Dan Boeckner on Heated Rivalry, Ohio, Podcasting, Being Online, and the Decline of Culture

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.

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Now, let's get back to business after a slight pause in free content (paid subscribers, you know you've been well-fed in the last week or so): the breadth of Dan Boeckner's career pretty much speaks for itself. Obviously, you have Wolf Parade, one of the best indie rock bands of the 2000s period (and are about to head out on a Canadian tour in March), as well as the wealth of excellent projects he's been in and worked on over the last several decades (including 2024's solo record under his own name). Aside from his very impressive musical CV, Dan's also made the leap to real-deal podcasting over the last decade, his most recent venture being the Trouble in River City series that's accessible through his Patreon.

I've been wanting to talk to Dan for forever now, and after a few DMs were exchanged last year we finally got down to what turned out to be a very long and extensive conversation. Two conversations, in fact: We first spoke a month before Heated Rivalry became the sensation that it was, and after Wolf Parade had a surge in popularity on streaming as a result (culminating in a very worthwhile upcoming reissue of Apologies to the Queen Mary) we agreed that it was worth hopping on the phone again. So what you're getting here is the seamless fusing of those two conversations—and, honestly, this is one of my favorite interviews I've run in quite some time and I think you're all going to join it too. Check it out:

When did you move to Cleveland?
I moved to Columbus in July of 2024, and after about a year I moved to Cleveland because I've spent a lot of time there. I'd moved to Columbus because my friend Sam Brown, who plays in Divine Fits and Operators, lives there, and I'd gotten to know Columbus pretty well over the years. I thought I'd move there and buy a house, but Columbus is undergoing—not unlike a lot of medium-sized cities in America—a total infestation of tech people who are creating a speculative real estate bubble.

It really is happening everywhere, isn't it?
It is. It's truly demonic. Cleveland, so far, seems kind of immune. My partner's from Cleveland, and while we were in Columbus we'd come up here on the weekends. There's a great black metal bar here that we would go to, and an ancient bowling alley that's super fun. We'd come up here and have a great time and go back to Columbus and look at house listings and just be like, "What the fuck are we doing here?" So we moved to Cleveland. Before Ohio, I was in New Orleans for a couple years. Before that, Montreal.

I have several friends who have ended up in New Orleans over the last several years.
Oh wow, that's crazy. My partner was there for 15 years, she worked on Beasts of the Southern Wild. New Orleans is interesting, because it's a beautiful city. There's no city like New Orleans in North America. The only analogue I can think of is Montreal. But with New Orleans, it's like how Austin has become a unlivable repository for those tech gremlins. As prices raised in Austin, a lot of people in the entertainment industry and tech-adjacent people started speculatively buying in New Orleans, driving up prices there and ruining it for everyone.

I can't speak from authority, because I lived there for a short period of time, but a lot of the people that are moving there and changing the character of it for the worse have second homes there. That's not their primary place—which is really funny because, back in the colonial era, before they solved the problem of malaria and yellow fever, in the summertime all of the wealthy merchants and slave owners would leave in the summer and leave the working class people to suffer through mosquito hell. I've noticed a similar thing with entertainment people, where they don't stick around in New Orleans during the summer.

Yeah, my friend who works in events down there has made it clear that, if you think the summer in New Orleans would be great for business down there in general, it's actually the complete opposite.
The summer is kind of like Montreal winter. That was the only thing I had to compare it to when I lived there. No one goes outside because it's too fucking hot. The last summer I was there, there was such a severe drought condition that the seawater from the Gulf of Mexico was coming back up the river and poisoning water supplies. So in my neighborhood—which was adjacent to the very rich, transient white person neighborhood—there was a huge run on water. If you went to the grocery store, people were fucking hoarding it.

Also, I will say, in the summertime there's another phenomenon wjere the air becomes electric with what I could only describe as craziness. There's always a bit of a crime wave spike. People lose it, and it's understandable, because a lot of people are living in really difficult conditions in that city, and it's hot all day and night and you can't sleep. It's not a good mental health scene.

What do you like most about Ohio?
When it comes to the nature here, Ohio really does contain multitudes. The city of Cleveland itself has lost almost three-quarters of its population from its peak over the last three or four decades, so it's a city built for a million-plus people that has maybe 300,000 people living in it. Nature has kind of reclaimed parts of the city in a way that I think is really beautiful, and maybe a way forward for degrowth. If we hit a brick wall with consumption, people can maybe look at how Cleveland Metroparks took over one of the most polluted freshwater ports in America and revitalized it after the beachfront had gone into receivership. Basically, the city of Cleveland was broke, and the state took it over—and when Ohio started flipping over to being Republican, the state was essentially like, "We don't want to fucking pay for Cleveland's waterfront," and Cleveland Metroparks stepped up and cleaned it up.

It's so different than 2004, which was the first time I came here. I was opening for Modest Mouse. I'd never been to the city before, and I remember playing in the flats in the old industrial area, just west of downtown. It was summer, and I was like, "I'm gonna jump in the river," and the promoter was like, "You're not jumping in the river, don't fucking do that." I'd never heard any of the famous Cleveland stories, like the Cuyahoga catching on fire. I was just like, "That looks like a cool place to swim." But since then, it's been revitalized.

I almost don't want to talk about it too much, because I don't want the same thing that's happening to Columbus and so many other cities to happen to Cleveland. But I also think that Cleveland is is a little proofed against that, because it's a post-industrial city that, on the surface, doesn't have a lot to offer these ding-dongs that are trying to revitalize the Rust Belt by turning it into a city version of an airport lounge.

I definitely understand feeling like, "I hope nobody comes along and ruins this." That kind of seems like the way things work these days.
Absolutely. One of the last toothpicks that's holding up the Western economy is speculative real estate, sports gambling, "artificial intelligence," and pornography—and I think artificial intelligence is going to pull the rug out from underneath the pornography industry.

There's also that thing where you have to upload your driver's license in some states just to access pornography now.
Republican governors can't really offer their constituents anything except for culture war wins, and that's a really great way to do it—although I think it's going to backfire. I don't know if you read that Harper's article on gooning, but in an increasingly alienating world that promises more instant gratification in the pursuit of completely numbing yourself from the material conditions, people are going to want to jerk off to porn, you know?

I have a very specific question for you regarding Ohio. Do you know anybody who managed to catch, or even be remotely adjacent to, the Black Keys crypto concert that happened a couple years ago?
No, I don't—and, you know, I've been blocked by both the Black Keys' official account and by Pat and Dan. I covered this a little bit on a podcast Fortune Kit with my friend Charles Austin, who also does E1. I started seeing ads for this America Loves Crypto super PAC thing—and then I started seeing ads for the Black Keys playing in their hometown of Akron. Crucially, neither of them live in Ohio anymore—they live in Nashville. Their disastrous partnership with Irving Azoff, who was managing them for a while—I don't know if you remember—

Oh, I'm all over the Black Keys' many failures at this point.
I mean, the Irving Azoff thing is incredible, because it's a microcosm of everything that's fucking wrong with the music industry right now. Telling Pat and Dan that they were going to be selling 14,000 tickets in the middle of nowhere is insane stuff. So they parted ways with him and were like, "What can we do? I know—we'll play a hometown show for a super PAC that's absolutely devoted to unseating Democratic politicians."

To turn around after the Irving Azoff thing and be like, "We're going to do this show for an undisclosed amount of cash, and the purpose of the show is to unseat the Democratic leader of Ohio and replace him with a ghoul, all in service of allowing weak legislation against cryptocurrency fucking nonsense." I did read some fan testimony of the show, and it was so sad, man. It was these kids being like, "We paid the money, we waited in line, but it turned out that there was another tiered package." So if you bought a regular ticket, they made the fans watch the band from behind the stage with the PA pointed in the other direction, literally playing with their backs to their fans. You can't get a more perfect metaphor of really just not giving a shit about the people that support you.

It's interesting. The industry is obviously not in a great place—I mean, I don't think it ever has been, but it seems especially bad right now. You see various ways of weathering it, and I do feel like I've seen a lot of people who were experiencing what could be regarded as large-scale success in the 2010s just lose their way in regards to decision making. They're just totally unsuited for the bottom-dropping-out-ness of the moment.
Yeah, I think about that all the time. It's hard to watch. Best Coast, I know she was getting really heavily criticized for posting about touring being not lucrative and it being difficult. And in a lot of ways, I'm kind of like, "Okay, everyone is dealing with this, so going on the internet and making it about yourself is kind of embarrassing." It speaks to what you were talking about—these people being unequipped for the bottom dropping out—but at the same time, I was kind of sympathetic. Here's this person who got catapulted to making more than a decent amount of money than a normal job would pay you in the heady days of 2012, and now they're being told, "Hey this doesn't work anymore—and, actually, it never worked in the first place. It was just luck."

I actually talked with Spencer about this for Hearing Things back in 2024, but there was this period of time—from 2007 to 2015 or so—where, I don't think anybody was making any money off of anything, but from the music side of things there was a lot of funny money being thrown around. It was tech bubble-esque, but for indie rock.
Yeah, I wrote about that in a piece I did for TrueAnon's newsletter that Steven asked me to write. I wrote about the making of Apologies in a way that was a lot more candid than I've ever been about that time in my life, and the time leading up to it. One thing I touched on was what you're saying—which was that, for a brief period of time, I'd date it back even to, like, 2005, there was these chunks of money floating around. If you had a degree in communications or knew somebody that worked at VICE and had managed to get a job there, you could get your hands on that money and distribute it to your friends—but the money never stuck
around or stayed in one place. It was like a weather system. Red Bull Music Academy is a great example of that.

Over the last 10 years, I've become very close with a lot of people in the podcasting sphere who all previously had jobs during the media bubble, where people were investing tens of millions in Jezebel. A lot of friends have written for VICE before. On the political side of things, it's really interesting to see which direction people go in—either the dark path or the light path. The light path has been people startingvery good podcasts or writing for respectable news outlets, and the dark path is reinventing yourself as a disinformation expert and acting as a kind of greased tube to send packets of information from the state department to readers. Somebody, one day, is definitely going to do a very good investigative piece on all the grift that's come out of that.

Tell me more about getting into the podcasting world. I know it's something you're pretty involved with at this point, and what you do in that space seems pretty aligned with your interests and general knowledge. To be candid, when I see a lot of musicians doing podcasts or Substacks, it often just seems like another way to promote the work.
Yeah, I don't blame anybody for being like, "I'm going to have a bi-weekly thing where I talk to other musicians about music stuff." I've even dipped into that on my Patreon. I recently did a 12-episode explainer of the years around Handsome Furs putting out Sound Kapital—but I'm not enforcing that on anyone. It's paywalled, so if you really want that, you can get it.

One of the weird contours of the Wolf Parade extended universe is that we got popular before social media was super necessary, which means our Instagram numbers are fucking terrible. After years of prodding, I got a Twitter account, and I was just posting about things that I was interested in or frustrated about. The first thing I really latched on to was the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, because I read an article about monuments to a Waffen-SS division in Oakville, Ontario. I took history in university. I'm pretty autistically interested in Eastern Europe. I've traveled there a lot. I was like, "What the fuck is going on here?"

The deeper I dug into it, the more upsetting it became, and that became the kernel for The Bottlemen podcast that I had with [Riley Quinn], who runs Trashfuture, which is basically the UK Chapo Trap House. For a couple of years, we did a podcast on Canada's image of itself versus Canada's real relationship with itself and the rest of the world. The idea that Canadian identity is defined by the fact that we are not Americans is not enough glue to hold a country together in a real way. We wanted to explore that, and why it's funny. We ended up having guests Jeff Vandermeer and Alexandra Scaggs from Financial Times.

I was always really interested in political science, geopolitics, history, and traveling, and all of those itches got scratched with Handsome Furs. We basically set up a system where, instead of just touring North America and Europe, we could tour North America, Europe, Eastern Europe, Warsaw Pact countries, and Southeast Asia. But I didn't have anywhere to put any of that energy except into music, and nobody wants a book report in the form of a song. So podcasting was very satisfying for me, and a great outlet for that part of my creative life. To be honest, a lot of the people who were involved in the first wave of leftist podcasting—the Chapo Trap House people, Brendan and Noah,who do Blowback, even Charles—were all fans of Wolf Parade. That was delightful to me, and I became friends with them through that.

It's interesting to hear you talk about this, because I've heard the opposite from a lot of a lot of musicians over the last decade: "I gotta get offline." I hear it from a lot of writers too! Quite honestly, I think there's something wrong with me, because I like being online.
I think there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. You have to go in with the mentality that 90% of shit that you're seeing—especially now, since things are so much worse now than even five years ago—is just garbage. I always think about Nate Ruess, who is a perfect online guy. His posts are always great, and his account is locked 90% of the time, so he's only talking to and interacting with people that he's become friends with through the internet. So I can't sit here and say that the internet is bad for everything, but I think, on balance, it's probably pretty bad.

You put out a solo record back in 2024. Let's talk about your musical evolution over the years.
For that record, I had a long talk with Jonathan Poneman. I was like, "Do I need to start another band? I'm always starting new bands." He encouraged me to put the record out under my own name, because he saw everything that had happened after he signed Wolf Parade as an extension of the same project, just working with different people, you know? He was like, "You need to wrangle this under your own name." I have no reason not to be totally candid about this—and I think maybe more people should talk about it—but one of the challenges of having multiple projects is trying to bring fans from each project to the next one. Of course, you're gonna get people who prefer At Mount Zoomer to Handsome Furs' first record, and you're gonna get people who come to Handsome Furs and are like, "I don't really like Wolf Parade all that much." You can't bring everyone over.

But with my career specifically, there's been a disconnect with connecting the dots between all these projects as involving the same person. I can't tell you the amount of times that I've played a Handsome Furs show and somebody would be like, "I loved that. Are you the guy from Wolf Parade?" So the Boeckner moniker was an idea to fold everything under one name. Whatever I do with that name, it's going to be me, and it'll be easily connected to the other stuff.

For the record itself, I had a bunch of songs that I was working on, I ended up working with Randall Dunn, who's an incredible producer and now a friend of mine. He was the front of house for Sunn O)), and he produced a lot of their stuff along with Marissa Nadler, Zola Jesus, and that ambient Wolves in the Throne Room record. He's like a weird occult wizard. I started working with him, and Ben Greenberg from Uniform also works at that same studio, so we became friends and he joined my touring band, which unlocked this whole world for me of, not quite indie rock people, but people more on the metal and hardcore side of things

I'm curious to hear you talk about what makes a collaborator for you. What works, and what doesn't?
In the musical sense, it comes down to somebody who challenges me to be better. With Spencer, it was pretty obvious right away once we started playing music together in his apartment—I was like, "Oh, this guy's really good." He's good, and he's good in a way that I'm not good—but I'm good in a way that maybe he doesn't have access to, which creates a feedback loop.

It's a similar thing with Divine Fits. I've been a lifelong fan of Spoon before Britt reached out to me about starting a rock band together. I bought Telefono when I was in high school. Fucking great record, one of my favorite bands. So as a fan, I was like, "I have to do this." It was difficult to see myself as a peer to Britt when we first started, but quickly, we started writing. I learned a lot in that in that writing process about what makes a good song and what doesn't—just being ruthlessly efficient about stripping things away.

In some of my other projects, I'm the principal songwriter. But with something like Handsome Furs, I wrote the music, but that band wouldn't have been the same if it wasn't for Alexi—her contributions, her stage presence and overall aesthetic drive. She brought a bunch of stuff to that project that I would not have thought of, and she was really helpful in getting us off the ground.

It's interesting to hear you talk specifically about the complimentary songwriting dynamics between you and Spencer. As a longtime Wolf Parade listener, it's always been pretty easy to be like, "Here's a Spencer song" or "This is a Dan song," beyond who's singing it—but there's also moments where your sensibilities merge.
Those are my favorite Wolf Parade moments, like on Thin Mind's "Against the Day," which we sing together. "Kissing the Beehive" is maybe the best example of that. But with Wolf Parade, over the years, it's solidified into a top-down collective vision for each song. Each person brings their specific thing that they're good at, and then Arlen is the glue that smashes those two sides together.

When you guys were touring in 2020, it was literally the last show I saw before shit closed down for COVID.
Oh, God. I 100% had COVID. I can't do anything to change that. But I have to say, Thin Mind, I'm so proud of that record. We went out touring it as a three-piece, and we got like super tight. We were back to the original lineup of Wolf Parade, and I was so excited about doing another North American leg into Europe, which obviously didn't happen. But when we started the tour, Spencer was sick, and he was like. "I think I have allergies." I'm kind of a Nazi about people being sick on tour, which I know is annoying. I'm fully aware of how irritating I am about it, but I was so pissed. I was like, "He doesn't have allergies. He's sick." And then I got sick, and then everybody got sick.

I remember playing in San Francisco, and Brace and Liz from TrueAnon came to the show. It was the first time I'd met Brace in person, and he was like, "Dude, I've been so sick, it's weird. I've been coughing and I've had a fever. I can't smell anything." I was like, "Yeah, me too." So on that tour, we were just spreading fucking COVID around. I feel terrible about it.

We ended that tour after the Brooklyn show. I was staying at a hotel in Chinatown that's right by the bridge. I loved staying there, but I ended up getting stuck there for a full week. The rest of the band went home, and we were to reconvene in Europe. I have this friend Mark Ames a journalist who has a podcast called Radio War Nerd, and they were talking to an Italian guy who's on their show a lot named Annibale. He was living in northern Italy at the time, and he was like, "You guys don't understand how bad it is here. They're taking bodies out in trucks." That was the first time I heard anything objectively terrifying about what was happening.

I talked to the band, and everybody was like, "Fuck it. We're not going to Europe. We're going to get stuck there." Our management at the time was not happy about that, which is fucking hilarious. The gear rental-slash-van rental company—who, I'm sure anyone who's ever toured eastern Europe knows this company well—their owner was like, "You guys are a bunch of pussies." So we had to pay our deposit to this guy. Our manager was fucking clearly pissed at us, even though he was like, "It's all about your health, I totally understand."

We paid our crew what they would've been paid for the tour, because we didn't want to leave them hanging—and then we had no money, and that was the end of the Thin Mind cycle. I went back to Montreal, which was partially how I started podcasting. I was like, "Well, the last 15 years of my life have been spent in a rotating series of tours between bands. That's how I make my money. Now I can't do that, and I'm fucked, so I have to make money online." So I did that.

Several months after that, our manager was like, "Hey guys, I've got a great idea for you to make money. Have you ever heard of NFTs?"

Oh my fucking God.
Yep.

We've been through, like eight stages of grift in the last five years of culture.
I know. I don't know what it is about the entertainment industry, but the current crop of managerial class and their parasitical little underlings—they constantly fall for it. I did a little thing a couple months ago where I went through the history of South by Southwest's panels, and immediately post-pandemic, it's all crypto. Now there's a demonstrable shift towards artificial intelligence—and it's all the same fucking people. I got really interested in how NFTs got sold to the entertainment industry in general. I don't know if you remember Jimmy Fallon and Madonna popping up with, like, Bored Apes.

Yup, I sure do.
So I started digging into it. My friend Tim helped me out, because he remembered a few things that he'd experienced in the L.A. music scene. But Madonna's manager, Guy Oseary, somehow got put in touch with Snoop Dogg's Web 3.0 guy, who got Snoop Dogg a lot of money for a Dyson vacuum placement. So Guy invested a bunch of money in NFTs and Bored Apes and then was like, "How do I get my fucking money back? I'll make Jimmy Fallon and Madonna sell them to America to juice the fucking price."

One common thread in this conversation is that there's a lot of idiots in the music industry, on every level. Even in instances where people are very talented, there always exists the possibility that there's not a lot going on up there. This typically leads to the proliferation of fake bullshit, and there's been a lot of fake bullshit in the last ten years. As an observant person, was there a moment in the 2010s you can pinpoint when you were like, "It seems like things are getting even worse"?
Definitely the summer of 2012 or 2013. When Divine Fits put our record out, I noticed the parasitical underclass popping up—especially around festivals, because festivals are a magnet for them. It's usually a guy between 28 and 35 with enough personal capital—usually through inherited wealth—to be able to withstand living in one of the more expensive places in North America, where all the business happens. That's L.A., or Nashville. He kind of dresses like a hype beast, but, like, subdued.

You'd be backstage at a show, and there'd be four dressing rooms, and Live Nation would've somehow colonized the biggest dressing room. There'd be eight of these guys back there on their phones. What do they do? No one knows. Do they want to be there? Doesn't really seem like it. Do you want them there? No! What the fuck is going on? Then, when you meet them and dig into who they are...it's not entirely their fault, they're just a product of a broader decay of the economy. The whole thing that people don't want to work anymore—it's managers who don't want to work anymore.

The shift in the 2010s to Instagram—"unlocking the promotional power of the artist"—gave a lot of managerial class people, and some people at major labels, this false sense of, "Well, shit, we don't really have to do anything anymore." If I'm a manager, I don't have to call the Live Nation rep in Lawrence, Kansas and be like, "Hey, have you guys done any flyering?" Because what's the point? It's all on the artist. Never mind the fact that Lawrence, Kansas might be a tiny sliver of the people who follow the artist online.

It's work that's been offloaded onto artists, and in a similar way, managers offloaded their own job onto this class of underlings—and the underlings are underpaid, but the brass ring is to someday replace the boss, not do any work yourself, and be the one who's complaining about, like, the brand of carbonated coconut water in the fridge.

I also feel like, until pretty recently, there was this general misunderstanding that if you were on a big indie label in, let's say 2006, you had it made and were making a lot of money. I'm curious to hear you talk about how the financial aspect has shifted over the last 15 years.
There's been two major shifts. I say this any chance I can get, in case anyone who's younger than me is listening, but I 100% won the lottery by signing to Sub Pop when I did, because that era was before everything switched over to DSPs. Even if bands like Interpol were complaining about Napster or Limewire, that era was actually super helpful for regional indie bands like Wolf Parade. Wolf Parade wouldn't have become a band where everyone could quit their day jobs if Limewire didn't exist. Even if the record store in Tucson didn't have a record, people knew all the songs, because they were illegally downloading, and then they'd buy something at the show.We'd put out a record, and people would spend $0.99 a song downloading At Mount Zoomer or whatever.

That shift towards DSPs was one of the first big seismic things. It was bad. For me, it really negatively impacted my income, and it forced everybody out on the road in a way that was kind of untenable. At that point, you had to book four to five months in advance. Now, it's eight months. Release schedules started getting longer and longer as pressing plants got backed up. That was rough. But what's been even rougher, and where we're at right now, is it's an as above-so-below situation with the general economy, and the economy of the entertainment industry. I'm sure you've experienced the same thing, but the middle is getting fucking squeezed.

I'm not saying anything your readers don't know, but it needs to be said that there will be a handful of pop acts that make an exponential amount of money, and a handful of indie bands that will play every single festival and you will see everywhere for a period of two to three years. That's just how it is. Everything else is legacy acts. Touring is the only way to make money, and post-COVID, every vendor has realized they can charge two to three times more than what they were charging. Ever since hotels adopted airline-style dynamic pricing, you can add a question-mark amount of thousands to your touring budget. That's something I don't see a lot of people talking about, because it's a boring nuts-and-bolts thing—but if you're a touring band, you're gonna need hotels. Now that dynamic pricing exists for hotels, especially in "desirable markets," you're pretty fucked. At the same time, guarantees have stayed the same.

Touring is just such an insane economic proposition to begin with. Plus, your manager is still commissioning on gross, not on net—so the fact that these commodities and the cost of touring has gone up and guarantees have stagnated doesn't really matter to the managerial class, because they're like, "Whatever we're still making the same fucking money we always did." Whereas the band is making exponentially less, because everything is three times more expensive. That's driven a lot of people off the road, and it's also—and I really hate this part of it—unfortunately pushed out a lot of people who don't have the economic foundation to weather this. We're getting denied tons of great music right now, because unless you're fucking rich, getting in a van with a drum set and a bass player and touring is economic suicide you know yeah no i think you're 100 like there was and financially anymore.

Across the board, it really does seem like the problem across the last five years is that the bad things have gotten worse, whereas everything else has mostly stayed the same.
That's it. My partner is a tour manager, and we talk about this all the time. The people who have realized that nothing has changed are musicians. Something has to give, becuase for management and booking agents and promoters—especially these giant conglomerates like Live Nation—nothing has changed. It's nothing but blue skies. But for musicians, everything is more expensive. Then you're like, "Hey, I'm broke, and I can't afford to be a musician anymore, so you can kiss your $55,000 a year from my band goodbye," and they're like, "Oh no."

I don't want to be fully depressing about this, so I will say that the one thing that won't change is that people will start bands and play regional shows. They won't stretch their budget by flying all over the place, or living in a van driving around North America for negative dollars. But regionally, things will keep going, because that's the bedrock of the industry. If I can put a single point on it, there's an alienation of labor happening, where all of these people I've been talking about are taking advantage of this situation or are blind to the fact that things are as bad as they are. They have somehow forgotten how to do their jobs, and they have also somehow forgotten where all the money comes from, which is musicians writing songs and performing them in front of people. That's completely analogous with how the management class views labor in North America and Europe in general.

As you know, all the conversation around AI points to this. "God, we love making money—if we could just get rid of these workers!" Recently, I've seen it go a step further with more complex, esoteric financial transactions. I wrote a paper on AI where this person was saying, "What if we could replace the customer too? What if we had a completely antiseptic system of artificial large language models trading
financialized units with each other? Wouldn't that be great?"

I will say, the light and the darkness here is, living in Ohio, I've got to see this incredible transnational emo revival scene, with bands like Liquid Mike, Camp Trash, and Combat. These kids have managed to repurpose a type of music that I really didn't like when I first heard it into something that's amazing, and I think that's really admirable and very cool, and proof that there's still juice left in North American creativity in general. The way they tour, the attendance for these shows—I don't know how much money they're making, or whether they can quit their jobs, but there is something there, and it's not touched by the stuff that we've been talking about, and I think that's beautiful. It's where a lot of the energy is.

That song "K2" from Liquid Mike—I was like, "Oh, this is perfect." It's basically Guided by Voices meets a bunch of emo stuff that I hated when I was in my mid-20s—and the first Weezer record, but the lyrics are so good. It's formed with obvious conviction and sincerity. There's no remove, and it's fun. I had to fight through my own prejudice to understand it, but I'd see these Instagram shoegaze bands on my feed and be like, "Oh my God, this is absolutely derivative slop."

One thing I've noticed is that people are concerned that AI is going to get good enough that it's going to be able to create music that's indistinguishable from music made by people. But my argument is that people are already doing it themselves to work the algorithm—and I don't blame them, because it's the only way you can get anyone to pay attention to music these days. Music press is gone and hollowed out, so why not? That gave rise to the twin pillars of TikTok and Instagram shoegaze.

I'm not going to name any bands specifically, because I don't want to get yelled at—but the broadly flattened-out and generalized Americana that seems to have been sourced with everyone, I've lived through three of these "Americana is back"
things, and this is definitely the most boring one. I understand that it's a game of kind of Russian roulette—a suicide pact with the artist and the algorithm, whether they're conscious of it or not, to sand off edges and make themselves palatable to as many people as possible, because whoever's hearing you for the first time is going to see you for 10 seconds, so you want to appeal to as many people as possible. Whether people are aware of it or not, that's definitely shaping people's musical decisions.

It's also a suicide pact with the ecosystem of writing about music, because once something gets popular if you have an unpopular opinion about it or don't want to write about it, you're placed outside of it. But then, out of this self-imposed slop world comes a band like Full Body 2, who are doing the shoegaze thing but if the guy who wrote all the Final Fantasy themes also played guitar like Kevin Shields. That's fucking cool. I haven't heard anything like that.

What do you got in the hopper next?
A couple of things. Wolf Parade just announced some shows in small town Ontario. We're doing a tour of what they call the Golden Horseshoe, which is—if you can imagine Toronto as the sprawl from William Gibson's Neuromancer, this is in the outer burbs of greater Toronto, the Arcology sprawl. I'm pretty excited, because when we first started playing together, our first real shows outside of Quebec were in places like St. Catharines and Guelph. That's where we really built up our initial fanbase before we started going to the States.

Last year, we did some Apologies residencies, where we played the entire album and then played the hits as the second set. These shows aren't Apologies residencies, so we're just going to be able to pull a bunch of stuff from the catalog that we haven't played in forever—since 2020—and present it like we would've on that tour, had it finished. That's pretty exciting. We're also talking about writing some new stuff together. I feel like the band is in a really nice spot right now—maybe better than we've ever been in terms of being on the same page about stuff.

I'm also working on a new solo album. I had an an insane burst of creative energy i listening to the Drones. I fucking loved that band. I was working in my yard and listening to them, and all of a sudden, I got six, seven, eight songs beamed into my head. The last solo record, I made it using a lot of outboard analog hardware—sequencers, synths, stuff like that. I'd build up these parts and sing over them. With this record, I've decided I'm not gonna not put any keys on it—it's all guitar. I bought a guitar from the 1920s that I found at a junk shop, and I don't know what it is about this thing, but the last time I wrote songs on acoustic guitar was for Apologies.

My process right now is, I start on the acoustic, finish the song, record it on four-track cassette, and then I think about overdubs. I'm about 3/4 of the way through writing it, and I'm gonna hopefully record it with [Sam Brown] on drums, Ben Greenberg on guitar, and Eliana Athayde, who I absolutely love and plays bass in Waxahatchee. That's the general plan for the next record.

Walk me through the Heated Rivalry sync. It's a big deal, and I don't often talk to people about what level of awareness they have when it comes to this stuff coming together.
I will say that this sync is very different than any other sync that I've done with any band, including Wolf Parade. Jacob Tierney and his people approached us not just with, "We want to license a song for our queer hockey show"—it was like, "We want to license a song, and it's a fundamental plot point in the season." They lined out the deployment of the song and how they were going to use some of the dialogue from the song in the show itself. I've never seen a sync pitch like that before. Usually, you're dealing with—and I mean this is no disrespect to music supervisors—a music supervisor, or a music supervisor's assistant, who's dealing with either your record label or your publisher, and they're like, "We need these beats hit."

For the last five to six years, there's always been a caveat at the end of these pitches, which is, "We don't have that much money for this project," whether it's a Hollywood movie, a Canadian television show, or a web series. Upfront sync payments have been declining since probably 2008. But with Heated Rivalry, it was like, "This is the money we can give you." They were very enthusiastic and direct—and, obviously, we're like, "Yeah, absolutely, gay hockey show, yes."

Did you watch the episode?
I watched the entire series, and I loved it.

Yeah, it's good.
I got super emotional in the middle of the series—episodes four and five. It really got me.

I was very taken aback by how the song was deployed uh at the end of episode five. They really nailed it!
It's really driving the narrative. It's building to this point, and then the song hits and it's this extremely cathartic experience. Jacob really understands the song inside and out. I know he's a fan. Before the series came out, he quietly asked our publisher if he could get into those Toronto residency shows we played in March earlier this year. I didn't get a chance to hang out with him or anything, but he's a legit fan, and he understands the emotional dynamics of the song because it's edited slightly in a way that's extremely cool. I've definitely done syncs where the song is chopped up for effect because it's being used in a film, and it just doesn't work or seems unnatural. But he edited it like somebody who likes the song.

It's funny that you talk about syncs just being chopped up for effect. For me, with television over the last six or years, all of it is such careless, thoughtless junk now.
"Careless" is such a good word for it. I won't name the show, but I interviewed to do a soundtrack for—let's just say a beloved Canadian intellectual property that was a film, that was then being turned into a television series with a little bit of a gender reverse. Instead of being a nihilistic psychological horror film, it was pitched as a comedy. Talking to the producers, I was like, "I don't think any of you have actually seen the source material," and there was a feeling of, "We don't really give a shit about this." It's the Netflix thing, where these shows become almost like line items and tax write-offs. That experience made it very apparent to me, and what you said about it being careless—I think that's correct. We are making cultural product and just pumping it out.

The negative reaction to the final season of Stranger Things had me thinking about this notion that a lot of the biggest cultural properties of the last decade or so—Marvel and Taylor Swift are both in this realm too—are having this moment where everybody is now starting to be like, "Wait a minute—this fucking sucks. Why do we have to deal with this?" But we're stuck dealing with it anyway.
Yes, absolutely. It's a zombie cultural product. I've been trying to think more about the decline of the West as analogous to the absolute decline of the Soviet Union leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall—the very end of Gorbachev and glasnost, and how their planned economy completely fell apart. It became so byzantine and inefficient. The MCU is almost like a Soviet cultural product at this point—mass production, with no thought or care for quality. And everybody is just like, "Yep, another fucking shitty tractor, another can of tinned sprats." The decline of this era of capitalism is really mirroring the decline of the worst of the Soviet era.

Something that's interesting about the viral moment Wolf Parade's been having is that, increasingly, these viral moments are so random and out of one's hands that everyone's eventually left saying, "So...what do we do about this?" I'm interested in your insight on that potential conundrum.
Yeah, nobody knows, because your entry points to the way you can affect or shape it, and the processes behind it have become so obscure and automated that it's impossible to control or predict.

This show going viral and connecting with so many people has resulted in Wolf Parade's monthly listens going up by, I think, seven or eight times on Spotify—which is insane. As of today, we're on a bunch of Spotify viral charts, because it's a global phenomenon. There was a very funny exchange between our A&R guy and me and Spencer, where some of the guys in the band thought the show was Canada-only, which makes me smile.

If you're in a band like Wolf Parade that's consistently sold records and can consistently sell out stuff, we missed the Instagram era. We went on hiatus the year that Instagram really took off. I think we're confusing for a lot of younger promoters because we don't have a lot of followers on social media. We didn't have a TikTok until this Heated Rivalry thing. So they look at it and be like, "There's 14,000 followers on Instagram. That's not very much." But we can sell 2,000, 4,000 tickets over two days in Toronto. So for a lot of bands like us, record labels and management are like, "Well, hopefully something like what happened to Unwound or Duster happens where kids start using your song on TikTok"—and then it does happen, and nobody really knows what to do. Because what can you do? It's like a slot machine, honestly, where you're like, "Okay, cool, this happened. What's next?" It's pretty much out of my hands.

I'm gonna dish: We've got some shows in Ontario coming up, and multiple nights in St. Catharines and Guelph. There's one promoter handling it, and I'm very excited to do these shows and work with them—but this show blew up over the last week, and I was like, "Alright..." A promoter's job these days seems to be, make one post on Instagram and then just tell the band to keep posting. I was like, "This is a perfect opportunity for you, as a promoter, to post—because those hockey scenes were all filmed in Guelph!" And I can't get a hold of anybody because it's the fucking holidays.

Our A&R guy and I did some napkin math, and we realized that all these millions of new streams, if we total them all up, amount to $640 total for the band. That's about $215 a piece, which is really fucking funny.

Part of my hope when moments like this happen for bands is like what MGMT experienced in the last couple years, where they have an entirely new, much younger fan base all of a sudden. The sensation also draws a level of attention to the fact that, if your song is blowing up on TikTok, that doesn't mean you're like buying a house off of that.
It means you might be making one big grocery buy for a week. You might be able to get the good chicken at the grocery store. Just because people are connecting with this song doesn't necessarily mean they're going to buy albums or tickets to your show. But the hope is that people get interested in the band and dive deeper. Not everyone who posts is going to sit down and listen to At Mount Zoomer in its entirety—but someone is, and that's good.

That's kind of how it used to be, a little bit. That Volkswagen commercial with "Pink Moon," I was, like, 11 when that commercial aired, and I went out and bought Pink Moon because of that commercial.
I think the high water mark for that was was The OC. You had Modest Mouse playing at whatever the club was. I don't know what's going to happen, though. Peoples' attention spans are way more short, and things are not as materially centralized as they used to be.It's not like you're going to watch Heated Rivalry and go down to your local record store and be like, "I need that Apologies to the Queen Mary."

To be candid, I personally haven't talked about the way I identify sexually in any interview, because I'm a straight person, basically. It's not my job to take up space from people who are queer and are in music. But like a lot of people, I've had short relationships with men in my late teens and early 20s, and I grew up in a small town that was dominated by hockey players. Those guys—not all of them, but I would say in general, and I think a lot of Canadians and rural communities have had the same experience—made my life and the life of my friends absolutely fucking miserable. Maybe that was a product of growing up in the late '90s. Things weren't as woke as they are now. But it was rough. So seeing Jacob's show, in a very kind way, queerifying hockey and having it be so popular with a lot of straight women just feels really good.

I saw a Reddit thread while I was doing research for my podcast where these hockey fans are just going off conservative hockey fans being like, "There's a gay conspiracy against hockey." I'm not a huge hockey guy myself, but the show is extremely reverent to the sport—and it's also just like, "Here are some hot dudes."

It's actually been very interesting how I haven't seen as much manufactured cultural backlash towards Heated Rivalry as there have been towards other things.
I think it's because the show is so undeniably good and the romance is so pure, in a lot of ways. It's like a classic romance. Also, it's incredibly popular. It would be like if Taylor Swift came out as gay and someone was like, "Alright, I'm going to take this person down." You'd get annihilated.

Anything else you've watched recently that you enjoyed?
I'm re-watching The Sopranos right now with my partner. I know that The Sopranos has been in and out of the zeitgeist, especially with terminally online people—but, man, it really shows the evolution of the American psyche. It's so good, and it's so jarring to watch that and then watch contemporary television.

I could not agree more. I do feel like the meme-ification of the show has resulted in some of its key thematic elements—specifically, misogyny and cycles of violence against women—being overlooked more often now, which is a shame.
Yeah, you can really clock someone's political compass by what they think about Tony Soprano now. There's like that right-wing Sopranos memes account, and that guy is just like, "Tony Soprano, fucking cool guy. He's a G." No, he's a fat, neurotic, evil, violent piece of shit who's too lazy to be a good person.

I watched this episode last night where they're having a conflict with the port, which their entire income revolves around stealing things from. It's important for their livelihood that the Port Authority and Customs officials are bad at their jobs. But then Tony watches this news piece on Al Qaeda smuggling in a dirty bomb, and he blows his top. He's like, "What are these fucking guys doing? My children could be turned to cinders." No dude, you need it to be bad for you to keep making money."

Did you see Eddington?
Yes, I loved it. I saw it when I was still living in Colombus, and there were four or five walkouts during the film at different points in time. I'm just making assumptions, but looking at the people who walked out—they were all for very different reasons. I have friends who, I respect their film opinion and love them, and they hated that movie—and I understand why they did.

The Bottlemen podcast covered the rise of QAnon in Canada, and its final form was the People's Party of Canada, which had candidates that included an open white supremacist as well as a guy named Nakula Das, who was a testicular breathing meditation coach. My brain is fucking filled with these people—their ideas and how they get to the point of spending all of their time staring at their phone, giving YouTube rants. I thought it was so accurate and malevolent for Ari Aster to be like, "This is society. This is what we're doing. It doesn't look good." Somebody was criticizing that film for being not artful enough, and it's like, no, it's not an artful film. It's a gross funhouse mirror on North American society.

I really like Ari Aster's movies. Beau Is Afraid is one of the best of the decade, to me.
I agree.

People really hate him, though. I'm always kind of like, "What's the beef here?" The guy makes very interesting, entertaining movies!
Yeah, I don't understand it. I remember he did an interview with Will Menaker and Hesse on the Movie Mindset podcast. There's a great quote from him where they're talking about what he finds funny, and he's like, "If the old lady falls down, that's funny. But what's really funny is when the old lady falls down, the bone is sticking out of her leg, and she's screaming, and you just leave it there for, like, two minutes. That's funny."

He's right!
He's totally right. It's just about what you find funny in the end, I guess.