When I was asked if I wanted to interview Shellac for the current issue of The Wire, my initial response was to regretfully decline due to other commitments. The next day, however, I woke up regretting my regrets. A decisive factor, of course, was the opportunity to speak with Steve Albini, who is famous for, among many other things, giving great interviews.

My favourite interview with Albini is by Eugene S Robinson from 2021, where Robinson (a brilliant artist and writer in his own right, profiled by Laina Dawes in The Wire 473) gets Albini talking about everything but music – racism, sex, charity, Chicago’s murder rate, and the ethics of continuing to enjoy the cultural contributions of problematic celebrities. Albini’s response to this last point comes down to the inherent limitations of time and attention, and not wanting to spend his own precious (and indeed, all too finite) time and attention on people who don’t deserve it. Rejecting the platitude that it is possible to “separate the art from the artist”, Albini offers an axiomatic rejoinder: “The idea that we can remove the artist from the art means that art isn’t communicating anything after all, it’s just decoration, an amusement.”

Not only is Robinson and Albini’s conversation hilarious, it provides a lens that has helped me contextualise some of the more troubling aspects of Albini’s earlier work, from casually violent band names to a documented fascination with transgressive and even morally reprehensible content – all things he expressed regret about in later years. If I had had more time with Albini, I would have loved to have gone deeper on these and other issues (and yes, by other issues, I do mean his epic disdain for Steely Dan). But since the feature was about Shellac, my goal was to capture something of the dynamic within the power trio that has been Albini’s primary creative outlet for the past three decades. Since I had the good fortune to talk to all three band members at the same time, this meant that all I really had to do was get them chatting among themselves, letting their banter reveal the contours of an enduring collaborative friendship.

When I met with Bob Weston, Todd Trainer, and Steve Albini over Zoom on 15 April, I could never have imagined that this conversation would be one of Albini’s last. By a tragic coincidence, the same day that The Wire 484 with its cover feature on Shellac went on sale, Albini passed away. Realising that I had almost certainly conducted the final longform interview with Shellac – if not the last ever interview with Albini – I returned to my transcript to find it overflowing with wonderful stuff that didn’t make it into the print feature due to space constraints.

The following is that transcript, offered with my deepest condolences to those who were close to Albini, in particular Weston and Trainer, who found in Albini not only a bandmate and friend, but a catalyst that invited them to more fully develop their own artistic voices.

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Steve Albini: Bobby, you’re on mute.

Bob Weston: How about now? Can you guys hear me now?

SA: Now we can hear you.

BW: Sorry, I have an insane setup here, so I’m just trying to get it all to work.

Emily Pothast: I really appreciate everybody making time to be here at the same time. The technology makes it possible to close the geographic distance, but it’s still challenging with people’s schedules.

BW: Thank you Covid.

EP: Has Covid really changed the amount that you’re working, still? Or do you have Covid now?

BW: No, I’m just saying that I wouldn’t know about Zoom if it wasn’t for Covid.

EP: Oh, I thought you meant in terms of being free, having time in your schedule right now was the result of Covid.

SA: We had a lovely week where nationally, wastewater Covid sampling was down for the first time in like four years, where it looked like we might actually not have to worry about Covid for a while. And then it went back up again.

EP: It’s interesting how wastewater is where we get our information about Covid. I suppose we could get into the symbolism of that, of finding the truth in the sewer. But instead, let’s talk about the fact that I haven’t heard your new record. I would like to hear as much of it as you would like to share. But I see that you’re not doing any kind of streaming?

SA: As far as not giving people the record early, or whatever, we’re just trying to be even handed with everything. Like, we’re trying not to play favourites with people. I mean, obviously our friends have all heard the record and our families and you know that sort of thing but it creates this weird power structure when certain people get access to the record and they feel like they’re in a little club and then it becomes like a promotional gambit where we’re playing people’s vanity to try to get them to write things about us and stuff like that and it’s just a whole thing that we don’t just want to participate in. We just make the records, put ‘em in the stores, and when people want them they can come get ‘em, you know. There’s a whole metagame to putting out a record that the rest of the music business wants to participate in where they want to make it into, like a parade and a celebrity thing and a status thing, and we’re just trying to bypass all of that. We just want to make records. They take as long as they take, they come out when they come out, they cost what they cost, they just go to the store and any one who wants one, anyone who’s interested can have one.

BW: Yeah, we’ve never solicited press and so we don’t send out copies or links to listen to it. Because we don’t care.

SA: Not to be rude.

Todd Trainer: But it will be available on streaming services.

BW: It will be available everywhere on the same date. Streaming, CDs and LPs. It’s just that we don’t send anything out to the press. We don’t give free copies away to anyone except our friends.

SA: Yeah, there’s also kind of a marketing strategy which is another capitalist notion that we’re just not participating in where you release it in certain formats or certain outlets and give certain streaming services the material and then it starts a word of mouth buzz and then there’s a street date and then you have a fucking team putting up stickers in the stores and shit, like, we just don’t do any of that.

EP: Oh, OK. I thought I read that you were bypassing streaming services, which I actually thought was interesting because of all of the things that happens to music once it enters that system – once your art becomes digital content and gets, like, scraped for data by the all-seeing organs of industry. It made me think about your song “All The Surveyors” where you’re talking about the cameras in orbit surveying everything. I guess I was reading into it a philosophical statement on keeping your art out of the streaming, scraping surveillance arena.

SA: Well, thank you for imbuing more meaning into our music than we did, that’s very kind of you. But we are literally just trying to make ourselves comfortable with the process, and trying to keep things as much inside our control as possible. And there are some very simple ways that we can do that that the rest of the world sees as some kind of a control mechanism. And really, what they are is just making it so that we’re not uncomfortable with what happens to our own band, you know. Like the record label we’ve been dealing with we’ve been dealing with since we started. For more than 30 years. And my relationship with Corey [Rusk] and that record label goes back another ten, 15 years before that. We call the same guy about our records that we called 30 years ago and say what’s up with the record, and the same guy answers the phone and tells us. And when we’re booking shows we make the same phone calls to the same people that we’ve been speaking to for years. We just want things to be simple and comfortable for ourselves. And every time there’s a new – there are these, like behavioural things that the industry does around a new release or by way of promoting things or by way of tying in your touring and your records and stuff – like, all of that stuff makes us uncomfortable and we don’t want to do it. So we just carry on. We get together when we can and we practice. And it’s not heavy at all. We’re not trying to make a statement about things. We just wanna do things in a way that seems normal to us.

BW: So there’s no – like, the record label doesn’t have a promotions department or any other department or a social media department or anything like that. They just make the record available to the stores and that’s it. That’s the end of it. And maybe there’s a press release on Facebook or whatever.

EP: Definitely part of being able to do that is the fact that there are people who will get excited from that announcement alone, because you have been doing this for so long. And it’s been about a decade since you put out a record as Shellac. To me that’s interesting because so many people who survive as artists, who make a living off the art, wind up in this situation where they have to be creative in a very specific way whether they feel like it or not. They have to produce on a timeline whether they feel like that timeline or not. When you say you get together just whenever you want to, it seems like there’s a distinction between a capitalist timeline and the art having its own logic that drives the thing.

SA: Yeah, but I mean primarily we’re friends. And we want to hang out with each other and we want to play music together and we want to do shows and write songs and record and so what’s driving this whole exercise is that we want to do it. And we make time to do it in our lives. All of us have complications and obligations in our lives that we have to pursue, that we have to take care of pro forma. And so we have to carve out time to do things with the band and that’s the driving factor for us. We do it because we really want to do it. Because it’s important to us. And it’s always struck me – the longevity of the band, to me, I think, boils down to the fact that we’ve never allowed the band to be an obligation for any of us. Like a nuisance for any of us. Like, we had the record finished and ready to go several years before it came out. But a bunch of things happened. You know, Covid, we had tours that were interrupted and then there were these massive delays at the pressing plant, and we wanted to get the artwork right. So it took time. But it’s not like there was a conceptual reason for it to take time. It’s just that’s the amount of time it took to get it done. And I also I feel like I would rather have – a band that I love, I would rather have them make a record that they were happy with and proud of and have it take an extra five years than for them to just chump out some garbage because they had a tour coming up and they wanted to get the record out, you know.

BW: It’s simply – it’s not our job. We’re not required to make a living off of it so we don’t need to keep to a schedule.

EP: You’re not making those demands of it and so it’s not making those demands of you. So, I know that all three of you work day jobs in meta-musical fields in some capacity – either recording or mastering or teaching music. Something all of these things have in common is how they help to bring other people’s music into being. I’m wondering how being on that end of things informs what happens when you come back together as Shellac.

SA: Well, I know I love the stories that Todd tells us about clever things his students say and things that he’s doing with his students. And I don’t get those kinds of interactions. I don’t get to see the smile on a 12 year old’s face when they first learn how to play a backbeat or whatever. But I love that sort of shared innocent joy that Todd gets to see every day. I have a pretty distinct partition between the music that I work on professionally for other people in the studio and the music that I work on with Bob and Todd. Like, I don’t think those interact with each other that much, honestly. Sounds weird, because it’s still music, and still bands. But, like, I often see things that bands do in the studio and think, well I’m glad we don’t do that. [Steve and Bob laugh.]

BW: What do you think, Todd?

TT: Well obviously Steve’s expertise, and your expertise, Bob, are very helpful when it comes to recording or mastering a record, but you know, like Emily said, that’s only been once in the last decade and it’s for a few days or a few hours. So maybe your experiences aren’t constant reflections that reflect back onto the band and how we operate, but certainly your experience and expertise helps when it comes to recording or mastering. And I think the major difference between Bob and Steve and myself is that they probably hear a lot more new music than I do.

I’ve become a little less adventurous as I get older. And they definitely have their finger on the pulse, if you will, of what’s going on a little more because Steve’s recording bands probably a couple a week on average and many of them unheard of – certainly unheard of by myself – so he’s exposed to a lot of new music. And then Bob likewise is probably exposed to more music with all these mastering projects. So, you know, them guys are up to their necks with new music on a regular, daily basis. Myself – so, I do drum instruction and drumming instruction. And it’s been incredibly fulfilling but I’ve had to look at the drums, the instrument, from a new perspective that I never did my entire life. My entire life I just wanted to be creative and original. I wanted to be a unique, distinct drummer. So all my favourite drummers, or musicians in general, have one common thread which is that they’re easily identifiable if you hear them play. That’s true in Shellac, but it’s also true when I was ten. If you heard – I don’t like to throw out a lot of names, but if you heard Keith Moon playing drums it was obviously Keith Moon. And these guys that had signature styles, to me, that’s something I started to strive for in my late teens, I guess.

I wanted to be original and creative. And actually the first two bands I was in didn’t allow me to do that. because I replaced a drummer, in one case, and was kind of, um, limited to playing his parts. And then the second band that I was in, I replaced a drum machine. So I was limited to playing these machine-type parts. And it wasn’t until Steve and I started playing together that I was able to really develop my own style, which had a lot to do with his style. His awkward rhythms and sense of rhythm had a big influence on how I approached the drum kit and I was able to develop a unique style shortly after Shellac started, basically. But back to teaching – the one thing I never did early on was work on rudiments. And just for the people who are unfamiliar with the world of drum rudiments, it was originally a group of 26 rudiments and I call it Morse Code for the army. It was basically for marching drummers to communicate with the front lines. So these were not really developed for rock drummers although they have now expanded the 26, the original 26 are now 40 rudiments and you know, some of them are very applicable to music in general, and some of them are not. And you know, typically your marching band drummers are going to be very good and know them all inside out. And once I started teaching I thought wow, I really need to learn these rudiments.

BW: They’re sort of like technical exercises?

TT: Yup. Essentially sticking exercises. And they’re very valuable for speed and dexterity and you know, they’re fantastic exercises, but not always applicable to a rock band. So my biggest goal has been to improve as a drummer and improve as a teacher, but try to keep that separate from Shellac. I try not to let rudiments creep into my style. Although, when I’m at home here in Minneapolis, that’s all I’m doing now is like, hey, I’m gonna try this ridiculous rudiment! Because it’s a ridiculous rudiment I’ve never played in my whole life! So they’re fun for me, they’re challenging for me, but when I go to Chicago I try to make a great effort and attempt to just play as the drummer I’ve been in Shellac. And not get fancy and not let all these rudiments influence my style so much. It’s something I teach with, something I don’t create with.

SA: I think the commonality here is, I guess, that what we’re doing in our professional lives is related to music but it doesn’t have a huge impact on Shellac. Like the fact that Bob owns a mastering studio, so instead of flying to England to cut a record at Abbey Road at enormous expense, you know, I could get there on the Blue Line if I really had to. You know? That makes a huge difference, just in the comfort and the familiarity in the band. Like you know, things don’t have to be as much of an ordeal when we have these facilities. Like if we happen to have a weekend free in the studio and we happen to have a new song and we happen to want to record it, we can do it. That sort of thing means that we don’t have to have, you know, rigid planning to the extent that we would if we had to book time elsewhere and send money overseas and all that kind of bullshit. Like, everything is – the sort of related aspects of it are practical, rather than creative or functional.

BW: Yeah, I guess my response would be similar to what Steve said, in that I don’t feel a huge connection between my work and the band. Or I don’t think it influences the band, my work doesn't influence the band any more than the fact that I get to listen to tons of new music and anything you listen to is gonna, you know, go in your brain and float around in there. Everything you’re exposed to changes how you write music or play somehow, but not specifically, more just generally. Generally getting exposed to a lot of music.

SA: I did a project recently – I’m not gonna talk about who it is because there’s a political aspect to this – but where a band was recreating an earlier recording for the purposes of having their own material under their control so that they could license it and keep all the money.

BW: You did Taylor Swift?

SA: No, I’d be in a nicer studio if I was doing a Taylor Swift record. Um, and that was a really interesting exercise to me. Because this was a record they did 20, 25 years ago, 30 years ago. And even the very people who did it were having a hard time figuring out what they did and how they did it. And with a team of professionals working on it trying to regenerate this music that was extremely familiar to them – that they in fact made – it was very difficult to do things again that they had previously done. You know, like the original record might have been knocked out in three or four days. And they were here for well over a week, you know, trying to do this meticulous recreation of it and it was way more work, you know. And that was interesting to me, just as an exercise and very briefly I thought, like I wonder if we could do – when I just scrolled back through my head of some of the old Shellac recordings, I wonder if we could recreate those. And I know that like our playing styles are all slightly different, our ways of our modes of creativity are different now. Our aesthetics are all different and I think it would be equally hard for us even though we are sort of regarded as a band who hasn’t changed in 30 years. Like our shit is basically still the same. But even as simple as our shit is, I think it would be difficult to regenerate it that far down the pike. So I guess that’s a moment of reflection that wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t working with that band in the studio.

EP: That reminds me a little bit of Aaron Dilloway. He’s obsessed with these 8-track tapes that you could buy at truck stops in the 1970s or 80s. Like instead of The Rolling Stones or whoever, it was somehow cheaper to pay for studio time for a band that wasn’t The Rolling Stones to record their albums. So he’s got this whole collection of these covers of entire albums on 8-track.

BW: I didn’t even know that existed.

EP: I didn’t either but Aaron Dilloway has a whole bunch of these 8-tracks. It’s wild that it was in someone’s financial interest to do this at some point. And it’s such an absurd endeavour, but it speaks to how commodified music becomes once it’s in the situation of being sold for profit. Because music itself is intangible but the album is this tangible thing that you can sell. I think about the name Shellac, which obviously has connotations of an obsolete format; an old way that music is made material in an object. And because of this, I guess in my head I’ve put you into this category of artists who think a lot about the object-ness of records.

SA: We do, kind of. I mean, not so much in the conceptual way that you’re describing, but we do take a lot of care – kind of an uncomfortable amount of care – in the presentation of our records. Like the cover of the record that’s coming out shortly is an architectural photo that Bob took of Union Station in Chicago and – we got physical copies in – and I could not be happier with the way it came out. There’s a printing technique that we have used in the past that the guy who does our formal art direction – a guy named David Babbitt, he’s really a genius with this stuff – and he helped put it all together. This technique is called a duotone; the image is printed twice. It’s a black and white image, so it’s printed with black ink, but it’s also printed at a different contrast level with silver ink. So you get this slight iridescence in the gray portions of the scale, which have this reflective silver in them that makes the whole image look, like, sculptural almost. And I couldn’t be more happy with the way the record came out and it was a nuisance getting it right but I am extremely glad that we did all of the things that we did to make this record look the way it looks. And the pressing – we’re using a newly developed pressing technique that only has one place in the world that does it and the reasons that we wanted to do it are kind of to do with the way we think about the band and the way people should interact with music – and that took for fucking ever. And Bob had to, you know, custom cut the lacquers in order to suit this process and a lot of it was an enormous pain in the cock, right? But in the end what you have is this record and we’re now proud of it. And if we had just sloughed off any of these decisions or any of these things I wouldn’t have the same affection that I have for the record. I wouldn’t feel as gratified holding it in my hands as I do. And that’s true for all of our records. I’m extremely proud of – if you have a collection of Shellac records, I’m extremely pleased with the idea that you could take any one of them as a physical object and kind of marvel at it and little details and things about it. And the more you know about it, the more rewarding that marvel would be, you know? I feel like that’s a plus and that’s a layer of satisfaction that I get out of this band that I didn’t get out of any of my other musical stuff that I did prior to Shellac. Because I feel like I’m super proud of these records as things, you know?

EP: Both you and Todd have mentioned getting satisfaction out of Shellac that you weren’t getting out of previous projects. And I want to just – for the sake of chronology, and thinking about ‘now’ as a snapshot of things that all have causes running through them – ask about when you all met and started working together. And like (Todd kind of talked about this a little), but what you were doing before that – maybe in how you were raised, or how you discovered music, or the scenes you were coming up in – that sort of prepared you to come together as Shellac.

SA: Well I don’t want to speak for Bob and Todd, but we came up in very similar circumstances. Like, we played in bands and our bands functioned in the punk and post-punk underground of the US.

A lot of that was informed by a very DIY sensibility where you do as much as you can for yourself and you don’t expect indulgences from other people and you work with the available materials. Like, these are the kind of clubs we play in so we’re going to suit our stage behaviour to playing in these kinds of clubs. You know, these are the size of audiences that we’re going to have, so we’re going to suit our expectations to this size of audience. You know, that kind of thing.

And I know for myself, from the beginning of that stuff, like when I first started playing publicly in the 80s — in 1978, 79, whenever – it never occurred to me for a moment that there would be reward, like financial reward, or that it would be a career. That was never even a ghost of an impression in my mind, that I would be a professional musician playing music for a living. Like that was not an ambition of mine, it didn’t seem realistic, and, like, in the circles that I’ve traveled in, those kinds of ambitions were seen as kind of gauche, or gaudy or unrealistic and delusional. Like, you’re in a band called The Fuckbabies, you think you’re gonna be on television? You know? It’s like, that kind of thinking just never entered our mind. And so you develop a pattern of behaviour and you develop a mode of thinking where none of that stuff is a consideration.

Now, if I had come of age in a later generation, where you could shoot yourself singing on your iPhone and post it on YouTube and be an international star, like if that was the reality I’m sure I would be an awful person by now, if I had come of age later where I didn’t have to make do with scraps and I didn’t have to just put things together on a shoestring. I’m sure that that would have played into my vanity and that I’d be awful. I feel like being formed in that scene tempered me as a person and made me rational and comfortable with less, is a way to describe it. And those scenes were all full of such freaks and weirdos, you know? Like having a guy in your band whose profession was that he was a weed dealer wasn’t a big deal. That was normal. Or having friends who were, like, part time prostitutes or whatever. Or having, you know, like people in the underground – like the real underground of society – all around you. That was normalised. And that also kind of tempered me as a person, made me more open minded about what kind of people are legitimate and what kind of people I should take seriously. I feel like all of that to me – that scene and those people formed me as a person. And I’m grateful for it. Because I know that I was susceptible to influence because they influenced me. And if I had fallen in with an uglier or dumber crowd, I would be a dumber and uglier person.

BW: Like Steve said, all three of us, prior to Shellac, we were all in similar sort of level bands in this underground circuit in the US. We all did six week tours in vans, right? In the late 80s? So we all came from the same place and the thing that I find interesting is – I played in a band called The Volcano Suns for a while before I moved to Chicago, that was my big band before I joined Shellac – the thing that I think is interesting is that I think all three of us, our playing styles were pretty different in our previous bands than how they are in Shellac and I’m not quite sure how we ended up playing the way we play together. Because my Volcano Suns bass playing doesn’t have a lot to do, I think, with my Shellac bass playing. And maybe I’m crazy, maybe it does? But it seems kind of different to me and – well, I mean, Steve and Todd already were playing before I joined. So they had a batch of songs already going and I sort of – I needed to just learn those songs the way they had been playing them already. But, for the other stuff, I don’t feel like – yeah, I don’t think I play like I played in The Volcano Suns; I don’t think Todd plays the way he played in Rifle Sport and Steve, your style is pretty recognisable but it’s still, you don’t sound like you did in Big Black or Rapeman when you play in Shellac, I don’t think.

[At this point, I have to send them a second Zoom link because the first meeting has expired.]

EP: So, we were talking about the way that you’re not playing like you were playing in other projects when you came to Shellac. That there’s something different about this situation. I’m curious about that. I would like to know more about what defines this project and your relation to it. Is it being friends? Is it the lack of external pressure? What kinds of questions or challenges do you set up for yourselves?

SA: I feel like I’m dominating this conversation and it makes me a little uncomfortable but I do a lot of these interviews and so I have a tendency to leap right in after there’s been a question, so forgive me, Bob, and when Todd gets here I’m going to ask him to forgive me as well.

BW: Todd and I both feel that Steve’s super eloquent on his feet, so we normally defer and let him do all the interviews because he’s good at it and he likes it, and I’m usually pretty uncomfortable with them and would prefer to go out and have a nice dinner.

SA: But for me, when… [Answering phone: “Hello? Come on in.”]

BW: When Todd comes back I have a final thought about what I was saying a second ago. And then we should pitch it to Todd, about how his previous bands affected Shellac.

SA: There was a thing that I was aware of in the music dude scene where, you’re in a band, that band has some notoriety, it goes under, so because of that notoriety you can start another band fairly easily. It’s a facile thing. So you start another band, that band goes through its paces, maybe you achieve something, maybe you don’t, whatever. And maybe when that band ends you start another one, or maybe you just go out as a solo act, and you just have people backing you up. Like, that kind of lifer behaviour seemed awful to me. It seemed like it wasn’t doing music with purpose. It seemed like it was just doing music because it was the easiest way to go forward. It was like a cop out, to just carry on doing this, right?

So when I started the band after Big Black, it was because I had known and admired David Sims and Rey Washam and I wanted to play music with them. It was kind of an ambition of mine to play music with people of that calibre. And we got along initially and we wrote some music and we made a record and we did some touring and I was proud of all of it, but from a chemistry standpoint we just should never have been in a band together. You know, our personalities were not suited to each other and we didn’t want to function in the same way.

So that band was sort of short lived, and it made me realise the sort of frailty of that way of doing things, of just hopping from project to project, and doing it because it was easy. And I kind of made a promise to myself that if I was ever going to start another band that it would be with intent. And it would be the last one. I would ride that one out. Whatever the next band I was in, I wanted it to be like, I wanted it to be for keeps. I didn’t want to just do it because it was easy to start another band because I had some notoriety or whatever. So I didn’t play music for a few years. And then I kept myself busy by recording other people and by doing, like, little temporary things. And one of those was that I played in the backing band for our mutual friend Peter Conway, who put records out under the name Flour.

BW: I saw that show in Boston.

SA: Yep. We did a couple of tours where Pete put together a backing band, and Todd played drums and I played bass in that backing band. And various other Minneapolis…

BW: David Sims was in that band, right?

SA: David Sims played guitar, and then the ‘cwelders – [Rob] “Led Robster” [Graber] and Bill Graber from Arcwelder – played in Pete’s backing band. I don't remember who else. Todd, do you remember who else was in Flour’s backing band? There were two different versions.

TT: For us it was David Sims, Brian Paulson, you, and I.

SA: Brian Paulson! How could I forget Brian Paulson? He played guitar in both of those. Brian didn’t play on the records, though. You played on some of the records right?

TT: I did drum programming on two of them. I only played on, I think I played live drums on Luv 713.

SA: At any rate, Todd and I started playing, while I was in Minneapolis for the rehearsals and getting ready for the Flour tours, Todd and I started playing together informally just the two of us. And I had some goofy riffs and between the two of us we started to put music together that seemed like it was actually a band. Like we were starting to put together a body of songs. Very informally, very casually, like I would go to Minneapolis and we’d play for a weekend or he would come to Chicago and we’d play for a weekend.

EP: What year is this?

SA: 1990? 91? Somewhere in there. Yeah, I don’t remember. It’s all one long week to me. I don’t do the details. But, like, you know, there was never any ambition about it. We just enjoyed each other’s company, we enjoyed playing together. And then we tried playing with another person playing bass – a guy that we love named Camilo Gonzalez who’s like an old school punk rocker from Chicago – very creative, very clever guy, great bass player. I couldn’t really articulate why, but we could just tell that that wasn’t gonna be the band. And then I had known Bob from The Volcano Suns…

BW: Steve recorded us. Steve recorded our last album. That’s where we met.

SA: …and he was talking about wanting to get out of Boston potentially, and I had this studio in my house that I was upgrading, and I said, well come out here, and we’ll fix up the studio and you can try playing in Shellac and we’ll see how that goes.

BW: The Shellac thing wasn’t a foregone conclusion, that I’d be in the band when I moved out here. I moved out here for the job. And then it was like, try playing with me and Todd, maybe it will be OK, but no promises.

SA: ...and very very quickly after we started playing with Bob, it just felt like a complete band, and we were fairly content just doing it in the basement, you know? Like, not that concerned about touring and making records and stuff until we had, like, a kind of body of material together and we wanted to get out and start playing it in front of people. And that also started very informally, like playing unannounced shows at a local tavern where a friend of ours worked. And then – I may have this wrong, but I want to say that our first ever tour was when we went to Japan and Australia, is that correct?”

TT: New Zealand, Australia, and Japan.

BW: Had we played any US shows other than the Augenblick?

SA: I think we had just played the Augenblick.

TT: That’s correct.

SA: When I think about that now, that sounds fuckin’ insane.

BW: Well yeah, I mean, your concept was, you’re famous, and we’re not going to be allowed to learn how to be a band onstage in front of people because too many people are gonna show up to our initial shows with high expectations and we won’t get to become comfortable onstage in front of small crowds. So let’s go somewhere where there are lower expectations where we can play small shows. Let’s go to Japan, Australia, and New Zealand and learn how to be a band onstage before we have to play in front of people who are gonna be real critical.

SA: Did I actually say that out loud?

BW: Yeah, something like that. Todd, do you remember it like that?

TT: Essentially. Yeah, that was the idea. That there would be high expectations if we were to do a US tour or something.

BW: Yeah, the Big Black guy! Come see Steve Albini and his band.

TT: Which would have been extremely disappointing for those with high expectations.

SA: Wow. That’s way more thought than I would have put into it now.

BW: But to return for a moment to the topic of having been in previous bands – the other thing, to reiterate what Steve was saying, I think all three of us had been playing in bands as our hobby that we loved. And we all had jobs and we would all get in a van with a sound guy and travel the country and so when we started doing Shellac we were like, why would we change any of that? It’ll be the three of us and a sound guy in a van playing small clubs touring the country whenever we felt like it. So it never made sense to do it any differently, because that’s how we had all been doing it for years. Todd, what were your thoughts about coming from what you were doing into Shellac and how that affected Shellac?

TT: Well, one of Steve and I’s first conversations, essentially, was what did we enjoy about our previous bands and what didn’t we enjoy about our previous bands? What did we learn from our previous experiences? And just try to sort of sketch out a rough outline that was, hey, here are the things that worked, that we enjoyed, and these were the things that we didn’t and just kind of tried to model it after our best experiences and avoid our worst experiences.

BW: Do you remember things from the list?

TT: Well, really specific things, like Steve didn’t want to have monitors. He didn’t want to rely on monitors because sound checks could turn into these major projects in themselves. That was the idea behind just having one drum monitor and having the drum kit set up in front of the bass cabinet and in front of the guitar cabinet so that we had one monitor to rely on, one mix to rely on. There were simple things like that, I think? Um, and the list was probably quite elaborate, actually. But those were the types of things. It was like hey, soundcheck can be a real drag when everyone’s trying to get a real comfortable mix, what if we just relied on one that all three of us could live with.

BW: And also, when you get three monitor mixes going on an analog console and you come back later in the night to play the show, they never set it up the same so it would always sound different.

TT: So those were the types of things we did. We tried to simplify the band.

BW: Like logistical things?

TT: Yeah, essentially. I think so.

SA: Yeah, a lot of bands have other people that they delegate stuff to because they don’t want to deal with it. Like they have a booking agent to book their tours because they don’t want to have to deal with it. And they end up having just as many problems with their booking agent as they would have had if they had called the club themselves. And there’s this layer of administration that kind of irritates and obfuscates things. There was a big discussion a few months ago about how there are all these things that get added to a contract between a band and a club when they’re playing. Like merchandise fees was the hot talking point for a couple of hours. Like if you buy a T-shirt from a band at a certain venue, the venue takes 35 per cent so they have to increase the price of the T-shirt, you know. And those are the sort of things that a booking agent wouldn’t care about. Because it doesn’t affect their percentage of the gig. And so they would let things like that fly. But if you were booking the gig yourself, there’s no way you would put up with that, right? Basically having intermediaries between us and other people – like, you didn’t have to go through a press person to speak to us. Your magazine just emailed us and we were like, yeah sure, you know? Like, we don’t have a publicist, we don’t have a lawyer, we don’t have a manager, we barely have a record label.

EP: You can’t pay someone to care as much as you would about something that you actually care about.

BW: Exactly.

EP: Todd, I feel like you’ve already said a little bit about this, but I want to go back to that question about how your previous experiences have influenced your role in Shellac.

TT: For me, this speaks back to what I was saying earlier about being in my two previous bands in which I replaced other drum parts, a drummer and a drum machine. So the exciting thing about this for me, other than having an opportunity to play with Steve, who was one of my favourite guitar players at the time, and still is I suppose, was the idea that I could truly express myself and develop my own style. Something that I had wanted to do before I was in those other bands. Those other bands were bands that I greatly admired, and were tremendous opportunities for me to actually be in a band, and you know play shows. They were great experiences for me. I really loved those bands, I loved their music, I loved being able to play it. It was really challenging for me to learn those parts and play them. It did not come terribly naturally to me. You know, it’s very unnatural for anybody to play somebody else’s music, or for a painter to paint someone else’s painting, or a sculptor to sculpt someone else’s sculpture, you know. It’s a lot more work than just creating your own thing. And so that was the most exciting opportunity for me.

It was like, wow I get to really develop my own drum parts, patterns, fills. So that was a big opportunity for me. I could really develop my own identity as a drummer. I recognised that early on. When I started – I think when you start, most musicians naturally just kind of emulate their idols, if you will. I get a lot of drummers that come in and they’re like I want to play like – and they’ll name some of the greatest drummers who’ve ever graced the planet. And I say, well, that’s going to be a really unsatisfying endeavour because (A) you never will, and (B) if you want to play drums like yourself, we can do that today. We can do that in a half an hour. Half hour lesson, I’ll have you playing drums like Emily. But we could work on it a lifetime and you’re never going to play drums like Buddy Rich. There’s a natural element of his skill. He was just maybe gifted, right? And not everybody is gifted. But I do believe that everyone can develop their own style and learn to play an instrument to varying degrees of technical proficiency.

So yeah, I guess that’s what I would say about it. It was just a great opportunity — something I recognised early on, I want to be my own drummer, then the first two bands I was in I couldn’t be that drummer. I was the substitute drummer. And then I got to be my own teacher. My own drummer. So, very rewarding. It wasn’t until we did the first Shellac singles where I was like, awesome. My drum parts. My patterns. And again, Steve was influential on how I played because of his ideas, you know he laid the foundation for me to sort of create these parts and things that I was really excited and satisfied with.

SA: One thing that I think is really cool – and this is just related to this idea of originality – is that people emulate their heroes when they first get started with an instrument. As a way of learning they try to do things that have been inspirational to them. They emulate people or try to recreate things. [Answering phone: “Hello? Come on up.”] So the fundamental thing is that the person that you’re emulating, the person that you’re idolising – they got there by accident. They developed their style just by doing what they thought was cool in the moment. Like sometimes there was an element of them idol worshipping someone who came before them. But the part that you like, the part that’s uniquely theirs, that came from them unbidden. Like they were playing one day and this thing came out and they were like, oh, that’s cool. Let me work on that.

And so one of the things that I like about the way Shellac writes our songs and the way we function as a band is that when we’re playing, we all allow for, oh I just did a thing there, let me work on that thing. And we all allow for that, as a fundamental part of the band, so that these distinctive quirks in our playing are accommodated. It’s not like, you have to play it like this. It’s like, we’ll get started with this idea and then see what happens. Like, the majority of what we’re doing, we’re just doing it to see what happens. We’re not really doing it to try to hit a target, you know?

EP: I want to talk about the aspects of your music that involve spoken word or texts in some way. Because there’s obviously a lot of times in your live sets where you are either stopping and taking questions or adding spoken word elements to songs that have this comedic aspect. And I’m curious about that, because there’s both a semantic meaning and sonic presence to words, and texts bring in all kinds of ideas and associations beyond the sonic. So I guess what I want to know is, for this band which is so instrumental and sound-oriented, in a way, what is the importance of text?

TT: I’m going to give you my opinion first because I have a dentist appointment so I’m going to be departing the Zoom here in about ten minutes. You brought up a comedic aspect to the text. 99 per cent of that is Steve, if it’s in the middle of the song or something. Bob does the question and answer things, which can also be very comedic. But the one thing I would say about the text that Steve’s interjecting in the middle of a song, which we do quite regularly. There are a few songs that typically are the foundation for these moments but they can be comedic, they can also be tragic. So that’s one thing that keeps Bob and I really hanging on to Steve’s every word. They’re not terribly predictable. And from evening to evening they can go from funny to really sad. So only if you see the band multiple nights in a row would you understand that those are quite different from night to night for the most part. They can be very comedic and funny and they can crack Bob and I up, and sometimes he will go off and it will bring a tear to your eye because they can be quite sad. So he has the ability onstage to run this gamut of all the emotions. I feel like our best shows go through all the emotions. It’s a roller coaster of like, exciting, dull hopefully more exciting than dull. Funny, sad, hopefully more funny than sad. But we have the ability as a band to do that, but primarily Steve can do it with the spoken word. And Bob can be very funny with the question and answers as well.

BW: I think we like making people uncomfortable too, sometimes.

SA: Well, part of my conception of the whole thing was like, when Bob started doing the questions, that was spontaneous. Like, I had to tune my guitar. We used to do – there was one song in particular that we did where I intentionally whacked my guitar out of tune so that it has this dissonant sound, right? There’s a song called “Song Of The Minerals” where the beginning of the song is me detuning my guitar so it’s a mess. And when we would play that song, after that song it would take me a while for me to get my guitar back in tune. And Bob just sort of one day spontaneously started asking if anybody had any questions to fill the time.

BW: I did that so I wouldn’t have to have ridiculous stage banter. “How’s it going tonight ya’ll?” I could put that onto the audience.

SA: And that got me thinking about another concept that was kind of fundamental to the band from the beginning, which is that we’re all at the same show. The crowd, the bartenders, the people on stage, the guys working the show. We’re all at the same show. We’re all here having the same experience and we want everybody to participate in the thing as much as they can. And when you’re interacting with people that way, in a direct way, and an unfiltered way, then it kind of reinforces that you’re taking them seriously, that they’re a legitimate part of the show. They’re not just furniture that we’re extracting money from. They’re people having this experience with us. And, you know, I want to know what’s on their minds. And I really, really value getting these exchanges with the audience because it reinforces this thing that it’s not show business. We’re not just being paid to do labour in front of you. We’re not just extracting money from your appreciation of us. We’re having a thing. We’re all at the same gig, and we all get to participate in it. To me, that’s a pretty important part of it.

BW: We all enjoy the shows so much more when the audience seems like they’re a part of it with us, than when they feel separate from us.

SA: There’s a lot that goes into it. Like, when there was a thing for a while where even at, like, relatively small shows there was this barricade put up between the stage and the audience. And also, like, bands would set themselves up on these risers where they’re like, apart from the crowd. And we’ve always kind of set up on a flat stage as close to the front as we can and we’re right there with them. And my favourite thing to do in a song is to address one person. Like, if there’s this whole song going on and there’s one sad little person there and I’m just having a conversation with him while the song is going on. Like that’s my favourite thing. It doesn’t happen that often but we’ve done more than a few shows where just sort of spontaneously somebody from the crowd has said, “Hey can I play your drums?”

BW: Yeah, during the questions.

SA: And Todd always immediately hops up from the throne and hands them his sticks.

EP: Now that people are going to know that, you’re going to get a lot more of it, I think.

BW: Well, you don’t have to write that.

SA: That can be between you and me.

EP: Before you leave, Todd, I know you play like yourself, you’re not trying to emulate anyone else, but I am curious: you’re young, and you think, maybe I want to be an artist – what do you hear that makes you go, oh, this is an approach that I’m interested in knowing more about, or taking in my own direction. Like, influences.

TT: As a drummer?

EP: Yeah. Or anything. As a personal philosophy of approaching art.

TT: So, I’ve always been as interested in music in general as drums probably. So guitar, bass guitar, singing, lyrics. All of those things are fascinating to me. When I enjoy a band I usually enjoy the entire band. And I’m not one to maybe listen to the band because, oh, that drummer’s really fantastic. I’m all in for the band that’s all in for themselves, essentially. And I think, I knew really early on when I would go see Aerosmith in the arena. My first thought was, when I grow up and get a real job, it’s gonna be roadie for The Who or something like that. I’m going to hang out backstage outside by the 18-wheel semi and offer to move speakers around for a living.

Much like Steve or Bob, I never assumed that I would be in a band for anything more than fun. Punk rock blew that whole sort of – I hate to say dinosaur rock, because I love a lot of those bands, who are really important bands in my life – but the fact that now these snotty kids came along and like, they couldn’t play to that level, they didn’t have that level of experience, they didn’t have that level of affordability to go buy fancy equipment. And they were making really great records. Or just great bands popping up out of nowhere. And that was the moment where I was like, wow, I really want to do this thing. I want to be in a band. And it became obtainable. It was no longer these people you idolised as much as, wow, we can do that. You can do that. And that would have been the late 70s, when that really exploded, I think. And the number of bands exploded exponentially after that, I think. It certainly did in Minneapolis.

Minneapolis’s music scene in the very late 70s and very early 80s was absolutely outstanding. I had no real idea how great it was. My earliest shows outside of the arena shows, outside of seeing massive bands play in front of 20,000 people, were seeing The Replacements and Hüsker Dü and Soul Asylum play in front of 50 people. And that was the small little scene of like, these guys are really great! Never expecting it to be recognised or legitimised by the rest of the world. And it wasn’t. It really wasn’t until most of those bands were over and done, in all honesty. The Replacements or Hüsker Dü at their peak never played to more than a few hundred people. It was only after the fact that they became sort of recognised as influential artists by the rest of the world.

So I was really lucky to be – and Chicago had its own scene, and Boston has always been a great music city – everyone had their own little scenes. But we were all very fortunate to grow up in a really exciting time. The late 70s, early 80s time was magnificent and that’s when I realised, I can do this! These guys are just up here playing in front of 50 people. So the expectations were very, very low. It wasn’t 20,000 people, it was 50 people or something. And that was me trying to meet all those people, all the scenesters that were doing that, because I didn’t have peers at my high school that were. So I kinda had to infiltrate the scene. I introduced myself to Steve at the first Big Black show at the 7th Street Entry. I would do that. I would introduce myself to bands just to say, hey I liked your music. Because you could. You couldn’t meet Angus Young when you were sixteen, but when I was old enough to see shows in town, like, you could just walk up to the stage and introduce yourself to the band and say, that was awesome. I really enjoyed it. And so that’s when I realised, I can do this. I can be in a band. And it’s been really one of the most satisfying and rewarding things in my entire life, being a part of all of the bands that I’ve been in.

SA: I got very lucky when I landed in Chicago in 1980. I came here to go to college just because Northwestern University had a journalism programme.

TT: Steve, hold that thought. Bob and Steve, nice to see you. Emily, lovely to meet you. I’m going to sneak off because my dentist is half an hour away.

SA: Thanks for doing this, Todd. I appreciate it.

TT: My pleasure.

SA: So, I got very lucky by landing in Chicago into a music scene where, like, everybody that I met and everybody that I saw was inspirational in some way or another and I still consider a lot of them friends. And when I listen to those old recordings or see any evidence of that old scene, I’m reminded of how much better and how much more invigorating the music scene was here than it was in other places. If I had landed in New York or in Los Angeles or whatever, I’m sure I would have ended up, you know, really awful.

EP: What are you hearing now that’s good?

SA: I just fell into this – there’s a kind of a charming punk band from the UK called The Bug Club. I just stumbled onto their music by random and one of my favourite things about a band is when you discover them and you realise that they’ve got like ten albums worth of stuff that you’ve never heard and they’re an extraordinarily prolific band and I think they’re really charming and very, very fun and very lighthearted. And it’s the first band like that that I’ve actually enjoyed in a while. Most of the bands that try to be fun and lighthearted end up just being embarrassing in their attempts at humour. They remind me of – there’s a band that started in Boston that moved to Chicago called Masters Of The Obvious, or MOTO, and they remind me in spirit of that band. Like you know, energetic, fun, lighthearted music that’s not embarrassing.

BW: Also, The Bug Club – Steve told us about The Bug Club, we’re going to have them play a show with us, and coincidentally the next day I went to work and my office manager was like, hey you’re gonna cut lacquers for this band Bug Club today. Complete coincidence.

SA: I’m already late for my session, I have to go.

EP: Thank you Steve, thank you for your time.

SA: Ciao, Bob.

EP: Now that Steve’s gone, I regret not getting him to roast me about liking Steely Dan, or asking him about the proper way to wear a guitar strap.

BW: I bet if you sent him a Zoom link and said, Steve I have two more questions for you tomorrow morning he would do it.

EP: And one of the two questions is just desiring a roast. I think I have what I need for this. But it would be fun to get him to go off about something. It seems like he’s being pretty measured.

BW: The way he was this morning is pretty much how he is 99.9 per cent of the time. He’s not a hot head. He’ll write ridiculous stuff on the internet occasionally that comes off like that, but that’s not how he behaves in real life.

EP: It seems like he just doesn’t do pretence. Like, a lot of times people choose their words carefully because they want a certain calculated outcome, and the impression I get is that Steve Albini’s not doing that kind of calculus about how he benefits from whatever it is. It’s just like, what do I actually think is true? With a little bit of, how can I not be a dick, maybe.

BW: Yeah. [Laughs]

EP: And the ‘how can I not be a dick’ has increased as he’s gotten older, to the point where he’s gotten a lot of press for trying to not be a dick. Which I think is fairly charming. Considering how I think he grew up in a time when it was widely considered fun and cool to be kind of mean?

BW: Oh yeah.

EP: And I think a lot of younger people see that and think, why would you ever do that? And the answer is, I don’t know why? Because other people were doing it?

BW: No, I think people were just super sarcastic and would say mean things because it’s funny.

EP: And it shuts some people out. It’s alienating to some people.

BW: Oh yeah. Absolutely.

EP: It definitely has a gatekeeping function because if you feel like you’re in the in crowd it’s funny, but if you’re not, it’s alienating.

BW: Oh yeah. I really notice that when I would go see bands, and bands would like, have in jokes on stage with each other that the audience could hear, that would always kind of put me off. So I’ve always tried not to do that when we’re on stage. I want to include people. I don’t want to have like little in jokes that the audience is trying to figure out, like oh, I wish we were part of that. I don’t want in jokes on stage. We’ll talk about the people afterwards, amongst ourselves. No. Sorry, I’m just being sarcastic. It’s very David Letterman. It was like, David Letterman-era. Everyone was super sarcastic.

EP: Yeah, I’ve thought about this a lot actually. Because of how vulnerability can be very dangerous, and so there’s this sort of hard carapace of defence that’s sort of put up by being funny sometimes. And it also helps police boundaries of what’s acceptable, what’s unacceptable; who’s in, who’s out.

BW: Yeah.

EP: So you haven’t had a chance to tell me yet what you were listening to when you were young that made you go, what? I could be a musician!

BW: It was sort of similar to Todd but a few years behind him – I’m younger than those guys a little bit – and so like, I can sort of trace it. I know I really loved – in like elementary school, I remember specifically really loving KISS and AC/DC. Like really insane stuff. And then in high school I was a huge fan of, like, The Police and U2. Like massive bands. And I wasn’t aware of the existence of local scenes and small local bands. I lived in the suburbs and I didn’t know it existed. And then I went to college and then immediately was like, oh a college radio station? Oh, I’m going to get a show there. So I started to listen to college radio and immediately discovered all these tiny local bands – not just local to Boston, but local to wherever they lived. And so we called it, you know, ‘national bands’ versus ‘local bands‘. This was 1983. And when I understood that these local bands existed, I was like oh, I can do this? I can do this too? OK. Just like Todd said, when he started going to see The Replacements at a tiny club. That’s what it was. I went to college and was like oh there are tiny bands playing in tiny places? I didn’t even know that was a thing until I went to college. So yeah, for me it was college radio and learning that there was such a thing as a local band. And the scene in Boston was huge then. I would go to see bands in Boston two or three nights a week for years, as soon as I realised oh, this is a thing.

EP: This is interesting because I’ve been listening to Shellac and I’ve been trying to parse the like, buttrock elements of it. Because it is very tight and not flashy, but then there are these moments where it just starts to kind of wail. And it’s interesting to hear you guys talk about KISS and Aerosmith, sort of glam stuff.

BW: Yeah, we all like AC/DC and ZZ Top and KISS – well, maybe not KISS, that was elementary school. But yeah, The Who and Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith, all that stuff, we all listened to that when we were teens. So that’s all just built in.

EP: The things that you usually think of punk as pushing against.

BW: Yeah, like Todd said, when we all discovered punk, it was so against those big dinosaur bands. But those dinosaur bands are just sort of part of our upbringing. They’re just in there. Even though we shunned them all when we got into punk rock. It’s still in our DNA or whatever. In our bones.

EP: U2 is in your DNA.

BW: That’s how I learned how to play bass, by playing along with U2 and The Police. So that’s weird right?

I mean, not really. It’s not that weird. Especially The Police. And I think it’s harder for me to view U2 through the lens of not having had them non-consensually install their album on all my devices.

BW: Yeah, I mean, when I liked U2, they had two or three albums out. I haven’t really followed them since then.

EP: I just remember that – one of my favourite pieces of music writing ever was that Quincy Jones interview in Vulture a few years ago where Quincy Jones is just spilling way too much information and he’s talking about Bono and U2 and how Ireland is so racist that he has to stay in Bono’s castle when he goes there and he says, “Bono’s my brother, man.” And the interviewer asks him, “Is U2 still making good music?” And it just says, “[Shakes head.]”

BW: [Laughs]

EP: So will anyone send me any of the record? I’m not trying to be like, the cool person who knows about the record beforehand, but just so I can comment on it in the feature?

BW: We’ve never let anyone hear the record before the release date in 30 years. So I don’t think anyone wants to change that.

EP: Alright!

BW: That’s just the way we roll. It just sounds like another Shellac record. It’s the same three guys in the same studio. Sorry to be…

EP: No problem.

BW: I mean we, like I said, we’re happy to talk to people, but we’re not going to send out records, and we don’t solicit the interviews, you know what I mean.

EP: I hear ya.

BW: If we were soliciting this interview, asking for it, it would be dumb for us to not offer to send you the record. Sorry. I don’t know. I’ll talk to those guys and see if there’s any way I can send you, like, a song that you can hear once and then it disappears or something.

EP: Ha ha, it’s ok. I know what the cover art and concept is like. To All Trains.

BW: Yeah, do you want to know about that? We didn’t really have an album title, we had most of the songs done. I don’t think our album titles ever really have much to do with the music, except for the Peel Sessions one, we called it The End Of Radio, which is the name of one of our songs. All the others, one of us has just been like, oh, that’s a cool phrase, let’s use that for our next album title. And so this one, Steve was in Union Station in Chicago and he saw this archway with a big sign that says ‘To All Trains’ and the next time we practiced he was like, hey I like that phrase ‘To All Trains’. I saw it on this big archway in the railroad station. What do you think about that for an album title? And we were like – I don’t think anybody was like, bowled over by it, but in the years since he came up with that, all of us have come up with different album titles and none of them were that good. We’re like, To All Trains is fine. Steve saw it, he liked it, we didn’t have anything better so it stuck. And I was like, why don’t I just go down there and take a picture of it and we can use that as the cover. There’s not a lot more thought in it than that. Have you seen the rest of the album package?

EP: I haven’t.

BW: So the back of it is this picture. I took a picture of me taking the picture to send to those guys, because it took me forever to go down there and take this picture with this fancy camera. So with my iPhone I took a quick picture of me taking the picture and sent it to them. I was like, look, I finally took the cover shot. And those guys were like, oh! This picture of you taking the picture is great. Let’s make it the back cover. So that’s why it’s the back cover. And then the inside of the cover is three band photos. But the band photos are pictures of these weird trucks. Have you ever seen trucks like this?

EP: Mmm. They’re like collecting stuff.

BW: Yeah, we call them scrappers in Chicago, but every city has a different name for them. And we have a picture of one of these for each of us. Those are the band photos, essentially. And we did that because we have a song called “Scrappers” that’s about these scrapper trucks. So, that’s the concept. That’s all there is to it.

EP: Nice. It’s beautiful, actually.

BW: Yeah, I love the jacket.

EP: It’s very simple, but there’s a liminality to the nexus point between where you are now and all possible futures. Like, there’s this sort of articulation of the nature of temporality. It’s rich with possible associations beyond itself.

BW: Oh, the fact that it’s a train station?

EP: Yeah. And that it’s the gate to all the other places one could go.

BW: Sure. I don’t think we thought about that, but who knows!


This interview forms the basis for Emily Pothast’s cover feature in The Wire 484, which is available to read in print now. Subscribers can also read the issue in our online library.