Good Luck
Leave a commentNovember 28, 2013 by Wasted Opportunities Zine
Appears in W.O. Zine Issue 5:
For me, Good Luck’s ‘Without Hesistation’ is one of those albums that seems able to reach inside your chest, and hit a variety of raw nerves and tug on a range of heart strings in seemingly surgical fashion. Many of the songs and the themes of the album hit home with me in a big way. For better and worse there’s no instruction manual or guide to how to live your life. Obviously that’s a good thing for the most part, free to choose, to change, to discover. But it also means mistakes, ‘what ifs’, and becoming cautious over the years to avoid hurt, pain or embarrassment. Which all has the effect of limiting and reducing our choices down over time if we don’t consciously act on a whim, breaking free without hesitation, to boldly make our decisions and follow them where they lead, good or bad. That’s life, you can’t avoid it. All this fails to mention another crucial aspect about the band- that they make great songs. Full of amazing guitar lines, trips into little, twisting rhythmic valleys, before rising with soaring vocals. All conveying a sincere and open hearted nature. I’ve written before about Ginger Alford’s other band, Traveling, that her voice is one that makes you develop a crush, powerful, emotive and vulnerable at once, and it’s still true today. Matt Tobey’s vocal counters, humble and considered, grounds and balances the songs along with the distinct drumming of Mike Harpring on their latest release ‘Without Hesitation’ which sees the band expand upon the sounds of their first LP. It uplifts. So when it came to asking for an interview I knew I just had to act and not think about it. Ginger was kind enough to reward the leap…
On the band’s facebook page it mentions that you listen to Jurassic Park in the van. Is that the book on tape or are you driving around the United States countryside to the John Williams score?
Actually we were listening to the movie itself. We have a van dvd player but if someone watches something the whole van has to listen to it. If it’s a movie we’ve seen a lot of times though it works out just fine. I actually saw Jurassic Park in the theatre 7 times. I think it was my first true love. Anyway I must have written that band description like, the day after that happened and never changed it.
The band seems to belong to a pretty vibrant scene/area around Bloomington. What makes it special? Can you pinpoint certain qualities or efforts that seem missing elsewhere?
Bloomington is a really special place. I think people from other cities get sick of hearing how awesome we think it is in Bloomington, hah. It’s a pretty small town so it has that element of easy liveability and you get to know people really well. I think the main thing that’s great about it though is that people are really supportive of other people’s projects. There is just a feeling that you can start any kind of endeavour and people are really going to root for it to work out. My friends are opening a crafting store in the next week, and they don’t have any real business experience, but everyone in the scene is really excited about it. And if you start a band, you are going to get asked to play a million shows off the bat, if you make art you can get in art shows really easily. I have a friend that’s an award winning comic artist, and there are people in really huge bands living here rather anonymously…just working on their art like everyone else. Plus we have tons of forests and three lakes nearby!
That has to influence Good Luck to some degree, have you ever reflected on how it might have shaped the band or perhaps your creative output more personally?
Oh sure, Bloomington had a big influence on Good Luck. We always felt like we wanted to work harder on the band than we ever had before, but Bloomington is a really humble place. Like, you just can’t be pretentious at all here without people looking at you like you are crazy. So there’s an element to our songs that’s just about our nerdiness and social problems that is totally sincere, but we couldn’t take ourselves too seriously, you know? Cause our friends would hear these songs before anyone else and laugh at us if we did, hah.
Whenever I listen to your albums, despite the songs exploring the dramas and realities of life, an overall positive/PMA outlook on things comes through. (And you all seem to smile a lot in your press photos) There’s always a little bit of hope in there. Do you agree with that assessment? If you do, where do you think that comes from?
People say that to us a lot actually, which is great, I’d always rather be thought of as a band/people that bring more positive than negative energy into the world. But it wasn’t something we ever put a concerted effort into, we definitely didn’t get together and say “let’s start a posi-band.” The reality is of course that we’re people with varied moods and bad days and not all of our songs are happy. But, when we started the band I do think we were all in a place where there was some raw energy was happening for us. I had just moved to Bloomington and was really happy about getting out of a kind of bad living situation prior to that, and I guess I had written a lot of songs with my old band One Reason about that hard period in my life, so when we started this band I felt like I had finally moved on from that and wanted to write about more life-affirming things. Matt also had been wanting to play “rock guitar” in a band, he’d been doing his acoustic project for a long time and I think he was ready to let loose. It felt very easy and “right” to write songs together and I guess on a subconscious level I’ve always felt that when you are genuinely enjoying playing music that comes across.
Do any of you ascribe to a particular set of ethics or moral code and principles that shape your views on life and relationships? What gives you meaning and perspective?
I don’t think anyone wants to hear me talk politics and ethics. My politics are probably exactly what you think they are. And I don’t have anything particularly amazing to add to the canon of philosophy on life, etc. I know what gets me up every day is only having relationships with people, so I try to work pretty hard being as good to the people around me as I can. The ephemeral nature of everything is terrifying, but it’s also kinda like, fuck it! I’m gonna tell everyone I love them and spend as much time with them as possible. So I’m an incredibly blunt and transparent person these days. I try to keep busy so I can throw a little art into the void because that’s just another way we connect with each other. Also it keeps me out of my friends’ hair. That’s all I’ve got.
It seems like you all respected each other’s earlier works and are good friends. Does that make some of the tougher aspects such as touring, recording, covering band costs, easier?
Yeah, we did play shows together in our previous bands, I was definitely a Matty Pop Chart fan even back when I met him as a 17 year old in overalls. (he’ll love that I wrote that). When we started the band Mike and I had been hanging out a lot too…there was definitely an element of it being an adventure we were starting together, and that was really exciting. We’ve had a lot of epically good times together, and to a large degree if you aren’t having fun with the people you are on the road with, it just makes no sense to do it. But being in a band for a long time is a bit like a marriage, and after 5 years the honeymoon period is definitely over. We know each other too well for it to be a magical party all the time. But if you are interested in where the other people are leading you creatively, and if you respect them as people, then it’s worth it.
What’s a ‘day in the life’ like for you? What do you do with your time? Do you work or are you able to make ends meet some other way? Where does that sit within the broader scheme of your life?
(I’m not sure if this question is just for me…)
I’m pretty busy all the time. I work at two really awesome places here in Bloomington. One is an all vegetarian restaurant that some friends of mine who also play in bands (Ryan Woods and Toby Foster) opened. I serve people out front and I also pay all the taxes and bills and do the payroll. I also do the same kinda number-crunching at a non-profit bookstore in town called Boxcar Books which is a crazy 10 year Bloomington institution started by punks and misfits. I don’t have a degree in accounting or anything, these were just jobs that I gradually fell into. I’ve learned a TON about accounting and money management, which is awesome, but even more importantly I work also exclusively with all my best friends. So really it’s a pretty amazing situation, and sometimes I can’t believe not only that I work there but that these places are even open and functioning in this crazy world. As for the broader scheme of my life, my mind is like a moth drawn to every interesting thing in the world so I who knows what I’ll be doing in 10 years, but for now I’ve got it pretty good.
Besides that, I play music with people in town as much as I can. I read just as much as I possibly can because I think that’s the ultimate homework for writing songs or prose. I’d love to write a book someday, so I’ve been messing around with that. Oh and sometimes I participate in some epic D&D campaigns, where I am usually a thief.
I’m guessing there are always financial pressures to pay for fuel, for a van, to go out on the road? Is the motivation to work just to keep the band going? How do you cover the costs? Can the band pay for itself these days?
We all feel extremely lucky that the band does pretty well on the road so we don’t have a lot of financial concerns with that. It is pretty liberating to know that playing music and traveling isn’t going to be a pit that you throw money into. It definitely takes the stress out of the cycle of working to pay for tour…I did that for a lot of years.
Everyone in the band seems to have different projects of some form or another, homemade movies, bands, writing, and art. Do they provide outlets for different emotions or aspects of yourself? Or do you explore the same subjects that you do in Good Luck but conveyed via different mediums? Is it complementary or iterative?
I definitely think it’s complementary. We haven’t been able to do a lot with Good Luck lately because Matt is in a really intense program in college and Mike moved to Philadelphia last year, but for me it’s really important to stay creatively active or I just lose my mind. Much like I was saying earlier about how I was writing some pretty dark songs at the end of my last band One Reason and starting Good Luck freed me up to write a different way… I feel that way about any creative project I do. Sometimes you just need to hit a reset button not only to try new things but to be able to reflect on what you’ve been doing before. It’s completely different writing and playing songs with different people, and you realize what’s easier and what’s harder to do with others. For me it’s almost never repetitive because I write completely different songs with different bands. This is going to sound a little crazy but a lot of times when I’m writing a song I’m writing it for or to the other people in the band more so than to the greater world…there are tons of little inside lines/jokes in Good Luck songs between me and Matt and with my other current band Traveling I write songs about things that Alan and I did together and in the style of music that we both like. That may sound shallow but it’s more like a prompt, as If I was in a poetry class and they said “write a poem about geography” it’s like “write a song that Matt will appreciate.”
Also, I think the main thing I’ve learned is that I’ve gotta keep busy working on something creative or I forget how to look inward and express myself. It’s definitely not easy for me to write, I know people who just sit down with a guitar and mess around casually and start new songs all the time with no prompt. It’s really like pulling teeth for me, I have to WORK at it. The writing is not fun, but at the same time I know it’s important for me. so having an impetus of an album I’m writing for, or an essay I’m working on for someone’s zine, or even making videos for my friend’s video competition keeps me opening that self-expression vein. Otherwise I would just read novels and hang out with people all day.
What did you take away from the production side of things with ‘Without Hesitation’? The album sounds great overall, who did you work with, how did that process play out while you recorded?
We recorded with Mike Bridavsky at Russian Recording here in Bloomington, which is actually the same guy with whom we recorded Into Lake Griffy. But in the intervening time he moved into a brand new really fancy studio that he built himself and really upgraded all his equipment, so in some ways we were able to bring more “fidelity” to it just through that. Also, we just set aside a lot more time for recording “Without Hesitation” so we went into it with this attitude of “ok, we can do anything we want to do with this album, time isn’t an impediment.” In some ways I think that was both a good and bad thing…I’m very happy with the quality of it but I think I personally spent a little too much time in the studio and started to go a bit crazy. We gave ourselves a lot of leeway to second guess everything and Matt and I are REALLY second guessers by nature. There was definitely some “the guitars are too loud, now they are too quiet! Wait, maybe I’m wrong…” going on. But we did have the opportunity to do things like have a chorus of 17 of our favourite singers come sing back up, and try tons of cool different guitar tones to find the one we loved the most for a particular solo.
It feels like Good Luck has been a band for a little while now, but only has two full length albums out. Why do you think that is? Does it feel that way from the inside?
Hah, yeah, we know we haven’t put out a lot of stuff. That was actually part of why we liked the album title “Without Hesitation.” It was a nod not just to the lyrical theme of the album but also to it taking us three years to record another album.
Really just the main explanation for that is that we all have pretty busy lives and Good Luck is not by any means the only thing we have going on. As I mentioned, Matt started a really intense audio engineering course about a year after we recorded Into Lake Griffy, and Mike always has tons of art and work projects (he’s a self employed fixer of things, car-tinkerer, artist). For the first year or two of the band we were really into doing it full steam all the time, but then we all just realized that we wanted to have lives too. There are a lot of cool things to do in the world and I don’t want a band to be the only one I do, ya know? I kind of like our attitude now…we do the band when we want to and when something presents itself that we really want to do. Like this past summer we toured with our good friend Spoonboy and we also learned all his songs and were his backing band for the tour, which was really fun. It makes the whole thing very INTENTIONAL. We do the band on our own terms when we can. That probably means we don’t get to record a lot or go on tour a lot, but that’s ok.
How do you write for Good Luck, especially with other projects, what’s the deciding factor in bringing a song to the band? Do you and Matt ever do lead vocals on songs the other has written?
For Good Luck we write almost all our songs as a band. There has only ever been a few of songs that we’ve brought to the band mostly written, and those have been some of the hardest songs to make work as a full band, just because we are so used to writing together.
We do trade vocals quite a bit…Matt wrote “Stars Were Exploding” then when we were recording it we just tried out with me singing it…Then that’s the version we always play live because it’s more “rockin.” I feel kind of bad because everyone thinks I wrote those lyrics, which I think are some of the best Matt ever wrote. Oh well. I gave him the line “oh The Feeling is Spreading out to the ceiling when the band plays everyone’s favourite song” so I guess it works out.
Sharing vocal duties, do you explain a song’s meaning and why you wrote with each other? Or do you let each member interpret the lyrics on their own so they bring their own understanding and feeling to it?
Hmm, Matt and I usually end up talking about the meaning of a song at some point in the process. If it’s a really personal song it can be too daunting to explain everything straight away, but Matt and I have definitely talked in depth about lyrics that we’ve written, especially if we are looking for input from the other person. Sometimes I don’t even 100% know how to explain what a line means. But there have been situations where we send each other lyrics in the early stages and we say “I don’t know about this line, it doesn’t make sense to me.” And then we’ve talked about what the line is about and whether we should keep it, whether it is effectively communicating. I had like three alternate lines for where I say “Now I’m back to broken strings from note bends” In Pajammin and Matt picked that one of the three. I don’t think we’ve ever given each other lines without at least mostly understanding what they mean, but at the same time I love hearing lyrics Matt wrote for the first time and trying to figure them out for myself based on what I know about him. It’s a fun game.
How much work is involved in developing the guitar riffs, tones and song parts? They’re so involved and fluid during a song. How do you go about building that up?
We have a really intense process of hammering out the songs second by second together In practice, which can sometimes involve an scenario where we play a part over and over again until something weird happens or someone has a good idea. This is definitely part of the reason it takes us so long to write songs, because we literally have to all 3 agree that we like part of a song or we just won’t keep it. So yeah, sometimes a part can get written and rewritten quite a bit. I remember Public Radio being a song we had to play for a really long time and change several times before we were all happy with it. “The Story Rewritten” from the new album also went through several incarnations before the one it’s in on the album, it used to have a really choppy drum part and a weird delay guitar part through all the verses, but eventually we just decided it was too busy and simplified it to the straightforward rock guitar chords. I think if anything, sometimes we have to work on simplifying things we’ve written more so than adding more to them. “More” is always our inclination.
‘Without Hesitation’ to my mind seems to cut loose a little more in terms of letting the melodies and vocals really soar. Where is ‘Into Lake Griffy’ is more of a tightly wound package overall. How do you see the difference between the two? What prompted the changes do you think?
Some of the changes would just definitely have to do with us figuring out what we’re capable of. I didn’t really understand my range as a singer or know how to use it until being in the middle of recording Into Lake Griffy. I would say the same of Matt. We got a certain amount of confidence to “just go for it” and really sing as intensely as I can or for Matt to play the craziest thing on guitar that he can come up with. I mean, when we started the band we had literally like 4 songs that matt and I sang together THE ENTIRE SONG. It was just to back each other up and beef up the song because we come from punk music which is about being aggressive and getting the vocals to cut through with a bad PA. Then we got some advice from our engineer Mike that we really didn’t need to do that. We had to have the confidence to just put ourselves out there and go for it alone. So yeah, by the point we recorded Without Hesitation there wasn’t anything we were too embarrassed to try musically. The verse guitar part on “Impossible” sounded CRAZY to us the first time we wrote it, like a Pogues rip off punk band playing video game music or something, but we accepted that and I really love it.
What makes you the most proud of ‘Without Hesitation’? What’s the biggest sense of accomplishment you associate with the album?
Ahah, I would say the biggest since of accomplishment I have is that we actually finished it. It was a REALLY REALLY long process, and had to break up recording and mixing into lots of separate sessions. So just having it be done felt great, especially since we had talked about recording and writing songs for the second album for like…years before it came into existence.
Can you talk a little about Traveling, the side project you put out. Why did you release those songs under that moniker rather than take them to Good Luck?
Yeah, so Traveling is a band I started with some friends of mine in Bloomington, Jake Alexander and Alan Crenshaw. The funny story is that we had been talking a lot of shit about starting a band together, and then we decided to do this stupid/crazy thing of going on a cruise immediately before Good Luck was playing at the Fest last year. So we were like “ok, we have to write some songs now because then we can tour down to the cruise in Florida.” So that’s what we did. We wrote like 7 songs in a few weeks, which is a lot for me to bang out lyrically. But it was a really fun process because with Good Luck we had been working on our last album for SO LONG that if felt really great to not overthink the song writing process with Traveling. So the songs came out kinda simple and the lyrics are way more straightforward than what I would normally write. I was really happy with it.
Much like with Good Luck I mostly wrote the songs for Traveling with the other guys in that band as opposed to writing them at home and then finding people to play them. I think like 3 of our songs I wrote outside of the band, other than that it’s very collaborative. Actually our drummer Jake comes up with a lot of our guitar riffs. I feel like with both Good Luck and Traveling it’s gotta be a “no ego” zone where everyone contributes and whoever comes up with the best thing…that’s what we’re gonna use. I love that process because honestly I’m
super extroverted and I just don’t have the penchant that some song writers do for sitting in my room all day playing guitar and writing excess lines.
There is the notion of life being like a narrative unfolding in some of the songs with characters coming and going, stories being written, which is an idea I’ve always loved and related to. What do you so love about writing, about novels? The ability to escape inside a novel? The expression it provides? The shared/universal nature of themes? How it can strip life to its essence? Why is it an important in your life and songs?
Well, Matt and I are both pretty big readers and I think we are both also really affected by what we read. I remember Matt was reading “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles” by Haruki Murakami on a tour and he said it was heightening his whole perception of the tour and the world, making him super introspective and questioning everything he was feeling. That happens to me too…I was reading “The Satanic Verses” by Salman Rushdie while we were writing Into Lake Griffy and it made me have this feeling that everything that was happening in the everyday was also secretly infused with magic and coincidence, and that affected the lyrics I was writing. That’s something that happens in books that we love a lot, whether it’s obvious in a fantasy series like Harry Potter or whether it’s just a really beautiful novel like East of Eden.
I was talking to Alan from Traveling about how some people are just better storytellers than others and it’s mainly because they know how to leave out the details that don’t matter and boil an experience down to the STORY. When you are just living parts of your life it can seem boring or monotonous and it’s not until later that you see the patterns of that part of your life, how you were playing out your own bigger narrative. Or even better, how someone new was just about to walk into the scene and change everything about your summer. Only after the fact can you go back and see the foreshadowing, or find out how that person was in the same place as you five times before you ever met them. And that’s what songwriting is like…boiling down your life, which is just haphazard and continuous into a story that’s 3 or 4 minutes long.
I was listening to a Ray Bradbury interview where he talked about living life, of being in the moment, of ‘just doing it’, without hesitation. I’ve read in other interviews by Matt that your album’s major theme is along similar lines, of being more decisive with choices in life. How do you work past the doubts and questions the mind can throw up when confronted with big decisions about our lives?
Honestly I still have no idea. My problem is that I want to do everything all at once. I want to be in punk bands and also study economics and also write a novel and also travel across the world and
also be a home owner. I have yet to figure out how to reconcile all these things, but I think the only thing I’ve learned is not to be so terrified of making the wrong decision. I used to be unable to tell people how I felt about them, for the obvious reason of it possibly not being reciprocal. But then I’m stuck in a state of limbo forever. I could do the same thing with my life, wanting to move or start a big new endeavor like a restaurant but being terrified by the real possibility that it’s gonna backfire. But I’m learning to just do it and accept the consequences. I don’t have any advice really. But I did read this fantastic book recently called “The Fault in our Stars” in which a main character comforts a very sad friend by saying “You are going to live a good and long life filled with both great and terrible moments that you can’t even imagine yet!”
Where have some of those decisions ended up leading you since you’ve put some of your doubts or questions to the side and committed to something? Any clear examples that come to mind?
Sure! Well with my friends decided to start the restaurant that I work at, it seemed like a really insane undertaking. Between all of us we had like…no experience running a restaurant. They invested a lot of money so obviously they were the ones making the biggest commitment, but I quit a job of 3 years before we even opened, which felt crazy at the time. I think it’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, even if the restaurant fails eventually. I didn’t love that job anyway, I needed to do SOMETHING else, I needed to just jump.
Late last year there was an up swell of discussion about gender in punk music. I was wondering about your own thoughts and views on the issue and ways to approach it based upon your own experiences? What have your experiences been like as a female in a band in a still very gendered, masculine-centric/dominated world?
Well, in a lot of ways I feel like I’ve been very lucky because I grew up in a punk scene that was very progressive. There were a lot of strong women personalities so I didn’t feel weird being the girl in bands in high school. Then I got very into the Plan-it-X scene which has tons of women artists and really amazing supportive guys. I feel like I honestly didn’t think about it very much until a few years ago once I started getting a little press. The one thing that I have noticed that does bum me out is how some people believe my being a woman in a band gives them a right to comment on my appearance as if I am presenting myself to them for approval or in any way thinking I am trying to attract them. I have had some pretty hateful shit written about me on the internet that honestly no one would ever say in person, because they never have. I wasn’t even really made fun of in high school, I’ve always had a really easy time getting on with people, so it was shocking to see guys being like “she’s ugly” or “What is she wearing?” like I put my picture up on Hot-or-Not for review. Of course some of this is just a product of the anonymity of the internet, but I haven’t seen other guys from my bands get quite the same treatment (although someone did say that Mike looks like he works at Starbucks???) So that was pretty upsetting, but I’ve gotta realize, that’s not the larger world, that’s a few fucked up people and for every few of those I met 10 amazing supportive people. I think things are continuously getting better.
The only other thing I’ve noticed, as I’ve grown older, is really my own awareness and personal growth. I can see now that I really used to be “one of the guys” in how I dressed and how I acted when I was a “young punk.” I hung out mostly with guys, so I was always interested in what they were interested in and made the kind of jokes they would make. It took me growing older to see how women of all types could make their own place in the scene and be accepted. I would hope the same thing is slowly happening for Trans folks, that it’s becoming easier for them to feel comfortable being themselves in the larger scene, although I don’t have personal experience with that so I really don’t think I should comment other than saying it’s REALLY important.
So, the band’s love for Harry Potter is relatively well know- If an alien came down to Earth to explore and (having been introduced by a polite government agent) asked you about why Harry Potter was so beloved, what would you tell said alien?
Well, there are tons of reasons that I love the Harry Potter books. I love them as works of literature, I love the characters and the plot arc and all the normal things that everyone is into. But most importantly I love how so many people in the world love Harry Potter too. It is at heart such a dorky thing…a really long fantasy series about kids going to school, and yet at its peak it was the most popular thing on earth. It’s not a thing where jumping on the Harry Potter bandwagon is gonna earn you any cool points or get you dates, so it’s really a result of the world relating to the story and wanting to imagine themselves in a world where magic exists. It’s one thing that I can literally have a fun conversation with ANYONE I MEET about. Considering how divisive and sad things are out there, it’s really beautiful to imagine the world relating to each other on those terms.
Finally I always finish with asking about an opportunity you’ve let go to waste? Or if you drink, has any opportunities come your way while being ‘wasted’? So it can be a sad story or perhaps an unexpected and happy one.
Well, a few years back this very cool guy named Paul Cummings wanted to do a music video for Good Luck, he had a little bit of fame from doing some really popular stop animation videos on youtube and wanted us to stop over in Boston for a few days on tour to film in his studio. He tried explaining his idea to us and we just weren’t 100% into it, or at least we weren’t into it enough to take two days completely off while on tour. So we said, “Thanks a lot maybe we can do something later.” Then he ended up filming a music video with PAUL SIMON within 6 months of that. Matt and I are huge Paul Simon fans and it kinda felt like we missed our one random chance to have some connection with him. I know we probably wouldn’t have met him or anything, but what if??!!
Wasted Opportunities 