No Skips: Jeff Rosenstock takes us track by track through HELLMODE ahead of Sunday’s Bottleneck show

Jeff Rosenstock //Photo Courtesy of Jeff Rosenstock

In our series No Skips, we sit down with an artist or band and go track-by-track through their latest release. For some of us, the banter in a concert where a song gets explained is our favorite thing in the world, and we’d just like to keep living in that. Every song has a story, and these are those stories in the order you’ll encounter them on the record.

At 41 years old—and 15-20 records in, counting each and every group he’s been a part of—Jeff Rosenstock is still at the top of his game. And while some have labeled his ‘23 record HELLMODE as one of the greatest of his career thus far, it is clear his focus is on the future. A week out from the second outing of his summer tour, Rosenstock will play The Bottleneck on Sun., Jul. 21. We took some time to chat in-depth about that record and the decisions revolved around creating it.

The Pitch: The last time you came to Lawrence, you played The Bottleneck back in 2022 in support of NO DREAM. You have played The Granada twice during your solo stint and then a date back in ’11 with Bomb the Music Industry!. What is it about Lawrence that keeps you coming back?

I have a very simple answer—If people come out to see us play in your town, we’ll always try to come back until no one goes to see us anymore! Everyone in Kansas is always so nice. Our last show at The Bottleneck was really fun and people went so hard, even though it was like 130 degrees or some shit outside.

Anthony Fantano might be the most well-documented music critic on the Internet and he had HELLMODE finish as his number one album of 2023. What does that mean to you to see something like that? Are these things that you’re looking at during the end of the year?

Sure, I definitely look at these things. It’s always nice when you work on something to get some sort of acknowledgement that you did a good job. Who doesn’t like a little pat on the head? A lot of people on our most recent tours in the UK and Europe have talked to me about that Needle Drop number one—Either new fans who found out about us through there or old fans who are like, “Ooh la la fancy boy, look at you with Fantano’s number one record.” With Anthony Fantano in particular, he listens to a lot of music and speaks very considerately about it, so it does feel pretty nice that he doesn’t think my records suck. But I’m sure it’s coming!

What is it that drives you? You’ve been in several different projects, including three very prominent ones—this, Bomb and Antarctigo Vespucci—and have been at it for almost 30 years now, still coming in with consistent releases. What do you love the most about music and what makes you come back to it?

I just like music, I think about it all the time, it’s fun to make it, and it’s fun to play it. If I ever stop feeling that or finding joy in music, I’ll move on from it. Music is so multi-dimensional and cosmic, I think what I love most about it is that it’s impossible to pinpoint what I love most about it.

I’m curious how you ended up scoring the Cartoon Network show Craig of the Creek. I know it’s known for its LGBTQ+ representation. Is this something that’s important to you?

I ended up scoring Craig of the Creek because one of the creators—Ben Levin—had seen Bomb the Music Industry! play a house show in 2007, remained a fan, started working at Cartoon Network, and eventually was able to make a pilot of this show. He hit me up for the music and I’ve never replied to an email quicker. Not only has it been a dream for me to make music for a cartoon, but I knew Ben and Matt Burnett were coming from Steven Universe, which is an amazing and legendary show.

The real special thing about it all is the crew was filled with empathetic, kind, and supportive people who were also top-tier talents and so very, very funny. To work in an environment like that was a real privilege. Everyone was encouraged to share their stories and that really shines through the fabric of the show, which is why so many different walks of life are represented. I would have been excited just to work as a composer, but I can’t think of anything that I would have wanted more than how it felt to be part of Craig of the Creek.

“Will U Still U” almost feels as if it’s on its own island compared to the rest of the LP’s tracks. What was the thought process to lead off the record with it? Talk about the two sides of this track and transitioning to the comedown after the blast-off between the second and third verse.

This song had been kicking around in my voice memos for a few years before it reached its final form, but it always felt like an opener to me. I like an opener that makes you want more music by the end of it. It kind of came together in bits, like, I had the beginning of the song but it took a while for it to lead anywhere. As the song lyrically became more about levels of forgiveness, I wanted to try and musically depict burning the past to the ground to represent, both the point of view of someone who has been forever changed by someone’s actions, and also someone who has done wrong and needs to eradicate their old self, grow, and become a better person.

I thought just some clean J-pop-sounding seven chords and a twinkly melody would fit in well with the idea of being on the other side of something, and then there were all these lyrics leftover from when that skate punk part in the second movement went on for way too long.

This is very reminiscent of how Worry. began with “We Begged 2 Explode.” Did you have that in mind?

No, and I kind of hated that the chords were similar, but I am me, so I guess I write like me. What can you do? Other chords didn’t work. There’s a few ways I like to open records—I like songs that build into a big thing, and I also like songs that feel really immediate and leave you kind of breathless. This one is fun to me because it does both of those things. I think smarter songwriters would probably start their records with their most accessible songs, but I like to warm up to that. Wait until like, three or four tracks in before the songs are any good.

“Head” treads territory you’ve hit before, albeit most in your Bomb the Music Industry! days, but still manages to feel fresh and its own thing. Were you trying to reinvigorate the Bomb days?

No, definitely not. I really tried to make that drum machine sound different than it does on a Bomb the Music Industry! track with a similar beat. I used a physical 808, blew it up through a Neve console, and it still does kind of sound just like the stuff I did in reason with Bomb! Again, what can ya do? I’m definitely more about forward momentum with my music than I am about trying to reconnect with stuff I’ve done in the past, but like I said in the last answer, ultimately I am me and I write songs like me, so stuff like this is bound to pop up after so long.

The second verse dives into the current state of the political system pretty evidently, probably the clearest influence on the record. Was this because of the shortness of the track and the pace of lyrical delivery?

The lyrics of this song came first, but they really flooded out, and there was originally a lot more. I feel like I could write 2,000 words very quickly about how our system fails to represent everybody, how we are oppressed, how any time we see some light break through the cracks, the powers that be quickly plug the hole, and I’d still not even scratch the surface or solve anything. So with that in mind, I decided to try and make my point more concise and acknowledge at the end that while it’s fair to succumb to the exhaustion of infinite despair, that doesn’t mean the bad things stopped happening just because you looked away.

“Liked U Better” was the first song you released in over two years, since SKA DREAM. The music video had a Wingdings font at the end, which translated to the album title. Where did this idea come from?

There is a graphic design troll that lives inside me and I feel like this was a big win for the troll. For years, I’ve been trying to crack the code on how to make Comic Sans respectable and dignified, and never quite got there. With HELLMODE I was trying to think of a coded way to tease the record, pitched this Wingdings sticker to Natalie Davila—the marketing director at Polyvinyl—at 1 a.m., she was like, “Oh yeah, let’s fucking go,” and I was psyched. It felt like a good way to counterbalance the self-seriousness of teasing a record in a subversive way. I like how we hinged the whole album campaign on fucking Wingdings.

There were theories that the album was going to come out on June 6 because of a Jeff Rosenstock-related website saying 666 in the top corner. Are you aware of this?

I’m not aware of this! This makes me remember how bummed I was to not finish Goodbye Cool World! in time to release it on 6/6/06 though.

Why was this the initial single, out of all the songs? Did you think your audience would respond the best to it? It’s obviously got your stamp all over it.

Ya know, the original plan was to release “Doubt” as the first single. Then we started making a plan to play the song live on Late Night with Seth Meyers and drop the song that night with the anime video from the Craig of the Creek crew. But with Seth Meyers, there’s time restrictions on how long your song can be and “Doubt” is long. So we ended up switching it out for “Liked U Better,” which I wanted to do as the second single. Then, the writer’s strike happened, our plan for Late Night got thwarted for the second time (first time was because of COVID) and at that point the plan was in place, the video was done, the video for “Doubt” took longer than I accounted for because animation takes a long time, so we just stayed the course. I don’t really think of how an audience will respond, but I know that chorus is catchy, which is always good for a single.

It feels to me that half of the songs here are rather straightforward lyrically and half are sort of more up-in-the-air. “Doubt” is in that former category, but the electronic feedback juxtaposes that in a jarring way. Walk me through some of the production choices on tracks like this.

On “Doubt” in particular, I really wanted the song to feel like it was growing the whole time, even before it gets loud. So like, by the time we get to the third verse, the melody moves in double time, we’re keeping the pace with hi-hats instead of the floor which adds a new sizzly thing into the mix, just slowly more and more until it hits you in the face. By the end, I wanted it to get to a place that feels further than you expect it to go, even a bit untenable once it gets loud like anything could break at any moment, before it explodes into that final chorus.

To me, you tap into a beauty here that is more sparse in previous material. Would you agree? If so, do you think part of that is how long you’ve been doing this and just getting older?

I listen to a lot of quiet and spacious music, and since Bomb the Music Industry!, I’ve been trying to find my voice in that context. So, I don’t think it has anything to do with getting older. I think we were as successful with that vibe as we’ve ever been on this record, and I wonder if that’s because NO DREAM was intended to be a full-speed-ahead, efficient punk record, so on HELLMODE (and 2020 DUMP), it was exciting to indulge in space and length again.

The bridge in “Future Is Dumb” seems to be tapping into climate change—“So what if you die? So what if you don’t die? So what if bubbling haze rains ash from the sky?”—Is this what you’re talking about here?

Yeah. I was running between twenty and thirty miles a week during peak pandemic times here in Los Angeles, and, at one point, the air quality got so bad from wildfires that you weren’t really supposed to be outside. It was hard to not think of the doom of it all on my runs on these tree-lined streets, how humans have damaged this perfect planet as if we have the upper hand, but at the end of the day, Earth is going to keep on keeping on. It will survive the human race. We’re only sealing the fate of humanity by ignoring climate change, Earth doesn’t give a fuck if we die. Earth will be just fine. Then there’s also this nihilistic aspect of it because, on an individual level, we cannot change the course of climate change the way the giant corporations doing most of the damage can.

The first verse of “Soft Living” has a line about Aaron Carter screaming in a Target. Can you explain this? Was his death a year prior a reason why you included him in the track?

This is in reference to a very specific incident where after driving across the country to move to Los Angeles, my wife and I saw Aaron Carter in a Target in Palmdale—our final stop before reaching our new home. Felt kind of funny for that to be our first big Hollywood celebrity sighting in la la land—Aaron Carter in a Target in Palmdale of all places. Almost ominous.

He passed away about two years later, long after the song was written, overthought, and recorded. Felt disrespectful to take his name out, to nerf the song instead of memorializing him, even in this weird way. I often think about him when I sing that line live now and how you can dream big and hit amazing heights, but that doesn’t necessarily lead to the easy, long life you’re promised with perceived success.

What were some musical influences for this cut?

I was just fucking around trying to get a disgusting guitar sound, plugged my baritone guitar directly into my interface, stacked like three tape simulator plug-ins on top of each other, all dimed out, just to hear what it would sound like, and started playing these chords. A lot of the song came pretty quickly from that. There’s obviously some Weezer influence in there with the fuzzy, chunky power-pop vibe, some Torche influence. This song was originally half as long but it felt unresolved in a bad way, so it ended up feeling right to open it up and let it keep going, Built To Spill style.

“Healmode” is another outlier compared to the rest. Was your Neil Young covers EP with Laura Stevenson an inspiration for the sound on this?

Probably a little bit! I wrote most of this very quickly on my stoop in the rain, and, I think, if I hadn’t made that EP with Laura, as well as a lot of quieter, sparser music on Craig of the Creek, I might have thought I couldn’t turn it into a real song. Laura, Ben, and a lot of the people on The Creek crew gave me a lot of confidence in my ability to sing quietly and make something pretty, without blowing it to bits by the end, so I ended up giving it a shot as a demo and liked how it turned out.

How did Stevenson’s guest spot on the song come about? I know you guys still collaborate, but why here?

Laura has actually sang on the last five records! Plus a ton of Craig of the Creek songs! We are dear friends and I love her voice. I’d love it if she could be in this band all the time, but schedules and life don’t permit that, so I’m grateful whenever we can make something together. This was fun because she came out to the house, not only to record vocals for HELLMODE—which we banged out in one day—but also the Younger Still EP, which we spent the next four days making. She’s one of my best friends and we hadn’t really hung out with each other in the two-and-a-half years since I’d moved, so it was a real treat of a week, even though I guess we were working our asses off most of the time.

You said in an interview that you’re “always waiting for the other shoe to drop” and for them to say “fuck this guy.” I feel like that comes across in “Life Admin” fairly well. Am I reading this right?

I think there’s just been a really obvious shift in my financial situation since the band started doing well, and I got a professional job as a television composer simultaneously. It was hard to fathom having stable income, and since I have spent a lot of song space writing about the uncertainty of unemployment and low wages, it only felt like the right thing to do to acknowledge my newfound stability and trite gripes instead of pretending everything’s the same as it was in 2009. I told the label that this was my “Top of the World” or “Juicy,” except written by a person with depression and anxiety.

There are some clearly personal anecdotes in the last verse. What pizza spot are you referring to here? Does “Got burned last December” imply a bad experience there?

There is some pretty bad pizza out here in LA. Pizzas with terrible crust, very sharp tasting ingredients, and cut into all sorts of imaginative shapes that are not triangles or even squares. This pizza had all of those qualities, it was terrible. Seems like it would be so easy for it to have been done right, and yet, I don’t remember which spot it was for certain. There’s a few bad ones, but I think I know the place, and no, we haven’t been back there. See, I’m still complaining.

“I Wanna Be Wrong” contains pessimistic verses paired with an optimistic chorus. A lot of the songs here can be summarized in that way, where you’re listing complaints about the world, but also the hope that may be reached on the other side. Did something specific inspire this track?

I think I was afraid of writing this song for a while because I don’t want my music to simply be a doom dump, and I knew this song was going to be that. I don’t really find the chorus to be optimistic though. People are really reductive of serious issues when they can ignore it all and go on with their lives, and because of that, they’re dismissive of people who care, who yell, and scream for change. This song is about how, “Yes, I do wish it was all going to be fine if we stayed the course, but if you look at the world around you, that unfortunately is not the case, so wake the fuck up.”

Explain, “Watching the world burst into flames for no reason/other than the fear that you were wrong about something” in “Graveyard Song.” Is this just about some people being too afraid to fess up to their mistakes?

Specifically, that line is about climate change deniers who, as more studies pour in, as the world gets hotter, just keep doubling down on their bullshit like, “Nope! That isn’t happening!” As if it’s not happening! I detest this sense of stubbornness that permeates policy, this refusal to let go of the wheel, and let the next generation take it, even if it means the future will suffer. All because people think they know better and are embarrassed to admit when they don’t.

“Fuck all these people” feels added on to one of the later verses during the transition to the next section. Was this always the idea? How did it originate?

It just felt good to yell that after that bridge, just thinking of how people will let future generations of children fear being mass-murdered at school because, to them, “freedom” equals everyone being able to buy an assault rifle. “Freedom” doesn’t equal going to the hospital if you’re hurt without fearing it will bankrupt you. I am a nonviolent person and I am very anti-gun, but I understand everyone doesn’t feel this way, even if that disappoints me. What I can’t understand is how it’s impossible to impose restrictions that prevent the mass-murder of children. No other country has this problem. Fuck the gun lobby, fuck the NRA, and fuck everyone else who stands in the way of progress.

“3 Summers” is only your third seven-plus minute track featured on your LPs (“Usa,” “Let Them Win”). What made it right, given you lean more heavily on tighter, more musically exposed material?

As I was demoing it out in the desert, that melody came into my head, although it’s admittedly a bit stolen from the Shinobu song “Regular Love Triangle”, and looping all of these things on top of the repetitive structure at the end felt very meditative to me. I could picture stars falling. I think it’d still be like five and a half minutes without that, though. Sometimes a song just needs to keep going to be its full self. I used to think that if a song isn’t three-and-a-half minutes, it’s too long, but again, listening to a lot of Built to Spill, listening to music while running, I’ve started to be more okay with letting things stretch out when they need to.

In an explanation that I saw you had for this song, you talk about how you asked yourself whether going back to music “is just because I’m supposed to or something?” and that no matter what you do, you participate in capitalism, which you don’t believe in. How do you live through this and what advice would you give to people who are also battling it?

I would say just try and give when and where you can. Volunteer your time, donate your money if you have the means to, open your heart and be as kind as possible to friends and strangers. Be a little beam of light, make what’s directly around you brighter, if you can, and don’t beat yourself up when you try really hard and the world forges ahead in the stupidest way possible anyway. The system has been rigged for corporations against people.

I end all my interviews by asking an artist what the best thing they’ve listened to lately is. It can be something that just came out recently or something that came out all the way back in the ‘60s.

I’ve been diving into the deep King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard catalog and live sets. I’m very inspired by their fearlessness when it comes to ridiculous ideas. It’s also cool to me that they’ve managed to find this spot where they are a DIY band, but also a massively successful thrash metal jam band. And that only really scratches the surface. I’ve also really been enjoying Joanna Sternberg’s I’ve Got Me, the new Grandaddy, Little Simz, The Frames’ For the Birds, Pachyman, Big Thief, and have been revisiting Mike Krol and Death!

Jeff Rosenstock plays The Bottleneck on Sunday, July 21, with support from Chris Farren. Details on that show here.