Brendan Kelly has been a key part of Chicago punk since he was a teenager. His career is a grocery list of some of the most innovative and memorable bands in Midwest punk. Whether it be in Slapstick, The Falcon, The Lawrence Arms, or his solo work with The Wandering Birds, Kelly writes songs brimming with heart and humor. Outside of music, Kelly is an accomplished comedy writer and blogger--his doom-posting about fast food and existentialism on the Nihilist Arby’s Twitter account landed him a gig at the Onion.
Since getting vaccinated, Kelly has been back on the road. Booking shows in normal times is hard enough, but re-learning the rules now that concerts are back has made it much more difficult. Kelly has been playing solo acoustic shows at outdoor venues like breweries, pool parties, and even the now-notorious Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
“We set out to try and do some safe, distanced shows back in the spring. Knowing full well that if we couldn’t do it right, we wouldn’t do it at all,” said Toby Jeg, booker for the aptly named Here Goes Nothin’ Tour. “It was obviously tricky to book so many unorthodox venues and outdoor spaces. I’ve had a lot of luck with breweries. Those places usually have outdoor stages and beer gardens, plus they know all the safety and health protocols.”
I spoke with Kelly over zoom about the new acoustic tour, juggling his various bands, the Beastie Boys, and why the Simpsons are better than Shakespeare.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity
Strumming on Empty: How does it feel to be back on the road after all this time?
Brendan Kelly: It’s a real mixed emotions thing. On one hand, I’m terrified because I haven’t done this in so long, and I’m doing it acoustic, so I’m without my legion of gentlemen that are good at what they do to make me look ok. [Laughs] But on the other hand, people are so fucking stoked, I feel like you could just go up there and fart out the McDonald’s theme and people would be like, “Yeah, alright!” So I’m scared to get up there, and I don’t believe in the response. [Laughs] I think the first couple shows I’ve done have been really good.
SoE: You’re playing a show at Four Seasons landscaping which is really exciting!
BK: Yeah, that was Toby’s guy in Philly who was like, “I’ve been looking for the right act, BK is the right act.” Toby was so excited and I was excited about it. At the end of the day, Four Seasons Total Landscaping is a bunch of women who make mulch. So they don’t really know anything about shows and they were like, “We really want to make sure this is a home run if we’re gonna delve into this kind of thing,” and so we were like, “Who else could we possibly pick that would fit the bill?” How about Laura [Jane Grace, frontwoman of Against Me!], a trans anarchist who’s also a dear friend of ours? Perfect!
SoE: Does playing a song acoustically change your approach to it or the way you interpret it?
BK: Yeah, extraordinarily. A lot of my songs in The Lawrence Arms are very athletic from a vocal perspective, and there’s some I feel would translate with that same vocal approach into the acoustic realm. But most of them I find I have to rework into versions that sound what they want to be acoustically. The Lawrence Arms veers hardcore-adjacent at some points, and even songs like “Ramblin’ [Boys of Pleasure]” or “Requiem Revisited” are the best acoustic numbers that I do. It’s a complete reworking of the song, but it’s still 100% true to what the song is!
I’m not gonna sit there and bang on an acoustic guitar--I feel like about 10 years ago there were a lot of punks that were like “I’m going acoustic!” and just banging power chords out and screaming. I watched that and was like, “If God forbid, I ever get old, [laughs] I think I’m gonna try to do it with a little more dignity than this.” That’s kind of why I developed The Wandering Birds. When I’m 65, no one will think it’s weird when I’m singing “Black Cat Boy.” And I try to transpose even the heaviest Lawrence Arms and Falcon songs into something that is somewhat digestible in that arena.
SoE: Do you ever find yourself exploring different themes or styles based on the project? Like, have you ever had something that wouldn’t work for The Lawrence Arms and thought it would be a great Wandering Birds song?
BK: That’s a great question, especially in light of the pandemic. I’ve been writing recently and trying to figure out what’s wrong with it. It’s not going well. And the answer is, when I usually write, for my entire life, I sit down to write a record. “Ok, I’m writing a Lawrence Arms album.” That’s on my mind, or I’m sitting down and writing a Falcon album, or I’m sitting down and writing a Wandering Birds album.
This time, I was like “I should start writing again, because it’s a pandemic.” And it was a disaster. It’s very project-based, it’s very specific and singular. There’s people that say stuff like, “Holy shit! I wish I had heard Keep Walkin’ Pal before because it’s a whole album of ‘The YMCA Down the Street From the Clinic,’ my favorite Lawrence Arms song.” But I wrote “YMCA” while I was writing Lawrence Arms stuff, which makes it a Lawrence Arms song. There’s a nihilism and sadness to it instead of nihilism and glee, and that’s the difference between The Lawrence Arms and The Wandering Birds.
SoE: How did Chicago shape your sound?
BK: I grew up in Boystown, I live about two and a half miles from where I grew up. My first shows were Naked Raygun shows, I saw Jawbreaker at Reckless Records. Once I started getting into the scene a little bit, I was watching Oblivion, the Mushugennas, Apocalypse Hoboken, the Mushugennas, Smoking Popes, a murder’s row of the most esoteric, cool fucking bands of all time. 88 Fingers Louie, the Bollweeviles, how did it shape me? I had to be better than all that shit or it wasn’t worth doing!
I had to be faster and funnier than the funniest wisecracking frontman that used to insult me and embarrass the shit out of me in front of all my friends. I had to write better songs than any of these motherfuckers. Did I pull that off? No! Absolutely not! Those bands are all spectacular! [Laughs] But it drove me to try.
I feel like the answer you want is “The pulsing city beat, the subways and the els, and the deep dish pizza, the neighborhoods, a lot of Polish people,” whatever, and that’s all true! But the truth is, I started doing this when I was a young kid, and there were these other bands and I was like, “Well I’m not gonna do this and be worse than these guys.”
And again, am I worse than those guys? Yeah! For sure! But it encouraged me to try and have a goal. When you’re a kid especially, that’s the most formative thing. When you wanna be the best pitcher on a team, or you wanna write the short story that blows that guy’s mind, for me it was I’m not gonna be in a band unless it’s the best band at the Fireside Bowl. That’s the effect this had on me. It turned me into a fucking weirdo.
SoE: Do you find that your comedy writing and songwriting inform each other at all? Can they learn from each other?
BK: All my writing is humorous, and I don’t mean that in terms of it being funny. Even that “YMCA” song, it’s very depressing but there’s a sense of humor in it. And I don't mean that it’s funny, it’s that humor comes from the word human. That’s the root word.
Without a sense of humor, your art, whatever it is, is bad. I guarantee you. If you’re wearing black angel wings and have pantyhose down your arms and you’re just like, “We are the angels of death,” and you think that’s funny, awesome! If you think you’re fucking freaking out the squares? No. Terrible! I always try to apply humor in everything I write in the humanistic sense. That question is really informative to me, I should try to open that membrane and let things flow back and forth a little more.
SoE: You’ve said before that Bad Religion’s No Control completely changed you as a person. How?
BK: I got a $5 allowance a week, I lived alone with my mom right around the corner from Reckless Records, I didn’t have any friends and I didn’t know what was up in general. It wasn’t like I was getting hookers or blow, I had nothing to spend my $5 on! I would walk around the corner to Reckless, and I would buy tapes based on the covers. Bad Religion No Control, that sounds dangerous as shit. And I put that shit in my double closing boombox, and put it on, listened to the whole thing. And at the end, 22 minutes later, I remember sitting in my room, two Guns N’ Roses posters on my wall in front of me, and I went, “Well, I'll never be the same again.” And I said that out loud!
How did that change me? In every way! This was a bunch of intelligent people weaponizing intelligence, and more badass than the idiots. That really appealed to me as a dweeb. And this guy’s the best singer I’ve ever heard, they’ve made guitar solos cool as shit again. It just seemed so rebellious.
And then the nihilism of it! I read this interview in thrasher magazine. It was Greg Graffin being like, “Don’t worry about dying, it’ll be just like before you were born, you were already dead for an eternity. You die, you’re doing it again. You’ve already done it, you’ll be fine.” This is what my young Catholic brain needed to hear to completely break away from all dogma. Eventually, that became Nihilist Arby’s, I guess.
SoE: You recently tweeted that The Beastie Boys are the biggest and most influential punk band of all time. I don’t disagree with you, I’m just interested to hear the case to be made for them.
BK: It’s so simple. Did they juke to playing hip hop? Yes. Is that a super punk rock move? Yes. Did they, in turn, influence generations of hip hop? Yes! There's a track of a young Ice Cube trying to sing like Ad Rock back in the day. You forget that The Beastie Boys started in like ‘81, Straight Outta Compton came out in ‘89. That’s 8 years of letting shit marinate. The idea of what they do is so punk! It’s like, “We’re not even rappers! Here we go!” [Laughs] “And we’re gonna be the best at it. Now we’re gonna play funk music! Now we’re gonna pretend that there’s samples that don’t exist!”
They’ve been so influential to me personally as an artist. The whole Greatest Story Ever Told, I didn't know it at the time, but when I made up all those footnotes, I made up the names of all the paintings, that’s all Beastie Boys shit. I would like to pause and say The Beastie Boys are better at this than we are. I’m not saying we did it first, what I am saying is based on their influence, we came up with this idea to do something. To me, they’ve always been a guiding light in iconoclastic music.
It’s so fucking hilarious to see the replies to that tweet! It’s just a bunch of people like, “Ever heard of a band called the Ramones?” They’re not as big, they’re not as influential, I don’t know what to tell you. “You think they’re a punk band? Yeah! I know they’re a punk band. That’s not up for debate. Those guys started because of Bad Brains. Bad Brains was their influence, how about them? Not as big, not as influential. I was dreaming it, I woke up, I tweeted it, and man did it make people angry!
SoE: A lot of your work, I’m thinking particularly of songs like “Cut It Up,” and more recently “Pigeons and Spies,” have that same kind of back and forth and duality as The Beastie Boys do.
BK: Very much something that I said to Chris in the studio. On that whole Oh Calcutta! record, I was always like, Let's do it like The Beastie Boys. I want The Beastie Boys back and forth.” So I’m really stoked that that comes across. They’re the most influential dudes to me.
If you're in a band and you want to sound like Bad Religion and all you listen to is Bad Religion, you’re gonna be worse than bad religion. Cuz Bad Religion is fuckin’ better than your band. So for me, when I’m listening to stuff, I wanna constantly think of the best of the best. I wanna think of Townes Van Zandt, I wanna think of Ice Cube, stuff like that.
Which is not to say punk rock has no place in my influences, but I wanna stray from that so what I do sounds fresh and interesting. Not like I listened to a bunch of Bad Religion and wrote a Bad Religion song.
SoE: What non musically-related art are you finding yourself drawn to now?
BK: I have been falling back in love with the Art Institute. They have a bunch of Magrittes. He's my favorite painter. I would see those as a kid cuz I was a fucking nerd. I would look at the Magrittes and be like “Wow, I love these.” There’s one in particular, it’s a series called Empire of Light. It’s so spectacular. It’s the most profound art I’ve ever seen. It’s just bombastically beautiful in it’s understated-ness.
I’m reading Devil in the White City. I went backwards with Eric Larsen books, I feel like he hadn’t hit his stride yet with that one. Dead Wake, I couldn’t put it down. But I do love it because it’s about Chicago and I’m the mayor of Chicago. [Laughs] I just re-watched the movie Tombstone with my son and daughter. Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday, best character in any movie ever. He’s so good.
SoE: I know you’re a big Simpsons fan, do you have a favorite Simpsons character?
BK: Mr. Burns. Hands down. His lack of knack for language is [kisses fingertips like Italian chef]. There’s nothing funnier than old people. And he’s the best example of that because you really don’t care if he dies.
SoE: Funnier than Grandpa Simpsons?
BK: Grandpa is funny but he does a lot of shrill yelling and it’s really fun, but Mr. Burns has the “It’s 1901 and I’m talking like that,” which I appreciate more.
SoE: Is there a Simpsons quote you find yourself using in your daily life often?
BK: The main line is a little from column a a little from column b. I go “Ooh!” like Homer a lot. I don’t toast “to alcohol, the cause of and solution to all life’s problems,” but I find that to be profound on a level that’s like, put that on a wall of an ancient Buddhist temple! I don’t say “everything’s coming up Milhouse” cuz people that say that are dorks. I say “they weren’t all Happy days, Marge.” 95% of my vernacular is the Simpsons . Without them I'd be under a rock.
SoE: It’s so crazy now cuz people will say a politician just openly stating the evil shit they want to do is “saying the quiet part loud.” That’s a fucking Krusty quote!
BK: Yeah! It is crazy how it’s seeped into the universal discourse! It’s Shakespearian at this point. Cromulent is in the dictionary. Embiggen is in the dictionary. It’s unbelievable. Cooler than Shakespeare!
Great interview!