Last year, the Canadian punk band PUP released the fantastic The Unraveling of PUPTheBand, a concept album about that exact topic. Touching on themes of corporate influence in popular music and the absolute anguish of actually being in a band, it ironically is the most joyous music the band had released yet, sliding into the sounds of celebration rock (a sub-genre that the Japandroids’s masterpiece has lent its name to) to create the most joyous album ever about how being in a band sucks. After a long tour supporting the album, PUP has now teamed up with Torrance’s Joyce Manor for a co-headlining trek that will visit San Francisco March 11-12 at The Regency Ballroom. I caught up with Steve Sladowski, lead guitarist for PUP, to ask him about San Francisco, AI, and an awful lot about sports. Also, because he’s Canadian, I also started him off with a question about Geddy Lee of Rush.
Spinning Platters: I know that you’ve been on the road for nine months with this album, is that right?
Steve Sladowski: Oh, boy. Yeah, that sounds about right. I think we started in right around when the record came out in April and we finished in November, you know, with a little bit of time off here and there.
Spinning Platters: So I figure you’re sick of talking about it, so I’m going to try to ask you only questions you haven’t been asked before.
SS: Okay. Alright. Love it.
SP: First thing is you’re well aware that Geddy Lee is a huge, huge Blue Jays fan, right? And he used to route his tour so that he could go to Blue Jays games. I don’t know if you know this.
SS: I think I’ve read something about it.
SP: So I just happened to notice that you’re playing in Denver on the 7th and you have a day off on the 6th, and the Raptors are in Denver on the 6th. And I’m wondering, is that part of your plan?
SS: I did not know that the Raptors were in Denver the day before our gig in Denver. Now I have to look, we are coming from Tulsa, OK. On the 5th, so I wonder if we can make it, but yes, it would be, funnily enough, it would, if, if we can make it. And it’s not part of my plan now, or it wasn’t part of my plan until about 30 seconds ago, and now maybe it is. So thank you for the intel.
SP: You’re welcome.
SS: It would be my second time seeing the Raptors in Denver. We were there once on a tour ages and ages and ages ago. And the Raptors were playing and a friend was able to come through with a pair of tickets, and we went to the game and I had to leave. It was an overtime game, and I ended up missing overtime because I was like — I won’t get back to the venue in for us to play if I stayed for the end of the game, so I basically left the arena and walked on the stage, which is was cutting it close, but was worth it.
(Editor’s note: Click for the PUP setlist from that same night.)
SP: I, I know that Paige McConnell of Phish, he’s the piano player, he’s such a big baseball fan that he will play the piano while watching games on his phone.
SS: I’ve done that before.
SP: You’ve done that before?
SS: Is that your question? I have.
SP: It wasn’t my question, but that’s great that you have, you’re a true sicko.
SS: Yeah, I am. Absolutely. In 2017, when the Blue Jays were in the American League Championship Series, we played a show in Kingston, Ontario, the former capital of the country and now just a very picturesque college town. I had the game on while we were playing. Yep.
SP: So do you have (NBA) League Pass and just watch the games in the van constantly?
SS: Oh yeah, definitely. I think something I realized in spending a lot of time on the road, as music became more and more the focal point of my working life in a great way, like, it’s the career that I’ve always wanted — I have no regrets whatsoever. But realizing that flip had switched, where music was a a passion project primarily and then something that I thought about as a career secondarily, and then when the career element became more in the forefront, I realized it’s important to still have hobbies and passion projects that aren’t necessarily connected to your work.
And I think that made me reconcile sports fandom in a way that I didn’t think — I studied music at school and thought that to be a serious artist and musician, you weren’t allowed to like baseball and stuff. Which is obviously — it’s totally ridiculous. But that was something that I think was a useful way of engaging with people in new cities, a great way, just wearing a (Toronto) Blue Jay hat was like — people wanna stop and talk about baseball sometimes.
SP: Yeah. I I know that’s right because even in the music writer world, people are always surprised when I’m a sports fan.
SS: It’s strange, isn’t it?
SP: Absolutely.
SS: So I think that leads into, then, in order to keep yourself creatively interested in a second run of the same mountain you have to find distractions. I think it’s important to always have a good balance.
One of the benefits of the touring schedule that we have is that we’ve also been able to do it a little bit more comfortably in recent years. We’re on a tour bus more often than not, not always, but more often than not.
And so that allows you to get to the city overnight and arrive in the morning and you get to walk around and it’s a lot easier to go to record stores, or if there are sporting events on days off, you get to check out a sporting event or just go and check out a local restaurant or get a coffee or if it’s an evening you can go to a bar and just get to know a city a little bit more like a tourist, which is something that I didn’t actually consider in the early days when we were touring.
And now it’s actually something that I really appreciate about the life and the demands of the job, that I really try to force myself out of bed even when I’m exhausted, because of the mechanics of touring.
SP: As this is clearly not your first time to San Francisco, do you have any favorite spots here?
SS: I love checking out the record stores. And I’ve always loved being in the mission and I love burritos. Obviously that’s a big thing. You know, my fiance and I had an awesome dinner in San Francisco last year and I’m trying to remember the name of the restaurant. It was very fancy and our manager helped us out. And I can’t remember what it was called!
SP: If it comes to you before we’re done, let me know.
SS: I’m looking through my email now. Progress is what it was called.
SP: Oh, okay. I have not been there.
SS: Yeah, it was, it was cool. But yeah, you know, I mean obviously like,
I think San Francisco is a really amazing place. I think there are also a lot of really important community organizers — people who are on the front lines fighting for the sorts of things that people in all large cities do, when they have forward thinking aspirations and ideals. You know, that’s something that’s inspiring about San Francisco too, is the spirit of resisting and looking out for the benefits of poor and working class people in the Bay Area. I think that’s a really cool thing to learn about San Francisco that stands a little bit in opposition to some of the utopian kind of tech things that obviously it’s quite well known for as well.
SP: Well, we’re in a challenging time because the tech jobs are starting to go away, big job cuts, and remote working has emptied downtown. And the mayor has come out recently to say it’s never coming back. The downtown that you know is never coming back. And I think that there’s gonna be really another shift back toward the artistic, hedonist side of San Francisco. So I’m looking forward to that.
SS: Yeah, I hope so. I think of our experience in San Francisco. The first time we ever played in San Francisco, we played right in Haight Ashbury, and you know, we’ve been able to play at Bottom of the Hill. We’ve been able to play at the Warfield. We’ve played a lot of really legendary venues. And, and it does still feel like that spirit is there, no matter how it feels like some of these forces of capital try to extinguish it. And in Oakland as well and in all parts of the Bay Area, I think it’s inspiring and you feel the energy and that lasting kind of impact, City Lights bookstore, for example. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s just always nice to be here, and we get to spend two nights, so it’ll be nice to actually get to walk around, and kind of hang out for a little bit longer than we usually would.
SP: I’ve listened to your album from when it came out, and there’s the song Robot Writes a Love Song, which as you know, it’s expressed as if a robot had written a love song. And in the interim, in the year since that’s been out, now we have robots online like Chat GPT that you could actually say to it, could you write me a love song as if it were a PUP song? You could do that and see what comes out. I haven’t tried that myself, but I’m just wondering if you have any comments on what AI might do to music and lyrics.
SS: You know, there are people who I think are a little bit smarter than me who’ve talked a lot about this.
There’s an academic in the music and tech sphere that I really like a lot. His name is Max Alper, but he goes by the name La_Meme_Young. And he’s talked a lot about how the thing that is most concerning about AI in terms of a creative and art perspective is that it’s just gonna get co-opted for the the least interesting kind of creative avenues because it’ll be about monetizing things.
And we’ve already seen a little bit of that with major labels trying to sign these avatar rappers and then quickly dropping them, like they get milkshake ducked or whatever. It’s funny that you asked this today, there’s a Keanu Reeves snippet where he talked about AI art kind of being on the front lines of a social question that we need to ask, ask ourselves about what is real and what isn’t, and how we value what is real and what isn’t. And, and I think that’s sort of the thing that we’re gonna end up needing to wrestle with as creators.
In the case of our band, the necessarily kind of wordy and imperfect nature of live performance is where we’ve always thrived and what we’ve always loved about being in a band is that you could be playing in front of a thousand people and if your microphone gets unplugged, your microphone got unplugged. And like, rather than that being kind of a negative thing, the night to night variance of what could happen is something that you should embrace. And I think through AI, that kind of essential humanity and the appreciation of fallibility doesn’t go away completely, but I think it’s the kind of thing that gets deprioritized in a way that, at least to me ,feels like should be considered before fully embracing what I think has pretty wide and fascinating creative potential.
SP: Before we wrap up, I’d like to ask you to tell us about something you’re listening to that you’d like more people to know about something that you’re into that you don’t think people are paying enough attention to this.
SS: There’s a Texas based ambient electronic musician named Claire Rousay whose work I discovered during the pandemic. And I’m just so fascinated by her process and the results. She basically runs Zoom recorders in her home and in her personal space and in other spaces as well. And then takes whatever interesting tidbits of daily recorded life she has and then integrates them into these expansive soundscape kind of ambient music textures. And I’m so fascinated by it.
My fiance and I were listening to a 20-minute composition of hers last night while we were making dinner. And it kind of feels like you’re in a movie a little bit and it does just feel like you’re listening to your own environment, but in like a very musical and just fantastical kind of way. I’ve just not really experienced anything like it, and it’s been really fun. She has a massive back catalog on Bandcamp and on all the streaming services. And I’ve bought a couple of her records. It’s been cool to just dig through it. And she’s funny online and she’s another one of those people who I think also is not afraid to say that she likes basketball. So there’s a lot that I’ve admired from afar.
Thanks so much to Steve for spending some time with us. PUP plays at The Regency Ballroom along with Joyce Manor and Pool Kids. Saturday’s show is sold out, but tickets are still available for Sunday at the time of posting.
This interview was edited for clarity.