Protomartyr's Joe Casey on Fatherhood, Getting Married, and Finding Something to Live For

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it, along with a Screen Memories column every one or two weeks where I write about stuff I watched lately.

Today's installment: For the second time this week, someone's joining the three-timers club on the newsletter! Earlier this week it was L'Rain's Taja Cheek, and today it's Joe Casey of the excellent Detroit rock lifers Protomartyr. Joe was quite literally the first guest on the newsletter way back in 2020 (when the newsletter looked a lot different!), and he returned in 2023 to discuss the band's last excellent record Formal Growth in the Desert. Protomartyr's latest record, Hotel Usona, sees release today, and it's quite possibly the biggest left turn the band's taken yet—and I mean that as a compliment. I hopped on a call with Joe to chat everything out a week or two ago, and as always the convo was lively and insightful—few subjects crack me up the way he does. Check it out:

Let's start out by talking about recording with Dave Fridmann. It's not always that I've been in the same recording spaces as the people I'm talking to, but I visited Tarbox when I was profiling MGMT while they were recording with Dave. It's one of those spaces where you're like, "Oh, this actually looks exactly how I'd imagine Dave Fridmann's space to look."
We always like to work with somebody different each album. [Guitarist Greg Ahee] had it in his head that he wanted these massive sounds without it just being guitars. He wanted trumpets, and he wanted the drums to really be loud—and if you want some loud drums and trumpets, Fridmann is the way to go. We interviewed a couple different guys, and some were not interested in working with us. But Fridmann listened to the demos—which, no offense to Greg, they're always shitty-sounding demos—and he heard something in them where he was like, "I know what you're going for." They were able to geek out and talk about things in a musician way that I don't understand, so they hit it off and it was like, "Okay, we're going to do it there."

Growing up, I was a fan of the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev, so I was excited to go. It's funny when you get there—it's out in the woods, and Dave says, "If you go out for a walk, bring a baseball bat with you, because a dog might attack you." It's not idyllic. Lily Dale is right there, where the most psychics in America all live in this one little town that's connected. So it's got a weird vibe, and we were there in the summer, the fall, and the middle of the winter. We got three different seasons there.

Was this your first time in that area?
I've driven through quite a bit, but it was the first time we've stopped there. It's interesting—Lily Vale and the Chautauqua Institute, which is where Salman Rushdie got stabbed. It seemingly goes back to the 1800s, when people, instead of going to California, got as far as Western New York and stopped. They said, "Okay, this is our idyllic space."

My friends that live in New York City, when I'm like, "We're going to be recording in New York," they're like, "Oh, maybe I'll swing by. When you say "upstate New York," they think it's just up the river, like Kingston or something like that. And I'm like, "No, it's five or six hours away from where you are." It's quite the drive, and I appreciate the vibe. The Fridmanns took us into Fredonia, and of course, everybody are Buffalo Bills fans there, and Buffalo always gave me a Detroit vibe. The hippie vibe is an ancient hippie vibe—like, 1700s or 1800s hippies. It's a weird part of the country.

Even for a Protomartyr record, this new one sounds pretty dark. Let's get into that.
I didn't know it sounded dark until people started telling me that. Greg always has ideas going in—"I want this one to have pedal steel," "I want this one to have jazz"—that always sound terrible before we do it, because I'm worried that it's not going to meld. For this one, he was like, "I've been listening to a lot of 1950s exotic and lounge music"—and that sounds terrible. How are we gonna combine those? He also wanted a lot of horns, because he didn't want to have the guitar be the loudest thing. So that sounds weird to begin with, but he was left to his own devices much more than in the past, because Alex and I were busy with our kids. So he followed his muse and latched onto something.

As the music and the news of the day was coming in, I was like, "OK, this is going to be kind of a dark record lyrically. It can explore the ills of America." He was using exotica and lounge music from the '50s in a horror sort of way, where he was latching on to the idea that it was this exotic, hi-fi music for people coming back from World War II—presenting this fictionalized version of the South Seas and the creepiness of it. That fits with Protomartyr, where it might sound cheery but there's something off about it, without completely hammering you over the head with it. Greg was also leaning more into the fact that he's Lebanese, bringing in more Middle Eastern tonalities—again, things I don't quite understand. But the music was there, and I don't think it became scary-sounding until it was recorded and Fridmann pushed the loudness button.

Let's talk more about how you and Greg work together when it comes to the creative process.
Greg knows what I can do and what I can't. He tries to write knowing that I'm going to have to sing over it, but he doesn't really worry about, "I gotta write Joe a chorus part every single time." I have to figure that out what that is, and sometimes I'm wrong about it. I'll be like, "That's the part that I'm going to focus on," and he's like, "Really? I thought you'd focus on this part." Over time, we've gotten better at knowing each other's moves before we make them—but there's still always a song or two on an album that's a challenge for me, where I'm like, "How the hell am I going to sing over that one?" I've come to appreciate the challenge of it.

For this record, "Knife Dream" was one where the demo sounded extremely strange. I was very confused. It was a challenge for me to figure out what to do. This was also the first time we recorded in blocks. We recorded two weeks, then took a month or two off, and then came back. After the first block of recording, we realized we probably needed one more song. Greg was like, "Did you have any ideas that you hadn't done for this record?" I was like, "Yeah, I want to do a song about [Israel] using AI for bombing Gaza." That was the first time he actually knew roughly what I was going to sing about ahead of time. "Lavender — Gospel" was the first time that's ever happened, where he went off of me being like, "Write a song that sounds like this."

You mentioned becoming a parent before. How old is your kid right now?
19 months.

How's it been going?
Pretty good. It's one of those things where she's of the age where she's starting to have temper tantrums. That's when you have to really decide if you love this kid or not. [Laughs] When they're young, cute, and a baby, they're wonderful. But when they start yelling at you for no reason, then you're like, "Wait a minute." You find out what unconditional love is really fast—when they can walk but not talk or listen to you, and you'll never take a shit again alone. They're always going to be standing right in front of you.

"Checking Out" is partially about you becoming a parent, and it's an incredible way to end this record in general. Talk to me about that song.
We knew that was one of those ones—and this has happened before—where Greg will send in demos, and one will obviously sound like the first song and one will obviously sound like the last song. "Checking Out" was the longest thing we've ever done, and we knew that it would be the last song fairly early on. The middle part where I'm not singing was much longer, and they were toying around with what to do there. It had contracted and grown at different times. So I had two parts that I had to deal with, and I was going to ignore the middle part.

I'd promised Greg that I wasn't going to write an album about how having babies is great, or what it's like to be a father. He was like, "Thank God. Promise me you're not going to do it." And I'm glad I didn't do it. But as I was writing the lyrics, I realized that the reason why I'm as pissed off as I am is because I've got a kid. I'd always be a grump about things, but if the world is falling apart and I'm a single bozo, I don't really care about myself that much. But since having a kid, you start worrying about the future and all that stuff, unfortunately. It'd already been springing up a little bit in the lyrics, and I was like, "Well, I have to reference this at the very end. Maybe Greg will be too tired by then and won't notice that I'm doing it."

"Checking Out" is unfortunately the summation of the Protomartyr ethos, which is never, "Here's the answer to your problems" or "Here's how you solve what's going on." It's usually like, "The world is very bad, you have to get through it somehow, and there's not much you can do." That's why the first half is like, "What is a coward to do?" I don't know the answer to how we stop this train wreck, but one of the answers is jumping off the train, which is the first part of the song. The second part is, "Well, now I actually have somebody to consider, so I have to see a way, at least for her."

I tried to write it as straightforward as possible without it being too sappy. There were probably versions with too much sap in it. I wanted to strike a balance of it because I didn't want to hit a clanger off the rim right at the last song. It's easier said than done, writing a song like that—but it turned out okay.

I hear a parallel in terms of how having a child has made you feel about the world at large and how you started Protomartyr after your father's death—this notion of life transitions that cause you to take stock and act differently. I'm curious to hear if that's something you've observed too, or if I'm just doing a very bad job playing 5 p.m. psychiatrist over here.
[Laughs] Yeah, you really nailed me there. No, but I get frustrated in the act of living when I wonder what the purpose is. A lot of times, if you're just reacting to what's online or trying to vote for the most ethical person and it's a hard choice to make, you wonder if your voice or your vote even matters. If you're trying to make your way through your daily life and pay your bills, a lot of that can be really crushing and really negative. What is actually propelling me through the day? It can't just be the TV shows that I watch, there has to be something deeper or more rewarding.

Protomartyr came along at a perfect time for me when I was in my mid 30s and I was like, "Is this it? I gotta find something to do with my life that's going to give my life some purpose." Certainly, having being in a relationship or having kids is your purpose—there's nothing better. The great thing about having a kid is you no longer have to ask what do you do with your life. It's been answered for you. You have to get this kid across the finish line as best you can, and you don't need to think about about yourself anymore—which, for a lot of people, is a relief.

It's going to be interesting going forward, threading the needle. Because I do feel like being a singer in a band is a very self-centered, selfish act—for good reasons, which is fine. But between the raising of a kid and the period where you're like, "I'm sorry, honey, I need to think about my lyrics." You're trying to weigh the two, and one of them comes up lacking.

Last time we talked, you were engaged but not yet married. How's married life going?
So far, so good. Again, it's one of those things that gives you purpose. I waited too long to do all three of these things. Starting a band, don't start in your mid-30s, is my advice.. Getting married in your mid-to-late 40s, probably not good. Having a kid when you're almost 50, maybe not the best idea. But, I mean, hey, I crossed them off the list.

When I got married, I found the act of planning the wedding to be one of the most stressful and agony-inducing things I'd ever done in my life. And it wasn't even that big of a wedding! How was that for you?
We did it very small at the Outer Limits Bar in Detroit, just outside of Hamtramck. Larry [Williams], who played bass in Tyvek—he's a judge, so he married us. Even just having a party at a bar, you end up being like, "We should've done this, we didn't do that." We realized fairly recently that we didn't dance at all at our own wedding. We just had a party here at the house, and the planning of it is always so stressful—and then you're worried about how people are having fun. I realize I'm not really a party-thrower, because you never get to enjoy it—and that was kind of like how our wedding was. But people seemed to like it, and I liked it enough. I'm glad we only have to do one of them.

We had a really nice cake that we ordered for the wedding, and the wedding photographer didn't get a picture of the cake before it was carved up, so we have no idea what it looked like. For a bit, my wife and I were like,"I guess we should like feel bad about this." Eventually, we were like, "Who gives a shit. Let's move on."
I skimped on the wedding photographers and had a friend of mine take the photos—but he took tons of photos of my friends and didn't take hardly any of my wife's friends because was like, "I didn't want to bother them." Now it seems like my wife has no friends. That's what I get for doing it cheap.

The cover art to this album is really striking, and you handled design and layout as you've done for the others.
My original idea, long before the record was even done, was to have a woman holding two cats. People got so mad about the last record because there were two faces on it. All the supposed Protomartyr fans were like, "There's only ever one face on the cover of a Protomartyr record. How dare they?" So I was like, "Well, fuck you. I'm going to put three people on this one." But as the album came together, it became about America, and I was like, "Well, maybe I should have an eagle on the cover." Greg was like, "Well, that's a little bit too obvious." I thought about that for a second—like, is it too obvious? And then I thought, "No." In this day and age, people need some hitting over the head with things sometimes. My friend Ben, who took the photo, is a bird photographer. Those are eagles that were on Belle Isle, which is a park in the Detroit River—so they look a little bit rougher than your average eagle, I suppose. Once I saw those photos, I was like, "Well, I'll just use this, it'll be perfect."

You mentioned kind of the act of being a frontman before, and the first time I interviewed you, we talked a bit about how when you saw a therapist for a bit, you talked with her about the act of persona onstage. Talk to me about who you are as a live performer at this point. I thank myself when I was younger in my mid-30s that, if I was going to be doing this 16 years later, I decided early on not to do the thing where you're jumping around on stage, falling down, jumping into the crowd, or being overly aggressive. It's just not who I am, but also, I thought that if I was able to keep doing this for a long time, I didn't want to slow down where it would be like, "OK, obviously this guy's not jumping around anymore. It must be because he's old and fat." My biggest routine is that I pull beers out of my pocket—but I can still do that, no problem.

I felt like an old man when I was 35, and I'm starting to get to the point where I am an old man. It might be one of those things where people will always assume that I was one age. I look back at those early days and I'm like, "Wow, I was young and hot. Why did I think I was fat and bald then? I'm fat and bald now." So I'm growing into it. I don't know if I'm getting better, but I'm getting more confident about part of what I can do.

You guys had Kelley Deal touring with you for a few years there. Is that going to continue on for the next round of gigs?
Not for the next round. She was definitely in for a while, but then her other bands had some things going on. She's been taken off the board for this one, but we do have Fred Thomas filling in.

Love Fred. What did Kelley bring to the band in terms of live stuff for you guys?
She gave a sense of professionalism, because it's [usually] just the four of us and we can fight a little bit more. We're more of a band of brothers. But when you bring in someone like Kelley that's been doing it longer than us, you don't want to look like a fool in front of her, so you put your best foot forward. It's not like she was a schoolmarm or something like that—she takes to touring very positively, and it was hard to complain about things when Kelley's having the time of her life. You're like, "Who am I to complain about the joy of touring?" That made you appreciate it. Musically, when you have a Deal voice backing up your own voice, that to me is a dream come true, because it immediately makes my voice sound 100 times cooler. If we can't tour with her again, I definitely want to have her record something with us again, because that was always fun. It happened at the right time, where we've been doing it long enough that we needed something different to kkick us in the butt and make it more interesting—and she definitely fit the bill.

Let's talk movies, I know you like them.
With kids, you can't go see new movies, so I haven't seen a lot I saw The Odyssey, I thought it was fine.

Yeah, I didn't love it.
There's a movie I can recommend. I've got Tubi, and I'd seen something online where they suggested this film by this guy Dan Zukovic. The name of the movie is Scammerhead, it came out in 2014. It's very low-budget, and it's insane. Neil Breen [movies], they're kind of bad and hard to watch. This guy's movies are similar—he's only done three movies in 30 or 40 years. He did one in the '90s, The Last Best Thing, that was one of Mark Ruffalo's first movies. It's very fascinating what he was able to do on a budget. It has that Neil Breen thing where he wrote, directed, and produced it, and he's the main character—but it's so much better than that. It's on a different level where you can actually appreciate the art of it, even though it's a very low-budget movie.