PipemanRadio Interviews Hardball

0:04 Hey, you love them too, that's sure. I'm f W four C. Why wake up America, It's time for the Adventures. So pipe Man on W four C YI com West pom Beats is number one internet radio station. Here's your host, the pipe Man. This is pipe Man here on the Adventures pipe Man, w f C Y Radio. And I'm here with our next guest. Our visitors from the North with some badass, cool music we're gonna check out. So let's walk them to a show. Jeremy from Hardball, how are you? Hey? Thanks for having me. I'm pretty good. How are you? Oh, I'm doing phenomenal and listen, I love your music and I got I just gotta say right off the bat, it's it's kind of funny that the way you are described, or not you specifically, but the band or the music is described is that, you know, we met in kindergarten and somewhat and somehow along the way we accidentally turned

1:36 into a grunge band. Yeah, yeah, that is literally what happened. It wasn't intentional at all, it wasn't planned. It just fell together like that. So let's tell that story. I want to hear about that. Well. Yeah, so like The description says we met in kindergarten. We were three buds. I actually started playing music long before the other two, and I was kind of like a loaner musician, and I had nobody else to work with because I was like this freak little kid, and nobody else was playing guitar at that age. But by the time we got to high school, both of them started to kind of mess around with instruments and they started hardball with another drummer, and I don't know, for whatever reason, he just fell out of the picture. And at that time I started as a guitar player. But around that time I started kind of picking up the drums a little bit, and I just said I could just sit in on some sessions for you guys. I could just fill in for a few shows until you get somebody to replace me. And that never happened. So here we are. I love it. And you know what else I love too, is you're like the opposite in me because I played drums for like nine years since I was in first grade, and s I sucked at it, and then I switched the guitar. So I did the opposite of you, right, yeah, in the way I mean, I never switched. I still play guitar all the time. I played guitar a bit on the record.

3:04 Well quite a lot on the record actually too. But yeah, obviously my main post in hard balls of drums. No one else is going to hold it down. So now that And it's interesting too because usually if somebody's gonna like trade places, they want to get out from behind the drums and you know, play guitar like like roll. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I went the opposite path. And you know what's interesting about that? You know what's interesting about that. Okay, so this is not gonna be a popular opinion, but yeah, I definitely I was a huge Nirvana fan, and I was a metal head that was a huge Nirvana fan. It took me a long time to kind of like the Food Fighters. It was so different that I kind of like it now, but I don't. I'm not obsessed like I was with Nirvana. Yeah, it's a different stick. I mean, the first couple of records are more kind of Nirvana adjacent. The songwriting is sort of more similar to what Nirvana had. But yeah, they've they've gone off in sort of a different direction. And another unpopular opinion, I'm the rare metal head that they'll say, thank you for bringing some grunge music back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're welcome. Except I don't even know why we did that. I don't know, Like, like we said in the yeah yeah and the notes that we sent forth, it just happened that way. Like I don't know if any of us individually are super

4:39 huge grunge listeners or anything like that just seems to be the natural chemistry between us as a band. Don't know why, and that's what works, you know, listen, I would I wouldn't say I was a huge grunge person. I was a huge Nirvana person. And I liked yeah, others, but I liked I liked Nirvana because they were more punk than the others. That's why I liked it. Yeah. Yeah, that was the first band that I really fell in love with. That's what got me to play guitar and start this whole journey in the first place. And I, like you said, I wasn't specifically a huge grunge person. It was Nirvana. Yeah, And you know, one of the things I did like about it was, which is, you know, the whole reason grunge came about and kind of was like a hurricane that went through the rock music world. Is I was so sick and tired of the bullcrap hair metal and fake metal. And you know, I was a thrash metal head. Okay, so thrash metal heads dressed pretty similar to grunge in some respects, you know, and it was that other ridiculousness that I couldn't deal with it. I think everybody likes to say grunge killed metal. I think hair metal killed metal. Yeah, I think it killed itself. It's suicided exactly, you know. And so tell us a little bit about the new music for our listeners, you know what they can expect. I can give you my insight a little bit.

6:09 It definitely did give me a Nirvana vibe. I gotta tell you, I got chills. Yeah, I think that's a bit inescapable. I will admit that a lot of my drumming is kind of grow based, like I think that that's sort of how I got into drums. Is. I just noticed that his parts had like a simplicity to them that was just kind of easy for me to pick up on, and that that is how I kind of learned the fundamentals of playing. It's just by copying and stuff. So there's that, but yeah, uh, what else about the record? I mean a lot of it is based in Scott's riffing and stuff. That riffing in itself is another reason why I got into drums, because for some reason, whenever I would hear him jamming playing a riff, even before I was really a drummer, I'd be like, oh, yeah, I know exactly what the drums should do for that. So nice, yeah a little bit, yeah, go ahead, Sorry, No, I was just saying, nice, that's pretty cool because usually like people, you know, it's their own normal instrument that they would do that with, but you like, it was like, yeah, it was almost like the universe was saying you need to be a drummer. Yeah, yeah, it was. It was kind of pulling me in that direction somehow. It just yeah, super organic the way that happens. So I love this too. Okay, in Budgie's mind, it's a concept album, but it's admittedly the most incoherent concept album of all

7:41 time. Oh my god, it's so funny. Well in his mind, yeah, I guess I would agree with that statement if that's true, that it's a concept album. In his mind, it must be incoherent because I don't know exactly what the concept is. Yeah, because that goes on to say it's a deep dive into his own psyche, unturning all the different stories that maybe should have been left alone, all the while worrying about being too self indulgent in the processes. Yeah, all the stuff he probably shouldn't have said. That's him saying it. Oh man, that's good stuff. I like, that's worrying about whether he should say it or not. Oh man, that's that. You know that. That's so twenty twenty three though, you know, like, yeah, think of some of those hair metal bands we're talking about. They wou've never survived right now because it was too offensive to these people today. You know, Like you think of the words of some of the songs in the eighties, And I was in high school in the eighties, so I was like, I lived basically at the Sunset Strip in the eighties, and man, I think of everything that happened the eighties, and none of it would have been okay today. Yeah. I've been thinking that a lot, but a lot of different things, Like what does Blink one eighty two come back? I went off and like kind of revisited some of their old stuff that I enjoyed when I was a kid, and

9:11 I was just like, man, would this not fly today? Oh? No doubt. It's funny you should say that because I do radio coverage of like a lot of the major music festivals, and a few years ago before they made their reunion, Blink played at Aftershock and it wasn't you know, it was before the reunion and they were the headliner one night. And you wouldn't believe how many of the people they are like left for a headliner because they're like, yeah, because they were like, you know, I could relate to this when I was fifteen, but I can't really relate to it now. Yeah, I can see that being a thing. So yeah, I found that like so interesting. It's like what made them popular would make them very unpopular now, I think, yeah, based on that, Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is an interesting direction that things took. It changed so fast, no doubt. I mean, could you imagine that.

10:16 Here's a funny one. You know, so many people are talking about these artists that get up and they talk and tell them to not talk and they shouldn't express their views and their opinions and their political beliefs specifically, and I'm thinking myself, wasn't that the whole point of punk music? And it was also the point of metal, you know, is like that's the point you have the voice and you're talking against the things that you don't like, and that's part of it. Yeah, yeah, that is funny. How the whole point of it at the beginning, it now seems to be something that you kind of shouldn't do. Strange. Well, you know what's even strangers Some of the punk bands that I've interviewed in the past couple of years that were like like longtime punk bands. One of them I was friends with them, Like when did you guys become pro government? Right? Right? Yeah, I know, everything is kind of flipped around. It's like it's it's inverted from what it was before. Here's something interesting too, on that same note, I don't know if you knew this. Do you know that the boomers were actually the hippies? Yeah? Of course, yeah, Like a lot of people don't know that. And I think that's hilarious too that somehow, how did the hippies become the boomers? I don't know, must have been a fad, I guess I don't I know. Right, But then

11:48 there's you guys who have some killer music, and man, I dug it. Like I said, it gave me chills. I think it was the first song on the album I was listening to and I was like, oh wow, like within five seconds. That's exactly what my expression was. So I think a lot of our listeners will have that same expression. How do they check out your new music? Kind they get the album connect to you on soulcials, all that good stuff, right, so they check it out on any of the main streaming platforms the Apple or whatever, Spotify, etc. Basically any of them Amazon. The only stumbling block block for finding us is we chose a really generic name, which is Hardball. You might have to sift through a bunch of stuff that isn't us, but otherwise we're on all the standard platforms that you would expect, and we're on all this you know, the standard socials, Facebook, Instagram, it's just our name, Hardball. I think Instagram it's Hardball BC. So that helps to set it a little bit apart from the Chris Matthews and Keanu Reeves and so forth.

12:50 Right, Yeah, and here's the one that I happen to me. When I first like was googling, is I found Hardball the movie? Right? I know, I know, I googled it last night just to see if anything had changed with the algorithms. It was all Hardball the movie or the or the Chris Matthews show, right, is what it is. Yeah, you know what you gotta do. You just gotta keep flooding the flooding the socials because that is what will change it. So yeah, we got to claim that title if we're going for it, So that's right. Yeah. So do you guys have a TikTok a TikTok? Yes, we do, and oh man, it's horrible. Don't look at it. There's one video on it which is basically just a goofy video of me complaining about how I couldn't upload TikTok's with our music in it because it hadn't been released yet and it was copyrighted and TikTok wouldn't let us do it. TikTok wouldn't let you upload your own music because it was copy written. That is funny. Yeah, because we had started releasing it and it had been I don't know, put into their registry or whatever. And their algorithms picked up on it.

14:03 They're like, no, this is hardball, worried whatever. You know the song and they didn't. Yeah, let us post it and it's cool. Like you can stream the stream the album via distroke Kid and as a digital download through band camp and also more most importantly, I think most importantly, they can get the album right through you guys directly twelve inch LP and a compact disc. Yeah, and on the LP that actually won't be out until I think September, so September October. Okay, we put it orders a while back, but it takes a while to make them. Yeah, I know how it is these days, Like you know what, I've found a lot of I've been the last few years. I've been interviewing artists, even big ones, that they're putting out cassette tapes because they can't get the vinyl.

14:56 Yeah, and so that that kind of is a stand didn't for that vinyl sort of vintage vibe. I guess the cassettes, I know, right, I'm like looking for you know, can somebody please put out an eight track just for ships and giggles eight track? Man? It would be really hard to play those now, wouldn't it well, no doubt, I sometimes because okay, so I had check this out. I had Blizzard of Oz on eight track nice and so during mister Crowley, first of all, what you used to have to do is used to have to take a matchbook and put it under the eight tracks so it wouldn't be like or you know, because because it would never play right unless you put that matchbook under there.

15:46 I don't even know if you can find a matchbook nowadays, but you know, then they were everywhere. And then what used to trip me out is how they would, you know, cross fade songs in between tracks. So mister Crowley would fade out in the second track and then fade back in and the third track and there's part of the song missing. It's like, oh, you know, some of that was kind of cool, you know, And yeah, some of what like we do nowadays with digital production and plugins and stuff like that in the box is made to replicate all these things that we used to hate about the technology, I know, right, kind of funny, yeah, kind of like Okay, so I remember back in the day, you know, and speaking of cassettes, you know, you had to have a pencil with you if you had your cassettes just in case you needed it, because the cassette player ate your tape and you had to pencil it back together. Oh man, the struggle was real. I remember being so mad about that so many times when I was a real little kid, I know, right, and then like splicing and have a tape it together.

16:56 And you did it because you didn't get this crap for free. You had to hey for it. So like you weren't even though your cassette wasn't out crap, you weren't giving up on it. Yeah, you weren't going to give up on your Nirvana. Never mind that easily exactly exactly. So, yeah, what else do you guys got coming on the horizon that we want to tell the listeners about or anything that we haven't covered yet in the interview. Sure, Well, we're kicking off a slight tour later this week. We're gonna be in Vancouver and then Squamish this Friday and Saturday. Next week we're going to be traveling around a bit more BC and Alberta and uh yeah, that would be the next thing coming up. Basically, it's just these tour dates. You can check our our socials for those and are you up there, are you experience a heat wave like the rest of the world.

17:48 Are you still cold like you always are? Ah? Yeah, no, it's it's a heat wave right now, but that's fairly standard for this time time of year in this area. Yeah, so I'm not really noticing it as a heat wave so much. But yeah, it's hot. That's why I'm down in South Florida and they keep talking about don't go outside, it's dangerous heat, record record heat in July, and I'm thinking, because I've been here long enough, I'm like, I don't know, it doesn't feel like different to me. It's always this freaking hot in July in August. Yeah, I'll just I'll just say that where I am now, it just seems like summer. Yeah, exactly, that's what it feels like to be here, Like it's like, I don't know, it just seems like South Florida weather. That's all. Yes, I'll live, It'll be okay, I'm gonna make it, yep. And so what everybody in every heat wave area in the whole world and clean South Florida needs to do is just stay inside and listen to hardball, that's all. Yeah, you know you don't need to be out there in the heat. Yeah, you don't need to be out there in the heat and worry about anything. Just sit back and listen to some hardball and enjoy your life. There you go. Yeah, doctor's recommendations. That's it, doctor pipe Man. That's just given you your prescription. So cool. Well, I love the music. I hope

19:18 everybody listening loves it too. And I would love to see you guys playing the States for sure. Maybe yet one of the festivals would be even cool too. And thank you too. We're hopefully get it organized. It's a bit of red tape, but we do want to make that happen. Nice, can't wait. And thanks for the great music. And thanks for being on the Adventures of pipe Man. Okay, thank you pipe Man. Appreciate fate it so much. Thank you for listening to the Adventures of pipe Man on W four CUI Radio.