The Menzingers were probably the last international band to play Australia on virtually the eve of the world shutting down back in 2020. The band returns to Australia on the heels of last years incredible album “Some Of It Was True” to treat Australian fans to a great night of Punk Rock. I caught up with The Menzingers front man Greg Barnett to talk all things since the band were last here.
Get your gear on, grab your crew, and get ready for a night of punk rock zingers! From anthemic singalongs to the pulse-pounding atmosphere that’ll remind you what it means to be alive. Whether you’re a seasoned gig veteran or a newcomer ready to dive headfirst into the chaos, this is your call to arms. Join the ranks of the faithful and witness the punk institution that is The Menzingers.
Andrew : Good morning, Greg.
Greg : Hey, how are you?
Andrew : Good. How are you? Andrew from The Rockpit here in Australia. Thanks for spending some time with us and of course welcome to Australia.
Greg : Thank you so much for having me.
Andrew : Absolutely pleasure. First of all, I want to congratulate you guys on the last album, ‘Some Of It Was True’; what a mighty fine record that is. It’s been a record that’s been on regular rotation, I’ve got to say, since its release, which is pretty much 12 months now. It’s probably some of the most honest rock and roll I’ve heard in quite some time. I just love the vibe and the maturity on the record. But the reason for our chat today is to celebrate the fact that you guys are coming to Australia and New Zealand next month to play for us, which super exciting.
Greg : It is exciting, absolutely yes.
Andrew : Now, the last time you guys were here was on the eve of the world shutting down back in 2020. You were one of the last bands to international touring acts to play in Australia. Tell me about the impact that time had on the band.
Greg : Sure. I mean, we’ve done so much touring. We’ve been to Australia a handful of times now. That experience was one of the craziest experiences we’ve ever had as a band. Just everything emotion wise, just safety wise, there was so much going on and everything was changing every single day and we didn’t really know what to do. We were so far from home and I think we knew by the end of it; by the Melbourne show, that was the last show. We knew this was going to be really, really bad and we’re not going to be able to do this for a long time. We almost canned the Melbourne show. We didn’t feel comfortable doing it at that point, but I think we were already there and we were like, you know what? This is our last show. We’re going to not be able to play shows for a long time.
The promoter says It’s okay. The government says it’s okay. Let’s see what it is, let’s go for it, I guess. And we did it. That Melbourne show, without a doubt, will always be one of our favourite shows, all four of us felt it, because it was so emotional that we knew that the world was going to change. It was just very surreal and I think everyone in the crowd knew it as well. So, the show was very, very rowdy and was very therapeutic in a way, unspoken. I think everybody just knew there was something going on and yeah, we all always remember it and we flew home the next day and didn’t play a show for a year and a half. So that was our last show.
Andrew : What does that do to you as an artist though? I mean, you’re riding a wave of momentum, playing some great shows, and then to have that rug pulled from under you, what does it do to a bands mentally.
Greg : It was really difficult. Listen, I have to start off by saying we’re very fortunate. We were all healthy. So many had this a lot worse than we did, so I don’t want to make it seem like our story is more difficult than people that actually struggled. But as an artist, if I’ll answer the question, it was difficult for me to accept that. We had just put out an album; it was doing really well; it was gaining a lot of traction. The tours were really successful. We had just come back from Europe and that was the most successful Euro tour we’ve ever done. Now we’re in Australia and the shows were selling out and they were packed, and there was just such a great energy there. Then it was just very quickly over, and that was hard because we put a lot of work into the album, and this happened to a lot of bands.
We knew that that album was never going to get the lifespan that it deserved. It’s unfortunate, but it kind of is what it is. So, with that, I think we all felt we can’t really be in the same room together, but we all wanted to be creative. We all wanted to do something. We recorded an acoustic album of “Hello Exile” separately. I put out a solo album. The goal for me was I just need to create music as much as possible during this time and try to use it as a positive because we tour so much. To have a year and a half stuck at home, I tried to use it wisely, I guess. It was definitely difficult to stop the routine we were in. I went back and I was reading my tour journals from right before in Europe, and I didn’t realize how incredibly burnt out I was.
I’m kind of thankful for a break because it kind of reframed everything. When we came back to it, all of a sudden, I wasn’t as hard on myself and I enjoyed it more. My anxiety about traveling and music, I get a lot of anxiety when I travel and play shows and that, I wouldn’t say it was fixed it, but it kind of put it in a new perspective. I was to, was so caught up in the touring cycle that I didn’t realize that I kind of needed a break and we’re never going to take a break. We love to be busy; we love touring and playing music. It takes something like that for us to actually stop. in a way, I am kind of grateful that we had some time to reset because I think it was really good for the four of us, our relationships and just the overall strength of the band to continue to go forward. We were going really hard before that.
Andrew : I guess that’s the thing in this day and age, when you look at your career at that stage, I mean the band was 14 years young at that stage. From everybody that I’ve spoken to that first 5, 10, 15 years really are the ones that define whether you have a career and whether you stick around. Everything that you say about that relentless touring, the recording, the writing, the keeping yourself fresh and growing aspect of life, it’s interesting to hear you say that it took something like this for you to realize that you had burnout from touring. I get that, and that really does have to be a huge silver lining that you’re able to sort of almost step back away from yourself and go, Hey, okay, this is what it is. Then to come back and deliver an album that I think is certainly the strongest in the catalogue, certainly the most infectious for me. There really is a growth in the writing for me on this last record. Some of it was true, so much I think I saw and heard just even in the performances, just a level up in everything that you have done before. Is that something that you think you could have done or achieved without having to take a forced break?
Greg : Thank you. Thank you very much. That’s a tough question, but I would say no. I would say I don’t think it was possible. I think that the Menzingers machine was grinding so hard that I don’t know if we would’ve been able to write this album the way that we did. As you say, creative growth is the theme for me of the album. It was the thing that we wanted to put the most focus on. We wanted to challenge ourselves as writers and as musicians and as a band. The thing that we always kept saying to each other is that this is our seventh album. Historically a bands seventh album is usually not that great.
Albums don’t go and go on and on and on, and bands saved for this long and you get excited about that. It’s the first couple albums and then they go on autopilot. And we were very, very aware of that and we didn’t want that to happen to us. We spent a lot of time writing this album and a lot of time talking about what we wanted to do. And a lot of that was changing the approach of how we’ve written in the past and which is scary because we know at this point what makes for a good Menzingers song. We know what fans will react to, but that doesn’t necessarily make for a great album that kind of just makes it sound like the last album or the album before. We were really focused on trying to find how could we push ourselves in a way that our fans will understand and come along for the ride and do something different enough that will challenge us and to continue to write great music that we believe is worthy to put out and to listen to and to spend our lives traveling around the world playing. Obviously hoping the fans will come along for that ride. A lot of our writing changed, as in typically me, Tom would bring in a bit of an acoustic song or there would be something more structured and fleshed out, but a lot of the writing was written on the spot and the songs would start to form. Then the melodies would form and the lyrics would form all at the same time, which usually didn’t happen. Usually, it would be maybe lyrics and melody kind of came first and then the song was dictated around that. We were trying to create more so just everything in the moment. And when we recorded the album, Brad understood our song writing approach and kind of helped us record that way as well too. It has a lot less editing, a lot, a lot less nit-picking everything and letting things breathe and letting them be what they are.
That was new for us because we’ve typically been perfectionists where we want every note to be, right. But then when we were referencing albums realized that those albums that we want to sound like they don’t sound perfect. Not every kick drum is exactly the same frequency throughout the entire song, like a drummer plays and they play and there’s fluidity there. If we wanted to have the approach of what we sounded like live, we had to give up that perfectionism and let us just trust each other again. What was really fun about doing this album was that it kind of felt like we were writing our first album again. We wanted the excitement of a band that doesn’t really understand what they’re doing. And we kind of took that approach where we definitely know a lot of studio tricks at this point. We know song writing pretty much inside and out, especially for writing Menzingers songs. We kind of threw a lot of that away and we’re just like, let’s write. We were innocent kids writing music again. I think that came through in the songs and then the style of the performances. But yeah, it’s interesting to carry an excitement in music for as long as we’ve been a band, and I find it challenging, but it’s a thing that I’m excited about to keep doing.
Andrew : You mentioned that there were things that you were referencing. What kind of artists and album were you referencing?
Greg : Well, I like The Replacements, they are one of my all-time favourite bands, but you could see how the band changed with time, whether there was band members leaving or if it was the record label pressure or success or just there’s things where you could hear that in the music. It’s very difficult to, it’s your livelihood. This is how we make a living. And to do an album cycle is going to be two years of your life. If you put out a bad record and fans don’t respond to it and they stop coming to the shows, you have car payments and mortgages. It’s scary to take artistic risks, but I think we all realize that you have to take them, if this is going to work; you have to put yourself out there. You have to be vulnerable because if you’re not, then you can tell. When you hear an album and it just feels a little phoned in, it feels like, oh, I’ve heard this before. It’s not exciting and that’s something that we’re just very against. We were just pretty adamant about keeping that excitement there. We want people to hear our newest record and be like, that’s better than all the other ones, that’s the goal.
Andrew : As you mentioned before, you’d just dropped an album pre covid that didn’t get the lifecycle that it shouldn’t have. Was there a pressure from the label at all to come back with something that I guess almost spoke twofold. They’ve invested in an album with you and the world’s gone Crazy. Labels are a business and that’s understandable. How were they in their approach to you and doing new music?
Greg : I will say that I don’t think you can be on a better label than Epitaph. They’ve always just trusted us. Anytime that we’ve ever, they’ve never put any type of pressure on us. It’s just always been like, you guys know your band better than we could ever know it, and we trust you. And that’s been since the very beginning till now. There wasn’t a pressure from them to have this big high-profile record. It was more so on ourselves, we put that pressure on ourselves for sure, of wanting this record to be something that we’re really proud of and that it’s been a long time since our last album in 2019. “Some Of It Was True” came out and then 2023. We had a large gap of time. It was really on us where we wanted to make sure that this was worthy of dedicating the next two, three years of our lives to.
Andrew : There was a deluxe version of “Some Of It Was True” that was released I think earlier this year, and that version featured two new tracks ‘Gone West’ and ‘The Last One Killed Me’. Where did those songs come from? Were they a part of the original writing process, or is that material that’s evolved since the album’s release?
Greg : Those were two songs that we recorded in the session with the album. We did 15 songs for the album. And when we were mixing the album, we wanted to slim it down and just thought a 13 song album flowed a little bit better. We thought that that collection of 13 songs fit together in the way that we saw it in our heads. And we think that both of those songs were great, but sometimes you get B sides, and that’s kind of what happened here. It’s funny because when I think of those two songs, they span the whole spectrum of writing the album. ‘Gone Wes was one of the first songs that we wrote for the album, and then ‘The Last One Killed Me’ we wrote in the studio. We were working on it throughout the whole length of the writing process, but we couldn’t really figure out, should it be a rock song or should it be an acoustic song. Then the lyrics weren’t finished, so we finished the song in the studio. It’s kind of cool when I look at having those two songs off and now having them released as a seven inch of being a start and end point of the entire writing process. I’ve noticed that sometimes songs get more attention from fans this way because sometimes I think if those two songs were on the album, I think people would’ve liked them, but they might’ve gotten skipped over. But when you release them separately, they have a new life and it seems like they’ve gotten a really good response. So, I’m excited about that.
Andrew : Obviously you touched before on your solo album that was done during lockdown and the acoustic album. Did you go into writing mode as a form of comfort during that period?
Greg : Oh, absolutely. I don’t think I wrote much the first month or two, but then I was like, okay, I need to get some type of schedule here. When we did the Menzingers acoustic record, that was every day I could wake up at nine and record all day and write all day till 5:00 PM and then have dinner and have some semblance of a workday because I think, I don’t know, a lot of musicians I know at least I’m sure the ones you’ve talked to probably attest to this as well, but the lack of a definitive schedule as a musician, it can be very difficult for a lot of people. It’s very easy to do nothing for weeks on end, and then it’s very easy to just be completely overwhelmed with so much stuff that had to happen to do this for a living. I felt that I needed some type of schedule to mentally stay sane without an end goal, end time period of how long that was going to last. Writing music definitely became a you need to do this because if you don’t, I don’t know where your mind’s going to go. It was something that helped me make sense of the world and make sense of what I was going through at the time. And also, to be fair, I really wanted to document it. I thought how many people live through plagues? This is a wild experience to live through, and I wanted to create something that when I look back, I could remember what it was like to be locked in my house for that long. So yeah.
Andrew : We talked about burnout prior to Covid, and then how has your approach to touring changed?
Greg : I guess my approach to touring has changed in some ways, but in a lot of ways it’s still as difficult as it was. We definitely have done things as a band that are a lot kinder to ourselves of taking more days off on the road, not scheduling so many shows back-to-back, making sure that we each have our own hotel room so that we could get a good night’s sleep and have some alone time. You didn’t realize that at the time, but that’s really important for your overall relationships with people to just give people the space that they need. Things like that really helped definitely realize I was drinking way too much on tour and I was just carried over from being young in my twenties and developing a routine of that. After the pandemic I really realized that, okay, you can’t be drinking this much and performing every night. Your body is not going to accept it anymore; cutting back on that, making sure I’m getting sleep and just being kinder to each other was something that we all realized we don’t need to nit-pick and bicker and let things fester, because we’re all best friends, right? We’re brothers. So all of a sudden, like brothers, you start fighting about nonsense. And I think we’ve realized that what we argue about usually is nonsense. Who ate the last of the M&M’s. It’s like stupid stuff like that. It’s like trying to make sure your relationships are healthy with your band mates and with your crew, and that everybody, if someone’s going through a hard time, watch out for them.
Andrew : For those who may not have seen you guys live, how do you best describe a Menzingers live show?
Greg : Interesting. I would say that’s what we do best. I guess that’s the thing that I’m most proud of. After all the, I love writing music. It’s my pride, it’s joy of being in a band is writing, but playing music is right up there. And we are a fast-paced, high-energy band that feeds off the crowd. I think the crowd understands that and feeds off of that energy as well. I don’t know, it’s hard to say this, I’m trying to figure out the right words when I say this, but we’re very normal people. And I think that sometimes when you look at bands on stage that you think that they’re larger than life and they’re something special. It’s like we’re four kids from a coal town in Pennsylvania. We grew up going to shows and idolizing bands and playing those shows. We’re just like the people in the audience; I think that fans understand that. There is just a connectedness that we have, and I hope I can explain that without sounding corny. But yeah, so I don’t know. Our shows are very communal and very fun and just a good time.
Andrew : As far as the set list is concerned, is the show going to be, “Some Of It Was True” heavy? Obviously, there are the hits that everybody has to play, but will the shows be a showcase of “Some of it was True” Live?
Greg : It’s a bunch of new songs, but it’s also just a bunch of everything. I mean, we try to do between four to six songs off of every record from “On The Impossible Pass” onwards. It’s definitely a mix of everything. I’ve always been a fan of bands that span their entire catalogue at a live show, and we try to do and we change it up. You see what works, what doesn’t. We do a lot of requests in the encore and yeah, you just vibe off of what the energy is.
Andrew : You have some great local talent too, with you opening up the shows. Who were your favourite Australian bands?
Greg : Oh, man. Some of my favourite Australian bands. Good question. Well, Joe, our drummer, his first favourite band was Silverchair, and he would play Silverchair for us all the time. So that’s one that I always go back to. Silverchair, Camp Cope, that band, they were friends with them and used to play with them a bunch. Press Club, that’s another great band. Gang of Youths is my favourite Australian band. Love Gang Of Youths. Wow. What else? Frenzal Rhomb was always on mixes growing up as the punk mixes that we would listen to. Yeah, obviously AC/DC, so Australia definitely has some great music.
Andrew : There is a band that I’m a particularly big fan of that’s actually opening the second Sydney show Clay J Gladstone are just awesome. You need to check them out.
Greg : Oh, nice. That’s so great to hear.
Andrew : They are such a fun band.
Greg : Nice. That’s awesome. Oh, The Chats, there’s another band.
Andrew : Those guys are such a fun band too.
Greg : We played with them at a festival or something last summer. That was really fun watching them. But yeah. Cool. Alright, that’s great to know that we got the Sydney Band.
Andrew : I’m in Melbourne and I’ll be at The Croxton Bandroom show. I’m really looking forward to it. Awesome. And I think this is probably the show I am most excited for over the next couple of weeks coming up.
Greg : Great to hear that.
Andrew : Just based on revisiting the album, leading into this too, I went and revisited the Deluxe and it just resonates. I’ve been playing the band to my partner and she’s just gone, this is just cool so you have a new fan there too.
Greg : That’s great. Incredible. Thank you so much.
Andrew : It’s been great to chat of course, thanks so much for your time, it’s been a blast.
Greg : Thanks for the chat too, I’ll see you at the show. Bye until then.
Andrew : Take care until then.
TOUR DATES
Thurs, Aug 15: The Triffid, Brisbane w/ The Cutaways
Fri., Aug 16: The Croxton, Melbourne w/ Something Something Explosion
Sat, Aug 17: Crowbar, Sydney w/ Chinese Burns Unit
Tues, Aug 20: Valhalla, Wellington*
Wed, Aug 21: Whammy Bar, Auckland*
* Presented by SBM & Whammy
TICKETS ON SALE
Wednesday, March 27 @ 12.00pm AEDT
sbmpresents.com/tour/the-menzingers-2024/
