No Skips: Sean Bonnette previews AJJ’s Thursday night tilt at Uptown by walking through Disposable Everything track-by-track

AJJ. // Photo Courtesy of AJJ

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.

A few days before the second leg of their U.S. tour as openers for pop-punk band Say Anything, we caught up with vocalist Sean Bonnette to discuss every track on AJJ’s latest record Disposable Everything to preview their return to Kansas City on June 13 at Uptown Theater.

The Pitch: I don’t think you guys have played in Kansas City before. I know you did a pretty lengthy nearly 30-song set in Lawrence last summer, and played Lawrence three times before then. I think in 2015 you came with Jeff Rosenstock and The Smith Street Band, which sounds like quite the tour if you ask me. Are you excited about coming here?

Sean Bonnette: We’ve definitely played Kansas City like three times, twice at the recordBar. Well, I guess technically four times because one time we played a daytime all ages show at a skatepark and at a bar later that night. I think that might’ve been the last time we were in Kansas City, actually.

How did the tour with Say Anything come about? I know you haven’t really played as an opener for a tour in a couple of years. And how did the first leg of the tour go in the spring?

It was really fun. I like the Say Anything folks. Really nice band, really nice crew, and their fans are great. And the opening band, Greet Death, completely blew me away, they’re really good.

I want to talk about the cover art from William Schaff. Why did you guys decide to go that route? It gives off some folk-punk like vibes, but it seems like you guys have swayed away from that sound in recent releases.

We kind of just go wherever the inspiration blows us. But as far as that cover, we usually wait until the album is done to decide how to do artwork, and that’s what we did this time. It kind of just came from listening to it and honestly having a pretty high opinion of how the record turned out. That led us to Mr. William Schaff’s door. He’s made so many really amazing, influential records to all of us in the band. When we made something that we’re kind of that proud of, it felt like we could finally kind of take a swing at getting some artwork like that.

He’s actually very approachable. Online, his process for doing artwork for bands is very transparent and quite ethical. Usually, he has you send him the music, and then he creates a piece of art while listening to the music, and then he shows it to you. You pay half of whatever his price is per album cover, it’s pretty standard for him. He doesn’t gouge depending on what label you’re on or anything. You pay half upfront and then if you like what he does, you pay the rest and you get to use it as your album cover. If you don’t like it, you paid a little bit to try it out and he made something he likes and then he can use that for something later.

Disposable Everything feels like a 2000s indie punk, noise rock-y sort of focus, with lots of hooks and more restrained instrumentation juxtaposed with a more sinister dark lyricism. How was approaching this one different than the previous LPs?

It was definitely different in that we had never recorded at a place where we stayed before. The first seven days of making this record was done in, not isolation, but in an environment that was pretty much a place where you can eat, you can sleep, and then the rest of your time is spent doing music. We recorded at a studio in Texas where there is nothing else around. It’s just a house on a farm and then a recording studio next door that you just walk across to. So we were very focused.

“Strawberry (Probably)” seems like it’s about a relationship sparking, while at times being political, leaning towards capitalism. Is that on the right track, or am I just associating too much with some of the other tracks on the record?

It is kind of on the right track. Not 100 percent and I haven’t really consciously thought of it in that way. The line that I think is kind of the crux of the song, well, it must not be that good, because I can’t remember it and I wrote it. Let me find this thing online. Not so much about capitalism but there’s just the slightest little hint of COVID in talking about how we, as a society, or as a country maybe, or a Western culture, decided to kind of turn our heads about it and never talk, think, or speak of it again. Not so much about capitalism, but more about how we can react after a tragedy or some kind of gigantic event.

“Everything is free now” just being constantly repeated at the end makes me feel like this is either an optimistic take on capitalism in the near future or that it is a way to describe falling in love.

“Everything is free now” is to encourage people to shoplift. No, part of it was just kind of in tribute as a way to flip about Gillian Welch had said about how everything is free now. She sings about it in the way that it’s a bad thing, which I agree with her in her context. But you can also decide that, if everything is free now, then I’m just going to walk out with this.

I found the lyrics. My favorite line from that song is “disposable dignity, there’s no taking this seriously/there’s no time for collective grief, strawberry probably.” It was a pretty quick song. I wrote it, turned the demo around in like an afternoon, and then that was our first song that we recorded for the sessions. None of us had played music together since COVID, I think it had been over a year. So we were just very excited to be with each other again. That’s how the version that you hear on the record turned out. Just kind of live jamming at the end and stuff.

Was it always thought of to be the opener for the record?

Not necessarily. It was in the running to be last, as well. But pretty well on, it was like, “Oh no, this is a great opener.” The closer “In the Valley” was actually a leftover from the previous record Good Luck Everybody. It was one that I wrote right as we were finishing up tracking and kind of making that record. The version that we had recorded, which incidentally is coming out in four days in a demos collection, wasn’t going to get done quickly enough for that record to come out, and then we just kind of revisited it. We recorded a couple different attempts on how to treat that song. It was a weird one, trying to not be too “heave ho” kind of pirate bullshit about it, given the time signature and everything.

“Dissonance” feels very Sufjan Stevens-esque. It seems like you are fed up with common societal views and that the chorus is you battling those thoughts. Is that on the right track?

Yeah, for sure. And having to hold more than one thought in your head at the same time. Oftentimes, it’s more than three thoughts, or parallel planning. The first line in particular—not to take away too much mystique—but it’s about trying to plan a tour kind of in-between COVID waves.

What does “I’ve been doing lots of parallel planning” get at?

Well, we were trying to book 30 shows, but in case those 30 shows have to get canceled for some reason, then I’m going to do this at home instead. That kind of parallel planning. Planning for multiple contingencies and getting loopy about it.

You bring up Jake Angeli, the Q-Shaman guy, at the beginning of “Moon Valley High.” Are the lyrics here based in objective reality?

Yeah, my mom and his mom were best friends at Moon Valley High School in the ‘80s, and though I have never met him, I think about our strange connection sometimes. It’s not really something I think about all the time since I got to spit it out in a song. The song was good for that.

Why place this here on the record, between two very distinct songs with bigger hooks?

Probably so more people would hear it. It seemed like a good move to put it in between two songs with big hooks because it’s more of an exploratory song.

You have a lyric in “Death Machine” that is “in the belly of a death machine,” which some people online are associating with the Godspeed You! Black Emperor song “Dead Flag Blues.” Is there an association there?

I’m not sure if I’ve heard that song. I’ve heard quite a bit of Godspeed, but it’s not intentional.

What were some of the musical influences on this one? This is something I’m always curious about when I hear fast-paced, quick under-two-minutes tracks.

Jay Reatard for sure. Big-time Jay Reatard. We listened to Blood Visions when we were trying to explain how the mix might end up and stuff like that. Classic album.

“White Ghosts” has a gorgeous string arrangement and somehow feels even more open than a lot of stuff here. How did the instrumentation come about?

The string arrangements were all done by our friend Vicki Brown from Tucson, AZ. She’s a producer and David J’s go-to violinist. She’s so awesome. She also did strings on “Disposable Everything” and “Candles of Love.” This one we cut live, the vocal and everything. It was sounding good enough where we wouldn’t need to do that many overdubs of the main instruments, so it took just a couple tries. We even filmed the correct attempt and put it out as a video.

As we were finishing that one up, we got a surprise visit from this guy Don Was. He’s kind of a behind-the-scenes guy. He was in a band called Was that did a hit song called “Walk the Dinosaur,” and he just produces so many artists. With “White Ghosts,” one of the biggest inspirations for the performance of it was “I Can’t Make You Love Me” by Bonnie Raitt, which Don produced and played bass on. So him coming in at the tail end of that song, he was touring the studio just to see if he wanted to bring an act there. He was producing the talented group Intocable in the next studio over. He said, “Oh, play me something,” and we played him that and he told us a cool story about “I Can’t Make You Love Me” and it made my day.

“Every thought of you makes me want to be better” is focusing on past regrets or wanting to be better in the future for somebody?

Better in the current for somebody, better in the present. That kind of love that makes you always want to be better. The lyrics to that song are a haiku. Or at least they started out that way.

The title track is a more tempered take on pessimism. I have to ask, what makes you think the country hates humanity?

I think that is pretty open to interpretation, but my biggest interpretation would probably be that I live in the desert, which is a place that really hates humanity. Sure, the country does too. How much money our country spends on military, imprisonment, and punishment and how little it spends on the things that prevent poverty. The fact that it’s all rooted in punishment and scarcity. To me, that says if it doesn’t hate humanity, at the very least, it dislikes it enough to exploit it.

The lyric, “Lately I’ve been feeling good and that makes me feel so bad” feels like a confession of guilt, but for no reason other than other people may have it worse. Is that what you meant here?

The lyric kind of says it all. If happiness is finite then I’ve had all I should have. Do I steal it from another? Does it come right out of me? I tried to make it as clear as I could.

“The Baby Panda” is part two of the under-two-minutes frenetically-paced trio here on the album, and the pace makes the hook really stand out. How did that line come about?

That came about for me and Ben just fucking around in the studio, or practice space. But the first iteration of that song was about a baby panther and it was about half the speed. I sort of wasn’t fucking with it for a while until I figured out varispeed, which is a way to kind of speed up a recording. I sped it up really, really fast, then the song kind of started to pop and tell us the rest of what it wanted.

Is the verse in the middle just a call-out of society as a whole?

It’s also kind of a tribute to the way of the Croatian style of swearing. It’s kind of an inside joke between myself and the producer, David. He’s Croatian and when they cuss at each other a lot of it is related to agriculture, like, “I’m going to fuck the dirt that you grow your food in” or “fuck the sun out of your sky so your crops don’t grow.” And then they have a general common expression “jebi boga,” which means “fuck God.” It’s such a cool, irreverent, and rebellious way for a culture to say, “oh shit.”

It’s also a punk song and it’s kind of mad. It’s a pretty safe bet that a lot of my songs are about society.

“A Thought of You” is one of the musically dynamic moments on the record, starting off as a chiller, acoustic song and then becoming psychedelic at the end. Were there direct influences in mind to create a song with two distinct halves? What inspired that repetition at the end?

The first two thirds of the song, at least my vocals, I consider inspired by George Jones, applauded by many as being maybe the greatest country singer of all-time. I just like the way he chews on his words. I kind of noticed after the fact that I was doing that on that take, which I don’t mind. And then the influence for the last part of it is by way of my mother, who the song is kind of for, and a lot of the album is for. She was really into ’70s prog rock. She wasn’t very much into Emerson Lincoln Palmer, even though I am, but she was more into King Crimson and Yes. She wasn’t all about prog rock, she mostly liked funk music, but that was my prog rock tribute to my mom.

Were candles just a convenient device to use as a metaphor in “Candles of Love?”

Have you seen those plastic, sometimes they’re made of real wax, but they’re battery powered candles? You can turn them on with a remote control sometimes and they change color. It’s about those. My aunt and uncle, Tommy and Shannon, gave them to me as a wedding present, so we put them up and every time they come on at our house I’ll sing a little song. I got enough of a song from just kind of singing it at home when the candles would come on and then I played it for my producer, David, when he was over and he was like, “Oh, you have to cut that.” It’s a pretty basic song but it’s nice, I like it. It’s very loving.

How does the creation process work for you? How do you know when you have something?

I try not to judge whether it’s a good idea or not until later. Usually, it’s a good sign if it kind of gets stuck in my head. I’m always composing little jingles and things in my brain as I go about my life, and I think a lot of other people probably do, too. But sometimes I’ll be able to focus on them really hard and turn them into songs. But other times it’s more work, where I’m kind of consciously trying to go through with pen and paper and figure out as many ideas, see what’s interesting and follow the threads. The approach varies greatly from song to song.

I don’t consider it scrapping things but I do definitely put things aside until they’re ready for something later. There are parts of songs that have sat around for years just kind of waiting there for the right puzzle piece. Sometimes it happens, something I’ve worked really, really hard on, but haven’t been satisfied with yet will finally find this little place. Like “In the Valley.” “Baby Panda” was kind of one of those.

Why turn this song into something about that at the very end? Is this constantly something you think about when thinking about things you buy?

Yeah, I’m pretty preoccupied with microplastics at the moment. I think about those, I think about how long something’s going to be around. The cool thing about the candles is that I didn’t have to think about buying them because they are a gift and I can just simply enjoy them. But yeah, I think about what’s going to happen after and trying to manifest that whatever happens after capitalism will be a good thing for most of the people. That’d be nice.

I heard you say in an interview that your brain started focusing on politics when you didn’t want it to, and then eventually transitioned that into your writing. Talk about that. What interests you the most about it?

For Good Luck Everybody that was a very conscious decision because I felt, at the time, that every artist should probably speak up. That was the hope that I could purge that and then sing about beauty, truth, and cool shit the rest of the time. I guess I don’t know how to think any other way, but I do want to write songs that aren’t political. Or that aren’t like “hit you over the head political.” I like songs from a place of positivity, in rationality, and general goodwill towards mankind, and sometimes that is political.

“I Hate Rock and Roll Again” which closes out the trio of shortened cuts, has a more absurd, silly hook. I assume these are just cynical thoughts that just happen from time to time. Do you often think about the idea of who will die next when somebody in this scene dies?

It’s an anxiety that I have and it’s also kind of a sad resignation that there’s a good chance that I won’t ever get to see Neil Young perform live before he passes, and that that’s going to be really shitty. That’s simply because I have a lot of obligations these days that would make it hard for me to go see Neil Young when he’s in town. I was just on tour when he came and played Phoenix. My bandmate Preston Bryant actually got to see him in San Diego, lucky fucker.

I adore Neil. Neil is incredible, he’s one of my favorites. So it’s not a “fuck you” to Neil at all and I wish the man only the best, but when you’re writing a song, you kind of have to be honest about what the song needs, and that’s to pessimistically say that Neil’s next. That song itself kind of wrote itself spontaneously the night that Daniel Johnston, or it might’ve been someone else, died. It kind of for a while, in my own head, became the song that I would sing on the night that people I liked would die—Mark E. Smith, Martin Rev, Daniel Johnston.

I have to ask, is “Schadenfreude” a term solely used to rhyme with your name? Is Sean-Claude you?

We threw a red herring in there because Margaret pronounces the word wrong. She was pretty sure she was pronouncing it right at the time, which is a funny thing to capture on tape. My first name is Sean-Claude, my middle name is Vincent.

“Schadenfreude” is the feeling of joy you get from seeing someone you dislike suffer. I wrote it the night that Trump was diagnosed with COVID.

A lot of tracks here are pessimistic outlooks, but this is one embracing a negative quality in yourself, or the narrator. Was this a purposeful juxtaposition?

To set that against the rest of the songs? No, the song itself stands alone.

I put aside for a while and kind of tried to figure out what the song should end on. If we are to learn anything from the song, what should it be? I don’t know if I did a good job or not. It’s kind of a hard thing to wrangle with.

Does that kind of thing happen often when you record songs?

Yeah, I think so. You keep playing the songs live and they eventually kind of become more finished. Wherever you’re at when you record them, it’s a snapshot. But I was happy enough with the song and I felt that it was complete enough to release it, of course. If any songwriter is being honest, they have that doubt about stuff. Artists return to the same themes again and again because it’s the things they wrestle with.

When you begin to play stuff live, you begin to appreciate the songs more?

Yeah, or if you don’t start to like it more you probably stop playing it. Next time you go to a show, listen to a band’s first record with all the songs people like on it and see how they play those songs live, if they do. They’re going to be drastically different, is my guess.

How do you think about your old music that you don’t really associate with as much anymore?

Our very first record, Candy Cigarettes, and all the demos and stuff—That’s a different band and I like that band. That’s not what we do but that’s a pretty cool band. All those songs I wrote when I was 17, so it’s like listening to a good punk record, it’s like Misfits-inspired or something, even though that was before I heard the Misfits. It does kind of have that same sound.

I must say, I really like the type of song that “I Wanna Be Your Dog 2” is. I’ve heard it so many times before, but it always gets me. Just being so obsessed with somebody else that you envision these sort of messed up fantasies, that are at the same time sort of endearing. It almost feels like an Antarctica Vespucci song. You guys play this one, right?

Yeah, it’s very fun to play live.

Why are you interested in creating so-called “sequels” to previously released things. This is a sequel to an Iggy Pop song, correct? And then you have The Bible 2…

I’ve always thought sequels are pretty funny. The title never comes first, so I’m not really creating sequels to these things. It’s kind of just nominally, and after the fact, I just get a kick out of it, personally. Ben Gallaty and I think it’s funny. In the case of “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” it’s very obvious, sorry, because it’s the first line of the song. I think it was the melody and, kind of like you were saying, the cringy love of it. Everyone loves an Electric Boogaloo. One of our most popular songs is called “People II: The Reckoning.” On the album it’s on, that song comes before “People” in the tracklist. So we’re just idiots, that’s all.

“All of My Woulds” seems to be questioning why we feel down or pain from something, when at that end of the day it doesn’t matter as much as we think. Were you just setting out to explore that topic?

It’s more about if there’s a difference between Buddhism and nihilism and what is it? If it is all a dream, if it all doesn’t matter, if it’s all a hoax, or a beautiful illusion that we’re all sharing, then why does it hurt so much sometimes?

Was 14 songs the original idea or did you have any leftover?

I think in this case we had 14. No, we had 15, but then we decided to take a little more time on song 15. That just came out—That’s our song with Kool Keith and Kimya Dawson called “Best of All Possible Worlds.” It came out like a month ago or so. The record that it’s more of a part of is coming out on June 14, called Disposable Everything Else. It has some remixes by Open Mike Eagle and Deep Dream, as well as that song by Keith and Kimya. And then a bunch of demos and a couple alternate recordings and a practice version of “Death Machine” from the first time we ever played with Kevin Higuchi.

I think it might be 13 or 14 songs, something around there. Not the same running order, it has its own sequence that kind of has the best flow, in our opinion.

“In the Valley” is a very beautiful sounding song for how depressing the lyrics can feel. There is just a behemoth of surreal metaphors here that coupled with the immaculate sound that is brand new for the record.

For a minute, “Strawberry (Probably)” was in the running for the end, but I would say pretty early on that it established itself as an opener. For the last song, I would say it was between “All of My Woulds” and “In the Valley.” That was a wonderful surprise and it was the last one to be finished, and was the most alien to the rest of the recording process. We didn’t end up using anything from Sonic Ranch—the first studio we recorded at for that track. That was all tracked in Tucson and LA, and maybe a little of Texas.

We had a Swan onboard for some overdubs, Thor Harris. We started sending him stuff to record on Good Luck Everybody, so the record prior. We met him through John Congleton—the guy that produced Christmas Island and The Bible 2.

You consistently use places and things inside said thing in these lyrics. Is this an attempt to point out how small everything is in this world? That feels like a direct transition from “All of My Woulds.”

I think I like how it’s kind of rhythmic in its nature because of the repetition. And it sends you deeper into whatever you’re trying to describe.

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

Best thing I’ve been listening to lately is this record I recorded from a band called sewerbitch!. The band is incredible. I love sewerbitch! and their songs are really, really good and they’re great singers. I don’t know anything about the release plans for the album or anything, I’m just recording it thus far. But we finished the vocals and it sounds really good. Drums and bass and two really good singers. They trade off on songwriting duties and their harmonies are just out of this world. The songs are witty, kind of silly sparks, but intelligent.

But I guess a non-plug, because that’s nothing that anyone can listen to for a while, is, I’ve been walking around sobbing to the song “Fancy” by Bobbie Gentry. That’s my number one “go for a walk and cry” song.

AJJ plays Uptown Theater on Thursday, June 13, with Say Anything and Greet Death. Details on that show here.