Mom Jeans Interview

For Mom Jeans, this summer on the Sad Summer tour wasn’t sad at all. The emo/alt-pop outfit tagged along on this festival tour with The Maine, State Champs, Mayday Parade, The Wonder Years, Stand Atlantic, and Real Friends. I had the chance to talk Eric Butler of Mom Jeans in the back of a tour van at The Rave in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to discuss things like Sad Summer, plans for a future record and how it is being written, and the Foo Fighters.

Main photo courtesy of Ishan Goshal; all others courtesy of @momjeans_ca on Instagram

You’re at the end of Sad Summer tour. What has it been like touring with bands like Mayday Parade and The Maine who’ve been in the scene for a long time?

It’s really cool. I feel like we’ve been trying to learn a lot from them. It’s hard to think of examples, but just seeing the way that those bands operate on a day-to-day basis. I think both of those bands have been very good at cultivating a very involved and invested fanbase, and that’s something that all bands really have to do these days to have longevity in their career. That’s something that we’ve been thinking and talking a lot about, just trying to decide whether we want to be in this band for the next five or ten years. If we decide we do want to do that, we all know that growing pains happen and changes need to be made. Finding out how you grow and in the ways that you can while still keeping on doing things your own way. Seeing how The Maine and Mayday Parade do that and how State Champs and The Wonder Years all have their own ways of operating and how they all have their place in that has been really cool for us. It’s been a great experience.

So keeping that in mind, how do you, as a band, plan to grow and change as the scene evolves around you? Do you plan on trying to stick to your roots with your fanbase, or are you more open to adjusting as music evolves?

I think that we’re all about just doing what feels right to us at the time. I think it’s inevitable that bands are going to grow and change and their sounds are going to grow and change with them, because we change as people. I mean, by the time we put out the next record, it’ll probably be two or three years since the last one. You’re not the same person that you are two, three years later. I think what we try to do is be straightforward and honest about where we’re at when we put out and write music. I think that we do what feels right to us and whether or not we think something is sick and if we want to play those songs. I think we will kind of stick to our roots as far as what we think is important and what we think is fun; all we really want to do is to keep doing that.

Since you brought up the album, how did it feel when you were finally able to release Puppy Love and throw it out there for the world to hear?

Oh my, it felt really, really good. I don’t like sitting on music for a long time, and I really like making records and recording music. It’s very fun for us, and we all have a really, really good time with it. So once we make something, we really aren’t going to sit on it. I just want to get stuff out there. So, I don’t know, hype is weird sometimes. I feel like things get overhyped, and as a band, we’ve always tried to be very honest and straightforward about what’s going on. There’s no smoke and mirrors. You know? There’s no fourth wall or anything like that. We just like to pull back the curtain and what you see is what you get. There’s no crazy album rollouts or anything like that. We just like to make music and we put it out once it’s done. Hopefully people like it. Puppy Love is one of those things we had to sit on for a little while and we didn’t get to just put it out. So now that it’s out and people had time to digest the songs, it feels good. I think it’s growing on people?

Since Puppy Love was released in 2018 and your first album was released in 2016, does this mean you’ve got plans for an album in 2020?

Going every two years would be cool and that definitely would be nice if it ends up working that way with timing. I would love to do that, but I don’t know. It always comes down to when it’s ready and when it’s done. We’ve talked a lot as a band about what we want to do for the next album and what our expectations are, and I think we aren’t gonna know that it’s done and that it’s ready until it’s done and it’s ready. When we all feel like we’ve reached that point, then that’s when the album is going to be done. We don’t want to put any limits or timeframe on ourselves. Right now, we just want to do the absolute best that we can.

You want to be happy with it before you give it to everyone else.

Yeah exactly, I don’t want to have any regrets. I want to have a lot of time to play through the songs and a long time to record the songs so there’s nothing I regret releasing.

You guys have a very distinct sound and I love it. Was this something that took a long time to cultivate or is it something that kind of came naturally when you started playing music?

A little bit of both. I think it definitely takes you a long time to find what feels good and what feels natural to you, at least for me personally. I started playing guitar when I started playing in this band. I still don’t think I’m a very good guitar player, but I’ve just been learning as I go, and I think with that every new thing you learn is something that you can add to your arsenal. Over time, we’ve each settled in to what we think is cool and what we like for this band. We found how we like to sound and that’s definitely taken a long time. On the other hand, it was a lot less intentional than you might think. For me, it was just turning knobs and listening to a lot of bands that I liked, and I think whenever you try to replicate another band’s sound you can never really fully do it 100%. It always ends up sounding a little bit unique and it always sounds a little bit like a mixture of all your influences, and so we try to wear influences on our sleeve as much as we can.

Absolutely! So since you’re wearing them on your sleeve, who would you say are your major influences when you are writing?

So it’s listening to a lot of Joyce Manor, Modern Baseball, Free Throw, and bands like that. I really like the twinkly stuff. Bart likes the really loud rock and roll stuff. Austin is somewhere in the middle, and when we put that all together, it just kind of becomes its own thing.

When it does come to your songwriting process, what do you do? Some bands just write as they’re on the road and some bands take a two-week retreat to the middle of nowhere. What do you guys do when it’s time to write a new album?

Well, I think something that all of us struggle with in the band is the balance of the high intensity work of being on tour and then having nothing to do when you get home and being bored. So when we are home and we’re not on tour, we try to fill that time with as much creative stuff as possible. We usually do a week on, then a week off. Bart lives three hours away from us, but he’ll come up and spend a week at our house. We try to fill the time as much as we can. We try to practice a couple times a week. We try to jam or demo out a couple of times a week as well. We’re also in a lot of other bands and a lot of other projects that are always recording and practicing and doing stuff. When we’re on tour, we’re on tour and we’re focused on the tour we’re doing, and when we’re at home or writing, we’re thinking about the next tour or we’re getting ready to do all that stuff. As far as the writing process goes, it’s definitely gotten a lot more collaborative. When the band started out, it was very much just myself and Austin, our drummer, writing songs together. Over time, especially with this new record that we’ve been working on, Sam has been writing a lot and helping a lot and Mark has actually been writing a lot. It’s been really fun having all four people in the band writing stuff rather than just me and Austin creating songs and then bringing it to everybody. Everyone has been peppering on their own flavor, and I think we sound like a whole new band, and I think it feels different in a good way. It feels like a step in the right direction. It feels like we are tapping into the full potential that we have. My goal for making the record is if we do our absolute best and we think we smash it out of the ballpark and we give it a hundred and ten percent and do the absolute very best that we’re capable of and people don’t like it, fuck it. We did our absolute best. I don’t want to ever walk away from a project or walk away from an album feeling like we only we only did like 70 or 80 percent of what we were capable of, and right now it definitely feels like everybody is firing on all cylinders and bringing as much to the table as they possibly can. It’s a very good feeling, and it makes me really excited about what the next album is going to sound like. Whenever I’m in a bad mood, I listen to the demos that I’m super stoked on.

I absolutely love how excited you are for the next record, I’m sure the fans are just as excited! Bringing it back to the performing side of things, when you’re performing, is there a message you’re trying to convey? On this tour, I assume there are a lot of people who haven’t seen you before. Is there a message you try to convey to those fans?

I don’t know. I try not to. I try to stay in my lane. It’s really hard to make a solid point in

the two seconds you have between songs so I try to keep my mouth shut unless I’m really certain about what I want to say or unless there is a very specific issue or something that is really important to me. As a band, and myself personally, I feel like we very much found ourselves in this situation where people like our music and want to see us on tour. The first album that we put out is still growing and things are still getting better. Every tour that we do gets bigger, and we’re still improving as a band, which is a huge privilege. I don’t feel that we’ve done anything in particular or work any harder than anyone else to deserve something like this, and the way that I reconcile that is that I want people to know that if they want to be in a band and they want to go on tour and they want to do some stuff like this, they absolutely, totally can. There’s nothing different about me or nothing special about us. There’s not enough women that are starting bands right now, there’s not enough people of color that are starting bands, there’s not enough trans people starting bands, there’s not enough queer people starting bands. I feel like I don’t know what else to do as like a person with the privileges and platform that I currently have. I don’t know what else I can do other than encourage and formally invite people to please start a fucking band. If you’ve been waiting for somebody to tell you that your stories are good and that your experiences are valid, that’s what we’re here to do. You can be up on the stage in two years if you want to. The last time we were in Wisconsin, we played my friend J.J.’s mom’s basement. It was for like 60 people and it was awesome. That was less than three years ago and now we’re here and doing this huge show. If we can do that, so can you. We’re just like a ragtag bunch of kids from the fucking ‘burbs of California; there’s nothing special or different about us. I want people to know that and I want people to put aside whatever little voices in their head that are telling them that they’re not good enough at guitar or that they play ukulele and that it’s not important or that nobody wants to hear a girl singing a song. That’s bullshit. I think that people should just start making art for themselves and start making art because it’s important to them and because they believe in themselves. They should find people that believe in them and want to support them because that’s what we’ve been lucky enough to do. And that’s that’s the only thing that we’ve done ‘right.’ We’ve surrounded ourselves with people who we genuinely care about us, and you can’t fail if that’s the environment you’re in.

On a completely different note, when you’re not on tour and you’re not doing anything music-wise, what are some things that you do when you’re at home?

I smoke a lot of weed and watch a lot of TV. That is definitely something that I do. I’ve been trying to find more creative and constructive outlets. I’ve been getting into drawing and tattooing a little bit, which is very terrible and is in no way anywhere near good enough to call myself somebody who has that as a hobby. But that’s something I’ve been filling my time with. I like going hiking, I like cooking, and I spent a lot of time with my partner. A lot of us in the band spend time with our partners. The downtime that we have is very much just downtime, very much just chilling. We also like having people over, like partying and stuff. Not like we’re getting wasted, just entertaining. We have a house and we like having people over and we grill and watch Foo Fighters music videos and stuff like that. It’s really fun, I’m sure you do something similar with your friends.

Definitely, my friends and I like to go back and watch the drunk history of Fall Out Boy regularly.

Oh yeah, there’s been many a night where it’s just a case of White Claws and the Foo Fighters documentary on Netflix. It’s just like, “Alright everybody, strap in, we’re doing this again.”

That’s an amazing documentary though, I completely agree. When it comes to the future, where do you see yourself going as a band? You’ve played a lot of smaller venues like your friend’s mom’s basement, and then this whole tour is a lot of bigger venues such as The Rave tonight in Milwaukee. When it comes to touring or anything like that in general, where do you see it going?

I don’t know. It’s honestly hard to say, because if you asked me that two years ago, I never would have said this. I think as long as we’re still playing shows and we’re still playing music together and we’re still friends, that’s all I really care about. I don’t want to sound ungrateful or anything, but at the end of the day, I really don’t care about this band as much as I do getting to share this experience with my friends and the people we have been doing that with. That’s the only reason we ever started a band. It was just because it’s fun to play music together and there’s something special about all four of us just playing our instruments at the same time. That’s the feeling I’m always chasing every time we go on a tour and every time we make an album, and as long as I get to have that in whatever capacity, just the four of us doing that together, then Mom Jeans will continue to be a thing. If something ever gets in the way of that and threatens our relationship as friends, I think I would definitely see us putting the band aside. I just really hope that we get to we get to do this as as long as we want. There’s something really rewarding and validating about busting your ass every day and going to bed exhausted but proud of yourself, knowing that you did a good job and you deserve to be exhausted and that you kicked ass. There’s something really great and validating about that feeling, and that’s the feeling that tour gives me. You know?

Being able to go to bed at night tired and happy.

Yeah, and just looking back at the day and being like “Woah, I did that,” or looking back on the tour. When you actually try to sit back and process everything that you put yourself through physically and mentally, it’s astounding. I think every time I go on tour, most bands of our size that are doing the things that we’re doing, you’re really pushing yourself to your absolute limits physically and mentally. There’s something cool about that. A lot of people do that in other ways, like marathon runners do that and people who climb mountains and people who skydive do all these ridiculous things. And for me, that’s going on tour and that’s how I do it. I’m always chasing that feeling and I will for as long as we get to do that. As long as we feel like it’s worth the time and it’s worth the effort and sweat we put into it, we will keep on going.

My last question that I always ask is the same. For someone who reads this interview and wants to check you out, what do you want them to know about you?

Everybody’s welcome at the Mom Jeans gig. Even if you don’t particularly like our music and you just want to come to a show and see what the vibe is and see what it’s like, everybody’s welcome. We’re very much trying to do an anticool guy club thing. I’m sick of going to shows and feeling like it’s a leather jacket and tattoo sleeve contest and everybody is secretly having some contests for like the coolest looking guy in the room. There’s no prize. I hate that feeling and I’m sick of going to shows like that and I’ve been sick of going to shows like that since I was a teenager. Luckily we’re in a position now where we don’t have to make our shows like that. We get to be as accessible and as inclusive as we want. We’re trying to do gender-neutral bathrooms as much as we can at all the shows. My goal is to have the only reason that anybody would not like our band or not want to come see us in a show is just because like they don’t care for the music and it’s just not for them. If you’re unsure about it or you want to come to a Mom Jeans show or you want to hang out with our band or be involved in whatever capacity and you’re not sure if you’re cool enough or whatever, fuck that. Say what’s up and come hang out, because this experience in this world is for everybody. I’ve been given so much of it and I’ve been given this crazy big platform and I want to share it with as many people as I can. It’s the only way I can sleep at night, it only seems fair. You know what I mean? I just want to share with as many people as I can.

A huge thank you goes out to Mom Jeans and specifically to Eric for taking the time to sit down with me and talk. The inclusive culture is coming, and Mom Jeans is doing their best to help cultivate that at their shows. Mom Jeans’ latest album Puppy Love is available now on all streaming platforms.

Hosted by: McKenzie Moore