Off With Their Heads
A brutally candid Minneapolis band has more than punk up its sleeve
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“Sorry, man, we suck. We’re not actually musicians. But you knew that.” So confesses Ryan Young of Off With Their Heads in a bit of studio chatter at the beginning of “Terrorist Attack?”—a 79-second blast of pure punk that appears on the band’s 2008 full-length, From The Bottom. The song vents frustration at the media’s reaction to the collapse of the I-35W bridge in the group’s Twin Cities home base in 2007. That’s about as topical as Young gets in his lyrics, but his brutal honesty never lets up: The singer-guitarist drills mercilessly into his own brain and heart to fuel OWTH’s battered, ragged anthems. Lurking somewhere between the gruff crudeness of the Dwarves and the self-destructive pop of The Replacements—with nods to fellow Minneapolis punk heroes Dillinger Four—From The Bottom was one of 2008’s best unsung albums, and by far the year’s most aching, hilarious, and sincere. Set to play 3 Kings Tavern on Saturday and Community Cycles in Boulder on Tuesday, Young spoke with Decider about love songs, hate mail, and how the band isn't afraid to take a detour from punk.
Decider: Your lyrics are very forthright and plainspoken. Has that honesty ever gotten you into trouble?
RY: Yeah, people get pissed about it all the time. It’s weird. I don’t know why anyone would really care. We get, like, hate mail. [Laughs.] Some of the people that our songs are about have gotten mad at us.
D: Can you name names?
RY: Well, our song “Call The Cops” is about a girl who actually did call the cops on me once. She was mad at me, and I didn’t even do anything. She was pissed when she first heard it, but eventually she thought it was pretty funny.
D: What’s the whole story?
RY: I was dating this girl for three years, and she started yelling at me at the bar once. I was like, “Fuck you, go home.” So she went home. But me being the insecure idiot that I am, I walked backed back to her house and got hit by a car on the way. [Laughs.] She just started screaming at me, and I started yelling back. She called it a domestic dispute of some sort, and she tried to call the police. It was stupid. I’m glad that whole part of my life and that particular relationship are long over. [Laughs.]
D: Sometimes writing a song about a bad relationship seals the deal.
RY: Yup, exactly. Closure. [Laughs.]
D: Despite all the misery and self-deprecation in your songs, there’s a streak of perseverance that shines through. Is that intentional?
RY: I never really try to balance anything out. I have to go that extreme to make the song good sometimes. The thing that people don’t understand about me is, those songs are just about one day, one bad day. I’m not like that all the time. Most of the time I’m pretty fun-loving and easygoing. But my songs are about those certain times when things really suck. There are a couple of happier songs in there somewhere, too, buried on 7-inches.
D: Why do more of the bad days make it into your lyrics?
RY: That’s what sticks out in your mind. That’s where the inspiration comes from, that extreme. It sure beats writing about sitting around outside in the sun, doing nothing. It’s been so hard for me to write songs lately because I have an awesome girlfriend now. I have nothing to write about, basically. But if I wrote about how rad my new girlfriend was, I think people would probably dislike that. Not that I care. I probably will anyway.
D: You mentioned your 7-inch singles. Those old songs have very different feel to them—more moody, more complex. Where were you at, musically speaking, when you started the band?
RY: Our first, self-released 7-inch—which most people don’t have, there were only 500 of them made—was very, very different than the stuff we do now. It was very complicated. But eventually we were like, “Man, this is really hard to play.” [Laughs.] One day we said, “Um, let’s just write three-chord songs that are super easy and fun.” Then we kept that same kind of bad vibe of the lyrics. That was where our first EP, [2005’s] Hospitals, came from. And it worked. We just sort of accidentally stumbled onto what we do by being lazy. [Laughs.]
D: There were even a lot of keyboards on those early songs.
RY: We actually plan to do more of that in the future. It’s more a matter of how much time we have to record next time around. I like layering stuff in the studio, making it sound a bit different here and there. The next record that we do will be pretty weird. We’re going to bring some of that stuff back—not in a self-indulgent way, though. We just want to keep things interesting.
D: To anyone whose first exposure to Off With Their Heads is From The Bottom, that kind of a progression might seem like a weird leap.
RY: We don’t really listen to the kind of music that we play. I don’t think a lot of punk rock is really done very well. A lot of it doesn’t really grab me. We’re more into Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds and things like that, bands that cover much more ground. One of my favorite records of all times is Kimya Dawson’s Hidden Vagenda. I love stuff like that. That’s basically what we’re trying to do: make punk versions of different things we like. From The Bottom is this hard pop kind of record, but it was a onetime thing. I hope to mix it up more as we go.
D: You recorded a cover of “Goddamn Job,” one of the most straight-up punk songs The Replacements ever wrote. Do you see Off With Their Heads someday mellowing out and maturing like The Replacements did?
RY: Maybe. It’s really hard to say. We don’t really have a plan. I can see almost anything happening—even, like, some industrial-sounding sort of record. It all depends on who we record with next time. Blag Dahlia of the Dwarves wants to record us, which is cool. The last Dwarves record [Dwarves Must Die] was just ridiculously all over the place. It had everything from hip-hop to almost death-metal sort of stuff. It’s not like I think I could pull that off, and I’d certainly never try a hip-hop thing. [Laughs.] Who knows what’ll happen.
RY: Yeah, people get pissed about it all the time. It’s weird. I don’t know why anyone would really care. We get, like, hate mail. [Laughs.] Some of the people that our songs are about have gotten mad at us.
D: Can you name names?
RY: Well, our song “Call The Cops” is about a girl who actually did call the cops on me once. She was mad at me, and I didn’t even do anything. She was pissed when she first heard it, but eventually she thought it was pretty funny.
D: What’s the whole story?
RY: I was dating this girl for three years, and she started yelling at me at the bar once. I was like, “Fuck you, go home.” So she went home. But me being the insecure idiot that I am, I walked backed back to her house and got hit by a car on the way. [Laughs.] She just started screaming at me, and I started yelling back. She called it a domestic dispute of some sort, and she tried to call the police. It was stupid. I’m glad that whole part of my life and that particular relationship are long over. [Laughs.]
D: Sometimes writing a song about a bad relationship seals the deal.
RY: Yup, exactly. Closure. [Laughs.]
D: Despite all the misery and self-deprecation in your songs, there’s a streak of perseverance that shines through. Is that intentional?
RY: I never really try to balance anything out. I have to go that extreme to make the song good sometimes. The thing that people don’t understand about me is, those songs are just about one day, one bad day. I’m not like that all the time. Most of the time I’m pretty fun-loving and easygoing. But my songs are about those certain times when things really suck. There are a couple of happier songs in there somewhere, too, buried on 7-inches.
D: Why do more of the bad days make it into your lyrics?
RY: That’s what sticks out in your mind. That’s where the inspiration comes from, that extreme. It sure beats writing about sitting around outside in the sun, doing nothing. It’s been so hard for me to write songs lately because I have an awesome girlfriend now. I have nothing to write about, basically. But if I wrote about how rad my new girlfriend was, I think people would probably dislike that. Not that I care. I probably will anyway.
D: You mentioned your 7-inch singles. Those old songs have very different feel to them—more moody, more complex. Where were you at, musically speaking, when you started the band?
RY: Our first, self-released 7-inch—which most people don’t have, there were only 500 of them made—was very, very different than the stuff we do now. It was very complicated. But eventually we were like, “Man, this is really hard to play.” [Laughs.] One day we said, “Um, let’s just write three-chord songs that are super easy and fun.” Then we kept that same kind of bad vibe of the lyrics. That was where our first EP, [2005’s] Hospitals, came from. And it worked. We just sort of accidentally stumbled onto what we do by being lazy. [Laughs.]
D: There were even a lot of keyboards on those early songs.
RY: We actually plan to do more of that in the future. It’s more a matter of how much time we have to record next time around. I like layering stuff in the studio, making it sound a bit different here and there. The next record that we do will be pretty weird. We’re going to bring some of that stuff back—not in a self-indulgent way, though. We just want to keep things interesting.
D: To anyone whose first exposure to Off With Their Heads is From The Bottom, that kind of a progression might seem like a weird leap.
RY: We don’t really listen to the kind of music that we play. I don’t think a lot of punk rock is really done very well. A lot of it doesn’t really grab me. We’re more into Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds and things like that, bands that cover much more ground. One of my favorite records of all times is Kimya Dawson’s Hidden Vagenda. I love stuff like that. That’s basically what we’re trying to do: make punk versions of different things we like. From The Bottom is this hard pop kind of record, but it was a onetime thing. I hope to mix it up more as we go.
D: You recorded a cover of “Goddamn Job,” one of the most straight-up punk songs The Replacements ever wrote. Do you see Off With Their Heads someday mellowing out and maturing like The Replacements did?
RY: Maybe. It’s really hard to say. We don’t really have a plan. I can see almost anything happening—even, like, some industrial-sounding sort of record. It all depends on who we record with next time. Blag Dahlia of the Dwarves wants to record us, which is cool. The last Dwarves record [Dwarves Must Die] was just ridiculously all over the place. It had everything from hip-hop to almost death-metal sort of stuff. It’s not like I think I could pull that off, and I’d certainly never try a hip-hop thing. [Laughs.] Who knows what’ll happen.
Off With Their Heads, “Fuck This, I’m Out” (from 2008’s From The Bottom)
