Three Home Runs and A Loss

Pkew Pkew Pkew's Mike Warne on new album 'Siiick Days,' new beginnings, working with Craig Finn, writing eulogies that double as fan anthems, friends trapped in the Capitol on Jan. 6 and more.

The first one was a 68 MPH curveball invitingly dangled over the plate. Bottom of the third, 1-2 count. Toronto Blue Jays catcher John Buck connected and hammered it over the left field fence.

An inning later, 1-0 count. Low and inside, 85 MPH, he pulls it over that same fence, high enough that it looked like it might clang against the Rogers Centre rafters. After going 3-0 down, the Blue Jays were now up 5-3.

Bottom of the sixth now, 2-2 count, one out, this time straight out to center (or centre, as they say in Toronto). It was one of those magical games that people remember forever. But unlike when Reggie Jackson did it in the 1977 World Series in front of a packed house, the Rogers Centre was far from full capacity that day. Just shy of 11,000 in the house.

But it's a game that always lived in Pkew Pkew Pkew bassist/vocalist Mike Warne's memory, as while Buck was smashing home runs (and driving in 5 RBI's), Warne was watching his grandfather pass away in a hospice facility.

He immortalized the moment on the aptly titled “The Night John Buck Hit Three Home Runs,” the final song on Pkew Pkew Pkew's upcoming album Siiick Days, out Friday, Sept. 22 on Stomp Records. It’s a quiet landing after nine songs that fit in a lot more with the Pkew Crew’s usual work – that is to say, loud, reckless, “beer soaked” as some other journalists would say, etc. (It’s also one of my two favorite songs about grandparents passing from this year, the other being Ratboys’ phenomenal “The Window.”)

But, Warne doesn’t want anyone feeling bad while they’re listening to this song, which is hard with lines like “We can’t stop you from dying, so we’ll just stop you from dying alone.”

"This isn't a sad song,” he says. “Don't be fooled. It's about watching baseball with my best pals for as long as life will allow."

Warne has always had a real knack for writing songs that connect with people, not necessarily through complex emotion or winding, poetic landscapes. He writes about the perils of skateboarding into your 20s, choosing to eat some pizza before you get too drunk and puke, the countless hours of van life that comes with being a touring musician, the mundane. They’re the stories of everyone, and hiding under the jokes about having to sell a PS4 to raise some money during the pandemic, or the beauty of hotel hot tubs are stories about the complexities of relationships, the insecurities of aging, the daily anxieties that chip at all of us.

On Siiick Days, the band enlisted a little bit of lyrical help from one of the best in the game, The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, arguably the premier narrative lyric writer in rock n’ roll, and his influence shows. Warne’s own songwriting took a noticeable jump, too. Still focusing on the complexities (and sometimes simplicity) of every day life, Warne sharpened his focus on the characters to add even more layers without having to use more words.

I caught up with Warne over the phone a few days before Siiick Days’ release to talk about the new album, lineup changes, feeling like a new band, friends being trapped during the Jan. 6 Riots, articulating loss and hope at the same time, and more.

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How are you feeling now that it’s release week?

Pretty good. It’s busy. Lots of stuff to do, lots of stuff to go wrong. I don’t know. It’s been a while I guess. But it’s feeling good.

You’re a few releases in now. Has your emotional state around releases changed over time?

Yeah, I guess. I think the more you do it, the more you know what you should do, and you have to, like, live with yourself for either doing all of the possible work you could do or not. So, it’s like, this has been the most busy one because I know the most stuff.

What do you mean by that?

We’re doing a listening party, we’re doing new merch, we’re doing all this – just the stuff you can do to support it. You learn more as you go. And we’ve definitely never done a listening party before. We definitely haven’t done our own promotional artwork before. Boosted posts or all the stuff that we’ve been learning as we go. So now we’re just really busy and there’s a lot less time to be excited.

Do you like doing that stuff, though?

I mean, I like it. I think I’d be good at doing it for someone else.

Let’s stay on that theme of doing things for other people. One of the things I wanted to talk about the most was how you guys enlisted Craig Finn from The Hold Steady to serve as a ‘lyrical consultant’ for this album. How did that working relationship come to be?

He’s always just kind of been ready to jump in and do that since he did Optimal Lifestyles and Open Bar with us. I always think of it like when you’re in school and your teacher says you can, like, hand something in early and get notes, and then hand it in again for real. And that’s just kind of how it feels to me. Why not run it by him? And he’s always been down to do it. It’s fun to work with him, too. He’s really good at it, which isn’t surprising. He’s good at getting you to think of new ideas and explain sort of how he works, which is cool.

What’s his editing process like? What are his methods to get that out of you? I want to know more about Craig Finn the teacher.

Kind of just asking questions, like, clarifying what you mean or talking about what the actual story is, and is it happening sequentially or what? It’s mostly just asking questions and clarifying, and then like, oh, it made sense in my mind. Doesn’t exactly translate to everyone else or his mind, so now we have to re-work this particular thing.

There’s definitely a lot on this album that does seem very narrative, as opposed to some of your songs that are more slice of life or stream of consciousness moments, like, ‘Let’s order pizza / I’ve gotta eat something before I throw up.’ There’s a lot more narrative structure and looking back on things, especially during the pandemic. What changed in your own process here that made you want to look backwards instead of the present like you have in the past?

I think the big thing for me is that I wanted to write songs, but I wasn’t going out and doing anything, and I’m not really good at making up stories. So it kind of just has to be stuff that’s happened.

Did Craig ever try to get fiction out of you?

No. I don’t think I could. It’s funny, cause that’s what’s great to work with him – I don’t even want to write like him. I appreciate how he’s maybe one of the best in the world at it, but it’s not my thing. But, like, it’s cool to have that in the mix and maybe move towards it eventually. But right now it hasn’t worked out that I can do that.

He’s sort of the unofficial fifth member of the band then. The Wizard of Oz sort of.

Yeah, kind of. He’s always down to do it, so it’s a no-brainer. Why not send him lyrics? There’s definitely stuff where we go to practice it and I’ll be singing, and I’ll be singing my original lyrics, and everyone’s like, ‘That’s not what you recorded.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, damn, I have to learn lyrics.’

There are a few other shakeups for the band, with [guitarist] Ryan McKinley leaving the band. Was he in the recording process for this or did he leave prior?

He was kind of always on his way out, just because he moved and doesn’t love touring anymore. So we kind of figured he wouldn’t be around for touring. But he was there for the album, and he’ll probably be there for the next ones, too. It’s a touring thing for him.

So you guys still have that collective that’s largely the same. Does it feel like a bit of a rebirth moment for the band, though, coming out with this album with a bit of a new look?

Yeah, our new member, Kate, is really cool to play with because we’ve never had keys in the band before. And having her voice in the gang vocals is really cool. It’s really energetic and refreshing. All the high parts that we were fighting over, like, ‘Who’s going to sing that? We can record that, but we can’t sing it every night.’ It’s totally easy for her to do. It’s been really fun to kind of become a new band now. I’m playing bass now and Emmett’s playing guitar, so like, we’re a new band at this point.

Was that a hard adjustment?

To learn bass?

Not necessarily to learn bass, but just taking on that new role and having a new look for the band.

It’s fun, right? You’ve just been doing it for so long that it’s fun to do something that’s totally different, but also exactly the same. It was challenging for me to learn to play bass and sing at the same time, but at the same time it’s like, I already know all of these songs perfectly, now I’m going to play something differently in them. So it was cool.

Maybe I’m just projecting my own fear of change onto you. I would’ve freaked out about it.

I think years ago I would’ve freaked out about it, but have gotten past the point where, no, change is good now. It’s been really fun, too. I don’t know if I ever really loved playing guitar. I think I played guitar so I could write songs. And I love playing bass now. I play all the time. It’s great.

So you recorded this in Asbury Park with Pete Steinkopf from Bouncing Souls. What was that like working in Jersey as a Toronto band?

It was expensive to be alive. Pete’s from there, that’s our producer from Bouncing Souls. Obviously we want to go where he is and do the whole thing that he does, you know? It was cool. We worked out of the Lake House I think it’s called above Russo’s Music, and then we worked out of Pete’s house, and then we worked out of the place where the Bouncing Souls practice and had another little studio there. It was really cool. Some people put us up for the whole time we worked there and we had never met them before, and they were awesome. I think it was like 10 days.

That seems pretty quick.

It’s way quicker than we’ve ever done it before. I think that’s why we were so happy about it.

You like working fast?

Yeah. Yeah. With Pete we work 9 to 5 every day, and we were done at 5 every day. We were on our way home. And we finished everything right on time. Everybody just works better when we work fast.

You think about a punk band and don’t necessarily think of an efficient 9-5 schedule.

It’s fun to hang out and stuff, but I don’t know. All of our other albums have taken months. And it’s like, to do this one so quick, because we have to, right? Every day we’re paying to be alive there. On top of the studio you have buying three meals a day for four guys. We were just really, really well-prepared for it because we knew we had to be. And then we still like budgeted time in there to play around and try new things. But it was part of the time timetables. Here’s where we can try some weird stuff.

Do you think you just learned to be more efficient over your careers and be prepared more?

I think with Pete we learned it, but we had the desire to learn it going into it. Everybody was confident in the plan, but we’d just never done it before. That was not really a worry, because we want to work fast, we were ready for it, but we just hadn’t done it before. We all got what we wanted, and at the end of the day we’d go home, and it’s like 5:30 and we’re making dinner, and we’re talking about what went good and what went bad today and what’s left to do.

Did you have most of it written before you got there or did you have a lot to work out in Jersey?

The ‘Johan’ song, we left, like, We’ll write it in the studio, but we know how it’s supposed to be. But everything else was written before.

Can you tell me a little bit about that song? When I was listening to the album, that was one I couldn’t grasp exactly what it was about fully, and I think it’s a real standout song on the album sonically, too.

Yeah. On January 6th when the Capitol building was getting raided, I saw that come on the news and I was like, I wonder if my friend is in there? Cause my friend Johan works for like the Congressman of California or something. And so I texted him, like, 'Are you in there?’ And he’s like, ‘Yep, I’m under a desk. We’re going to be here for a while,’ basically. We were talking a bit, and I was like, ‘Let me know when you’re home and all that.’ And later he just sent me a text that’s like the lyrics to the song.

How’d you land on the dreamy trumpet in the background of that? It’s almost like a bridge song between songs.

That was sort of the idea. Emmett plays trumpet, so we’ve kind of been trying to put it on as much as we can lately. And then Ryan’s really into drum machines and synth stuff, and so am I, so it was fun to work on.

I do want to talk about the album closer, “The Night John Buck Hit Three Home Runs,” because I think that’s a real standout. You’ve made it pretty clear this is about night your grandfather passed away. I think it’s a really touching song. How did you land on this particular way to tell the story and eulogize him in a way?

It’s kind of an old song. I’ve had it kind of kicking around for a while, and it was kind of time to get it out. I guess the thought was whether it was a Pkew song or should I just put that out myself or something. The only real thought was that we had never done anything like that before, and I think this album kind of sounds new for us, so why don’t we just keep doing new stuff and try to put an acoustic song on?

I think the one thing you said when it came out was that it sounds sad, and obviously it does sound like a sad song, but it’s a happy song to you. How did you tap into that feeling you’re describing of making a happy song out of a very sad time?

Yeah. He was, like, almost 100 years old. So, it’s sad, but it’s not tragic, and like, you’re going to hope for something better than that really? That’s pretty good. And just that night, I’m hanging out with my grandma and we’re watching baseball, but we’re also at a hospice, and it’s just a nice distraction. And it’s funny that it feels like it’s OK to be distracted by something like that, but it worked.

It’s also funny – I don’t know if ‘funny’ is the right word, but I’ll use it for lack of a better one – that the refrain is ‘Go Blue Jays,’ which is just such a carefree thing you just yell at something frivolous like a baseball game. But it carries so much weight in the moment in the context of the song.

I think that was maybe my way of getting away from the too-heavy part of it. It’s funny how sports work their way into life. I sent it to John Buck, and he was like, ‘This song is dope.’

How did you get it to John Buck?

I just sent it to him on Instagram. The first sentence was ‘I wrote a song about you.’

Obviously it’s a lot deeper than that. So you buried the lede a little.

I figured that was my chance.

To wrap things up here, did that guy you referenced in ‘The Dumbest Thing I Ever Done’ ever sell you your Playstation back?

No. No, I still don’t have one. I’m currently borrowing one from someone, but I still don’t have one.

Damn.

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Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Golden Apples.