Punx unite: Frank Turner and Jon Snodgrass team up for a loosely planned collaboration

In June, British folkie Frank Turner was opening for Green Day at London’s Wembley Stadium in front of a crowd of about 100,000. A couple weeks ago, he was holed up in a makeshift studio set up in a Fort Collins garage recording a handful of songs for a collaborative effort with local Jon Snodgrass. While Snodgrass’ modest backyard studio lacks the soccer-pavilion glamour of Wembley, the culture shock didn’t derail Turner. “We’ll see how many times we do it,” Snodgrass says. “We decided that we’re going to make a record together every year, kind of annually.”

Seeds for the two-day session—one day spent writing, the other spent recording—were sown when the pair met on the Revival Tour earlier this year. One night, as things wrapped up, the pair bashed out a mostly improvisational number offstage and discovered an affinity between their shared punk roots. Plans were laid to record the song for a 7-inch in the summer, when Turner was back in the states visiting family in, of all places, Longmont.

Just for kicks, the pair decided to bang out a B-side for the tune. Snodgrass drove down for a six-hour writing session and came back with an additional eight songs put together. “I was like, ‘If we write one more song, we’ll have a 7-inch. If we write three more songs, we’ll have a really good 7-inch,’” Snodgrass says. “I kept joking to people, saying if we write a bunch of really funny 30-second songs, you’re going to know I was just trying to make it an even 10 [songs for an album].”

The collaboration yielded only one half-minute tune (“But it’s fucking awesome!” Snodgrass qualifies) and a handful of others that Snodgrass was still gushing about the day after he mixed them at the Blasting Room studio. There’s one written and recorded in the van as Snodgrass drove Turner back to Longmont (“It’s just ridiculous,” Snodgrass admits) and a mostly Turner-penned tribute to Steven Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant who grabbed headlines after going nuts at work. Despite the goofier moments, Snodgrass relishes the quickly brewed element of instant songwriting. “That’s how me and Steve [Garcia, Armchair Martian bassist], and me and Chad [Price of Drag The River] always did it. I like doing that.”

Snodgrass doesn’t have a title for the album yet, nor does he really even know how it’ll be distributed—expect some sort of lo-tech digital distribution—but for now, that’s not the point. For the collaborative-minded Snodgrass, it’s just another buddy-rock memory to cherish. “It’s one of the most fun times I’ve had in a long time,” he says. “It’s not like someone was paying us to make a record. We could just have fun and do whatever we wanted to do.”