by Giliann Karon (@lethalrejection)
In another life, Deedee is a cantankerous bridge troll who can be charmed with a clever riddle or whimsical jester gallivanting around the royal court. But we’re in this life, and he’s the oddball frontman of MSPAINT, a guitar-less quartet from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. In both lives, his Zoom photo is, of course, the same grainy picture of Garfield smoking a blunt.
The group’s 2023 debut, Post-American, garnered praise from Militarie Gun, Soul Glo, and Turnover. Performing for diverse audiences across the country and in Europe helped them contextualize what others hear, encouraging them to go bolder the next time around. Their new EP, No Separation, drives the poles of blistering synth-punk and unflinching hardcore even further apart.
This time around, Corpus and Show Me The Body lent their studio expertise, which Deedee credits to helping the band synthesize their array of musical touchstones and instincts. The group began with demos from synth player Nick Panella, then each member pried the layers apart and injected their own individual flair before Deedee wrote lyrics.
There’s a puzzling mysticism about the mononymous artist, who teems with infinite admiration for his band and biting political commentary, all of which drips in southern drawl. He bounces from topic to topic at lightning speed, tapering off sentences before he has a chance to complete the thought. I can barely keep up, but he keeps coming back to the process of deconstructing a demo and rearranging the pieces until they’re unrecognizable – torching it all down so their infectious synergy can rise from its ashes.
In a few weeks, they leave for a month-long nationwide tour (w/ Lip Critic, Draag, and Pat and the Pissers), bookended by dates in Birmingham, Alabama and New Orleans. A deep reverence for Hattiesburg and Southern culture runs through everything they do. For many audiences, especially international ones, MSPAINT is the first Mississippi band they’ve been exposed to. As their city’s unofficial ambassadors, the band reconciles with Hattiesburg’s grim history while leveraging conscious communities to imagine a brighter future.
MSPAINT by Thorne Hood
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
GILIANN KARON: You toured a ton after Post-American. How did your touring schedule help you gauge what you wanted to make on No Separation?
DEEDEE: The past two years was the most any of us had toured. We played a show in Europe with Show Me The Body, who we ended up recording with. We told them we want to do an album and we're working on songs, but it’s hard between shows. After touring so much, we realized writing songs is a process, not just getting in a room and jamming out.
A shorter release felt more achievable and something we could dump more emotion into, as opposed to two back-to-back albums. An EP made more sense for our schedule. Even thinking about it from the listener’s perspective – 12 songs is a lot of songs.
We played some of the unreleased songs live too, which was the first time we’d done that. The live performance wasn’t too far off from how we ended up recording them. It’s hard to be like, “let’s try this certain thing tonight.” There are so many buttons on a synthesizer, and that technology is far beyond me. It’s not easy to try new things on the fly. It’s much easier when you’re physically in the same room and jamming together, which you can’t always do on the road.
GK: What changes, if any, did you make after playing these songs on tour?
DD: There would be a time where we'd be like, “two weeks ago when you accidentally hit that button, it sounded sick.” We’d keep that in mind so we can experiment with the song live.
Other than that one night where we captured a random sound or somebody messed up, writing on the fly is pretty rare for us. There were a couple of songs we’d play faster and faster until we landed on the right speed. “Surveillance” was originally way slower.
GK: What did you listen to growing up and how did that fit in with the tastes of your bandmates?
DD: Nirvana was the first big band I heard on the radio. Growing up three hours north of Hattiesburg in the Mississippi Delta, there weren’t a lot of radio stations that played contemporary music. I realized you can take any song and simplify it. I’m a little more improvisational than the other members of MSPAINT. Usually they’ll write something and once it’s done, I’ll come in and figure out my part.
I didn’t like playing music with people growing up. When I moved to Hattiesburg in the middle of 10th grade, I met people who also played music and went to local shows. I didn’t know there were bands from here. It blew my mind.
After going to shows for a while, I knew I wanted to play them. I’m still in a band called Stellatone that I started in 2009 or 2010 with some friends. We all learned to play music and write songs with each other. When we went to college, the same thing happened again because you’re around even more weirdos with similar interests.
I’d never been in a band with a drummer and synth, but Quinn [Mackey] and Nick [Panella] were in some of my favorite local bands. I knew we all had different music tastes but I was excited for that dynamic.
It was fun to have somebody else lead. I'll star in a role that I'm given. I can take initiative, but if I need to follow the vision, that’s just as fun for me. Our synth player comes from a more scholastic background. He studied jazz in college, as did our drummer. They know what music is and how it functions. I’ll sometimes say we're thinking too much, and then they say, “this can definitely go deeper.”
Randy [Riley], the bass player, and I probably have the most similar taste. We both like heavier stuff. We all come from different places. There’s plenty of overlap, but we're rarely all like, “oh yeah, that band.” We never know what each other's fucking talking about sometimes. At this point, we’ve been in a band long enough that we might not know someone’s exact reference point, but we know the musical instinct they’re getting at.
GK: How does that play out in the songwriting process?
DD: When we were writing Post-American, Nick brought in demos and we did light deconstruction so people could get their parts in. We tried to get the vision with as much input as possible.
No Separation was even more collaborative. Nick would bring these songs in and by the end, they were unrecognizable from their original form. We went into the weeds of each other’s musical backgrounds. It was fun learning to contextualize what someone means when they talk about “the chaos section” or “the scary part” or whatever their lingo is. You’re in a more vulnerable, malleable space when you’re laying it down in the studio.
Nick was in one room with Harlan and a bunch of synths. I don't even know what the fuck was going on in there. Drums and bass were in the other room, and we’d send stuff back and forth. Nick was in the lab. He took the time to find and curate acute, sonic details that we didn't explore as much before. We knew we could layer a bunch of different synth sounds, but we’d never done it. There’s no template for any of this. You have to mess around. It's still a very guitar-brained environment, but we're breaking away from that.
No Separation feels attached to Post-American. We wrote these songs messing around after tours. “Angel” was the first song where we were like, “we're gonna put something out and this is on it.” It began as instrumental and didn’t sound close to what’s on the EP, but it has the same synth and piano lines. So we had that song to build upon. We worked on these songs and then toured again.
We were so unaware of what we were getting into. We were gone for so long, playing shows all the time, and hadn’t practiced in months. The songwriting process became slower because we’d be home for two weeks. Love y’all to death, but we can’t – of course we’re gonna see each other in our hometown because it’s so small – it’s not that we don’t want to play music, but we only had two weeks to get two months of rest back. Still, it’s a privilege getting to do this. It’s the greatest honor.
We worked on Post-American during COVID, so we had infinite practice time because that’s all there was to do. This one was the opposite. I watched us as a band get way tighter, as musicians and as friends.
It’s not necessarily that No Separation is more cohesive, but it's more representative of what happens when they’re messing around and I’m listening. It captures those moments, just as much as it captures how deep the rest of the band can go into a song, deconstruct it, and pay close attention to the parts I don’t always pick up on. I'm the first one to be like, “y'all killed it.” I love adding another phase to their plan.
We left a little in the tank after Post-American. It was only five songs, so we wanted to dump everything into them. We don’t have a lot of experience in the studio, either. The Corpus dudes were so easy to work with. It was very fun to have peers you can shoot the shit about, but we loved to be around people who were like, “you can do this this way” while letting us figure stuff out on our own.
GK: Post-American has a very distinct identity, which No Separation builds upon. You’re much clearer with your political messaging, rather than alluding to it. What inspired the shift?
DD: I felt like there were enough ways to say something poetically. I read this book called Poetry as Spellcasting, which is something you’d read in a college course, it had exercises and stuff. A lot of it went over my head, but the idea was that words can wire the way someone thinks or feels. It was a pretty basic concept, but it’s fun to me to explore it within the context of music.
When I was writing lyrics, I couldn’t even come up with anything different to say. I’m a motherfucker that speaks in riddles or weaves out of conversation. I wanted to say it on the nose while putting me in a headspace that makes me emotional and excited. It’s not that I’m out of metaphors or analogies, but for some of the songs, I wanted to paint the picture in my mind.
I’m 31 and have been in bands since I was 20, but I’d never been just writing lyrics, staring down the barrel of a Notes app. I listen to the music MSPAINT makes and I’m like, “what do I do?” “Angel” was the first song that actually sounded like something you could play on a piano or acoustic guitar if you were so inclined.
I think it's political for us because we have the privilege to see how it should be for people. And it's almost more frustrating to know how it could be different. There's no reason for it to be happening. We know that to be true. You could be vibing, staring at a computer all day, complaining about work, and that's the biggest worry on your plate that day.
The traveling and shit, it's not like we saw shit that was worse or better, but there's so many other cool ways to live that don’t involve 70 fighter jets. It’s all becoming quite literal to me. Not that it never was, but we’re not in a timeline anymore where you can be like, “oh no, I didn’t hear about that.” There's a bunch of shit going on all the time.
I didn't want it to be corny, either. I don’t like dancing around stuff. At some point, you gotta say something’s on fire, something has to fall. You can't just point at it the whole time and be mad at it with imagery. If it's something I can say and it makes me feel a certain type of way, then that'll probably translate.
That’s what I like in the contemporary art I consume – the more literal shit, even if it’s goofy. That’s why I love that MJ Lenderman album (author’s note: could be either Boat Shows or Manning Fireworks) because it's some of the most nonsensical goofy dude shit, but it's also straight on the nose, no frills, guys rock music. It hits for me.
I’m starting to be genuine. We played with Wednesday in the UK, who I didn’t listen to much before. You listen to them? Their lyrics are stream of consciousness, unraveling, but every other line is part of a story. At the time, I was working on lyrics when the band was finishing the songs.
But there also has to be a bit of finesse. Since there were a concise amount of songs, I didn’t feel like I had to come up with 10 different ways to say we are not getting paid enough. There’s only so many different ways you can say shit to me too, but it’s also thinking about the people who pull up to see us.
There’s so many ways people escape from the day-to-day, and they get that weekend where they come see your band. These people had to give up something today to do this. I remember when I worked and would wanna go to shows, I'd be like,” I just can't swing it.” And then you'd have that one crazy homie who's like, “bro, I'm gonna be back here at 3:00 AM and I'm clocking in.”
I never considered that part of the audience before. $15 or $20 for a ticket can mean a lot to some people. There’s been times in my life where I couldn’t perceive paying more than $10 for a gig. We all come to these cities and our shows are where people convene. If the roles were reversed, I’d want the bands I’m seeing to stand on principle and lay it out there on the table. Tell me how you really feel.
GK: That’s why I think the “a better world is possible” messaging is so important. No one wants to spend money on a show only to be lectured on how bad the world sucks. We know! That’s why we’re here.
DD: I'm definitely not someone that's gonna give the speech during a show. I have been moved to tears by some really impassioned speeches at shows. But I’ve definitely seen some shit where the artist doesn’t really say anything, they just sound angry and basically said “fuck this shit, we all know it sucks, so fuck it.”
Just say, “thanks for coming out, let’s get it moving.” But I always appreciate when artists use their platform to speak on stuff. That’s just not my vibe. I’d rather just put it in the music and that’ll resonate with people because it resonates with me.
We come from such a humble place. It’s changing us in ways we didn’t know about, but it’s not forcing us to compromise who we are. A few times, someone has asked why we don’t talk much on stage, but that feels like I’m yapping for 30 minutes straight. That’s just my perspective.
I don't shut the fuck up the whole time I'm up there. Every time we're playing a song, every part got a lyric on it, which is crazy. I appreciate when the message is potent enough where I don’t expect to hear much from them otherwise because I know where they stand.
GK: Repping Hattiesburg has always been important to you. What’s so special about the city and how do you contextualize it to your audiences, especially when performing abroad?
DD: Speaking to performing abroad, we’re usually the first Mississippians these crowds and these venues have seen. There are bands from here that have toured in Europe and Japan, but it's cool to see bands doing tours that aren't through our friends. Our tours are with other bands that already have established audiences.
It’s this really unique experience for us, especially at a seemingly professional level. They house you and feed you. But then we’re at Stonehenge and like, “these rocks are so big.” We’re still country dudes at our core.
A lot of times, people hear us talking and be like, “what kind of American accent is that? Is that the Georgia American accent?” And we were like, “no, it's Mississippi.” They’d be fascinated because they’d never met someone from there. That kind of stuff is still childlike fun, like “the boys aren’t gonna believe this.” It’s exciting to share our music with people outside our small community.
It’s always cool when younger kids in the scene say they told a band where they’re from and that band mentioned MSPAINT. That’s the stuff you should get hype on. That’s my own personal agenda.
No one is shocked when someone’s never heard of Hattiesburg. When I started getting involved in shows, I learned about everything that happened in the 80s and 90s. I’d pass this one house – it used to be called the 1126 House – and my older friends would talk about the shows they saw there.
This show really contextualized how I viewed shows going forward: Jeff Rosenstock’s old band, Bomb The Music Industry!, played in Hattiesburg. You could not talk to someone without them bringing that show up. It was so weird that there was an event that happened here, in this house, not a venue. All these people were talking about how crazy it was. And then I started asking people about it, and everyone had a different story like that – a different band at a different time in a different house.
It made me realize the things I want to do here are possible. The things you see in the crusty YouTube documentaries are real and happen in this town. At that point, I'd lived in Mississippi my whole life and I didn't know about this. Why isn’t everywhere like this?
Our instinct was to go on tour. We gotta be the band that plays somewhere that people talk about, but also get eyes on what we’re doing. It’s easier to bag something when you see how important it can be to other people. Especially being from Mississippi, there’s such a long history of everything that goes into the most evil parts of our country. That’s chapter one for Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and all the other plantation states.
You wear that as someone from here, especially as conscious people. We changed our state flag from the Confederate emblem less than 10 years ago. And even then, you realize there are still people like that, and it is real. But it’s still a tight-knit community in the sense of, no matter what's going on, even if it’s separate people doing their separate things, everybody comes together in the city.
It’s easy to root for that. It's easy to say we're from a tiny town that no one should know about, the band is cool and fun and people like it, and we don’t have an agenda other than that we’re from this place.
Everything we do is already out of the realm of what we expected. We recorded all of Post-American on our own and re-recorded it in Los Angeles. Pretty much everything after that sounds made-up to us. It didn’t feel real. We’re from here. No one we know has ever had a booking agent or someone that helps us do interviews. I don’t have any homies who have ever done anything like that.
Everything is special because we’re obviously putting a lot of work into it, but we get to share it with people who, years from now, will be like, “dude, that was so cool” and know where we’re from. That shit’s so fun.
No Separation is out now on Convulse Records
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