Flogging Molly

As a packed house of eager fans awaited the arrival of Flogging Molly in Edmonton for the first time in their illustrious career, I hoped onto the band’s tour bus to talk with the recently re-joined accordion player Matt Hensley to talk about their first ever cross-Canada tour along with the effects of recording Float in Ireland and, of course, how awesome The Dead Milkmen song Punk Rock Girl is.

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Bobby: Starting with the basics, you guys have been on this tour with Dean Lickyer and Inward Eye for almost two weeks now; how’s that going so far?

Matt: It’s going great man. The crowds have been excellent. This whole Canadian tour has been pretty solid.

Bobby: Has there been any really memorable moments from the tour so far?

Matt: Every night seems to be a memorable moment. Our first night was in Nova Scotia, Haliax and that was memorable for us because we’ve been singing about somebody from there for a long time. So it was pretty good but every night’s been good times. Like last night we played.. – *turning to the tour manager* where did we play last night Aaron?

Bobby: Winnipeg?

Matt: Winnipeg.  Was that last night?

Aaron: Wait, no it wasn’t. *Looking at the landyard* Saskatoon.

Matt: Saskatoon. And then afterwards we went to some pub and played music at the bar with everybody for like an hour or two. It was fun.

Bobby: For this tour, Gallows were supposed to be on it but had to drop off due to unforeseen circumstances, were you disappointed when they weren’t able to join you on the tour?

Matt: Yeah, obviously.

Bobby: I’ve heard that they’re absolutely insane live. I was interested to see them just go crazy.

Matt: Yeah, they would go crazy. They go crazy for sure.

Bobby: I was thinking this was your first cross-Canadian tour for a long time since I’ve only seen you at Warped Tour but then I remembered you played Calgary like three years ago…

Matt: On the Warped Tour a couple times and on our own but we’ve never gone coast to coast, like a proper, real Canadian tour. It’s always been we’d jump over the border for a couple of shows and then we’d split back.

Bobby: So is it good to be able to finally do the full Canadian tour?

Matt: Oh god yes, absolutely. It’s been great.  Again, Canada, as a country, has always treated us really well. It’s something the band has wanted to do for a long time, but you only have so much time to do it all and still have a couple months off every year. So I’m just happy we’ve finally got to do it.

Bobby: Well thank you for finally coming, it’ll be better than just seeing you at twelve thirty at Warped Tour.

Matt: For sure. *laughs*

Bobby: For this tour you tried to make it so that there was always a way for people to buy tickets without paying service fees. What made you decide to do that?

Matt: That’s probably a question, to be honest with you, for our manager of this band. But we’re trying to keep it real for all our fans. We’re not trying to exploit it. We have to make a living, because this is all we do in this band; we have to support families and kids, so we have to charge but we don’t want to be charging crazy money for tickets. When people get fucked by the surcharges and stuff, it gets irritating. We only kind of hear about it, we’re not in charge of that necessarily but if we can prevent it and do something about, then we will. Sometimes you just can’t, sometimes it’s not up to you. Somebody that’s much bigger than us or any other band will be like “fuck you, we’re going to do it anyways” and then what are you going to do about it? But if we can control it, we will.

Bobby: Like now it’s getting to the point where people are starting to get angry at Ticketmaster for all these service fees for no reason.

Matt: Of course.

Bobby: Like you pay two dollars when you print out your own ticket because it’s more convenient when you’re using your own stuff. How does that work?

Matt: That’s fucked for sure. But at the same token, I think the whole music industry is tripping out and not knowing how to handle it. It’s a different time now. The last six, seven years have been different for music than it has ever been since like the Beatles. There was a format and now it’s all been kind of trashed so I think people are tripping out. Some people are probably taking advantage and that sounds like somebody’s trying to take advantage.

Bobby: Of course, in the New Year you guys are going to be going on the annual Green 17 tour. You guys have already announced that the St. Patrick’s Day show will take place in Phoenix, Arizona. What made you pick Phoenix for the show?

Matt: Last St. Patty’s Day we played Chicago but the two or three other times before that we’ve always played Phoenix. The reason is that one of the biggest fan bases we have is Phoenix, Arizona. I know it’s funny because we couldn’t even pay to play there when we first started as a band. No promoter would give us a show. We’d play Tucson, which is great too, but we just couldn’t understand it and then we got a lot of love. We got some radio love there and the next thing I know is we’re doing really well in Phoenix. I know it sounds like we should play New York, Boston, Chicago, doesn’t it? Or like LA. Not Phoenix. But it really goes over really well. Phoenix has always been really kind to us. It’s not Ireland but it’s a pretty good damn time.

Bobby: When will you be announcing the rest of the dates for the Green 17 tour?

Matt:  I don’t know. Those are questions for the people who work for us, I don’t really know.

Bobby: Back in June, your album Drunken Lullabies was certified gold by the RIAA. What was your reaction when you found out?

Matt: I was ecstatic. This whole band, all of us, have been working so hard at trying to make this thing really grow and do the best we can with it. I mean, it’s just a gold record, it’s not real gold; but what it represents is something so huge to me. I actually didn’t think it would be that big a deal to me, but when I got it, it was a huge deal. I was in tears. That one little gold record represents fourteen years of struggle and effort and missing my wife and missing my son and loving what I’m doing but also…nothing, like life, can ever be 100%. There’s always that give and take. We’ve paid a lot of dues and it represents that. So I’m very, very proud of it.

Bobby: You also recently announced that you guys are going to be on Punk Rock Domestic’s Home Rockonomics cookbook which hits stores tomorrow. What recipe did you guys give to the book?

Matt: *laughing* I have no idea. You might have to talk to Dave, the singer, about that; or maybe Nathen because he’s a good cook. I’m a lousy cook so it wouldn’t come from me. I don’t know. *laughs*

Bobby: I read that today and thought it was cool. There’s quite a few punk rock cook books coming out over the next couple months. Like Punknews is doing one, this one. It’s like a new trend I guess, it’s kind of cool.

Matt: Oh really? I didn’t know that. Yeah, my cookbook would suck. It would be like a top Ramen recipe.

Bobby: Mine would be different ways to make peanut butter and jam sandwiches.  That’s about my extent of cooking skills.

Matt: I’m on the same page man.

Bobby: For Float, you guys recorded that in Westmeath and Blackwater in Ireland as opposed to in the States for the first time. What made you decide to do that? How did that affect the sound and recording process of Float?

Matt: For the most part, instead of playing in a city where we’re accessible – in other words, we have lot of friends at or other things where people want us to go out and party and stuff – we were so far out in the middle of nowhere Ireland that that wasn’t an issue. We could really concentrate; not that we didn’t before on our other records, but this let us really dig deep or deeper into your own soul and your own musicianship and try to come up with the best stuff that you can. It was great. And yeah, it was being in Ireland so to really be there, to see it, to smell it, to see it, it had an affect for sure. It probably had a bigger affect for Dave than it does for me because we were in Ireland. Because for me… I’ve been to Ireland before and I find it beautiful, but it was the isolation that I found to be what really helped me just to really concentrate and hone in on what I’m trying to do. As a band, Flogging Molly, we’re like any good band – hopefully – just trying to be better musicians, write better songs. Never just kind of go “well, I’m good enough.” I speak for myself personally, and I know the band too is the same way, but I never think I’m good enough. I constantly want to learn more about music, about how to record it, how to make it sound better, how the microphone works, you know what I mean? I want to really dig deep and just continue to enjoy the struggle of trying to reach the plateau that you’ll probably never get to but it’s the ride that’s fun.

Bobby: It definitely did work. I mean, Float debuted at number 4 on the Billboard 200 chart selling 48,000 copies in its first week. Which was, I was reading, the highest position for any Irish artist other than U2 since Enya’s 2000 release, A Day Without Rain. So how does it feel to kind of be in the same boat as U2?

Matt: Pretty fucking good man. We’re on the back of the boat. We’re like on the little dingy attached to the big boat, but its’ still fucking alright. It feels pretty good.

Bobby: You also just released a fantastic animated music video for the single Float. Who came up with the concept for that music video?

Matt: Well, the guy who did that heard the song, read Dave’s lyrics and simply took it to mean that. That song is filled with metaphors, so it could mean a bunch of different things. He took it for that; we watched it and we loved it. I just feel it’s very… I don’t know… down and out but at the same time there’s some hope still there too. I don’t know. When I first saw it I couldn’t believe we were doing it. Like “This is fucking unbelievable.”  You have to understand that while this is going on, we’re on tour. It’s not like we’re sitting around. I mean, it’s like I’m with you right now, someone else in an office in Los Angeles right now is working on something for us. I think it’s a video that we’re trying to come out with.  But you know what I’m saying? Unless you’re all there when you’re making videos, then we all know what we’re doing it; but a lot of time we talk to artists and give them the freedom to have some go with it man. Feel the song, close your eyes, listen to it for a couple days, feel the message and see if you can do something crazy with it. In that instance, it was beautiful. It worked perfectly.

Bobby: You’ve said before that you want people to leave your shows feeling uplifted and having had a positive release. How do you go about trying to make it so that people do have this positive release at your shows?

Matt: Well, it’s simply that we kind of just play our hearts out every night. I think that if we do that, most of the time it will transcend. If you give everything you have, people are going to feel that. They’re going to hear that and then they’re going to give whatever they’re going to give; and most of the time that’s them releasing and having a good time. And then we kind of both feed of each other and the next thing we know, everybody’s having a really good time. That’s generally kind of what happens. I’ve watched a million bands over the years, especially being in this band, we’re always playing live music. If I watch a band that’s just kind of giving out sixty percent, not a hundred percent, ninety-five percent – you can feel it. You can feel it, not with the notes but you can feel it with something else that I can’t explain.

Bobby: The atmosphere.

Matt: The atmosphere. I mean, it’s just a simple note but it’s… I can say this, I’ve seen musicians that are not that good at being musicians – not that I’m not great either – but my point is they’re not that good but they give it everything, giving it so much that it’s tenfold makes it for any bad musicianship because you feel the struggle or the pain or the happiness that that person is trying to provide in that song.

Bobby: You’ve also said before that you don’t really like compartmentalizing music and giving it genres or classifications.  Do you feel that people can become pigeonholed if they do try and stick to their one genre classification?

Matt: Yes, you answered your own question for sure. We just want to make the best music we can. Yeah, we have a lot of Irish influences because our singer’s from Ireland; but we’re not afraid to come up with pretty much any genre of music. I don’t want to pigeonhole myself.  Basically, I don’t want leprechauns on the stage and I don’t want it to be so much about that. I want the music to stand up, period. Understand? I don’t want it to be like “oh, it’s a Saint Patrick’s Band, Wohoo! Leprechauns, and there’s the pot of gold.” Then that’s just horribly cliché. I want people, no matter if their Irish or fucking Jamaican, to hear it, to feel it and enjoy it. It’s got nothing really to do… Dave is from Ireland, it is about a lot of the struggles of him growing up and in that sense it is Irish but I feel like – to me, in my own heart – the music is just about the music. It’s hard to explain because we sound like an Irish band playing Irish music but I don’t want to be that. I want to be just a good band. And I love Irish music, don’t get me wrong. I play the accordion; I play sessions all the time – like I love that music. But in the Flogging Molly context, I think if we were just that, we wouldn’t have all these people lined up tonight to watch us play. You know what I mean? I think it would be like fifty people. It’ll be a different scene, you gotta think beyond that.

Bobby: Well even looking at the line-up outside, it’s quite a cross section of people. You have the high school kids, the college kids and even their parents and the older generation – like my dad is a huge fan of your music too. So what do you think it is that makes it so that your music can cross those generation barriers?

Matt: I think it’s because, well first of all, the songs are- hopefully – good songs and they hold up, they hold water. The melodies are very whistable, you can whistle them very quickly and you can hum them; and I think that works very well with the really young kid – the little tykes and stuff.  I can’t tell you how many mothers have come up to me and “my kids just love Flogging Molly you know. They can whistle, they can tap on the table, and it’s not too much stuff.” It just feels good. It goes all the way up to the grandfather or a super old man and if he’s having a good time, I think that’s the beauty of Flogging Molly to be honest with you. The punk rocker, the seventeen year old kid with full Mohawk, charged and ready to go likes it because there’s enough fucking aggro to let him get down; but there’s also enough different instrumentation and enough mellowness I guess and enough waltzes to make everybody kind of like it.

Bobby: I want to talk a bit about some of the extra curricular activities that you have been involved in other than Flogging Molly. First off, how did you get involved with MXPX for their cover of Dead Milkmen’s Punk Rock Girl for their On The Cover II?

Matt: They just called me, emailed me and said “Matt, what’s up dawg? We’re gonna do this song, you wanna do it?” I said “Fuck yeah,” it’s just that simple.

Bobby: Nice, nice. That song is one of my all time favourite pop-punk songs, it’s just phenomenal.

Matt: Yeah, that’s why it was hard for me to turn down the offer. “Of course I will!”

Bobby: And an accordion solo, you can’t go wrong with that!

Matt: Nah, nah. It was cool.

Bobby: You also run the Innes clothing company which you started back in 1996. What made you decide to branch off and do that? Is it nice to have another outlet as opposed to just Flogging Molly?

Matt: Well, yeah. I used to ride skateboards for a living. So for me, at the time, the skateboarding style was not really going in the direction I could really get down with. So I figured I would just do my own stuff and kind of go against the grain; and yeah, it gives me an outlet to do my own thing. A lot of time it backfires because what I really like is not fashionable. Fashion changes, I try to just stick with a timeless thing where if it’ll will look good today, it will look good in fifty years. Whereas fashion, somebody from twenty years will think we look like crazy today.

Bobby: You just released the Hensley Jacket and Pant combination. Is it weird walking down the street and seeing people dressed exactly as you normally do?

Matt: Yep, that’s definitely weird; but I knew that was going to maybe happen because I made them. But yeah, it’s not that weird but a little bit. I mean, if somebody dressed just exactly like you, it would take you back a second.

Bobby: Exactly. You also run the Flying Elephant Pub – do you have any free time?

Matt: No, no I don’t man. I do too much shit.

Bobby: I think it was two years ago that you took a year break from Flogging Molly. Is it nice to be back and what made you decide to come back to Flogging Molly and share the stage again?

Matt: It’s beautiful to be back. I’m lucky to be back. I’m one of the first guys in the band to actually have kids and I always kind of felt, in a nutshell, that as much life that I was feeling, I was kind of wronging my kid. That kind of guilt all the time just kind of ate me up, it fucked me all up. If I could go back in time, I would make a different decision but I can’t. It is what it is. After doing that and having my son – my own son who I was doing this for – wearing a Flogging Molly back pack and kind of looking at me – and being smarter than me at fucking  nine years old or ten years old than I am at thirty whatever the hell I was – going “What are you doing? Do what you love, man.” He didn’t say this, but he said it in little kid’s terms. It was totally the truth. I was like “you’re absolutely right.” I can’t live without it. These people are more my family than my family. I spend more time with them then I spend with anybody else on this earth.  So it felt like going home.

Bobby: The album Float came out in 2008, do you have any plans to start working on a follow up to that yet?

Matt: I think so. I think the end of the tour cycle. I think in February or so we’re going to start thinking about it. I think Dave’s starting to work on songs as we speak. I don’t know the details, we actually have a meeting at the end of this tour and then the details will be given.

Bobby: I guess that’s about it. Thanks a lot. Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to add?

Matt: Nah just thanks very much man. Thanks to Canada for being supportive of Flogging Molly and we’ll be back for sure.