Photo:Brian Kelleher

Here it is finally. Paddy Costello, bass player for the best punk band on the planet, Dillinger Four, shedding some light on the band’s new record C I V I L W A R, which is easily the most anticipated punk record of 2007.

Let me just introduce this interview with a few notes. I had previously talked to Paddy about two weeks prior to this conversation but my recorder fucked up and I ended up losing most of the interview (except my questions, naturally). A big thank you goes out to Jason and Vanessa from Fat Wreck for helping out again and to Paddy for willing to talk to my ass for another hour.

After a few minutes of rambling about how Motorola Razrs phones do not work properly, how sick he was last time we talked, putting together a hotdog eating competition at the Triple Rock and the dynamics of the Wing Bowl in Philadelphia, we began. Enjoy.

Paddy Costello-Did you see the competition where they had the hotdog eating contest between a man and a bear?
No
Yeah, I saw it on TV. I was bartending one day and they showed it on ESPN or something. It was this big ol’ brown bear and man sitting there. Obviously the bear won like a motherfucker.

I wonder who came up with that idea; “We should have a competition between a man and a bear eating hotdogs.”
I just couldn’t believe there was a man who took him up on it. Like who the fuck is going to be the dude who is like “oh dude, absolutely. I can eat more hotdogs then a bear.” What the fuck?

So, the new album. Do you guys have a specific release date in mind for it or are you just aiming for the Spring?
We’re aiming for the Spring but we’re not being that vague just because of concerns of when the record’s ready. It’s more to do with when we want to tour. Right now it’s more that Lane’s having a baby and Billy might be selling his house. Just all sorts of crazy shit like that. We’re waiting to see when would be the best time that we could leave for two and half months. It’s a domino effect.
Actually to tell you the truth, that’s all bullshit anyway. We like having secrets. We like kind of being almost a secret society. In this day and age, music’s lost its magic. Thanks to things like the Internet and the over-abundance of music magazines and fanzines, the world’s gotten so small that we like to have a little mystery. We think that’s what underground music is missing is mystery.

Keeping people on their toes
Exactly. You don’t want them to know too much. In fact, we aren’t even going to announce the new record is out until two months after it comes out and we are only going to press it up on vinyl.

You’re going to pull an Axl Rose and release it one week and it will finally be out.
We were just talking about that last night. We’re playing that Guns N’ Roses rule. The way we look at it is like yeah, it’s been four years since the last record, but that means we still get fucking nine years before people start yelling at us. We’re coming up with one song every sixteen months. It’s going to be amazing.

And some punk band will take C I V I L W A R as an album title and mock you guys and say they are going to put it out first.
Although, actually I’ve had numerous people tell me that apparently Civil War is the title of a really big comic book right now.

Oh, really?
Yeah, so I am kind of investigating that right now because it seems like that’s annoying certain people. [We’re] probably going to change the title again. Pretty good! Get some mystery!
I’ve talked to people who are annoyed that we named it after the comic book. Not that I’ve ever read it.

I don’t know much about that world but I guess they would get annoyed if an album took that title away from them.
Yeah, they’ve got their own cult too. Actually, we’ll just make the record, it’ll be a theme record about the comic book Civil War. Like an accompany piece. You know how you can listen to the radio while watching the game on TV? We’re going to write a record you can listen to over and over again while you read the comic book called Civil War.

That’d be kind of amazing.
The other idea was also that we don’t put out a new record at all. We go out on tour and do civil war reenactments and then tell everybody that’s what we meant in the first place. Be like “a new record? You kidding me? We quit playing instruments years ago. If we still played instruments, we would have put out a record in 2004.” That might ruffle some feathers.

(Laughter) Yeah, that’d probably get some people a little pissed off. Do these conversations keep coming up with people in your inner circle?
Mostly like, buddies of ours that don’t live here. All of our homies that live here know that we’re practicing. It’s coming along but the other thing too is that everybody that lives up here, for example, they know I went on tour for a long time. They know I’ve been playing with The Arrivals and the Fuck Yeahs. Lane has this other band called Spankray that he does too. Obviously everybody sees Erik and Billy at the Triple Rock every day because they work every day. Most people around here know that we’ve had other stuff we’ve been up to. The year that Situationist Comedy came out, we weren’t here at all. We toured pretty constantly before that. I think everybody kind of knew we’d chill a bit after that.

Have you been frustrated or annoyed at all with the delays?
I wouldn’t say I was annoyed. There was definitely one little period there maybe a year and a half ago where I get really uppity. Like “What’s going on here?” but that was right at the point when I just started playing in a bunch of other bands. Actually, it was exactly the period of time where I started playing with Sean Na Na again, which, obviously, is a side project thing anyway. Nonetheless, I realized when we started getting the Sean Na Na album done, I was like “Fuck, what are we doing? We really got to get this D4 record done.” It’s kind of like when we just sit down and go “ok, fuck this, we’re going to finish the record right now.” We’re all like “yeah, yeah, it’s going to be done right now!” Everything we started writing then was kind of crappy. We almost kind of felt the stress of “the record had to be done now.” We all just went out for drinks and were like “What are we doing? Why do we even care this much?” Everybody is yelling at us to get our new record out but fuck it, if we don’t have a new record ready, there’s no point in rushing it. Once it’s out there’s nothing you can do about it. Just because a record came out on time doesn’t mean it’s good. That’s when we were like “eh, screw it.” This year, all of the delays made sense to us. Once it comes out, no one will even think about this crap anymore.

The album will be out and then people will start asking about the next album. It’s a cycle.
We’ve already starting joking about what we want to do. Put out the new record and then we’ll put out another new record six months after that. We’ll just establish Dillinger Four as sort of rock and roll vomit. Just stand there, dry heaving in a parking lot and finally it comes, it comes and it doesn’t stop. That’s what we’re going to be like. We’re going to put out thirteenn LPs in twenty minutes; it’s going to be amazing.

They’ll be screaming no more.
It’ll be like “dude, when are you going to stop putting out records?” That’s what I am waiting for somebody to ask. “Seriously, why are you guys putting out another record? Just stop.”

“Stop recording out everything you do.”
We’ll settle down, become a Las Vegas revue. We’ll pick up a residence in the Sierra. Just play Midwestern Songs, beginning to end, over and over again (laughter).

I am sure you guys would get a consistent group of people coming out to see that though.
That’d fucking rule. I’d do it in a heartbeat. Get myself a nice little tuxedo, shave my beard off, and just leave the moustache. I’ll have a gold chain.
But yeah, I wouldn’t say any of us were really frustrated. I think the touring thing; that’s the one thing. Some of us in the band like touring a lot more then the others. I mean, nobody hates touring by any means. I think if Billy and I had our way, we’d tour forever, like non-stop. Erik and Lane feel pretty strongly about touring pretty consistently when album comes out.

Have touring plans come closer to being finalized?
We definitely know we should take off some time in the spring. It’s mostly because Lane and his wife Courtney are having a baby and the baby is due in February or March. We don’t want anybody to have a baby and then all the sudden be like “ok, well, cool! Here’s my baby. Isn’t it adorable? Great, now let’s jump in the van and leave.” She’s pretty much almost at the point where they can get a more specific time frame, when the baby is really due. Then, the other thing we’ve been talking about lately is that it also just might be a lot easier, instead of going out and doing one big chuck of tour, just dicing it up. Go off and do the East Coast for two weeks, come home for two weeks. Go do the West Coast for two weeks, come home.

You mentioned that you’re working with the same producing crew on the album. Have there ever been thoughts of working with different producers or is that a non-issue?
Well, we have, here and there. It’s been exclusively compilations stuff. At the same time, Dave Gardner, probably the main guy we work with, the first time we ever recorded with Dave was the second record we ever made. The second 7-Inch, the split with The Strike, and that was literally when his studio was his basement. We never really need to not work with the same guy. If it ain’t broke, why fix it? We’ve had buddies bands who’ve gotten in touch with us to see who we worked with just so they could come up and work with Dave too. You kind of just want to keep it all in the family.

Having a record titled C I V I L W A R is bound to have some political messages to it if any but are there any other underlying messages with the album?
I think pretty much every record we’ve made has always ended up having a theme of some sort. It’s never really been intentional as its ending up being. The overwhelming theme of Midwestern Songs of the Americas was Minneapolis in general. Versus God speaks for itself. Situationist Comedy is definitely somewhere between the celebrations of the working stiff/total frustration in this post-Warped Tour world. This one so far, I don’t know if I’ve really picked up on the themes just yet. It’s a lot more stories; I’ll definitely tell you that. You aren’t going to get so many straight up political, rhetorical things but that’s also because I think we have way more anecdotes to work with now. I mean, shit, three of the songs that I am working on right now are based on what happened to me on the European tour, and that was the same year Situationist Comedy came out. Lyric-wise, I know at least on my end, most of stuff I have, some of it I just wrote on that last tour I was on last month. I got some lyrics that I wrote four years ago. I don’t think we’re working with any specific template. It’s not like we got together and been like “so let’s talk about feelings.” (laughter)You pretty much write what you are going to write about and by the end of it, when you get to see the whole picture, then you’re kind of like “oh, wow. ‘Blah blah blah’ is the theme of the record.”
I’d say the only theme we are working with right now is that we’re kind of sweet dudes (laughter). I’ll call the guys after we’re done this interview and start working on themes about how we’re kind of sweet.
I’d say we absolutely do not get into that detail when thinking about the album. It’s just pretty much Erik will bring in some songs; I’ll bring in some songs. We all kind of hash them out, kind of monkey around with the lyrics and do whatever. At the time, all you’re only really wondering “I wonder what time we’ll get out of practice.” You’re not even really thinking about the lyrics, you’re just looking at it like “did we spell accidental right?”

It’s probably better that way. Let the theme come out gradually. Back to the whole label thing, I know you guys have mention working with No Idea at some point. Do you plan on working with Fat for the immediate future or would you like to work with a bunch of other labels?
I wish we did a lot more EPs in between albums. When it comes to albums, as far as I’m concerned, if we did every one forever on Fat I’d be ecstatic. I absolutely love Fat, I love everybody that works at Fat, I love how Fat operates. I’m not the biggest fan of the logo but that’s the only bad thing I can say about Fat (laughter). The logo of the label I think is a little bit lame. That is the only thing that is not awesome about Fat. When we made Situationist Comedy, we made a very conscious decision that like ‘ok, after this album’s out, we totally got to do at least a couple split 7-inchs. We have to do an EP for No Idea. We have to do all this stuff.’ Then you go off and you do a long tour and come back and you’re done with all the press. Guys start coming up with other projects, people start working a lot more, and the next thing you realize it’s a year and half later and you’ve only written one new song after writing like eighteen up until that point. There’s definitely been a lot of labels I wanted to do stuff with. Just D4, we’re not that prolific to really have enough material to do that kind of stuff. On the flipside, I’m also not that embarrassed about that because I think we do tend to put a lot more thought into the stuff we put out then eighty percent of the other bands in the world. I am obviously in other bands like Bloodbath and Beyond and the Fuck Yeahs where we don’t think longer then five minutes on any song. [With] The kind of stuff that D4 likes to is play, there’s never been a song that we just brought in on a day and everybody learned it. It kind of takes awhile. Definitely the No Idea thing hangs over our head like you wouldn’t believe. I’m not even talking about other people making comments to us. I’m talking about in our own hearts and minds. We’ve always wanted to do a record with Var and it’s just never kind of work out to have enough material to do it. We want to put another collection like This Shit Is Genius. We have enough stuff to do a sequel to that at this point. I’d personally like to call it “Balls Deep in the Hoopla.” I’ve bounced it off Var about possibly No Idea doing that. There’s been a lot of labels along the line that we’d want to do stuff with.
I always hated when there was a band that put out great records and you’d find out about these limited edition 7-inchs and be ecstatic and track them down and there totally bullshit outtakes from the album. The songs they didn’t even really like. We definitely write songs that after we record them we’re kind of like “eh. That’s not so good.” Those songs, we don’t give them to anybody. Why put out something you don’t like a lot?

Working at a record store, I’ve noticed that some of your earlier stuff is harder to find now. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that? Like I know Midwestern Songs doesn’t come in that often.
As far as I can tell, it always seems the albums are pretty readily available. I never really hear anybody actually say they have trouble finding Midwestern Songs or Versus God or anything like that. There’s been some stuff that we’ve put out where later on we find out from certain people that it’s like a collector’s item. Like the split with Pinhead Gunpowder was a big one, where we knew you could still order that from Adeline. We go on tour and there’d be some guy there selling records out of a box, sort of collector’s things, and he had it in there for twelve dollars. We’re like “dude, why are you selling this for twelve dollars? Just order it online today for $3.50 or whatever.” Then we found out that actually wasn’t the case and that it’d gone out of print a couple of times. Sometimes, you just don’t know. I know there’s been times when This Shit Is Genius has been kind of hard to find. We never really hear about it because when we’re traveling we always bring everything with us. If it’s in print, we have it. There’s even been some times, I’ve actually caught hell from some of my friends. Before we left on the Situationist Comedy tour, I found a box of about twenty-five copies of the Girlfriends and Bubblegum 7-inch.

Oh wow.
I just threw them in the box and sold them for three dollars each, like any of the stuff we were selling. By the time we got to San Francisco, a bunch of my buddies there were like “Do you have the Girlfriends and Bubblegum 7-inch?” I was like “Oh no, we sold them all” and they were livid. It just didn’t really occur to me that was some rarity thing. It’s kind of weird because when you get into label stuff, we’ve never really been one to fuck with any label we’ve ever dealt with. I put out records myself and I know how fucking tricky [it is]. I don’t care if it’s a huge label like Hopeless or Fat or if it’s just a guy in his bedroom like Jason from THD Records. Keeping things in print, keeping on top of it, getting it distributed, getting the word out, advertising, letting people know its out; it’s kind of hard. If somebody ever told me they were having trouble finding whatever, I just tell them then it’s probably out of print. If I can, I’ll call somebody and find out. If we found out today that Midwestern Songs was out of print, that’d be insane but at the same time, I’m pretty sure Adeline doesn’t repress the split with Pinhead Gunpowder anymore. I collect records on my own so I am already worried more about tracking down other bands records (laughter). Maybe I should start flip-flopping that. Just start trading all my rare Dillinger Four stuff for other peoples stuff. That’s what I’ll start doing.

I am sure you’d get some pretty interesting stuff doing that.
That’s what I’m hoping!

Have you guys ever thought about re-releasing some older stuff before?
I love it when reissues aren’t really fucked with. There’s some things like our first 7-inch Higher Aspirations; I’m not going to lie, it’s not a really good sounding record, the original. I like it but I understand it’s super fuzzy. The pressing of it just wasn’t that good. When we were talking about reprinting all that stuff, in my mind, I thought we were going to reprint them as they were, with the same packaging and everything. The idea came up like “well, no, why don’t we do an LP and collect all the 7-inchs and comps?” I kind of had reservations about it but I am really happy how it came out. Again, we’ve hit that point now that if we did another collection should we just go ahead and make it comprehensive? Just let This Shit Is Genius go out of print and then remake the whole thing so it’s actually all of This Shit Is Genius plus all of the other comp and 7-inchs stuff that came out ever since then. I also understand that’s kind of a jip to anybody that bought This Shit Is Genius in the first place so I don’t know. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, if I won the lottery today I would love to do a one-off repress of all the 7-inchs with the actual packaging they came in. I think that’d be really cool. We definitely have to reissue a bunch of weird stuff. The Pinhead Gunpowder split; probably half the people that talk about D4 records bring that up. They just never even saw it, they didn’t know where to get it from, whatever. Girlfriends and Bubblegum; that one is just kind of out of control. I only found out after that last tour. When we went to Europe, it was especially stupid. Everybody in the UK, none of them ever got it because there was no distribution for the record over there. All of these people knew the songs because they could download them online but nobody knew what the words were. I’d love to reissue all of that shit.
We want to get the new record out before we do all that because that would look kind of corny, to take this long to put out a new record and be like, “here’s the new record and the new record is all old records.” That’d be kind of fucking stupid.

Can you expand on what happened at The Fest again this year? “The fire ant incident”
Oh god. I was actually kind of worried about that whole weekend leading up to it. I had one band a night I was playing with. I was playing with the Arrivals on Friday night, D4 played the Saturday night and Sunday I was playing with Bloodbath and Beyond. The Saturday night was just absolutely a ball. The show at The Fest was one of my favorites of all time. By the time we got done, you just feel euphoric and stoaked and we heard there was this house party going on and Grabass Charlestons were going to play. Totally went to that and partied literally all night. All I remember is kind of waking up at 11:30-Noon on Sunday and everybody was talking about going to watch the Bears play, because there were a bunch of guys from Chicago down there and I am a Bears fan. I remember when we walked into this bar to watch the Bears play, I remember while we were walking there thinking like “I think I am still drunk.” But I was thinking fuck it, Bloodbath And Beyond tonight and we always play loaded and it’s going to rule. Everybody’s having a good fucking time. The whole vibe of The Fest was festive as hell and super cordial. We went to the bar, just drank a ridiculous amount and all I remember is walking so I could find a piece of pizza. The next thing, I remember waking up in a parking lot and Will from Grabass Charlestons was picking me up. Then I remember waking up later on in an alley across the street from the club Bloodbath was playing at. I don’t even know where I was walking to but I bumped into Todd (Taylor) from Razorcake and Todd was like “Whoa Paddy, you don’t look so good.” I was like “yeah, I don’t feel so good. I’m pretty loaded.” He was like “Yeah, you missed the show.” I had just seriously forgotten about the Bloodbath show. They had played an hour and half earlier. He knew I had to put something in my stomach and sober up. We walked up to this fast food burger place and I got a burger and I was walking to this friend’s house I was staying in Gainesville. I thought maybe I punched somebody because my right hand was just really swollen, like after you get in a fight. I got really nervous and was like “ah fuck, did I blackout and get into a fight? God damn it.” I got back to her house and crashed down. When I woke up the next day, my left ear was literally like a radar dish sticking out of my head. My right hand looked like I was wearing a flesh mitten over it. I was just like “what the hell?” but I didn’t have bites. Fire ants, when they bite you, don’t leave a bite like a mosquito or a bee. It’s just a little red dot but the shit swells up. A couple of the Gainesville locals went to tell me “dude, you got bitten by fire ants.” Later on, I called up Will from Grabass Charlestons just to apologize for being kind of dumb in the parking lot and thanks for trying to pick me up. He just told me of the state I was in but he was the one who told me there were fire ants all over me. The next thing you know, I still gotta play shows with The Arrivals to get home from Florida and I can’t hear out of the left side of my head. I could hardly hold onto my pick because my hand was so swollen. On top of that, I didn’t know this, but when you get bit that much by fire ants, you’re kind of poisoned. I was real drowsy all the time. It was kind of hard for me to pay attention in conversations. Just in general, I felt really out of it. Luckily, a very kind off-duty doctor happened to be at K-Mart in Alabama while we were there and I just asked him what I do. He told me to grab this and take this and put this on your hand and I did it. It was just really funny because it was only after I got home from that tour, that all of that shit healed up. I just realized that it was like a whole week on the way back from Florida, I might as well been on acid the entire time because I just completely felt out of my mind. Now, I know I was basically poisoned but I didn’t know it at the time. It was pretty much about as uncomfortable as it can get. But at the time I didn’t really care because at that point I’d been on tour for so long and I knew it was the home stretch. I was kind of like, “alright well, I’m broke as a joke, I got insect bites all over me, I’m out of clean underpants and I’m out of bass strings. My bass is broken and I am at the point of having to borrow gear off people” but I was like “you know what? I am going to be home in five days.” You kind of don’t care. You’re still pretty happy. I’ll tell you this; I am definitely not fucking with fire ants anymore, that’s for sure.

Tags: Dillinger Four, Interview //