Psychostick Interview
Psychostick has mastered the perfect blend of metal and comedy into something they call humorcore. Rather than focusing on one dark and heavy style of music, this Chicago based band brings the heavy to anything. Psychostick is amidst part 2 of Return of the Vengeance CD release tour bringing their live show to faithful followers and new fans on the west coast and Midwest. Songs about beards, dogs who like socks, boobs, and a rhino as president are among the many diverse topics that find their way into the set with appropriate props, costumed characters and high energy fun. By the Barricade caught up with vocalist Rob “Rawrb” Kersey and guitarist Josh “The J” Key before their show at The Mint in Los Angeles California to see what all of this fun is about. The full interview transcripts follow.
Other members of Psychostick include:
Alex “Shmalex” Dontre – Drums
Matty J “Moose” – Bass
So far you have made 3 music videos for tracks off of Revenge of the Vengeance? Can we expect more?
Both: Yes!
Josh: Oh, yes you can.
Is there an upcoming title you can tease us with or is it top secret at this point?
Josh: There is one, but if we told you we would have to kill you … twice. I don’t want to do that because it’s bloody and it’s not good PR.
You said in a previous interview that you were on a quest to “fix” all non-metal music and that led to your decision to cover Danger Zone by Kenny Loggins and the Reading Rainbow Theme Song. Name a few more songs you would love to fix with covers.
Josh: Dirty Dancing (“I’ve Had the Time of My Life Theme Song”).
Rob: We talked about doing that one. We also were talking earlier about a Heart song.
Josh: “Footloose”
Rob: Which will be messing with Kenny Loggins again. Those are the only two Kenny Loggins songs I know and that would be a fun one.
Josh: There are so many possibilities.
Rob: That is the beauty of this band is that we can do anything, there is no limit.
Josh: We have a recording studio now so there is not even that constraint. We can do all things.
Rob: Sometimes it paralyzes us wondering what to do. I’ll just take a nap and think about. You have to be careful with too many options.
Josh: We have about 4 songs we want to record when we are back from this tour. We can’t wait to get back to the studio. Plenty is on the way!
Does writing happen when you are on tour?
Josh: Sometimes.
Rob: Not as often as we would like. Touring is tiring and exhausting. It sucks away your creative energy.
Josh: We are good with coming up with ideas, just not following through. We save them and keep a digital notebook and refer to it.
Rob: We had one today and the idea bank is quite full.
Josh: There are hundreds of ideas.
You guys have opened yourselves up to a lot of possibilities. Shifting back to Danger Zone from Top Gun, but in what situations have you entered the Danger zone in your own lives or as a band?
Rob: The danger zones in our band are pretty boring.
Josh: No, the danger zone is the I-80 in Nevada. We have actually slid off the icy roads twice there and we swore off winter touring because of that. That is a literal danger zone. But there are metaphorical danger zones.
Rob: For us a danger zone is not communicating because nothing gets done. We are getting better at that.
Josh: We are. When you don’t cc someone on an email, that is a Danger Zone.
All: *Laughingl
You have been asked a bunch of beard questions, and In Obey the Beard you list all sorts of things the beard enables you to do. You have also listed the top ten uses for a beard. What has the beard enabled you to do as a band?
Josh: I think the greatest thing our beards have done for us is to help us write a song about what beards have done for us.
Rob: We had to grow it and channel it. I was in high school when I had my first beard. People would look at me and say, “You are in high school, you are not supposed to have a beard.” I would reply (in a tough, deep voice), “I’m a man!”
Josh: Instant respect. Whether you deserve it or not.
Rob: Of course my mother hated it. Mothers are supposed to hate their kids becoming adults. It’s weird.
When this wild beard craze ends are you going to keep the beards?
Rob: We were wearing beards before wearing beards was cool. So I have a feeling we are going to keep wearing it until that trend circles back a few more times.
Josh: The beards themselves may change, but the beard is within. You can’t take away the beard.
Any advice on beard grooming products?
Rob: I am not an expert but a friend of ours is, his name is Justin who lives in Massachusetts. He has a great big beautiful beard and there are products for beards you can buy like salves and waxes. The general thing he says is to not use shampoo when you are washing it, just rinse it out and put conditioner in it to soften it up and make it all shiny. It works really well.
Josh: Really? I’ve learned things today.
What is the strangest thing you have found in or on a beard?
Josh: I am pretty sure I found an earplug in it one time.
Rob: It usually is some sort of food that I forget about. Which is pretty stereotypical. I’ll pick like a turkey bone or something out of there and think, “What the hell is this?” If you let it go too much like Matty, he wants to be as much beard as possible, which I respect, you have most problems with stuff.
Josh: Mo’ beard mo’ problems! That’s how it goes.
As far as your style, this humorcore genre that you have developed, it is very open ended. What type of response do you get from other metal bands?
Rob: Usually very positive. A lot of them are a little envious that we are doing this. They think, aggh, “I can’t write a song about that and I wanted to but my band is all about the darkness inside.” I feel for them and feel like I would run out of material if I was in a very “normal” metal band.
Josh: Every now and then there is that one band that just hates us. They feel we are disgracing metal and I feel like if those dudes are pissed off that we are having fun with it, they are their own disgrace to metal because they don’t remember that it is all about music. It is supposed to enhance your life and not make you feel miserable. It is supposed to make you feel better. Even if it is angry, it is still a release. It is entertainment and it is supposed to change your emotional state.
Rob: Most bad opinions are not usually from bands, they are usually from websites. Trolls on forums who use the anonymity of sitting behind their monitors and talk smack.
Josh: Or the guys who spend all of their time dissecting what genre everything fits into. “Are you fitting into the proper box? Are you breaking the rules of said box?” We don’t exactly adhere to the whole box thing. It defeats the purpose of what we do. We just have fun.
Your songs are very intelligent social commentaries sometimes. To be sarcastic and funny you have to have a special kind of intelligence. What inspires that kind of outlook in you?
Rob: Life. Every song that we put out there had some sort of tie in to a real life experience or something that happened. It is something that creates an emotional reaction that leads to a song idea and it is all tied in somehow.
Your inspiration can come from anything but is there anything it would never come from?
Rob: We would never just sit down and say, “Let’s write a funny song,” because you are not going to write a funny song. It has to be natural and genuine. That is why it works so well, because it is real.
Josh: We try to stay away from serious subjects like politics and religion. We do have a song called “Politcal Bum,” but that is actually making fun of people that are serious about politics. We are not here to change society with the perfect solution, we are here to get everyone to lighten up and enjoy their lives while they have got it.
Most of your song lyrics are credited to more than one of you. How does that work?
Rob: Usually somebody starts off with the idea and they write a few lines down and then they hit a block and say, “I need some help with this.” Josh usually is our chief song writer so he will usually pull one or two of us in and say, “Let me play this for you.” And then I will say, “What if you did this here?” and suddenly two people are involved in the lyric writing process.
Josh: It also stems from who is the most excited to get working on it. Sometimes it is a matter of who is working on it and a combination of two people that will yield a different result than another two people. Sometimes I write almost entire songs alone and then bring people in to get the final touches on or sometimes there will be two or three of us there writing it together. Those different combinations allow for different feels so it keeps it from all sounding the same. I am looking at myself here. I wrote a lot of the first album and our first songs. They were already written but it is better to get everyone on board to take it in different directions.
Rob: It is also great for morale when everybody has their hand in there. They have parts they can point out and say, “I wrote that line.” It’s pretty fun.
So Rob, the comics that you do, is that an outlet for thoughts that are too short for entire songs?
Rob: Yes, honestly I have been doing web development for more than half of my life. I’ve always wanted to have popular content on the website. Just a goofy nerdy thing I wanted so the comics came about because I have all of these ideas that are yes, either too short for songs or that would work better visually rather than trying to explain it with words and sounds. It is another way to entertain that is better suited to me. If Alex came up and said, “I want to put something on our website where I just put pictures of feet everywhere I go.” I would say, “Do it.” We like to encourage that kind of stuff as long as it is growing and benefiting the band. I think it is working.
Josh: It all comes down to us wanting to be creative and to make people laugh and smile. Music is obviously the main way we do it, but we also may do it through a comic or a funny tweet or a stupid picture. I love laughing and I love other people laughing too.
Rob: Sometimes drawing a comic is way faster than producing a song. From writing to recording to releasing, touring, etc.
Speaking of touring, you are about midway through the second leg of your tour. What keeps you going?
Rob: You could say we are ¾ of the way through. It is hard to say what keeps us going because it is multi-dimensional.
Josh: We keep each other going. There are definitely really rough days. There are days when we ask, “Do we really want to keep doing this?” But it is like, we have come this far we are not going to quit now. Let’s keep going and see what happens. Every time we have hit something rough and gone through it, we are rewarded for it.
Rob: Recently we cracked a code on how to promote touring better and our turn outs have been more than double what we normally draw because we changed a couple of things. Now we are saying, “Let’s keep doing that! It’s working!” Now we are pumped up again. Touring does wear on you. We think about what if we stopped and just put out new content, then we think, “No, we can’t stop touring because we have been doing this for so long, we have this trailer, we have fans, we have venues where we have rapport, we have to figure this out.” We decided to be smarter about it and it is working out.
There are a lot of stories about tour pranks. You guys are humorous on stage, are you more serious as regular people off stage?
Rob: We are actually pretty chill off stage. I hate to disappoint.
Josh: We are too busy on our laptops trying to keep up with Game of Thrones than to bother with messing with each other.
Rob: To be honest, you hear stories about bands who do all the drugs and hookers in the area, but they don’t have any responsibilities. We run this thing ourselves and we have to be on top of it otherwise it would all fall apart. That is what keeps us out of trouble. We are not boring people, we just want this to work.
Josh: Literally this morning we did a radio interview and I got four hours of sleep. I went back to the hotel and was faced with, “Do I want to sleep more or do I want to take care of the things that will affect my sleep?” So, I went with the latter and I did some work for three or four hours to get those things off my mind. I literally chose work over sleep, but I am going to sleep good tonight!
Rob: It is really fulfilling. We have a lot of fans that really like us.
That gives you a good life balance because you can be as wild and crazy on stage and then take care of life. Are any of you parents?
Rob: No
Josh: Yes we are. We have this child called Psychostick that is a demanding, high-maintenance
Rob: Whiny, dirty,
Josh: With a constantly breaking down trailer.
Definitely more difficult that any human child. Do you think if you did have kids you would be doing the same thing and probably be the coolest parents alive?
Rob: I don’t know.
Josh: It would be really difficult. If someone else ran everything then it might be a little more doable. But I wouldn’t want to be away from my kids. I would feel like a piece of shit. I would feel guilty all the time if I was away from my family.
Is there anything else you would like to tell the readers of By the Barricade?
Rob: We are everywhere online. Go to Psychostick.com, everything Psychostick is there, Facebook
Rob: Twitter, Vine, all of it. Please follow us, please say hi, we always respond in some form. We have a very big and growing online merch store. Tons of shirts and more stuff coming. Lots of changes, lots of growing happening.
Josh: Lots of music, lots of videos, lots of everything. We are just getting started.
Rob: Even though we have been getting started for how long? We are still just getting started.
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