by Patrick Pilch (@pratprilch)
Forget the von Trapps, scratch LMFAO and set your Len CD on fire - The Deals are now your new favorite family band. The Chicago-based quintet released Clear and Severe at the end of January and holy cow. If you’ve ever enjoyed pop music in the slightest, I promise you will find something to enjoy on The Deals’ debut. Clear and Severe is an incredible synthesis of all things pop. Joe Suihkonen’s songwriting harnesses style and genre, with each track brilliantly rendered by The Deals’ remarkably talented members. The band’s musical flexibility, the album’s flawless sequencing and each song’s functionality culminates in a wild expedition of The Deals’ tongue-in-cheek theatrics and obsession with song structure. The transitions between power pop numbers “More Than Most” and “Can’t Take Care” are downright thrilling and almost disorienting by the time the twangy country-crooner “Yard Sale” dodders into earshot a few minutes later. For a second you’d think it was a different band but then you realize there’s literally a guitar solo on every fucking song, so it’s gotta be The Deals. It’s hilarious and excellent and I think a lot of bands try to do what they have done on Clear and Severe. To quote Suihkonen, The Deals are “The Beatles for dumb assholes.” In that case, The Beatles suck and I’m a dumb asshole. Check out our interview below:
Post Trash: Can you introduce yourselves and tell me what you play?
Joe Suihkonen: My name is Joe Suihkonen. In the band I go by Joey Deal. I play electric guitar, acoustic guitar and I sing.
Ben Cruz: I’m Ben Cruz, I go by Bin Deal in The Deals. I play guitars of various kinds and sometimes sing backup.
Aaron O’Neill: My name is Aaron O’Neill, newly dubbed Ronnie Deal. I’m the second bass player in The Deals.
JS: That’s a little misleading, we only have one bass player at a time.
AO: Right, I’m the successor to Benji Deal.
Post Trash: I was going to ask who Aaron Deal was - I saw it in the liner notes.
JS: So Ronnie Deal, that’s Aaron. Our old bass player Benji Deal, he cut that record with us. He lives in Madison now. He was a tough cookie to replace, just because he was such a great bass player. I had met Aaron through touring because Aaron moved here from Saint Louis. When Aaron told me he was moving to Chicago, I was like, “perfect,” because Aaron’s great.
PT: I know each of you are involved with a few different groups, so can you tell me what you’re involved with.
JS: The Deals is my main band, in the sense that it’s the band that I’m the “leader” of. It’s the band I write all the music for. I play in a couple different bands. I play auxiliary, maybe sometimes lead guitar in a band called Gentle Heat. We’re making a record next month, it will be the second full length. I play bass in a band called Patter and I play in the Options live band. What else do I do?
BC: You play trumpet.
JS: Oh, I play trumpet, right.
PT: Ben I know you’re in Moontype and Threadbare.
BC: Yes. Threadbare, which is a band that hasn’t really played in a long time, put out a record this past year. It’s me and Emerson, who also plays in this band and also Moontype, and Jason Stein. Moontype is the other main thing I’m a part of with Margaret and Emerson.
PT: Joe, you wrote these songs, and those songs were arranged as a band. Can you talk about that process? Did you show everyone the songs as demos?
JS: No demos. Maybe I’d send out a voice memo of me playing them. I’d be more open to doing demos after this year, just because of GarageBand type stuff, but at that point I was against it. I didn’t want to try to have undue influence over what anybody’s part would end up being. The people in the band are all better than me at what they do. Nobody’s there to be a set of hands. I don’t want to reign in their initial instincts on hearing the song because the song’s really just a skeleton and we put clothes on it as a band.
AO: That metaphor doesn’t really work because there’s no skin.
BC: There’s no skin or organs, yea.
JS: But yea, so I just come to rehearsal and I play through the song and we’d just go from there.
BC: Often the songs would be learned by one person at a time. You’ve always shown me songs separately from showing Ben or Emerson songs.
JS: Yea, that’s true. They just kind of come together. I don’t think we have the world’s most codified creative process, but we’re hanging out all the time. And when we’re hanging out we’re playing music most of the time. When we have one in the oven we’ll just work on it as it happens.
PT: Were there certain stylistic choices that came from the members or Joe, were you like, “I want to make this a country twangy song?”
JS: I don’t know. Ben, how did that even work?
BC: At the time of writing this record there were a couple things operating at a pretty intense level. It was Joe being into punk, Joe being into country and us having a country band that was basically all the same members of The Deals. Also our previous and continued love of power pop and being obsessed with song structure and different ways a good song works, regardless of genre or style. I don’t know, Joe, am I getting at something?
JS: No, I think that’s true. I don’t want to return to this skeleton metaphor but it’s important to us to have a wide stylistic variety at our disposal because ultimately it’s all the same to me. It’s the same melodies and chords. The songs are the same. I remember one rehearsal when we were going into this recording session. Going into the recording session, not everything was completely done yet. The last rehearsal before the recording session, there was this question of how we were going to play “Fortune 500,” the second to last song on the record. I remember we tried it as a fast Ramones thing, then a slow, spacey Duster thing. We tried it a bunch of different ways and we landed on this “Bennie and the Jets” ripoff, which was a joke. But it ended up being what we did. We even copped the rhythm. That memory sticks out for me because I was like, “This band is the best, we can do whatever.” We know how to play different styles of music.
BC: Everyone in this band is so good and I feel we all know about the same styles of music.
JS: I feel there’s a share of “not-so-guilty-pleasure” we all have. We all love Green Day.
AO: A lot of bands know how to do their own thing which is cool but it’s also nice for musicians who have a breadth of knowledge about other stuff so you can communicate easier and seamlessly.
BC: I think easy communication is the name of the game.
JS: Absolutely, that gives us opportunities. We can rehearse not that much and get by. But if we are rehearsing regularly, we get past the nuts and both stuff pretty much immediately. Then the rest of the time is spent on brainstorming and wacky shit coming out of nowhere. As far as the stylistic stuff, variety hour nature of the band. Personally, I think about The Beatles a lot. That band was able to make records where it was like, “this is a Vaudeville music hall thing,” and “this is a country song” and “this is a gospel song” and this is an “old timey rock and roll song” and “this is a pop ballad.” They were blatantly ripping off these things but they ended up synthesizing all these songs. For example, a song like “Oh! Darling” doesn’t really sound like a black gospel song at all. It sounds like this specific Beatles thing. That’s something I really love about that band. They’re copying people but they, maybe even accidentally, end up innovating in their own little corner.
AO: It always sounds like they’re having fun doing it too.
BC: This band is always fun, too. Especially when we can all be together. I was just thinking about that rehearsal and arriving at that “Bennie and the Jets” thing was so absurdly fun and joyous. By the time we got there we were losing our minds doing it. But it was exactly what it needed to be.
JS: I feel we had a conversation going into making the record where we constantly wanted to be toeing this line asking ourselves, “is this too much?” Or “is this stupid?” Especially with all the guitar solos.
BC: There’s a guitar solo on every song.
JS: Yes, there’s a guitar solo on every song. There was this pretty common emotion during Deals rehearsals. That “Bennie and the Jets” thing is a good example. We were halfway through the first verse and I was laughing so hard. Part of why I was laughing was because it was so stupid. The other reason I was laughing was because I was like, “Dammit, this is going to be what we end up going with.”
PT: One of my favorite moments on the album is the transition from “More Than Most” into “Can’t Take Care.” Every time I listen it sounds like pure giddiness. The picture I get is an animated band in a clown car playing these songs, like, “Okay and here’s the next one!”
JS: You should see us do that one live. I’m so out of breath. One day.
PT: That’s interesting about “Fortune 500.” It’s cool how it morphed and you changed the style of the song over recording. Did that happen to any other songs on the record?
JS: Yea, one more, which is “More Than Most,” which you were referencing. “Fortune 500” and “More Than Most” are older songs. Those two are songs I wrote in college. We were compiling what songs we wanted to do and those two songs ended up fitting even though I was initially against it because they were so old. But they sort of ended up working into the thematic flow of the record. “More Than Most” used to be a mid tempo, slow burner.
AO: It was a reggae song. [laughs]
JS: Yea, it kind of was reggae.
BC: It was like a Strokes thing.
JS: I was really into a couple different classic sounding punk bands.
PT: Like who?
JS: The Ramones are definitely one of my all time favorites. At the same time I was listening to a lot of The Buzzcocks as well as this smaller band out of Texas called Radioactivity.
AO: I listened to that record after you put it in the chat, Joe. Good rock. The guitars sound amazing.
BC: That Radioactivity record is amazing. Everything sounds so good. It’s all very flat.
JS: It sounds kind of like shit.
BC: It sounds like shit and it sounds so good.
JS: That’s something I was on a lot about, pop music having these strong genetics of things you can trace from genre to genre. I understand the phrase “pop punk” refers to a really specific movement that started in the 90s, but it’s always seemed funny to me that we needed to add the word “pop” to punk because, in my mind, the very first punk bands were just trying to be the next big pop bands. They just had leather jackets and big guitars. The Ramones were covering Beach Boys. Especially at the time, I was really fascinated by that. If you got enough drinks in me, I’d talk to no end about it.
BC: Our country band covered The Ramones too.
JS: That’s true. Our country band used to cover “Oh Oh I Love Her So,” which is a great song.
PT: Ben I can hear a lot of the country influence on your guitar. I like the way, in the last fifteen or sixteen notes of “Can’t Take Care,” it turns into a little country riff, despite the song being a power pop number. Was that intentional?
BC: It’s how I play at this point. Like Joe, I try to not see a boundary between these things. As far as my guitar solo-ing, I grew up playing Led Zeppelin. Then I went to jazz school and I also play country music. I love it all and it kind of just pops up. Sometimes I can’t help it. The number of times we’re in a rehearsal and I play a guitar solo and I play something really dumb and completely inappropriate that’s from god knows where. The song will end and everyone will laugh at me and I’ll be laughing at myself. It happens a lot.
JS: While we’re talking about Ben’s solos here, we’re touching on another thing that may or may not be clear. There’s a really big element of improvisation happening in the band. Obviously we love arrangement and we love things being together, and we go nuts with these compositional flights of fancy. I don’t want to give credit to any jazz conservatory but the fact that we all come from that background of playing music that’s improvisational in nature does play a big role. It’s even little things, more than just soloing. There’s little group arrangement things that happen on the fly a lot.
BC: Improvising is a mindset in creating arrangements and being flexible.
JS: Absolutely. Another cherished Deals memory of mine was from playing this basement in Saint Louis. I made this joke about us being a Chicago blues band. We played a blues jam for a good couple minutes and it was funny because it was stylistically accurate.
PT: I feel there is a lot of nuance on this record even if a lot of it is improvised. Thinking back it’s hard to tell what’s purposeful or arranged. Would you say there are passages of songs that you arranged but every time you played it, it came out differently?
JS: I’d say that’s a pretty common thing. I think the songs evolve slowly over time. For instance, there’s a live Puddle Splashers video session that will come out after the record drops. One of the songs we do is “Can’t Take Care,” but it’s a completely different song. I don’t know how interesting the nuts and bolts of guitar arrangement goes, but Ben doesn’t play the exact same thing in terms of rhythm guitar parts. I play more rhythm than he does, but I have sort of an elective nature to the rhythm parts. When we’re filling out space in a verse that’s supposed to be accompaniment to vocals, there’s a lot of trying new things. The arrangements can be more of a loose set of directives than a specific set of notes. Of course, there are events that are exact. We make our way to and from.
PT: Chorus, verse, chorus, bridge…
JS: Yea. And like, “don’t forget at the end of the second chorus there’s that little hit.” Emerson is not playing parts, usually. He’s playing a part that’s more just an idea.
PT: Hypothetically, if you were to tour, do you think the songs would sound much different at the end of tour?
JS: I don’t know if they’d be much different, but they would definitely sound different. I don’t think they’d sound dramatically different. I think those more noticeable differences happen over longer stretches of time rather than a couple weeks. We’ve only done one tour in January of 2020. It was only a week long. The biggest change came in the songs sounding better and better. There were little changes happening but I couldn’t tell you what they were. The only thing I was really aware of was that we were a better band each time we played.
PT: I like the band’s idea of laying a groundwork for a song then figuring out the best way to play it. Like, if you strip it all back, is it something you can play on just an acoustic guitar?
JS: Yes, I think you touched at a central idea there. These songs are all written alone on mostly just an acoustic guitar.
PT: This might be more of a Seth Engel question. What was your approach to recording the group vocals for “How Good it Feels?”
BC: Under duress. [laughs] Basically we learned our respective parts. There’s five of us, so someone sang a single part, but everyone else’s parts were doubled. Each time we sang, everybody’s parts would shift. We started low and we’d crawl our way up. We sang it all live on one or two mics and it was really fucking hard.
JS: Yea it was one multi-directional mic. We were standing in a circle. We tried to start off the last day doing it and we hit this wall immediately. It was a nightmare, so we put it away and came back to it later and it wasn’t a problem. The voice switching was really what was hard. You have to learn all three voices. It’s basically like, first verse, second verse, third verse, fourth verse.
BC: So by the end you’re singing an octave higher than you originally were, which is also problematic for people like me who were already singing higher than they originally could.
JS: When we were mixing that at Jamdek, Doug has this great space echo rack mounted unit. I was like, “turn that up.”
BC: Nice and wurbly.
PT: Was that an original design plan? To have choral vocals for that song?
JS: I don’t really remember, it must have been.
BC: I think it was. It became pretty clear after playing it that the sentiment called for everyone to be singing together.
JS: I remember having a rehearsal sitting on the floor without microphones trying to work out these parts. Without instruments, too. It was pretty clear that wherever that song fell in the tracklisting, it was going to serve as the emotional centerpiece. When I was trying to sequence the record, any sequence where it wasn’t last didn’t work at all.
PT: It’s a great closer.
JS: Thank you, we like it.
BC: I had so much fun playing guitar on that, too.
JS: There are a ton of layers of Ben goofing around that we washed out and it sounds great.
PT: Nice. Another one of my favorite things about Clear and Severe is the songwriting. Do you have any favorite lyricists Joe?
JS: Favorite songwriters probably Lennon and McCarthy, Elliot Smith, Kurt Cobain, Joni Mitchell, Lucinda Williams, Mitski, Kacey Musgraves. As far as songwriting goes, I feel I only recently put my thoughts in order into how to write songs and got good at it after a really long time of being not very good at it. I listen to songs I wrote ten years ago and I’m like, “Geez, these are so bad.” As far as lyrics go, don’t try to write about too much. Write about one thing and keep it simple. Don’t thumb your nose at pre-established things that work. Extended metaphor, strong imagery, multi-syllable rhymes and certain rhyme schemes. Why mess with a good thing when you could just study and learn from it? I like rhyming and I like metaphors that I have to figure out what they mean after I’ve arrived at them, like a dog eating bologna.
PT: I was going to ask you about that.
JS: Oh, it’s a metaphor. [laughs] I don’t have a dog, it’s just a metaphor. I hesitate to say exactly what it means. I feel it’s a strong enough visual that I don’t want to take it away from anybody.
PT: I think it’s cool when anyone interprets lyrics on their own terms and makes them something else.
JS: If “How Good It Feels” is the emotional centerpiece, “Bologna” is the thesis statement. I don’t want to dissect it too much because that would give the whole game away. It’s about everything and it's absurd and it’s also about nothing at all.
PT: There is one song on this album that is somewhat specific. You dedicated the record to Warren and Diane, the owners of The Levee. Can you talk about them and the specific aspects of the bar that inspired you to write “The Levee.”
JS: Yea, I feel like kind of a poser for writing that song just because when I wrote it I had only been there one time. But I love The Levee. It’s a shitty bar that’s really big and you can play basketball inside. We live in Logan Square, we’re in our 20s. I like it because it’s nice to go to a place that reminds me of a place my uncles would go to drink. It’s not this yuppie bullshit where they’ll have something like a Miller High Life but it comes with an Amarro. Like, what aesthetic is that? Is it fake hipster?
BC: It’s just money, dude.
JS: It’s like, “we’re all broke, but we like the finer things, and we’re not actually broke.” It’s just dumb. I like drinking shitty whiskey and Miller Lite and playing ping pong and maybe talking to some older folks you wouldn’t usually talk to.
BC: They got karaoke too.
JS: Yea and you don’t have to wait a million years for your song.
BC: And you can sing like, eight songs.
JS: It’s hard to explain.
AO: When this bullshit is over, I’ll take you to some Saint Louis bars.
JS: Yea, The Levee is a special place. It’s a place that feels like it’s weird that it exists. I feel every bar of its kind has gone out of business. I feel they must own that place. I think they might operate at a loss to be like “We’re The Levee, thank you for being here!”
PT: They have food, right?
JS: Sort of. They have popcorn and you can order chicken wings.
PT: Yea I saw their reviews online and I was like, “Oh it looks like there’s food here but I don’t think there’s necessarily a menu.”
JS: No. If you order chicken wings they might call somewhere for you and bring you chicken wings.
BC: They have chips for sure.
JS: Zappos, yea.
PT: The first time you were there, did you meet Diane?
JS: Yes, Warren is the owner. Diane is the bartender who gives off the impression that she owns the place. Diane was working alone and that’s why she’s mentioned in the song. Like I said, I wrote it the first time I was there. It wasn’t until the second time I went back I met Warren, who is a talkative guy. He’s like, “Please drink and let’s talk.”
PT: How’d I know this guy just wants to have a nice conversation?
JS: Oh, he does. Warren, sadly, had a stroke a couple months into our going there. It became hard for him to verbalize but that did not stop him from having extensive conversations with you.
PT: That was also the night of the lunar eclipse.
JS: Yes, it was. That’s why that lyric about the moon is in there.
PT: One of the other things I wanted to ask was about the production. I think the sound of the record is super punchy and fun. Can you talk about how much you were involved in shaping the sound of the record and what you were going for?
BC: Recording it, we did it pretty quick. There was definitely an attention to sound. I think the bigger thing was mixing it. It took a little more time. Most of us were there. Joe was obviously there the whole time. I was there for a couple days.
JS: It was a net 36 hour mixing experience with me, Doug Malone and the other band members coming in and out. We tracked it with Seth Engel at Pallet Sound. I trusted Seth to know way more about being a recording engineer than I am. We went back and forth about what sounded like what. I think the record is a pretty neutral representation of what the band was sounding like at the time, which is what we wanted.
BC: It’s pretty much all the gear we use live. No special shit, really. It’s just that everything was louder. It was pretty much what we sounded like when we played.
JS: Standard tracking. Bass and drums at the same time. We played scratch guitars in their headphones and they re-amped the bass. We had a day where we did all the guitars. We had a day where we did all the vocals. Then we played around with some organs, vibraphones and synths and stuff. Three days, knocked it out.
PT: Another one of my favorite things about Clear and Severe is its sequencing. I think the first three tracks are awesome. One, two, three punch. I think that energy almost even overshadows how good of a song “Bad Feeling” is, too. Then “The Levee” kicks off the second half. Can you tell me about how important sequencing was, if at all?
JS: Extremely important. The sequencing was honestly really hard to track down just because the record is so eclectic. I tried a million different sequences and I listened to them all in order. My dad is someone who cares a lot about album sequencing. I gave it to him and he sequenced it in a bunch of different ways. I kept running into this problem whenever “Yard Sale” came on. It just didn’t work. I was trying to space out “More Than Most” and “Can’t Take Care,” since they’re sort of similar. It was actually my dad who was like, “they should be right next to each other because they’re in the same key.” I think the “The Levee” being the centerpiece made sense because “The Levee” is enough of a cheesy dad rock song and then that going into “Yard Sale” made sense. “The Levee” was the least jarring way to get into those opening chords. I knew “Bologna” was the first song. It was pretty obvious “How Good It Feels” had to come last. Where “Bad Feeling,” “The Levee” and “Fortune 500” were going to go took some doing. Ultimately, I was happy with where it ended up.
BC: At this point it feels there’s no other way it could go.
JS: I agree. I think you’re right that “Bad Feeling” feels like a palate cleanser song, but it’s actually a song I’m super proud of. It’s such a low key song. It doesn’t kick off until the guitar solo when the drums come in which is about two and a half minutes into the song. So the little synth blips and what Doug described as Sonic getting coins at the beginning of the song. We go through the whole form without singing with the organ chords going. I wish there was a better way to showcase that as an important moment rather than a cool down moment but I think discerning ears will get it. Those only with immense intellect will understand. [laughs]
AO: It takes a lot of intelligence to understand The Deals.
JS: We’re kind of like the Rick and Morty of music. We’re sapiosexuals. We don’t want to meet dumb people. Make sure you print that.
PT: Joe you covered The White Album in early 2020. What has changed in your approach to songwriting since then and how did that experience impact your appreciation for or approach to songwriting, in general?
JS: I wish I had a more poignant answer to that question. Honestly I’m pretty embarrassed about that project.
PT: Why?
AO: No, dude it’s sick. You’re a madman. It’s one thing when you say you’re going to do it and it’s another thing to actually do it. And it’s like, shit you did it.
JS: It’s such a vanity project. The reason I did it was because it was the beginning of quarantine. Remember when quarantine still felt novel enough to where you’d be like, “I’m going to work on a bunch of fun shit,” instead of having trouble doing the dishes. I don’t know if I learned much besides how all those songs go. I realized I already knew most of them when I went to learn them. When you hear a song that many times you kind of subconsciously learn it even if you’re not really trying to. I love those songs and I loved them before I started it. I think I learned I loved some songs less than I thought I did and some songs more than I thought I did. This might be controversial but I don’t think “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is that good of a song. I’m sorry. Also “Dear Prudence.” I don’t think it’s that good. I only say that because I really liked those songs up until I went to record them. Then I was like, “these are really boring to play.” Then there are songs that I really didn’t like like “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” or “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” or songs like “Sexy Sadie” or “Cry Baby Cry” that I thought were just whatever. When I went to learn those, I was like, “Oh these songs are actually really good.”
AO: You thought “Cry Baby Cry” was whatever?
JS: I thought it was a filler song, yea, I did. I’m taking it back now. The songs I knew were the best were still the best. “I Will” and “Julia” at the end of side 2. Those are the two best songs ever. I’ll never write a song as good as either of those.
AO: Maybe you will.
JS: Even if I did, I wouldn’t think of it as such.
PT: Maybe I misread but I saw you will be distributing horse figurines with the tape?
JS: Yea, hold on one second.
AO: They have big weiners.
BC: It’s pretty surprising for a figurine of that size.
PT: Do they actually?
BC: Yea. You’ll get to see for yourself very shortly.
JS: I actually just got my hands on these, myself, but here they are. [shows horse figurines]
PT: Oh my god, that’s sick.
JS: Yea, the horse toy and horse on the label were Tim Curley’s idea. He runs Hobbies Chicago, which is the label we’re going through. He designed the album cover and did the graphic design for the tape layout as well. There are a lot of different versions of the album cover. Ultimately we ended on this design without the horse and this with the horse. Everybody wanted the horse to be in it. Because it’s a horse, but it’s a digital rendering of a horse, it’s sort of an abstracted Americana, which you could kind of think of our music that way. There’s references to Americana but it’s sort of a joke. Tim had the idea for the horse toys.
BC: Aaron already mentioned the horse’s package.
JS: Yea, the horse penis, you can see it right there.
AO: Not safe for work package.
PT: You know I was on the fence about getting a tape but now I think I’m sold.
JS: They’re beautiful too. The tapes are clear and really pretty. Tim did a great job. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the Hobbies Tape releases, but they’re way more space age looking and they’re in these VCR cases. They’re translucent and they’re very cool. I think we both felt we wanted to go a slightly different direction. We ended up with this.
PT: Did Hobbies do that Tenci tape?
JS: Yea, they did the most recent Gentle Heat EP called Phase.
PT: Do you have a favorite Fountains of Wayne album?
JS: Of course. Welcome Interstate Managers.
BC: Best one for sure. But close second is the self titled.
JS: That’s also very good.
BC: The self-titled is amazing. It’s probably the one that I put on more. But as far as scope and production and stylistic variety, Welcome Interstate Managers is easily the top.
JS: I think there’s a trad country tune on Welcome Interstate Managers. It’s called “Hung Up On You.” When I was going back and forth as to whether “Yard Sale” was going to be on The Deals record, I looked to that song for reassurance a lot. It is sort of totally out of place but it’s one of the best songs on the record. Welcome Interstate Managers is amazing. RIP.
AO: I’ve honestly never really listened to their discography but I’m downloading now.
JS: Have you ever heard of a song called “Stacy’s Mom?”
AO: I mean, yea. I can tell they’re a good band just from that song.
BC: It’s so visible how good of a songwriter Adam Schlesinger is.
AO: It’s all the things you’d want to hear in a rock song.
JS: A key change and guitar solo happening at the same exact time. That shit’s the best. That was really a bummer when he died. He was one of the first big COVID deaths. Him and John Prine. It really sucked. Those were both really hard. We don’t have a cause of death for MF DOOM but I’m assuming it was COVID related. Just kicking us in the balls, this whole fucking year. Killing our favorite folks. It really sucks.
PT: On that note, what parts of life make you happy?
JS: Aaron?
AO: I’ll have to think about that one. Honestly I don’t know what makes me happy. I just try to be happy as much as I can. Certain people, other forms of art that aren’t music, looking forward to a hopeful future.
BC: The sun, walking around, fresh air, reading. Reading anything. I really love reading fiction.
PT: What have you been reading?
BC: Just read Virginia Woolf for the first time. I just finished To the Lighthouse.
JS: What did you think of the ending? It’s pretty great.
BC: It’s fucking amazing. I’ve read a fair amount of stream of consciousness writing but none that so deeply understands what it’s like to think. It’s so beautiful
JS: The whole middle of that book you really go on a journey.
BC: Dude, the middle? “Time Passes.” Oh my god.
JS: It’s such a mindfuck and it’s so beautiful and strange.
BC: She has an incredible way with language. No words do exactly what you expect them to do. Lots of verbs. Really cool verbiage.
JS: Speaking of books, Ben gave me this book by Hilary Leichter called Temporary. It’s about working at a temp agency but it’s extremely ironic and surreal. She temps as a CEO of a major corporation called Major Corp. Then she temps as first mate on a pirate ship. It’s fucking hilarious. Things that make me happy? I think my therapist would say we are focusing on contentment right now because happiness happens by chance. That's what he says: “Happiness happens. Happenstance.” He’s always trying to focus on my cash flow. Don’t show him this. We’ll take this part out. He’s okay.
AO: What about the cash flow?
JS: He’s like, “how much money do you want to make next year?” He kind of thinks of himself as my business coach. He’s like, “How much are The Deals worth?” [laughs] He’ll never read this. We’ll leave it in. That’s funny. My favorite things, aside from music and people, are sex and coffee and my two cats.
BC: I would also like to add in sex.
AO: Not a big fan of sex. Not for me.
JS: I was writing stock answers for interviews this week, since we’re doing a few, and my girlfriend said I should say “sex with my girlfriend.” [laughs] She’s really funny.