Interview: R-NOT

1: How did you decide on the name, “R-NOT"?

Good question! It’s spelled R-NØT… the Ø will be important later in the story… 

R-NØT is a punky way of conveying R-Naught – the epidemiological reproduction rate for an infectious disease. Said more simply, Rø is the rate of viral spread aka “going viral.”  Yeah, Covid played a large part in putting a viral concept front and center. But R-Naught as it is printed, seemed too metal; and while I do love quite a few metal songs, I identify more with the ethos of punk. R-NOT could’ve worked nice as a double entendre: a) that it’s supposed to be r-naught and b) it’s a state of denial, as in, “we are not”.  But nobody would get it… so what to do? Having spent a lot of time in Russia and Scandinavia, it felt just punk enough to throw in a Danish “Ø” and be done with it.

Remember Covid? – when the whole world was on lock down? Maybe that’s a good place to start. With all that solitude, I had a lot of time to reflect on things that were important to me, things that I didn’t want to squander. Music was at the top of the list. 

I’ve always been the consummate songwriter – stockpiling sketches and full-blown song ideas since I was a kid. It’s a part of the brain I just can’t seem to switch off. God knows I’ve tried. 

When Subversive fell apart (another cool but long story), I sort of tried to move on. I got a “real job” and dove into the rat race with an office job. I immersed myself in that world, in relationships, in technology, in dinner and a movie, in books and videogames and tried to pretend that something wasn’t missing.

A few years into that, I got this crazy need to put my creativity to the test. I gave myself a song-a-day challenge. I would see if I could write and publish a new song each day to SoundCloud for a year.  

2: What advice would you give to someone who wants to be in a creative profession?

I’d hate to pretend like we can call what we are doing a profession… ask us again later when our advice might mean something.

I’ll go ahead and wax philosophical though.  I’ve always believed that you need skills to pay the bills but you also need something to feed the soul.  Those people lucky enough to do both as a profession, I stand in awe of.  Until the last century or so, folks had to ply their creative gifts in the service of actual work for hire. Many of the greats were certifiably insane and died broke.  This modern era where people gamble on fame and fortune as a likely positive outcome from their creativity might be mistaken.

I believe that everyone has some way in which they express their creativity. I also believe that less than 20% of people are truly driven by creativity – maybe even less.

Creativity is activated by a torment of constraints both real and perceived. Ever hear “Necessity is the mother of invention?” – you don’t put your creativity to work as much as it puts you to work.

So as far as advice for someone who wants to be in a creative profession – whatever it is you do, you can do it creatively. I know everyone looks at musicians, artists, and writers as “creatives”. To me, there is just “the box”. If you’re creative, the box is just a constraint. It has something to teach you but just can’t acquiesce to stay in it – that’s for everyone else. Even among the exalted “creative” professions, there are those who make a profession out of treading lightly and just repackaging the box. They might make a couple of bucks but did they leave their unique mark on the world?

3: Do you feel open minded about what you listen to? Do you like going out of your comfort zone?

Mike does. For me, the 5 greatest artists will never be topped – Dylan, Dylan, Dylan, Dylan, and DJ Dylan.

I feel the older we get, though, the more we pine for what truly moved us when we really came alive in this world, when music helped define who we would be as people.  That’s pretty heavy and not many of us put the kind of pressure to find new music that re-invents themselves. 

I’m an introvert but I do force myself to go out to shows and engage in the scene. I’m often surprised by what I find both good and bad but I’d like to say that I’m “open” to it all.

We tend to gravitate towards what we already like. The algorithms can recommend whatever they want. I’m not going to like new country. I’m not going to like technical death metal. But I do consider myself very eclectic, I just am a harsh judge.  You never know, you hear a song in a movie or a tv show, you weren’t expecting it but somehow it sticks – that’s being pretty open right? 

They say context is king. I think the context of how you experience new music greatly affects how you will receive it.

4: What outlets do you find out about music from? (Record stores, magazines, samplers, etc.)

Mike just spams our group chat with song links – I leave it to him.  We’ll grab him next go-round of interviews. 

5: What is your favorite format to listen to music on? (CD, Vinyl, etc.)

I like music on 3.5 floppy disk. Sometimes I’ll stand really close to the bathroom door while Chuck is showering and listen to him sing; that guy has the voice of an angel – does that count as a format?

6: How do you feel the internet has impacted the music business?

The traditional music business has been devastated by it.  On the other hand, there’s way more opportunity for content creators to get their music out there. 

As for making a living from the business of music… there’s a signal-to-noise problem nowadays. There’re millions of bands and 100s of millions of songs floating around out there. What deserves your attention and your money?  What makes 1 song more special and commercially viable than another? It’s all easy-come–easy-go.  I think the internet has fostered a much more passive music culture globally and that’s a bad thing. Why bother to geek out about a song, the world’s full of them.

7: Who was the first band/artist that became your favorite band?

The Beach Boys

8: If you could open a show for any artist, who would it be?

It’s a toss-up between The Wonders and Weird Al.

9: Do you have any hobbies outside of music?

I like to pick up shifts as a janitor at ivy league schools and solve math equations that I find written on blackboards.

10: How did you decide on the title, “Dumpster Fire"?

I’m sure there’s a really funny story about how the name came about but in the end all I remember is that we were throwing out potential album titles and concepts for a couple of weeks in early summer but nothing stuck. One day, Chuck was complaining about something and called it a total dumpster fire and the three of us all locked eyes and just knew that we had just found the album title we were looking for.

However, as flippant as the album title story sounds, there’s a real reason why it stuck and that’s because the overall theme of this album is a tragic running social commentary and Dumpster Fire encapsulated all of that.

11: What inspired you to create this album?

If you consider that we are sitting on 60 albums worth of content – it wasn’t so much as being inspired to create something, it was more an effort to a pair it down.  

2024 was the 30th anniversary of Green Day’s Dookie. While I wasn’t a 90s punk super fanboy, that album is inherently listenable.  It’s pretty easy to go door-to-door listening to every track on that album. So we wanted to release something really catchy and professional sounding – that was our intention.

An EP would’ve have made a lot more sense. Nobody makes full length albums anymore. Thanks to the rapidly shortening attention spans, the industry has made it a commercial priority for artists to release singles, carefully spaced apart, to maximize engagement and to not waterdown the financial prospect of earning revenue by saturating the market with your content.  And that right here was all the motivation we needed to release a full 12 song album.

We got to talking about releasing a full album this past year with the intent that it should illicit a lot of that energy and charm and just be something you find yourself listening track to track and thinking: “man this whole album is freaking solid”!

12: Where was this album recorded?

We recorded the album with Ben Green at Ivakota Studios in Washington D.C. That’s Ben’s studio.  We started out with locking in a great drum and room sound for the first 3 days of tracking and ended up knocking out the bass tracks as well.

We had such an amazing time working with Ben. He’s got a great bed-side manner and knows exactly how to pull performances out of a band that they themselves didn’t believe possible.

Guitars and lead vocals were tracked in my basement because he’s a weirdo but Ben really dug what he was cranking out, so we let him keep at it.  We showed up a few weeks later, as schedules would permit, to have Chuck lay down waves of backup vocals and sing some lead here or there.

By October, we were deep into mixing the album.  At every stage we just couldn’t get over how the album felt like it kept getting better and better – how is that even possible? Usually by the time you record an album you’ve played the song so much that you sometimes literally become ill hearing the same stuff over and over and over… 

We all live outside the city which gave us plenty of time, on the drive home, to vibe to the latest batch of song mixes.

13: What were you listening to while making this album?

Is this question supposed to draw out what some of the influences were behind the songs? Haha. Some songs are over 10 years old – written when I was under the influence of his song-a-day challenge, where he’d write, record and publish a new song online each day for a full year.  So who knows what was going through his head on any particular day. If he told you, I wouldn’t believe a word of it…

Mike and Chuck add their own flavor to a lot of my raw ingredients, so, there’s a lot of room for things we’re listening to make an impact. Like we were talking about earlier, Green Day’s Dookie album was an inspiration and the of course had an effect. I guess you could say we were listening to a lot of 90’s music while searching for a great drum sound, or bass tone, or guitar sound… Nirvana, NOFX, Pennywise.. stuff like that.

14: Who did the cover art for this album?

The truth? ChatGPT. After such a magical band moment when we came up with the album title, we wanted to get some comps together and work it out with an artist. While messing around with some AI sketching software, a variant dropped that made us all stop and say “damn!, that’s it!”.  We could’ve been posers and pawned it off as our own hard work. We could’ve asked a human artist to organically replicate the concept, but why? With an album full of tragic social commentary inspired by happenings of today juxtaposed with the cautionary tales from cyber punk novels – I can’t think of a better artist for the cover than an AI.

15: What is your favorite song on the album?

My favorite song is Cult Democracy. I think lyrics are incredibly important even if they are often overlooked. While not always the case, in this instance, I am satisfied with the lyrical content.