#STEFAN KAISER MUSIC HOW TO#

If you don’t know how it got from point A to point B, it probably means that something good happened along the way.” But it’s always goal when recording – the song to be different to what it started as. Not saying, ‘Oh, it’s so good’ – I’ve been very vocal about the fact I think this band sucks,” he says with a smirk,”but I look back and I don’t understand how we came out with the songs the way they are. “I look back on this record and I just don’t know how we did it. This is the first time I’ve had saxophone on anything I’ve done in a very long time.”įinding themselves on the flipside of a “rational mindset”, Babcock says, was just the ticket. “But Zack suggested a saxophone freak-out and I was like, ‘Yeah, sounds cool.’ I used to play in a ska band, and at some point I made a ‘no saxophone’ rule – only trumpets and trombones allowed. “I hate the saxophone it sounds like a duck quacking, to me,” says Babcock. “We were making decisions fort he record because we thought they were too stupid to not do, or too funny to not do.”ĭecisions like, for example, the sax hysteria on album closer PUPTHEBAND Inc. “By week three or four, we’d all gone off the deep end,” he explains. Immersion in the living-and-recording process (“We didn’t do anything except work on the record: every hour, every waking moment”) meant the guys’ choices began to splinter off into bizarre avenues, but Babcock attests this was ideal. It’s just Zack sitting in the hallway with some crazy keyboard he found, just whaling on it. I’m the go-to-bed-early guy, but I’d wake up at 2am and I’d hear horror music coming down the hall – ‘What the f-ck is this?’ – and get up and go look. “Pete has so much old recording gear, and half of it’s broken, but it’s amazing. “There’s a zone in the basement called the Black Hole it was like a cave with no end.” “It’s a crazy place, with so many rooms,” Babcock says. More than ever, I can hear all four of us on each track.”īabcock, along with his bandmates (and friends since high school) Nestor Chumack, Steve Sladkowski, and Zack Mykula, decamped to producer Pete Katis’ Connecticut “bat-filled mansion” to record TUOP, a location that sounds more Palace of Wonders than pedestrian studio. “But every record that we’ve made, I enjoy each one more than the last. “It was only one out of four votes, so,” he laughs.

Yes, despite voting to end democracy – which was, of course, voted down. Because the four of us have such strong personalities, and we care so much about the product, that it feels like we might end each other before we finish the record.”Īnd yet it’s the ever increasing collaborative nature between the band’s four members that Babcock cherishes. “For me, it’s such an intense, emotional experience. “Honestly, every album we’ve ever made, half the time I’m thinking ‘We’re not going to finish this,’” Babcock says.

#STEFAN KAISER MUSIC HOW TO#

Its tracklist is interspersed with three vignettes featuring frontman Babcock accompanying himself on piano, spinning the tale of PUP’s increasingly impatient “board of directors”, his own vote to“end democracy in this f-cking band”, and how their whole budget went on the piano itself, which Babcock only started learning how to play “last Thursday.” One of these ditties is just nine seconds long, with Babcock declaring the album nearly completed and then crunching a bum chord.

The already alarmingly self-aware Toronto punk four-piece underwent a further, more acute crystallisation of self-analysis over that period, resulting in the candidly titled The Unraveling of PUPTheBand. Stefan Babcock is chatting to us alongside his beloved pooch Moose from his Toronto home – the same spot from which he recorded the video for Waiting For Something to Happen, the April 2020 anthem which sent the couplet “You barely feel like you’re alive/ You think about it all the time” into the lockdown ether. Saying ‘yes’ to whatever (literal) batsh-t idea bubbled to the surface of their minds was PUP’s ticket to triumph, says frontman Stefan Babcock he spoke to STACK about the lunacy of the Canadian band’s fourth album, The Unraveling of PUPTheBand.

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