Roll of the Dice: 9 questions with Bridge The Gap

Bridge The Gap have put out one of the best records of 2023 (Secret Kombinations on People of Punk Rock Records) and in doing so they have bridged the gap, merging the 90’s skate-punk Epi-Fat sound into today’s scene. I was super stoked when the opportunity presented itself so I could lace up my Vans and speak with vocalist/guitarist Chad Jensen about the record, working with Bill Stevenson and what’s still to come.

Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Congrats on the release of Secret Kombinations. Personally, I fucking love it!  What can you tell us about Bridge The Gap, your sound and what you stand for?

First of all, thank you. We really appreciate the kind words and coverage TGEFM has given BTG, especially as a new band on the scene. This is a good question. I don’t think we’ve honestly ever really thought about what we stand for because we’re not organized as an overtly political band. We’re four friends of 25-plus years who love playing music together. I guess what we stand for can really be summed up by our name Bridge The Gap, which has a positive, maybe even motivational connotation. The idea of overcoming the obstacle; we definitely stand for that. And speaking our minds, and exorcising our demons through our music. But if we have a mission statement, it would be something approximating ‘balance.’ As dads with lots of responsibilities, BTG, and the time we put into the band, has to be fun and it has to be balanced with the demands of our families and our primary income as individuals, respectively. We all have careers outside of music that support our families, etc. As for our sound, I would describe it as ’90s-influenced melodic hardcore. We write and play the type of music we want to hear. 

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?

Speaking for myself, Bad Religion is the greatest and best band in the world. Sorry, Tenacious D. You’re on the list, though, JB and KG. The catalyst for wanting to write songs and play music, for me, was the first time I heard Pennywise‘s Unknown Road, which was around late ’93. The last line you hear on that record — at the end of “Clear Your Head” — has a news-anchor kind of voice-over that says, “One of the earliest entries: some dreams do come true.” The album opens with an inspirational idea of “what passages, what fantasies lie just beyond the unknown road?” After hearing that and listening through 13 amazingly uplifting, though, at times, dark, songs, the album being punctuated with a message about how some dreams do come true really sparked something in me. It was a metaphysical experience, and I asked my Mom for a guitar for my birthday almost immediately. She obliged because my Mom was the best. I started a band within a couple of months from that PW experience, and the rest is history. Bad Religion might be my favorite band from a meta-perspective, but Unknown Road remains my No. 1 desert island record because of what it awakened in me when I was 13-14 years old. The Greg Graffin/Brett Gurewitz duo would go on to inspire me greatly by showing how intellectual punk rock could be from a songwriting perspective. And it was Jim Cherry‘s songs (Strung Out/Pulley/Zero Down) that most spoke to my soul, and made me realize the artistry that is possible in a raw, unpretentious genre of music like punk rock. I wish we would have gotten more Zero Down music before he passed away in 2002. But Jim wrote some of the best songs of what I call the “legacy” era of skatepunk, including “Bring Out Your Dead,” “Ultimate Devotion,” “Mind of My Own,” and “Down This Road.” He deserves more credit than he gets in the grand scheme of things. RIP, Jim. 

You guys have all been at this for quite a bit now but you took a bit of a break for a while.  What happened that brought Bridge The Gap back together to start creating new music again?

I kept writing songs. Even a decade-plus after our old band broke up. Then, as a dude in his 40s, I finally found myself in a position where I could afford to buy some home recording gear. So I studied what to buy and how to make basic, rudimentary demos at home, and I started recording my songs. Jeff, our lead guitar player, counted before we went to the Blasting Room, and I had demo’d something like 70-plus songs. As soon as I started, I began sending the files to the dudes from my old band for feedback. They were stoked. One thing led to another, and soon Jeff and I got together for a couple of weekends. Jeff has always been my primary musical collaborator. We fine-tuned some songs, wrote some new ones, and hatched a plan. It went something like this: ‘Bro, we’re finally in a position where we’re not broke as hell and we really love these songs, so wouldn’t it be cool to actually go record them at a legit studio, with a producer that the 19-year-old version of ourselves would have killed to work with?” We both agreed, and I said, “Bill Stevenson and the Blasting Room.” So Jeff approached Bill, and he was down. Next thing we knew, we were in Ft. Collins, CO, and making what became “Secret Kombinations.” We enlisted our bro and former drummer Ryan, and our bass player Shon, who managed and recorded our band back in the day. And here we are. 

Secret Kombinations was recorded at The Blasting Room with Bill Stevenson. I would think the presence of a musician of his caliber and a producer with his resume would put my personal anxiety through the roof. Was there any added pressure or need to impress working with such a goddamned legend?  What advice did he bring into the room to help you bring out your best in the studio?

Pressure? Check. Anxiety? Check. That goes for all of us. But for me, the rubber met the road in the vocal booth with Bill when it came to anxiety and pressure. First of all, we’re stoked on our album and we’re thrilled people are really digging it, but there’s no overstating the impact the Blasting Room itself had on that whole enchilada. The amount of muscle that worked on our record is staggering. From Colton Krohn and Andrew Berlin (the latter of whom is a Grammy-nominated engineer/producer), to Miles Stevenson, to Jonathan Luginbill — just the professional personnel who engineered, edited, and helped produce the record is staggering. Then throw in Bill as the grand overseer and the legendary-in-his-own right Jason Livermore, who mixed and mastered the album, and it’s literally an all-timer All-Star team who helped us make Secret Kombinations. However, the reason we wanted to record it at the Blasting Room, aside from its storied punk rock history, was Bill. He was always someone whose music I absolutely loved and admired, and whose production resume featured a who’s who of literally 90% of my favorite records ever. I’ve had the fortune, and in some cases, misfortune, of meeting many of my heroes in life. Much of the time, they let you down, and that ideal you had in your head is proved to be wildly inaccurate. Not the case with Bill. Bill was exactly what I hoped he’d be and more. The amount of wisdom and knowledge we gleaned from Bill is far too much to even scratch the surface of mentioning here. But I will tell you that the single biggest piece of advice that I took to heart was how important it is to be prepared vocally for the studio, in more ways than one. And in that vein, how to approach that process, from literally writing the vocal melodies, writing the harmonies before ever arriving at the studio, lyrical phrasing, and, frankly, how to sing for real for a musical Giant like Bill. We are very grateful to Bill for his super-human patience, his kindness, and willingness to share his hard-earned wisdom and stunning natural musical talent with us. I’ll forever be indebted to him. 

What’s the state of the scene from your point of view?  We are living in a “just deal with COVID” world and everything about this timeline is some level of completely fucked.  What impact, if any, does the current cultural and political landscape have on the band, lyrically or just in general?

I’m not sure we’re the most qualified band to speak on the state of the scene. All I can tell you is that it feels like we’re living in the most hyper-polarized time in America — since I’ve been alive, anyway. My observation of the pandemic was that it made people do a lot of strange stuff and behave bizarrely. Fear is a powerful, pervasive thing, and relative to the pandemic, it came out in the wash in a lot of shocking ways. We comment on some of that stuff in our music, but as the primary songwriter in our band, I really try not to be too overt in any political subject I write on. I want the listener to interpret the song in their own way, without being clubbed over the head with a message, but I’m not perfect. A mentor taught me a maxim when it comes to art: ‘Give me an idea open to interpretation, or give me nothing.’ I can tell you that while BTG isn’t the most political band, we have our views and obviously, sometimes it comes out in the music. Regardless of the subject matter, when we write a song, we’re just trying to get a thought or a feeling off our chest.  And hopefully make the listener feel something; not think something, per se. Whatever the current state of affairs is, it’s always going to affect art and the expression thereof. That’s even more true when it comes to punk rock music. The people who preceded us in the ’90s thought their era was the most screwed ever, and so did the people in the ’80s, and so on. I do take some comfort in that, with how dark, divisive, and myopic it can be nowadays. I mean, listen to NOFX‘s War on Errorism. Fat Mike wrote as if the world was coming apart at the seams and we’d all be smithereens in no time flat, and here we are 20 years later. Again, it’s a hopeful thought in the face of a gathering darkness.

You’ve all been at this all for a while, 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??

I have plenty of regrets in life. I don’t regret anything in my musical experience, though. On this subject, I probably can’t speak for the band, but I don’t regret a thing because every fork in the road, every obstacle — whether it’s been overcome or if it impeded — led me to where I am now. And that’s in a really cool place making the best music I ever have with my best bros and new friends that I wouldn’t have met otherwise. I’m very fortunate, and so is BTG. I appreciate your question, and I hope you don’t view this answer as a cop-out. But on the subject of music, I have zero regrets. 

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 band on your radar that TGEFM readers may not know about, but you think they should know about?

I’ve always been a punk rock-only nerd. My musical tastes are, to some, shockingly narrow. However, I must admit that until we started things up again with BTG, I had become unaware of how many great contemporary skatepunk bands there are now. I don’t love all of them, but I will #DefendSkatepunk to the bitter end. Being active in the scene again has definitely turned us on to some killer bands. Here’s a few that are newer to us that we find to be absolutely killer, and maybe a little bit slept-on: Thiev, Plasma Canvas, Colorsfade, Give You Nothing, Double Negative, Sam Hauge, Kingfisher, Have No Heroes, Record Thieves, and Twenty2. Friends With The Enemy made a record called Divide & Conquer last year that was arguably the album of the year. Counterpunch warrants no introduction from yours truly, but they’re a newer band to me, and I absolutely love them, especially their album Bruises. 

Now that the world has its hands on the record, what’s next for Bridge the Gap?

We’re heading back to the Blasting Room soon for Album No. 2, so we’re gearing up for that and I’m going apeshit in the demo phase. The time soon comes where we’ll have to whittle down the list to the final number that we’ll submit to Bill. But this next batch of songs is killer and we’re already champing at the bit to share them with the world and all our new fans. I must say, as a band that’s only existed on social media for seven months, we’ve been stunned by the support and following BTG has built up, especially on Facebook and Instagram. Thank you for your follow. We promise to strive to honor your support. We’ll be playing more shows soon, and hopefully a little U.S. tour. That’s hard for our band because of our families but we’re gonna figure it out. We’re looking for booking representation at the moment. Hit us up! 

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

Maybe this: connect with us on Instagram and Facebook, and if you dig BTG, make sure you’re following us on Spotify because we have a little surprise coming up soon.

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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.