by Heather Williams (@heatermeow)
On Friday, June 23rd, San Francisco and Vancouver band Pardoner's new record Peace Loving People is set for release into the world via Bar/None Records. I love the energy of this record. It is fun, makes me laugh, and not a moment goes by that I don't feel like dancing or swaying. Join us as we talk about the good times recording, touring, and working with their buff producer Jack Shirley.
photo credit: Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes
Heather Williams: How long ago did you start the process of making this record? It’s gotta be over a year now, right?
Max Freeland: We recorded it over a year ago now.
River Van Den Berghe: We recorded it before the last tour so March [2022].
Max: I had written a couple of the songs a year or two before that, so probably 2-3 years total that it’s been in the pipeline.
Heather: You moved up to Vancouver?
Max: It’s been three years. Right after I got married. I’ve been here in Vancouver and it’s been awesome.
Heather: On the last album you sent demos back and forth, how does that process work for you guys?
Max: We send each other voice memos a lot. I’ll send them to them really late at night, like really high and vulnerable, and say, “Does this sound cool to you guys?” Then Trey [Flanigan] will write a part over it and send it back to me and vice versa, that kind of thing.
Colin Burris: I feel like they’re helpful for when we actually get together to practice, which is less often now, we all at least have familiarity with the songs. Less showing everyone everything, we all get plugged in.
Trey: For this album, we demoed the whole thing by 4-track a couple months before we recorded it.
Heather: Do you have a practice space that you demo in? How long did it take to get the demo together?
River: Yes, here in San Francisco.
Max: Not that long.
Trey: Two days of recording I think for that.
Max: Got it done pretty fast. It was super helpful. We had never done that before, demoed the whole thing out before we recorded it and it helped big time.
Heather: You guys work with Jack Shirley, right? How did you meet Jack?
Max: Yeah. By begging him to record us.
Heather: You’ve been working with him since 2016 or 2017 right?
River: Yeah, he had worked with some artists we really liked so we reached out to him.
Heather: What were some of the albums that you were like, “I want to work with this person, they did awesome on this”?
Max: He did Punch and he was doing the Deafheaven album at that time. Tony Molina and Happy Diving. Mostly just other Bay Area people. He made their stuff sound all crazy and good.
Heather: What keeps you going back to him over the years? What’s it like working with him?
Trey: He’s really fast and efficient. He keeps us on track. We always try to get the least amount of time possible. He’s good at making us do stuff.
Max: Any time we are goofing around, he very politely and firmly tells us to get back to work. [laughs] We need that. A good steady hand. He’s a super cool, nice guy and I think we are all just really comfortable working in his groove. His studio is really cool and it’s not far for us to drive or anything like that. So it’s pretty easy.
River: I think with each record we’ve done with him, too, it’s a lot different of an experience each time and it’s a lot more fun. We have this really good repertoire with him now, and he was down to try some new things with this record. It was a really fun experience.
Max: He comes to all of our shows.
Colin: It’s really flattering. That guy got nominated for a Grammy and he still shows up to our dumb shows.
Max: Grammy Jack. That guy is awesome. He’s super cool, just the nicest buff guy.
Colin: He has perfect hair. I never see him without a good, nice haircut.
Max: Super composed and in a good mood basically all the time.
River: He also specializes in live recording which is something we wanted to do.
Heather: So then this record you did it all in one shot, the instruments?
River: Yeah, the music.
Colin: There were some guitar overdubs. We, all four of us, all played live in the room together. [Jack] comes from the hardcore and punk world. We all do. It’s nice to have that short hand with him. When we want to be loud or do a weird fast part, it’s not surprising to him.
Max: He’s good at recording that type of music, it is his specialty. How many days did we do the record in?
Colin: Three and a half. We were all in there for three days and then a half day of guitar overdubs and vocal overdubs.
Trey: Also, for this one we just recorded with him, we usually do everything on a reel-to-reel, but we wanted to try live tracking instruments to the 16-track TASCAM, and then did all the overdubs on the reel-to-reel, which was cool that he was down to experiment with that. Now he’s doing that with a lot of bands.
Max: Yeah he’s selling it. We should be making money on that.
Colin: Max, on the previous album, had this idea that he really wanted to do it on the TASCAM that we knew Jack Shirley had, and I feel like it begrudgingly was dragged in for the last record but it worked and we liked it. So for this one, we were all like, can we basically try to do the whole record on this TASCAM 16 track? He did it and I think it was pretty cool.
Heather: Do you have any memories you want to share from the recording session? Anything that sticks out to you?
Max: The glass of water thing was really funny.
Colin: Super kick ass.
River: I thought that was cool, too. Basically Jack has always, back to Uncontrollable Salvation, wanted to use a contact mic for something. So for one song we put a contact mic on a wine glass and put a finger around it to make noise.
Colin: But the crazy thing is he had us tune it and I didn’t know you could do that [laughs]. He had us put a guitar tuner on the wine glass and was like, “Dump more water out,” then he was like, “Add more,” then he was like, “Alright, that’s like a C major note now and play that.”
Heather: Wait, which song is it, or should we search for it on our own?
River: Ohhh….
Max: Uh….
Colin: Ahhh…
Max: Stop, don’t say it!
Trey: I think you’ll know it when you hear it.
Heather: Okay!
Max: …It’s on “Rosemary’s Gone” [laughs]. So when you hear that funny little sound, guess what, it’s a glass of wine.
Colin: That was a really sick one and any time Rocky, Jack’s dog, is in the studio, is a good one for me. He wears a little shirt and he is awesome.
Heather: I think that makes the best places to record when there’s a studio dog or cat.
Max: Yeah, he was soothing us all.
River: Also working with Sinclair [Riley], too. Always fun.
Max: It was crazy, I feel like she was only in the studio for a total of an hour maybe.
Heather: Wow! Yeah. Her background vocals are real good.
Max: Yeah, we played her that song, “Rosemary’s Gone,” and I feel like she listened to it twice, and I was like, “You should sing this kind of thing,” and then she wrote something else that was really good and better and just made it up on the spot. It was pretty cool.
River: She’s amazing.
Heather: What other bands is she doing?
Max: She’s in some BANDS right now. She’s been in The She’s for a long time, a kind of San Francisco institution.
Colin: That’s how we met her, when she was playing in The She’s. She has been in [The She’s] since she was 13.
Heather: That’s awesome!
Max: So it’s been like 15 years or something like that.
Colin: Currently she’s playing in Maggie Gently’s band and a band called Torrey.
Max: And Pardoner sometimes. She’s played the bongos for us before.
Trey: She was also in a band called Pllush for a long time.
Max: Yeah, they were the goat.
Heather: On your upcoming tour, do you have a release show in San Francisco?
Trey: Yeah, the last date.
River: It’s at Great American Music Hall.
Max: Yeah that’ll be cool. With Smirk and Marbled Eye.
Heather: That’s gonna be awesome.
Colin: Yeah, really looking forward to that gig. I mean, all of the shows will be great, but River and I grew up in Santa Cruz and the Great American always had ages 6 and up shows so we could go. I remember getting to go to shows in San Francisco and some of my first memories of getting to go to shows was going to this venue so it’s really cool we get to play there.
Heather: I’m realizing I saw that on a flyer and thought it was a joke.
Colin: Nope, not a joke!
Heather: That’s awesome… IT’S REAL!
Colin: It’s right on the website, 6 and up.
Max: Gotta have some rules [laughs].
Heather: You’ve got a tour coming up in July. What do you do, do you just meet up a couple days before and practice like crazy and then just hit the road after?
Trey: Yeah, basically.
Max: Yeah, sometimes not even that. I feel like sometimes we’ve just met up and went!
River: On the Momma tour, we kinda just winged it.
Trey: Did we really not practice at all?
Max: We practiced once at my studio in Vancouver.
Colin: Yeah but didn’t we do that like 45 minutes before our show that night?
Max: Yeah. We will have more time this time to meet up and to work on some new stuff. It will be more normal and easy this time.
Heather: On previous tours, do you have any fun memories you would want to share?
Max: I can’t think of anything in particular but I feel like every tour we go on, the thing that I remember the most is we’re sitting in the car for 160 hours and we’re singing the words to a song but we’re changing them to be about poop and butts and stuff like that, and taking a dump. [laughs]
Colin: That email you sent with the questions, I read that question and I don’t think I have any like great tour stories. It’s really hard to explain it to people why I enjoy it so much. Like it’s like River getting screamed at in a parking lot by strangers, which is not particularly cool but like I have that story.
Max: I feel like some cool stuff happened last tour, though.
Trey: We did push-ups with that guy in Cincinnati.
Colin: That was dope.
Trey: We were doing push-ups in this parking lot and this guy just came up and was like, “WHAT’S UP GUYS, HOW MANY ARE YOU DOING?” and then he just did way more push-ups than us. He did like 100 push-ups.
Colin: And then he lit up a cigarette and said, “Y’all are cool as hell” and just left. We never saw that guy again.
Max: What else cool happened… God, I feel like we had so many good times.
River: We played Kings Cup in the hotel room with Momma, that was great.
Colin: Yeah, this hotel room in Arizona, just playing Kings Cup and eating Domino’s.
Max: I felt really weird about that though because when they left two hours later, an hour after that I posted a video of all of us shirtless, beating up Colin, and they all saw it and responded immediately and were like, “What are you guys doing?” [laughs] Yeah, I don’t know, we were just juiced up, watching South Park [laughs].
Heather: National Photo Committee is going to be playing with you on some dates on the upcoming tour. Have you played with them before? Where do you know them from?
Max: I have an internet friendship with the singer in that band, Max [Bottner], but they played a show with us in Indianapolis last year and we just got along with them super well and really liked their set. We were talking about Weird Al and stuff with them for a really long time. Then we were talking to Max more and it seemed like a good idea and we are going right through there so yeah, just kinda for funsies.
Heather: Where did the title Peace Loving People come from, what’s that about?
Max: Yeaaaah, I don’t know, I think I just kinda thought it was dope [laughs]. No, I mean a lot of writing on it is about people our age who do the things we do, artist types and how they’re all kinda insane but say that they’re really normal, peaceful people, it’s kinda ironic. It’s a little sarcastic.
Heather: When you were writing the songs for this, were there any albums or bands that you felt were influencing the sound?
Max: Yeah, for sure. For my stuff, I was listening to this band Ruin a lot at that time. They were a band in the early 80s from Philadelphia and Southern Lord reissued their records as a comp. The first quarter of it is their first record and they do a lot of that stuff where it sounds like a normal song and then it goes really psycho and evil, or it sounds like a certain genre for like two and a half minutes and then just like really quickly does something different. I thought that was really cool. That is the most specific example I could give. What about you, Trey?
Trey: Probably just like Guided By Voices. I was listening to that band Medicine a lot but I don’t think that that really came through. Also, Yo La Tengo. Actually, it was during my big Grateful Dead phase.
Max: I was listening to Smudge a lot. They write a lot of short, good, fast-ish pop songs. Really concise and to the point. I was listening that record Manilow a lot.
Heather: Where was the picture taken on the front cover of the record?
Colin: Golden Gate park.
Max: Yeah, at the Ferris Wheel. Our friend Marisa [Kriangwiwat Holmes] took that picture. She lives in Vancouver and is really good friends with my wife. She is dating the guitar player in this band Dumb that we are really good friends with. Dumb was playing in San Francisco on their tour and Marisa flew down and met us all there. Hung out for a few days and took a bunch of pictures. That day I feel like we were just walking around and doing weird stuff in the park. Then we went to a bar and took a bunch of pictures in my friend Seth [Murray]’s bar and that was pretty much it.
Colin: That was a really cool thing because we all love Marisa and we were able to get her paid by our label to take photos of us, which was really sick. I feel like [the photos were] a lot of her influence, like Max said, we were just walking around and she was doing a lot of like, “Hold here and let me try this” and then it was going through all of the photos that she sent us which was where we saw the album cover one and really enjoyed it. That was really cool because it was a lot of her eye for photography and then us just being lucky enough to use it.
Max: You’d be shocked how many pictures of us we can’t use because one of us thinks they look ugly in it. There will be like 1,000 pictures of us and then 300 of them we will be like, these are real good, and then I’ll be like, I look ugly in those. Sorry! We can’t use them.
Trey: There were also a lot of silly ones where we were jumping or doing something stupid.
Max: Yeah we did the “do a silly one” every 5 pictures.
Heather: Do you think you will release some of the outtakes?
Max: Yeah… Maybe on the Patreon. Yeah. For the gold tier subscribers [laughs].
Heather: This is going to be your second record coming out with Bar/None. What is it like working with them? How did you get hooked up with them?
Trey: Our friend Justus Proffit put out some music on that label, so just kind of through him.
Max: We toured with him and when we were, they were contacting us a bunch so we just had the email already. Then when we were trying to figure out if we should just post the record on Bandcamp or something, we just sent it to them and they liked it.
Heather: That’s awesome!
Max: Yeah. They’re cool. They’re super funny guys that came to our show in New York and it was really dope to see them there.
Heather: They’re based out of New Jersey, right?
Colin: Yeah, Hoboken. It’s been those two guys for over 30 years now.
Heather: Do you have any suggestions for other releases on the label that we should listen to?
Max: FOR SURE.
Trey: Yeah, they’ve put out Yo La Tengo, The Feelies, and Alex Chilton.
Max: Justus Proffit, Winter. They have a pretty deep back catalog of super cool stuff.
Colin: To be on a label that put out an Alex Chilton record is kinda unbelievable.
Max: It’s pretty dope.
Heather: What have you been listening to lately?
Max: One of you guys want that one?
Colin: The new Poison Ruïn LP is amazing.
Max: What about you, Trey? Anything awesome lately? Are you trying to think of the coolest thing you can right now?
Trey: I am, yeah [laughs]. I’ve been listening to podcasts more than music lately.
Max: Which ones?
Trey: Joy Tactics [laughs].
Max: Yeah, I listen to that podcast, too. It’s really good. Joy Tactics, yeah. Music? I don’t know. I still listen to that band Medicine like every day. I’m listening to Smudge.
Trey: Uni Boys.
Max: That was a fun show. When we made our really long Instagram story fight thing where I saw you guys fighting and then I came out and slapped the shit out of both of you.
Trey: Yeah, a good tour memory is all of our staged fighting photos.
Colin: It’s a great way to pass the time if you show up in a new city, not sure what to do.
Max: Take pictures and make it look like you are killing or being killed by your friends [laughs].
Colin: I just saw Woolworm and Sun Spots, both those bands rock and are current.
Max: Woolworm. Legends. They’ve been a band for over 10 years, I think. They have been going on for so long and they’re super nice people and really good. I recommend listening to them.
Heather: So you’re getting together soon and working on new stuff?
Trey: We’ve got something planned.
Colin: Something’s in the works.
Max: Keep your eye on us for the next three years because some time in that window, something crazy is going to happen.
Colin: I’m going to be making some MOVES.
Max: And I’m not at liberty to discuss them… yet.
River: It’s going to be really scary [laughs].
Heather: Anything else you want to add before we head out?
River: Shout out The Artists, Max’s band. That band rocks.
Colin: That band is very good. Watch out for that album. Don’t make it so good that he quits Pardoner and just does The Artists.
Max: Yeah, I am going to go finish recording that TONIGHT.
River: Sick.
Max: Trey and River are in Discovery, a great band. Colin in World Smasher, another great band. And he’s in Repo Man, too. That’s a good band. He’s in Firearm, what can’t this guy do, he’s in everything.
Colin: Shout out to Amanda, Max’s wife, who made the pendant on the album art. That was a really cool thing we got to do, we took Trey’s artwork and made it in the 3D space which was a thing I feel like we’ve been talking about for awhile. That was a really fun aspect to this record.
Max: Yeah, definitely shout out to my wife. And I’m not just saying that because she can definitely hear me right now [laughs]. That will be my closing statement, that I love my wife.
Colin: Shout out Brian Smith for filming our music video, that was very cool.
Max: [Laughs] We’re just doing a shout outs section. And oh, shout out Seth, my best friend Seth, he’s got this this awesome bar in San Francisco, The Sage & Drifter. If you’re ever in town, get a drink and watch the Warriors. Oh it’s cool, free pool [laughs].
Colin: Thank you so much, Heather, this was really cool. It sounds like you actually listened to the album [laughs].