The Menzingers

Scranton’s very own The Menzingers have proven to be one of Pennsylvania’s finest. Featuring Tom May -vocals and guitar, Greg Barnett – vocals and guitar, Eric Keen – bass, and Joe Godino – drums, The Menzingers’ songs are filled with poetic lyrics that anyone can relate to alongside the aggressive music of punk rock. When you’ve listened to their songs, it feels as if they knew you personally when they were writing them. The Menzingers also give one hell of a live performance that takes the audience by storm and leaves you wanting more when they leave the stage. Their new album, On the Impossible Past, was released this year via Epitaph Records.

I spoke with Tom May from The Menzingers in Jacksonville Beach, FL before their show with Luther and The Bouncing Souls at Freebird Live.

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Ashley: How are you doing Tom?

Tom: I am doing great. I’m at the beach and it is amazing!

Ashley: Great! You guys are on tour right now with The Bouncing Souls and Luther, how has the tour been?

Tom: The tour has been incredible. We just went with them to Europe and that was an amazing experience, we did a short run to Canada and came back and now we are with them all summer and it’s amazing. It is one of the bands we all grew up, you know, listening to. It’s amazing going on tour with them. It is funny, I was telling them the first time that we saw them we told our parents, I told my parents I was going to Wilkes-Barre which is twenty minutes outside of Scranton instead we went to Philadelphia and saw them with Anti-flag and it was just so cool.

Ashley: That’s amazing!

Tom: Yeah, it was amazing.

Ashley:  So, you have been on tour with some amazing bands such as Hot Water Music, Against Me!, Pennywise, and The Descendants just to name a few. How has that experience been?

Tom: We played a couple of shows with Hot Water Music and we haven’t played with Pennywise yet.

Ashley: So you haven’t played with Pennywise yet?

Tom: No, not yet, that is coming up in August in Australia. But it has been pretty amazing to go on tour with bands that you look up to and that genuinely end up being really good people at the same time and just reconfirms everything they sing about in their songs. 

Ashley: Right!

Tom: It’s great.

Ashley: Let’s go back, how did the band form?

Tom: Um, the three of us Eric, myself and Joe played in a ska band together and Greg played in a band with my brother and when those bands dissolved we just kind of just came together.

Ashley: Where did the name The Menzingers come from?

Tom: The name, it was from the first password we ever used at the first bathhouse we ever went to.

Ashley: Oh, OK.

Tom: Yeah, it was pretty rad.

Ashley: So your new album, On the Impossible past, can you tell us a little bit about the album.

Tom: It was recorded at Atlas studios in Chicago. We spent more time on it than any of the other records we ever did and working with Matt Allison was amazing, you know, he just got the things out of us that we wanted to get out of us that we really couldn’t describe or you know, like put into words… it would be all awkward, he would be like do this “ish” and it was just a great experience.

Ashley: So how was Chicago?

Tom: It’s great. I love it. Chicago is an incredible city.

Ashley: Where did the title come from?

Tom: The way we are looking at it is it has to do with the subjectivity of your past.

Ashley: Who designed the artwork for the album and how does that represent the album?

Tom: There was a photographer from Scranton; his name is Mark Cohen. He was a famous photographer coming out of Scranton and the Wilkes-Barre area. He had a bunch of photographs that we really wanted to use as a cover, like something that would be iconic. We chose that one because the person being photographed you can’t see their face, but you can tell so much from their body language how shocked she seems to be to have her picture taken with the wedding ring (puts his hand to his chest), I thought that was really cool.

Ashley: You also released an album of acoustic demos called, On The Possible Past, What made you do that?

Tom: That was all the demos we had made for the record and we just compiled them together and remixed them with Andy from Luther and we put it out on tape for a limited run for people who pre-ordered the album.

Ashley: The songs are often very nostalgic driven – reflecting on past failures and successes. What leads you to write in that direction?

Tom: That is what just came naturally at this point. You know not all the songs are nostalgic driven but a good majority and the theme of the album is totally like that and everything you are in the present came from what you did in the past, so it is just kind of reflecting on that and trying to relate and put it into words to either change for the future or to understand what is coming with the future.

Ashley: The songs are often very specific, retelling particular instances and friends. Is it hard putting yourself so out there and sharing these stories and emotions to such a wide audience?

Tom: I wouldn’t say it is hard, if anything, it feels good and therapeutic.

Ashley: There is also a sense of simplistic Americana in your lyrical structure. While the stories are very specific, there is still something universally relatable in the stories on songs such as “Mexican Guitars”, “I Can’t Seem To Tell”, and “The Obituaries”. How do you think you were able to do that?

Tom:  Well thanks, first of all. Actually, those songs were written by Greg, so you would have to ask him that one.

Ashley: Some of your older material had a lot of literary or musical references, now that you have progressed to, as I said, more personal anecdotes. What made you leave some of the literary devices behind?

Tom: I don’t know if it was necessarily a conscious decision. Are you talking about literary references?

Ashley: Yes.

Tom: It wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision it was just what we felt at the time. We were really inspired by the things that we were reading like in songs like “Even for an Eggshell” is about Hamlet. There are a lot of other songs that have literary works that were really important to us at that time. You know, that was where we were going at that point.

Ashley: What was the transition like from releasing stuff on Go-Kart to Red Scare and to now Epitaph? Was it a constant evolution or big leaps?

Tom: The first one was a big leap kind of because we really didn’t have much of a personal relationship with Go-Kart and we ended up putting out things on Red Scare which is run by Toby Jeg and he has become and will always stay one of our best friends and one of my personal best friends forever; so that was a really cool jump. Then the jump to Epitaph has been intense, it’s such a bigger machine and it has been very beneficial for us and it is very exciting.

Ashley: Your band is labelled in the punk rock/indie genre. Do you agree with bands having genre labels?

Tom: Yeah, you have to use words to describe things. People get ridiculous with pigeon holding stuff but you know, it is like saying there shouldn’t be any difference between purple and blue because it is the same kind of spectrum of visible light or whatever but that might not be the best analogy. But yeah, I agree with that. I mean you can get crazy with pigeon holding, if you want to differentiate with different styles of music it only makes sense. The style of music genres also have a connotation of some kind of like moral stigma or fashion related thing or something like that and that’s all fine; its just people expressing themselves. Places like the internet and stuff it definitely gets out of hand.

Ashley: Besides “Nice Things”, are you guys looking into making anymore videos for this new album?

Tom: Yeah, Hopefully, it was a lot of fun. Making “Nice Things” was fun; we had a blast.

Ashley: How do you guys choose your setlist for the shows?

Tom: We come up with somethings that we know work and some songs that flow together with each other and then usually Greg will come up with the rest of the setlist and we will kind of pick and choose what we want to do. We’ll say “Hey, I don’t want to play this song today or we want to play this song today.” We also try to make it so that if we played a city recently, we play a completely different setlist so the next time we come through it is not the same exact thing.

Ashley: What do you guys do for fun to pass the time in the van between shows?

Tom: Talk a lot of shit. Read and listen to music, you know what you would expect. We are thinking about getting some way to watch movies…that would be awesome, like one of those fold up DVD players.

Ashley: Last question, Any advice for the struggling musicians or bands out there waiting to break into the industry?

Tom: Yeah, play a lot of shows. Don’t overplay the town you live in and trade shows with bands from other cities, that way you get them a show in your city and then you play their city in front of the people that like their band.