[Transcript is the direct interview]
Algernon Cadwallader — Interview Transcript (Edited for clarity) ________________________________________

PETER: Halfway to Holland ended — I think we did a little more touring after, still playing together but having to come together on weekends. I don't know what year it was that we kind of fell apart. It sort of fizzled out. At one point we were just like, "Alright, no more of this band — we're doing other bands."

JOE: That sounds about right. I think we were all just playing in a lot of bands, and bands were coming and going.

PETER: And it just felt like it was time for that one to go.

COLIN: Yeah — or maybe not forever, though.

JOE: Not that we weren't going to ever play together again, but —

COLIN: Yeah. I feel like I remember thinking — and we had those bummer recordings, too, which was a downer.

PETER: That's a good point. We were writing a whole new record and recorded it with someone in Brooklyn who we thought was going to be a perfect fit — someone we were excited to hang out with, in this cool warehouse studio. It was a great experience, but then he totally ghosted us before it was done and sent us these awful mixes. Some of the Halfway to Holland stuff you hear on YouTube — those are not mixes we wanted. Vocals and guitars aren't even lined up with each other. It's just a mess. He refused to continue and just handed us that as a finished product. That was a bummer. After that experience, and with us not being around each other all the time, we just laid it to rest for a while. But it wasn't too long before we got the itch to play together again. Was it 2004 or 2005 — that summer we started getting together and jamming on the new songs Colin and Joe were writing on guitar?

NICK: Our first jam as a full band was 2004. I think me, Joe, and Colin jammed in the fall of possibly 2003 at Echo Studios for the first time, and then we didn't do anything again until late winter — February or March of 2004.

COLIN: Yeah, that sounds right.

JOE: It felt like years at the time, but in retrospect it might have been just a two-year gap, at most.

COLIN: It really did feel like a long time.

JOE: And that band only lasted for a year. Then Peter was on tour and we texted him: "You're in our new band." He wrote back: "Okay."

NICK: And it took 40 minutes to text because it was the old keyboard — you had to hit a button 20 times to make it say "okay." ________________________________________

NICK: I was adjacent to the scene — I didn't really know them in the Halfway days. I'm from New Jersey, they were from Pennsylvania, so we had slightly different music scenes. But Halfway to Holland was one of my favorite bands when I was younger. They were unbelievable. I remember seeing them play and just feeling so humbled — 17, 18-year-olds playing with a level of musicianship I hadn't seen from anyone my age at the time. I listen back to those recordings all the time and still think they're amazing. One of my favorite pop punk records of that era, up there with Without a Plan. Halfway to Holland was great. Super underrated.

COLIN: I had no idea — I love Halfway. It's crazy. ________________________________________

PETER: You could say it started even at the end of Halfway, because musically our style was changing. Colin was on bass for Halfway and I was on guitar, so we can't do what each other does on the opposite instrument. But lyrically, we had one song where the lyrics actually became an Algernon song — totally different music, different song altogether, but that overlap was already there. The same way Halfway sounds the way it does is because we were listening to pop punk, hardcore, and 90s emo — the last of which we had just discovered during Halfway. You can still hear all of those things throughout Algernon. To me there are still hardcore backbones to songs, still pop punk riffs and vocal harmonies. And by the time Algernon started, we were already obsessed with 90s emo, so that took the main focus of our sound. But it carried over in a very natural way. We just wanted to write songs together, and they were going to sound like the stuff we listened to.

NICK: I think dynamically we've always been a punk band. We play like a punk band. I still think we play like we're 18 years old, and we write with the same mindset. We've gotten better at it, maybe, but —

COLIN: It's like those ages where you just get the most excited about music. It makes sense.

JOE: Can we just take a second to realize that Pete, Colin, and I are working our asses off up there — and Nick is just like, "Yeah, I'm just going to play what I would've played when I was 18."

COLIN: I know! I've spent years — every night —

JOE: I don't even practice. I just play the first beat that pops in my head that 18-year-old me would've played.

NICK: And every year he's got fewer drums up there too.

COLIN: Every year there's one less drum. I don't understand it.

NICK: I haven't played since we last played. I have to start again because we have shows coming up. But honestly, if we didn't have Nick on drums, it would just sound like a bunch of stupid stuff. Nick holds it down every time. ________________________________________

PETER: We are a band that practices almost exclusively in basements. We haven't played a basement show in a long time, but I'd say 95% of our practicing, when we're getting ready for shows, is in someone's basement. It feels like the perfect spot. Getting prepared for shows in that atmosphere puts you in the right mindset. That's also just how I hear music best — it was ingrained in me from discovering so much music in houses. When we practice in a proper space with whatever PA and monitors they have, it's always hard. Then we go into any basement and all of a sudden I'm like, "There's that sound. Now I can feel it." That's our core sound.

COLIN: The first go-around, I think I only played Algernon shows in basements. Up until recently I don't think I'd ever played an Algernon show that wasn't in a basement. Well, maybe — there was that one with Up Up Down Down —

NICK: Definitely a majority for sure.

COLIN: Are basements even an East Coast thing? Like a water level issue? Or maybe not just East Coast —

PETER: A little bit. East Coast, Midwest — but West Coast, California doesn't have a ton of basements.

COLIN: They still do living room shows there though, right?

PETER: Yeah, here in Portland there's a pretty good house show scene. Philly always has tons — always changing. I've seen a lot bigger shows at cafes and more commercial-type places lately too, which is cool. And outdoor shows — those are always really fun. In Philly, people play at FDR Skate Park and Grays Ferry Park. We threw a couple of shows for Dogs on Acid at Graffiti Pier — an old abandoned pier. Well, half of it has caved into the river at this point. Outdoor shows have seen a bit of a rise, especially during the pandemic. The first show I went to after lockdown was under a highway bridge in Portland — plenty of space to spread out. There's also Anarchy Beach here, which does shows on the bank of the Willamette River. People get fire pits going and drag their gear onto the sand, which seems really annoying, but they do it. I love an impromptu venue. It keeps things exciting.

JOE: Yeah, I think shows will always happen wherever there's an opportunity. If somebody thinks they can have a show somewhere, they always try — even if the cops come immediately. It's like weeds through a crack in the sidewalk: wherever there might be a space, people have a show there. I think it's sick.

COLIN: I saw a video of a grindcore band playing in a Subway. The sandwich place. They just set up and played.

NICK: I definitely think our whole music community growing up was built around making what we didn't have or have access to. Even before I met these guys, we were booking shows at VFW halls because we couldn't book at bars — but people were in bands and they wanted to play. And when we got a little older, I was in a band trying to make things happen, and the whole music economy fell out while labels and booking agents didn't know what to do with the internet and streaming yet. When I met these three — especially Peter — it really guided me into a DIY mindset. We don't have it? We make it. Basement shows, early touring, really early internet — there were cool communities and websites where you could find help booking tours. Book Your Own Life was a really good one. I think the people I know now who are really successful all came from that DIY punk community. You don't have it, you figure it out, you just do it. That was a big part of how we came up, and that torch will always be there.

COLIN: Hey, what were those little Halfway CDs we made? I just remembered — they were a weird shape, right? Tiny?

NICK: We were spray-painting CDs in Peter's mom's driveway, doing all the packaging ourselves, silkscreening — washing screens out in my mom's bathtub, ruining the tile. We just wanted to do it more than anything, so we did it. And it's led to careers. I'm a graphic designer because I had to make T-shirts for my band in 10th grade, because no one else could do it. I figured out how to do it. I still have that shirt. It's really funny.

COLIN: McDougle! That's pretty McDougle.

NICK: It was named after the most New Jersey pop punk thing ever — the bass player's manager at KFC. It was a bad band. Oh god. ________________________________________

PETER: Everything in life except music is just trying to survive — paying rent, paying bills. I appreciate a good struggle; there's a silver lining to it. It makes you appreciate things that come easily more. I try to focus on those things. If I don't know what I want to do, I think about what I definitely don't want to do, avoid those, and eventually find my way toward my path. Playing music with these guys — I feel very lucky to be doing that again. Doing the parts of life that rule, and really trying not to give any more time to the bullshit parts than are completely necessary to survive. Lyrically, especially in those days, I made a conscious effort to write really broad lyrics that could be interpreted in whatever way the listener chooses — leave them open-ended. I guess I'm still that person. I like to say what I'm thinking, but not put words in other people's mouths. It's more of a feeling. A lot of the lyrics are probably confusing because they were intentionally confusing — that was definitely a conscious decision. Since we were writing all the music together as a group, I didn't want the lyrics to sound too personal or too directly from just me. The whole band was kind of the message.

COLIN: I always thought it was about that time we moved a piano down the street.

PETER: ...extremely literal.

COLIN: I thought it was very literal! Wait, which song?

PETER: Which piano are you joking about, Colin?

COLIN: We did move one piano, didn't we? It was down the street — it was free and we were like, "Oh!" I very much remember this. Although maybe I'm wrong. We probably took a lot of free pianos for some reason and then couldn't get them in the house.

PETER: "Big Brother" — who's that about? Probably leaders of the country, politicians. That song was actually one of the more straightforward ones on the record, even if it sounds a little silly. It was based on this book I was reading called Horror — I thought it was about cinematic horror, like Wolfman, Frankenstein, Dracula. And then right in the middle there's a chapter about American slavery. I was like, What? Why is this in here? It was comparing slavery in America to all the horrors in American cinema. The chapter before is about Dracula, the chapter after is about Wolfman, and right in the middle is this chapter saying: here are the real horrors of them all. So the "baby brothers" of American history were supposed to be those other horror genre characters — which would make the "big brothers" the worst of it: white supremacist Americans. ________________________________________

PETER: We didn't have a real website back then, and we thought it'd be cool to have some kind of online presence. There was a lot of cool stuff going on Blogspot at that time — great music blogs, a lot of bands using Blogspot as their main website because you could share real information. More than just "click here for tour dates" — you actually got real insight into what was happening. It was basically a zine on the internet. We started it just to let people know about tours, and then it became a place to journal what happened on tour. I'm very bad at journaling outside of that — it's something I always wish I did more of. Back around that time I was the best at it. I'd keep a little journal, even an illustrated one where I'd just draw people instead of writing. It's amazing — I look at it and can totally remember being there, and other details come flooding back. I wish I'd done it way more. But I'm glad I threw those words down while things were happening.

COLIN: I love looking at your doodle journals. I can tell what they're about — I'll see one thing and all the other details come rushing back.

PETER: Yeah — it's like little timestamps on your memory. All these things that stick around a little bit longer than you do. ________________________________________

PETER: At that time we'd recorded the record in a couple of different spaces — a giant church and a few others — but most of it was being mixed and overdubbed at the warehouse we were living in, Big Mama's Warehouse in North Philly. Joe and I lived there, and the studio was there too, so there was no cap on our time. We could just keep working on it forever. And that's what happened. When you're too close to something, you can't make out the whole picture — you're only looking at the little details. I remember coming close to the end still going, "We need to do this, and this, and this." And then towards the end, it was almost like giving up. It's hard to actually remember exactly what it was like because there were a lot of sleepless creative nights at that warehouse in general. Joe was definitely driving the ship — behind the controls, mixing, putting the finishing touches on everything. At some point I kind of got lost in the water. But I was satisfied and happy with what we'd made.

JOE: I remember the very end clearly. There were nights in a row of recutting things last second — recording an egg shaker through a laptop speaker while the album was being mastered, recutting the guitar solo for the opening of "Cruising" an hour before mastering. We got it mastered by our friend Ryan Schwab. The three of us went out to an all-night diner just like, "What just happened?" Then we went back to the warehouse and blasted it at three in the morning through the monitors, out in the garage part, maybe smoking a cigarette or a joint, listening. I remember we looked at each other and said, "This is good, but we can do better next time." And we never got to do that. Maybe we will. But that was how we left it.

PETER: I completely forgot all of that. Thank you for reminding me. That's the actual ending.

JOE: And then the next day we stayed up all day printing T-shirts and went on tour.

COLIN: I saw something online — is it true there was a third record that was recorded and never released?

PETER: That might be referencing the fact that This Parrot Flies was recorded twice. We recorded once — didn't totally finish it, never put vocals on — but we recorded all the music and then said, "We can do better." So we started all over.

JOE: We actually picked songs from each session. The first time was all to tape into a click; the second time was in a different space, into the computer, no click. The more mid-tempo songs are from the tape sessions — warmer, fatter. Songs like "Pitfall" and the more aggressive ones are from the digital sessions. ________________________________________

PETER: We were just ending our tour — I thought it was around the 16th or something. It was the end of our tour with Joyce Manor. We found out on tour that Tank was going to be a dad, and he decided on tour that he was going to quit the band after it wrapped. We were like, "Totally respect that — congratulations." And by the end of the tour, me and Joe had come to the decision that we weren't going to find a third drummer. We were just going to start something else. So we knew, the whole second half of that tour, that those were going to be our last shows. The very last show was in Washington DC. The show before was Philadelphia — we didn't quite get to end in our hometown, which at the time I remember wishing. But we did announce on stage in Philly that it was our second-to-last show. All the shows on that tour were amazing — totally packed, totally insane. It felt pretty big. At the time it was really heavy, knowing it was the last time we'd be playing those songs. I remember feeling a little out of it — tunnel vision, like standing behind myself watching. "I can't believe this is going to be the end of this band." We'd been a band for seven years, which felt like a lifetime. It was just really important to us. I remember feeling really grateful, but also just — heavy. I did feel a little sad. I don't know if I knew exactly why. I was just feeling this really heavy emotion, and I can still kind of get the feeling of that show when I see pictures and video from it.

JOE: I think you said a lot of how I was feeling too. I remember sort of watching myself play some of those songs for the last time at the Black Cat — mid-riff. We were tight, too, so it was extra fun. I wasn't anxious about hitting every note. We'd been on the road for a minute, we were playing really well, people were loving it, and I could remove myself a little. Like: Oh, this is the last time I'm going to play this part. Oh, this is the last time I'm going to play this part.

NICK: I was actually at the Philly show, I think — and at the Brooklyn show for sure. I remember Tank came up to me outside and said, "I'm leaving the band — I want you to play drums in it." At that point I didn't feel as connected to it and I didn't really want to. And I remember mid-song, he tried to drag me up on stage to play. I actually had a panic attack and just walked out. I was so anxious — no way. I think Pete and I had started doing that band with Barclay around that time, so you and I were jamming again, which was cool. It was nice to be back in the circle. But I wasn't ready to be in Algernon again. It stressed me out. ________________________________________

PETER: When you're doing something collaboratively with friends — creative stuff, constantly pushing each other — I think that's what life is all about. That's when people really age, when they forget what life is about and fall into the routines of making money and paying bills. Being in bands keeps you young.

JOE: From a simpler standpoint — it's just nice to have something to look forward to. We don't do a lot as a band together, but when we do, it's a lot of fun. At least I get to do this next month, you know?

COLIN: And muscle memory kicks in — all of a sudden it comes back. Still got it.

NICK: The older you get, the more you understand that saying — "youth is wasted on the young." You don't realize how special it is to see your friends every day until being an adult takes precedence over everything. There was a point where we just saw each other and made stuff and went on tour and could do whatever we wanted. We were happy being broke. We just did the thing. Now it's harder to do the thing. So when we get to see each other and do the thing, it's very special. ________________________________________

NICK [INTERVIEWER]: I just want to say — you guys pretty much define Midwest emo, in my opinion. You were my entry point into the genre. Seeing you guys live was legendary — it felt like going back in time, walking into those old live YouTube videos that used to push me to start my own band. The next day I found out you guys were playing in Toronto and I forced some band members to come with me just so they could see how good you were. We all skipped work and drove to Toronto just to catch you again. I broke my guitarist's glasses in the pit.

COLIN: There were tons of hats on stage that show, I remember.

NICK: I wanted to ask — your influence is pretty undeniable. What do you think of the landscape of emo now compared to when you started, knowing that you've influenced so much of it?

PETER: I don't know if my finger is totally on the pulse of what emo is doing right now. I know some of the more popular bands, but as far as what's going on in basements — where we came from — I'm not totally up on it. A lot of bands from our time and earlier are coming back, playing again, getting reissues, which is rad. Joe probably knows more of the current music — he records a lot.

JOE: I'm always delighted and surprised, especially getting to hang out with some of the next generation of kids coming up. There are still tons of house shows happening. When they describe it, it sounds exactly how I remember it. When they show me videos, there's a bunch of kids going crazy — super hot, everybody sweating on each other. Maybe they're not holding as many drinks as they used to be, but yeah. Has it changed musically? Probably — it always does, there are always new twists. But I think it's wonderful.

COLIN: The guitar playing has gotten really good. They've really perfected a lot of that stuff.

NICK: They rip for sure. And I find that despite all the technical proficiency, they still have that raw punk ethos — at least in their execution and recording of it. They still have that imbalance, which is really cool.

PETER: The recordings from Japan especially — they always go after that punk production. I'm like, is that all they have access to, or is it totally an aesthetic decision? Because it's sick either way.

NICK: Honestly, I think even after they find the means for cleaner production, it's a conscious choice to stick with that more crushed, punk recording style.

COLIN: Yeah. I remember hearing that first Strokes album and thinking it sounded ancient — but that was totally the point.