Getting naked on Cape Cod… Rare insight into the “Post Country” genre… Barfing in lofts… The sorrows and joys of booze… The sad blasphemy of top 40 country radio… More Tales from the Underground: GunFight!

(This interview took place in a bar in Bushwick called the Wreck Room. We apologize if the interview seems a bit erratic; it is difficult to interview four people at once in a loud bar. But for artistic purposes, we wanted to capture the wild spirit of GunFight! We have listened to them in recordings, seen them rile up crowds.  To have conducted the interview in the traditional, sterilized manner would have missed the point completely. The four members: lead singer Drew Mintz, lead guitarist Bill Dvorak, bassist Tony Aquilino and drummer Dominic Turi.)

SH: New album… where do you see it going? What do you think about it compared to your EP?

Tony Aquilino: The songs we wrote for this record, I think we kind of had a creative burst. We flushed out what our goals were musically more than our earlier stuff did. We expanded in the style a little more and explored some new stuff.

Drew Mintz: When we did the EP, not to say that we weren’t knee deep into what we were trying to do, but I don’t think we had really flushed out how we wanted to do it. We knew we wanted to take this concept of country music and this concept of punk and post punk and put them together in a way that wasn’t cheap or silly. You can hear it on the EP [All You Need – 2009]. There’s a lot of country on “All You Need,” and on “Vaccine” you can hear sort of a ballady country influence. But when it comes to the other songs it’s harder to hear. Those are some of the first songs we wrote. When it got to the album, we had a wealth of material to sort of look at and the time to say this is what we think is “Post” country, the genre that we’ve tried to push.

SH: What does Post Country mean?

Bill Dvorak: Ask this guy [Points to Drew Mintz].

DM: It’s a changing term…

SH: Well, I think country has a bad connotation.  When you say “I listen to country music…” people are like…

TA: Everyone says: “I listen to everything but country and rap.” Those are always the two qualifications.

DM: What is it about country that drives people away because when it really comes down to it, it is one of the highest grossing forms of music sold? Most people in America identify with this kind of music; if you live in the Northeast, you hate it. We’re all from the Northeast. We don’t have any ownership over this music. I know I just sort of fell in love with it, maybe because it wasn’t something that I could feel was mine.

TA: There is a point where I think we all had this opinion of country music that it was something that was really outdated and hokey.

Dominic Turi: Considering what it has been for the last 20, 25 years…

BD: Since the 80s it has been pretty shitty.

DM: I think one of the major themes in our music is that it draws a connection between the Northeastern suburban living, where we’re all from, with the ideas of country music. It’s all really the same idea of the American experience.

The way we live today, it’s probably true that kids grow up in Texas the same way that we grew up in upstate New York, which was not true 25 years ago. So when we all try to find out what our American identity is, we sort of look at southern country music from Tennessee or Texas from 25 years ago; that’s as much mine as it is anyone else’s. So trying to come up with a new American sound, there is something we have to share with that. We’re not divided anymore. We all have a K-mart in our town and a multi-plex.

BD: … the same themes, just decades later and many states apart.

I know a lot people that are from the New Jersey suburbs that identify with the ideals in contemporary pop country: just being a regular person, living humbly and not worrying about money and fame and whatever else. I think now, from coast to coast, it’s more of a class thing rather than a geographical thing. That’s why someone like us from the Northeast can pick up some of these ideas that have been around for a long time. They apply to people all over that come from a certain background that we can kind of identify with… the idea of being regular people and regular Americans.

SH: So how do you transform that into music?

DM: I have no idea.

TA: We just have a certain way that songs come out of us. There’s something about the way we play our instruments naturally that it just kind of results in the way the songs sound.

DM: We can try real hard to think about it in a methodical way, and we really have tried, we can take this little piece, with this lego piece and this lego piece and this connects piece… You can do that all you want and it’ll end up sounding manufactured and cheep.

SH: What type of country music do you listen to?

DM: Anything from silly prairie songs: from Jimmy Rogers or Jimmy Dean

BD: That Outlaw country stuff…

DM: In the past year, I’ve been obsessed with Waylon Jennings. I’ll absorb myself in that sound. If you boil yourself in soup long enough, you’ll taste like carrots.

BD: We’re also definitely influenced by punk. We sort of see the themes of it and early country music: working class lifestyles and simple themes about life and struggle… there’s definitely a parallel.

DM: You were definitely influenced by punk [pointing to Bill]. One of the funny differences between the band is where a lot of the sounds come from. You grew up in Jersey and you listened to punk music. Tony and I are from upstate New York, and we listened to classic rock all the time. I think that from Led Zeppelin to blues to country somehow makes a clean transition, but when it meets punk from New Jersey, all of those things meet in a weird way.

They’re all folklore, really. People who make this sound are not educated people. They are not people who have studied this music over and over to the point where it’s exacerbated. It comes from their heart and not teachings.

BD: It’s raw emotion and not technical prowess.

DT: We’re all self taught.

BD: I still don’t know how to make chords properly. I just play them the way I think they should play.

SH: What drew me into the band was your energy, not just on stage. I actually listened to your recordings before I saw you live and that’s really what got me interested. Talk about that: where do you get your energy?

TA: I think it’s booze mainly.

DT: I just like being sassy.

BD: Yeah, I like a confrontational stage vibe.

DM: I don’t really know where that energy comes down to. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I still have no idea how we ended up playing this kind of music.

TA: I’ve played in other bands and I’ve never been this energetic on stage than I have been in this band. I always just stood there.

DM: This guy will barf on stage. He’ll get naked. It’s all over the internet.

BD: I think part of it is just the energy of the crowd. I feed off of them so much. If no one’s there or nobody’s drunk and it’s a week ight, it’s not going to be that energetic. But when people are wild, we’ll be fucking wild.

DM: During the recording, if you listen to the EP, we tried hard to keep that energy in the recording. And when it came to the full-length record, the first obstacle to overcome was, “Are we going to able to get that energy for those twelve songs?”

SH: Is it just booze, or is something else?

DT: I think it’s like what Bill was saying about the crowd. Not only are they accepting, they are asking for it.

TA: I always remember our first days in New York. Me and Drew were both working for this shitty job. We would have these awful five days, have these breaks and go out and smoke cigarettes where we would talk about how much our lives sucked. Then Friday night, we would go out to Brooklyn and we would have a show and by the time we got there, we were so fed up with our shitty lives, it would all just come out.

DM: There is no other way to treat this music.

SH: When you are recording, is it the same idea?

DM: We recorded live. There are overdubs here and there, but for the most part, the record is 95% live. I think you’ll hear that a lot of the songs on the album have that wow energy. That’s what we’ve done before, but they’re also some songs on there that aren’t just balls out rock and roll country or punk. There are some songs that are a little bit more folky or more mid tempo or toned down.

BD: We have a more relaxed, middle section on the album.

DM: The most important thing about this record is that we wanted it to be entertaining to anybody that listened to it. There’s a wide variety of different definitions of entertaining, so one song will be entertaining because it’s loud and fast or one song will be entertaining because it’s dancey, or one song is entertaining because it’s a little bit slower but maybe the words catch you. There’s a different way to approach each song. So I think we tried to translate that energy through what was entertaining even if it wasn’t raw energy, it was energetic because it had something else that was entertaining about it…

Listening to what we have, in so few days… I’m proud of it. It’s hard to get anything to sound good when you are recording. There are things all throughout the record that I’m like “Damn it.” But I’m pretty proud of it for it being what it is.

BD: It’ll feel nice to have a full-length album to hold in your hands and show to everybody and say: “I did this when I was this age, and it sounds great.”

SH: To change it up a bit, I think there’s kind of two scenes in Brooklyn, there’s the Grizzly Bear that’s interviewed by Pitchfork…

BD: NPR indie?

SH: Yeah. I like that. Is there a parallel to you guys with them, or what do you think about that scene?

TA: We dig a lot of music in there, and we go to a fair amount of shows. There are a lot of Brooklyn bands that we all really like to listen to.

DM: And that we’re proud that they are part of our community. By no means do we not feel a sense of home turf with these bands. I think in terms of Brooklyn bands, it reflects Brooklyn in general. It’s all over the place and there’s no sense about it. You can think that you have a sense of what is a consistent Brooklyn sound, but when it comes down to it, there are so many different interests, there are so many different people playing into it, that you don’t know what’s going to come out of Brooklyn in the next six months: you don’t know who’s going to get promoted by Todd P; you don’t know who’s going to get promoted by some recorded label that runs out of a loft somewhere.

SH: Well I guess where my question is going is what is the point of having a band. Is it to go and have a good time?

DM: That’s a question you should go and ask them and not us.

To be honest, we have this idea of this American sound – this post country sound. We listen to all the things that are going around us, and we try to apply that to what we think it is to be an American today. We’ve been sticking to this idea as an intellectual concept longer, much longer, than what has been the sound of Brooklyn over the course of six months. The sound of Brooklyn has changed like two or three times since we’ve been playing…

BD: We’re not goona just play reverb heavy punk just because. We want to play something that for a couple of years we felt is us and not just some aesthetic that seems fun. That stuff is fun and it’s good, but we’re going to play what we want to play and we’re not going to compromise.

DM: I think what those bands have, and we sort of maybe are on the cusp of, is what people think they haven’t heard before; we try to make up by being as energetic about what we’re doing as possible. I don’t want this to come across as a rejection of that music…

BD: No, we like that stuff, but it’s not just what we do. There’s a lot of people who go to their shows who play in bands and have other musical tastes, and they like it because it’s a big scene and there’s a lot of press and a lot interest in it.

TA: It’s really good music to listen to; Brooklyn has a lot of great bands. It’s just something different than what we do.

SH: In recent memory, what was your best show?

BD: Our friends has a loft space and any time we play there it is a sweaty, crazy, crowd surfing show, and this guy’s dancing in his underwear…

DT: Also there was a very good one we played at Pyramids. We weren’t playing at someone’s house or working with some annoying venue, it was huge and there were like a million people there.

DM: I think in general we enjoy playing loft shows.

BD: Yeah, we’re a party band. We like it when it’s cheap as shit and everyone’s drunk.

DT: I like it when I can throw a beer at someone’s head and know I won’t get dragged out.

DM: Charges won’t be filed.

SH: I had this place back home called the happy shack-

DM: Where are you from?

SH: Cape Cod…

BD: We played there once.

TA: I got naked there too. It was in Hyannis Port.

BD: It was the only cool bar in Cape Cod.

DM: It was not cool.

BD: If you’re from Cape Cod, that’s about as cool as it gets.

DM: This guy’s from there, don’t say that!

BD: I’m just saying… I’m from Chester, New Jersey. There’s nothing cool there.

TA: Anyways, it was fun. We hung out real late and just…

BD: I was really nervous because Cape Cod is like a family place and this guy was running around naked.

SH: Anyways, is there a place you drew your inspiration from growing up?

DM: We had this place behind my friend Eric’s house. He was our first drummer for Gunfight! It was like a septic field.

TA: We called it The Field, or the Shit Field.

DM: We went up there because nobody would ever bother us. On the way we would go to the Getty on route 6 in Travoke. We called it “Getty Juice” because the guy would never card us.

TA: We also had the method where me and our friend Eric worked at different grocery stores. We would go into each other’s stores and buy beer from each other. But even though I was buying it from my friend, I was still really paranoid. I would chalk my I.D. and pretend to be an adult. I’d go in and ask about the sales that week and ask for a copy of the circular. He would call me sir and thank me for my services… and that was for a 12 pack of Budweiser.

DT: You guys made it look 12 times more suspicious.

BD: “Hello sir, how are your several wife and children?”

I guess locally, in terms of hang out spots that were influential to us, about a year ago or two years ago there was a warehouse around here that we called The Werehouse on Thames Street. It was a crazy party atmosphere. We used to hang out and play shows there and met a lot of our friends from New York. It’s changed and new people live there, we don’t really hang out anymore, but when I look back at first moving to Brooklyn and the friends I made and the shows we played, that was the place.

TA: That was where we met Dominic.

BD: Yeah, that was Dominic’s birthday. He was trying to surf on the bathroom door.

DT: It was just tolerable enough and now it’s so fucking disgusting you can never go back in there.

DM: If you listen to our songs, “Take Off” is about The Field, “Empties” is about drinking in parking lots in the York Town heights New York, “Wag Bag” off the new album is about drinking in Allston.

SH: How does drinking relate to country music?

BD: Every country singer from George Jones to Waylon Jennings had horrible drinking problems. [Mocking in a drawl] “I’m gonna drive my lawn mower to the bar because my wife took my car keys.”

DM: I think this is a problem I have with other bands that are doing the same things we do. Yes, drinking is, through and through, what we’re talking about on the album, but we don’t sit there glorifying drinking. It’s just sort of the reality. I think there’s a lot of contemporary bands that are probably doing the same things that I think make cheep country music. It’s the idea of incorporating country into their music just because it incorporates drinking. What we were doing on this album, by no means we were trying to do anything hokey or cheap or trying to exploit any ones culture. We were trying to take different things and make our own culture. Drinking is one of the problems that makes country music annoying these days because you’ll get these stupid songs just about drinking. You can boil top 40 country down to five different categories and probably half of those categories will be about alcohol. And it’s all just a joke!

BD: Early country artists, a good majority of them were drinkers, but when they wrote songs, they weren’t writing about drinking, they were just writing about things that were going on in their lives. The alcohol was always there, but now it’s being glorified.

DM: George Jones wrote about drinking all the time. He’d write a song like “Wine Colored Roses” and it wasn’t about drinking itself, but it was about the curse of drinking.

TA: Drinking songs used to be cautionary. They saw people that were sucked in by it and were kind of saying: “Don’t do this.”

DM: To an extent, studios wouldn’t agree to release a record unless they took that perspective.

TA: Nowadays, it’s the opposite.

DM: I love Waylon Jennings, but when you turn on a Shooter Jennings record, his son, he will just spew out weed references and drinking references. How many times on top 40 country can you hear the term Jack Daniels or Jim Beam uttered. That’s just so fucking stupid to me. I don’t know who they’re trying to please with that! It’s so disingenuous to me!

DT: There’s a lot of good songs about drinking, but when you have too much Wet Brain you can’t really write much of anything. I think that’s what’s happening.

DM: “All You Need” [off the EP] is about the way a relationship turns out when you’re drinking all the time. “Sticks,” on the new album, the main character is in this relationship and his significant other thinks he’s nicer when he’s drunk. So the whole song is about giving up sobriety. “Alright fine. I’ll be drunk. If you want me to be drunk all the time, I’ll be drunk.” But it’s sad. No one’s recommending it to anyone. Drinking comes with equal parts confusion and equal parts…

BD: Clarity…

TA: Connection…

DM: How many times have you gotten into a fight with somebody because you were drunk? And how many times have you gotten into a, “I love you man?”

I don’t want to be categorized as glorifying drinking because I don’t think anyone of us tries to do that. In history, every agricultural society has figured out that if you let that sit out too long and drink the puddle next to it, it will get you feeling fucking awesome.

DT: Even animals. There’s a video on YouTube. It’s like seven different types of animals getting drunk off of this one tree.

DM: I wanna get drunk off a tree.

TA: That’s funny. We’re always saying, “What do you think: Booze grows on trees?” and I guess it does.