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.
Zach Starkie, frontman of Tooth Lures A Fang 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 Tooth Lures A Fang; your history, your mission, your sound?
We are a lightly hinged power pop band from Cincinnati! We strive to write satisfying, interesting, and meaningful music and to perform energetically and honestly in a way that honors the music. We sound like Smashing Pumpkins, some early Weezer and Pixies, with some Rozwell Kid and the Beths!
You are gearing up for Midwest Friends Fest in the coming months, what does the festival circuit mean to artists like yourselves?
We love playing festival shows because of the community at the shows. The bands are always a great hang, and the fans that come are so passionate about music! Fans at festivals are so open to new music and are usually the type of person who listens to all the bands beforehand so they know how to schedule their day!
What does Tooth Lures A Fang have planned for us beyond MWFF?
We have an upcoming release later this year. It’s a mix of new and reimagined old songs. We’re excited about releasing singles and music videos leading up to the album dropping. We’re also doing two weekend tours with our friends in Sungaze!
What have been some of the most memorable moments or experiences with the band so far? What’s been the most unexpected? The weirdest?
I think some of the most memorable experiences are the ones where something unexpected happens but we figure out a way to still make a show great. We played a Sunday night in a small city where we were told there was a good PA system, and when we got there none of the equipment was set up or even complete! Nic figured out a solution where we shared gear with other bands and used a bass amp for vocals. It was one of the best nights of tour and everyone ended up having a great time. When we shot the cover and promo shots for our first album, we went to a putt putt golf course and ordered the biggest soft serve ice cream cones they’d sell us. We sat in the corner of an empty swimming pool and ate them but they mostly melted all down our hands and faces. The workers would occasionally come over and see what we were up to and just look confused. We made a mess but cleaned it all up.
The other things I remember most are just the large number of small inside jokes that we end up compiling together and referencing later. I don’t think they’re funny to anyone but us, and that’s ok!
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 to bring a great high energy performance to the stage. We hope they love how we’ve worked to write intricate music that is tight live and on the album.
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?
We have recently moved to an ampless setup and about a year before that we started using in-ear monitors. Both of these things have made our live sound so much more consistent! We also don’t have to lug amps around to gigs, up and down stairs, or load them into a van.
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 think the gatekeeping thing is related to discovery. People want to find music they connect with, and it’s so personal and special, it sometimes feels like there’s only one right way to do it! I think there’s also the fear that if a band blows up, their sound will change and then the band you love is kind of gone. There’s also kind of a tendency in general to spar or argue in conversation, just as like a way to keep words flowing, and that often comes off as overly combative.
I think the inclusivity part is related to the creativity of making music. Creative people feel like and are treated like outsiders, so finding a community that fosters that is important and special.
This festival is all about friendships and music. What do you value most in friendships amongst yourself and your stagemates?
Nic and I have played music together for more than 10 years, and we have different musical instincts, but we always agree on servicing the music that we make together. I think we’re good at solving problems together. Everyone in the band is down to clown and has a great sense of humor, so when we’re hanging out before a show or on the road, we’re going to have a good time.
Tooth Lures A Fang 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?
There are so many bands in Cincinnati, and several disparate scenes with more bands that are great but I don’t even know about! We generally play with the weird kind of rock bands, but we get booked with anyone with singers and electric guitars. Even within that scene, there are so many bands that play weird shows together just because they like each other rather than having anything in common sonically.
Last year, you were part of the inaugural Midwest Friends Fest. What made you want to come back and perform with MWFF again? How has it felt being able to watch this thing grow from the inside?
It was truly the most well organized festival that we had been a part of. The bands were incredible, the organization and communication was great. There was a great crowd with a ton of eager fans, and it’s at one of our favorite venues, the Southgate House Revival!
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?
For Zach, it was Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. There were so many styles and such a range of music. It was also the late 20th century modern rock radio station called WOXY 97x. I listened to so much radio, and they played everything! There was a huge variety of music and sound, I wanted to somehow capture some of that on my own.
The Dreaded Laramie isn’t playing MWFF this year, but they are absolutely a band that everyone should check out and listen to. Also the Heartthrobs from Toledo, A Very Special Episode and The Planes from Brooklyn.
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?
I think it would say just “TLAF.” We’d want to do several color variations though. If we went really deep, maybe “IOWTDS” from the song Fake Control or “STTMATWS” from Real Love.
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)?
An acoustic version of “I’m not OK (I Promise)” by My Chemical Romance! Everyone sings at the top of their lungs!
Midwest Friends Fest is a smorgasbord of fantastic acts. Which bands are you most excited to see?
We can’t wait to see Mike Adams at His Honest Weight! We played our first show ever with them in May 2014 and we get to share the bill again which is so exciting. Manor Gates is incredible as well as Signals Midwest. Locally we love National Barks, Sleepy Drums, and The Board of Directors.
Was there anything I missed that you’d like to share or dive deeper into with our readers?
We love having fun on stage and we’re so excited for the engaged and interactive crowd at MWFF 2025. I think it’s so much more fun to be physically into the music you’re experiencing live (if that’s the vibe) and bands that are doing that love an audience that gets into it! It’s easier to give that energy out when you’re getting it back! We invented the “frolic pit” at last year’s MWFF and we hope to set it off again this year!
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/