For the past decade, Nashville, TN-based heavy melodic rock duo Friendship Commanders have created a soundtrack for the nonconformists and underdogs and those needing a pick-me-up and place to help unleash their emotions. Featuring a mix of sludge, doom, heavy metal, punk, and hardcore, the Friendship Commanders’ sound commands attention.
The group originally formed around 2015 as a side project by two veteran musicians – vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter (and two-time GRAMMY winner) Buick Audra and drummer and bass player Jerry Roe. Earlier this year, SWT covered Buick’s recently released album ADULT CHILD via an Artist Essay and Singles Spotlight.
The band started their time together in prolific fashion, releasing two EPs (2015’s Garfield and 2017’s Junebug) and a debut album (2016’s Dave) in their first few years together. Those releases were self-produced in their own studio, Fort Knockout, and supported with regional tours.
That barrage of music earned them a plethora of fans, including legendary producer Steve Albini. Albini co-produced the band’s 2018 sophomore album, Bill, at his Chicago studio, Electrical Audio. Following Albini’s passing in 2024, the band released his original analog mixes of the project, Bill – The Steve Albini Mixes.
Shortly after the release of Bill, the group returned to the studio to record a 2020 EP, Hold Onto Yourself, their first of several collaborations with record mixer Kurt Ballou. The band recorded and co-produced their third album, Mass, again with Ballou at his GodCity Studio in Salem, MA.
On Friday, October 10, the band is sharing their fourth album, Bear, also recorded with Ballou. It’s their first album with a new label, Magnetic Eye Records, after releasing previous albums on the independent label Trimming The Shield Records.
The album is arguably the band’s most personal to date, with Audra singing songs that focus on the idea of belonging and her struggles with it, both growing up and in the music industry. She wrote the songs after realizing, according to a press release, “she had essentially been kicked out of womanhood, if she had ever been part of it in the first place.”
“In ten tracks, she takes the listener through other places of human connection: art, outsider culture, and dark rock venues—all places where empathy and creativity grow wild,” states the press release. “She and Jerry Roe arranged the album to have two sides to it, musically: heavy and light. Salt and sugar. Fire and air.”
SWT was fortunate enough to catch up with Audra and Roe recently prior to the album’s release and band’s tour (you can find tour dates here) do discuss arguably their most personal and ambitious release to date.
The new album is your fourth, but first on the new label. What does it mean to continue the band’s journey on the new label?
Buick Audra: It means so far trying to be open to new ways of doing things. We’ve only been signed for [over] two months today, so it’s still enormously new, but so far so good. I mean, we like the label that we’ve joined for this record, and we like the community that they have otherwise signed. There are a lot of other bands on the label that are friends of ours or just community peers of ours in general. So, it felt like a good fit. Our music is a little bit different than the stuff that they typically release. I mean I feel like our music is a little different than the stuff anybody typically releases, which is fine. We’re okay with being the weirdos on the label. But yeah, so far so good.
Jerry Roe: Yeah, to what Buick said, we’ve become very protective of our process and what worked for us. And being challenged on that in any way is great. Actually kind of snaps you out of it and makes you think differently. So, it’s very valuable to have a third party involved, I feel like. And they also signed us based on the record and heard all the right things and the same things we did.
How do you think your chemistry with each other has grown most on this album?
BA: I think this is the most elaborately performed and arranged record we’ve ever made, which makes the title fitting. It was definitely a big undertaking to shape it up to what it sounds like now. And I think that we worked really well together. And as far as tracking the instrumental performances, we tracked this record with Kurt Ballou. I don’t track my vocals with Kurt, but we tracked the instrumental performances with Kurt, and that went really well. It was long. I think we spent the most time in every single area working on this record, instrumentally vocally, mix-wise.
JR: Yeah, something happened where we both really were interested in taking every song as far as it can go, which resulted in things like the track called “Found,” that’s over five minutes long, but it’s actually just like a straight pop rock song in a lot of ways. It’s one of the poppiest songs on the record, but it just somehow ended up being five minutes long. It doesn’t feel long at all. It feels like three minutes. And I’m personally very proud of that.
And our chemistry on stage I think came through on this record the most that it ever has. There’s an extended instrumental section where we’re just playing together, and our live shows are extremely energetic and really loud. And I think some of our favorite times spent together is just playing really loudly on stage. So, I feel like that comes across more than it ever has, and the arrangements of the song has allowed that to come across.
BA: And they also allowed room, like the songs breathe more on this record than I think on any record we’ve ever released. Meaning when Jerry is talking about that song “Found”. We really allowed space between sections instead of being super economical with the way that the parts kind of crammed together. And in the past, I think we felt pressured to be really economical with our time, and this time we really wanted to capture the energy of each composition and have a lot of great music that we love has space. There’s space between sections where transitions are happening and the music is breathing, and we were really interested in trying to make that possible on this record, and I think we accomplished that. So that was a shift in the dynamic.
Both of you co-produced the album with Kurt. You’ve worked with him for quite a while. What do you like most about working with him?
BA: I love Kurt as a person. He’s a great hang. He’s really funny. He’s really dry; he’s very straightforward, which suits the process of working together. I’m enormously straightforward. Jerry is pretty straightforward. So, the chemistry between the three of us I think is pretty lived in at this point. It has been six or seven years that we’ve been collaborating in one capacity or another. But as far as working on BEAR, like I said, it was the longest amount of time we’ve ever spent together.
And I do think that by day eight, we were all sort of squirrely and whatever. But overall, it’s a very methodical, thoughtful, but also terribly stressful time. Sometimes tracking can be fraught for a number of reasons, and I don’t feel like we encounter that as a group. When we track with Kurt, there’s a lot of a real culture of equality, and everybody gets a say about what we think. Sometimes we come to a crossroads where we’re trying to make a creative decision between the three of us as co-producers, and there’s room for everybody. And then we decide.
JR: And much like what we said with the label, having Kurt there to interject a new idea or say he prefers one over the other is really invaluable and helps you get over a roadblock. And also, he just loves to talk and hang and make jokes, and it’s a great time. We’re very excited to do it again as soon as possible.
BA: Yeah, Kurt’s a great hang, and when you’re in the studio, being a great hang is really important because the days are long and they’re intense. So being able to share space together well is super valuable.
What surprised you most about working with him this time? Was there anything that you were able to do differently compared to past records that surprised you?
BA: I don’t know if it is a surprise about specifically working with Kurt, but one of the surprises, one of the things that’s new on this record, are the wide, wide swings between dynamics. So there are some points on the record that get really soft and really quiet, and we’ve never really done that before, but there’s a song called “Dead and Discarded Girls” that closes the album that we actually set up two completely different sets of recording rigs for both guitar and drums to be able to track that song because the swings are so wide. And also, the song Jerry has been mentioning, “Found”, comes down to a really intimate, quiet spot. And I think it was interesting for the three of us as a group to figure out how to best do that both on a technological level but on a performance level as well.
JR: Yeah, it’s tough. We are pretty well locked into our way of working with him and not much different from Mass. So, there wasn’t a whole lot of new discovery there, but he was down to go with this wherever we went, and what Buick was saying when we wanted to get quiet, that was kind of a new thing for us and new tones in a way. Our records are just a wall of sound, always, usually.
With the album, it sounds like you wanted to split it into two sides, kind of the heavier and the lighter side. What sparked the idea to do it like that?
BA: Just the songwriting and the way the songs were shaping up before we went into track. I think I was writing these really super hyper melodic songs and then also these really brutal songs. And we loved them both and thought that they both were telling this story about belonging and feeling like an outsider, but observing pockets of feeling accepted in other places, and they work together really well.
And so, we just leaned into the differences instead of trying to flatten them out and make the songs feel the same, make 10 of the same thing. We were like, ‘Let’s let these groups of compositions be individual and represent two different tonal sides.’ I think it’s cool, happy with it.
Can you talk a little bit about the theme of belonging and how that idea came about?
BA: It’s weird. It’s both such a normal thing for me to think about and it’s kind of abstract, so let me try and put it into language, but I mean, I feel like an outsider in many areas of my life, which has been a lifelong truth because of the way that I was raised and because of things like going to a different school every year of my adolescence and childhood. But I started to really have this awareness that I am not really counted among my peers as a woman. I am not really included by other women ever anywhere. I’m not included. And that’s been true for years and years. And I think for a long time I just pretended it wasn’t true and kept trying to make myself fit into spaces that weren’t my size and shape. And then a couple years ago, it just started to really bear itself out and become really apparent to me.
And the first song that I wrote for the record is called “Keeping Score”, which also opens the project. And it was about this awareness that I had had that sense of being rejected by other women goes back to childhood. I mean, I had grown women reject me when I was actually a kid, both in my family and outside of it. And so, I started to kind of document that set of awarenesses throughout the process of writing this record.
But even if that subject matter is too niche for someone and there are maybe some that don’t fit this bill, and who knows what they’re like, but most people understand what it feels like to not fit or to not be the same as everybody in a certain group or category. So that just ended up being what the record was about. I don’t think it was super intentional, and Jerry really understood the theme and wanted to lean into it as well. And so, we just made this record about belonging. And there’s a lot of joy and inclusiveness on the record too, but there is also a lot of grief and just sort of looking at why some people are so different and some are not.
JR: Buick writes the songs that I can speak to. It being a universal subject, I feel like I can relate to it just in my own life. I have seen it play out between women exactly what she’s talking about between men and women, between just like anybody in my circle and my professional world, versus being in this band. There’s always a strange competitiveness and weird stuff that doesn’t make sense and makes you feel like an outsider no matter what. And I feel like that’s a big part of our music and our loud music and the culture that influenced us. It was outsider art weirdos with nowhere else to go that just had to be loud.
Buick, the album, kind of feels like a companion to your solo album that came out earlier this year. It has very similar themes to it of belonging.
BA: Yeah, they were written and recorded the same year. They’re not exactly the same topics, but I think I was working on certain feelings and concepts in both projects and exploring ways to talk about them. But yeah, I definitely consider them to be related, for sure. They are for me because it was all one big bunch of output and creativity, and a burst. 2024 feels really like a memorable year because I did write and record so much music. Too much, maybe.
How do you decide what becomes a solo song versus a band song?
BA: The songs just sort of fall on one side or the other. Friendship Commanders stuff tends to, the lens that those songs are created through, tends to be a little bit more like broad and community-based and cultural, where I’m looking at community patterns and trends and things that I’ve experienced, but also things that I’m witnessing. And the Buick Audra stuff tends to be much more personal, even though there’s still cultural observation happening there. But yeah, I don’t know, they just sort of tell me where they go. And also, my left hand tells me French Commanders is very riffy.
Jerry, it sounds like you were really excited when you first heard the songs for the first time. Can you talk a little bit about that? What was it like hearing a different side of Buick that you maybe hadn’t heard from her before?
JR: Well, Buick being the writer, there have been many times where I’ve been extremely excited and blown away by her playing something for me for the first time. But it is one of the more fun things about being in this band that she writes very quickly. Song ideas take a long time to form sometimes, but once it’s time to write them, they tend to just fall out in one big spurt.
And so, whenever that starts to happen, whenever that season hits, and it’s always a season of songs coming in a stream that ends up making a full-length album or an EP, I’ll start to hear them. And there’s a through line with them all. Sometimes a song ends up becoming a Buick solo song. But yeah, it lined up that she was going exactly where I wanted to go without having to say anything. These are more expansive, more up-tempo in a way, kind of more grungy rock songs, and while still getting a lot of the stuff that we’ve become known for in the past few years. And I couldn’t have been really happier, especially with songs like “X” and “Midheaven” was crazy to hear and work out too, and just that extended instrumental midsection with all her.
BA: I mean, I am the songwriter, but Jerry and I definitely shape everything up together and arrange it together. He hears stuff when it’s half-baked, or I’m like, “Midheaven” was written in sections. I think I had the verse in the chorus the first time I showed it to him. And then a day or two later, I was like, “I think I have this bridge part.”
And it ended up being that very long, involved instrumental bridge. But Friendship Commanders absolutely relies on the sonic and creative contribution of Jerry. If it were just me, it would just be guitar salad and probably a lot less direct. I think Jerry contributes to it being a much more aggressive sound. I’m very aggressive as well, but Jerry’s a huge part of what makes the music sound the way that it does in its final iteration. And Jerry also played drums on what, six of the Adult Child songs.
JR: Yeah, whatever drums there are. That’s me.
BA: Yeah, that’s J. So, I mean, the two albums really benefit from his contributions, and Kurt Ballou also mixed both records, and Brad Boatright mastered both records. So, just to your point earlier about the records seeming connected, they are in other ways beyond theme. There’s a lot of crossover with who contributed.
Going back to the song “Keeping Score”, why did you feel it was important to write a song kind of about breaking the cycle of seemingly societal norms?
BA: I have no idea other than I don’t know of another one that exists on exactly this subject matter. And I feel like there are so many things that happen that are very in broad daylight patterns in our cultural movements that nobody talks about that just nobody puts language to. And that makes me feel very freaked out and also lonely a lot of the time as a person, if I’m perfectly honest with you. And as a woman seeing other women, I mean, I experienced it as a young girl myself, having women attack me and be afraid of me and warn other mothers about me that I was corrupting their sons or whatever they thought that was happening, which I was documented in that song. But I see women doing that garbage now, and I’m like, “First of all, why is this an accepted behavior?”
And second of all, “why are we not talking about it?” And talking about the ways that women limit and hinder and damage girls, we have a tendency to talk about the big bad bogeyman of the patriarchy as this bunch of faceless cis white males in suits. But if you’re a woman harming a girl’s sense of self and identity from a very young age, that title belongs to you. You are doing the damage. And I felt like, as a woman, I was entitled to say that I am in the fold. I’ve experienced it firsthand, and I’ve witnessed it as a grown woman firsthand. And it just felt like a fever in my system that I had to expel, and “Keeping Score” was the product of that moment of fever pitch. And I’m super proud of it. I mean, I would do it again a hundred times. I think that music should express what is difficult to express in other ways.
It seems like there are a lot of double standards within life, music, and pretty much everything.
BA: And wait, I feel like let’s just say ’em out loud because we’re in a lot of trouble right now culturally, I don’t know if anybody else has noticed it, but our nation is in rough shape. And so, these trends, where we allow these harmful behaviors in micro-cultural sects and areas, these are contributing to larger cultural movements. So, when we are making women and girls feel less than when we are endlessly centering men and boys as the heroes of every situation, that is how we become and maintain a more conservative culture.
So, I feel like it’s important to not just be fighting for human rights and all that. Of course, of course, because that’s lifesaving and life changing, but there are so many other areas of our everyday lives where I feel like we could be doing better and giving voice to these patterns that are very obviously true. And while it might not make me popular in my lifetime, I’m happy to be the one to say some of these things because I know exactly what they’re doing, those behaviors and those cycles, I know exactly what they’re doing. I mean, it changed my life to have women not trust me and dislike me when I was a girl. It changed my life, changed the way I moved through the world right now.
The band seems to traverse the extremes with girls and how they’re treated, from the insults on “Keeping Score” to the last song, “Dead & Discarded Girls,” which talks about a murder.
BA: Yeah, it’s about the murder of Rena Burke, who was a 14-year-old girl murdered by another girl and a boy who were also teenagers. But the murder was led by this group of girls, actually, but one who carried it out in Canada in the nineties. And I think a major through line of this project and Adult Child is this observation of empathy and why certain situations don’t call for the outcry of community empathy and others do, and why we’re not looking at who’s doing the damage in these situations. But yeah, “Dead & Discarded Girls” is about how I’m able to hear a story like Rena and be horrified and outraged on her behalf and her family’s behalf. I should also say that she’s Indian, she’s not white, and she was murdered by a white girl. And I don’t have to have a dog in that fight to care about that.
I can hear that and know that we have to do better culturally. And I guess one of the things that I wonder about in this life is why everybody isn’t like that. Why do we need to have a personal stake in a situation to have empathy or outrage or the impetus to change a situation or a set of dynamics? And so that’s what that song is about, and that’s why the record ends that way, because I wanted that question to sort of ripple out from this record, care about the things even when they don’t impact you.
You wrote “X” after the passing of Steve Albini, with whom the band got to work. Why was it important to convey the song’s message within that context?
BA: We were grieving because we knew him personally and creatively, of course, and we both just loved and admired and respected Steve a great deal. But I think Steve is one of those remarkable human beings who touched an entire generation of people, multiple generations, but certainly Generation X. He was sort of the king of Gen X if you were a rock musician or lover of rock music. And when he died, it was interesting to observe the way that people grieved him or didn’t because I think the Gen X sometimes stutters on its own grief.
And so, I just wrote a song about that generation who raised me creatively and culturally and musically, and I have so much admiration for them, but I have also watched them grieve so many things in their lifetimes. So many people, so many music icons, and the grief is very singular. I’ve never seen another group of people grieve or not grieve in the grieve in the ways that Gen X does or does not. So, I wrote a song about that group of people and also about Steve and other people that generation lost. It just felt pertinent in the moment, and Jerry really had a strong reaction to it. I think I cried the first dozen times I played that song. It was very from the bone, both because of Steve and other people that we’ve lost.
JR: Yeah, musically, that song really hit me exactly where I was. I didn’t know I needed to be hit there, but I kind of always wanted a song like that, and we got one of the best ones ever. And also, I think it’s valuable for me to say, I think Buick seems songs just come to her, and she doesn’t even really know why she’s writing them initially. So, there’s never a free designated plan or idea or concept that kind of just shows itself eventually.
BA: What Jerry is saying is that I’m obsessive and I get obsessed with certain topics and ideas, and then I just write them to death over the course of 10 or 12 songs, and then I sort of exhaust myself on that subject or it changes it for me in some way to write about it. But yeah, I don’t ever set out to write about anything.
JR: One of the things that makes us unique is the heavy and loud band, I think, is songwriters of the old classic era up through the seventies, and past that, they would just write songs that came to them, and then albums would happen. And that’s essentially what happens with us, versus I think a lot of rock bands, that a big part of that is that they write together as a group. Often, they’ll decide on a concept or an idea or a sound and then chase that down. And that’s really something that happens after the fact of us. It’s an artifact of what the songs end up being.
Another song that was a favorite for me was “MELT”, which you wrote about the challenges of being a woman in the music industry. Can you talk a little bit about the inspiration and experience putting that one together?
BA: “MELT” is really, I think, where I started to understand that this record was about being so outside of womanhood at this point in my life. And it outlines a couple of experiences that were real-life anecdotes that happened in 2023 and 2024, where I was like, “Oh, I do not make the cut. They do not want me as a friend, as a collaborator, as just whatever. I just don’t make the cut.” And it was equal parts clarifying and devastating. So that song holds this duality of being sort of freed by saying it out loud that I’m too much, it seems miraculously not enough for a lot of women, saying, “I just do not seem to make the cut.”
But then also being like there’s a lot of grief in it too, and the bridge where I say, “I want to know was I marked at birth, I do want to know. I do want to know why I just cannot get it together with women.” So yeah, I mean that song was really a keystone piece of the writing and the concept for me and was completely leveling for me to first perform and say out loud, now it feels really light and buoyant, but I think that’s because I put all of the sentiment into the song, and so I’m not carrying it around in my body. That’s one of the great benefits of being a songwriter is you just get to store your sentiments somewhere and not have them all on your chest. But Jerry really leaned into the buoyancy of it, and I think it is a huge part of why that song feels so almost celebratory.
JR: I think it is to be celebrated. And I thought the video, the video should match that because we filmed it where we play all the time, where we do belong.
BA: Yeah, that’s Drkmttr, which is a very beloved DIY venue here in Nashville. It’s collective owned, and we play there at least once a year. We love it very much. So, it was very meaningful to shoot the video there, and Jerry made the video.
It sounds like there have definitely been some positive aspects of being touring musicians, including the different venues and places you get to play.
BA: Hell yeah. Yeah. I mean, “Found” is really a love letter to the places where creativity runs, free venues, art schools, museums, all sorts of creative outlet venues. But it’s also a love letter to the creative impetus itself, and that some of us are blessed/cursed with the gift of empathy and observation, weirdos. It’s a love letter to the weirdos of the world. It’s a very positive song.
You wanted to get a classic feel to the music videos. Why’s that?
JR: Yeah. I mean, we’re big fans of what the nineties looked like. I really think that’s the best time for music videos in general. It’s always influenced our work. And yeah, I have a hard time getting past it, but I think on this record, too, it especially fits.
BA: We have a video for “Midheaven” that Jerry shot. Well, Jerry directed and shot. Some of that’s astonishing. And that long instrumental bridge section is all one single shot, which is incredible.
JR: And that one’s a little bit more modern, I’d say.
BA: It is it, that’s why I’m jumping in because I don’t think that that’s as retro or callback at all. I think it’s all you.
What song changed the most from writing to recording it?
BA: Oh, that’s a great question. “Found” and “Midheaven,” I think, took on the most production and arrangement conceptual stuff, and I did an enormous amount of vocals on both of those songs, which is new on this record. I don’t always do that.
JR: They got stretched out and added to and sort of pulled apart and rebuilt in some ways.
I imagine that it’s exciting when a song goes in a different direction than you thought it would originally.
BA: Oh yeah. That kind of discovery, where you have a set of sections that you like and that you’re committed to, but then when you go like, “oh, we could do this twice in this part and then add some room to breathe before the bridge,” all of that stuff is really fun to explore and figure out in the room. And then when I track vocals, there’s a whole other bit of discovery. I track my own vocals alone, and so I spent something like eight hours doing the backing vocals for just “Midheaven”. And that was a delight, a stressful delight, but a delight because I got to sort of be like, “how wide can this go and how ethereal can some of this be?” And Jerry likes to do a lot of that stuff in post-production as well.
What were some of your favorite or most surprising moments making the album?
BA: I think “Dead & Discarded Girls” is one of my favorites, just because we really deconstructed so much to build that track.
JR: We had two completely different setups. We saved it for last and recorded the midsection before. Recorded the beginning and ending.
BA: Yeah, I think that was a favorite. I’m trying to think of what else. I think “X” was a lot of fun.
JR: “X” was a lot of fun, realizing how big it is and how cinematic it is. One of the funnest memories for me was automating the gain on your pedal while replaying the bridge part on “Found”, which we had to try and get perfect in time for it coming back in.
BA: Yeah. Discovery also involves trying things that are terrible and then deleting them later. So, when we were building the track for “Dead & Discarded Girls”, Jerry was like in a section where there’s now a vocal part, a vocal phrase. Jerry wanted a bunch of distorted feedback, guitar feedback, and we track.
JR: Kurt hated. He’s like, “I don’t like this at all. Like, I hate this.”
BA: And it’s always funny to have one of us just hate something that we’re trying.
JR: I was like, “How can you hate this? I don’t really understand.”
BA: And Kurt rarely hates stuff, but when he does, he’s like, “I hate this.” And we left it all the way until I was tracking vocals, and then I heard a vocal part that suited the section better, and so I muted the distorted feedback guitars and tried the vocal, and it was much better. So, Kurt never did mention it to us when he was mixing it. That part had been deleted. But in the room when we were tracking it, he was like, “I hate this.”
JR: [It] was so funny too, because feedback is such a huge part of the recordings he worked on, but we also learned there’s a very specific kind of feedback he likes and doesn’t like, and we were getting the one he didn’t like. But I took it as a compliment that it wasn’t musical enough for the song.
BA: Yeah, he’s a real champion of all things musical and in serving the song. But yeah, once in a while we’ll try something, and I mean, we all say “I cannot stand this. I don’t want to do this.” And then we scrap it eventually. But yeah, it’s funny. I like those moments.
The band is playing some shows this fall. What are you most looking forward to?
BA: It’s hard to pick. I love so many parts of the country. I mostly just love being out and playing with other bands.
JR: Yeah, we’ve had two great Los Angeles shows in a row, so we’re excited to get back there.
BA: I used to live in Boston, and I wrote a whole record about that whole saga called Mass that was the record before this one. And so, Boston is always really energetic to play because there’s a lot of community there, and just old ghosts, where any place where you used to live is always like an interesting show. And the album release show in Nashville will be really great. Nashville’s music community is pretty rad. How about you, J?
JR: Yeah, I mean, we pretty much covered it. We’re going over to Europe and UK for the first time next year. That’s all starting to get figured out. We haven’t gone yet and we cannot wait.
BA: Yeah, truly it’s time.
JR: Yeah, big time.
You can follow Friendship Commanders via their socials and listen to their music at the following links:
The band’s fantastic website: Friendshipcommandersband.com
Facebook: Facebook.com/friendshipcommanders
Instagram: Instagram.com/friendshipcommanders
YouTube: Youtube.com/@friendshipcommanders
Bandcamp: Friendshipcommanders.bandcamp.com
Spotify: Friendship Commanders on Spotify
Joshua is co-founder of Scummy Water Tower. He’s freelanced for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including: Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Guitar World, MTV News, Grammy.com, Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, A.V. Club, SPIN, Alternative Press, Under the Radar, Paste, PopMatters, American Songwriter, and Relix. You can email him at josh@scummywatertower.com.
