Where are you currently based?
Patrick: I’m up in Vancouver right now and Mike is down near San Diego.
Mike: We haven’t been able to play and had various shows cancelled and that’s been a real bummer. But, we found our new label Pet Shop Records during this time and we have been very happy with them. We just released our first single “Eyeliner” through them along with a music video we made using, of course, eyeliner (MAC brand if it must be known, but we are happy to be won over by other brands if they would prefer us using their eyeliner). All in all I think we have been pretty fortunate during the covid experience, we haven’t had any friends or family fall ill although I swear I had it in January when we were recording, and we have been able to work tons on new material, which is always a blessing when you are given time for that.
Patrick: I had begun emailing back and forth with Mike in 2016, and after being pen-pals for a while we decided to meet up. We had a lot of similar music tastes and were enjoying the music each other was putting out at the time, so I flew him up here in 2018 and we spent a month writing and listening to lots of the Smiths and Depeche Mode.
Patrick: I was listening to a lot of electronic music and pop on our last EP, but for this song and a few I wrote around the same time I was really into some of the glam music from the 80s and a lot of 90s grunge that I grew up on. Weezer and The Offspring were big for me, and some new bands like Paerish and my friend Marshall’s band Teenage Wrist.
Patrick: Lyrically, it’s about a time where I was at rock bottom in life, and at one point literally sleeping at people’s houses just so I didn’t have to sleep in my car.
Patrick: We recorded some tracks back in January, luckily before the pandemic happened, up here in Vancouver at Park Sound Studio with our pal Dan Ponich. It was mixed by Josh Tyrell and produced by ourselves with some help from Skip Curtis who runs the label we’re on.
Patrick: It was really cool, since Mike and I are best friends and speak the same language musically we breeze through tracking. On our last EP, Mike’s drummer from the Bravery, Anthony Burulcich, played drums and Marshall Gallagher played guitar. This time, we decided to take it as a two-piece, and I played drums, guitar, synths etc which I hadn’t done for almost 5 years before this. But it was a really cool production idea, because my drumming was a lot more raw and unrehearsed and I think complemented the songs really nicely.
Mike: Alfred Aholo Apaka (the voice of Hawaii) soothing tunes to help escape the hectic world.
Mike: Surf, doodle and meditate in isolated places
Mike: Favorite food is definitely Phó with a Twizzler desert. The Library is always a cool hang because you don’t have to think of anything to say.
