thepolyorchids

[thepolyorchids]

A bit about each song on The Polyorchids LP

Track 1 of 10: The Lark

This was the first Polyorchids song that didn’t exist prior to the band’s formation. It was sort of an experiment in a different writing style. The first Courtney Barnett album had just come out and I loved the way she wrote these songs made up of super specific and sometimes mundane lyrics that, when added up, made you feel something. Tony’s naturally great at getting specific like that, but I tend to retreat into my own mind and write from that space. I used a simple a two-chord progression I’d been sitting on for years and wrote a blow-by-blow telling of a drive out to a gig Travis, Tony and I played in Willits a few weeks prior. The hills of Lake County had just been burned by a huge fire. On the trip, we met a bunch of nice seasonal weed-trimming folk (plenty of them white dudes w/ dreads, hence the chorus, which was originally just a placeholder but ultimately stuck) and we crashed at a shitbox motel called The Lark. I liked a Joyce Manor song called “Midnight Service at the Mutter Museum” which had a quiet-verse/loud-chorus structure to it. I brought it to the band with that in mind, but couldn’t get Travis to soften the his floor tom hits, only to find that the thumping beat actually made for a better song. From there it found its groove. — Justin

Track 2 of 10: Predisposed

Most of the lyrics and melodies for “Predisposed” were written in 2011. I think for most songwriters it’s easier to say something in a song than it is to say it in real life. This song was written directly to my friend (and sister from another mister) Nicole Putnam. She was and has always been someone that had my back no matter what, no questions asked. This song turned out to be a (WELL-deserved) explanation/Thank You (even though she never asked for either) for all the times in that year she was there for me when I felt like I had no one. It started as an acoustic song (like most Polyorchids songs), I absolutely forgot I EVEN WROTE IT! For me writing becomes sometimes like therapy, so once I finish... I feel better and feel like I can move on a bit. I found and old iPhone in October of 2017. When I checked out the voice memos, this bad boy was on it. It wasn’t totally complete but Justy, Trav and I worked it to be a full band song and it made it to our album. This is also the first time in The Polyorchids history that I sing my own song on the record. — Tony

Track 3 of 10: Dumpster Heap

I wrote the melody for this a few years ago on a miniature kids’ guitar I was fooling around with, but I spent more than a year just humming gibberish to it. Tony and I have had tons of conversations about our feelings about talking politics on social media. On one hand, it’s a cesspool of garbage that brings out the worst in people and diving into it accomplishes essentially nothing, but on the other hand, it’s where we do 90% of our communicating at this point. If we don’t talk about this stuff online, we’re sort of making the decision to not talk about it at all, which isn’t good either. I’ve typed out full responses to Facebook comments only to delete them before posting so as to avoid surrendering my day to a shit show of notifications. This song is about that internal conversation. I wrote a second verse for this after the “grab her by the…” tape came out, but decided it made an evergreen idea too specific. A few months later I started writing ’45’ and realized this 30-second song could exist with just one verse that feeds right into that one. — Justin

Track 4 of 10: 45

The sort of bizarre post-election vibe had given way to the inauguration and now this guy was slapping his Sharpie signature on like five executive orders per day and arguing about crowd sizes. A parade of idiots were marching through Charlottesville with tiki-torches the day I started writing it. I can’t really pull off overtly political lyrics because they feel corny to me about one hour after I write them, but it seemed like a joke that this dude was running things and I felt like trying capture that in some way, because it was inescapable. Jeff Rosenstock’s WORRY had come out a few months earlier and knocked me out. A fast/crazy deep-cut called "Bang on the Door” was my favorite track and I pretty much wanted to jack it and make it my own. The chords and melody for 45 are totally different from that song, but you can tell they’re sort of distant cousins. I only had one verse written, but I showed it to Trav and Tony at the very end of a practice and the “Side! Eyed! Glances!…” intro was so glorious and punchy with the full band. Some songs take work to find their groove. This one was a natural fit right off the bat and we got excited about it. I wrote a second verse and we started playing it at shows. I finished the third verse the night before recording with Pat and our friends Mike and Jake came in to sing gang vocals on the outro. — Justin

Track 5 of 10: Skeletons

Tony wrote this one a few years ago and lost the demo on an old phone (that’s his move) until just a few months before we recorded the album. I’d never heard it prior to that, but I instantly became obsessed with it, even more so than Tony I think. I told him as much, and I even played it a few times at open mics by myself. The song is really just one verse and one chorus… or a looping chorus with one bridge — however you want to put it. I added the guitar riff, which mirrors the melody but gives it something new, and pitched the idea of having Tony and I alternate singing with a louder, shared verse at the end. This is the only time we’ve ever structured a song that way. We recorded this two days before I moved out of California and we had absolutely no time to practice it with Travis. We tracked our instruments to a click track (unlike most Polyorchids songs, which we record live as a full band) and let Pat at Earth Tone play the percussion after the fact — also something we’d never done before. — Justin

Track 6 of 10: Down in the Desert

This song was written after a trip to Arizona for my uncle Jeff’s funeral. My brother and I grew up with our uncle around a ton, bringing us those little popper/snappers and just generally being the best. As we grew older, we came to realize how truly bizarre and fucking hilarious this person was. Eccentric and witty to his absolute core. He joined the Army out of high school and was stationed in Germany, which I think clouds this song in a bit of confusion because “shipped out to Germany…” really sounds like WWII, but it was actually decades later during a peace-time in Germany. My uncle enjoyed room-temperature tall cans of beer — a taste he said he developed during those years in Germany. After the Army, he got into theater and ultimately became a union-carded makeup artist in Hollywood, working on stuff like the sitcom Major Dad and a TV adaptation of the movie Weird Science among many other projects. Before the funeral, my dad received a letter from one of Jeff’s old makeup artist friends/colleagues. He read that full letter at the funeral and it was just about the most real and beautiful thing I’ve heard in my whole life... Just a human being remembering another human being through the specific memories they shared — the kinds of specifics that send you inward to think about your own memories. I cried hard and felt extremely happy at the same time.

The whole extended family stayed at a desert motel that night and passed a couple of tall cans around in a circle and took turns sharing stories. I liked the idea of letting that evening with family be the chorus and Jeff’s life be the verses, so that’s the basic structure of the song. I started the first couple of lines during that road trip to the desert, but the rest came one line at a time over like a half a year. I never hit a wall, but I never hit a groove either. It was a challenge to write, and yet I felt strongly about seeing it through. It wasn’t until I played an almost-finished version for Tony that it became a potential Polyorchids song at his insistence. I played it once at an open mic but the first time we played it live as a band was at Danny Secretion’s Fuck Cancer benefit almost exactly a year later. — Justin

Track 7 of 10: Back off, Warchild

I started this as a sparse and mellow folk song on acoustic guitar, but abandoned it after about a month of frustration over the lyrics. It started as a sort of abstract story about conflict and tension, but I had a hard time keeping it moving. I liked the first verse on its own but didn’t see a path forward. But then we tried it as a band right after the Popgun EP was done while floating some new song ideas. This came right after we’d found some momentum with The Lark, and I got excited about the dynamics of the full band banging it out. It added something new and took some pressure off the lyrics, which I still feel a bit lukewarm about to be totally honest. The binding theme of the song is frustration and tension and negativity. Verse one is childhood, verse two is early adulthood, and verse three is the old age and death. The chorus is sort of an anthemic reveling in that pessimism, which is no way to live but real nonetheless. The one lyric I really love is the chorus line: “...Not our tax brackets not the weather / could pull the graphite out of the letters...” The song title comes from a line in Point Break when Keanu is about to get in a fight at the beach. We spent our teens and 20s camping and boogie boarding at that beach (Leo Carrillo) and rinsing off in those same outdoor showers. — Justin

Track 8 of 10: Low Class Love Song

Low Class Love Song was started in October of 2017. It started out as a baseline I couldn't get outa my head (I'm not 100% sure but I feel like I might have stolen the chords from "runaround sue"). It ended up being a song about the feeling of dating above your class and knowing it's not gonna end well but pursuing it anyway because the pain of a broken heart is worth the experience of sharing some time with that person. Music really is cheaper than a therapist. — Tony

Track 9 of 10: Preachers in Private Jets

This song started as a jam session groove at a practice. Our old band wrote some songs that way, but The Polyorchids never really have. We loved playing it but didn’t know how to treat it because there was no chord progression, just this looping riff. Eventually we added a palm-muted version of the riff and I started yelling nonsense over that part sort of in the style of Fugazi’s Waiting Room. Around that time I saw a video of two televangelist preachers shooting this shit about why God is very pumped about them being super rich. More than half of the lines in this song are lifted almost directly from that YouTube clip. A week before recording, Hurricane Harvey hit Houston and Joel Osteen locked up his megachurch doors, keeping out the affected. That last verse was finished right before recording. The chorus chords were written separately by Tony for a different song, but we were elated to find that they fit right into this one and added a nice melodic part that contrasted the verses and the riff. We took a long time to start playing it live, but Jake from Pisscat nudged us to play it every night of a tour we did together around Lake Tahoe. Pisscat pal Becky wrote it on a set list as Pee Pee Jay one time and I regret not calling it that. From there it felt complete. — Justin

Track 10 of 10: Readiness for Radio

After a life spent not caring either way about Bruce Springsteen, I found my way to his Nebraska album and loved it like many before me. I did the obligatory deep-dive into its origin story: DIY four-track demos that he’d recorded in his basement with plans of doing a proper full-band studio album, only to release the raw demos instead because they served the songs better. I liked the idea of writing something that referenced the themes of the album and its story without ever doing so explicitly. The result, I think, is one of those songs that lets the listener find their own meaning. It’s not an autobiographical song for me, and yet I identify with plenty of it personally. The main chords were adapted out of an old mewithoutyou song. I thought I’d spun them off to be totally unrecognizable, but my brother’s wife Veronica spotted it like four years after I wrote it! If you listen to that band, let me know if you can spot it. I recorded it live in the big drum room at Earth Tone, soaking it in open space and reverb. Pat left the loooong ringing sound of the final chord and then abruptly ended it when I slap the strings shut. I love those final seconds. — Justin

[thepolyorchids]

[thepolyorchids]

One night early this summer, Bianca and I spent a few hours taking hundreds of photos of our kids’ dinosaur toys moving around their bedroom while they were asleep in the other room. I assumed we had plenty of video after that one night, but it turned out to be barely 30 seconds. I was too far in to stop, even though I never wanted to do it again.

My kid Noah, age 4 at the time, and I did the same thing a few months later, with me improvising the dinosaurs while he controlled the shutter. And then again a few months after that, because holy hell, this shit takes forever. 

Trav and Tony came over sometime after that and Bianca filmed us playing, which is horribly uncomfortable and awkward. Plus Trav couldn’t hear the track over his drums (hence the earbuds) and Tony was passing a damn kidney stone. Enjoy! -- Justin 

Filmed by Justin, Bianca and Noah Cox. Edited by Justin Cox. 

[thepolyorchids]

Starting The Polyorchids (A West Coast Tour)

By Justin

The three of us used to play in a band called Stenna and the Poison Apples along with our good friend Ryan. After a year or so of local bar shows and an EP release, the band began to scatter, and then dissolved completely in 2008 when I moved to Chicago for school.

Just as I returned to California, Tony moved away to the Pacific Northwest, and then later to Maine for a couple of years. I bounced around the state for a while, but eventually landed back in Davis. After a significant lull period, I started writing again for the first time in a long while. Tony had been doing the same in Maine, and then he too moved back to California.

In our previous bands, we had some kind of inferiority complex that kept us from making it anything too serious. Going on tour always felt like a very legit thing that Real Bands do, so who were we to mess with that? We were from a small town and nobody around us was going on tour. It never even blipped on our radar as a possibility.

But why not? Once the idea entered my head, I couldn’t really let it go. I floated the idea to Tony, who was on board before I could even finish the sentence. Trav had just moved nearby to Vacaville, and he was into it too, so we started practicing some songs – a few old ones, a few new ones and some covers to pad things out – in his spare room. I put the Stenna and the Poison Apples EP on Bandcamp and sent a shit load of emails in an attempt to book the tour under that name (even though the music we were now playing was something more stripped back), doing my best to give the impression that we were an established band who had never stopped playing, even though we had no social media presence. Tony did something he’d always wanted to do: bought an upright bass (and immediately freaked out about the purchase), but then learned it on the fly as we booked the tour – something that still blows my mind. 

In the end, we nailed down 9 shows in 10 days, from Mendocino County to Orange County. Tony’s mom let us borrow her Mercury Mountaineer and we rented a U-haul trailer. What followed was an killer experience that would be spun into The Polyorchids a few months later. These shows went from May 22 to May 30, 2015:

Shanachie Pub, Willits, CA – We stayed in a fleabag motel called The Lark, which would ultimately become the title of a yet-to-be-recorded Polyorchids song. The gig was packed with folks who were living there temporarily to support the weed economy. They happened to love the 10-minute freeform jams we heavily leaned on to pad out our three-hour (!) set. They could mostly give a shit about our three-minute originals, although the experience truly was positive from top to bottom. We made a couple hundred dollars, drank for free, and were fed a pizza for dinner. It was our first show in years (besides a pretty brutal warm-up gig at a bar in our hometown) and it put some serious wind in our sails for the rest of the tour. It was the best start imaginable. 

Winters Tavern in Pacifica, CA – The free pizza from the previous night wrecked every band member’s stomach – mine especially. We crashed in San Francisco with our friend Casey, whose bathroom felt the wrath of the whole band. The show was awesome and the venue was great, but I felt like I was going to die about three-fourths through our set. I was officially ill. 

Sean’s House, Walnut Creek, CA – The next day was our only day off. We had arranged to crash at our pal Sean’s house before a show in Oakland. His ex-in-laws were over for dinner, and we played them like six acoustic songs in the living room. You could argue that this wasn’t actually a show, but Tony cautions me not to fuck up a good story with the truth – so this definitely counts as a show. Oh yeah, I had become sick as hell and spent the bulk of this day sleeping.

The Night Light in Oakland, CA  – Our band was scheduled to play a set after a slate of stand up comedians. The night was hosted by an old college friend, Joey Devine, who has since carved out a space in California’s stand-up comedy scene. We watched Mad Max: Fury Road that morning (from the front row of the full theater). Not a pleasant experience when you’re sick as hell. As we drove over Highway 24, our radiator blew up. Honestly, I was pretty certain for a minute that the tour was dead in its tracks. I think we all were. But we had a show in like an hour, so we poured every bottle of spring water we had into the Mountaineer’s cracked radiator, which somehow got us to the summit of the Oakland hills. We rolled down the other side of the mountain and parked our overheated car near the venue. After the show (which was fun, and a nice way to distract from our fucked-up vehicle), we drove a few blocks to a Chevron (car already getting hot ), where we replenished our radiator coolant. We filled it up, and then climbed Highway 24. As we reached Sean’s house, it was just starting to get too hot again. We made it, and we fell asleep knowing we had some choices to make the next day.

East Village Coffee in Monterey, CA  – First thing in the morning, we walked across Walnut Creek to a Napa Auto Parts, where a guy named Jim Sandman sold us a fresh radiator. Tony’s mom had passed along our car troubles to his Uncle Ron, who said he’d wire us a couple hundred bucks for a new radiator if it’d keep the tour in motion. (Cheers to uncle Ron). We walked back to Sean’s and spent the next five hours replacing the busted one, which wouldn’t have been possible without Travis. Swapping a radiator is pretty clear-cut, but Tony and I wouldn’t have had the confidence to think we could do it that morning and still make it to our show in Monterey that evening. Trav grabbed the reigns and got the job done, with Tony and I as his assistants. Now we bow at the alter of Jim Sandman. I played Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” from my iPhone as we cut out of town with our fresh radiator and some renewed excitement. We made it to East Village Coffee about 30 minutes before our scheduled set – where we played about an hour of songs in front of a few close friends and a handful of strangers who were there to drink tea and read books. (Although a few of them tipped us the money we’d use a few minutes later retreat to a nearby brewery, where we’d drink off the long day).

During the drive out of Monterey that night, I had a very slight accident in my pants as a result of my illness, which had reached its depths by that point. I disposed of my underwear at an In-n-Out Burger in Salinas, and resigned myself to ridicule from my peers, which I received in heavy doses. I’m including it here because it’s not even worth trying to keep secret. It’s the first thing Trav and Tony share when asked about that tour, as they should. We crashed at April’s house in Morro Bay and grabbed sandwiches at a deli before heading south. (I drank a homemade kombucha at that deli and credit it entirely for a rapid reversal of my stomach illness, even if it had nothing to do with it). Plus, I slept great that night. 

The Red Cove in Ventura, CA – We Yelped The Red Cove just as we pulled into Ventura and found a disturbing amount of comments describing the place as a hub for skinheads and white supremacists. (Photo taken in the parking lot). When booking the tour, I had cast a massively wide net, because I knew our band was not a draw, especially on a Wednesday night in a town where we had no friends. But I had also sent a blast of emails to some alt-weekly magazines and websites, and the only one that reached out was a weekly magazine in Ventura. They interviewed me and wrote a cheesy-as-hell article that made our band sound far more legit than it actually was. (The Red Cove staff had seen the article, so they tripled their staff for the night). We arrived on the Wednesday night to pretty much zero crowd, besides a handful of skinheads sitting far away from the stage and one nice middle-aged woman who loved our band and educated us on Oxnard’s nardcore punk scene of her youth. The place was dead and the sound sucked. (Tony’s upright bass fed back endlessly atop the hollow wooden stage). We packed up as soon as we could and drove up to my grandma’s in Valencia for the night. Thanks, grandma. 

Pike’s Bar in Long Beach, CA – I was excited to book this show mostly for Tony’s sake, because Pike’s is owned by a former drummer of Social Distortion, whom he loves. (Trav and I could take or leave ‘em). As it turned out, it was among the best shows of the tour. The people were great and so was the sound. We crashed with my super hospitable friends Amanda and Nate, who also fed us a great dinner. The set was great, and we befriended some locals with whom we hung out post-show. If we get to do a similar tour again, Pike’s will be on the list.

The Copper Door in Santa Ana, CA – I booked this place because I had gone out for drinks there with Bianca’s sister about a year earlier and dug it. The show was cool, but we played super early as a warm-up for a DJ. The place was quiet besides Bianca’s family and our buddy Mike. The show itself wasn’t anything special, but it was a nice, mellow stop, and it was cool to hang with friends and family. 

Kevin & Steph’s House Show in San Clemente, CA – We ended things at my uncle’s house in south Orange County. It was a backyard BBQ, and we set up facing the pool, but didn’t start playing until evening. Just as we started playing, most people settled in around the bonfire directly behind us. Poor planning on our part. We turned our gear around for the second set and had a long, fun night, even if we didn’t sound our best. We drove home the following morning absolutely knackered, barely making it home without passing out at the wheel.

We let things settle for there months -- not playing another show until we debuted as The Polyorchids at a Battle of the Bands at the Yolo County Fair that summer. (2nd Place, right where we belong). We played Odometer, Bottom of the Bay and a song we had just finished called Popgun. My second son, Milo, was born the day after that set, which made things extra crazy. We took another few months off before playing again, but then we regrouped, started fleshing out some new songs, and have been clipping along ever since.

[thepolyorchids]