King Tuff, aka neo-psychedelic singer-songwriter Kyle Thomas, is a modern-day renaissance man. When he’s not fronting the stoner-rock band Witch, occasionally playing with Ty Segall, or focused on his solo career — recently releasing his sixth album MOO, a full-circle return to the lo-fi aesthetic of his early home recordings, on his own record label, MUP — he’s usually at his bunker in Vermont, drawing, painting, and pickling.

This master of the arts also an incredible webmaster, overseeing his animated-GIF-adorned online hub, kingtuffworld.net, which could easily be mistaken for the Space Jam website or a Wayback Machine redirect to a discarded GeoCities page. World Wide Web-surfers probably feel like they’ve stumbled onto the site via some Ask Jeeves portal, and they can practically hear the screech of a 28.8k modem or see toasters flying in the distance as they journey down Tuff’s information superhighway. But along the way, those lookie-loos will clean a lot more information than most artist’s modern websites offer —  not just Tuff’s photography, artwork, and mostly self-directed music videos, but his likes and, more comically, dislikes, listed in the Papa Smurf-themed section called “Grandpa’s Complaint Corner.”

Grandpa Tuff may have plenty to complain about — “This world could be a lot nicer,” he tells LPTV, sitting at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records while signing copies of MOO — but he’s actually an exceedingly cheerful dude, living his best life. “You only live once, as they say. So, you’ve got to experience all you can,” he shrugs. In the delightful video above and edited text Q&A below, he discusses his return to both his rock roots and his home turf of Vermont, mixtapes, ice cream, tacos, pickles, cheese, and something that has nothing to do with food, “avocado baby voice.”

Come hang Tuff in Kyle’s corner.

LPTV: Your new, sixth album, MOO, seems like a full-circle affair. You were perhaps not totally comfortable with your last couple of records, and you wanted to return to your roots. You even recorded it on your old equipment from back in the day.

KING TUFF: Yes. I do like the last previous albums I’ve made, but I was kind of experimenting with my sound a little bit. And when it came time to playing those records live, it was hard to pull off because they had strings and pianos and stuff on them. When I’d be playing live, I just kind of wanted to play the rock songs, my earlier songs. So, I was like, “I’m just going to make an album that’s fun to play live.” And it’s also just the music that comes most natural to me — just fun, rock ‘n’ roll kind of music. So, I just decided to lean into that. And yeah, I went back to my Tascam 388, which is the tape machine I recorded on a lot of my early stuff on.

Your debut album from 2008 was recorded on that! Did it still work?

It didn’t work for about a decade. That’s why I hadn’t been using it. But I finally got it fixed, and instantly I just felt like myself again when I started working on it.

Is there something about that old equipment that the newer stuff just can’t replicate?

Yeah. I mean, it’s a pain in the ass to keep it working, but it just has a sound to it. Whereas recording on the computer, you have to work a little harder to make it sound cool, because it’s so clean and high-def that you have to put effects and plugins on it to make it sound cooler. With the tape machine, you put something in and it comes back sounding cooler.

What made you want to experiment sonically on your two previous albums, The Other and Smalltown Stardust?

Just boredom, really. I mean, you do something for a while and then you want to try something else. I have a lot of different musical influences, and I think a lot of artists want to see how far they can take their sound. I just write songs, and they come out the way they want to come out. And certain songs ask for certain things.

Were those albums well-received by your fans, or were fans like, “Hey, Tuffy, get back to your Tascam”?

Some people definitely were like that! But a lot of people are like, “Those are my favorite albums.” You can’t please everyone, so you just have to make something that is exciting to you. I just try and make the songs that I want to hear.

Are there any other ways in which MOO is a full-circle moment, in terms of the lyrics, what you’re writing about?

Definitely. It’s full-circle in also moving back to Vermont. Just the spirit of it, like falling back in love with a lot of the stuff I listened to as a teenager and in my early twenties, like ‘70s punk stuff. My early influences were like a lot of Modern Lovers and Television and Ramones, the classic stuff, and I hadn’t really listened to that stuff for a while. And then I got back into it and I started dating someone and we were making each other mixtapes, and it’s so fun. I was like, “I forgot how fun this is.”

What was on the mixtapes, if it’s not too personal to ask?

That’s a good question. I don’t remember. I’ve made her quite a few at this point!

That’s very sweet.

But yeah, I think I go into making albums like that, too — I want it to be like a mixtape where every song is good and is its own thing, and you can listen to it over and over again. That’s what I like about cassettes, too. It’s like a record, where it has sides. I think that’s the one thing that streaming doesn’t have. I’m into sides.

When you’re doing the sequencing for an album — or even before that, when you’re in the middle of recording it, even if it’s not on vinyl or cassette yet — do you mentally have in your head a Side A and a Side B? Do you think about when one side will end, and at what point the listener would flip over the tape or LP?

I mean, usually I like to treat each side as an A-side! So, you could either put on either side and it would sound like the beginning of a record, or sound exciting. The first song on Side B should sound sort of like a beginning again.

I like that K-Tel compilation vibe. Because, did you ever have experiences growing up where you bought an album because you liked one or two singles, but then you got the album and were like, “Oh my God, those were the only two good songs”?

Yeah, it’s weird when a band just has one song that’s so good. And then you’re like, “What happened to the rest? What happened here?” I want every song to be like candy that I want to eat over and over again.

Did you write a lot of songs for this record, or was it more like the songs you wrote are the ones that ended up on MOO?

Pretty much [the latter]. There’s maybe a couple extra ones, but yeah, it all came pretty quickly.

More quickly than usual?

Way quicker! I think that was partially due to working on the tape machine. I work a lot faster on that, because you just have to make decisions and you can’t labor over them. And yeah, I had a clear vision.

What was the vision?

Fun rock ‘n’ roll. Good songs. Keep it simple.

I dig it! You mentioned returning to Vermont [last year], where you grew up. I know you used to live in L.A., for over a decade. What made you go back?

I’d been thinking about going back ever since the pandemic, really. I really started to miss nature and the seasons, the extreme seasons. And also, the person I’m dating is also from Vermont. So, the fires last year kind of put us over the edge, and it just felt like a good time to go back.

How did Vermont inform this album?

Definitely a lot of the lyrical content is … I was kind of manifesting the move back, I think. There’s quite a few songs like “East of Ordinary,” “Backroads,” “Landline.” … I actually do need [a landline phone] now.

You live somewhere remote?

Yeah. And my [cell] phone doesn’t actually work most of the time.

It must be nice though, after being in a big city for so long.

Yeah. I basically traded a social life for trees. And I’m fine with that. I had gotten to the point in L.A. where I wasn’t leaving my house too much anyway, so I was like, “I might as well be surrounded by trees, if I’m in my house all the time.”

We’re talking a lot about going back to the past — your old equipment, your old sound, your old home state, et cetera. So, I have to ask you about your website! I love the whole ‘90s aesthetic, and I assume that was a choice. Because it’s a new website, after all.

I love that aesthetic too. I think you can treat a website like an art project, kind of. So, I have a bunch of random stuff on there, like…

“Grandpa’s Complaint Corner”! I want to ask about that, but go on.

And yeah, some of my photos and just artwork. I was really inspired by Wendy Carlos’s website, where she has a bunch of just random stuff.

Your site is so fun, especially “Grandpa’s Complaint Corner.” You are Grandpa, and you rant about very specific pet peeves.. One is “cursive voice,” which you also call “avocado baby voice,” which is basically people sort of singing like they’re from Iceland or just like doing weird mush-mouthed vowel stuff. Why does this bother you?

It’s a style of singing that has seemingly just infiltrated every corner of music, and I don’t know… it’s disgusting to me. I cannot listen to it. Maybe I’m just old and I don’t get it, but it makes me want to die. … I just hope it ends soon.

OK, another one of your music-specific complaints is the idea of being perfect in the studio, which ties into what we were discussing about the making of MOO. Why was that on your list of gripes?

I think especially with rock music, it should not be perfect. And I think this also goes hand-in-hand with recording on computers: You can make things “perfect,” and that just makes them boring. It’s similar with using AutoTune or something; it kind of makes everyone sound the same. And for me, it’s all about personality. I want to hear the personality in someone’s voice, even if they’re singing off-key. That is what I am drawn to, just somebody’s true personality. It’s just boring when it sounds like a robot.

“Grandpa” is also not a fan of bright LED lights.

Is anybody?? I don’t like overhead lighting. I like lamps. A lot of lamps. … I’m trying to push this idea of a lamp-lit supermarket. Can you imagine how relaxing that would be? You would actually go to the grocery store to relax.

I think when a store or office has bright lighting like that, they don’t want you to relax. They want you to just get your groceries and get out.

Yeah, maybe, I don’t know. This world could be a lot nicer and we need more lamps.

Well, speaking of groceries,, I felt your pain when browsing Grandpa’s Complaints, because mentioned your favorite discontinued desserts. I feel that way about Zima and several beauty products, like my favorite lipstick shades that got discontinued. But the things you’re upset about are Good Humor Toasted Almond Bars and Friendly’s Wattamelon Roll. These are a really specific complaints. You’re not just like, “Oh, I hate chewing loudly.” Well, you did say that, actually…

I do hate chewing loudly.

That is true. But I was fascinated by some of the specific complaints, because other artists’ websites just say, “Here’s my bio, here are my tour dates.” But I was deep-diving into these random sections of your dark web, and I was really into it.

Well, again, it’s like I want to show people who I am. I want to share what I’m thinking about. That’s what’s interesting to me to learn about other artists and stuff. But yeah, the desserts… Friendly’s, that’s like an East Coast chain. The Wattamelon Roll, it was incredible. It was like watermelon sherbet — not “sher-burt” —  with chocolate chips in it. And then the rind was lemon-lime sherbet.

I’m trying to imagine chocolate chips with watermelon and lemon…

It sounds weird, but it was incredible. They changed it into a different form and it sucks now, and I’m just mad about it.

This happened with your favorite brand of cheese as well! You had a favorite brand of cheese that I’ve never heard of, called Seriously Sharp Cheddar Cheese, that apparently is no longer seriously sharp. False advertising.

Cabot Cheddar is actually close to where I live and I am a lifelong devotee. I still love Cabot. Shout-out Cabot. But they have this cheese called Seriously Sharp and I don’t know what’s going on, but it is not sharp anymore. And I wrote to them! I said, “What’s going on here?” And I got back a pretty bland response.

Much like the cheese itself.

They’re just like, “Every batch is different.” And I’m like, “No, no, it’s not. For decades it was the same and it was sharp and it was good.” And it’s still good, but it’s not sharp anymore.

Who do we have to escalate this to? We need to speak to the manager.

I might just have to go down there.

This is good marketing here. We’ll get these products happening again. But I don’t want to make this interview all about your complaints. If people want to see your other complaints, they should visit your website and check out Grandpa’s Complaints Corner. You like a lot of things as well.

Oh yeah, a lot!

I wrote down the things you like. It was also very random. Some of them, besides of course playing music, drawing, painting, and other design work, are driving the snowplow (I guess that’s why you moved back to Vermont), dogs, bowling, the forest, maple syrup, turtles (much like that “I like turtles” YouTube kid), and making ice cream. So, you could make your own Wattamelon Roll! You also like eating ice cream, root beer, and pickling your own homegrown cucumbers. You are a renaissance man of Vermont, aren’t you?

Yeah, I’m getting into some pickling. The first song I ever wrote was called “Pickle Boys,” so I gotta live up to that song.

How old were you when you wrote that?

Think I was in fifth grade, maybe.

Was it a very literal song about how you liked pickles, or was there some other metaphorical meaning to that?

No, it was just my love of pickles.

Are there any county-fair, blue-ribbon pickle contests in Vermont you’d like to enter?

I’m still working on my recipe, but I might get into some of that.

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We’re talking a lot about food, but a lot of artists do go into that. Hanson have their own beer called Mmmhops. Alice Cooper has a line of hot sauces. Do you think about going into the food space?

Yeah, sure. I’m sure not making money from music, so I’ve got to start a pickle company.

Or an ice cream company.

Probably both.

Is that one of the reasons you also left L.A.? Because it’s so expensive to live here?

It definitely is cheaper in Vermont. My car insurance went less than half. And the gas is half. It’s much more manageable.

Is it a better space to create because of all of those things?

Definitely. And there’s no distractions. When I lived here, I would wake up and be like, “I guess I’d better get out there and meet some people or do something.” And now I’m just like, “There’s nothing going on!”

But is that ever a concern, that you need to be where the action is, networking or whatever?

Heavens, no! I can come to the city when I need to, get my fix, and then retreat back to the woods.

Well, since you’re back here for a day or two, when you come to Los Angeles, what are the things you miss?

Pretty much just tacos. Vermont has a lot going for it, but it doesn’t have great Mexican food.

I imagine that would be on Grandpa’s Complaint Corner too — you venting about the lack of good Mexican food in many parts of the world. What’s your favorite taco joint in L.A.?

I mean, got to shout out Villa’s.

Which was in the Super Bowl halftime!

Yes, I got very excited when I saw tha.t That was close to where I used to live. My OG that I first loved when I first came to L.A. was Taco Zone. The Asada Mulita at Taco Zone.

Well, I hope you get to have some Asada Mulita while you are here. What else do you have going on? Besides your website, your complaints, all your diverse interests, and of course getting ready to put out and tour MOO, what else are you focusing on these days?

I’ve just been doing a lot of artwork and making all the music videos.

You shoot them and direct them?

Yeah, for this record I’ve started doing that, and it’s been fun.

I know you do the cover artwork for your albums as well. So, the chicken-or-egg question I have about that is: Which comes first? The artwork or the music? Do you think about the artwork while you’re making the music?

I’d say it’s always different, but a lot of times one will kind of inform the other. I switch back and forth a lot. So, if I’m in a songwriting mode, sometimes I’ll get ideas for a painting, and then I’ll start painting and I’ll think of songs. It kind of goes back and forth that way.

You’re a renaissance man. King Tuff of Vermont.

I do what I can. You gotta live. You only live once, as they say. So, you’ve got to experience all you can.

When Los Angeles indie-pop trio Cannons returned from their grueling Heartbeat Highway tour in late 2024, just as their career was really exploding, frontwoman Michelle Joy knew something wasn’t quite right.

“We were in survival mode. We didn’t want to say no to anything — and that’s the quickest way to burn out,” she recalls, sitting with LPTV and her longtime bandmates, guitarist Ryan Clapham and bassist/keyboardist Paul Davis, at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records after an autograph-signing event for Cannons’ eagerly anticipated fifth album, Everything Glows.

The burnout and subsequent impostor syndrome actually inspired one of the new LP’s singles, “These Nights,” in which Joy wonders if she’ll be able to maintain this pace and still perform at the high level expected from the group. “I came back from tour and I was just in this low state,” she confesses. “Like, ‘Can I even perform again? Can I even write a good song? Can I show up the way that I want to show up?’”

Thankfully, Joy eventually got her joy back, as indicated by the new album’s optimistic title, shimmering and euphoric tracks like “Light As a Feather,” and overall summer-soundtrack disco vibes. But it frustratingly took three months for her to be diagnosed with severe anemia, because many doctors refused to take her seriously — instead blaming her persistent, crippling fatigue on her rock n’ roll lifestyle or even on clinical depression.

“It took me so long to figure out what was wrong with me… because of dismissive treatment, telling me that it was something smaller than it was and not doing thorough checkups on everything,” Joy sighs. “Later, I found out low iron causes very depressive [behavior] … It shows itself as severe depression.”

Joy is in a much better place now, physically and emotionally, after receiving proper treatment and undergoing stomach surgery. But her health crisis obviously posed a huge challenge as Cannons commenced work on Everything Glows, and they had to radically alter their collaborative process.

“I had six weeks [while recovering from surgery] where I couldn’t meet up, and I told the guys, ‘Don’t let me stop you! Keep going to the studio and keep writing!’” Joy says.

“We were in the studio for a little bit and we were trying to think of, like, ‘Well, what would Michelle write about?’… Or, ‘What’s Michelle feeling?’” Davis explains.

Joy stresses, “The reason I even wanted to make songs or join a band is because I love writing.” So, any lyrics she sang on Everything Glows had to ring true, as if she had penned them herself. “[Clapham and Davis] did an amazing job at that, because once I had the brain space to listen and pay attention to what was going on, like deeply listen… I was just like, ‘How did you guys know? Exactly, this is how I feel!’ These are words and things and images that I would’ve wanted to put in a song.”

There clearly was a sense of camaraderie and trust, almost even osmosis, between the three band members by this point; they likely wouldn’t have been able to make an album this way if this setback had happened 13 years ago when they were first starting out.

“I feel like there’s not that weird, ego-based thing in the room that might’ve been the first year, where I’m like, ‘But I need to contribute this!’” Joy chuckles. “We’re all in the same space where we’re just like, ‘What’s going to be the best thing we can do to bring out the best in each other’s talents?’”

“Also, at the end of the day, the three of us collectively form our sound. So, there’s no egos in it,” says Clapham.

“There’s so little ego, we have to force Ryan to write solos!” Davis jokes.

While Davis and Clapham’s friendship goes back to childhood, their bond with Joy formed when they answered the then-recent Florida transplant’s “vocalist seeks band” ad on, of all things, Craigslist.

“I liked writing poetry… and I would like to try writing songs, but I’d never been in a band,” Joy explains. “I didn’t want to go into this solo-artist type of world because that scared me, and I wanted to grow with people, because if you’re a female that’s trying to make some songs, it seems scary to just hop from producer to producer. So, I was like, ‘I want to meet people I feel safe with, and I can learn from them.’”

Campbell was intrigued by the ad’s mentions of darkwave influences like TR/ST, but since Craigslist can often a skeevy forum, Joy ended up barely checking her messages. “Honestly, after the first couple of replies, I was like, ‘I’m just not even going to open these emails,’” she shrugs. So, Campbell tracked her down on social media instead (which sounds skeevy, but it wasn’t in this case), and after they finally connected, they began trading audio files.

“I vividly remember hearing Michelle — her voice on a demo,” Campbell says. My wife was with me at the time; it was like Thanksgiving or something. We were driving home and I’m like, ‘Listen to her voice. This is absolutely amazing. I think we have something here…’”

“And then we met up at a coffee shop in Studio City, and it felt like you were already my friend,” Joy says, grinning at Campbell. “It felt like I already knew you. And then when we all worked on music together, it felt like this was what we were supposed to be doing. Nothing felt out of place. It just felt like one of those things in life where you’re just like, ‘This is what I’m supposed to be doing.’ And we just kept doing it.”

(courtesy of Columbia Records)

When Cannons eventually played their first gig — which was, incredibly, Joy’s first time singing live in public anywhere — at a dive bar called the Rendezvous in Clapham and Davis’s L.A.-adjacent hometown of Santa Clarita, they somehow managed to fill the venue. And that’s when they really knew they were onto something.

“We did expected a couple people, maybe just three people,” Joy laughs.

“Friends and family,” says Davis.

“I’m not even sure how it was so packed! How did they even find our music?” says Clapham.

“That was a really cool thing in the beginning, though. We always had fans coming to our shows just by finding us on SoundCloud and through blogs,” Davis recalls.

“It definitely felt like we had something,” says Clapham. “And if just people would just listen to it, it would catch on eventually.”

Cannons have long since graduated to major stages, and as they return to the road for their Everything Glows tour, they’re making sure to pace themselves this time around.

“We really want to be a band that has longevity, so there’s a specific way I feel like you have to work so you don’t burn out,” Joy asserts. “We’ve reached a point where we make good music, we’re proud of what we do, we have more confidence, and taking care of ourselves, mentally and physically, is No. 1 — showing up fully to each thing we do, instead of having 15 percent [strength that day] because we’re exhausted.”

The band enlisted a supportive new management team to make sure their limits aren’t overextended (“‘Boundaries’ wasn’t even in my vocabulary when we first started, but I can’t tell you how important it is to say no to things and really take care of yourself. Boundaries!” says Clapham), and Joy even recently took her first-ever vocal lessons to increase her stamina.

“I had horrible breath support for half of this album because I had a stomach surgery and it was hard to breathe, so it took me some time to get my breath support back. But now I’m in great shape and ready to tour,” Joy says. “[I’ve learned to] just pay attention and trust my body, and take care of myself a little bit better. And that’s going to make a huge difference with the longevity thing.”

Listening back to Everything Glows now, after the band has survived so much and emerged all the more stronger, closer, and more inspired for it, Joy muses, “It’s kind of cool to see the progression of my confidence throughout the album, because the beginning was a very unconfident kind of fearful place, where it started out. But the music is so beautiful and juxtaposes the feelings that I had, and it makes it feel safe to be in that space.

“My dad is no longer here, but he came to me in a dream and told me that this album is something that people really need right now,” she continues, getting a bit choked-up. “I definitely feel the message on the album is the idea that we all come here with a spark and a light inside of us, and many things happen throughout your life that maybe by a certain point dampens it. And you can’t really see it sometimes, when life gets really heady… but there’s a lesson in it that can bring you back to this knowing of inner joy. I feel like I’ve done that personally through being in this band. It has brought me so much joy, so much purpose, and all of the trials and stuff that we’ve been through over the past four years have taught me so many lessons. … There is so much light that comes from making it through a tough situation and finding out how to move forward in a new way.”

Michelle Joy hugs a supportive Cannons fan at Licorice Pizza Records on Everything Glow‘s release day, March 27, 2026. (photo: Max Scott)

Alt-rock singer-songwriter Whitney Tai may have just released an unexpected cover of the theme song to That Thing You Do!, but her most recent full work, the epic concept album American Wasteland, is a movie unto itself. Created with producer Tom “Tommy Hatz” Hatziemanouel between 2021 and 2024 — obviously a tumultuous time in the world, but also in Tai’s personal life, as she dealt with the death of her addict father and the end of a toxic long-term relationship — it’s her most personal and defining artistic statement yet.

“I would say this album is the most me,” says Tai tells LPTV, sitting at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records before performing American Wasteland live in its entirety, with a full band, for the first time. “It’s the most organic and rustic and folky. I’m very inspired by ’70s folk music, but I’m also a ’90s kid, so I love grunge and alternative metal. At the end of the day, you wash a pop sensibility over that from my ‘90s experience, and this is the amalgamation of this album has become. It’s all my influences, all the things I want to sing and perform, wrapped into one. And I don’t feel like there’s any compromises on myself in this record.”

In the edited Q&A below and extended video above, the renaissance woman opens up about the family that has shaped her (the death of her mother from cancer when Tai was 10, her fraught and complex relationship with her dad, the vaudeville in her blood, being parentified, and how her grandfather encouraged her to pursue her dreams); her return to music after giving it all up for a 9-to-5 life; how her past architecture career and her love of nature influence her aesthetics; and how making American Wasteland saved her life and became her “peace.”

LPTV: American Wasteland has been described as a concept album. Is that accurate? And if so, what’s the concept?

WHITNEY TAI: American Wasteland began sort of like this subconscious journey into my own personal trials and tribulations, dealing with abuse and narcissism and just people and situations that were causing me mental health issues. For a while I was writing this record and I didn’t even realize that while I was writing it — that I was working through circumstantial triggers and problems around me. My body could feel that there were issues going on, but it didn’t really know, on the outer cortex, how to process those yet. And as things started to come into fuller focus, the concepts I was dealing with interpersonally started to connect to those outer worlds. So, it’s like looking at things around us — like, people around us could treat us like trash, they can manipulate us, they can abuse us, but it’s also happening at a larger scale from corporations, from big tech and healthcare organizations. It’s just everywhere we look; we are being reduced to a piece of waste. And so ,this album is really just to reclaim that sense of purity. … The title track was written at the end of the process of writing this album. I sort of tied it all together because it was like our anthem song. It was like: “Fuck you. Yeah, we’re waste, but we’re also not waste.” Like, you can bury as deep down as you want, but we’re still going to climb the fuck out. It felt good to reclaim and tie the record together from it not just being a microcosm, but a macrocosm at the same time.

This record was written between 2021 and 2024, which was a really tumultuous time in the world and this country. But your father also passed away during this time.

Yes, at the end of the record being done. It was almost like this chapter closed on everything. My dad was one of my earliest musical pushers or inspirations to go into music, but he was also one of the most complicated people in my life, because of how his struggles with alcohol abuse and drugs impacted me as a child and caused me to go through a lot of suffering. And so, there’s a song on the record called “King of Wands,” and at the beginning of the song, there’s an old voicemail he left me where you can hear him kind of guilt-tripping me yet again I put it in there because there’s a sadness — like, my dad loved me so much, but he was a victim of his own problems and he could never escape himself. He never worked on himself. I feel like our generation is the generation of working on themselves, cycle-breaking. And our parents, the Boomer generation, they’re kind of stuck in their ways and don’t know how to take mental health seriously or even see that they’re contributing to a problem at large. And so, that affected our relationship for many years. But it also empowered me to never be like that and make sure that if I do anything in the world, that it’s with love and passion and tenderness, and that I’m not going to fall back into habits. Because he was an amazing guitar player, an amazing musician, and he never saw those things through because he was stuck in his issues. Him passing away, it was almost like the initial aggravator of my childhood trauma was gone. I was really sad, but I was also in a way free, because I didn’t have to keep being tormented by someone.

Were you and your father close at the end, if you don’t mind me asking? Was there any closure him with about all of this?

There was never closure, but I think there was an unspoken understanding that my dad knew that he effed up and he just really never got a chance to reclaim our relationship. But I loved him anyway, and I showed up to accept him as he was in those last years, because I think he was also realizing the mortality and the finality of life. I’m fortunate that we were amicable, but I had to keep my distance just to protect myself, because as everybody in the scene knows, dealing with substance abusers is really difficult, because their behaviors are extremely manipulative and narcissistic. It’s hard to reason with that when there’s constant lying. I feel like I’ve built up such a hard shell around myself, like armor, throughout my life because I’ve always had to be the parent. I’ve had to be the mature one. My sister is special-needs, so I had to take care of her when I was a kid, and I’m taking care of her again now that he’s passed. So, it’s like my life has been dedicated to just being the strong eldest daughter.

And I know you were a caretaker to your grandfather as well. You said your dad was one of your early musical inspirations – I’ve read that the first music thing you ever did was singing 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up” at age 7 with your dad accompanying you on guitar — but then it was your grandfather, much later in life, that encouraged you to re-pursue your musical dream, right?

Yep. He was very father-like to me. There was this love and this nurturing there that I never really got, so that nurture just reminded me of who I was. Because I’ve had to be so hard for most of my childhood, having that softness and nurture really reminded me that I can lay back into my feminine and be myself, and I don’t have to be so guarded and running away from what it is that I desire. And that takes time. I went to art school, I did architecture, and I was practicing that for many years. But that also led me back to music. All of those things colliding reminded me that music is my true path and that I needed to be surrounded by people who loved me in a way that was gentle and unconditional, to be able to make those [career] choices again.

Was there a specific conversation with your grandfather when said, “Don’t wait, go for it now, go to back to L.A. and do music again”? I don’t think you were living in Los Angeles at that time.

He would say that very often. He was like, “My dream is to see you perform in Madison Square Garden one day.” He just loved when I would sing around the house. He never got to see me perform live; I was hoping that would happen before he passed. But he’s the one who gave me the ability to chase my dreams, because I was in survival mode when I lived in my house. I did not have any way of accessing or having time to do something like that. And so, having the time to be an artist and to dig back into music, I was able to rediscover my purpose. I think it was just his everyday slow love that allowed me to really know what was right for me.

Are there any songs on American Wasteland that are about your grandpa?

I would say that the closest song that reminds me of my grandfather would be “Sequoias,” because my grandfather was very gentle. He was kind of like that gentle voice of reason, that soft listener, that funny little banter that you need to be shaken up. And there’s a lyric in “Sequoias” that’s like, “Do you see the skyway, or are you distracted by the billboards far above the sun?” It’s kind of just a reminder of like, you have this beautiful world in front of you. Why are you looking at the materialism? Focus on love, focus on nature, focus on what matters, because all that shit’s going to fade. And my grandfather was that. He really cared about things. He cared about his family. He cared about us. My grandparents, both of them, were just all about love, and they’ve lost all their children. So, for them to even still be walking around like statues of love, after everything’s been taken away from them, inspired me when I was young. I was like, “If they can go through this shit and still choose to love and show up correctly, then that’s a choice we all can make, and I’m not going to be a victim of my circumstances.”

You say your grandparents lost their children… I know you lost your mother at a young age. Was that something that contributed to you being hard so hardened?

Yes, that definitely contributed to it. My mom was a tough chick and a businesswoman, entrepreneur, artist, and for her to go at such a young age, while I was at a young age and my sister was a young age, definitely changed the way I see the world and approach the world. I promised myself when I lost her that I was never going to do anything without the utmost purpose, intensity, and passion. Even if I have to die for the thing that I love, I would do it, because I don’t know when my last day is, just like she didn’t know hers. And my mom was very healthy. She was athletic. She was positive-minded. And she got swept away too soon. That’s why music for me is everything, and it’s the one thing that’s saving me right now after all that shit.

You have music and art in your blood, right? Your dad was a musician, albeit not professionally, but don’t you come from a long line vaudevillians, tap-dancers, et cetera?

Yes. My mom’s grandfather was a vaudeville performer and he was a part of the Borden’s Milk Quartet, who used to go around the whole country singing. My grandmother was a tap-dancer who used to dance with the Marx Brothers. Show business is in my family, and everyone’s very musical. My grandfather used to sing lots of weird songs around the house when I was a kid. I was like, “Where the fuck are you getting these songs?” They were made-up. He was a songwriter in his own right. He just loved making up little ditties and I was like, “Wow, these are really, really catchy.” It was nice to be around that.

Why did you delay your own musical career, then? You mentioned that you had responsibilities that made things difficult, but were there any other reasons why you were a relatively late-in-life professional musician?

It was a couple of things. I didn’t grow up in a neighborhood like that; there was no community around me encouraging that. It was Yonkers, New York, and there’s not a big music community there. When I was young, I wanted to be a dancer and a figure-skater. I had many passions, but I’ve always sang. I think it was when I was working for an architecture firm, a friend of mine kind of poked me and reminded me to go back into music. I started working with a producer in Europe and then my voice, hearing my songs produced and understanding what I could do and being shown the capacity of where my music could go, really made me switch something on and go, “Oh, so I can do this!” I didn’t know what was possible at the time, because I didn’t have a fruitful community around me showing me what I could do. So, it’s really just having access. That’s why schools I think should have access to music from a young age. … I think I could have benefited from having a more music-driven community.

But since you initially went into architecture, how does that inform what you’re doing now? Obviously you’re very visual, so that had to have fed into how you present yourself now onstage, in videos, in photographs, et cetera.

I think architecture and music are identical as concepts. They are applied differently, but they take the same amount of process. You need to understand harmony and composition and scale and density and empty space. There are so many concepts you use when you’re planning a space that you would use in a song. All the parts and pieces have to be harmonious. They need to make sure that they’re not fighting each other, so that each thing can shine on its own. And so, when I’m making songs, I see them like little spaces, little buildings that I have to configure to make everything work. From the melody to the chord structure to everything, it all has to flow. I think at the end of the day, most mediums, whether it’s art, painting, music, architecture, requires the same process to arrive at a beautiful, harmonious piece of work.

Whitney Tai performing at Licorice Pizza Records (photo: Facebook)

If you put your architecture skills to use, the sky was the limit and if you were playing Madison Square Garden on a Lady Gaga-scale tour, what sort of amazing stage set would you build?

If I was doing my own set, because I’m like a nature buff, I would probably recreate an Icelandic landscape and just have maybe low-lying fog at blue hour, and then maybe lots of stars and cosmos and beautiful moss strewn upon the stage, and then bioluminescent objects. I’d really love it to feel magical and ethereal. The lighting would be almost as if it’s in a winter kind of wonderland. I could go a million ways with it, but I’d want to keep it more organic.

Yes, I know you’re a big nature buff. Maybe people would look at you and not think you’re a granola girl or hippie or bohemian attire, but nature is also a theme on this record. That’s evident in the photography and the videos you’ve done with Joseph Cultice for American Wasteland.

Yeah, that was really fun. I had this vision in the beginning that I wanted to be this modern-day wasteland, an Ophelia that’s like drowning in this disgusting moat. I just really wanted to portray the glamor in the decay. That was really was the concept of the main album covers, the glamour and the decay… that things aren’t what they seem. We’re suffering out here. We’re going through a lot of shit. And you slap some latex on it, you put some nice lighting and you put some chains and it’s like, “Oh, things may be OK,” but it’s not. Because deep beneath that latex is a body that’s been soaking in dirty water from the L.A. River for some time.

What ended up happening as we evolved the imagery was that I wanted the closing of the record, which is “Sequoias” — the bookend song where she’s restored, she’s back in the ivy, she’s pure, and she doesn’t have to identify with that part of her past anymore. She’s evolved and metamorphosized into something that even she herself could not see, because she was so tarred by the gross shit beneath her and flowing in from all places. And I think Joey did a really good job at understanding that evolution, even just musically, because we never really discussed how that was going to take hold. I think he just absorbed these songs for so long and knew where it was going: that this is us at our lowest point where we don’t know who we are, and this is us reminded again of who we are and how we’re never lost. We wander down a path that we shouldn’t for some time, and that’s OK. Because the return is what’s beautiful.

How does American Wasteland differ from your previous two records?

I would say that the first two records are a little bit more electronically driven. I’ve always been more of an alternative/grunge sort of artist, and it’s taken me a long time to find my sound. I know what I love to listen to what I’ve been influenced by, but it takes making records to get closer and closer to who you are and what you have to say, because you’re also growing as these albums are happening. You’re going through phases of your own evolution. And so, I would say this album is the most me. It’s the most organic and rustic and folky. I’m very inspired by ’70s folk music, but I’m also a ’90s kid, so I love grunge and alternative metal. At the end of the day, you wash a pop sensibility over that from my ‘90s experience, and this is the amalgamation of this album has become. It’s all my influences, all the things I want to sing and perform, wrapped into one. And I don’t feel like there’s any compromises on myself in this record. I was able to have 100 percent creative control alongside Tom [Hatziemanouel]. We were able to do this with our hearts fully in it, and there was no ego and no fighting at all. The entire album process was so harmonious that it was amazing.

Since you mentioned ’90s and grunge, I must ask about the Alice in Chains cover you did, “Brother,” because I believe there’s a direct Alice in Chains connection there.

Yes, my good friend, Michael Rozon is a pedal steel player for Jerry Cantrell, and he and I have worked in other capacities. He’s produced me in the Beauty in Chaos project, which is the president [Michael Ciravolo] of Schechter Guitars’ project. I found out that he plays pedal steel and I was like, “Oh my God, dude, you’ve got to get on this record!” We did a session one day and it came out insane and I just loved the outcome. I felt it was the organic thread that the record needed to bring you back to some sense of the Wild West.

You mentioned Tommy Hatz, your producer, and it’s my understanding that when you first started working together, you didn’t necessarily plan on making a whole album.

No, we didn’t! I met Tommy through Schechter Guitars as well. He started showing me some demos back in 2020, and then he wanted to do something like my song “Starfish. He sent me “Perfect Storm,” and that became a whole soul/pop song and it didn’t even go in that direction. I was like, “I want a choir; I want everything,” and it became what it is today. It’s funny that from there I was like, “Well, let’s just keep writing and see where it goes,” and at some point we’re like, “Um, think this is an album. I think we’re writing an album right now.” And we just kept going.

There are a couple of other songs I want to ask you about. I feel like the single “Rhea” is an especially important centerpiece of the album.

It is. When I was writing it, Tom goes to me, “Is this song about your mom?” And I was like, “I don’t know. I’m not really sure.” Because I thought it was about my breakup really, because there’s a parallel to being lonely — it’s like, there are some people that make you feel more lonely when you’re with them than when you’re alone. And that reminded me of when my mom passed away, because there is a strange loneliness that overtakes you when you lose a parent at a young age, and it never really goes away. It’s like a hole that’s driven into the center of your chest, and you can’t ever fill that hole, so what you do is just try to live as deeply and passionately as possible. And over time, that hole closes. You’ll be reminded of what that feeling was, but then there’s people that really make you feel more fucking lonely than you actually should feel. It was a reminder to me that I need to surround myself with people who never make me feel alone. And so, “Rhea” is a broader question of “Do we belong together? Are we forced to be alone out here forever? Am I alone by my own design, or do I get to choose whether I’m whole already?” Rhea is one of Saturn’s moons, and poetically, all the moons are tidily locked around a planet, so their back is always to the darkness and one is always to the light. So, it’s like you’re finally getting to see your moon from both sides. I guess that’s a funny way to see it. It’s like having a full, 360 understanding of how I don’t have to have my back anymore to the sun, or I don’t have to have my back to the darkness anymore. I can turn around. I don’t have to be locked into this position. It’s my choice. I’m a quantum object in this field, and I can make the decision to feel whole again.

I also want to discuss “Slumber Party,” because you’ve said before that that song “saved your life.”

“Slumber Party” is literally just a song about waking up for manipulation. A lot of people don’t really know a lot about manipulative people and how they move through the world and understanding the nuance of how cognitive dissonance works. And “Slumber Party” really attacks about how our body is smart enough to tell us when something is wrong. So, it’s like, what if we never leave the state of slumber we once believe was our reality? It’s like, you don’t really understand how much control you have over your own mind until you’re pushed to the point of no return, where you’re at like the ledge of the cliff and you’re like, “Oh shit, I’m alive. I’m here. I’m breathing. I can fight back!” It’s being pushed to the edge of a cliff and then realizing at that final moment: “I can wake up and say no and ‘fuck you.’ I can leave this place.” I think we’re in a state of cognitive dissonance in many situations in our lives where we comply with things that harm us because it’s a familiar feeling. We’ve been abused in the past and we conflate love with abuse and think that they can be one thing. But they’re not, and they should never be in one sentence together. So, “Slumber Party” is telling you to love yourself more and just show up and just say no. You don’t have to RSVP. You can just bounce.

Well, obviously there was a lot to unpack with this record, and it was over the course of several years and going back into things of your childhood. I imagine it was a very healing process to make this record. What was the biggest thing you learned about yourself during the making of American Wasteland?

I would say that I should have been kinder to myself. I should have loved myself more. I should have realized my power and not have it usurped by certain people around me who maybe were opportunistic. I try to implement a sense of care to the people around me, but sometimes it’s at my own expense. And I think that I’ve learned over the years that I’m never going to sacrifice my peace ever again. And so, American Wasteland is my peace. It is the one thing that saved me, because it reminded me that I already have all the power I need within me and I don’t have to look elsewhere to create or build that reality. It exists in my heart and my soul already.

The Eldest Daughter, the debut album by Florida-born indie-folk artist Gatlin, might have been ever-so-slightly overshadowed by Taylor Swift’s The Life of Showgirl, which coincidentally featured a song called “Eldest Daughter” and was released on the same day. But rest assured, this fearless (no pun intended) singer-songwriter, who just released her follow-up EP Pipe Dream, very much has her own unique voice.

Inspired by her conservative Christian upbringing in Florida (as, you guessed it, the oldest of three children), and how she has processed and made peace with her childhood trauma since coming out eight years ago (she even re-read her teenage diaries during the recording process), Gatlin Thornton’s album is heavy at times. “I think that Christianity and my relationship with God was so tied into my identity, and growing up, I was very much taught that I was born bad. I was born evil, and God is the only thing that is good. That’s a really damaging way to grow up,” she explains, sitting with Licorice Pizza Records’ LPTV in Studio City right before her in-store performance. “I had to learn how to trust myself and believe that I was good.”

But The Eldest Daughter is also laced with wry humor, whether it’s the clever play on words in “Florida Man” (the comma is silent); the diaristic, nostalgic memories of Gatlin’s first girl-crush in “If She Was a Boy”; the rebellious declaration in “Jesus Christ & Country Clubs” when she sings, “I’m going to hell because girls are fun”; or that moment in “Man of the House” when she proclaims, “My cats can be gay if they want to!”

And that humor definitely comes through in Gatlin’s charming and candid LPTV interview (as seen in the video above and Q&A below), in which she opens up about undergoing ketamine therapy; dissociating during interviews (thankfully she didn’t during this one!); the whole “Florida Man” viral phenomenon; going (temporarily) no-contact with her family; donning empowering male drag in her music video; her ever-shifting relationship with spirituality; and, yes, gay cats.

LPTV: I’d love to start by asking about the significance of the title The Eldest Daughter, because I know you grew up in a conservative, religious family.

GATLIN: I think I was in this process of really doing a lot of healing with my family dynamic, and really a lot of things were coming to light. And so, naturally, I’m going to write about it.. And everything I was writing about was pointing towards being an eldest daughter and all of the pressures that come along with that.

What was your family’s dynamic, in terms the pressures you felt as the oldest of three kids?

I felt like in a lot of ways the truth-teller, the protector, another parent.

Did you feel you had more expectations placed on you, because you were the leader of the pack? When you’re the eldest, you’re the kid that does everything first.

Or you’re the guinea pig!

Yes! And also, parents are usually much harder and stricter with the oldest child. By the time the later kids come around, they’re much more chill.

It is crazy, the difference. I think also because when [the oldest is] female and the baby [of the family] is male, the gender of it all… yeah, there was a big difference. I wasn’t allowed to have sleepovers, or what I was consuming in media was just very strict, versus with the baby it was free reign.

I do want to get into specific songs on the record that address your childhood, but in general, what were you revisiting or maybe even reinterpreting when you were making this album?

I think it really started with my queerness and figuring that out. And then it was not only an issue with my family, my queerness, but then to talk about it publicly. It was almost more of a big deal when I decided I wanted to start talking about it and letting other people know! Because I think that’s a Southern culture thing: having this presentation of being perfect and everything is all put together, and not wanting the judgment from other people. So, it felt like I had to just full send it and go all the way there, of being honest and being open publicly in my art and my songs.

When did you come out?

When I was 19. Now I’m 27.

(photo: Dualtone Music Group)

So, it was relatively later in life for you.

Yeah. And it was bisexual. I came out as, “Oh, I have a crush on this girl.” But even at the time, I was like, “But I’m not going to do anything about it,” because I was still in the church. And so, it was very interesting, the way that I even presented it to my family and my community. It was like, “Everyone start praying for me! I have feelings for a girl!” It took me a really long time to process it and be OK with it myself. And then I was still dating men, so I think maybe my family would view it as I only came out two years ago, because that was when I was really [started] dating women.

Did they think it was a phase?

Yes. And obviously it wasn’t a phase!

Where do they stand with all this now?

It’s a process. I think they’ve come a long way from when it started. The song on my album “Love Me” is a song to my mom, kind of about right when I came out and she was saying extremely hurtful things. It has come a long way since then, but I still am struggling with it, because I do think that there is a difference between tolerating something and celebrating something about someone. I want this part of me to be celebrated.

How did your mother react to “Love Me”? I assume she’s heard it and knows it’s about her?

Yeah, I did show [my family] all of the music before it came out. It’s a hard thing that we’ve been having to navigate, because for me, this is my story and I’m just trying to be honest and it’s my way to process. I was like, “I’m not trying to hurt you through this!” But I think she did take it as hard to hear.

You mentioned this crush that you had on a girl, which was sort of your sexual awakening. The song “If She Was a Boy” is about that. Tell me about that real-life experience.

I wrote that [two years] ago, but from the perspective of 19-year-old me, when I was in that place of “I have feelings for a girl, everyone start praying.”

Did you really want to “pray the gay way”?

Oh, man. Yeah. I truly believed that if I acted on that [crush], I would go to hell. And so, it was a product of the environment I grew up in, and was in. I was living in Nashville [at that point]. I was at a Christian school and surrounded by other Christian kids and deep in the church. I grew up Baptist, and then we went to an evangelical Presbyterian church. It was very much: “Go spread the word of God, go convert everyone.” It was fear-based. I didn’t want anyone to go to hell.

This seems like it was traumatic, and yet you seem very untraumatized. You’re sort of laughing and joking as you talk about it.

I think maybe that’s just my way of coping with it. I’ve done a lot of work about all of this. I’m currently doing ketamine therapy. It’s really rocking my world.

I don’t know if you ever acted upon that crush at age 19, or if that woman knows about it. But I do believe I’ve read that you wrote about her in your diaries, and it was finding and re-reading those diaries — and in the process rediscovering your 19-year-old self — that spurred much of this album.

Yeah, because that was kind of the first moment when I began to really question. Maybe it was because I wasn’t living in Florida anymore; I was in Nashville. I felt in the space to start questioning. Before I was like, “Well, I’m as religious as it comes,” but I finally had the space to start questioning these feelings, and then that just stirred up kind of an entire deconstruction of faith, of politics, of what my family dynamic was, of gender. That was the catalyst.

Is it weird when you visit home? Is it one of those cliché situations of awkwardly being at the dinner table with people who don’t share the same beliefs you have now?

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people are having a hard time because of the political climate right now. [I didn’t go] home for the holidays [last] year. It’s my first time not going home for the holidays, but the beautiful thing about it is I have this chosen family and a beautiful community of friends and the queer community. I had a wonderful Friendsgiving and there was just so much love and acceptance.

I do think the whole notion of chosen family is very important. I assume you’re not religious anymore, at least not the religion you were raised in, but are you still spiritual, or do you still have some kind of faith in your own way? How do you define your faith, or are you just completely agnostic or atheist now?

Thank you for asking that! I love talking about it! I’m definitely very spiritual. I’m kind of like, re-finding God. For a while I had to separate from it, because there was a lot of pain attached to God. But it wasn’t God — it was people and humans that would corrupt it. I’m kind of in my journey of finding out what [faith] looks like. I’ve been in a lot of discovery, looking into different religions, reading the Bible again and seeing what I feel about this, now that things have kind of calmed. I think I’m just searching right now.

Is ketamine helping with that? I don’t know much about ketamine therapy.

I’ve been seeing this therapist for like eight months. I went to this place, got prescribed the medicine. We refer to it as “medicine.” It’s been very helpful for me. I don’t think it’s for everyone, but she had suggested it. I think it’s just been a way for me to reprocess things or create new neural pathways, because I can logically know something so well, but my body would still react. Even this process of doing interviews for the record and talking about the way that I grew up and family things… I was doing a podcast [recently] and I fully dissociated mid-podcast. And so, it’s just like, “Oh, there’s still work to do.”

I hope you don’t dissociate during this interview! Actually, you’re welcome to dissociate if that’s what you want to do, but hopefully you’re OK with how this interview is going so far. Do you mind me asking what the podcast question was that triggered that response?

I think it was just something about my parents and what they thought about me. And I just was like, “Annnnnd… I’m now no longer in my body.” It’s a body-keeps-score thing. The body remembers.

Well, if anything I ask bothers you to the point that it would make you disassociate, please let me know.

It would have a few months ago, but I have done a lot of work and I’m much better.

I’m glad to hear that, because as I get into asking about specific track, we’re obviously going to get deeper into this. I did want to ask about “Jesus Christ & Country Clubs,” because I love the line :“I’m going to hell because girls are fun.” That’s a great line.

I think that song is more me being a little bit angry. Growing up, I wasn’t really allowed to feel anger, or I didn’t feel like I was allowed to be angry. It felt good to get some of that out. It’s about hypocritical Christianity, like MAGA Christianity, and how the Jesus I knew wouldn’t be acting like this. It was really therapeutic for me to write that and to feel angry about it.

Which song on the record is the most therapeutic for you to perform live?

That one’s really fun. I feel like at shows, that’s the one that people really respond to and get excited about. “Love Me” is one that I have not been able to sing live without crying. I’m very deeply uncomfortable, but I think that is a good thing. It also has allowed for people who are there at the show to make me feel safe and make me feel seen. And I think it makes the space feel very safe.

Another track, “The Hill,” is about religion as well. There’s a line in it about how walking away from Christianity was the greatest loss of your life and the hardest thing you ever had to do. I imagine that’s another cathartic and/or difficult song to perform live.

Yeah. I think that Christianity and my relationship with God was so tied into my identity, and growing up, I was very much taught that I was born bad. I was born evil, and God is the only thing that is good. That’s a really damaging way to grow up. And so, leaving that, I had to relearn… not relearn, but I had to learn how to trust myself and believe that I was good. All of these things that were very difficult to do. It felt like I was completely losing myself. And I think for a lot of people who grew up in Christianity, that’s why it’s so hard to question it or to walk away from it, because you have grown up thinking that’s how life is. And then, also, my whole family is in it. And church is also such a wonderful place for community; I had so many friends and I felt so loved. So, it was a really hard thing to walk away from. And yeah, that was a painful song to write, but I think a good one. It phrases it almost in a Stockholm Syndrome kind of way.

https://youtu.be/O_Mpp3qR6hw?si=yqep6nBamGo2ST8M

When you talk about the community, did you lose a lot of friends or family members when you came out and changed the way you were living? Did you lose a lot of support? Did you have to make new friends?

It was a process, like a year’s process. I was living in Nashville at the time and a lot of my friends were all kind of coming out of it at the same time, which was really nice and felt less isolating. Family relationships changed, definitely. And that’s sad and heartbreaking, but also OK.

You do approach all this with a bit of humor, like I said before. You have a song called “Florida Man,” which I love because if you ever read The Onion or even the real news, there’s always a headline along the lines of, “Florida Man Does Some Crazy Shit.”

Have you done the thing where you put your birthday and then “Florida Man”? Google your birthday and “Florida Man,” and there’s always going to be something!

Ha! So yes, Florida has a bit of a reputation that’s probably somewhat deserved. But there’s a comma, at least an implied comma, in your song title, because you basically say, “I’m never going back to Florida, man!” It’s a fun play on words. So, tell me about this song, because there’s a lot of humor, but also a lot of anger in this too. It’s kind of like an F-U Florida, or at least that’s how I’m interpreting it.

I think now, retrospectively, I view “Florida Man” as this metaphor of almost who I was when I was living there, playing my role in my family dynamic and not being who I was and not questioning and being in the closet and all of these things, I kind of view it as, “OK, I’m never going back to that.” Through honestly writing this album, I kind of got to reclaim Florida as mine.

I hope anyone reading or watching this interview who’s unfamiliar with your music doesn’t think The Eldest Daughter is an entirely a sad, mopey, angry record! So, I’ll cite another example of your lyrical humor, in “Man of the House.” My favorite line in the album is from that song: “My cats can be gay if they want to.” I’m all for gay cats. I’m all for cats living their truth.

Let the cats be gay!

Yes! But what is “Man of the House” really about? Because that’s a loaded term — patriarchy, gender roles, all that.

Yeah, I was kind of claiming that for myself. In the visualizer I did, I was in male drag. I had a beard and the camo and I felt awesome; I feel like it unlocked something in me. When I wrote it, I was living in an apartment by my own, by myself, and paying the bills from my music, which was wild. And at the time I wasn’t talking to my parents, because you go through breaks, or at least I do with them.

Are you talking to them now?

No, not right now.

Oh, I’m sorry.

It’s OK. So yeah, I think it was the first time that I was like, “OK, I’m a little bit on my own. Let me figure this out.” I just felt powerful. It was a time of my life when I was like, “I’m a strong person!” So, I wrote “Man of the House” and I was like, “I get to live by my rules. My cats, if they want to be gay, can be gay!”

Are your cats gay?

One of them definitely is gay. For sure, gay. My partner says that I project a little bit. Like, I’m almost forcing them to be gay, when they might not be.

You’ve just got to let your kids, even your furry kids, be who they want to be, whether they’re gay or not. That’s one thing we’ve learned one thing from this interview! I also want to ask about “Soho House Valet,” because your press release called it the “north star” of The Eldest Daughter. It’s about a very specific conversation you had with a family member, I assume at Soho House…

I wrote that a week after I had this f fight with my dad walking into Soho House Warehouse in Downtown L.A., and I wrote it to process that. I was very honest in a way that I hadn’t in my writing before. I viewed the song as, “Well, this is for me. No one else is going to hear it. So, who cares? I’ll just say everything.” And then I sat with it for a while and I was like, “You know what? I think I do want to put this out. And I want to make an entire album that is this honest and is for myself.” I guess why it’s the north star. It was like the catalyst of, “OK, I want to start making music in this way.”

Do you mind me asking why you’re not speaking with your parents right now?

I think it’s a rollercoaster. Relationships change. And right now for me, as this album’s coming out and I’m talking about it, and there’s been fights, and the political climate… it’s just a lot. And I’m kind of like, one thing at a time. Sometimes space is good for healing as well. When things are really emotionally charged, sometimes it’s OK to say, “Everyone needs to take a break. Take a break and breathe for a second.”

But even though you have differences of opinion, different political beliefs, different religious beliefs, I understand that your parents always been very supportive of you of being an artist from very young age. And that’s interesting. Maybe some people would assume they’d be like, “Be a housewife! Don’t pursue a career!”  But they always encouraged you to be musician.

Yes, and I feel like that’s such a gift, because I’ve had so many friends who parents were like, “OK, be practical.” And doing music is not practical. It’s a hard thing to go out and pursue. And especially my parents are not creatives and not in this world, so they didn’t really understand it, but they were willing to learn with me and figure it out. So, I’m like, “OK, see? If you can do that with music, then you can do that with me being gay, too!”

Did you always want to play music?

Yeah, when I was young, it was always, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And I’d say: “A singer! I want to be a singer. I want to write my songs.” Maybe in middle school I thought I would do something practical, but then in high school I got diagnosed with an anxiety and depressive disorder and I was like, “Music is the only thing that makes me happy.” And I was really supported in that.

So, your parents supported you in your mental health journey and got you help, et cetera?

Yes, they did. So, you see, they’re not… there’s so many redeeming qualities. I had a lot of great things in my childhood.

I’m glad to hear that. So, let’s end things on that positive note. You were obviously unpacking a lot of stuff from your adolescence when making this record that was painful or dark, but there’s nostalgia on The Eldest Daughter too. What did you revisit that was nice to remember?

I think the last track, “Kissimmee,” which is where I was born. I had gone back to Florida and was able to go out with some queer people and discover so many beautiful people in Florida and be with family in a really positive way. And I was like, “Oh, I have this nostalgia for childhood again!” Coming back and being able to be who I am and really love who I am in Florida, I think was really good for me — because I’d kind of had this view of loving a place so much, but not really being loved by it. Maybe that’s a generalization, but you can find pockets and find people anywhere.

My last question is, what advice do you have for people who are going through something similar — whether it’s coming out, or just in some way breaking away from their upbringing — about they can be as grounded as you seem to be now?

Oh, wow, thank you! … I think being honest with yourself and learning how to love yourself is such an important thing. And I think I was able to do that by spending a lot of time by myself and doing a lot of work, but also finding community and finding people who celebrate you for exactly who you are. And it doesn’t need to be a lot. I think that has made all the difference with me — just having my few friends who are like, “I see you. I love you. And I’m here for you no matter what.”

Veteran musical comic (or is it comical musician?) Kyle Gass is reclining on a velour ‘70s sofa at Licorice Pizza Records, getting ready for his eponymous band’s very first in-store concert, live in Studio City, celebrating the release of their new release, Live in Palmdale.

But since it’s Grammy week in Los Angeles, Gass’s rare pre-show chat with the store’s LPTV (only his second interview in the past 18 months, after he recently broke his silence via Rolling Stone) inevitably turns to that historic night at the Grammy Awards — when Gass’s other band, Tenacious D, were up for Best Metal Performance. It was an especially stacked category that year, with the D’s fellow nominees being rock titans Slipknot, Motorhead, Mastodon, and Anthrax.

“And who do you think won?” Gass laughs, incredulously. “And [the other nominees] were so unhappy about it. Oh, they were not happy at all. Who were these ‘punk comedy dudes’ coming in, ‘stealing our hard rock?’ But it was a great track.”

Yes, that’s right: In a total upset, Tenacious D’s “The Last in Line,” a Dio cover recorded for the Ronnie James Dio tribute album This Is Your Life, prevailed at the 2015 Grammys. One might have assumed that the D’s fellow nominees — particularly Anthrax, who were nominated for their own contribution to that same Dio tribute compilation — would’ve actually been totally fine with this result. After all, it was technically a win for both the D and the late, great Dio, right?

“No, they didn’t see it that way,” Gass chuckles. (Anthrax’s Scott Ian, for what it’s worth, had more of a problem with the Recording Academy than with Tenacious D themselves.)

“I mean, the Grammys are pretty bogus — except when you win, and then it’s like the greatest thing ever! But come on, the Grammys, they’re so clueless over there,” Gass continues. He actually thinks that he and his Tenacious D cohort Jack Black, who were “very surprised” to be recognized by the Recording Academy in the Metal category at all, were more deserving at the 2013 Grammys, when their third LP, Rize of the Fenix, was up for Best Comedy Album.

“I think Jimmy Kimmel… no, who’s the other guy?… Jimmy Fallon. He won. I thought we were actually better. So, we didn’t win when I thought we should have won. And then of course, when we shouldn’t have won, really, because of all those great bands — we did!”

Sadly, Tenacious D were on tour in Europe at the time, so they weren’t able to accept their Grammy in person. This prompts LPTV to suggest that Gass launch an awards-season campaign for the Kyle Gass Band, so that Live in Palmdale can nab a nomination and he can enjoy a full, proper Grammy experience next year. To that, he quips, “Um, is there an award for Best Side-Project?”

Gass has a long list of acting credits (during his wide-ranging LPTV interview, he lightning-rounds about his onscreen debut in a 1988 commercial for the short-lived spinoff soda 7-Up Gold; his film debut in the then-little-known Peter Jackson’s splatter flick Braindead; starring in the Vandals’ cult TV series Fear of a Punk Planet; and his various roles in Elf, Wild Hogs, Seinfeld, and Friends). And the Kyle Gass Band isn’t even his only musical “side-project — he’s also played on and off for the past two decades with the Southern Rock comedy group Trainwreck. But of course, he will always be best known as one half of Tenacious D.

And so, LPTV’s conversation also inevitably turns to questions about the status of that comedy duo, who’ve been on hiatus for the past year and a half. In July 2024, during a Tenacious D concert in Sydney, Gass was surprised with a cake for his 64th birthday onstage, and when Black told him to “make a wish,” he blurted the unplanned, unfortunate comment, “Don’t miss Trump next time.” (There’d been an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, who was running for a third presidential term, three days earlier.) Despite Gass’s sincere apology on social media for what he called a “highly inappropriate” and “dangerous” joke and “a terrible mistake,” the backlash was so intense and immediate that the Australian tour was cancelled, and all future plans for the band were put on hold. Tenacious D have not been heard from since.

“Read the Rolling Stone [interview]. It’s all about it,” says a visibly uncomfortable Gass, referring to the above-mentioned exclusive he granted the iconic rock magazine just two days before he visited Licorice Pizza. “That’s my last interview on that [subject].”

Gass understandably has no desire to keep rehashing what went down that night in Syndey, or the subsequent fallout. He’d rather spend his LPTV interview, which he eventually cuts short to grab some preshow grub, cracking wise about blue ice meth (which is apparently popular in Palmdale?), bogus concert albums (Live in Palmdale isn’t one of them. but apparently The Last Waltz is?), or that time he visited Peter Jackson in New Zealand and took a secret passageway to Bilbo Baggins’s Bag End house, as one does.

But he shows no bitterness as he reminisces about the D’s early days, when — after he moved from Northern California to study music at UCLA, realized he didn’t fit in with all the “serious musicians playing piano and violin,” and switched his focus to acting — he met fellow Actors’ Gang theater troupe member Black. And he is willing to vaguely yet optimistically address Tenacious D’s future, saying they’re just “on a break.”

 

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“I’m actually a lot older, like nine years older, than Jack. But he did a play with us in the Actors’ Gang [in 1986] as kind of a youngster, and he was just a great singer,” says Gass, recalling Tenacious D’s formation. “He was doing these four-track tapes on the TEAC, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this kid’s amazing!’ And I was like, ‘’Well, do you play an instrument?’ He didn’t play an instrument. And I thought, ‘Well, dude, you’ve got to just have rudimentary guitar, if you’re going to do that.’” Gass offered to teach Black guitar, and he says Black was “a very good student. I remember for three months, he played the same three chords on the guitar, D, A, and E, over and over again. … He actually accused me of not showing him all the hard stuff!”

Eventually, in ‘94, Tenacious D made their official but humble musical debut at the legendarily seedy, now-shuttered DTLA dive Al’s Bar (“It was kind of our CBGB”), where they played their future classic “Tribute” and were approached afterwards by David Cross, who asked them to open for the live cabaret version of Mr. Show. “And the rest is history,” says Gass.

But are Tenacious D history now? Are they broken up? Gass insists that’s not the case. For the time being, he’s keeping busy with projects like the Kyle Gass Band and Guitarings (his recently revived guitar-tutorial YouTube series with his longtime “virtuoso” guitarist John Konesky), but he assures fans that the D will rise, or rize, again. Maybe they’ll even win another Grammy someday.

“Listen to Rize of the Fenix. That’s about us burning up and coming back from the ashes. So, the Fenix will rise again… as long as we’re alive,” Gass declares. “We’re buds. [Black] is working on his movies; he’s got a couple movies coming out. But we have a saying: We will serve no D-wine before it’s D-time.”

 

 

 

 

 

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In May 1980, legendary Minneapolitan music savant Peter Jesperson discovered the Replacements and went on to become their A&R rep, manager, producer, mentor, self-described “babysitter,” and the man sometimes described by fans as the “fifth Replacement” (although he’d humbly rather give that title to guitarist Slim Dunlap). It was a decision that not only changed the course of Jesperson’s life (as detailed in his fascinating 2023 memoir, Euphoric Recall), but changed the course of alternative rock, indie rock, college rock, and rock ‘n’ roll in general.

When Jesperson recently visited Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records to celebrate the new four-LP deluxe edition of what many critics consider to be the Replacements’ greatest work, their 1984 breakthrough Let It Be (featuring unreleased studio and live recordings, alternate versions, outtakes, and all sorts of ‘Mats goodies), he shared enough stories during his live Q&A to fill a second memoir.

In the video above and the (edited-for-brevity-and-clarity) text below, Jesperson dishes about his first reaction to the band’s 1980 demo tape and why they had few other believers in Minneapolis early on; how they evolved so drastically over the next four years; the band’s disastrous first gig and many other notorious shows, including one that caused Gene Simmons to walk out; Peter Buck’s solo on “I Will Dare” and Bob Stinson’s solo on “Unsatisfied”; the stories behind l “I Will Dare” and other landmark tracks like “Androgynous” and “Unsatisfied”; the stories behind about the Let It Be album title and cover photo; the weird way that the Replacements’ hero Alex Chilton first discovered them; why the Replacements refused to play the music industry game, and why that was both a blessing and a curse; why it took so long for the band to get their due and how frustrating that was, especially for frontman/primary songwriter Paul Westerberg; Let It Be’s unique appeal to female listeners; the band’s Rock & Roll of Hall of Fame chances; and even a possible ‘Mats biopic, spearheaded by a certain Stranger Things star who just hosted Saturday Night Live nearly 40 years after the band’s infamous SNL appearance.

courtesy of Rhino and Twin/Tone Records

LPTV: A lot of rock scholars cite Let It Be as the Replacements album on which Paul Westerberg came into his own, or very rapidly matured, as a songwriter. I’d love your insight on that. Was this a conscious thing, like, “It’s time to grow up”? How did that come to be?

PETER JESPERSON: I think it was a gradual thing. I think Paul was a great songwriter right from the get-go, from the first tape I got. I got a four-song demo in the spring of 1980. He walked into the record store. I’d never met him before. He handed me a tape. When I listened to it… I’ve done A&R all my life, or “talent-scouting,” and I don’t know that I ever had an experience quite like that. It was probably 20, 30 seconds into the first song where I just felt like somebody put my finger in an electrical socket. I actually stopped the tape and rewound it. I was actually at a record store — I managed a record store in Minneapolis [Oar Folkjokeopus], and I was listening to a bunch of demos while I was doing paperwork for the store. And so, as the tape started, I was probably slightly distracted. I thought, “Time to put my pen down and just listen.” And so, I played the first song all over again, and really, my first reaction was that it sounded to me like some kind of modern update on Chuck Berry with dirty words — not that Chuck didn’t have his share of dirty words at certain points! I was so excited about it. It took me a couple of days to calm down and make sure about my reaction, that I hadn’t overreacted.

And so, I called a couple days later and I remember a female voice answering the phone; I believe it was his mother. She hands the phone to Paul. I identify myself: “I’m the guy at the record store he gave the tape to. I really love the tape. Were you thinking about doing an album or a single?” And there was a long pause and he said, “You mean you think this shit is worth recording?” Because at the same time as we had [the record label that Jesperson co-founded] Twin/Tone in motion, I was also DJing at a club where I had some sway with the booking agent, and so a lot of people gave me tapes just to try to get gigs at this club called the Longhorn. It turned out that that’s why Paul brought me the tape; he was trying to get a gig! But he got a gig and a record deal at the same time.

The original demo tape Paul gave to Peter Jesperson back in 1980 (as seen in the Sorry Ma… (Deluxe Edition) booklet). #TheReplacements #SorryMa #OriginalTapes #DemoTape pic.twitter.com/mbWhjDtWiU

— The Replacements (@TheReplacements) January 6, 2022

I think I’ve read that the first Replacements gig was, ironically, at a sober club.

Yeah, they’d never played a real, bona fide rock club before we got together. They were sort of taken under the wing of a band called the Dads, who were a sober band back in the day — the only sober people I knew, to be honest! But they played the Longhorn quite a lot, and they were good guys and a good band. They had taken the Replacements under their wing and they’d played places in the suburbs like keggers and house parties, but they had gotten a gig in a sober club in downtown Minneapolis in a church. That was actually supposed to be the first [Replacements] gig that I saw. I remember walking up the stairs to the church and there was this kid sitting near the top of the stairs, kind of looking dejected with his head hanging down. As I walked by, he said, “Are you Pete?” I said yeah, and he said, “Well, I’m Chris. I’m the drummer. We ain’t going to play. We got kicked out.” I didn’t know why initially. And then Paul walked out and I recognized him from the store. He had [late guitarist] Bob Stinson with him, and he introduced me to Bob and said, “Yeah, they found liquor and pills in our stuff,” and [the concert organizer] was not happy about it. The guy had actually said, “I’ll take sure you guys never play Minneapolis again!” — which of course didn’t happen.

So, they were causing trouble from the start.

Yeah, yeah. It was a funny deal because I think they thought they’d blown an opportunity. And I hate to admit it, because sobriety or a lack of sobriety is not anything to laugh about, but at the same time when I walked away, I kind of chuckled. They sure didn’t scare me off.

You had such conviction about this band, but I know a lot of people in the Minneapolis scene were sort of were mocking, like, “What are you doing with this band with a 13-year-old bass player?” They didn’t take the Replacements seriously, but you saw the potential, which manifested itself on Let It Be, from the very start.

It was a slow, growing awareness of their talent, I think. But at the beginning, I was just so knocked out with what I heard. … I remember somebody giving me a hard time about how much I was blabbering about them, and I said, “You hang on for a second. Someday people are going to be writing books about these guys.” It was probably inflated hyperbole on my part at the time, but at the same time, I think deep down I had an inkling.

How many books, besides Euphoric Recall of course, have there been about the Replacements at this point?

Three or four main ones, I think!

Peter Jesperson at Licorice Pizza with LPTV host Lyndsey Parker

So, eventually they get to work on Let It Be, a period of time that overlapped with when you were working for R.E.M.

Right. Before we went into the studio to start Let It Be, I had gotten an offer to do some road-managing work for R.E.M. in between Replacement dates. R.E.M. had been playing Minneapolis for a couple years by then, and they really took the town by storm. … We got to be friendly; [R.E.M. guitarist] Peter [Buck] and I are very similar people , and he ended up crashing on my couch many times and staying up till the sun came up listening to records, because that’s what we love to do. And so, he offered me this temporary road manager position and I thought, “This would be great to do, but I can’t do it unless the Replacements are cool with it,” because they were my priority, obviously. And so, we had a meeting and I explained the situation and they all said, “Hey, this is cool, go ahead and do it.” I had kind of explained it as [R.E.M.] were a few rungs up the ladder from what the Replacements were doing, so maybe it would be an opportunity for me to kind of learn the ropes and meet people in higher positions. And so, I presented to the band that way.

And then they kind of changed their tune — or Paul did. The other guys didn’t really, but it was Paul who I think, looking back on it, wanted to be No. 1, and it hurt his feelings that I was paying attention to somebody else, to some degree. So, that made it a little tough there for a bit. But what happened was the [Replacements’] songs had started to advance at such a rapid rate, and I recognized it and I thought, “Paul’s having some kind of a breakthrough. He’s gone up several levels here, very quickly.” And I think he recognized that I recognized it, and so that brought us back together. We were probably closer during the making of Let It Be than we had been even before.

And then Peter Buck was involved in that record. I don’t know if it was an urban legend that he was at one point tapped to produce it…

He was never really on the bubble to produce, and we hadn’t really talked about somebody from the outside coming in, necessarily. He just wanted to come and hang out for the recording session. That’s why we put a guitar in his hand, when Bob Stinson was having a little bit of trouble playing the right kind of solo [on “I Will Dare”]. I mean, Bob himself even didn’t feel like he was nailing the right kind of solo. It wasn’t like Westerberg said, “Hey, you’re out, Peter’s in”; it was like Bob stepped aside and said, “Yeah, go ahead and let him try it.” Peter did the solo, and it was the right thing.

Didn’t Paul have “I Will Dare” in his arsenal for a while by then? Wasn’t it supposed to maybe be on Hootenanny?

Yeah, he called up as we had just finished Hootenanny and sent off the audio to the pressing plant and the package to the printer. A couple days later he called me and said, “I’ve just written the best song I’ve ever written, and we need to pull the record back and add it!” We couldn’t do that. It would cost a fortune to kill the project and it would delay it and slow the whole project down. He was not happy about that, but he understood deep down. And so, we held it from the record. But it was, I think, the first thing we recorded when we started Let It Be. I’d been out on the road with R.E., literally flew in from a gig at Six Flags in Georgia on a Friday night, took a red eye- home, got a couple hours of sleep, and then jumped in the van and picked up the band and drove to the recording studio. And then Peter [Buck] flew in a couple days later. In fact, I brought a couple of his guitars with me, which was also added to my luggage! I’m trying to manage all this other stuff, and I thought, “Oh man, I’ve got the Rickenbackers with me here.” I didn’t want to see somebody steal them or whatever.

But anyway, we started recording and “I Will Dare” came real fast, because they had been doing it for close to a year by that time. One of the interesting stories about it — I don’t think we’ve talked about this too much in other interviews — was at one point after [Buck] had done the guitar solo, Westerberg just said, “God, it would sound kind of cool if there was a mandolin on this.” He didn’t seem real serious, but I kind of filed it away in the back of my head. My older brother was in a bluegrass band, so he had a mandolin player. I called him up and I said, “Any chance I can rent your mandolin?” And the Replacements didn’t have the reputation they do now, or did then, for breaking things, so he trusted me with the thing. I gave him 10 bucks to rent the mandolin from him. The next day, Paul and I were going to the studio and I went to pick him up and he looked in the backseat and saw this little case and said, “What’s that? ” I said, “Well, it’s a surprise for you!” … I don’t know if he’d ever played one before, so it was really cool. He figured out that part out real soon and real fast. And so, that’s how the mandolin ended up on there.

So, Paul had told you “I Will Dare” was his best song yet. When you heard it for the first time, what was your reaction? Did you agree?

I did. … A couple of weeks after he had called me, we had a show at a place called Goofy’s Upper Deck in downtown Minneapolis, which was mostly a hardcore bar, but the Replacements were punky enough that they fit in and we got booked there quite a lot. I remember the set there being strong and we had a good crowd, and about seven or eight songs into the show. I heard them start a song that I didn’t recognize — a quick-strummed, kind of bouncy intro. It caught my ear because I knew their material so thoroughly, and as soon as the song kicked in, I suddenly went, “Oh, this is the one he called me about!” I mean, it sounded like a hit to me. It really did. And I don’t really think that way usually, especially with the band like the Replacements! But I thought, “Man, he’s written the song. This could be the one.” I was very excited about it.

Another Let It Be track I have to ask about is “Androgynous.” It’s crazy that song came out more than 40 years ago; I think it’s more meaningful or topical now than it was in 1984. I interpret it as a very positive depiction of what would now be called a gender-neutral or gender-queer couple, and it has been covered by Joan Jett with Miley Cyrus and trans artist Laura Jane Grace, and also by trans singer Ezra Furman.

I couldn’t tell you what the inspiration was, and I didn’t ask him, but I know that when Paul first played it for me, he was very surprised by it and a little nervous about it. And I was really surprised by it too. He hadn’t written anything like it. And as you know, from the beginning, when I first met him, it was all rockers. When I first met him, it was like they wanted to be Johnny Thunder’s Heartbreakers. That was their thing. The first show I ever saw them do, they did three Johnny Thunders songs. … So, “Androgynous” was a real outlier. It wasn’t a song that anybody saw coming, and I think it was a very forward-thinking song and certainly is getting a lot of attention now.

Was there any kind of weird, transphobic public reaction to it when it came out?

No, I don’t remember any kind of bad reaction. I think that people were kind of excited by the expansion of topic.

I also want to ask you about “Sixteen Blue.” I believe it was inspired by the awkward age of bassist Tommy Stinson, Bob’s younger brother.

That was a funny one. … I remember were at the Paradise in Boston where they were opening for R.E.M., and during soundcheck, they did this new song. I was walking around at soundcheck and hearing the words, and all of a sudden I went, “Holy shit, he’s written a song about Tommy!”

How did Tommy react to it?

We didn’t really talk about it. It was one of those things. I mean, everybody kind of got it that that’s what it was about, but it wasn’t something that was a big discussion point.

You mentioned the Replacements used to do Johnny Thunders covers, and there were some great, and surprising, covers during the Let It Be era, like Hank Williams’s “Hey, Good Lookin’.”

There was a live version of that on the flip of “I Will Dare,” the 12-nch. We had two songs on the flip: “20th Century Boy” by T. Rex and then the Hank Williams song.

And somehow that cover has something to do with Big Star’s Alex Chilton connection, who the Replacements later wrote a whole song about. What’s the connection there?

That was funny because we had been in Madison, Wis.; there was a club there run by a husband-and-wife team who were really, really good people and took a shine to the Replacements and booked them a lot. … I’ve sort of only half-jokingly referred to it as the Replacements’ Hamburg, because Madison is really where was where they cut their teeth, playing for people that didn’t watch them go through all their growing pains. And so, somebody, maybe one of our roadies, had thrown a tape that’d been a mixtape in our van to record the show, and “Hey ,Good Lookin’” was the last song they did. Maybe it was an encore; Bob’s solo is just so ridiculous, it sounds like he’s playing the wrong song. But we thought it was really funny. And so, on the way home in the van — I mean, this is another crazy thing, but when we used to go to Madison to play a show, we didn’t have money for hotels or anything, so we’d drive back afterwards. We’d leave Madison at 2 in the morning, and I’d be dropping them off when the sun came up. But anyway, as we’re driving back, Westerberg was riding shotgun and he kept playing that [newly recorded live Replacements] version of “Hey, Good Lookin,’” playing the solo and then rewinding it and playing the solo again and rewinding it and playing it again. And there was like this wrestling match in the van with Bob trying to get to the tapedeck. because he was going to chuck it out the window. So, it was like, hog-pile on Bob to keep him away from that tape.

The tape made it home, fortunately. So, when we decided to put it on the B-side of this 12-inch, Steve Felstead, the engineer, and I were transferring it from the cassette to a quarter-inch reel, and right when “Hey, Good Lookin’” ended, the mixtape that was on it previously popped out. It was almost like it was meant to be: There was the beginning of track one, side one of the first Big Star album, which the song “Feel.” You hear this dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, and I thought, “That’s so cool! Let’s just put on a few seconds of it and fade it out.” It was a little Easter egg because everybody knows about Big Star now, but at the time they were not known at all. It was our little tip of the hat. And interestingly enough, the next year when meeting Alex Chilton, he said that was the first thing he ever heard by them. He’d been driving from Memphis to New York and stopped at a friend’s house in Baltimore to spend the night before he went up to the city, and the guy said, “Hey, do you know about this band the Replacements? Look what they’ve done here!” And he played it for them. So, that would’ve been his intro to them.

What a great story! Now, I also have to ask about Let It Be’s cover of KISS’s “Black Diamond.” This was recorded in early 1984, long before people were admitting to liking KISS, ironically or unironically. No alternative rock bands were playing KISS songs back then, except Redd Kross. And I think Gene Simmons might’ve seen Replacements do “Black Diamond” in concert once?

Yeah, Gene came to CBGB. … It was actually not a great show. Alex Chilton was opening up; it was the first time we met him. I think that the Replacements had a few extra cocktails because they were so excited, and it was a pretty messy show. Also, they’d just been on the cover of the Village Voice and there were a lot of A&R guys in New York that were like, “Who’s this band we’ve never heard of?” So, it was packed with record executive.

This was a common occurrence, right? Where the Replacements would have a big show and not be at their best, but then they’d play some other show for like 10 people, and it would be the best show you ever saw in your life?

Yep, that’s exactly right! But anyway, while they were playing, [the sound guy] kind of nudged me — the club was packed, wall-to-wall, and there was a tall guy standing to our right — and he said, “You know who that is? ” I said no, and he said, “It’s Gene Simmons!” Of course I wouldn’t recognize him.

This would have been around the time that KISS makeup came off. It came off in 1983 at an MTV press conference.

I wouldn’t have recognized him with his makeup on! [laughs] But anyway, and there was a little talk-back system at CBGB, a little microphone on the board that you can talk to the band through the monitors. And so, when they finished a song, I hit the button and said, “Hey Paul, Gene Simmons just walked in, no shit.” And without missing a beat, they crashed into a really terrible version of “Black Diamond. “

Which is not a Gene Simmons-penned KISS song. Paul Stanley wrote that. Do you think maybe they should have done one of Gene’s song?

Well, I don’t think they knew very many. But anyway, he turned and left very quickly.

Oh, man!

But you’re right about the non-ironic part of it, because they also did [the Simmons co-write] “Rock and Roll All Nite.” I remember seeing them do that at another club in New York where it was a big crowd and they didn’t know whether the Replacements were making fun of it or whatever, but did such a great version of it that it didn’t really matter. … Actually, we recorded four covers during the Let It Be sessions, and we had to pick one. We didn’t want to put two covers on, but we thought one would be fun. I think that the band was kind of leaning towards the T. Rex song because they did a great version of “20th Century Boy.”

What were the other two?

The Grass Roots’ Temptation Eyes and “Heartbeat, It’s a Love Beat” by the DeFranco Family. … When we were deciding what’s going on in the album, I had the T. Rex song on there, and then I started thinking, “This is kind of obvious.” So, when we had a little band chat about what songs various members liked and what they didn’t like, I said, “I think it’d be cooler to put on the KISS song, because it would be so unexpected.”

The last Let It Be track I want to discuss is an original, “Unsatisfied,” which is considered to be another one of the Replacements’ greatest songs. You were mentioning how Bob Stinson didn’t do the solo on “I Will Dare,” but it was a complete opposite story with his guitar playing on this song.

Yeah, he did a great guitar solo on this one, and that was a studio concoction, really. Paul had written it, brought it to the band, taught it to Bob, and they recorded it right away. I don’t think we even did more than one version. We had one good backing track. Paul took a couple shots at the vocal, but there was only one really good vocal. The interesting thing about that one was when we recorded it, it didn’t have the acoustic guitar intro and we didn’t use things like click-tracks or anything, and there was no count in. And so, when all of a sudden Paul said he wanted to put a 12-string at the beginning, it was really difficult to record the 12-string and then line it up so it sounded right.

Another interesting thing about “Unsatisfied” is I remember after the record was out, we were driving through somewhere in Kentucky or Tennessee on a two-lane road and stopped to get gas. There was a payphone across the street, so while the van was gassing up, I ran across to call back to the office in Minneapolis, to just check in any names for the guestlist, that kind of stuff. Dave Ayers was a guy who was doing some A&R while I was away so much with the Replacements, and Dave said, “Hey, we got a call from Debby Miller, a writer from Rolling Stone. She loves the album and they’re going to review it, but she doesn’t understand one lyric.” She wanted to know if I could tell her what it was. … It was the line, “Everything you dream of is right in front of you,” but she couldn’t figure out what he said right after that. So, I’m standing there in the payphone booth and I’m looking across the street, and there’s Westerberg standing a couple feet from the van smoking, of course — which is good idea in front of the gas pumps. So, I shout across the street, “Hey, Paul, Rolling Stone is reviewing the album. They don’t understand this lyric, ‘Everything you dream of is right in front of you.’ What do you say after that? And he shouts, “Liberty is a lie!” from across the highway. I thought, “That’s a fucking great line!” So, I read it into the phone, and Debby Miller put it in her review.

I’ve read that “Unsatisfied” is at least partially about Paul’s frustration with where the band was at that time. Some people might’ve thought a band with their reputation didn’t want mainstream success, but I feel Paul did. Did that inspire this song at all?

There wasn’t a lot of talk about, “Where did this song come from? What did you mean? What were you feeling, Paul?” Those were not conversations we had. But I was shocked, and I’m shocked to this day, that it took them four albums before the major labels really got serious about coming after them. So, I think if you’re Paul Westerberg and you’re writing “Color Me Impressed” and “I Will Dare” and “Unsatisfied” and you’re not getting the kind of attention that you think you should be getting, you’re probably not very satisfied.

Obviously, the Replacements got to a certain level of success, especially critically, a type of success that many bands would be thrilled to have, by the time they broke up. But like you said, you thought “I Will Dare” sounded like a smash, and that Let It Be took the band to a new level. Did you guys think, even in the back of your minds, “This is the album, this is the one that’s going to do it”? They did get signed to a major label, Sire, after Let it Be, so I assume this record attracted attention of Seymour Stein or whoever. Were you thinking, “OK, now things are going to happen”?

I don’t know that that was really the way we thought. I think that everybody wanted to be more successful. Everybody wanted to be making a better living or whatever. But the idea was just to make the best records we could, and to tour as much as we could. And even though they did a lot of shows that were falling-down drunk, they didn’t go out there on purpose to do a shitty show. It was just kind of the luck of the draw. There was something cool about that, in a way, that they couldn’t fake it. And so, on a night where the chemistry wasn’t there onstage, sometimes they’d maybe flush it down the toilet a little bit and just be goofy. Or we played a lot of places where there were big punk-rock audiences and they’d do everything country-style, just to piss them off.

Did that piss you off sometimes? Here you are, their manager who’s believed in them since the first 20 seconds of their demo tape, getting opportunities like being on the cover of the Village Voice or playing important, buzzy shows attended by rock stars and A&R execs, and they sort of blow it. I imagine that could be frustrating.

Well, if you’ve got a bunch of people standing in front of you saying, “This is what we want, this is what we expect from you,” they are the kind of band that’s going to go the other way. I mean, that’s just the way they work. I was more frustrated when they just played shows that sucked because I knew that they were much better than that. There’s a lot of bands that go out there and they’re great every night, like a Bruce Springsteen kind of thing; they give it their all every night. Not everybody can do that. So, I kind of admired [the Replacements] for not playing the game in those ways. … I just think that there’s a purity to what they did in a way, that they didn’t kiss people’s asses at record labels. They did quite the opposite. I think that’s part of what makes people interested in them still. But who knows how that happens? It’s like that question they asked John Lennon many years ago, “To what do you attribute your success?” And he said, “Well, if we knew we’d form another group and be managers!” I think it’s that-X factor thing.

But it’s been brought up many times that if the Replacements had played the game more, the world could have been their oyster. And this goes beyond Let It Be — like, it applies to the “Bastards of Young” music video, which is now a classic, but was not playing the MTV game. I don’t know if that’s something any of them or you ever grappled with, the idea of what might have if they’d just fallen more into line.

I’m sure everybody thinks about it. But we might not be talking about them now, had they done that kind of thing.

There might have been fewer books written about them. Or, those books would have been a lot less interesting.

I think of the eight records they made, Don’t Tell a Soul [released by Sire Records in 1989] is the one where they really did try to play the radio game and all that. And I think that’s their least interesting album. I think it’s got some real duds songs on it.

Fair enough. So, I’m going to put you on the spot. Given the fact that you never knew what you were going to get with them, what is, in your opinion, the best show you ever saw the Replacements do? And just for kicks, what were the worst?

God, there were a lot… I mean, I saw them hundreds of times, and they were great more than they were bad. I know a musician, Joe Henry, who when I met him said he was a big Replacements fan and he saw them eight or 10 times and never saw them do a good show! And I thought, “Well, that’s too bad. I’m sorry about that, but I’m glad you like the records.” He

Joe Henry gave them a lot of chances!

But I guess I remember after the CBGB show where Gene Simmons turned up, the reason we had to play CBGB was because we’d been booked in a bigger room about a week and a half later called Irving Plaza. That was a big deal at the time. CBGB was booked first, so when we got the Irving Plaza gig, they said, “Well, there’s a no-compete [clause], so you can’t do this show.” I said, “What if we do the show under a fake name?” They said that’d be OK, so the Replacements actually played as “Gary and the Boners,” which wasn’t really all that much of a secret. And oddly enough, Alex Chilton, who was just coming out of retirement, said, “If they’re going to play under a fake name, I am too!” So, he played as “The Deteriorating Situations.”

I had to convince [CBGB owner] Hilly Kristal “Look, there’s going to be a huge crowd [at CGBG]. You’re going to sell lots of liquor. Can we do this [Irving Plaza show] under a fake name?” And Hilly and I got along really well; he’d never liked the Replacements, but for some reason he and I always had a good relationship. So, he said, “Peter, I’ll do this for you.” We ended up a week and a half later going to Irving Plaza and it was like they had something to prove. because they knew they’d done a bad show before [at CBGB]. And they walked onstage and opened with “Rock and Roll All Nite”…

And Gene Simmons was not there!

But they just killed it. That was a brilliant show all the way through. So, that would be one of the best. There’s also a club in Trenton, New Jersey — there’s a bonus 10-inch that comes with this new Let It Be Package that has six songs from a recording in Trenton, New Jersey, at a place called City Gardens. That was another one where the PA was so good. The monitors were so good. They could really hear themselves, and they played their asses off every time they were there. I mean, some drunk shows of course too, but …

I think the bad shows are maybe the ones that people remember more, because that was part of the band’s lore.

It became more of their lore. And it is kind of a frustrating thing where people come up to a band member or me or whatever and say, “I remember seeing them in Tulsa and you were so drunk you couldn’t play any of your own songs — and that was so great!” That wasn’t really why the Replacements were great to me.

I have some couple obvious questions about Replacements lore, one of which was about the Let It Be album title. Some people at the time might have thought it was blasphemy, but I do believe it was at least partially inspired by you and your Beatles fandom.

I think it was them needling me a little bit. Westerberg used to say, “[The Beatles] are a great rock band, but they’re not the be-all and end-all!” And I said, “No, they are the be-all and end-all, and you are wrong!” But I think what happened was, they probably were sitting at the CC Club, which was the bar kitty-corner from our record store where we all hung out all the time. … Paul’s sitting at the table with a couple of the band members and he said, “OK the next song that comes on the jukebox is going to be the album title.” And there it was: The Beatles’ “Let It Be.” And the other thing that I think was when we started making the next record [Tim], the first for Sire, right up until the last minute it was going to be called Let It Bleed. I thought that would have just been the coolest thing. to have Let It Be and follow up with Let It Bleed. And then at the last minute, Paul said, “No, I’m going to call the album Tim.” I was like, “Why?” And he said, “It’s such a nice name.” I think that was a missed opportunity!

And of course, I have to ask about Let It Be’s iconic cover photo, shot on the Stinson family home’s roof.

I was working at the record store that day that they took the pictures just a couple blocks really from where that house is. Dan Corrigan was a brand-new photographer at that time, and one of the guys that we worked with at Twin/Tone had said, “You should maybe take some pictures at their practice space, because that’s where they really became a band.” And so, Corrigan was shooting them there and then he said, “Let’s go outside.” And then all of a sudden… they got up on the roof, crawled through [Bob and Tommy’s] sister Lonnie’s bedroom window — there’s her baseball trophies in the window. When we were looking at the contact sheets, everybody just went, “Wow.” It really caught everybody’s attention. … It was like, “There’s your fucking album cover, right there.”

Like it said: Iconic. And it’s nice with reissues like this one, the Replacements are more appreciated than they were around the time of “Unsatisfied.” That 1980 demo tape through which you’ve discovered them is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Museum in Cleveland, and they were even nominated for the Rock Hall in 2014. Do you think they’d ever get in? And would they care? Would they show up?

Well, Tommy and I did a thing for my book [at the Cleveland museum], and it turns out the two directors of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame are Replacements fanatics. They were so kind to us, gave us like a two-hour private tour of the museum and couldn’t have been nicer. It turned out the main guy [Rock & Roll Hall of Fame president Greg S. Harris] used to road-manage Ben Vaughn, who opened for the Replacements several times, so we were probably sharing dressing rooms and I would have met him many years ago.

Well, there are a lot of Replacements fanatics out there who probably have Hall voting power now. Let It Be has been declared by some critics as the greatest coming-of-age album of all time, for instance.

Yeah, and I think one of the other things about this new package I’m really excited about is the liner notes written by this woman, Elizabeth Nelson, writer from the East Coast, who I think we’re just so fortunate to get. I encourage you to read them — they’re really absolutely brilliant, and if she doesn’t get nominated for a Grammy, I’m going to be really shocked.

I’m so glad you mentioned Elizabeth Nelson, because that was literally my next question! Just in terms of how they the Replacements have been historically perceived, I think she wrote something was really interesting. I’m going to quote her. “The Replacements were the ultimate rebuke to masculine punk, and Let It Be at its core is a record for girls.” I love that, because I think a lot of people think of the Replacements as being like a band for bros and dudes. But a lot of women love the Replacements, and Paul’s lyrics could be very sensitive and appealing to a female audience, so I appreciate that Elizabeth pointed that out.

I thought it made sense. I don’t know that I’d really thought about it. I didn’t ever really think they were a guy’s band, necessarily. I just thought that they were a band for people who really paid attention to good songwriting and liked to have a laugh.

With all these great stories about this mythical band, could there ever be a Replacements biopic? Have there been talks of one of?

Well, there have been several [discussions]. The [Trouble Boys] book [by Bob Mehr] has been optioned a couple times. It was optioned by Josh Green, who’d done The Fault in Our Stars, and he was determined. He promised: “This is my next movie!” He had done an X-Men movie and he’d done a 10-episode limited series with Stephen King of The Stand, so he had made a lot of money and said he was going to do as his pet project. He actually came to my house and we talked a lot about it, but he couldn’t get the film companies to agree with them and come up with financing. I mean, Cameron Crowe came on board as a producer! Anyway, that went away and then the rights went back to Bob Mehr, but now they’ve been optioned again by Finn Wolfhard.

No way! So… who’s going to play you?

[laughs] I don’t even want to think about it! We’ll figure that out. Maybe there won’t be a manager in the movie, I don’t know.

No, no, they cannot write you out of the story.

Well, anyway, right now it looks like it’s something that’s very real. I was kind of glad when the idea of a biopic went away though, because I thought, “How many good ones have you ever seen?” I haven’t seen many; there’s way more bad ones than good ones, if you ask me. But I think Bob Mehr will be involved in the screenplay and keep them on the straight and narrow. And also, the impression I get is that Finn Wolfhard is a fanatic for the band and wants to make it real and true. And so, maybe, it would be a good one.

Perhaps never in the history of Licorice Pizza Records events has a band made as grand an entrance as Italodisco bon vivants the Dolcevita Brothers. To quote the jet-setting bio on their minimalist website, DBone and Mr. Ciao arrive “from Tokyo rooftops to Milan back alleys, Paris runways to Rio beach raves” to Studio City, rolling down Ventura Boulevard to their Sprezzatura album release party in a sparkling white Rolls-Royce that looks straight out of Whitesnake video.

“We drive the vehicle ironically, only. We don’t drive vehicles literally,” quips Mr. Ciao. “Everything ironically. Nothing literally or seriously, ever.”

The Dolcevita Brothers, Mr. Ciao and DBone, pose with LPTV host Lyndsey Parker in front of Licorice Pizza Records. (photo: Max Scott)

Furthermore, the Dolcevita Brothers certainly are the only band to ever serve Licorice Pizza audience members a charcuterie board during an in-store concert, specifically during a song called “DIMYWTF” (“Does It Make You Want to Fuck”), while alternately playing keytars and cradling tiny purse dogs. Pretty much everything these suave, turtlenecked playboys do, they do it with sprezzatura, ironically or not.

“Sprezzatura is that effortless charm that you show in everything you do in life and you make everything look easy, even the toughest tasks,” Mr. Ciao explains. “It’s a lifestyle. You choose to live by the idea of sprezzatura. You make everything feel a little bit more easy, and you don’t care that much.”

“Like, you fly a private jet while eating KFC,” DBone adds in his silky-smooth, ‘70s-AM-radio-DJ voice.

Yes, the Dolcevita Brothers just might be the most interesting men in the world. But along with being men of elegance and killer style (DBone notes that “dolcevita” means “turtleneck” in Italian), they’re also international men of mystery.

Very little information exists about this pop duo, other than the elaborate origin story that plays out like a spicy Italian telenovela on their debut concept album. Are they really brothers? Are they really from Italy? Rumor has it they may actually be Emmy-winning director/photographer Carlos Alberto Orecchia and singer/actor Derek Reckley. But during their hilarious LPTV interview over wine and cheese in the Licorice Pizza back room, they claim to be long-lost half-siblings and the illegitimate sons of a 1970s Italodisco heartthrob who was known as “the Italian Barry White.”

“Our real father, Gepy e Gepy, is one person. That’s how big that guy was,” brags Mr. Ciao.

“We were both looking for our father, and we found ourselves at the Rainbow on the Sunset Strip,” says DBone. “Neither one of us knew our father, and we found out that he had slept with both of our moms on the same night. And then we found out together that we had a brother.”

“We never met him, but it’s OK,” says Mr. Ciao. (Gepy, whose full name was Giampiero Scalamogna, died in 2010.) “He gave us the gift of Italodisco.”

“I was interested in the masculinity that exists within Italodisco,” adds DBone, whose estranged superstar father would have been (if we’re doing the math correctly) close to age  40 on the magical, mythical night of the Dolcevita Brothers’ not-so-immaculate conception. “Because everybody I saw [in the Italodisco genre] was middle-aged, and then there’d be two beautiful chicks and they’re just shimmying. I was like, ‘Oh, my hair’s thinning. I could get up into this!’”

“[Our father] allowed us to take this adventure,” states a grateful Mr. Ciao.

And what an adventure. According to Dolcevita Brothers lore, the only photograph that the Italian-born Mr. Ciao and Indiana-raised DBone ever had of their parents together was of Gepy, Mama Bone, and Mama Ciao partying topless in a hot tub, which became the cover of the Gepy e Gepy album Body to Body. And so, for Sprezzatura’s climax, so to speak, they decided to bring everything full-circle — much like a pizza itself — and pay tribute to their heritage on the “Body to Body”-interpolating “Children of Gepy.”

“The last [Sprezzatura] track is both of us singing with our long-gone father. It’s kind of emotional, if you’re invested in this magical journey,” says Mr. Ciao. (The epic story-song opens with the surely tearjerking line, “Thank you for all the pizza!”) “You get to the end of this insane story, and you get rewarded with this beautiful song called ‘Body to Body.’”

If there’s any album art more glamorous than 1979’s Body to Body, it’s got to be Sprezzatura’s cover. Of course, it’s hard to separate the fact from the fiction, the fun facts from the actual facts, in the Dolcevita saga. But apparently the LP’s sepia-toned, Polaroid-style cover, featuring the Italian-American stallions leaning against their roadside Rolls-Royce, was captured by DBone’s famous neighbor —  a onetime member of the gastronomic Lou Reed tribute band the Pizza Underground.

“We were in [DBone’s] driveway with the Rolls-Royce, and we shot the cover on a Hassleblad vintage film camera that only had like 12 shots on it,” recalls Mr. Ciao. “There’s no electronics, there’s no self-shot; you can’t time it or use a timer. And we were only the only people there. So, we needed another person to press the shutter…”

“I was like, ‘Let me call my neighbors and see if anybody’s home.’ And the only one was Macaulay Culkin,” says DBone.

“[Culkin] showed up in 30 seconds, and he gave us so many cool directions and ideas,” recalls Mr. Ciao. “And of course he was like, ‘Are you going to give me a photo credit?’”

“And if you zoom in on the moon of the picture of the album cover, you can see Macaulay’s face,” DBone points out.

The Dolcevita Brothers seem to wear many fashionable and rakish hats. Apparently one of Mr. Ciao’s many former day jobs was creating and hosting the Apple TV series All the Pizza (“a psychedelic journey through the subculture of pizza” —  hence why Licorice Pizza was the perfect setting for the Dolcevita Brothers’ first-ever public performance). And while Mr. Ciao was unable to secure Culkin as an All the Pizza guest, he did book party king and known pizza enthusiast Andrew W.K., with whom he teamed on the song “Pizza Paradise” and a “whole episode discussing philosophy on why pizza is pure happiness.”

Mr. Ciao clams he also once played in Genesis tribute band back in his home country, while DBone once fronted a very un-Italodisco-esque act, releasing a country-rock album and a Halloween album under the DBone and the Remains. And when two of the latter album’s tunes ended up on the soundtracks for Hocus Pocus 2 and Adam Sandler’s Hubie Halloween, DBone fully developed the relatively late-in-life “bug for doing music” — right around the time that he and longtime friend Mr. Ciao discovered that they were blood-related.

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The result is Sprezzatura, a “sonic passport to joy” that would surely make the dear departed Gepy proud. Sexy standout tracks include the Eurodisco floor-filler “I Feel Giorgio” (“It could go on for 72 minutes, and you’ll still dance the whole time”); the steamy hot tub slow jam “DIMYWTF”; and another acronym banger, “GYAT Delulu,” which was inspired by the Gen Alpha slang of DBone’s 11-year-old daughter, just to bring the record out of the ‘70s/’80s a bit.

“She was like, ‘There’s a word, GYAT,’ which means, ‘Girl, your ass thick,’” DBone chuckles. “And then she was like, ‘Your big ass is making me delusional,’ which is ‘delulu’ in kid language. And I was like, ‘Ohhh, we need to do a song right away!’”

 

 

 

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On that note, the Dolcevita Brothers could one day expand to become a larger, multi-generational family affair — “a whole universe, a cinematic universe” — perhaps requiring a larger, family-sized Rolls-Royce SUV. Because Mr. Ciao says, “We just realized, as we speak, that our father Gepy e Gepy must have reproduced more than just the two of us! … So, if you don’t know who your father is, and you kind of sound like Barry White, but you’re Italian, you might be our brothers.”

But in the meantime, the dynamic duo of DBone and Mr. Ciao — whoever they are — are going to savor this moment and let their mythology grow organically.

“It’s just an excuse to make you dance and feel good and forget about the atrocities and complexities of modern life,” Mr. Ciao says of Dolcevita’s Hi-NRG music. “The intent of the album is to just make you time-travel a little bit, a few decades back. … It’s simple. Simplicity. Going back to not overcomplicating everything, like we’re now doing about all aspects of life. Just enjoy yourself and have a good time.”

Rocker Michele Bettencourt may be the subject of the documentary Beautiful Lie, but the fact that her more-fascinating-than-fiction story hasn’t yet been adapted for a biopic — or better yet, a Hedwig-style off-Broadway musical —  is downright mind-boggling.

“Oh, I’m not sure how interesting that would be to a lot of people,” Bettencourt chuckles humbly, sitting with LPTV at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records on Halloween night as she prepares to make her live public debut with her new band, Vampire Time. “I mean, I’ve lived it, so it seems kind of routine to me. It doesn’t seem that special.”

Bettencourt’s nonchalance aside, her life has been anything but typical, even it once seemed that way from the outside looking in. She was once a Silicon Valley CEO leading billion-dollar tech companies, and she also got married, twice, and raised four children. But behind her suburban/corporate façade, she was harboring a deep, dark secret.

Michele, then known as Anthony or “AB” [editor’s note: Michele often deadnames herself in conversation, and has granted permission for this article to include that context], was still grappling with the gender dysphoria that had caused her so much secret shame and pain during her difficult boyhood, back when she was growing up as the only child of a mentally ill mother. And so, at the late-blooming age of 57, Bettencourt blew up her life — leaving her career and marriage, estranging herself from her family, and beginning what she has described as her “emotionally and publicly jarring” transition.

photo courtesy of Licorice Pizza Records

“It’s a boys’ network,” Bettencourt says, ruefully recalling how the tech industry ostracized her at the time. “I was a joke for about a year. I was a meme. It was a comedic thing for people to bring up: ‘Oh, your CEO is now a chick!’ It was upsetting, and I thought, ‘I’ll never work again. I will never get hired in the [Silicon] Valley again!’”

But eventually, Bettencourt not only rebuilt her career and reconciled with her wife and children after a two-year separation, but also pursued the deferred dream of rock stardom that she’d had since age 13, when she’d taught herself to play drums. And in that process, Michele found her real voice. That voice is loud and clear on her debut album, Vampire Time, which features such esteemed collaborators as Carmine Rojas (David Bowie, Rod Stewart), Steve Ferrone (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers), and Russ McKinnon (Barry Manilow, Tower of Power).

“When we wrote [Vampire Time], we kept thinking of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young and Crosby, Stills & Nash — if it were 1969, but now, what would they write?” says Bettencourt, who is on the board of the Sam & Devorah Foundation for Trans Youth, is the founder of the Michele Bettencourt Foundation for Fair Transgender Employment, and is involved in many LGBTQ+ causes. Her protest album features political anthems like “10,000 Flowers,” “How Close (Will You Stand by Me),” “Freak Show,” and “Taking Out the Trash,” but its centerpieces is the single “Everybody Loves a Circus,” which has become a surprise late-in-life radio hit for Bettencourt, landing on five charts. And the album’s autobiographical title track, which certainly could be the Tony-worthy theme for a Vampire Time rock opera, has also racked up more than 4 million plays on YouTube alone.

In the video interview above and the Q&A below, LPTV and Bettencourt go deep during a conversation that took place backstage at Licorice Pizza on the record’s release day, Halloween 2025. That explains my True Blue-era Madonna costume, but here, Bettencourt just remains true blue to herself, no longer having to hide who she really is.

LPTV: My first question is an obvious one, about the Vampire Time cover artwork and what it symbolizes.

MICHELE BETTENCOURT: Well, it symbolizes a very upside-down White House right now. And then the first single that we put out is called “Everybody Loves the Circus,” and that just talks about politics. It is a bit opaque in the lyrics.

And that song is a surprise hit! Congratulations, especially because this has been a long time coming. I don’t know really where to start when asking you about this record and your life. I mean, your life should be a movie. It should be a biopic. It should be a rock musical, actually.

Well, it’s certainly a drama! [laughs]

You’ve had quite a journey. You grew up with music your whole life. You were playing drums at 13. But you’re a relatively late bloomer when it comes to having a band and doing music full-time.

Super-late, yeah. We did a record, a CD, in 2018, which was never released. We printed it, but I gave it away. It was very personal, while I was transitioning. And then I stopped, because it was very exhausting process.

So, you transitioned in 2018?

I transitioned from 2017 to 2019.

I guess you were a late bloomer in that way, too.

Yeah. I was 57 at the time.

Wow. Let’s just go back to the beginning. Like I said, you were into music as a kid, which was probably an escape for you. I know your childhood was rough, and I imagine you were going through some gender dysphoria.

I was confused. In 1968, there wasn’t a discussion about trans people at all. And when you’re caught [wearing] your mother’s stuff and it becomes a very sad night of screaming and yelling, it’s never discussed again, for 50 more years. Then you hide it.

It’s kind of interesting that — even though these people weren’t trans — in that era of the late ‘60s and especially early ‘70s, there was so much of what people called “gender-bending.” There was glam rock, Alice Cooper, the New York Dolls. These were men who identified as cis and mostly straight, like David Bowie or whoever, but they were dressing in makeup and sequins and heels. So, were you into the glam thing? Did that connect to you in any way?

No… in fact, by the ‘80s, I was married at age 21. I had triplet daughters when I was 27. And I was hiding. I would go to work, and then I would not think about it. It was a struggle. For whatever reason, I did not connect [with glam-rock]. We were raising kids, and so my life was very suburban. I worked for a tech company — was a VP of sales at age 24, VP of sales at a public company age 35, and a CEO of a public company at age 42.

Lots of people reinvent themselves, but certainly not to the degree that you did, both personally and professionally. But everyone has a sliding-doors moment in their life. And maybe you could have transitioned much earlier in life, or you could have gone into a rock career sooner. But instead, you were in this white-picket-fence world and became this Silicon Valley hotshot. So, was there a crossroads moment where you were like, “I’m going to choose my own adventure”? And if so, why did you choose the life you chose at that time?

I never considered transitioning when I was younger. Never thought I would do it. I never thought it would happen.

They called it a “sex change operation” back then, in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

I never imagined it. We had triplet daughters that were babies, and then they were growing up and I thought, “I can’t, no, I just can’t.” So, I just put my head down and worked. And I was really good at that. And then I built a bifurcated life. There’d be “Anthony” in the day, and then in New York, there’d be “Michele” at night.

Were you going out to clubs as “Michele”?

Yes, I would literally I’d fly into town, I would do my calls, have my meetings, and then I would change, put on hair and makeup, and go down to the bar and work. And I met a lot of interesting people who were curious. Some were kind of angry about, but it was really a cool social experiment for me. In a lot of cities, I had friends who knew “Michele,” but not “Anthony.”

Wow. Like I said, this is a movie…

Oh, I’m not sure how interesting that would be to a lot of people [laughs]. I mean, I’ve lived it, so it seems kind of routine to me. It doesn’t seem that special.

No, it’s an amazing story — especially when since we haven’t even gotten to the best part yet, which is when you become a rock star! But walk me through when you were living that double-life. Were you happy? Were you tormented inside?

I was pretty tormented, because you feel guilty because you’re going out at night — you’re not telling your family, and you’re [adding] two days onto a [business] trip so you can stay longer to go out and not tell anybody. But I was working; I wasn’t out screwing around. And then what happened later in life is with music, I was in a really crappy blues band and in 2006, my daughters were on MTV’s My Super Sweet Sixteen. I was a 235-pound penguin on that show, at 5-foot-8 in a tuxedo. Season 2, Episode 2, “The Triplets.” And they were 18 at the time! [laughs] I got the band Sugarcult to play, and they let me play with them.

Oh, wow! I have to go back and watch that episode.

It was wonderful. We had a place near my home in a winery, and I remember we had a dinner and I tried to get [Sugarcult] hired as a band. So, they brought their manager, I brought a friend of mine who helped me get the deal done, and I was trying to explain to them that I’ve got my three daughters — they’re lovely kids, they’re 18, they’re not brats. And [Sugarcult guitarist] Marko [DeSantis] and the band all told me afterward that they didn’t like me coming in because it was like, “OK, here’s some asshole rich dad who we don’t want to deal with.” I spent a lot of time saying, “No, my kids are really sweet. You’ll love them! … And my daughters think my band’s going to play [on My Super Sweet Sixteen], and they think that’s pretty cool, but I want you to play instead.”

But you could have been on MTV with your “crappy blues band”!

Yeah, but what [Sugarcult frontman] Tim Pagnotta said was, “Well, why don’t you learn a song and play with us?” And I said, “I can’t. I’m not that good.” They’d just opened for Green Day, the big tour. And then Kenny Livingston, who became really one of my best friends now, the drummer, said, “Dude, you’re not going to take over my day gig. Just learn a freakin’ song! And if you suck in a soundcheck, you can’t play.” And so, I didn’t suck in the soundcheck. I mean, I looked like I was about to have a heart attack when I played, but I think it was “Destination Anywhere,” the song we did, and I nailed it. And then the next day I thought, “I’m going to be in a band!” So, I formed a band, Zen Vendetta. I found people on Craigslist. … We rented out [Stray Cats drummer] Slim Jim Phantom’s club, the Cat Club, and we played our set. It was pretty good. I mean, it was stuck in the ’80s, but good! But when you’re doing music and you’re stuck in ‘80s… then we opened for Journey, Def Leppard, Foreigner, UFO, a bunch of bands.

So, at this point, it’s like you’re leading a triple-life. You’re a Silicon Valley CEO, you have this hidden life as Michele, and then you’re also doing this Hannah Montana rock-star-by-night-thing, all at the same time.

Yeah, I was CEO of a company and I had to leave [the office] early so we could open up at the Mountain Winery for Foreigner! … We were pretty good, but I was the drummer and I took one drum lesson at age 13, so I had my limitations. But in the midst of that, I met Jim [Phantom], and then I met [Sex Pistols bassist] Glen Matlock. I spent a lot of time with Glen, and then I met [David Bowie guitarist] Earl Slick. I’m on Glen Matlock’s album [Good to Go], but I play tambourine. And then I would eventually have all of them come to my meetings at work. We had 500 people in Texas for a sales meeting, and they’d come and play and I’d buy Earl’s guitars, and I’d make it like American Idol and [the business meeting attendees] would vote. Then [the famous musicians] would play a 45-minute set and come sit and have dinner with us all.

Now, that’s a reality show I would watch — along with your rock musical/biopic! So, you were living a pretty already quite interesting life. And then, in 2017…

Yeah, I was CEO and chair of a company worth $1.6 billion. It was a thousand employees, $300 million of revenue. It was a cybersecurity company, very public. I opened the New York Stock Exchange for them. I then opened the NASDAQ for them. And then an investor realized that I was being sloppy with my social media…

Did you have separate social media for your different names?

I did! I had an “Anthony” [account] and a “Michele” one. [The whistle-blowing investor] put $140 million of his firm’s money into my company, and he was pissed. He was worried that I wasn’t paying attention to work. I’d left my wife. I’d moved to New York. I’d bought an apartment. We were separated, and I was a bit messy. But I was not unfocused, I just probably wasn’t the best version of me for work.

So, this guy was transphobic?

No. The thing was, he went to my board. There was a meeting he went to, and he met with one of my board members and dumped on him: “Your CEO, something’s going on. It’s gender, and they’re not focused enough.” It caused a lot of problems for me with the company — not that they wanted me out, it was just they didn’t know how to explain it. I did not know how to explain it! And one of my board members said, “Why didn’t you tell us?” I said, “What am I going to tell you? That I wear dresses and go out? What am I going to tell you? I don’t know what it is.”

They said, “You can just hire a president and put them in California, be the CEO and chair in New York. Run the company, and sell it at some point.” And I was pissed at their response. So, I cleverly hired someone who could be CEO, and then I went to the board and said, “Make them CEO if I’m out. I’ll be chair of the board still, and I’ll leave when I can.” And I left. I left in February of 2018, and then I kind of got more serious about transitioning. And then I came home in 2019. My [second] wife and I struggled at first to date [again], but then we fell in love again.

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Yes, your reconciliation with your wife is another amazing chapter of your story. It seems like everything eventually worked out, but your bio says that this time in your life was “emotionally and publicly jarring” for you. Can you elaborate on that? There was that one investor guy who basically outed you, but in general, what was the reaction in the tech world?

It’s a boys’ network. I was a joke for about a year. I was a meme. It was a comedic thing for people to bring up: “Oh, your CEO is now a chick!” It was upsetting, and I thought, “I’ll never work again. I will never get hired in the [Silicon] Valley again!” Because I know how it worked. Like, I was a board member on a great company board and the company was $350 million and eventually sold for $12 billion, and the CEO was gay and he was terrified of people finding out. And I remember when I was CEO of another company and I wore a black T-shirt, skinny jeans, and earrings at that point — I was starting to telegraph, I guess! — one of my board members said, “Anthony, you’re not turning gay on us, are you?”

Yikes.

Yeah. I thought, “Crap, if that elicited that response…” So, when I came back to California, I wanted to go back and work in the Valley because that’s what I did, and I thought I wouldn’t be able to. I got very, very fortunate. Instead of becoming a CEO, I took board seats. I landed on three boards. We went public in one, opened again the NASDAQ. I became chair of the board and we sold it last year for $1.6 billion.

Well, congratulations. Like I said, it all worked out, on your own terms. But you were already leading this interesting triple-life in all these very different worlds. What made you not want to just stick with the status quo and go, “OK, I’ll be ‘Michele’ on my off hours, and I’ll be a rock person from time to time, but I’ll be ‘Anthony’ most of the time”?

I was tired of hiding. Because you live a life and all of a sudden you’re not truthful 50 percent of the time. You can’t tell your family. How would you explain it? Can’t tell your kids, can’t tell anybody at work. If people find out, you think it’s going to wreck everything. And when that investor went to the board, it played my hand. And it was OK. I mean, I sat down with him. His name is Jesse Cohen. I’ll tell him this: Jesse’s a wonderful guy. He called me about six months after it all got messy for me. We’d meet at the Peninsula for drinks when things were normal and I thought I could handle him as “Anthony” and manage him. And Jesse apologized. He said, “I wasn’t trying to attack you or anything. I was worried about the investment.” And I wasn’t kind to him; I was probably cool and a bit dismissive. And then I called him back three months later, met with him, and I said, “Look, you didn’t get the best version of me. I get it.” He and I still talk. I mean, he bought the album! [laughs]

So, life has turned out to be brilliant. I’m grateful for everything. I feel bad sometimes, though, because my life is a bubble. Just look at what I do now. My life is a bubble. I’m trans, but maybe not as “trans” as people want someone to be. … I’m a dad, I’m a husband, I’m so many things, and it isn’t always consistent with how a lot of trans individuals see life. So, I don’t even fit. But that’s OK.

It’s interesting to me that use you she/her pronouns, but you still refer to yourself as a “husband” and “father.”

I’m probably just as confused sometimes, because I can’t go backward and say I’m a “wife.” I’ve got really lovely wife, and I’ve got a wonderful ex-wife. We all spend holidays together with all the kids, and I’m just lucky. And I don’t have to be in that really bad pool where things are difficult.

Right. When you say you live in a bubble, it’s like, even though you’ve gone through hardships and have dealt with transphobia, it’s not in the way that the average trans woman has.

Yeah. When I lived in New York, my apartment was on 62nd and 3rd, and five blocks away there was a club called Evolve. I didn’t know where to go when I lived in New York, so I went to Evolve, and they had a transgender night. It was really these really cute, sweet kids who were forced to be prostitutes. … I had all these Herve Leger dresses that I bought that fit at one point in time, and I gave them all to the girls. … I remember sitting at the bar the first time I was there and a guy comes up to me and he touches my wig. I had a wig at that time; it looked like everyone’s grandmother when I was in a room! And I looked at him and I said, “If you touch my hair again, I’m going to break your fucking neck.” And the bouncer came over because the guy looked at me and said, “What?” The bouncer came over and walked him out. And I thought I was going to get kicked out. I saw how bad it was.

Are you involved any activism to help transgender people who are not as fortunate as you?

Yes, I’m on the board of the Sam & Devorah Foundation for Trans Youth. … And I’m involved right now in a documentary called As You Are. David Siegel’s producing, and I’m co-producing with Janet Zucker and Jerry Zucker. It’s about the 15,000-plus trans individuals in the military who are being fired by Trump for being trans. [The Vampire Time band has ] a song, “How Close (Will You Stand by Me),” that we wrote for the documentary.

One would assume it is easier for people to be openly trans now than it was when you were young, because now we actually have that language, and we see famous trans people in entertainment. But when you mention the military ban, I feel like things are regressing. And that sort of ties into your album cover. What are your thoughts about what’s going on with trans rights right now?

Well, they’re being rolled back. And according to JD Vance, I’m a “domestic terrorist.” Look, I’ve got a BB gun from 1946 that belonged to my father that doesn’t work. I have no weapons. I’m not a terrorist. It’s just one of those things where it is upside-down and backward right now, and it’s full of hatred. And the trans community is about 1.5 percent of this country. It’s the weakest cohort. So, the lyrics for the single we put out, “Everybody Loves a Circus,” are: “Find a wedge and use it wisely/Distract them with a parlor trick.” It’s all about [the Trump Administration targeting] group by group by group. That’s what they’re doing.

I feel like there’s a lot of scapegoating going on, when so much of the far right’s vitriol is disproportionately focused on a part of the population that’s such a small minority.

Yeah, we’ve caused a lot of bad shit to happen, apparently! Government shutdown? Trans people. My car’s out of gas? Trans people! Yeah, we’re guilty for everything. It’s just bullshit. It’s absolute bullshit.

Would you say that Vampire Time is a political album? Is it a protest record?

It is. When we wrote it, we kept thinking of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young and Crosby, Stills & Nash — if it were 1969, but now, what would they write? And so, we started writing a song called “10,000 Flowers,” which is about apathy. What happens is 10,000 flowers become one, if no one does anything. We have a song called “Freak Show,” which is about the administration. We have a song called “Taking Out the Trash,” which is more deliberate and about both sides screwing everyone. Both sides want to make it red against blue or blue against red, when really, we should be up against the oligarchs and the politicians and the bankers.

You mentioned Joni and Neil and that very idealistic era. People really did think in the ‘60s that rock ‘n’ roll could change the world, with the youth culture that came up with the Woodstock generation and the Summer of Love and all that. But there’s another faction of people who are like, “Just shut up and sing. We don’t want to hear what celebrities think about politics. We don’t want to listen to music about politics.” Do you think that music can still make a difference? Do you think it’s an obligation of musicians to speak up?

I think yes to both. I think it can make a difference. We sit around as a band and talk about the songs we’re writing and the messages we’re trying to impart and how evocative we want to be. We don’t want to be polarizing. We don’t want to create music that forces one side of the country to hate us — even though they may, because of me or something else. But we don’t want to do that. We want to try to unify and get rid of the division. That’s our intent. And maybe we’re a bit naïve, but we think it could make a difference.

What’s interesting is it seems a lot of classic rock fans, and some classic rock artists, are actually quite conservative, even though they may not have been so conservative when they were young.

Well, that’s an Alice Cooper talk, right? I mean, things come out.

Yeah, Paul Stanley has said a couple things about trans kids that were a bit weird. Why do you think that is? I mean, even if they were cis and straight, like I said before, these men wore women’s clothing and makeup, or were at least very androgynous, so you’d think they’d be empathetic.

I think people fear what they don’t understand, oftentimes. And when you really ask the rank and file, how many people have met a trans person — it’s not many. There’s not a lot of us. … So, I would think my job is to be an ambassador. If someone asks a question [about being trans], I’m going to answer it, and I’m not going to be upset. I’m going to give them a real answer. That way, if a trans person walks into the room after me, I want them to be treated better.

Almost 15 years ago, guitarist/vocalist Joshua and drummer David De Leon started playing Beatles covers in their Glendale family garage. Then the Guitar Hero-raised brothers made their unofficial public musical debut, “just for hilarity’s sake,” in a family band with the not-so-family-friendly name the Callipygians (which “means ‘nice ass’ in proper English,” notes Joshua), with their mother on lead vocals and their father on bass, at their grandma’s 75th birthday party.

Before their Better Days deluxe vinyl record release showcase at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records, when it’s jokingly suggested that the brothers — who now play in the indie-pop band One Outta Ten, which they founded in 2017 by “mostly just doing a bunch of Arctic Monkeys covers” — reunite the Callipygians for their grandma’s upcoming 89^th birthday, Joshua chuckles awkwardly, “Um, maybe. We’ll get to that in a second…”

Oof. Bad joke. One Outta Ten are visiting Licorice Pizza to promote their new album, Better Days, which was actually largely inspired by the grief stemming from their dad’s 2023 death — meaning that a proper Callipygians reunion will never happen, obviously. But before we can even apologize for the faux pas, Joshua jokes, “No, it’s OK. We can hold a seance or something,” with David pointing out that their late father “would be disappointed if we didn’t at least have a couple of laughs” during their candid LPTV interview.

Better Days grapples with some heavy stuff, much heavier than people as young as One Outta Ten’s members should ever have to experience, but it’s a surprisingly celebratory record. When asked how they managed to write such a cheerful album about death and loss, the band’s dark humor comes through in guitarist/vocalist Tyler Loftus’s deadpan answer.

“You make the demos before the bad stuff happens!” he quips. “So, you have a bunch of happy songs that you’re ready to write, and then something bad happens to you, and then you’ve got the happy song to write your sad song on top of.”

“I was going to say you frontload the first half of the album with party bangers, and then the mid-shift to just all sad songs,” jokes Joshua.

2023-2024 was not a good time for One Outta Ten, even if they ultimately got a really good album out of it. “Everybody was just going through this period of loss in different ways,” recalls Tyler. “And also, it was right when it felt like we were getting back to some sort of normalcy after COVID, and we were so optimistic about this time. Then we got hit with this giant wave of reality.”

Along with the death of Joshua and David’s father, Ray, who’d been hugely supportive of and influential on the band, just a few months later the De Leons lost two of their aunts and a close family friend. “So, that was three deaths over the course of how many months? Six or five? Three, two months consecutively? And I was like, ‘OK, I really want this to stop. I can’t keep going back to Forest Lawn like this!’” David says wryly. During that time period, Tyler’s grandma and dog also passed away, then bassist Mark Marquez’s dog suddenly died, and on top of all that, the group’s musical equipment was stolen.

“It felt like a year and a day, that kind of thing,” says Tyler. “I remember the day after [Josh and David’s] dad passed, we all went to their house and it was the day that we had that random hurricane in Southern California. And there was an earthquake when we were all sitting around, and it was like, ‘This is unbelievable. It is so surreal. There’s no way to make sense of this, other than to try to think about it and sing songs about it on a stage.’”

“It’s just one of those things that just keeps piling up and it’s hard to process altogether, but during that time, we all had each other and we all knew that we’re all going through very difficult times,” says Mark. “It was nice to have people that you connect with very closely emotionally that are also going through similar things.”

And so, in light of all these tragedies and setbacks, those aforementioned poppy demos the band had been working on took on new meaning and new shape. “We just had all of these songs and we’re like, ‘Well, we know what these songs are probably going to be about now, whatever they were going to be about before,’” says Tyler.

“I feel like I had all these emotions with nowhere to go, super-raw,” recalls Joshua. For instance, the album’s title track, which Joshua had written “when we got all our shit stolen” in February 2023, morphed into a tribute Ray, when he died six months later. “The [original] lyrics were corny and terrible, and then my dad died and it kind of felt like stream-of-consciousness. I scrapped the entire previous first verse, or the first draft of it, and I was just vomiting on a page, and it was all grief. It was like tears mixed with vomit. But it was good. It felt really cathartic. I feel like everyone has had their little cathartic moment on songwriting in this album.”

One Outta Ten have enjoyed the cathartic experience playing Better Days’ songs live, especially when their live shows help forge a stronger bond with their fans. “It’s so incredible to see that connection being made, and then also see them jumping around and having fun a couple minutes later,” marvels Tyler.

“It’s crazy to be playing these songs that we wrote together, and I’m looking in the audience and people are like crying,” says Joshua. “It’s sad and it’s so beautiful, but it’s also like to know that something that we made speaks so directly to people who have either have gone through it. One of the kids was telling me she listened to our album after her dad passed away, and she said it was really powerful for her. I think about that a lot.”

Feeling a new lease on life, so to speak, One Outta Ten, a band with self-described “musical ADHD,” are already thinking about making a one-off City Pop EP. But they also “want to do something productive” and record a metal record that David says will “channel a lot of our activist and political energy.”

“We’re pretty against the current establishment. We do not fuck with Donald Trump at all. We’re pro-choice, pro-LGBTQ, for free Palestine,” Joshua asserts emphatically.

“It’s the first time we’ve ever done [political music] like this before, honestly,” says David. “I think we really want to share this message that there is a better world to fight for, but you have to do it now. And I think the best ways to do it is to call out whatever is out there that’s wrong, but also to poke fun and punch up, to show that whatever monsters we’re facing right now, they’re nothing. We are perfectly capable of fighting back.”

“And also get involved in your community,” adds Tyler. “One of the best things about being part of a band and a smaller band is playing with all of these people, getting to know all of these people and having an opportunity and a platform to be able to talk about shit that matters and fundraise for things that matter and try to make a difference. It’s tough when you’re driving through your own community and you’re seeing ICE vans all over the fucking place. It’s really tough. Being part of a group of friends that care about the same shit that you care about, you can try to build something up with and make pieces of art that hopefully speak to something. It used to be about partying when we were kids, and then it was about loss as we started to grow up. And as we continue to grow up, it’s about all of those things, but also these more serious things that matter.”

And so, One Outta Ten, who’ve sadly had to grow up fast in the last few years, are facing a possibly grim Trump-era future with their trademark optimism and resilience. “So much happened, but it happened, and it’s like, there’s no way that it won’t keep happening,” says Joshua matter-of-factly of their recent ordeals. “In a way, I feel more equipped to deal with life, now that it’s happened. Every day I look back and I’m like, ‘That was the worst day of my life [when my dad died], and there’s no way that it can get worse from there.’”

“Better Days isn’t necessarily the future, and it’s also not necessarily the past, and it’s not necessarily right now. It can be any time,” keyboardist/guitarist JT Hamel sums up of the album’s title and the band’s overall positive message. “I think a lot of those ‘better days’ that we’re referencing in these songs, it’s like the memories of the people that built us and gave us these tools. And now we’re equipping them with this album to propel us towards even more better days.”

In 2025, roots-rock road warriors American Mile played at least 200 shows. But that wasn’t the case, obviously, five years ago, when the COVID-19 pandemic wiped everyone’s calendars and canceled everyone’s big plans. However, it was during lockdown, particularly during the holiday season, that the band found the inspiration to write much of their debut album. And that album, American Dream, finally came out this year during an equally fraught and crazy time.

“Me and [American Mile frontman] Eugene [Rice] lived across the street from each other, so there was nothing to do [in 2020]. So, we would just party and write music every day,” guitarist Joe Perez tells LPTV, sitting at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records, where American Mile playing one of their many raucous, roof-raising 2025 gigs. “We kind of went down the hole. But I want to say we wrote 40 songs, maybe more.”

“I got yelled at one time for being at [Joe’s] house,” Rice jokes. “I forgot it was New Year’s Eve, to be fair! We were writing music, and my lady at the time was like, ‘Where are you?’ And I was like, ‘I’m at Joe’s house. I’m literally across the street writing music.’ I didn’t even realize it was New Year’s Eve —  it was the pandemic, you know what I mean? It kind of just all blended together at some point.”

“We did one show in 2020, and it was a drive-in show,” Perez recalls of that surreal time. “Everyone sat in their cars and honked at us in between songs — to applaud, they would honk at us. It was just so weird.”

However, the band did spend three straight, solid months during the pandemic rehearsing to get “super-tight,” so by the time COVID restrictions started to ease up, they were “very prepared” to return to an actual stage. And American Mile’s first post-lockdown show was at the illustrious Rolling Hills Resort and Casino, in Northern California’s Tehama County.

“Literally, we would be like 30 feet from the audience, with plexiglass in front of the stage. Literal plexiglass,” Rice says. “[The sound] would just bounce off the plexiglass, right back into your face. You’d be playing a guitar and it was just so, so loud inside. You’re like a fish in an aquarium, and some 12-year-old’s there just smacking on the glass. That’s why they say don’t smack on the glass at the aquarium, by the way! I’ve been that fish. I understand it now. The signs are there for a reason.”

American Mile were able to adapt perhaps better than most bands, because, as Perez notes, they’d “always had this mentality: If there’s five people in the audience, it’s Madison Square Garden. Flip some tables, throw up some fingers, and just have a good-ass time.”

“That’s the reality of it. You have to understand that there are going to be a lot of times where you walk into a venue and you’re playing to the bartender and one other person,” says Rice of life on the road. “But you have to understand that when you do that, you’re giving them the greatest show of their life, regardless of who’s there. Because one person turns into two people, turns into four people, turns into eight. That’s always how it goes. That is the fucking music business in a nutshell. There’s no quick way to the top. It just doesn’t exist.”

So, now American Mile are back to their regular grind, and while life is still far from easy, they’re still undeterredly pursuing their own American dream. “We work so hard,” stresses Rice, who like many dreamers came to Los Angeles to pursue music (because he was “so fucking miserable swinging a hammer” as a carpenter in his hometown of Wallingford, Vermont). Despite failing to graduate from Hollywood’s Musicians Institute (“Who needs a diploma to be a musician?”), the move turned out to be a good decision for Rice, because it was in L.A. that he met Perez, American Mile’s other constant, core member. And he’s never regretted his decision, even though being in a “totally independent” band can often be a real slog.

“We’re like $30,000 in debt right now. … Cut up those credit cards, kids!” jokes Rice. “Yeah, I look in the mirror and I cry a little bit! … But I don’t think any of us would be here if we didn’t have real passion for music. … When it’s like your sixth gig in a row and you’ve traveled eight hours and then you get back onstage, you’re like, ‘I remember, every single time, why I’m here and what I’m doing.’”

Rice, Perez, bassist Dezmond Saunders, and drummer Colton Miller would no doubt rather focus on just those euphoric onstage moments. But as a completely self-contained operation (the band recently scored two nominations at the Hollywood Independent Music Awards), they have to run American Mile like a “mean and lean” business to make it work.

“You don’t get into [music] so that you’re like, ‘Oh man, I can’t wait to do the backend business stuff!’” quips Saunders. “It’s fun to play music — that’s everything that we want to do. Get good at doing that, because it doesn’t matter if you can’t do that. … But as soon as it starts to grow, you’re like, ‘Oh, I need to do this to be able to fucking survive.’ ‘ So, you have to buckle down and do the shit that’s not fun.”

“You’ve got to really have your business practices strong. You have to know that going into this, while it is a passion project, it’s not an overnight success. … You have to put the business aspect of whatever your project is in front of your goals as an artist. And I know that that feels weird,” admits Rice. “But you have to look at it business-structure-wise: How can I make this model work in today’s America and take four dudes around the country and play, and still end at the end of the month I can pay rent, I can pay my credit card, I can buy groceries, and have a little bit of money I can throw into my savings?”

All this ties into the title of the new album by American Mile, survivors who “come from meager standings, very middle-class to lower-middle-class kind of income” and in their early days would “go to the Mexican grocery store and buy the cheapest beer we could afford.” Says Rice: “American Dream, to me personally, as difficult as it has become in America to chase one dream… you think back at the people who came to America during the Great Depression, or when when people were coming to Ellis Island, and we complain that life is hard now. And it is, but life was a hell of a lot harder then. And I still think that the American dream is completely possible for your random fucking [small-town] boy coming out to Los Angeles trying to make a career out of music. You just gotta put your fucking feet to the ground and work and work and work.

“I still think with enough hard work you can make whatever your ambition and dream is; the universe will provide it, if you push hard enough for it and you believe in it enough,” Rice continues with almost evangelical zeal. “If you don’t believe in it, if you don’t believe in yourself and what you’re doing and you’re not willing to give 110 percent, it’s never going to happen — it’s not a reality, and you should do something else. And I wholeheartedly believe that that’s how it’s always been. All dreams, that’s how they baseline. If you don’t believe in yourself to the point where you’re going to war for whatever you are doing, you don’t believe in it.”

Despite the fact that American Dream tackles some “real-life shit” of American nightmares — immigration, poverty and inequal wealth distribution, the opioid epidemic (Perez grew up in Williamstown, New Jersey, where the heroin death rate was once nearly 25 times the national average) — and that American Mile spend a good portion of their LPTV interview discussing the pandemic and the numbers-crunching/bookkeeping/credit-card-maxing that comes with being a struggling indie band, they are a ton of fun. Their LPTV interview is also peppered with Spinal Tap references, geeky mentions of the recently announced Rush reunion and Aerosmith deep cuts, and Morrissey jokes, and of course, they are an absolute blast in concert. So, how do American Mile stay so positive?

“Oh, you wanna know our secret sauce?” chuckles Rice. “You’ve got to keep the party alive in a record. … I think there’s just a balance of keeping it authentic and singing about what you know, but also keeping the listener engaged so they don’t want to turn off the vinyl. You gotta keep it interesting. You’ve got to make people want to dance the whole time. And that’s what we learned from doing 200 shows a year.”

“Here’s the cheesy part, right here: Life’s too short  to not do what you want to do, ladies and gentlemen,” Saunders sums up of the band’s ethos. “So, just fucking do it. And that way, you don’t have to live with the what-ifs.”