Prolific king of DIY Punk Jeff Rosenstock is a man of many projects - so many that we didn't actually get to them ALL - but we did dig through recent solo work and his time fronting Bomb The Music Industry! Last month Rosenstock played a 46-song set at The Ford Amphitheatre, a show he dubbed MAXIMUM DEATH ROSENSTOCK (see that setlist here) and he's a few days away from taking off to tour in Japan. Lucky for us, he took some time to chat and get into the stats with us. Enjoy:
Use your keys
There's a handful of these on the top. "Nausea," "You, in Weird Cities," "Festival Song," "We Begged 2 Explode," "9/10" - Those are songs that we will play at like, 99% of our shows. Our records, No Dream and Hellmode, I tried to make those in a way that we could do, at least a majority, of what's happening live. Whereas the record Worry, when we started touring on that, everybody in the band had to get a fucking keyboard or a sampler that they had to play in addition to their regular instrument. And "9/10" has all those keyboards in it. If we don't play those songs, we’ve got all these fuckin' keyboards up here this whole time. We need it for one minute-and-a-half of the set.
Improv, covers, special shows
What else is on here? "Gourd Jam Improv." We only did a "Gourd Jam Improv" when somebody threw a gourd on stage one time. But I'm glad we have that documented.
We covered Josie and the Pussycats on this tour that we did with Modern Baseball, PUP, and Tiny Moving Parts. We asked people to submit things to this Google sheet and then whatever had the most votes that morning, we'd be like, "Okay, I guess we're covering this song today." I think the hardest one we had to do on there was "Dancing Queen" by ABBA because Kevin couldn't play the Canadian shows, and we had figured that out as we were crossing the border. So the drummer of PUP, Zack, he’s like, "Hey, just so you know, I learned all your songs." I was like, "I love you Zack!”
Oh yeah, we played Tijuana twice. We just walked across the border with our instruments and just played a show. Bomb played South Dakota, that was... This very kind fan wrote me this letter and was like, "Bands never come through South Dakota. I always have to drive like six hours to go to a show." I was like, "All right, we're gonna book a show in South Dakota." And then that person was like, "Oh, I'm gonna have work that day." That was how we ended the tour where we announced we broke up, which was with a show for like 12 people in a basement in Chamberlain, South Dakota. But it was a really fun time, and we stayed at a Super 8, which had a hot tub.
I'm glad I bumped New York to the top of this. I lived in New York 20 years, and a lot of that time was not getting booked on shows, having venues not write back to me, having promoters not write back to me. Once we could actually play venues, I think Bowery was just really on the top of a list of places I had seen so many shows just as a fan, just as a college student, as a kid from Long Island traveling into the city. And I think we planned to do two shows and then those sold out fast. So we ended up doing four shows.
At this venue called the Warsaw in Brooklyn, it ended up turning into this eight shows in-a-row thing. Two-hour long sets every night. We had two days to practice. The day before practice, we got a call from Taking Back Sunday that was like, "Hey, we had to reschedule our show. We know you guys are in town. Do you wanna play?" We're like, "All right, we'll do it." So then we had one day to practice all these songs and it was just kind of chaotic and fun.
The Warsaw, I used to live a block away from there. I got married there, literally. Bomb the Music Industry! played our last shows there, and that was a really special thing. Let me look at this. I remember the "Future 86" from that show. That was like the first Bomb the Music Industry! Song in a way, and it's about giving up everything to go be in a band and just go do it. Closing out the show with that, I remember that being very emotional.
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Jeff Rosenstock is playing a slate of shows in Japan beginning 10/29 - see a full list of dates and details here.
