An oral history of The Promise Ring
Nearly two decades ago, four punk lifers in Milwaukee began plotting what seemed like just a one-off project: None Left Standing guitarists Jason Gnewikow and Matt Mangan teamed up with Ceilishrine bassist Scott Beschta and Dan Didier after their respective bands broke up. When Mangan moved to Indianapolis shortly thereafter, the remaining trio invited Cap’n Jazz guitarist Davey Von Bohlen to join the new band, which the members went on to call The Promise Ring.
TPR quickly broke out of its hometown scene with an endearing sound that mixed cathartic post-hardcore bombast with sharp, pop-driven hooks. The band’s meteoric rise to prominence in the national indie scene paved the way for a slew of bands influenced by TPR’s revived spin on emo. The legacy of that maligned genre may precede the band, but TPR’s music still stands up against the wave of trendy groups that turned emo into a monoculture in the aughts. TPR broke up just as that genre broke big, shortly after the turn of the millennium, and ever since then die-hard fans have been waiting for the day the band would return. The first sign came in November in the form of a handful of quoted lyrics popping up on an official Promise Ring Twitter account. Now, after a long decade apart, The Promise Ring has officially reunited and is prepping a rarities compilation for Dangerbird Records. To prepare for the group’s upcoming show at Turner Hall Friday, Feb. 24, The A.V. Club decided to talk with some of the behind-the-scenes players—both big and small—for an in-depth oral history of The Promise Ring.
Davey Von Bohlen (vocalist-guitarist, The Promise Ring): I was still in Cap’n Jazz, so I guess my big eagerness was being able to be a part of things, ’cause I was the new guy in that band, and that band had more idea people than they needed, and so there really wasn’t the space or need for me to do that. I think when I joined the band they already had parts of two songs.
Dan Didier (drummer, The Promise Ring): We all, at the time, sort of wanted to go the same route, ’cause we’d all done the hardcore and post-hardcore stuff like that in our previous bands. We all wanted to do something different, but also something not too far off from that, so it was kind of a nice blend of everyone on the same page at the same time. Then we just started throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sort of worked and what didn’t.
Davey Von Bohlen: We probably wrote seven or eight songs in a month, practiced like five days or four days a week. So that’s how it started. I had some song ideas that I’d sort of been throwing up, and they had already written a couple, and we quickly had like four or five songs and started playing shows. I think our first show was after like three weeks as a band.
Dan Didier: It’s the band, and everything else is sort of second, because at the time we were just college kids. That was our life: We worked jobs, we paid rent, but that was basically it. We kind of collectively all threw ourselves into the band, and we did kind of want to go hit the ground running and be as productive as we can, as quickly as we can. We recorded; as soon as we had four or five songs, we recorded the demo, that little tape thing.
David Kawczynski (guitarist, Loomis; “David K” of TPR’s “Best Looking Boys”): When I was in that band Loomis, the drummer got The Promise Ring demo tape. He was like, “Hey, we should put them on a show.”
Josh Modell (founder, Milk magazine; show promoter; current general manager, The A.V. Club): The first time I saw them, I really liked them. The first recorded music I heard I think I was like, “That sounds like a Police rip-off.”
Dan Didier: I remember when we first wrote “Watertown Plank,” we went, “Oh man, this is totally sounds like The Police.” That’s what I feel like: Back then, when we were coming from a different mindset—a punk-hardcore mindset—any sort of pop sound ends up sounding like The Police.
Davey Von Bohlen: We started in February, and we just didn’t really click; we didn’t get along. I hadn’t met Dan or Scott Beschta until the band started, and I was friends with Jason for a long time, but the four of us didn’t know each other, so I think we had a lot of issues. The basic goal, I recall, was—and this is a completely ludicrous idea, talking about it now—but the goal was, “Listen, I don’t care if everybody has troubles or can’t relate or whatever the problem is, we’re gonna stick it out and we’re gonna do this 10-day tour of the East Coast in June, and that’s final. Past that, I don’t care if we ever speak to each other again.” And that was kind of the premise of the band for the first five months.
Dan Didier: That was miserable because we were in the South in the summer, and the van kept on overheating, so we had to blast the heat in the van in 100-degree weather while driving so it wouldn’t overheat.
Davey Von Bohlen: It was actually a lot of fun. We got along really well and seemed to kind of forge an identity as people, or as a group of people—or that’s how it felt. Then I went home for like five days, and then went on this Cap’n Jazz tour, which we actually put out a full-length album, so we were on tour in support of that. That went really well for the first nine days, and then the band broke up. So I got home, and it was kind of like, “So, are we still a band?”
In a weird way, Cap’n Jazz seemed to be the thing in the way, or that moving out of the way was the last piece. It’s like, the minute we practiced after that occurred in August it was like, “Wow, we’re all on the same page; this is, like, perfectly perfect.” It’s like, never had anything seemed so natural and easy and right and cohesive.
Norman Brannon (guitarist, Texas Is the Reason; editor, Anti-Matter): I was living with Tim [Owen] from Jade Tree back at the time of all The Promise Ring stuff, the demo tapes and all that. So I was the one that gave Tim the demo and the 7-inch and said, “Sign this band.” And I think it’s really funny, because Tim actually got it right away. I think, at first, he was a little bit thrown off because Davey’s voice obviously is quite unique. I feel like Darren [Walters] didn’t want to sign the band. Like, it was much easier to get them both on board to sign Lifetime than it was The Promise Ring.
Darren Walters (co-founder, Jade Tree Records): I’ve never been a person that likes the hard sell, so I got up there, and Norm and Tim had already decided, “This is it. This is the band.” So I was like, “Eh, they’re good, they’re good,” but I think it had less to do with The Promise Ring and more to do with the fact that those guys were like, “This is the band!”
I saw those guys in Philly, and so the story goes I got them all Coke and Cherry Coke and, like, Snickers bars and a bunch of candy. We hit it off, and they played to, let’s say, somewhere [around] 25 people at the First Street Union Church in Philly, and I was like, “these guys are awesome.” They put on an incredible show; I fell in love with their personalities as well, and it was like, “Great, well, we’re ready to go. Let’s put out the 7-inch.”
Jessica Hopper (former Promise Ring publicist): I saw ads for the split with Texas Is the Reason in Punk Planet, and I knew they were a big deal because everyone was excited about it.
David Kawczynski: They went from a lot of basement shows, and then opening for [Loomis] a few times, but it was a fairly quick ascension. But they did the tours with Texas Is the Reason.
Norman Brannon: There was a point where it seemed like everything clicked for them. ... I would say that that moment was probably closer to at the point when we went on tour together, which was in December of 1996. That was just a moment where it seemed like they just crystallized and became this thing that it was like all of the sudden: We’re on tour with this band; technically we’re headlining, and they’re just killing it every night. And we’re just scared out of our wits every night that everyone’s gonna leave after they play. It was that kind of momentum that they had going.
Davey Von Bohlen: Before the Internet, we were booking tours from tours. That’s what we did, and we were making music in those weeks we were home. Yeah, it went really fast. I remember playing a show in Milwaukee, maybe summer of ’96 or something, and literally getting onstage and being like “I don’t know who any of you are, and that’s so weird!”
Josh Modell: I think I was there at a time when something really exciting was happening with them, and you could tell. I’ve probably seen three or four bands like that where, you just see them [and] you’re like, “Oh wow, I’m right at the beginning of something really exciting.” It was awesome to watch them play to nobody, and then to everybody, in the space of a couple years.
Davey Von Bohlen: We did 30 Degrees Everywhere in five days near home, in a situation where we had no idea what we wanted to do or how we wanted it to come out.
Darren Walters: Davey was sick when he made that record. There were problems with his voice, and I’m not sure if the world knows that. I guess now the world will know it. So, it wasn’t like the best effort that everyone thought it could be, but we were pleased with it.
Dan Didier: With all due respect to [producer] Casey Rice, it was the wrong recording at the wrong time with the wrong person. He just came from touring Europe with Tortoise, and he had that sort of Thrill Jockey vibe going, and he sort of—to me, in hindsight—felt like he was just recording a punk-rock band. So he just made it sound punk, and who cares. The classic line from that recording session was, “That’s pretty close to punk-rock,” or, “Good enough for punk-rock.” So we were all like, “This is our first record,” so it’s like “Okay, cool, okay. Whatever. I love Tortoise!” We did that, and then listening back on the way home we were like, “Fuck.”
Josh Modell: I think the problem with that album—they might fully disagree with me—is that they had a very different sound in their head than what actually ended up on the record.
Norman Brannon: I think that it’s a testament to the fact that the songs were really great that the album connected with so many people, because the actual production and the kind of presentation—not the presentation, because it looks beautiful, but the presentation in terms of how it was recorded and how it was finished—I think didn’t capture exactly what was so awesome about The Promise Ring at that time.
Darren Walters: They were playing CBGB’s—I remember this distinctly—and I think they had five, six hundred, maybe more, of 30 Degrees, and they sold out all those at the CBs show. That was a tremendous shock to all of us. That wasn’t the intention; that was when we got them the records. Those were the records that were supposed to last them through a bunch of shows, and we went through them. And I think that’s when everybody—the band and us—were like, “Oh my God, what’s happening here?”
We like to say that the label and the band grew so much together because we had a lot of our firsts together, because of these kinds of experiences. When you’re selling five, six hundred records, you don’t expect that to be the case. Nobody knows how to handle that situation. You don’t know like, “Well, what do you see in the band?” And, “How do you get their records?” And, you know, they didn’t have a booking agent, and they didn’t have a manager, and we weren’t making videos. We didn’t have a publicist. All the machinery of them being a big band and us being a bigger label, none of that was in place. We were about to figure that all out together once we got to Nothing Feels Good.
Jessica Hopper: I’d been working with DeSoto and The Dismemberment Plan and some D.C. bands, and I think Jade Tree found out about me that way and called and asked if I wanted to work with them. I think my first real project for Jade Tree was that one for The Promise Ring; they thought they were going to be really big.
Darren Walters: Music like The Promise Ring’s is just getting bigger—we’re talking about 1996, 1997—so there’s other bands, there’s other labels. We’re not operating in a void here. There’s good reason to believe that Nothing Feels Good is going to resonate with more people. So anyway, they went down to Easley Studios in Memphis, got J. Robbins from Jawbox involved.
Dan Didier: We were really—at least I was—kind of nervous to meet him. But, obviously, once you meet him he was totally the lovable, amazing human being that made it really easy to record with because he put you in a nice sound to record. That was super low stress, which was good because my relationship at the time with Scott Beschta was terrible at best. I’m shocked that we didn’t kill each other either during the van ride down, the whole recording process, and the van ride back up. I’m shocked that we just didn't just off one another because it was a bad time.
We just started not really enjoying each other. It became apparent that we no longer seemed to care about one another, at all; just one of those things that happens that, the longer you’re with somebody or know somebody, either the stronger you get or more it just sort of falls apart. And in our case it just fell apart.
We knew Tim [Burton], and he wasn’t doing much as far as, he didn’t play in another band or anything like that, and we just asked him to join.
Darren Walters: Everything we did for Nothing Feels Good only grew both brands, Promise Ring and Jade Tree.
Jessica Hopper: It was kind of just the first band I was working with that anybody who didn’t already know about them was giving a shit [about], like, that I was really turning people on to something that they were really excited about. And people could sense—[they] knew about—that momentum.
Darren Walters: Our decision making the video was that I’d always loved music videos. I was never sure that they worked, but I was brought up on a steady diet of MTV. I’m a huge Duran Duran fan, and—let’s face it—they built their whole career on videos. So I was all for making a video, and again I thought, “Hey, if anyone, it’s got to be The Promise Ring.”
In the end, it got played on MTV. They got to host 120 Minutes and get interviewed on 120 Minutes with Matt Pinfield.
Norman Brannon: It’s not like The Promise Ring were making gold records, but I think people had the perception that maybe they were, because your perceptions are totally skewed when you come from the underground. You see someone on TV you think, “oh my God, they’re millionaires.”
Jessica Hopper: In this weird way, it’s like The Promise Ring was writing hits and there was something exciting about that sort of thing—this sort of poppy emo resurgence which right then, that was kind of the flashpoint, because there were a lot of things building. Every major scene kind of had a Promise Ring-y type band, you had like Jejune and you had Get Up Kids and you had Braid and you had this and that, but there was something about the Ring that everybody kind of knew was special.
Tim Edwards (booking agent, Flowerbooking): I had also been talking to Tim Owen, who ran Jade Tree Records, about working with the band. In winter of 1997, Davey sent me an e-mail listing all the basements and clubs they had played and about how many people had come to the shows. They were always an easy band to work with. I think I talked mostly to Davey in terms of planning their tours and such. The label was also a big part of that strategy in those days.
Dan Didier: We went on this little tour with Hum, and then on our way back was when we had our van crash.
Davey Von Bohlen: I guess the first hiccup comes in ’98 when we had the van accident, where, “Okay, so we’re mortals or whatever, like, we can get hurt, bad things can actually happen to us.”
Dan Didier: I remember coming to, I was on the side of the freeway. I still had my arms underneath my pillow, so I was basically in the position I was sleeping in, I was just in the snow outside and it was the most surreal moment, I was just sitting up and just looked and seeing the van upside-down with the wheels still spinning and not knowing what’s going on.
We took a little break, but not a big enough break because then right away we kicked Tim out, we got Scott Schoenbeck in the band, we rehearsed and we were on tour that spring already. It happened in February, and I think we were on tour; we took Jimmy Eat World with us, we were on tour all through the East Coast, and that was already spring.
Davey Von Bohlen: We wrote Very Emergency and we were really toeing this line of like, “we should be the next thing.” Like, there’s always a big thing, like “we can't do this thing, we should do the next thing and, in every way possible, we should just keep exploring and evolving by doing whatever’s next, not whatever’s happening now.” And I think Very Emergency was a record that was so tightly executed, for better or worse, that there was no next thing, like, the next thing was going to be a gigantic step sideways.
Dan Didier: I just remember being a lot more nervous because where Nothing Feels Good was open to experimentation and fun and loose, because that was the type of music we were doing, it was just kind of loud, and we could play around with a few of the other things. Where Very Emergency was such a very exacting record, and songwriting, when we were writing it, it was very precise and I had to do a very precise drum take.
Davey Von Bohlen: Physically, I was in a lot of pain for about 18 months, and I don’t know how else to finely put that. I was pretty much in constant pain. When we recorded Very Emergency, I recall taking a bottle of Excedrin Migraine pills every day, so that’s pretty much where I was physically, and the tours were way worse than that, that was kind of like not that hard. So that kind of like, it just takes tread off the tires a little bit.
Dan Didier: We stayed at J.’s house in Silver Spring and we would drive to Arlington every day, and it was kind of a nice drive. Dismemberment Plan’s Emergency & I just came out, or it didn’t come out, but we had a tape of it already or something like that, so we would listen to that every day on our way to the studio, and that was always fun.
Paul Koob (multi-instrumentalist and roadie, Joan of Arc): I used to think it was okay to wear a mustache every once in a while, and I think they’d seen me one time with one, and then were like, “oh, could you, you know, could you grow that mustache back? Would you want to be on the cover of this record that we’re doing?” So I grew the mustache back just for it so I could do that chauffeur on the cover [of Very Emergency].
Darren Walters: We did end up doing another video for Very Emergency.
Josh Modell: It was the same guy who did the really good video, the “Why Did Ever We Meet” video. He came to Milwaukee and did it, and so it was just like, oh, who’s around, who’s gonna be in it? And the milkman thing, making me a milkman, was presumably sort of a nod to Milk magazine, which I was publishing all through that time.
David Kawczynski: I guess the biggest scandal was the rumblings, because there’s a scene where Mike and I—we have the little peanut butter heart sandwiches—that we were some kind of lovers, that we were gay, and I’m like, “if you people knew either of us, you wouldn't think that at all.”
Darren Walters: There were definitely growing pains there, because they got a manager, they got a booking agent, we got a publicist, they hired people to work the video, suddenly all sorts of people were interested in the band, interested in the label, wanted to work with one or both of us and whispering in each others’ ears, and, you know, of course that has some way of worming its way into your relationship.
Jessica Hopper: By the time Very Emergency came out, we were already trying to downplay emo. I mean we never tried to play it up, but when Nothing Feels Good came out, it was like we weren't totally against it yet, we weren’t totally grossed out by it yet. Then by the time Very Emergency came out it was like a lot of that sort of bandwagon-ering, like Vagrant Records and some other people had just started. There was a palpable sense that this was gonna be something to cash in on.
Darren Walters: Promise Ring is trapped in this scenario where they’re one of the biggest, at this point, they’re still the biggest band on the label, and they’re going “great, so people think we’re an emo band and they think you're an emo label because of us.” So they’re basically trapped by their own success. It’s not just the other stuff that’s going on, but also becomes the fact that by simply breaking with Jade Tree, they hope to break with the fact that they’re an emo band, but also that we’re an emo label, so it’s like you basically wipe the slate clean. You can go record a record with Stephen Street on a label that’s got nothing to do with any of the baggage. That’s basically it, you get rid of all the baggage. It was an impasse. Did we want to see them go? Certainly not.
Jeff Castelaz (manager; co-founder, Dangerbird Records): There was this moment where they wanted to progress their careers. They loved Jade Tree, we were still all friends, but they wanted to be on a bigger label, but not a major label. And we were at this point where that was the plan, but I couldn’t really do anything because of Davey having to go into the hospital, have surgery, and then recovery.
Davey Von Bohlen: I think by like 2000, when I finally got sick, that was the first time we actually slowed down and had to take stock of our lives as individual things.
Dan Didier: We were taking Burning Airlines on tour with us, they were gonna open a European tour. That’s when we were all in the van and we were about to get Davey and Davey was sick in bed. It was like, “oh, we can’t go,” so we had to cancel the tour, and then that day is when we found out that he had a tumor in his head.
Jeff Castelaz: I was like, “man, I’ve got like, I’ve got this great band, they have never recorded a second of music that wasn’t exciting and vital, and there’s this thing hanging in the room which none of us can understand, and none of us can do anything about except for Davey to keep going to the doctor, and for Davey to follow whatever the next step is in his medical situation.”
Dan Didier: Yeah, it was a weird time, because you go for so long, and you’ve been doing a super-gung ho style that there was a lot of nervous energy. Nervous for your friend’s health, but also nervous for not doing something, because you’ve been doing something for so long, and so feverishly, it was a weird thing. Again, you know, you already escape into something, and I escaped into Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2. I played a lot of that game.
Davey Von Bohlen: All the stuff like van accidents, I had a brain tumor, I got married, life happened, Jason wanted to really leave the area, like things were occurring, but mostly I think that’s what happened to The Promise Ring, we weren’t all just stepping forward for the first time ever, and we took a gigantic step sideways, and I think everyone was really excited about that gigantic step sideways.
Dan Didier: We got a Pro Tools recording system in our studio, and we just started experimenting and playing around and trying new things. We recorded some demos with Kristian Riley, who ended up recording [Maritime’s] We, The Vehicles. We did that, demoed that stuff, and then that also left a lot of time for experimentation as well recording with him on some of those songs. It just seemed like at the end of the sessions we had like six or so songs, and it seemed like three of them were ones that we really liked, and those were the ones that weren’t like “rock” or anything like that.
Josh Modell: The song choices and that sort of style for that record [Wood/Water] was kind of a reaction to, maybe not consciously, but “we’re not this emo rock band anymore. We’re a gentle, sensitive pop band that records a record with Stephen Street.”
Dan Didier: Growing up I was a huge, huge Morrissey fan… A lot of times we would ask him [Stephen Street] about Morrissey, and I remember one time I was like, “I heard he was really hard to be with, he would send cryptic postcards and shit like that to people, and I remember one time he sent somebody a card that just said ‘enough is too much,’ and that was sort of like his breakup, and the end of the relationship with that person.” He was like, “oh, yeah, that was me.”
Davey Von Bohlen: We recorded Wood/Water in England over two-and-a-half months and we were very certain how we wanted it to come out.
Norman Brannon: That record was so unfairly maligned. I don’t know if it was people didn’t want that record from The Promise Ring, that they wanted more “bop bop bops,” or what it was, but I feel like playing again in 2012 and with all of the music that’s happened since Wood/Water came out and kind of realizing that that record actually resonated in some way with the larger indie culture, whether people knew it or not, and if you listen to it now it sounds very contemporary.
Dan Didier: We recorded this record and it was the record that we all wanted to do; we’re all really psyched to have done because it means that we did it. But the problem was that we weren't good salesmen, we couldn’t sell it to anybody, ’cause we were playing to a crowd that didn't want to hear that at all, and we were frustrated.
Davey Von Bohlen: When we went out and made Wood/Water and played it, it just didn’t feel good, and not because people weren’t loving it like they had loved everything else we had done up to then. It just wasn’t fun. There wasn’t that connection that we’d always had, so it just wasn’t in that way, it just wasn’t at all pleasant.
Dan Didier: We also had to do a crazy whirlwind tour from the release of the album in April and then do a two-month tour—a month in the States and a month of Europe—because we had to fit in the release of the record, this tour, before Davey’s next surgery. So then that didn’t help, either. Things were starting to go off the rails and we were stuck on a bus together, so it’s like we’re too close, for too long, in this uncomfortable situation behind stage and on the bus.
Jeff Castelaz: They were at the Roosevelt Hotel here in L.A. for an overnight, and either Dan or Jason called me and asked me to come down to the hotel, and I remember not wanting to go—and I didn’t go, because I felt like I was gonna be walking into a very, very emotionally charged situation. I just felt like really fucked up around it. Sitting here today, I would do anything to drive back to that hotel and talk with them and whatever. If that was like the one night where things could have been saved.
What band members have told me since then is that—it was pretty much [that] the die was cast by that point. It was also the night that my wife and I learned that we were pregnant with our son Pablo, who you may or may not know lost his life to cancer in 2009. And so that’s probably why I want to cry when I’m talking about this, because it was such a deeply emotional night both at the time, and then historically in my life.
Davey Von Bohlen: You get older and you’d have enough conversations where it’s like, “I don’t want to grow up and be in Bad Religion.” We did that tour with them right around the same time, and it’s like, “I don’t want to be sort of doing the stuff that I did 15 years ago just to do it because it’s easy and people like it enough.” Not to throw them under the bus or whatever, but it’s like that’s something that I think we really wanted to make sure we didn’t become, like that thing where it’s like “it’s successful enough, we’ll just kind of do it and not really think about it much and it’ll just kind of keep going.” That’s just kind of not art, and it’s just not the way we wanted to be musicians, so, I think it was really easy at the end was just walk away from it at that point, you know?
Dan Didier: We played our last show, and then had two days in L.A. because we were going to do this tour and film a new video in L.A. Obviously the shoot got canceled and we just sat in L.A. for two days before our flight, and it’s just like so brutal, so we kind of had nothing to do except for Bright Eyes was playing a sold-out show.
Tim Edwards: I am pretty sure I just asked—begged—them to play [Flowerbooking’s 2005 anniversary show]. We wanted to have a celebration of a milestone for the agency and we raised a considerable amount of money for various charities from the proceeds from the shows and various auction items. TPR were a big part of Flowerbooking’s early years and I knew there would be a lot of excitement to see them again.
Josh Modell: That felt to me—and I’m sure to them and a lot of people—felt more like, oh, that’s the period at the end of the sentence that we would rather have then the sort of sputtering-out that was the last tour on Wood/Water, and then obviously for this tour, it’s that same four-piece of Jason, Davey, Dan, and Scott, who really did—Scott Schoenbeck, it’s not Scott Beschta—who did the, were the band that kind of people fell in love with.
Jeff Castelaz: I had been talking to them over the past three to five years about getting back together. There were a bunch of phone calls, conference calls, with Davey and Dan and Jason about getting back together. Davey’s like, “people love The Promise Ring, and people want to hear The Promise Ring again even if it’s just shows and there’s no new music.” And I think it was never a start, it was a lot of start to the conversation and then people would trail off, we never actually did anything about it.
Josh Modell: Well, I tried to get them to reunite to do A.V. Fest last year, so they were talking about it as early as then, and they were gonna do it, but it just didn't work out logistically, like they couldn’t get together to practice.
Davey Von Bohlen: Not long after we did the show in 2005, pretty consistently, ideas have come across our plate, like, one-off here, one-off there, this idea, and it just has never really, timing-wise, worked. We kind of set aside this time to sort of be, you know, if we’re gonna do this.
Jeff Castelaz: When they got back together this time, for real, I got a phone call from Danny saying, “hey, we’re gonna get back together and we want to put out some music and we’d like to have the music come out on Dangerbird.”
Paul Koob: I think it’s cool. It makes sense. I’ve hung out with Davey a little bit last summer when Cap’n Jazz did those reunion shows, I know like a lot of those guys are in a way different place than they were when The Promise Ring was around the first time, it’s gonna be a lot different with the dynamic, with dads in the band and people kind of living all over the place; Jason lives in Brooklyn. I think it’s a good idea and I think that kids are ready to hear that stuff again, and even if they didn’t hear it the first time, I think it’s gonna be a band that does pretty well.
