Roll of the Dice: 9 questions with The Subjunctives

Seattle’s pop-punks The Subjunctives are preparing for the 15 September release of Lets Try This Again (pre-order). Featuring members of Sicko, Four Lights and Desolate Coast, the PNW super-group were kind enough to join TGEFM for a Roll of the Dice to chat about the new album, competing with their own prior work and what’s next for the trio.

Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Congrats on the upcoming record, “Let’s Try This Again”  What can you tell us about these new tracks and how it compares to what we’ve heard from you in the past?

Jeff: this one was more of a group written record, whereas the last one there were Ean songs and Jeff songs.  This record still has that, but some songs started off as Ean songs then became Jeff singing songs, it’s a more collaborative effort this time.
Wendell: Oh man that’s a hard one for me, because I wasn’t in the band! There are some through lines there, but I think that the songs reflect the societal climate a little more, they directly or indirectly reflect a lot of the things that were going on in 2020-2022, the pandemic, relationship dynamics shifting as peoples’ true selves came through via facebook, etc.  Stylistically the drumming is going to be different. What Matt did was really awesome, but I think the drumming now will be a little bit more simple maybe, we have different stylistic backgrounds and that comes through a bit.
Ean: the new songs are a bit more polished, and there was an increased focus on writing relatable lyrics.  We really can’t do another “at the kraken” but hopefully songs like “whats up fuckers” “smart punks” and “we aren’t friends anymore” are universally appealing enough that they will stick with a few folks.  The other thing that comes to mind is that there are a lot of 90s pop punk world references… references to Larry Livermore, Dr Frank, Milo Aukerman, and especially Lance Hahn.  We talk about things like MRR and the Epicenter Zone, and ideas like Smart Punk.  For me, these themes were central to my development in this milieu, and talking about them is very natural.  For other, I guess this may come across like a time capsule  (I hope) or a history lesson  (I hope not).

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?

Jeff: It was Green Day, Dookie.  When I learned to play guitar, I learned playing along to Dookie.  Mike Dirnt’s bass too.  I kind of keyed into that, and thought “oh that’s sweet”.
Ean: Very Very Powerful Motor by The Fastbacks.  VVPM blew my mind, altered my notion of what music could be, and gave me permission to play the kind of music that was in my heart, but I had no idea anyone else in the world would ever accept. But there it was – reaching out to me, melting the turntable in my 1990 college apartment. My Gabba Gabba Hey moment. 
Wendell: I always liked rock and roll, the stuff that was accessible to me in the small town where I grew up.  I dug some more mainstream stuff, Nirvana, Weezer, Steve Miller, etc.  Then I went to boy scout camp, and a friend’s cousin had sent him Punk-O-Rama 1 on a cassette, we listened to it on a boom box and my shit was changed.  It had Bad Religion, Nofx, Offspring, Pennywise, RKL, Gashuffer, Wayne Kramer, SNFU and they kicked ass.

You’re preparing to head out on a short run tour with Bad Year, what can live audiences expect from your shows? What’s the state of the live scene from your perspective, specifically as we try to navigate the new post-COVID, hyper-divided world?

Jeff: We haven’t played any shows outside of our little bubble, I can’t really say what it will be like out there, but I’m expecting it to be fun.   It will be exciting to get into some venues and expose people to it, not just via streaming.
Ean: We are fast, tight, and well practiced.  We are old, but we are not fucking around up there.  We take being good and trying hard seriously.  Kurt Bloch once put it this way: “being professional, without being a professional”.  We’re not jumping around alot, as we are all playing and singing, but to be honest I am old enough and out of shape enough that jumping would get me into trouble.  So we are energetic, but stationary!  AHAHAHA.  The live scene is to some extent what we have made it.  We set up shows, support local pop punk bands, run a yearly festival and a label, it’s very DIY and we’ve built up a nice little bubble around ourselves to hear and be heard in.  It’s nice.
Wendell: High energy as always, some jovial attitudes, nobody taking themselves too seriously, and hopefully some crisp clean excellent punk rock.  (state of the live scene) …that’s a hard one to say.  It’s fluctuating, especially in Seattle through the pandemic we lost some of our most fiercely independent live venues.  It’s tougher, people are hungry for it, and it’s returning to basement shows, but we don’t do that anymore.  I do feel optimistic about the future, I think that those venues will pop up again, we’re kind of in a dead zone right now.

My first step outside of radio punk like green Day and The Offspring was in the late 90’s when someone made me a mixtape with Bigwig’s Unmerry Melodies on one side and Chef Boy R U Dumb on the other, so Sicko had a major influence on me personally, but with Desolate Coast and Four Lights each of you have been part of such influential acts that mean so much to so many of us.  Does the high bar you’ve set for yourselves in the past help, hinder or affect your creativity today and to what extent?

Ean: The high bar helps in that I know what writing a good song and playing in a good band look like.  The other guys in Sicko were super talented and took the labor super seriously, so I really had to work to keep up with them.  It paid off though!  That ethic is still with me, and has helped me stay focused in The Subjunctives, partly out of wanting to be good and partly out of fear that some Sicko fan could come see the Sub-j’s and think “wow this guy used to be good, what happened???”  I also think that Sicko was a good place to start out from, I know that work and heart are necessary ingredients to a good band.  I do compare what we do now to what we did then, and while it’s hard to imagine people hearing this and going “oh that’s better” or even “just as good” as a band that meant so much to a certain set of people, I do take some satisfaction when I listen to a new song on vinyl and can say “yeah, that would fit onto a Sicko album” be that stylistically or qualitatively.
Jeff: When it comes to my songs, or music, or playing in the band, I want it to sound good.  So, I’m always wanting to be better than the last time.  I think with the Four Lights records, each one is better than the last, and we keep building.  And it’s the same with this.  Subjunctives are a bit of a different outlet for me, because I have more involvement in the songwriting process.  From what I notice, as far as Ean setting the bar, with Josh and Denny playing in The Drolls, there is a friendly competition between us and The Drolls.  Ean had one request for the cover of “Believe,” it just needs to be faster than the original recording by Sicko (we achieved this by a factor of 2 bpm).  So I definitely think there is some kind of bar on that.
Wendell: I think it helps, if anything it keeps getting higher.  I would hate to think that I’ve stalled in my development as a musician.  If it did, I wouldn’t do it anymore.  It helps me to feel more comfortable, having that high bar to step into new situations, but I always want to set the bar higher.

The music world has also changed a lot over the last few years. What are some of the biggest industry changes you’ve come across in your time within the scene?

Ean – Some changes…

• The death of the paper zine and the college radio station
• The return of vinyl
• Streaming gets your stuff everywhere instantly, but it has some (well covered elsewhere) drawbacks
• Inclusivity is a focus now, and a lot of the shitty past behavior of men in rock music is no longer tolerated, which really cuts down on the bad behavior.  A wider set of people feel welcome at shows.  Also, I never see skinheads at the shows anymore.  Nice!
• Low cost high production-value recordings… its very inexpensive to get a great sounding, super polished recording these days.  Of course that’s not all good.  Sometimes that lets people endlessly fix things just because they can, whereas in the past there wasn’t the tech to do it and folks at our level either had to just be that good or else accept some flaws as part of the artform.
• Facebook is becoming less and less useful for promoting shows, records, etc.  It sucks that I took time to figure out that lousy platform and now it doesn’t work for us!
• Jeff and his pals in 4L were the kids when I got back in 10 years ago.  Now they’re the grown ups!  That makes me a grandpa.  Or a zombie.  Or a vampire.  eeesh.

Jeff – I don’t want to say “less people” but it’s true!  It’s cool to see us suddenly becoming the older band in the scene. There are new bands coming on, and it’s interesting to see them coming up and cutting teeth.
Wendell – I think it’s been really incredible the amount of accessibility to DIY recording equipment, and releasing albums, for example on bandcamp.  I guess the caveat to that is that there is so much out there that it’s kind of hard to distill down or discover things, so finding the right podcast or radio program has been instrumental to that.

We’ve all got a few, but 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?

Ean – I really regret buying into the whole DIY Indie Punk Never Sell Out MRR bullshit line.  A lot of that was really just one guy’s politics, but it permeated the punk scene and created an elitist anti-success culture.  I wish I had gotten a chance to be on one of the majors that showed interest in Sicko, tour with the biggest bands, play big festivals, etc.  Maybe Empty could have made some money from us.  I know it would have ended up all the same: with me back in a normal middle class life going to grad school, working in tech, being a dad, paying a mortgage, driving a minivan, etc.  But it would have been cool to have reached a much bigger audience, and it would have made later projects like the Subjunctives a lot easier to ramp up.  But I drank the Kool Aid just like everyone else except for Josh, who was too smart to buy into that BS.  Oh well, in another life…
Jeff – I REGRET NOTHING!!! 
Wendell – My biggest thing is that I’ve always been in bands, but I feel like I was half-assing it forever.  I was super lazy when it came to merch or booking.  I’ve only been in bands that got gigs because someone saw us and put us on a bill.  I feel like that’s changed in the last few years, and I wish that I had pursued it harder before when I had more free time.

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?

Funny you should ask: 
Ean other bands: Sicko, Date Night with Brian, Tales From the Birdbath
Jeff’s other band: Four Lights
Wendell’s other band: The Desolate Coast
The Disorderlies, Rat Paws, The Riffbrokers, Mopsey, Foxhole Norman, Head Honcho, Dusty Cubby, Living With A Bear, BUGS, Hutchie, Midnight Movie, Alfredo Ghosts, Kids On Fire, Zeke, Rat Queen, Mangy, Magnitudes, The Stuntmen, The Cripples, Big Time, Mable’s Marbles, The Unemployables, 48 Thrills, Ol Doris, Skates!, The Drolls, Good Touch, Skelator, Loud Sleepers, Jeff and His Army of No One, FCON, Cheap Cassettes, Cosgrove, Passiflora, Bad Year, Jet///Lag, Some Rules, Three Fingers, Crasher, Trash Sound Conglomerate, The Replicators, Night Court (BC), Clean Lines, College Radio, Tim McBride and the Divide, Goodbye Viking, Dreadful Children, Who Is She?  Hilltop Rats, The Tranzmitors, The Stand Gt, The Smugglers,  The Fallouts, HEAD, Low Culture, Thrash Armstrong, and The Fastbacks. You can get records by many of these bands, including other Subjunctives releases, from Top Drawer Records at www.tdrecs.com.

Beyond the upcoming record and tour dates, what’s next for the members of The Subjunctives?

Ean: I am putting on Seattle Pop Punk Festival #5 this January.  We already have Dirt Bike Annie and The Copyrights confirmed, so it’s going to be RAD.  There are a lot of other killer local bands interested as well, and I’ll be announcing names over the next few months.  And then, back to woodshedding for a new LP…
Jeff: Maybe fly out and do some other shows in other parts of the country.   
Wendell: I’m looking forward to getting back to writing new tunes.  We’ve been working on this and holding onto this for a while, and I’m looking forward to taking a break from this material and writing new tunes.

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

Check out our self-run record label: Top Drawer Records at www.tdrecs.com …you can pick up vinyl records by the Subjunctives, Sicko, The Drolls, Tales from the Birdbath, and many other Sicko related projects.  Plus some great local PNW pop punk compilations and some very silly t-shirts.

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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.