by Alex Fatato (@alexanderftto) and Brendan Cornish
In August of 2016, a couple of friends and I drove up to New Hampshire to see Bad History Month play a set. We pulled into an industrial park, circled a series of factory buildings, and eventually found the entrance. The venue was a converted textile mill, its exposed brick walls lined with screen-prints and paintings. It was freezing cold. On the way into the elevator, my friend complained about the temperature, to which a bearded stranger in a t-shirt replied, “You gotta get fat.” When we reached the gallery space on the third floor, we found a spot in a small crowd and waited for Sean Sprecher, Bad History Month’s only member, to take the stage. As the gallery dimmed, we saw the bearded stranger from the elevator taking his seat behind a deconstructed drum kit with an old electric guitar. I’d been listening to Bad History Month obsessively for a year and had no idea what he looked like. That night, we heard half an hour of songs, many of which wouldn’t be released until 2017’s Dead and Loving It and this year’s Old Blues. I recorded the set on my phone and listened to it again on the ride back to Boston. When I got home, I listened a third time.
Bad History Month, the Boston-based music project of Sean Sprecher, has been performing since 2007. Old Blues will be his fourth album and the second under his current moniker, having moved away from a two piece lineup and the name Fat History Month in 2013. Along the way, Sean’s created a robust discography of simultaneously self-aware and self-effacing art rock. His songs validate and laugh at our collective suffering in the sort of way that Jonah Furman from Krill described as “transcendent,” on par with “great literature and art throughout history.”
The last time I saw Sean play was at my own band’s album release show last Valentine’s Day. Even though I’d be sharing a stage with him, and even though I’d be standing in a crowded bar hearing his voice through a piercing PA, watching him perform felt the same as it did in that quiet Dover gallery in 2016. He closed his set with “A Warm Recollection,” one of the songs I’d listened to over and over again on that old phone recording.
I had some questions for Sean about Old Blues and his career and reached out to set up an interview. He agreed and we traded emails over the course of the week.
What have you been reading during quarantine?
I just finished I Love Dick by Chris Kraus. It was great. I was into The Man Without Qualities for a bit, but I fell off, maybe I'll plow into that headspace again. I read Regarding The Pain of Others by Susan Sontag one morning, that was a good one. Got halfway through On Photography by her, thinking it would be interesting in Instagramland Era, I should finish that. It's nice because I don't have to return anything to the library til the world starts up again. I was reading this book New York: 2040 by Kim Stanley Robinson which is a cool future-historical novel about NYC post ocean encroachment. And an attempt to take down Capitalism sort of. Still gotta finish that one, I've been trying to get into more heavy serious stuff for a minute, haha.
Four years passed between Bad History Month and Dead and Loving it. You didn't play many shows and changed your band name. Why'd you take a break?
I didn't really take a break, just spent a painfully long time banging my head against a wall. I got bummed out on my inability to figure out the music biz and then bummed out on music in general, and playing shows kept feeling like it exacerbated that. I had to retreat and not look at the music internet or hear anything about the music biz for several years because my own personal self-loathing mechanism had attached itself to my bad feelings about that reality and I couldn't work on the record or enjoy my life while feeling angry at myself about that stuff. I only played two shows in 2015 haha. Even tried to quit music and didn't touch a guitar for that whole summer. Dumb. But maybe a break is necessary sometimes.
And then in 2016 shit actually got bad and my mom got cancer in May and died in October and I blew up my personal life at the same time, so that was pretty distracting. But by mid 2016 me and Mark [Fede] had gotten started on actually recording the final version.
Part of the challenge of recording was having the album too mapped out in my head before starting, and not realizing that letting things unfold in their own way is much more fun and less torturous. I had this whole big idea in my mind that I couldn't seem to bring into reality. And I quit playing shows because getting the record done felt like the most important thing in my life at the time, and playing shows kept ending up making me feel worse for some reason, which would set me back to quitter mode for months. I first tried to start Dead And Loving It in early 2014 with my friend Dan Angel in Philly, but got stuck and ended up using what we'd gotten done as part of my side on the Famous Cigarettes split with Dust From 1000 Yrs. Then in early 2016 I went up to Maine and tried to do it with Colby and Greg from Dimples, which was a really wonderful weekend, but when I listened back, I realized I wasn't good enough at drums to keep a steady tempo so I scrapped that and started obsessively practicing with a metronome. And then I started recording with Mark at his spot on Rugg Rd. in Allston before it got condemned for condos, but by that time I'd given myself a complex about tracking and being in the studio at all, and my ability to keep time, so it was pretty tooth-pully for a while. Steadfast Marko, my patient, long-suffering friend, hung in, luckily.
Finally, after a lifetime of being told I'm depressed, a doctor realized that I had really bad anxiety and gave me some mild pills for that which helped me ease into feeling better in the studio, and once things started moving I felt less scared of going to record and didn't need the pills any more. And then after Mark moved his studio to the Berwick building in Roxbury, he gave me a key and a tutorial in the recording program and set up a d/i and told me to try and do some stuff myself, and I got really into it and had a lot of fun. And that set the stage for having a way better time making this new record. Also, I finished Old Blues last June, so I'm a bit less of a slow poke than I seem haha. It's been nice to have a bunch of months to let it settle before it comes out though.
What led you to start writing about your childhood on this album?
For some reason I refuse to not write concept albums haha. One motivation for approaching writing that way, is that once I've got a few songs going, certain themes start to crop up, and then it's nice to elaborate on them in other songs. And also, having a few vaguely pre-established ideas of themes for an album is a nice cheat to make writing the last few songs easier. I'm not sure what the first song I wrote for this was, but that whole "Waste Not" song was written while facing a bookshelf with a polaroid of me and my brother covered in mud, posing like kooks, so that old feeling of buoyant insanity was definitely on my mind.
But I'd say, more than being about childhood, this album is about childishness carried into adulthood, and trying to find ways to grow past those old, fairly silly but destructive, sludgy feelings of hatred towards others and oneself into a kinder, more empathetic mode of interaction with oneself and the world. Troubled romantic/family/social relationships are a starting point for examining those feelings in relation to the external world, and then there's the whole "self-loathing body image torture chamber hall-of-mirrors" theme fused in there too for the internal strife/solution counterpoint.
"Childlike Sense of Hatred" came from thinking about retaliatory conflicts between nations, specifically Israel and Palestine, and the grudges we hold at all levels, from national to personal and how it really does seem to be the same emotion carried through our whole lives: this deep, unquestioned anger and hatred that a child can feel fully self-righteously justified in, without shame for lashing out, or empathy for the perceived enemy being lashed out at. This inexplicable, primordial violent energy builds up pressure in us and eventually needs somewhere to go, so we construct sluices and aim it at each other. That's my theory anyway haha.
"Low Hanging Fruit" and "Cosmic Repulsion" both explore my own childish inability to see outside myself into the wild psychedelic reality of another person truly existing as substantially and as intensely as I do, having their own deep, unknowable internal and external life, perspective, and experience, invisible though it may be to me. In my experience, this myopic, subconsciously dismissive lack of ability to acknowledge the other person's multi-dimensional realness is paradoxically exacerbated by the close proximity endemic to romantic relationships. That feeling of remoteness and separation and flattening of the other person's qualities is most noticeable in relation to the person I'm supposed to be closest to, but it exists to some extent in all types of human relationships. (Pretty sure that's why cave people invented alcohol).
And then there's the fantasized route toward a more general sense of connection through promiscuity. At the end of the song, "it doesn't work" applies to both modes of romantic interaction. But maybe they actually both work? I'm still learning.
"Love" is an impossible concept to pin down. But regardless, desire, and the acceptance of each other as beautiful, is an incredibly powerful gift that we all have the option to give to each other at any time. It's all warped and weird because our world is warped and weird, but caring deeply for each other's bodies and deriving pleasure from giving each other pleasure can be a radical anti-capitalist activity. Plus it's free. Nevertheless, pitfalls abound.
The Road To Good Intention running straight through hell is kind of a reference to how we only find our own desire to "grow-up" by learning how much it sucks to continue being childish even as we grow older. And how realizing I'm mortal was a nice incentive to want to figure out how to make good use of my mind and my time. One of my greatest fears is to be a bitter old man, and since I've inhabited that role already since I was a child, I'm hoping I can move beyond it by the time I'm actually near the end of the road haha.
Uhhhh so ya, childishness and its discontents, I won't go through every song, though I'm enjoying this.
In “Want Not,” you talk about how your philosophies have changed from your childhood to your teenage years to now. You skip over your 20's, any particular reason?
The "My 20s" section comes right after the "dark and stormy school night, stoned and alone/mole-discovery body horror" part. When I left home, I was 19 and moved from North Jersey to Boston. So the whole section about leaving home and subsisting on rice and beans, living poorer than necessary and being a penny pincher, not giving change to homeless people is all about my early 20s, terrified of losing my autonomy and self-respect if I ever turned to my parents for cash.
Being a "troubled teen" and getting forcibly sent off for correction by the same pair of beefy, chain-smoking ex-cop youth-escorts a couple times put a lasting terror of the physical power of Authority and loss of self-determination in me. Even my very minor, privileged and safe brush with captivity left me with a lifelong horror of losing my freedom.
And it still seems that aside from the major advantage of being a white dude who doesn't come from poverty, the main bulwark against potentially falling victim to the state, or anyone else's control, is to have some money you earned that you can pay rent and food bills with. Of course if you're stuck working a shit job or two for wage-slave pay, your autonomy is severely limited regardless of nominal "freedom". Anyway, I'm lucky as fuck, and safe, but I'm still pretty paranoid in that department, and was even more so in my early 20s.
And then the "Things I Learned From Frugality" section is mostly about loosening up in my late 20s and having a fairly steady freelance income I learned to trust, and rent I could afford, and having faith in the fact that I wouldn't lose those things, or if I did that I'd be able to figure out how to deal with it.
What do you want people to take away from this album? Does it matter to you how they interpret it?
I think the main ideas I tried to get across are that:
a. On a personal level, empathy and a willingness to let go of self-righteousness and see your own flaws is where it's at politically, as far as improving the world and your own experience of it.
b. That collectively, we live our lives soaked in the ambient radiation of a cartoonish and destructively false mass consumer culture, and we should be aware of and rebellious against the values it promotes, particularly in relation to beauty standards and the idea that objects can bring happiness. Pretty basic bullshit, but I still have a really hard time not being poisoned by mass media representations of reality. Maybe it's partly because I work in the movie biz haha.
c. People should feel allowed and welcome to love themselves and their bodies, regardless of their physical attributes. It shouldn't have to be a radical act to love yourself and feel sexy in spite of not falling within the parameters of culturally acceptable youth and beauty standards. And even though modern mass culture deigns to pay lip service to the idea that the fat lady can sing and be taken seriously, it feels somewhat manipulative to me, like charity in the interest of maintaining the status quo. Which is that we're all nothing but consumers who are supposed to hate ourselves and our bodies and each other, I guess because it's easier to sell stuff to us that way?
d. Even more importantly, people should feel allowed to exist and be interacted with as unique individuals represented by the content of their character rather than the way they look or what categories they fall into. This is pretty obviously an unrealizable dream because we are (at least partially) shallow beings after all, not to mention History, but in spite of that, I think it's an ideal worth keeping at the front of our minds and striving for.
e. And Capitalism kinda stinks, duh.
As far as whether it matters to me how it's interpreted, I think it mostly matters to me how people interpret it in terms of how they interpret me haha. I'm fairly explicit about certain uglinesses of my own experience, but my willingness to explore these things is based on the assumption that they're pretty common and relatable feelings. In order to write openly in this way, I have to have faith in the good will of the imagined audience, and their willingness to see themselves in the less attractive aspects of our collective experience represented in parts of these songs.
But if some of these words are taken out of context, as simply the thoughts and feelings of an alienated madman, and if the balancing attempts to find humor and redemption and a way forward and up and out of the inherent human state of shameful childishness is ignored, I could just seems like a scary, misanthropic asshole haha. And if that's the conclusion, then everything positive I say gets washed away and dismissed.
You included a John Cassavetes quote in your liner notes and have talked about your work as a projectionist in the past. Have you ever considered experimenting with film?
I never have. It's such an esoteric process to me. I did recently have a good time using iMovie to make a music video for this crazy remix version of the end of "Want Not" set to some slo-mo footage of a beard burning. But that was mostly fun because I enjoy the randomness of digitally editing with a program I don't really know how to use correctly. I like how it turned out.
I've gotten more into watching movies since I've worked in theaters for the past fourteen years, but I'm not too deep into how they're made or analyzing them much. I'm a plot-loving philistine. But I do like "art" films a lot sometimes. I'm resistant to the effort it takes to digest their nutrition, so it helps to see them in a theater without the temptation of distraction. I'm always glad when I get myself to go for it. Watching Woman Under The Influence had a pretty intense and positive influence on my attitude and the events in my life over the last few months.
What led to Mark returning to the drum set for one song? Was it tracked live?
Nothing special led to it really, just that he's awesome and went for it haha. The drums are all overdubs, but he's a master of that, so it sounds pretty live in parts. That song ("Want Not") was actually tracked in pieces with Greg Hartunian from Dimples when I was in LA for a day on tour in January 2018. So it was just guitars and vocals when I got back to Boston. Mark put some drums on the "Crazy Horse jam" section at 1:24, that were perfectly shambling. And then he threw on the 80s gated drums around 2:35. They sound way better than my Casio keyboard drum-sound placeholder did. The big percussion hits and giant thunder crack smash during the "dark stormy school night" section around 6:30 was him slamming this wooden chest and some metal I think, in the giant echo room at the Berwick. So good. And then he did all the drums on the last two sections starting around 9:20 and it sounds amazing. He filtered some of those drums through his Moog synth and I love how that turned out, there are these wah/whoosh sounding cymbal hits that are so cool, and the distorted little delay on the snare. The man is a rare talent. His style is so particularly him, I love it.
courtesy of Meg Coss
The cover of Old Blues is a departure from the last two album covers, which seemed to mirror each other. Was this intentional?
I wanted to use that goofy kid picture of me and my brother that I had spent a long time looking at while I was writing the songs, but the "picture of me as a kid" album cover has been pretty played out since the days of Biggie and Nas, so I wanted to try to come up with a way to present that photo without it feeling cliche. Also, "childhood photo" is a category of image that I so immediately dismiss and don't take the time to look at, unless it's me or someone I know, so I think the collage helps make it into something that catches the eye and encourages a closer look. And I like all the pictures. I love the juxtaposition of all the wacky action with The Saddest School Photo Ever Taken haha. That first grade is a doozy.
I think it's easy for some people to mistake my whole thing as dour and depressive, but it's not, there's a lot of playfulness and hope and self-deprecating attempts to undercut the unhappy parts of myself that take themselves too seriously. That's why I type "haha" in written interviews, haha. It's important to me to underline the lighter side of what I do, because that's the redemptive part, and it's maybe easy to miss if a listener thinks of it as just "sad" music. Straight complaint is a bore. You gotta make it fun and entertaining, and offer some levity and optimism and sugar if you're going to talk about difficulty. Conversely, optimism needs to be served with its proper portion of salt or it can be poisonously saccharine. Every yin needs its yang, y'know? When I walk into Walgreens and am assaulted with the undiluted, false-hope "you-can-do-it-ist" playlist of dystopian late-capitalism, it feels pretty gross and manipulative and sad.
So anyway, having the wild spirit of my boyhood all over the cover of this record feels like a nice way of saying "there's joy to be found here". I hope my music makes people happy, at least in that way where you hear something awesome and get a swell in your chest. Or I guess I should say, I hope my music makes people feel real, whatever that means. And I think what I mean by "real" is that I want to make art that feels like a realistic representation of the world and human experience as I see it, and as I assume other people see it, but may not always acknowledge or recognize until it's spoken. And when I encounter art that accomplishes that, and I'm able to identify with it, I feel less lonely and more hopeful about life and about the potential for feeling less alienated.
The particular cover design idea came about because I ended up taking a couple days off and resting at Meg [Coss]'s apartment in Oakland when I was really sick on tour in 2018, and she had one of her collages on the wall with this triangle stack of women on a blue background and I really liked it, so I asked her if we could rip off the idea for the album cover.
Aside from all of the above, I guess it was somewhat intentional to shift into a new visual mode with the artwork. I wanted a fresh start somehow. I started playing acoustic for a while, and that was really refreshing. And I considered changing the band name but thank god I had an extra year to reconsider before this came out haha. "Old Blues" was one of the many innocuous translations of "Bad History Month" that I came up with as a possible new name, and I like it a lot as a title for this album. But the music is still all part of the same art project, and the name speaks for itself, so I'm glad I stuck with Bad History Month.