drive and desire.

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 onyour radar that TGEFM readers may not know about, but you think they should?

Matt will tell you that Hot Water Music is his favorite band, but when they added Chris Cresswell and put out Light It Up and also Feel The Void, you could tell he wanted to get on that wavelength. It really shows in his newest songs. 
The Punkerton Records roster continues to be amazing. We’ve made great friends and been able to travel with so many bands on the label, namely Bad Year, Knives, Steelboy, The Boy Detective, just to name a few. Check out the label, it gets better and better every day.

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?

We call our fans ‘Outies’, which is the Middle-Out equivalent to ‘Swifties’ – So, pop that on a bracelet

Post show jam session in a large, empty field. What song are youperforming/covering 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)?

The bonfire in the middle of a field or deep in the woods is not a cliche, they are real and they do happen – They are a right of passage for any and all midwest teenagers to have their first taste of shitty beer from a liquor store keg and pass out in a ditch. Good times! 
Unfortunately, these days, you are more likely to have a battalion Ram 1500s blasting Kid Rock than you are to have an intimate acoustic session. But, you’d likely find us trying to play some Alkaline Trio covers before the faux rednecks try to beat us up and demand a Jelly Roll song.

Midwest Friends Fest is a smorgasbord of fantastic acts. Which bands are you most excited to see?

We just played with Caitlyn Edwards in Chicago, stoked to see her again!

Was there anything I missed that you’d like to share or dive deeper into with our readers?

You asked some very very deep questions, if anyone else has anything to ask us, feel free, but you’ve likely covered it!