A brand new video and a conversation with one of punk rock’s most socially conscious bands.
In the context of punk bands, Andrew Jackson Jihad has been around for a long time – ten years – and like wine, scotch, and mediocre baseball players in the 90’s (spoiler alert – they’re juicing), they just keep getting better and better. The Phoenix-based five-piece formed in 2004 as a an acoustic based band informed by the likes of Neutral Milk Hotel and the Mountain Goats as well as frontman Sean Bonnette’s career in social work, and in May, they’re releasing their fifth full length of emotionally heavy folk punk, and their first for California independent super label Side One Dummy (The Gaslight Anthem, Flogging Molly), Christmas Island.
To celebrate this release, The Good Men Project is proud to premiere a live video of the band performing a new song from the record, “Children of God”, at the Side One Dummy headquarters in April. The song’s theme, like many in the AJJ catalog, takes aim at a self-destructing society, and when singer/guitarist Sean Bonnette yells in his trademark high-pitched, urgent vocals, “I saw the children of God as they walked on slovenly by, the USB ports in their arms were bleeding”, it’s clear that Andrew Jackson Jihad is as brutal as ever.
We also spoke with Bonnette about social work, feminism, stoner metal, and Nicki Minaj.
The Good Men Project: Andrew Jackson Jihad is one of the few bands that I can pick out that actually embodies their ideals in daily life. How has your experience as a social worker and working for a suicide hotline impacted your music?
Sean Bonnette: A whole lot. Working as a social worker, and before I got my degree, I was a volunteer at a suicide and crisis hotline called Teen Lifeline. And I think Team Lifeline more than anything created the foundation for not only my mindset as a songwriter, but also as a human being. And that along with social work, trying to follow that NASW (National Association of Social Workers) Code of Ethics, keeping my mind open to new ideas regarding mental health, homeless rights, feminism, racial stuff…as a dude, I’m into that stuff, so as a songwriter, that’s definitely going to come out.
“American Tune” is one of the best protest songs I’ve ever heard, and I know it resonated a lot with what I believe and how a lot of other people believe. What goes into writing a song like that where you’re actively recognizing your own privilege?
I think Randy Newman has a lot to do with that. If you listen to some of his deeper stuff or anything in the Randy Newman songbook, you can see he kind of shifts his perspective or puts things in a different perspective, using things like humor, sarcasm, or completely unbiased narration. So that song was I’m sure totally inspired by Randy Newman, along with trying to grow as a person and learn about privilege.
In the last three years since Knife Man was released, how has everything in your life impacted the new record?
Well, a lot happened in my life between Knife Man and finishing Christmas Island. I moved a couple times, had loved ones die, and also thinking more about my childhood in a new light, all of that informs the new record heavily. And also trying to change the way I write songs. In this new record, there’d be days on end where all of my chord progressions and melodies kept turning into the same song. I basically needed to listen to some other stuff and teach myself there’s no wrong way to write a song. Like, I recognized something that’s just been natural in the past, but if you go to write something for a side project, or something that’s not for Andrew Jackson Jihad…a lot of my favorite AJJ songs started that way. Like, “Do Re Me” on the new record came from this idea that I wanted to go to one of the Blue line stops in Chicago (where I lived at the time) and put the demo, the electronic Casio demo, on a boombox, and do the karaoke thing. Never did it, but I ended up writing a song I really liked.
Yeah, I wanted to talk about that song. That’s probably my favorite song on the new record, you have this kind of like doo wop thing that makes me feel like I’m a kid listening to oldie stations with my parents, and then you name drop Man Is The Bastard. What was the big influence on that?
Yeah, I started meddling with it on guitar and I got a verse and a chorus in, and then I went downstairs where I lived at the time, and Matt from the Gunshy (who I lived with at the time) was showing me his drum machine, and we were messing around with his Casio keyboard, and I found a beat I liked, we recorded it, and it just kind of naturally happened. But that Casio rhythm and the way the keyboards interacted changed it from a C, A minor, F, G song to a weird Magnetic Fields song. The music I was listening to at the time, though, was probably Dopesmoker or Earth.
Recording with John Congleton (The Mountain Goats, Okkervil River, Xiu Xiu, St. Vincent) must have been a surreal experience. Tell me a little bit about that.
He was amazing. Yeah, it was so cool – not only are we Mountain Goats fans, but we’re also Paper Chase fans. And all of the stuff that he does..he’s Annie Clark from St. Vincent’s main collaborator, he’s just worked on all the good stuff. And we found out why – he’s the best. He works incredibly fast, like we had everything set up by noon on the first day. He had everything dialed in, all the tones were ready, he facilitates really good decision making in a really timely manner. He doesn’t give us time to agonize over details, which I’m super prone to, and I learned a lot about writing songs and recording from him, and not really sweating it. He allows a lot for mystery.
How did the writing process differ from other records? Did it change at all with more members in the band?
Yeah. If you’re doing it right every songwriting process should change a little bit from record to record. This is the first record I didn’t write all in Phoenix, and the times I did write in Phoenix were visiting…I lived in Chicago when I started writing it and then I moved to Michigan with my partner for school stuff she’s doing, so it was a lot more homesick than usual. And when I was in Phoenix writing, which is where I feel the most activated creatively, I would really take advantage of that and go to the practice space and be alone for long stretches of time, and just try to make myself insane. And after all the demos were done, usually that’s when the songwriting stops, when me and Ben have already recorded the tracks and we bring in people to layer over top of it. We’ve been transitioning out of that model, we did a bit of that on Knife Man, but yeah this time we arranged it as a band, and that gave me wiggle room to develop the songs further lyrically, and that gave us all wiggle room to develop them musically.
Where did the name for the album come from?
I’m trying to leave a little Easter egg for the listeners there. I will say, though – it’s worth a Google.
Has the goal of the band ever changed?
I think the goal has always stayed the same the entire time. It was originally, “let’s do this and see how far this goes”. We were ambitious, but not ambitious to make it, just to still be a band. And thankfully that goal let us do whatever we want. But it has changed in the sense that we have three more people playing in the band. And that’s pretty cool, it used to me and ben and a rotating cast of whoever, or just me and Ben, or just me. I still play solo every once in a while, I like that a lot. But having five people that have their own roles in the band has made it really exciting and easier to be in the band.
What’s the next step for AJJ? Touring plans?
We’re touring the US in June and July, we’re playing the Toronto Urban Roots Festival with Neutral Milk Hotel and Violent Femmes. That’s going to be amazing. I’m going to cry when I see Neutral Milk Hotel.
What do you wish you saw more of in popular music, whether it be in the DIY community or stuff on the radio.
Stuff that I want to see more of, that I’m kind of seeing more of…I like seeing a good interracial relationship on TV. More Janelle Monae, for sure. More Nicki Minaj rap verses in pop songs… More rock and punk bands with women in them, like, so many that people will stop referring to them as “female fronted” or “all girl.” Or the inverse of that, people talking about that awesome “male fronted” band “Dogbreth”, or that great “all boy” band Cheap Girls. More of that, or more bands with females in them, so people can stop qualifying them as “female bands”.
Christmas Island drops on May 6th, but you can stream the whole thing over at the AV Club now.
Photo courtesy of Side One Dummy.