A restaurant in Manhattan named Thai Food Near Me went viral before it even opened last year thanks to its SEO cracking name. The owners figured if that combination of words was what people looking for Thai food were going to be typing into their phones, why not claim the phrase as their own. They’d have to make a good product to stay in business even at the top of the search results, and their reviews have been glowing so business is booming. Yet still, the restaurant’s interview with The Verge opened with this admittance, “Even to its owners, the name for their new Thai restaurant seemed silly and unserious. Some of them were embarrassed to tell friends about it at all, for fear of it sounding too ridiculous.”
So many people these days are stuck doing the Thai Food Near Me trick to get their work seen, making some aspect of their work stupid and ironic enough to get attention while praying that doesn’t deride the genuinely good work they are doing in the process. Luckily for Doug Kinsella, his chosen genre of music, emo, is based almost exclusively around debasing yourself to get ahead. The pseudonymous musician named his new emo bordering on screamo band Captain Jazz and dropped their first album The Want last March to little fanfare. Doug thought people would find it hilarious he had the temerity to make his new band’s name the properly spelled version of Cap’n Jazz, one of the most influential bands in the emo genre, and that the record would catch on like wildfire as a result, but he quickly realized just how thick you needed to lay on a joke to get people’s attention. Doug started Captain Jazz after spending a decade hacking it in the Pacific Northwest folk punk and emo scenes in two different bands. He was feeling burnt out by it all, wishing he could be someone else entirely. Someone without a past to attend to, whose art was uncompromising and could cut through the noise. He wanted to shine a mirror onto the emo world and show what a joke it was, with everyone riffing on the same sounds, writing lyrics about the same topics, claiming to make transgressive art while doing the opposite. However, getting everyone’s attention wasn’t as easy as he thought it might be. As Doug put it, “I saw someone say they thought The Want was atmospheric covers of Cap’n Jazz songs, they weren’t even pressing play on the record.”
He was happy with the country-twinged emo stylings of The Want at the very least, and was glad to have the record out in the world even if it did flop. In its wake, Doug decided to double down and lay it on twice as thick for Captain Jazz’s second record. People’s blind faith in religion and how they can get similarly fanatical about emo bands was a central theme on The Want, and for the sophomore Self-Titled album’s cover art Doug wanted to burn emo’s equivalent of the Sistine Chapel, the American Football House. Doug correctly figured that such a grand gesture would piss off and crack up emo fans in equal measure, and spent the last money in his bank account to pay an artist for the drawing on Fiverr. He realized he had to put together an obstacle course of lyrical homages, jokes, and sonic experimentations to get people’s attention and keep them engaged, with the house burning down being the very first obstacle.
With the S/T, Doug wanted to expand upon the themes from The Want while focusing in on the disease of being driven to create art. On album opener “Simpsons 2” we’re greeted with our second obstacle, a spoken-word intro taken from a Q&A by YouTuber Post10. The streamer is asked about why he chose his channel name, a question he mostly ignores to talk about how he only ever made videos in the hopes of his semi-estranged and recently passed father seeing them. I found myself genuinely tearing up on the subway upon one of my first listens, only to get pissed off that I got played like a goddamn fiddle by a song called “Simpsons 2”.
Several track titles are riffs on famous emo bands, the funniest far and away being “The World is a Marketable Place & I am No Longer Afraid to Sell” but the songs themselves are generally no joke, with maybe one exception. The aforementioned track has an absolute typhoon of a close, where Doug laments that despite how smart he is and how good his opinions on emo are, he is no better than the other people in the scene he makes fun of. The record closes with the absolute barnburner “Nickelback Photograph” where Doug contends with the fact that he only does all this shit talking to cover up for his own insecurities. He sings about making fun of Will Toledo on 4chan back in the day, how Doug thought he’d be the one signed to Matador Records, and how sad looking back on his hair-brained music schemes makes him. With Captain Jazz Doug Kinsella held up a mirror to try and expose the flaws he saw in the God-damned emo scene and ended up realizing the flaws he really needed to take care of were his own.
Shortly before our interview started Doug sent me the band’s electronic press kit which you can find on their neocities hosted website. It features three pieces of press: UPROXX’s Best Emo Albums of 2023 list which featured a glowing review of the S/T by Ian Cohen, emo’s closest thing to a Herodotus figure, a positive post from a newsletter called Albums Weekly that was labeled Russian Substack Article, and a very very pissed off RateYourMusic review. The RYM reviewer spends seven paragraphs hilariously roasting Captain Jazz for being oh so clever with their name choice, before eventually saying that the songs do actually sound good if you can ignore the “lyrical spiritual” writing. So, hilariously, even the people who hate the joke of the band name enough to write a college thesis on why it’s dumb still end up admitting that these songs are slappers. (Momty, if you are reading this, you are a great writer and we’d love to have your work on our site.) This album is far from being for everyone, but Doug was able to force-of-will his way through the algorithm and get his music into the ears of the kind of people he knew would love it. The kind of people who also hate how you have to debase yourself to sell your art, and who feel similarly diseased by the impulse to create. And to think all Doug had to do to pull it off was piss off approximately half the people who’ll ever hear of his band.
I talked with Doug about Guitar Hero inspiring him to pick up the guitar, the band’s beef with Braid, and how he put together these two excellent records.
GSC: What’s your name? How do you identify? What do you do in the band Captain Jazz?
CJ: My name is Douglas Kinsella. He/him. I am the lead songwriter and I coordinate instruments from various outside sources that make up the project Captain Jazz. It’s a lot of mercs, a lot of hired hands. A lot of stolen art. I usually don’t pay for it either.
GSC: Good, 100 Gecs has enough money. You mentioned you grew up in the Pacific Northwest?
CJ: Yes and I just moved to Tennessee a few months ago. I lived and played music in the Pacific Northwest from like 2009 until this year.
GSC: What are your earliest music memories? Who was playing music around the house and what were they playing?
CJ: I was not as much into music from a young age. I used to watch movies on repeat and played a lot of video games. Early on musically, my Mom listened to a lot of country and my Dad listened to a lot of Van Halen. They didn’t make music themselves, though. I don’t have any musician relatives that I know of. When I was young, I became obsessed with Guitar Hero. I would submit my scores to scorehero.com and I was Top 100 in Guitar Hero 2. I would get home from school and I would do this shit like a job, playing it for eight hours a fucking day. And then I was like, well, I bet I could play guitar too and so then I started playing guitar.
GSC: Wow, you literally got into music the same way Post Malone did.
CJ: Fuck yeah, people are always comparing us.
GSC: I was also hugely into those games. Did you learn any music from Guitar Hero that was pivotal?
CJ: “Elephant Bones” by That Handsome Devil. I listened to that one over and over and then I bought that CD. That album was a huge inspiration to me, though it was like six or seven songs so I don’t know if it was a short LP or a long EP. The last song “James Dean” was especially big for me.
GSC: I remember “F.C.P.R.E.M.I.X.” by Fall of Troy off Guitar Hero 3 rewiring my brain a little bit.
CJ: When Guitar Hero 3 came out I was a hater from the get-go. Guitar Hero started getting mainstream popularity and I acted like such a little fucking pissant. I was like, “Guitar Hero used to be underground and cool. Now freaking Aerosmith is on it,” meanwhile Aerosmith was on the other one, but everyone starting to play it pissed me off. Net-net I’ve always been this way.
GSC: Born a contrarian. Would Guitar Hero have been your earliest contact with emo and screamo music? If not, what was your first interaction with that kind of music?
CJ: I was mostly into country and folk for a really long time. I love country music especially. You can hear that a lot on The Want. My first intro into punk and stuff was through Limewire. I was downloading Bright Eyes’ shit and came across Snowing’s Fuck Your Emotional Bullshit through that. I’m a researcher at heart, I really get into stuff, so I learned the entire history behind everything emo that had ever come out that I could find. That obsession started around 2010… through now.
GSC: Did you get to see Snowing live while they were still kicking?
CJ: I did yeah. “Trace the Line” has the lyrics about watching 1994 Jump over a fire pit in Idaho. That’s a true line. I went to the 1994, Algernon, and Snowing show in Idaho where it happened at an abandoned wheelchair factory. I freaked John Galm out though, I really freaked him out. I feel bad. I’ve met John twice and I freaked him out really bad both times.
GSC: What happened? Like in a fun way or an upsetting way?
CJ: I hope in a fun way, probably in a lame way because I’m kind of a lame dude. Everyone went to Denny’s after that show in Idaho. He was sitting with my friend and I came over to sit with them and I didn’t know what to say, so I brought up some obscure fact about Snowing. He was cordial and then peaced right out and my friend was like “What the fuck is wrong with you dude?”
GSC: He seems like he could be kind of an awkward guy too. I’m sure you’re similar in energy. You were two Yins who needed a Yang.
CJ: I like that perspective, though I do think this one was just me being awkward.
GSC: So I’m guessing you had a number of pre-Captain Jazz musical projects. Are there any that you’d care to talk about now?
CJ: The thing is, is I think people got really fucking sick of me. So I wanted to start fresh. There is a large body of work that I’ve made before Captain Jazz. Some people know what it is, but I’d like for it to generally not be known.
GSC: Did you know the other members that are involved in Captain Jazz previous to working with them on these two albums? Or was it a wholly new formed group?
CJ: Some of them yes, others no. The rapper King in Yellow on “Microphones in 3030” I’ve known for a really long time, and I begged him to be on it. I was really happy he did that. Some of the people who helped me out with songwriting are people that were in my old band. Other instruments and new sounds on the second album were by all new musicians that I’ve met through… stuff. I’m hoping to find more people soon.
GSC: Have musicians reached out interested?
CJ: I’ve had a few I’ve talked to, none for sure yet. I reached out to a few of my old friends to do guest vocals on the last album but they didn’t end up doing it.
GSC: Their loss honestly.
CJ: That’s what I’ve been saying. There was a crisp $20 bill they all left on the table.
GSC: What came first then, wanting to name a band Captain Jazz or wanting to make a screamo band and then you settled on the name later? What was the chicken or the egg of this project?
CJ: I parked the captainjazz.bandcamp.com URL back in 2014. At that time in emo, everyone was releasing four song EPs and then they were breaking up. I was like **smarmy self-mocking voice** “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m so smart. I’m going to make a four song hardcore EP called Captain Jazz and everyone’s gonna lose their mind. I am gonna call it I Will Be My Own Hell Because There’s A Devil in My Body because, ah, Teen Suicide is so big right now and I’m gonna really stick it to him.” But I didn’t end up recording it because I wasn’t good at the drum stuff yet. So I had that parked since 2014. Then my main band that I was in was coming to an end before I moved to Tennessee. So I told myself I either need to do this or I’m going to start an internet talk show. As you can tell, I decided to go with the screamo project.
GSC: Your band name is particularly interesting at this moment in time. There’s this restaurant in NYC called Thai Food Near Me that went viral because people look up “Thai food near me” and end up finding this restaurant. A lot of this album seems to be dealing with that issue of having to market and sell yourself to get your art seen in our modern world, and how debasing that can be.
CJ: That is absolutely central to the record.
GSC: In that regard, what level of ironic detachment are you approaching this project with? These seem like relatively ambitious records from an artist putting together something they believe in, despite the band name and cover art suggesting the opposite.
CJ: I hate search-algorithm emo. I hate trying to go viral ass emo. I hate that impulse from any kind of musician. You go online and it feels like all you see is this transparent algorithm roulette artists have to play to get their shit seen. So I wanted to make a project that would seem from the outside like search algorithm emo, but then once you get into it, it’s something else entirely. I thought that bait and switch would be really funny. For some people I think it is and for some people, they hit that wall on the outside of this and they don’t want to go beyond it. And that’s okay. I get not wanting to engage with it because that is how I feel about so much shit out there.
GSC: I remember listening to the record for the first time and having a head nod moment where I was like, “Oh, wait, it’s not a joke. This is a seriously considered record.” You just don’t know what you’re walking into, I guess.
CJ: There’s this movie called Asperger’s R Us, which is about stand up comedians that have Aspergers. There’s one guy in it who goes by New Michael because he doesn’t want to be Michael Jr. anymore, he wants to be New Michael. Everyone’s like, that’s a weird name, that’s a dumb name. But he’s like, well, it’s kind of a joke, it’s kind of serious, but that’s who I am. I watched that five years ago, and it’s lived rent free in my head ever since. It’s a complete joke, but it’s so serious, and it’s who I am.
GSC: You’re both putting your whole ass into it, but just the nature of what it means to even take yourself seriously as an artist can feel like a joke. Running a website called GrandmaSophiasCookies.com I definitely know what you mean. What were your goals going into The Want? What did you want to sound like and what did you want to accomplish?
CJ: As the band I was in was coming to a close I had a lot of ideas for weirder shit. We had been making slightly weird, but mostly palatable, pop-punky emo for about 10 years. I wanted to take all the weirder, darker ideas I’d been working on and flesh them out to see where they go. I wanted to make a really mad album, like FUNERAL DINER or City of Caterpillar, though it did not come out that way. I definitely wanted the country influences to come through too.
GSC: “Oh Boy, We’re Opening for Michael Cera Palin!” is a furious opening track. How’d you know that was the right one to lead off this project? I’m a big MCP fan, good seeing them get a shout out.
CJ: My friends played me their cover of “If It Makes You Happy” by Sheryl Crow at work and I was like this hurts me to listen to. I am not the biggest fan of fifth wave emo because, well, I am a fucking asshole. That was the first song I recorded for The Want. I wanted to make a mission statement for the record sonically and emotionally with that track.
GSC: Another track I love on this record is “All Women Go to Heaven”. It is such a ripper and then it cools down right there at the close. Two questions, do you truly believe the song title and how did that song come together?
CJ: I do believe all women go to heaven. Women are powerful, women are strong, and I support all women. Let’s fucking go women. Can we get some F’s in the chat for women please everyone.
GSC: The Fs in the chat stand for females.
CJ: My idea was I wanted to make “My Journey to The Weed Den” by Merchant Ships except turn it into a weird religious screed at the end. I guess religion is the main throughline of the album, to me at least.
GSC: Did you come from a religious family?
CJ: No, I was raised completely secular. Now that I’m in Tennessee, I mean, Jesus, everyone’s religious. It’s so weird coming from Pacific Northwest hippie granola-ville into this.
GSC: Where there church can be a social thing.
CJ: Yeah, it’s so strange to me. I cannot get into it.
GSC: What did you find interesting about religion?
CJ: Really the blind belief and being able to consistently go back to the well for power from an outside infinite power source. Constantly being enraptured by the same entity for all of time, I really like that. I think that works with emo. Some of these big bands have this infinite power that other bands attune themselves to.
GSC: It really gets fanatical too. Especially after a band breaks up people begin to start to talk about them in these quasi-religious terms. There are surely people who think it is borderline sacrilegious for you to call your band Captain Jazz.
CJ: That was my thinking going into it. People have placed this dusty ass record from 30 years ago so high up on a pedestal that if I even named myself Captain Jazz people will act like I am not showing proper reverence to what came before me. It really makes me wonder how the guys from the band feel about it all, hopefully they don’t care about it all too much.
GSC: Right, the Kinsella’s are still around and have been in twenty great bands since Cap’n Jazz and yet that one and American Football hold such a space in people’s heads.
CJ: Like this is their high school and college music! I wish the stuff I was making in high school was fucking gone from the earth. It has clearly worked out for them better than it did for me but I wonder if sometimes they wish people would move on.
GSC: Are you a fan of Cap’n Jazz by the way?
CJ: Of course, I am a huge fan.
GSC: “Frightened of Me For The First Time” that is a barnburner of a close, I love the twangy riff though that sends us home. How did you know this was the track to end the record?
CJ: I am obsessed with the United Nations, I wanted to steal their entire stick. Going into “Frightened of Me For The First Time ” I wanted it to be an ending statement about what this project is and then go out on a half-jokey, half serious tone with the pedal steel solo. When I make an album… I am so fucking full of myself holy shit. I can’t do it, I am sorry I’m not good at this shit.
GSC: Nah talk your shit dawg! I am with you.
CJ: When I make an album I try to make an overarching idea of what it is. I want it to be a journey, I want it to be cohesive. I want it to be a piece of art, even though it’s just fucking content. The idea for the last track was to make something that felt definitive, something that felt like the final word. Where “Michael Cera Palin, Oh Boy!” is the mission statement of coming with anger, it can’t be that forever. I can’t be angry forever, it eventually has to be an admittance of shortcomings that I can move forward from. That’s what the closer here does.
GSC: A coming to peace of sorts. Before moving on to the S/T Do you have any other songs from The Want that you want to give some love to?
CJ: There’s no unlicensed sample from EMI on “This Track Contains an Unlicensed Sample From an EMI Artist-Property” I just thought that’d be funny. Then Spotify wouldn’t let me use that title, I was fucking pissed. It has a bunch of samples from a lot of stuff, specifically Masked Rider which is the American remake of Kamen Rider. I’m really big into Godzilla and Kamen Rider, weird Japanese bullshit.
GSC: You see the new Godzilla movie?
CJ: Godzilla Minus One was awesome!
GSC: I was getting emotional at the end there, “Is your war over?”
CJ: I’m really into Shin Godzilla and Godzilla GMK.
GSC: What did you take away from recording The Want that you wanted to bring into the S/T?
CJ: Recording The Want I mean, sonically, the guitar sounded like shit. It’s not mixed very well. I wanted to do an actually good job here. I wanted to make it sound like a real record. I also wanted to make the joke of it all more obvious, clearly it was too abstract with The Want. I mean, no one presses play on that record unless something pisses them off enough or confuses them enough to do so. I realized I gotta make an obstacle course. The cover is the first obstacle, but if you can overcome that then you’re in the course. It eases you in then you are like, “What the fuck is this vocal sample!” The jokes, the lyrics, the sonic experimentations are all obstacles that hopefully make things more fun for the listener or at least give you something to contend with.
GSC: Who drew the cover? And how did you know that is what people are going to see when they press play?
CJ: This dude on Fiverr. For a long time I wanted to have a 1980s thrash metal cover, because I love that kind of art. I wanted a digital painting of a church burning, but for emo. Something familiar yet distorted and something funny. And so I was like, “Hello. I am Douglas Kinsella from this band that is kind of a joke. Yuri on Fiverr, will you please draw this house on fire?” And he had it done in a day, that guy is awesome. I had just moved to Tennessee and I ran out of money. I spent legit my last dollars on that drawing. I was down to zero after getting that album art and holy fuck it is maybe the second best money I ever spent.
GSC: You literally burned it all to the ground, that’s the American dream right there. “Simpsons 2” opens with a flip of a classic emo trope, a spoken word intro, but this time it’s taken from a Q&A by the YouTuber Post 10. I had never heard of the dude before but his speech is extremely emotional, I found myself tearing up listening to it on the subway.
CJ: I watch almost everything he makes. I’m really into small YouTubers. I heard that answer from him on a Q&A and I was like, this is perfect for the record. That was literally the first thing I had recorded for this album. It’s like, what does a name mean? And also what is the sickness that drives us? Why do we need to create the stuff we are creating? And it all comes from this streaming Q&A response that just gets way too personal way too quick. It’s so relatable and so sad.
GSC: He barely talks about his name, too. He’s like, Post 10? Doesn’t mean anything. Anyway, my Dad died and I should have seen it coming.
CJ: Like, what the fuck? I feel this way at work where I’ll want to talk about my stupid secret band or all this stuff where I have no avenue for it. So when he does that, it’s something he really wants to talk about but he just doesn’t have a spot for it. But here it is, pouring out of him.
GSC: Do you plan on sending him the song? Or do you hope he never hears it?
CJ: He doesn’t respond to stuff all too often. I saw someone posted it on his Reddit, but I don’t think he checks Reddit. If I was him I feel like I’d be fuckin pissed off, but I would like him to hear it and I hope he does like it.
GSC: What do you love about his content?
CJ: For the most part, he unclogs culverts. That’s his main thing, if water is stopped up in a culvert, he’ll unclog it. He also has these videos exploring abandoned places. I really like those. I like his childlike sense of wonder. He’s constantly talking out of his ass about why stuff works. It’s just so funny to me. It feels like an inversion of what content should be.
GSC: I hope that he stumbles into the song and enjoys it. I also love you sending “Simpsons 2” to that streamer, that’s not Guitar Hero right?
CJ: It’s Clone Hero, a Guitar Hero like program where you can chart out your own songs. I charted the entire album which is available for download on captainjazz.neocities.org. I sent it to a few people that were streaming Clone Hero that day. That guy was the only one to respond, and he played through the whole album which was really cool of him. He was so stoked and it made me very stoked as well.
GSC: I loved him singing the refrain at the end there especially. You really keep the momentum strong with “445 Words” How did that song come together?
CJ: I don’t know how to describe the drumbeat, I had a certain drumbeat in mind that was not just regular 4/4. I wanted to make it two different tempos because it was originally going to have guest vocals. I was listening to their discography and I took two different BPMs from their two biggest songs and I put them both in this song. I asked if they wanted to do vocals and they said yes but it was taking forever so eventually I said fuck it and recorded them myself.
GSC: “Oh Sussy Life” is a roller coaster going up and down. That song is the most obvious allusion to a Cap’n Jazz track. How did that song come together?
CJ: That song was called “Forever is a Cool Word” and “Forever is A Cool Word” was called “Oh Sussy Life”. I switched them around because “Forever is a Cool Word” starts with a line close to the title. Originally, “Oh Sussy Life” and “Nickelback Photograph” weren’t on the album, they were the last two I recorded. “Oh Sussy Life” definitely has become one of my favorites and one of my girlfriend’s favorites too. I went into it trying to make something very ping pong, like you described, up and down.
GSC: The name too kills me, the word sussy alone.
CJ: Out of all the song titles people seem to dislike that one the very most but I thought it was funny.
GSC: “0x” is maybe my favorite song of yours. How did that track come together and what inspired that track specifically?
CJ: That’s the song I wrote with my other band. I always thought it was very beautiful, Mountain Goats-y, Audio Recording Clubs-y. I like this idea of people who want to attend their funeral after they die as a way of proving something. That’s what that song is about, your lack of self confidence showing through your overbearing confidence. I love that dichotomy. I really wanted to have that specific outro with the birds in the highway too, so I am glad I was able to use that track and make it work.
GSC: “Microphones in 3030” not only samples “Money Machine” by 100 Gecs but has a rap feature on it. How did this track come together, why the 100 Gecs sample, and did you like your man’s verses?
CJ: So with that track, I wanted to have something about the commodification of art. I am obsessed with The Microphones. “Microphones in 2020” I listened to on repeat all this year. I thought wouldn’t it be so funny if you were to sell out that true raw emotion for something just fucking awful. I wanted to flip this into a complete parody track that makes fun of myself. King in Yellow’s verse on that I thought was perfect because it’s really heartfelt from him. At the time I sent it to him the track had no vocals on it, and when I sent him the 100 Gecs shit, he sent me a seven paragraph text about why I should remove it. He was like “I think 100 Gecs is the antithesis of art” and I was like that’s kinda the point.
GSC: You should have him rap that seven paragraph text on the next album. I love how divisive the record was before you were even done recording. People had massive opinions about it. Does he like how the track came out now that he’s had some time to sit with it?
CJ: I don’t think so. He’s my brother and he mostly just talks to me about how he’s fixing up his car.
GSC: What game are you playing in that music video too? That was a fun one.
CJ: I had done this joke before where I played my music out loud to people in Garry’s Mod DarkRP and VR Chat. I spent a whole day trying to get banned from servers just like spamming my album, and that’s what came out of it.
GSC: The chat was cracking me up.
CJ: The one dude who called it Nightcore 100 Gecs made my day honestly.
GSC: “Nickelback Photograph” is an absolute barnburner of a close. The final whistle on the track cracks me up every time. How did you know that’s how you wanted to close the record and what went into putting that track together?
CJ: “Oh Sussy Life” was the last song I recorded and “Nickelback Photograph” was the second to last. I felt like the album was missing a strong closer. I think it’s an album about history, about time passing, about how we deal with the passing of time and how we don’t deal with it. I start the record spitting in your face, and song by song slowly get more insecure and unsure about myself until here where I finally reach the bottom. And… well it’s all there. It’s all true. I used to make fun of Will Toledo on 4chan when he posted there, and I posted there at the same time. I used to make fun of him and then he got really big and I felt like a fucking idiot.
GSC: Did he ever confront you about it?
CJ: No, I don’t think I’ve spoken to him personally since like 2011.
GSC: You think he’d remember that deeply seasoned internet beef?
CJ: I don’t think so. I think he’s probably looking into real estate options at this point.
GSC: Do you have a favorite song in the record outside of the ones that we’ve talked about that you want to make sure to acknowledge? Or even a least favorite?
CJ: “Simpsons 2” is my least favorite. I think it’s too pretty.
GSC: It’s beautiful.
CJ: The joke that it’s a streamer doing the spoken word intro, I don’t know if it really works. I don’t know. I have a lot of bad opinions. I think it’s too pretty is my main beef with it, though it does have my favorite lyric, “Please buy more, the wheels are hungry for more.” The hardest song for me to make was “There’s No Gold Is There?” I wanted to cut it so many times. I wanted to do something different. But now it’s maybe my favorite song besides “Nickelback Photograph”.
GSC:How has it been seeing people interpret these songs and make them their own?
CJ: I’m so happy about it. I I went into it thinking it would be like, what is truth? What is identity? What’s the difference between acting and reality? What separates an action from the performance of an action? That was my idea going into it. Now, it feels like my struggle with creativity as a disease. Something you can’t get away from, something like I’ve tried to leave behind many times and try to just fucking work for a living because the shit is a fucking waste of time. People have talked about the sickness of the album being different things, from literal physical health to an anti-capitalist message, a lot of very different messages. I think there’s lots of different stuff you can take away from it but I feel like I am talking about my ass even giving my takes this much credence. If anything I’ve learned more about the record from reading what other people have to say.
GSC:I have seen some heavy hitters like Ian Cohen write nice things about the self titled, what has it been like to see some of the positive reception as of late?
CJ: So the first the first album, I was like, I’m gonna release this and people are gonna freak the fuck out. And then it just kind of fucking flopped. But it was exactly what I wanted to make sonically, so I was really happy that it existed. I went into the next one thinking it’ll be the same thing. I’m gonna make exactly what I want to make, and it’s gonna fall flat on its face, and that’s okay. I finished recording it in October, and then I started to feel a lot of self doubt about it. I was sending demos to people asking is the mix good? Is this joke funny? Is this a smart thing to do? And they were like, you should just change the band name because the music is actually good. I was like, the band name is the whole point. So when it came out and it got all this great reception and a lot of bad reception at the same time, I was like, what the fuck have I done to myself? That one specifically was so nice because I’ve been following Ian Cohen’s writing about emo for a long time, obviously. To see something I made reach him is mind blowing to me. It’s hard to not feel like a little bit of impostor syndrome because I’m literally being an impostor. But I think people can see that that is part of what it is.
GSC: Have you gotten the chance to play these songs live yet? And if not, are there any in particular you’re really excited to play?
CJ: I haven’t gotten the chance to play them live. I have offers to play them live that I really want to follow up on. So yes, I’d really like to. I really want to play “Oh Sussy Life” live. I have played “0x” live but it’ll be fun to breathe some new life into it. I also have a lot of funny ideas on how to do “Microphones in 3030” live that I am hyped about.
GSC: Will you have a Daft Punk or Orville Peck type situation where you’re obscuring yourself?
CJ: I’m doing a Slipknot kind of thing even though my girlfriend says it’s crazy. I really would like to keep myself as anonymous as possible. That being said, if anyone can sell me a copy of Will Toledo’s fursuit please reach out.
GSC: I think if you got your hands on that, Will and Post 10 Would collab on a lawsuit. Who are some of your contemporaries making music that excite you?
CJ: I think Garden Angel is really dope. They have this early 2000s Myspace thing going on, they’re from Tennessee. I think the vibe is funny as fuck. I shouldn’t say funny. I think it’s cool. It’s bedroom scrams, post-internet emo, and I think it’s really neat. Obviously Callous Daoboys. I’ve been obsessed with Celebrity Therapist for months. I’m excited about the new Sarah Shook and The Disarmers album coming out soon. Lydia Loveless‘ new album Nothing’s Gonna Stand in My Way Again kicks ass. That’s more country, I’m really obsessed with that record. The new Jerome’s Dream is dope. I really like Mo Troper.
GSC: MTV is full of hits, “King of Rock n Roll” is an absolute smash.
CJ: Yeah, he’s so fucking boss. I heard “Final Lap” and was like, holy shit. I love this. My second to last band went on tour and it was kind of really awful. We played with Diners and Mo Troper and we got paid less than them but Diners and Mo Troper gave us their share to make it fair and it was really nice. So shouts to the two of them. Diners rocks too! Big ups to Blue Broderick, that new Diners album was fucking sick.
GSC: What’s in store next for Captain Jazz? Where does the project go from here?
CJ: Sometimes I’m like, I need to make it less funny, and sometimes I’m like, I need to make it more funny. I have an idea from the next thing that’s maybe less funny, maybe more funny. I don’t know. I want to keep writing it until someone steps in my way and says, “Son, you need to sign this piece of paper, we need to make you stop.” I’m hoping that in the next couple of weeks, I’ll have a big non-musical event for everyone to participate in.
GSC: What is something outside of music that brings you joy that may surprise people?
CJ: Outsider YouTube content. I really like weird YouTube videos. I spend most of my day watching YouTube, it’s the only streaming service I pay for.
GSC: Who are your heavy hitters?
CJ: Post10 of course. I really like Premodernist. He does history videos. Sylvie and The Woggle Bugs, she makes a Wizard of Oz offshoot that she does 3d animations for that I think is really interesting. I’ve gotten really wrapped up in this Thomas the Tank Engine fan group in fighting and drama I don’t want to elaborate on but I can for anyone interested. Noah Caldwell Gervais does hours long YouTube essays about video game criticism, but I’m mostly interested in his travelogs. He did one traveling the Lincoln Highway, which is the first highway across America. He drives a Ford Thunderbird and waxes poetic the whole time. That shits fucking good. And the Star Trek animator TNPIR 4002. I have trolled his live streams before, but I didn’t mean it. I think he’s awesome. I wish I had his kind of dedication.
GSC: The loving troll.
CJ: Yeah, I am exactly that. I love YouTube. I made a short documentary about one of the youtubers I’m obsessed with at the beginning of the year, but I feel kind of guilty about it. So it is private.
GSC: Did you also catch them plagiarizing?
CJ: I didn’t catch them plagiarizing but that new HBomberGuy video goes off, I watch all his videos several times each. One thing I’d like to get off my chest, I think SummoningSalt has fallen off.
GSC: I did enjoy The Quest to beat Jimmy Poopins piece from earlier this year but I know what you mean.
CJ: It’s just become a little formulaic. Can you switch it up? His Wii Golf video goes off tho, I guess I just hold him to a higher standard.
GSC: Any last thoughts?
CJ: There’s a lot of people calling me out on plagiarism or saying I am astroturfing my album by pretending to actually be Cap’n Jazz. I think those claims are mostly unfounded or at the very least they don’t bother me. But there is one thing if someone was going to respond to me and really get me with, what they could do is remind me the final lyric on “0x” is, “So I reached for the moon and the door opens up into a smaller room.” I thought that that was a mistranslated Chinese t-shirt but I looked into it recently and it’s actually from an art group I think.
GSC: So on one line TurnItIn got your ass.
CJ: Yeah, if if you want to fuck with me, you should post “this guy’s fake because he stole this line from this art group via this t shirt.” And I’ll be like, You’re so right, I’m deleting everything I’ve ever posted. I feel genuinely guilty about that.
GSC: You should do merch where you translate that line into Chinese. Do the reverse.
CJ: I saw it on the shirts that go hard Twitter and I was like, oh, yeah, that’s fucking sick. I’m stealing the shit out of that. Then I did and now I’m just stealing from artists in the end, which I do feel bad about.
GSC: Have people been accusing you of plagiarism?
CJ: The guy from Braid posted the album to instagram mad as hell saying I was a ripoff and trying to trick people. I am not trying to trick anyone.
GSC: People love to be aggrieved these days. If people don’t feel like they’re in on a joke, they feel like the joke is about them and they can’t handle it.
CJ: In the Braid dude’s comments too one guy is like “Check out my new band Metallica” but funnily enough my friend Andrew Link from The Taxpayers played in a kickass band called Metallica.
GSC: You should name the next record Frame & Canvas (25th Anniversary Edition) to fuck with them.
CJ: That is hilarious. You are right about people being aggrieved though. That was a point with this project, you can’t make divisive art anymore. Bands mostly go down the middle of the road to avoid pissing people off. It’s really easy to get overloaded with hate messages. It’s really easy to only respond to the hateful shit. I’ve tried not to but I’m so bad at it. Since this record dropped, people have posted essays about what a fucking dickhead I am, which might be upsetting if it wasn’t so funny. Plus Sophie’s Floorboard liked the record, so who cares about what anyone else thinks.
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