Roll of the Dice is a short interview format with a variable amount of questions. A Pair of dice is rolled and the total, between 2 and 12, is the amount of questions we can ask. All questions are given to the interviewee(s) at once, and no follow-ups are allowed. The interview may be lightly edited for content and clarity.
Following 2016’s beloved Welcome Home Son, Alabama’s Camping In Alaska have returned after a six-year break to release Lost and Found a 3-song ep made up of acoustic demos recorded from 2017-2018. TGEFM was able to speak with the band about what they’ve been up to and what’s to come in a brief 3 question Roll of The Dice interview.
Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Congrats on the release of Lost and Found! Thanks to an unfortunately fickle roll of dice we only have three questions so I don’t want to waste any of them. I’m also going to do my best to maximize the questions by making them multi-part queries. I’m going to jump in with the most obvious, where have you been, what have you all been up to for the last few years, what brought Camping in Alaska back into our lives with this new release and of course, what’s next?
Well, ya know we’ve all gotten older and started to do the things you kinda gotta do when you get past your mid-twenties. That’s taken up a lot of time, and although we all still played music in some way, we didn’t gauge a ton of interest in Camping, especially around here in Bama. Of course that’s not the case anymore and we’re super grateful for that. We all went through a hard few years, and camping got pushed to the side while we all hit bottom and tried to get back up. Then this past summer we met our friends Tom and Alex from Spigot Pictures (check out their Instagram), and they hit us up to interview us and hang out and stay at me and Dani’s place for a few days. They’re awesome dudes and it got us all together in one place talking and hanging out again. We all saw we were in better places now, and when they asked why we don’t play music anymore we really didn’t have a good answer!! So that kinda kick-started it. Not long after that, Tommy and Devin from Sleepy Clown and Dive In, respectively, hit us up and everything kicked back up!! For some reason there’s a ton of new interest in the band and with all of our new and long time friends here supporting us, we’re really going at it harder than ever this time!! So that’s why we released Lost and Found. It’s a way to show everyone we’re still writing and working on stuff even through all the bullshit, and these songs we have for Eggbeater Jesus (tentative album name for a collection of roughly 13 songs, old and new, that we’ve been working on since 2017) mean a lot to us and we’re really proud of them. While we collect the funding to do Eggbeater Jesus right, Lost and Found is our way of showing that we’re still working and that there’s more to come, too ;).
I think its safe to say that the world has seen some shit since your last musical output. What changes on the political, cultural and business side of things have given you the most hope and the most consternation while you considered and executed the return?
Life hasn’t been easy on any of us in the past few years. We’re all pretty broke, but we get by and work full time jobs. All of us worked all the way through the pandemic because we had to. We also hadn’t had to pay taxes on our Bandcamp profits and because I believe that the law used to be that if you made less than 22000 annually you didn’t have to report it. That’s changed, and now you have to report as little as 600 bucks, and that has hurt us a little bit lol. It’s an insult to tax small artists while billionaires can avoid taxes all together. I mean living in Alabama is fucked you know?? I love the south in a lot of ways; it’s my home! But sometimes it’s so frustrating and alienating that I can’t connect or get through to a lot of my friends and family. The willful and aggressive ignorance is really depressing, and it’s only gotten worse in the past few years. At the same time it’s not all bad, the kids are all right, we’re all alive and all right, and there’s a great music scene all over the place that fostered our return this time and continues to foster other better bands!
One of our obligatory questions in these interviews also tends to be the one I have found most important on a personal level. Who are some bands on your radar that TGEFM readers may not know about, but you think they should know about?
Okay, so I’m taking this to mean recent bands, so everyone knows Alex G, but his music has meant a lot to me and Dani for the past few years. Dani is really into a band called Knifeplay, they’re cool. Our friends in Oolong are cool, we just played a kick ass sold out show with them and some other great bands (Michael Cera Palin, Elephant Jake, Bummer Hill, Stand And Wave), in ATL on Dec 27th. Your Arms Are My Cocoon have some cool stuff, very different sounding, which is dope because we need more experimentation. Melaina Kol is cool. Our friends in Evelyna, Glimpse, Silver Fern, Obed Edom, Heel Turn, XY Spaces, Vonfandre, etc (sorry if I forgot anyone lol I love you all) also make incredible music. But honestly, looking through our music, we’re complete boomers lol. We mostly just listen to Jawbreaker, Sunny Day Real Estate, Knapsack, Portishead, Cocteau Twins, Smashing Pumpkins, The Weakerthans, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Pavement, Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Akron Family, Why?, Guided By Voices, Modest Mouse, Built To Spill, Indian Summer, Shudder To Think, JAWBOX, Lync, The Pixies
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/
