Roll of the Dice: 9 questions with Young Hasselhoffs

After making us wait eleven years for last year’s Life Got In The Way, Omaha’s beach punks Young Hasselhoffs are making a quick return with the new record, Dear Departed. The band has opened pre-orders for the upcoming Mom’s Basement Records release. To celebrate the new record, TGEFM was able to speak with bassist Jason to discuss the new album, the shift in music industry norms and how the trio have transitioned from a full-time band to three individuals with responsibilities and demands beyond the music.

Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Congrats on the upcoming release of Dear Departed. What can you tell us about the new record and its songwriting or recording process compared to your previous albums?

Well, compared to our first three records, this is quite a departure. We were a pretty conventionally functional band 20 years ago. We had band practice, played local shows, went on tours, etc.. This particular incarnation of the band, however, has had to operate quite differently, just due to life circumstances. Phil and I both live in Nebraska, and Matt lives in Colorado. We all have careers and families and so in order to do the band thing we had to get creative. Life Got in the Way was recorded with very little rehearsal together. Matt would write demos, Phil and I would learn our parts, and then we just sort of put everything together in the studio…quite often not really fully having a grasp of what the song was meant to be. Which is a really exciting way to write a record, but also kind of a scary and intimidating one, particularly the first time we did it. But if it was going to happen at all, it was going to have to happen like that. It was sort of an outgrowth of, and a response to, the whole Covid era. We had to adapt like everybody else. People just got really good at doing things separately that they used to do together.
For Dear Departed it was pretty much the same process, but with demos that were nowhere near as fleshed out as they were on the last record. Some of the demos only had bass and drums after the first verse. There were no vocals, just a little synth line that hinted at the vocal melodies to come. So there’s a lot more blank space to operate within. Which was pretty exciting and liberating. It would just be each of us, first Phil on drums, then me on bass, and our producer, Andrew Berlin in the studio, making choices that made sense to us in the moment or got us excited. So we got to have a little bit more of an influence over the direction and the tone of some of the songs simply because they were so loosely sketched to begin with.

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?

Again, I feel like a lot of these questions are going to have two-part answers. Since our band has two distinctly different chapters of its existence. Initially we were inspired by all of the 90s era Lookout stuff. I don’t think our direct influences are too terribly difficult to identify. Green Day, The Ramones, MxPx, The Queers, Mr. T Experience, etc.. The current iteration of our band however, I think it’s pretty difficult to say what our direct influences are primarily because the three of us, musically, have really evolved in different directions. Matt, by his own admission, doesn’t listen to anything recorded in the last four decades. Phil and I have some contemporary overlap, but he leans more pop, and I was always more influenced by heavier music. Early hardcore, noise core, metal core, thrash, screamo, you name it I was into it, but also a lot of melodic, punk, indie rock, post rock and folk music. I guess to finally get around to answering the question you asked… for me, as it pertains to the band, I would say that I am for my part, most inspired by bands like The Menzingers and The Weakerthans. They write great songs that are at once personal and universal. They’re just really good storytellers and write the kind of songs that you can feel.

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 the Young Hasselhoffs back together to start creating new music again with 2022’s “Life Got In
The Way”?

I kind of touched on this earlier, but it was coming out of Covid, basically a text message thread between the four of us. Phil, Matt, Nick (who is sort of always been an unofficial nonmusical member of the band… the “glue guy”), and myself. I’m not entirely sure exactly how it came about, but very quickly things were happening. Phil booked us two weeks at the Blasting Room, after getting us to tentatively agree to the project writing a new record. Then we were basically committed because we had skin in the game. It turned out Matt had been writing songs the whole time. He had a half dozen demos that were pretty much fully formed and ready to go. To get a little more philosophical about it, I guess you could say that after Covid had taken so many things away from everyone, and really shrank the size of everyone’s lives to a pretty intolerable point, we were sort coming out the other side of that and I was in the mood to say yes to pretty much anything. So the timing was just right.

The scene, and music industry in general, has changed dramatically over the last 5-10 years or so.  What has been the most difficult to adapt to and where do you see things heading over the coming years within the
industry and scene?

Well-being of middle age, and not really participating in the scene the way we once did, I don’t feel particularly well qualified to speak to how that has changed. As for the industry, however, everything is completely different now. When we were about 20 years ago we were still recording on ADATs. Still selling CDs. The Internet barely existed and streaming hadn’t even been thought of yet. The way that streaming has changed how bands release music is not something I’m particularly excited about. I still like listening to record albums. Whether I’m streaming them or listening to them on physical media. I don’t like this slow drip of singles, but it’s the way it works now. Everyone moves on from everything so quickly. No one really has to invest in anything. Music and art in general is so disposable. I happen to be an artist in my professional life as well. I’ve been in tattooing for over 20 years. Changes there have been profound as well. It’s almost as if you’re not writing music for the song or making a tattoo for the tattoo. It’s more like you’re producing raw material that you will then turn into “Content.” Content has become the coin of the realm. The really insidious thing about it is that it changes your relationship with your own art if you’re not mindful of it. The temptation is to find new ways to mine your art for “content” continuously, or I think the fear is that the world will forget about you and move on more or less immediately. Once you start doing that, everything is upside down. It’s truly exhausting, and it cheapens the entire enterprise. Boy, do I sound middle-aged or what? Get off my lawn!

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.  Beyond the lyrics, what impact, if any, does the current cultural and political landscape have on the band?

Again, I can’t really speak to the scene here in Omaha or beyond. But I do think that is next to impossible for the state of the world and certain political realities from bleeding into the art we are making, despite never really having attempted to be an overtly political punk band. I think most of the songs we are writing these days have to deal with more universal and existential topics. But I do think there is an undercurrent of frustration, and occasionally hopelessness that bleeds through. What I do love about the lyrics that Matt writes is that he always lets a little bit of light in. He’s more of an optimist than he realizes or would ever acknowledge. And I appreciate that. Being a father now, I no longer have the luxury of fatalism. I have to remain at least a little hopeful that the world will get its shit together at some point. 

You’ve been part of the scene for a bit, 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 don’t know that I have any regrets really because I feel like life has worked out pretty well for us as things happened. The fact that we are able to be a band again at this later stage in our lives it’s sort of a testament to that. We are privileged to have stable careers and supportive families that enable us to pursue this. I do however sometimes wonder what it would’ve been like if we had truly committed ourselves to the band when we were younger. Listening to our early stuff again, I don’t feel like we were really all that far behind from some of the bands that we were sort of mimicking at the time. I think if we had been a bit more dedicated, possibly a little harder working, and may be a little bit luckier, we could’ve given it a go. But again, I hate to wish away the life I have. So I’m good with how things turned out.

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?

I think I’m past the point in my life where I’m the first person to find out about something that everyone else needs to look into. But the latest Mutoid Man record is fucking awesome. But I’m not sure how relevant that is to the interests of your readers. Just this morning, I discovered a band called Jerks! Their latest record This is Fun? is a real banger. Gives me some real No Use For a Name vibes. I also haven’t been able to stop listening to Tightwire‘s Head Full of Snakes. And our labelmates, Borderlines new record Keep Pretending is excellent as well. Go to https://momsbasementrecords.bigcartel.com to get a copy! That’s a shameless plug obviously, but seriously, we are super stoked to be releasing our stuff in partnership with John and Tricia at Mom’s Basement. They work really hard, and care an awful lot about the music they put out and we couldn’t have found a better home for the stuff we are doing now. 

Once the world gets its hands on the record, what’s next for Young Hasselhoffs?

Well, we have some pretty exciting stuff in the works. We are thinking about reissuing our back-catalog on vinyl with updated artwork and such. Still working out the details there. We also have the first half of the next record already tracked with plans to go back next year to finalize the second half. So there is more music to come. 

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

I guess I would just like to share with everyone who might be thinking of doing some creative work that might seem intimidating, or beyond their abilities, or not likely to find an audience, or whatever is holding them back, and just encourage them to go for it. At the risk of sounding like Rick Rubin or something, I do think that it’s really important for people to make things, simply for the sake of making things. It’s good for the spirit, it creates really positive distractions that you can use to hide from life in a healthy and productive way. This might sound like a bumper sticker, but just make art for art’s sake if you are able to. It doesn’t matter if you’re the only one that likes it. In fact, it might actually be better that way. I’ve been making art for other people my entire life, and at a certain point it just becomes a job.

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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.