The Menzingers are from Scranton, Pennsylvania, home of the American version of The Office and… well, that’s it.
They formed in the late 2000s, refugees from various Jersey pop-punk and ska bands, banded together to play the kind of melodic heartland punk you can base your whole life on. Many have.
The Menzingers are ‘The People’s Band’ in a time of high treason and moral bankruptcy, and they have a stellar eighth album, Everything I Ever Saw. Frontman Greg Barnett spills some beans.
What’s the new record about?
Changes. We’ve had divorces, marriages, babies since the last one. It’s about that.
Earnestness is an important part of your band. Is there anything that you are totally superficial about?
I don’t trust bands that wear shorts on stage. People paid to go see your show, you should not be wearing shorts on stage. Get dressed, please.
After twenty years in the punk rock trenches, what has there been more of in this band: vomit or blood?
Definitely vomit. We used to play a lot of really hot punk shows in the early days. We’d have a bucket backstage so we could take turns puking in it.
Do you have any running bits when you’re on tour?
I feel like bits are the only way to survive. It’s kind of stupid, but what we do is we purposely mispronounce things to, like, a bartender. We’ll say ‘moddello’ instead of ‘moddaylo’, and you constantly are mispronouncing things and you see how long it takes before somebody picks up on it, like, “What the hell are you saying?” It’s pretty fun.
Is there any place you’ve been to that you would like to never go again?
I’ll go anywhere. I’m just glad we don’t play in strip malls any more. We used to play these little towns where there was just, like, no culture. We ate at a lot of chain restaurants back then.
According to the internet, ‘menziger’ is German for ‘troubadour’. I’m sure the band have had a whole career of people guessing what the name means.
Yeah, you know, if I can go back in time and tell seventeen-year-old me that this is a pretty complicated band name and you’re going to be explaining it for the rest of your life, maybe I would have picked something a little bit more simple.
The funniest one to me is always, like, old people, because I think that people in their sixties, seventies, eighties, that kind of like fifties-type music, that’s what they think it is: ‘Men singers.’ Like, you know, Frank Sinatra. So you have to be like: “No, it’s this,” and they’re like: “Huh?” That’s probably the one that cracks me up the most.
What part of the album-making process is the most satisfying for you?
Finishing a song, finishing an album, to me that’s just such a high, because as a writer you exist in these things for so long. You’re constantly tweaking and changing and second-guessing, and then when you see it done and you’re satisfied, and it’s exactly how you pictured it in your head, that to me is such a great, great feeling. And like, I think it’s that feeling I chase all the time. I feel like I’m constantly writing, because I want that feeling again.
Everything I Ever Saw is out now via Epitaph Records.
