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FEATURE: AJJ says good luck, everybody

FEATURE: AJJ says good luck, everybody

An Interview with AJJ.

You can bet it's gonna be a bunch of bullshit … out in sweet 2020,” sings Sean Bonnette, lead singer of AJJ, on the final track of the band’s latest album.

When I point out his prescience, Sean, stuck in quarantine in his Tucson, Arizona home, grins and shrugs.

“Sorry.”

Sean Bonnette met Ben Gallaty his senior year of high school at a famed Phoenix coffee shop called the Willow House. Located where West McDowell Road met Third Avenue, the distinctive cafe, located in what had originally been a house built in 1903, was a hangout for local artists from the nineties through the early aughts, one where the haze of cigarette smoke mixed with the scent of coffee.

Sean was one of those local artists; in 2004, when he met Ben, he’d already been writing his own songs for a few years. He hung around the coffee shop but soon went from regular customer to employee, with Ben eventually becoming his manager.

The pair hit it off with their shared love of music. Sean had grown up, thanks to his mom, listening to the likes of the Beastie Boys, Dead Milkmen, and the Pixies, but also funk and R&B artists like Stevie Wonder and Chaka Khan. The rise of MTV introduced other influences like grunge and gangsta rap, and Simon & Garfunkel helped him get into folk. But it was listening to Violent Femmes, on the Grosse Point Blank soundtrack, that helped him think he could get into songwriting himself.

Ben had also worked at an iconic local record shop, Zia Record Exchange, in nearby Tempe, which helped open up his taste in music even further. (He’d grown up listening to classic sixties and seventies records, moving on to pop and punk in the nineties, before his taste started trending toward the increasingly obscure). Zia, which styled itself as the “last real record store,” was a quirky establishment with an in-house graphic designer and in-house carpenter that gave the local chain its unique look. Zia had a wall dedicated to showcasing local artists; eventually, they would stock the pair’s music too.

That was because bumping up to employee status at the Willow House also had its perks: Sean, who, since his junior year of high school had played open mics around town, put together the Willow House’s open mic night. He signed up himself and invited Ben, who’d just been gifted a bass guitar from his father, to play with him that night.

“It’s been smooth sailing ever since,” he says with a laugh.

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The pair form the core of AJJ; they bring in friends to round out songs. Their earliest recordings reflect a DIY folk-punk aesthetic mixing the intensity of Violent Femmes, the DIY aesthetic of grunge, and the blistering social commentary of the very best punk rock, together with a radical empathy all their own. Subsequent albums brought new sounds, like the Neutral Milk Hotel-influenced horns on People That Can Eat People Are the Luckiest People in the World (the title nods to a lesser-known Vonnegut work). More recent albums further expanded the band’s sound, while retaining their distinctive voice.

More than anything, though, the band’s music always allows for the possibility, and hope, of change. In one song, “People,” Sean declares “I have faith in my fellow man / And I only hope that he has faith in me.” On a 2014 track, “Kokopelli Face Tattoo,” he describes the hard work of striving for self-improvement:

Hey dude, I hate everything you do

But I’m trying really hard to not hate you

Hating you won’t make you suck any less.

(Whether the speaker is addressing someone else, or simply himself in the mirror, is left ambiguous).

It’s only natural, then, that the band itself would have changed over the years. Originally called Andrew Jackson Jihad, the band changed their name officially to AJJ four years ago. The band had outgrown the name; it seemed dated and carried too much baggage. But they ultimately weren’t defined by either the old name or the new one—it was always about Sean’s songs. Acerbic, dark—but ultimately holding out for the possibility of hope.

Last year, “I would try to write a song,” Sean says, “try to write something poetic or beautiful—all I could think of was this fucking orange motherfucker.”

It was like being haunted by a “demon,” he said, the inability to write about other topics—so he decided to exorcise it.

Sean came to Ben with a batch of new songs. “No Justice, No Peace, No Hope” repurposed a civil rights chant. “Normalization Blues” bemoans how we become inured to outrageous acts of division and atrocity. While AJJ has always been politically and socially aware in their songs, the album amounted to the most topical of the band’s career.

Together, Ben and Sean set out to work on the songs. Their earliest albums had been recorded at Audioconfusion, a storied Arizona recording studio in Mesa run by producer Jalipaz Nelson. Their two most recent albums had been  done at Elmwood Recording, in Dallas. But for their latest, they took a new approach.

“Me and Sean both live in Tucson now,” Ben says, “which is handy. We haven't lived in the same place in a long time.” They found a place where they could practice; it had the added benefit of a recording set-up. “Typically we use studio time—as the clock's ticking, you're just seeing the dollars ticking away as well, and kind of in a hurry to finish things up. Whereas on this record, we could just kind of take as much time as we want—explore an idea, take a song this way, take it the other way.”

It was a learning experience, as the pair bought new audio equipment, learning how to use it as they went, storing away the knowledge for future records. They showed some early mixes to Craig Schumacher, who ran the WaveLab Recording Studio in Tucson and taught music production at Scottsdale Community College. “Anything sound like shit?” they asked. He assured them nothing jumped out.

Bandmates Preston Bryant, Owen Evans, and Mark Glick—part of AJJ’s roster of studio and touring musicians—came down to record tracks for the album. Friends from around the country, recording on home studio equipment, added tracks as well. Jalipaz Nelson came back to prepare the final mix. And in January of this year, they released Good Luck Everybody into the world.

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These days, Sean Bonnette and Ben Gallaty, like the rest of us, are stuck at home. While we talk virtually, Ben’s young daughter bursts in and leans her face in close to the camera, curious about what her dad is up to. He’s taking the time to go back through some of his records; Sean has been streaming home performances to Instragram Live and posting them to Youtube.

Sean and Ben couldn’t have known how appropriate their latest album would wind up being for our present day reality. It’s a commentary on the Trump era, but also a message of hope in a time when it seems desperately needed. In the biblical Book of Job, the titular character, beset by sickness and pain, wishes for peace for everyone similarly afflicted:

There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest.

There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor.

The small and great are there; and the servant is free from his master.

In a kind of modern update, on the final track (“A Big Day for Grimley”) of the album, the band engages in a call and response:

Solitude for the stoic (Solitude for the stoic)

Mirth for the merry (Mirth for the merry)

A quiet room for the overwhelmed (A quiet room for the overwhelmed)

Arcades for the ADHD (Arcades for the ADHD)

Health for the sickly (Health for the sickly)

Coming at the end of the album, the next line (the “Grimley” in the title is Sean’s pet dog) takes on unexpected poignancy:

A big day for Grimley (A big day for Grimley).

The call and response creates a sense of community, of mutual support.

The irony, of course, lies in how the album was recorded: Sean laying down lead vocals, with friends from around the country sending in their own tracks. Together, apart.

In the final moments of the song, Sean sings, “Good luck, everybody.”

“Good luck, everybody,” the band replies.

Good luck, everybody. The voices fade out—distortion overtakes the music. End song.

Good luck, everybody.

ALBUM ANNOUNCEMENT: Evann McIntosh's "MOJO"

ALBUM ANNOUNCEMENT: Evann McIntosh's "MOJO"

SONG DEBUT: "Bad Ideas" - Childe

SONG DEBUT: "Bad Ideas" - Childe