New Interview: Lawrence Arms -Side Project, Going To Africa & Doing A Movie

Not only is Brendan Kelly one of the singers and bassist for Chicago’s beloved The Lawrence Arms, in his spare time he writes an insightful, humorous blog called the Bad Sandwich Chronicles. While fan boys of his band read his blog in attempt to fill the void of not getting a new full-length Arms album in over 5 years, the blog is also enjoyed by those who have never even listened to the Lawrence Arms.

Amy Meyer got a chance to catch up with Brendan on April 3 at the Beat Kitchen in Chicago to discuss how his kickass writing has let him slip by as a subpar musician, a movie he’s working on, and new music he’s working on -not for the Lawrence Arms.

Of note, he mentioned work of a new band he’s working on:

I’ve got a whole record of music written for – I guess it’s kind of a band. I’ve been working with one guy putting together demos, and I’m going to work with this other dude because there are sort of two facets of this band. I don’t want to talk too much about it because the descriptions of it are going to sound terrible and it’s a little bit cooler than the only way I can describe it. I’m working with one guy who’s a rock and roll dude that I’ve been working with for a long time, and I’m working with another dude who’s less of a rock and roll dude, he’s more of a producer. All that stuff, if I can get it done, I’m hoping to have out this year. It should be interesting; I think it will kind of surprise people, some of it is a bit of a departure.

He also talked about working on a movie he wrote saying:

Yeah, we’re doing the final sound clips right now. It’s a big thing that hopefully we can hear more about really soon. We’re sending it off to some people tomorrow morning. I went down to SXSW to try and schmooze around and get in with the film industry. It’s hard, we’ll see what happens.

Finally, Kelly also touched on plans to go to Africa to tour:

We were in talks with somebody to go to Africa. I don’t know a goddamn thing about Africa, but the thing I do know about Africa is that South Africa is where all the white people are, and then there’s the rest of Africa. This would be not just South Africa, but Southern Africa. This is all so tentative that I have no idea if this guy will ever even hit me back, but we talked about us going to South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Swaziland. According to this dude I talked to, based on the five emails we exchanged there’s a real scene down there. Not huge, but real vibrant and I really, really, really hope it happens. That’s where fucking human beings came from, that’s the wellspring of humanity, that’s awesome and I would love to do that. That’s essentially all that’s on our horizon anyway; we’re playing at Congress with the Dead Milkmen.

The full interview can be read here.