A lot has changed for the members of Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick in the last three years, since I first interviewed lead guitar and singer Ben Curttwright and bass player Mike Foster. When Goalie first formed the band was mostly an excuse for their group of friends to get together and jam. They never imagined they’d be recording an album or putting it out on a label, let alone touring. Then their debut record Ways of Hearing came out via emo stalwarts Count Your Lucky Stars Records in the fall of 2020, and the group’s somber slowcore tunes were exactly what a lot of us needed at the time. Goalie was elated at the response, so when COVID allowed they played some shows and started writing some new songs, trying to keep the band’s momentum going. As it always seems to work, right as Goalie was prepping to get in the studio for LP 2, a whole lot changed at once. Mike got married and Ben moved from the band’s hometown of Philly back to his native Omaha to take a steady job at The Union for Contemporary Art. There was a thought that this move could derail the band for good, but all six members of Goalie felt resilient in their desire to get at least one more record in. Thus Goalie went from an excuse for the gang to hangout to something that was helping keep their friend group together.
Mike and Ben talked at length about how much more fun it was putting the second Goalie record together, mostly because the group was as comfortable together as could be. In the time before Ben left for Omaha the band would hold regular jam sessions where they’d play covers, hone their old tracks, and try out funky things on the new ones. The sessions helped the group up their game as individual performers and better understand the depths of one another’s talents. Ben admitted that at his worst he can be neurotic with song construction and that he had to leave those tendencies by the wayside to let his bandmates cook. In fact, he said many of his favorite moments on the record were things his bandmates suggested that he wasn’t sure would work, from Alyssa stealing the show with her triangle performance on “April 25th” to engineer Mark Watters throwing in some drum machine on “Tightrope Walker / Stranger, in These Dark Times”.
The tracks within their Homericly titled sophomore record The Iliad and the Odyssey and the Goalie’s Anxiety at The Penalty Kick sound like the group indeed had a bit more fun than the first record. Several songs start slow and somber before blossoming into a more hopeful sounding number that generally gets the whole band involved. Ben compared album opener “Leaf” to the beginning of the legendary Talking Heads live record Stop Making Sense where David Byrne takes the stage before the other players in the band slowly trickle in one by one. The six and a half minute “Mr. Settled Score” takes a similar sonic trajectory, starting small before building into a monumental close, where Ana Hughes Perez’s violin feels like it is holding the song, the band, and the weight of the world together. Ben said that the track was a pseudo response to “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the Bob Dylan hits of the 60s. He came to Dylan backwards, first interested in the radical left wing politics of the age before realizing he should listen to one of the era’s most influential musicians, and the song sounds every bit as ambitious as that tale might suggest.
The record also features two tributes to honorary members of Goalie. “April 25th” is Ben’s fiancé Keely’s birthday and he wrote it to commemorate her birthday in 2020. The two of them went out and had a nice time with their friends in the park even though they didn’t know what was going to happen to the world, and you could say that having fun with the homies despite the insurmountable odds and uncertainty of the future is the central thesis of this record. The record closes with a gorgeous cover of “Clair De Lune” played on the bells by drummer Alyssa Resh. The song is a tribute to Mike’s wife Rhianna who walked down the aisle to “Clair De Lune”, prompting Ben to think “Oh wow, time to marry Mike” every time he’s heard the song since. It both seemed like a random way to end the record and the most appropriate way possible. As Ben put it, “You generally don’t get to make that many records in your life. If you have an idea you really think is worth doing then why not?” Why not let Alyssa rock out on the bells? Why not close with a tribute to a loved one?
All of these tiny little personal touches made by people who love one another culminate in a record that is among the year’s very best. While the tracks are no doubt more freewheeling and bubbly than the band’s previous record, they’re also leagues more ambitious. The band sounds every bit as comfortable together as they claim to be, always moving in lockstep. It is a record that has stayed in my headphones since I first heard it, and I imagine it won’t be leaving for some time.
Goalie is very excited for their upcoming tour, which somewhat shockingly will be their first proper headlining tour as a band. They have no idea whether they’ll be able to make another record happen as their six lives continue to blossom in different directions. They are for now focusing on having as much fun on this tour as possible and not worrying about if it’s the end or not. Then again Ben did say that keyboardist, singer, and songwriter Becky Hanno did already start writing some new songs that felt like Goalie songs, and you could imagine the group getting inspired back together on the road. You have to hope if they have a chance to continue to make it work, the six of them will all again be asking themselves, hey, why not?
I talked with Ben and Mike about Wim Wenders, which of Mike’s dogs is friendlier, and the process of putting together their phenomenal sophomore record.
GSC: What are your names? What do you do in the band The Goalie’s Anxiety at The Penalty Kick?
MIKE: I’m Mike Foster, I play bass in Goalie and I sing on one song this time, which is pretty fun.
BEN: I’m Ben. I sing and play guitar in Goalie.
GSC: The makeup of the band has not changed since we last talked right? It is the same collection of people.
BEN: It’s the same collection of people, yes. The one addition is my fiance Keely does a harp feature, I wish we had more harp on there. I think that that already confused some people because another interviewer asked if there’s a new person in the band. And it’s like, well no, she isn’t really new.
MIKE: You’re like “No, that’s just my future wife.”
GSC: Longtime honorary member, sure she’s been to a show or two. Kinda like what Cappadonna was to the Wu Tang Clan.
BEN: Yes, exactly. It’s the same six members of the band though. This record was much more collaborative with the writing process. The first record a lot of those songs I came up with and brought to the team and then people layered their parts on top of it. I reread our old interview in preparation for this, and we talked about Mike’s first practice with the band and stuff like that. We’re all well past that now, the getting to know one another phase. We’re very comfortable collaboratively now.
GSC: When we last talked, nobody in the band had yet seen the Wim Wenders movie The Goalie’s Anxiety at The Penalty Kick and Ben, I believe you were the only one who’d read the Peter Handke book. Any updates there?
BEN: Yeah, and I still haven’t seen the film. I’ve tried to, I need to commit to buying a physical or something.
(Ed Note: The film is on the Criterion Channel now, though it wasn’t when this interview transpired)
BEN: I have come to accept Wenders as one of the greatest filmmakers that is currently working. The best movie I’ve seen so far this year was Perfect Days.
GSC: I love that movie.
MIKE: Mike, are you familiar with this movie?
MIKE: No, I’m not. Last movie I saw was Dune.
BEN: As far as I could piece together, the backstory on Perfect Days is that Wenders was approached by a Japanese Tourist Bureau. They asked him if he would like to make a short promotional film to show the world that Tokyo really cares about its public restroom facilities as we’ve made some impressive innovations in the field. He came to the conclusion upon visiting some of these toilets that a short film wouldn’t do it justice. So he conceptualized this wonderful, heartfelt, totally austere movie about a middle aged Japanese man who’s the best toilet cleaner that you could possibly be. He’s got a little mirror on a stick that he uses to look underneath the… the toilet carriage. It’s all much more magical than it sounds.
GSC: It’s like Groundhog Day but instead of being about the mundaneness of life it was about finding the beauty in everything.
BEN: I really do love Wenders though, which is funny too because that isn’t even how we got the band name. Last year, there was a local theater near us that did a week-long run of Paris, Texas which is a top five movie for me. It is perfect.
GSC: My Paris, Texas t-shirt is sitting above my Goalie t-shirt in my t-shirt pile right now crazily enough.
MIKE: Where’d you get the Paris, Texas t-shirt? Like in the actual city of Paris, Texas?
GSC: No, there’s this guy And After That who does great bootlets.
BEN: I am on his website now and Mike this seems really up your alley.
MIKE: Yea, there’s a bunch of these bootleg t-shirt pages on instagram I love.
GSC: Who are some faves?
MIKE: I really like Night Gallery. I’m actually wearing a Gallery shirt right now, the Oasis one that everybody has. There is one Clumsy Goods. They did The Sundays, which is one of my favorite bands. So I bought one every time they’ve done the Sundays.
BEN: I love buying shirts. I should stop, I have enough. But it’s just so fun.
MIKE: I’ve been passing off some of my band shirts that I no longer wear to Younger Michael, who has played with Goalie a couple of times.
BEN: Funnily enough, Younger Michael filled in for one of our first shows where people specifically came to see us because it was during Mike’s honeymoon. It was a phenomenal show in Lancaster run by some enthusiastic college kids. Now we’re planning a summer tour which Mike won’t be able to be on because, we’ll actually Mike can I say?
MIKE: I guess so, yea my wife and I are having a baby.
BEN: We’re hoping they’ll be able to make our wedding but that may also be too close to the due date, so we’ll see, but we couldn’t be more excited for them.
GSC: Congratulations, that is so exciting! My next question was, how have your lives changed in the three years since we last chatted, because Ben, I know you are now living in the Midwest, but it sounds like life has changed quite a lot.
BEN: Indeed. When we put the first record out I was in Philadelphia teaching part time at two different universities, piecing things together job wise. Now I have a real job where I go to work and come home at five. I am back in Omaha which is where I’m from, and it’s, it’s nice. I’m not gonna say it’s not nice. I always thought I was gonna be back here someday, I just thought it would be further down the road. One thing that was hardest about it was, does this mean that the band is over? We were just preparing to enter the studio when I took the job, we had talked with the producer, and we were booking time at Headroom. We worried it’d stop the band from going forward but everyone was unified in wanting to make something work to at least get the second record out. Once you have the second record out, you have to tour the second record. Once you do that, then you might as well take this one other show and so on. I think that we’ve definitely continued longer than I thought we were going to and maybe there’s not an end in the near future. I don’t know.
GSC: I’m glad to hear that.
MIKE: Yeah, I would love for my kid to see a Goalie show. It’d be a lot less loud than my other band.
BEN: Does your kid have to understand what’s going on at the Goalie show? Because that would mean another what five or so years?
MIKE: I can settle for him just attending with those big baby earphones. Outside of the baby, I don’t practice law anymore, I work for a consulting firm now. It’s very similar but I don’t have to go to court. I was excited to practice law but then I did a long arbitration where the lawyer on the other side blew up, making it into this big ass unnecessary fight. After that, I was like, you know what? I did it. I’ve done cross examinations. I’ve made objections. I am gonna leave on a high note.
GSC: You did everything Phoenix Wright did.
MIKE: That is a big change Ben moving though, I wish I got to see him more.
BEN: The saddest thing rereading our last interview was that we didn’t actually ever go play tennis anywhere. I don’t think I’ve played tennis since. My sister never asks me to play anymore.
GSC: While we’re being tangential, is Spoons, the rec soccer team several Goalie band members played for, still active?
MIKE: Spoons, it’s not an exaggeration to say that we were forcibly knocked out of the Philadelphia recreational soccer scene in an act of violence. So in the summer we played 7v7 outdoors, and in the winter we would do 5v5, basically futsal, on a basketball court at this local community center. There was one game where we played a team that was all too big. They were extremely physical and three members of our team were injured for the season. One person on our team was concussed, Omar, and he had to go to the hospital mid game. I was elbowed in the throat. My initial response was just to be angry at the ref for not noticing the foul against me, but it did hurt a little bit. Then another girl gets knocked over and hits her head where we need to take her to the hospital to make sure she isn’t concussed. As we were driving home, my voice started getting raspier and raspier. I was talking perfectly fine right after I was elbowed and slowly got more Schmegle-like. My fiance Keely had made some cauliflower that I couldn’t swallow. Her Dad is a doctor and she asked him is that normal? He’s like, take him to the hospital, and I had fractured cartilage in my neck. I ended up in the UPenn ICU for two days under observation.
GSC: That’s insane. Oh my God.
BEN: So then at that point we didn’t have enough people for the next game and things soured quickly. I’ll bring this back full circle though. Mike said that he sings on one song on this record and he did that partially because my high range still hasn’t come back. It’s been like, three years at this point.
GSC: Could you not sue the league or the guy or anyone?
BEN: No, I signed a stupid waiver. I got back on the horse though, I’m still playing soccer once a week. There aren’t as many leagues here as Philly but I found one and I play pick up with some of the guys from that league. Funnily enough though, ever since I moved out of Philadelphia my appreciation for every single Philly sports team has only deepened. It’s a way to connect with a lot of people that you care about, in a simple dumb way. Keely and I watched the Phillies playoffs last year after not really caring about baseball just because her Dad loves them and it’s something to bond with him about, or keeping in touch with Mike by complaining about the Eagles losing.
GSC: I really appreciate that because I find you get the same community from sports that you do from music, but so many musicians act like they’re above athletics for some reason.
BEN: There’s a lot of fun characters on the Phillies, too. Our favorite is–
GSC: As a Mets fan, lemme guess, Nick Castellanos?
BEN: No but we do love him. He did an interview where he said Scooby Doo is his favorite superhero, and when they asked him to explain he went, “Well he’s a dog that can talk who goes around solving crime. That sounds pretty super to me.” Our favorite is Brandon Marsh, the wet guy.
MIKE: I am cracking up at you shaking your head Brendan.
GSC: Brandon Marsh is not my favorite.
MIKE: He’s got the long hair and the shitty beard, so bad. For whatever reason, every inning before they go out to the field he takes a new bottle of water out of the cooler and he opens it and he pours it on his head.
GSC: You know what’s funny, I just assumed he was a sweaty guy. So now into the music questions. How does Ways of Hearing sound when listening to the record now? You were all at very different points, both with the band and with your lives.
MIKE: I am so much better at bass than I used to be.
BEN: On the first record, you play great.
MIKE: That’s the only clear thing I can tell. I read a review today of us that was like “the bassist rarely strays from root notes.” And I’m like, you know what, I worked hard to play those root notes.
BEN: That’s not quite fair to you. I remember in the Ways of Hearing sessions you were coached back to the root notes. More than once you were doing something more exciting, and we listened back to the song and we were like, this sounds like nonsense because there’s no one playing the root notes. Then you drew the short straw as it were. I can’t remember the last time I sat down and listened to Ways of Hearing, I’ll be honest. I don’t know whether most band people end up listening to their own stuff a lot or not. In my experience you listen so many times as you demo, record, mix and master the record that you don’t listen to it a lot after that. I listened to Ways of Hearing a bunch and then it was out in the world and I was like okay, I don’t need to listen to this anymore. It’s been the same thing with Illiad where while I was waiting for it to come out I would put it on on my headphones as I’m walking to get a coffee at work. It was very inconvenient to do so because at the time it was first just like a bunch of files in my Google Drive and then on the Count Your Lucky Stars SoundCloud, but then now that it’s out I probably won’t listen to it very much anymore. I did however have to go back, rather embarrassingly, and open up a couple of the demo logic projects to figure out what the hell I was playing on guitar on a couple Ways of Hearing songs to prepare for the tour, “jars filled with rain” specifically. Overall though, I think that the second record is better. The songs are just better. I would hope that I would feel that way. If I thought they were worse, why put it out?
GSC: When you guys were originally forming it was mostly an excuse for friends to play together, you didn’t imagine releasing on a label or touring. The first album was then successful, and in the time since your lives have changed a bit where the band is helping keep the friend group together in a way. How did your lives changing morph your perspectives on the band and how you all approached the second record?
MIKE: Earlier we said something about how we felt more free recording this record. We were still friends first, hanging and whatnot, but it does feel like I was more keyed into the Goalie sound on this one. When you play music with a bunch of people that you’ve known for a long time, you drill into this synergy between each other. You learn how to communicate and get the best out of each other and how to make your bandmates get the best out of you. I remember when we were making “April 25th” I listened to it a bunch solo and went to Ben like let me hear you just stay on that riff for a while so I can come up with the bass part. Or on “Wildrose” there is a moment where the bass goes Boom Boom before the chorus and we just came up with that on the fly because it felt right. It felt so much more structured on the first one, where now it feels like we were really jamming.
BEN: Mike will attest, at my worst I can be neurotic and controlling with the music. There were songs on the first record, where I brought a file to the band that had demos for guitar one, guitar two, guitar three, bass but I’m playing it on my guitar, drum machine, vocal one, vocal two, just to be like hey everyone, do it like this. I don’t think that there were any songs on the second record that were written at all like that. I brought lyrics and melodies and music to the group still, but it was about each of us doing what felt right as a group in the moment and bringing what sounded best as a group to the record. I think that it turned out better because of that. Everyone in this group is so talented, you just have to be able to find ways to use all these skills.
GSC: You and Becky split singing duty close to 50/50 on this record. Was that by design? Do you ever write songs for one another?
BEN: There are some that Becky sings that I wrote. Becky has a much better voice than I do. I’m not even saying that in a faux modest way or something, you have to be aware of yourself as a performer at a certain point, it just doesn’t sound that good when I try to sing in a certain way. However I can still come up with a song and record it and show it to my very talented friend and be like you try something kinda like this. So there are a couple on this record that Becky leads because Becky wrote them and a couple others that I wrote for Becky.
GSC: I love the title of this record, it feels so Goalie. How did you come up with the title? Do you consider it a self titled record?
BEN: You asked me a similar question in the first interview, how I came up with the name of the band, and I gave you the very annoying answer that I just happened to be reading the book, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. When we were writing this record I was reading The Odyssey for the first time, and I was like this is really good.
GSC: You were like my man Odysseus is going off right now. Fuck that cyclops.
BEN: From there I thought that it was such a funny title.
GSC: There’s something about The Iliad and The Odyssey that feels so epic, we’re bringing these two great totems and then your band name at the very end of it is just perfect.
BEN: Someone said the best thing I’ve ever heard about it, and I quote, “It is the only album title I’m aware of that is just three book titles smashed together.” I’m gonna hang on to that screenshot forever.
GSC: The the cover art for the album is absolutely gorgeous. Is that original work of art?
BEN: It’s a study of a JMW Turner draft painting. The original painting by Turner is called Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, it’s in the National Gallery in London. There is a finished version of that painting, but then there’s a draft version of the painting that Turner did as he was working on the final that I actually like better. I gave the draft version to a coworker of mine, Tyrone Quigley, who is a phenomenal watercolor artist. I said, can you do something based on this? And he did and it’s beautiful. I have the original watercolor hanging on the wall in my bedroom. I got to keep it because I paid for it.
GSC: I love getting the homies involved especially when they are that talented.
BEN: I just finished an amazing novel The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt, I would highly recommend if you haven’t read, and there’s a scene where precocious 10 year old kid goes to the National Gallery and stares at that exact painting and is like “The placard says that there’s a cyclops in this fight, I don’t see it.” So I asked Tyrone to make it where the cyclops is more pronounced and he knocked it out of the park.
GSC: The detail on the ship is incredible, especially for watercolor.
BEN: I know man. When I saw Tyrone’s work I knew he was the man for the job, it really couldn’t have come out better. We met working at the place I work at now, The Union for Contemporary Art in Omaha. It’s an art gallery with everything from a theater program, to Co-op studios, a print shop, a ceramic studio, where anyone can just come in and learn from our talented crew and make art. It’s a really cool place. I feel like I’m doing meaningful work, even though I’m just fundraising there. There’s a little vocal booth upstairs, and I actually did some of the vocals on the record during the work day, so shoutout to my boss for the flexibility there. I was supposed to record those vocals in Philly but god COVID and couldn’t which was a whole thing.
MIKE: When Ben had COVID he slept in this basement that I am in right now.
BEN: Yeah, I was staying with Mike. The first two nights I stayed on the couch upstairs with the dogs and then we found out that I was just expelling the virus all over at everyone.
GSC: Did anybody else get sick?
BEN: Nobody else got sick. Mike also, Keely reminded me to ask, how is Fergus [Mike’s Dog]?
MIKE: He just had eye surgery today. He’s fine. He’s calm. He’s high as hell upstairs in his bed with a big cone on his head, he got an injection to get rid of glaucoma. Also Fergus is not the dog from the back of the record, that’d be Frieda.
BEN: Fergus is such a sweet boy. I am blessed to know Fergus. Frieda is very nice as well but Fergus is better with guests.
MIKE: Fergus is a lot more warm. Frida takes years of warming up.
GSC: Diving into the record proper, “Leaf” starts slow and feels like the first record before pepping up and letting you know things are a little different. How did “Leaf” come together? And how did you know it was the lead off track?
BEN: The real answer is that I got a drum machine. I never used one before, and it’s fun to use. I didn’t even plug it in either, just pointed it at the microphone. I wanted something that sounded like in Stop Making Sense how someone comes out and plays an instrument, then someone else comes out and plays another instrument. I had to use my fifteen year old mic to get the right vocal take too because the one I did on my normal mic was coming in too clean. I bet the old thing is worth more now than when I bought it too.
GSC: I love the second track “Hole Underneath The Surface of a Swimming Pool” which has a similar build as “Leaf”. What’s that track about and how did it come together?
BEN: Mike, how do you feel about that song?
MIKE: That one I always compare to “Mr. Settled Score” in that I learned them at the same time and they really remind me of our old Ways of Hearing tracks.
BEN: Those two are the Goalie-ist songs on the record.
MIKE: These are the “Ben sending me pics of his Carrissa’s Weird tattoo” style Goalie.
BEN: It’s hard for me to ever say that a certain song is specifically about this or that because I don’t really like to write lyrics that way. It’s more a collection of words and images and thoughts to evoke the right mood more often than telling a story.
MIKE: A collage more than a painting.
BEN: A collage more than a painting, yeah. I keep thinking about the week in high school where everyone discovers Chuck Palahniuk for the first time. For us it was his story collection Haunted.
MIKE: Damn you went to a literary ass high school.
GSC: Yea, I remember Van Wilder being a big deal in high school.
BEN: Well at my school someone found a short story in there where the character is a guy who likes to sit at the bottom of the swimming pool and get his ass tugged on by the filter vent. Then he gets his ass sucked out of them from the inside.
MIKE: My god, I read that actually. I feel like it might not have been assigned reading, but we mighta had a story from that collection assigned because I remember just stumbling on that story and having my mind blown.
BEN: You’re like, wait, can someone do that in a story? You can just write the words “his asshole” and keep going, and that’s fine and it’s in the library? I remember that story being instrumental to the image of the song if that makes sense, but it’s not really about that guy or that story.
GSC: I love “April 25” and I really love how you released the record on April 25. What came first, the release date or the song name?
BEN: The song by far. Yeah. We wrote the song two, three years ago. Anytime you’re working with an actual studio and an actual engineer and an actual record label, the tails on these things get so long, it was fortuitous. Keith from Count Your Lucky Stars texted me, “I got the masters, I got the art, I got the layout, everything’s good to go. I’m thinking that we put the record on the calendar to release April 26.” And I said, “Hold on a second. Can you back that up one day for me?” My thought was that it would have been dumb to have a lead single called “April 25” and then a record that comes out on the 26th.
GSC: It would have really pissed me off honestly.
MIKE: If another band had a song named the day after their album dropped I would ask why the fuck they did that.
GSC: Does “April 25” commemorate anything in particular?
BEN: It’s the rare Goalie song where the meaning behind the lyrics are actually really simple, it’s my then girlfriend and now fiance’s birthday. It felt like a nice gesture when I wrote it for her a couple years ago. This is the one year where it felt a little bit presumptuous because it meant that on her birthday I was doing media and looking at Twitter and texting Mike a lot. So Keely thank you for putting up with that this year.
GSC: Does she like the song? Is she a fan?
BEN: She tells me that she likes the song but she’s like, far far too nice to me. She’s very accommodating of the weird things that I do on these records, and not on the records. So I hope she likes it as much as she says.
GSC: My brother Liam’s birthday is April 27th so you nearly got one for him too. I still sent it to him though, he said it was nice.
BEN: I only realized this after it came out, but I kind of think we’ve given the band some longevity with that track. There are 365 days in the year, assuming even distribution among births then like 2.2% of people have a birthday that day. So hopefully it can commemorate other things for other people too.
GSC: I usually post “June 21st” by Jeff Rosenstock on that holy day, I feel you there.
MIKE: We just had Jawbreaker day “May 4th”. Listening to “April 25” I remember being in the studio and one of the engineers there was like I wish I wrote that bassline. That bassline is the one thing I will toot my own horn about, it might be the finest one I’ve ever written.
GSC: So “The Tightrope Walker/Stranger in These Dark Times” is another one with some pep in the backend. How did that song come together?
BEN: That one came together as two songs that were stuck together. Ain’t that funny? It was the last song on the record that got written from a lyrics standpoint. Becky brought it to the band so they would be better at answering this question than I am. The way I remember her telling it to me is it was two ideas that she started playing back to back, thinking they flowed together well enough. There was a thought they could be separate tracks but they came together as one because they were in the same key and sounded really nice flowing into one another. It’s kind of like a three part song. The beginning very slow guitar part, then there’s the slightly more upbeat acoustic guitar part, and finally the pop song that ends it.
MIKE: I gotta be honest, I love it now but I did not like learning the song.
BEN: I still don’t always love playing it, I at least need to focus. Becky writes guitar in a way that is not quite the way that my head works, so it’s an adjustment.
MIKE: I remember writing and thinking I couldn’t embellish anything, it had to be roots, and those roots weren’t always easy to find.
BEN: I start with a B7 then I have to go down to this C formation that’s like 8 skip 10-10-10. I don’t know how Mark Watter, our producer, managed to find a take where I was playing it well.
MIKE: I think it took us three hours of practicing before we all really got it down.
BEN: Hopefully live it sounds better because live you get a lot more forgiveness playing an electric guitar and like I I am solely acoustic on all the Goalie stuff.
MIKE: All of this just makes it sound like I’m saying that it’s bad. It is my favorite song on the record to play now. Once we got it down, it sounded fucking awesome. If I’m practicing the set, I’ll sit here and I’ll sing Becky’s part like it’s my own. It is a cool ass song and there was something very fulfilling about pulling what felt like a difficult song together like that. So thanks to Becky for the challenge if anything, again we really brought the best out of one another on this record.
BEN: How did “System of One” come together?
MIKE: That one’s different in that we wrote it as a band over the course of time. We played it at that World Cafe show. That was like the first new Goalie song we were ready to trot out. We played with fucking Bad Heaven Ltd. which also kicked a ton of ass. I love that band.
BEN: I thought that that one was gonna be just a guitar and vocal song for a long time. I got overruled on that. Everyone else was like, no, let us put in the big big drum build and this and that. I think that everyone else was right in the end.
GSC: “Mr. Settled Score” has really stuck with me. It feels like the most ambitious song on the record and it feels like the beginning of the finale, starting the procession out of the record. How did that song come together?
BEN: There’s always a certain trepidation towards admitting I ripped off this song or that song. I remember hearing “Voice in Headphones” by Mount Erie and discovering after loving that song for a while that the hook on that song is a Bjork song, he just borrowed her hook for his track. I don’t know if Bjork got mad at him or whatever. All of that is the really obnoxious way to say it is that “Mr. Settled Score” is a thematic response to the Bob Dylan records of the 60s.
MIKE: I remember talking with Ben about this song, and he basically described his goal as “What if Bob Dylan but good?”
BEN: No, I did not say that exactly. I love Bob Dylan. I legitimately came to Bob Dylan backwards. I came to Bob Dylan as someone who was very interested in the New Left of the 1960s, trying to figure out what happened in the US politically around those times. How can we channel that energy toward a new left wing politics in the US, how can we harness the good without falling into some of the traps that organizers did in the 60s? I was reading a lot of stuff about the SDS and The Weatherman and the Black Panthers and all these political movements of the 60s and figured I should check out the classic Dylan records of this time.
MIKE: I should amend my statement to say Ben said “this is Bob Dylan our way” or something like that and all I heard is “Bob Dylan, but good.”
BEN: The song has the same sequencing as “Mr. Tambourine Man” by Dylan, which is a great song and from a Dylan record, that’s… I don’t want to say optimistic, he wasn’t saying that there was a better world on the horizon, but there was a possibility that there was something people could do by coming together and sharing experiences and learning from one another. I wanted to write something that responded to it in a way and that’s what “Mr. Settled Score” is. I think that “Mr. Tambourine Man” is like Capo five or something and “Mr. Settle Score” is just a half step down, but they have very similar shapes of song. But now will Bob Dylan sue me if you publish that?
GSC: Let’s hope he isn’t too litigious. Mike, this is the track you sing on, what did you want to bring to the record vocally?
MIKE: It has been a long conversation with Ben and Ben about how to sing Goalie songs.
GSC: Very different from your other band, Poltergeist.
MIKE: It started from one of our Goalie open mics, I must have done a Saves the Day song or a Joyce Manor song. Ben was like, how would you feel about sitting on a Goalie song? It was really at practice when we were learning all the songs where I figured out how I wanted to sing. I had been messing around with the vocal melody and wanted to do this thing where I was slightly behind Ben. Not quite harmonized but maybe in the same melody. I did maybe ten takes in the studio and I was like I am done. Doing studio vocals is so scary man. Everyone is looking at you and listening to you sing.
BEN: They’re telling you that it’s bad over and over again. Every time you do it badly, it means that the thing goes on longer.
MIKE: I had a couple of attempts where I was not matching Ben’s phrasing and we were trying to decide if that was good or bad. Eventually we’re like, no, let’s do an exact match to Ben’s phrasing with max effort. The last vocal take I left it all on the floor because my voice was shot anyway so I really went for it, and I can hear snippets of that specific one. I think Mark ended up using an amalgamation of all of the vocal takes, he was a wizard with my voice there.
BEN: Mark’s catchphrase, like any good engineer, was “That was great. Let’s get one more.” So I’ve been there too, Mike.
MIKE: I am excited to sing that live though. It is a track with some real weight to it, it’s a real punch. I remember listening to it and I was like damn Ben with the lyrics.
BEN: I was gonna say, Mike, what do you think any of our songs are about?
MIKE: This one I liked the political edge it has but I don’t know besides the obvious ones, I just go with the flow. I remember we had this conversation when I first joined the band where I asked what the songs were about and Ben was like “I just write words and shit.”
BEN: There are a lot of songs on this record that are a little bit about a moment that I cherish, and a little bit of something I was reading at the time, and a little bit of something that I read 15 years ago. The priority is always to make something that sounds like a good line above making something that makes sense. It’s not out of a lack of appreciation for story based songwriting. I was just trying to write songs like that for years and they were not very good.
GSC: Oftentimes, people have this issue where they think of lyrics as poetry when the lyrics are meant to serve the song.
MIKE: That is the fault of one Peter Wentz from Fall Out Boy.
BEN: Its instrument in the band, the vocalist. The idea that the vision of the band is the vocalist’s sole vision never made sense to me. Like the lyrics are part of the story and often an important part, but they’re just one way we’re trying to make you feel something, and everyone is bringing as much to the track generally as the vocalist. Like “Tightrope Walk” we wanted to start slow and blossom into something Microphones inspired as a pick up into something more exciting. Lyrically, I don’t think the song tells that same story, but that’s another take on what the song is “about”.
MIKE: It’s very funny to hear Ben list off his influences. Like I was trying to play bass like Sublime as much as I could.
BEN: I said this to Mark a bunch but my biggest musical influence on this record are these demos that The Grand Archives put out in like 2010. After Carissa’s Weird had broken up the vocalist Matt Weir did like 10 years in Band of Horses. There’s an interview that Matt Brooke gave after Band of Horses won their Grammy where he was like, “I guess we were holding him back the whole time just having him play bass.” After just playing rhythm guitar in Band of Horses for a while, Matt Brooke wanted to get into songwriting again. They have four really great demos that he put out under The Grand Archives that I really loved. Then they did a record called The Grand Archives that I really hated. The four songs in the demo were on the record, and they were just not good anymore. They sounded way over produced. He was trying to sing in a way that wasn’t totally natural to his voice. If Matt ever reads this, I’m so sorry. You’re a legend, you’re one of my favorite musicians of all time, but that Grand Archives record just isn’t it. I remember being discouraged and not looking up the name Grand Archives again for a while. Then I stumbled across a set of demos that they put out for what was supposed to be their second record, to be called Villains. It was supposed to come out in like, 2012. It never did. For a while, they had demos hosted on a website that’s now offline, so the only place you can find these songs is on YouTube. These songs are so good, and were a huge inspiration for this record. They have the contemplative vibe that some of the best Carissa’s Weird songs do with a bit more fun too. Our first record is universally talked about as a somber record and these demos helped me see that the second record doesn’t necessarily also need to be a somber record to be a Goalie record.
MIKE: Not that I wasn’t having fun the first time around, but we did have a lot more fun figuring this record out.
BEN: In “April 25” there’s one part where Alyssa brought a triangle to practice. They’re like “I’m just gonna hit the triangle at this part.” I was like, “You can’t do that.” And then they did it and it’s in the record and it’s awesome. Mark threw some drum machine into “Tightrope Walker” in a cool way I didn’t anticipate. So much of the record was someone trying something weird or different and having it work way better than I guessed it would.
GSC: You guys ended the record with a cover of Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” How did that come about?
MIKE: I invited Ben to my wedding and my lovely wife walked down the aisle to “Clair de Lune” and after that Ben started joking about including a cover of “Claire de Lune” on a Goalie record and naming it “Time to Marry Mike”. **Brendan bursts out laughing**
BEN: I have loved that song for years. I loved it before I knew it was Debussy, I loved it before I knew that it was in stuff because it was 100 years old and copyright free. I just thought it was a lovely fucking song. And like, why not? You generally don’t get to make that many records in your life. If you have an idea you really think is worth doing then why not. We knew going in that there had to be a bell song because Alyssa is an incredible bells player and we wanted to include a song that showed those skills off. I wish we had the resources for her to really play the bells properly live, but she has a tiny Fisher Price-esque glockenspiel that she takes out and plays on her lap while playing drums. Even that is so impressive to watch her do live and yet it shows like a fraction of her skills as a musician on this instrument. Also, not to be “old man yells at cloud” about it, but I really would have loved “Clair de Lune” as a bonus track, but those don’t really exist in streaming. When Mark was mixing the record he sent me a version of the file that was the last two songs together and it sounds great. So we thought about doing it like that too, but on Spotify someone might see that it’s a 10 minute song and just not listen to it. I’m hoping that it makes one of those Debussy playlists, you know, the ones you always see going viral.
GSC: I feel like you left that name “Time to Marry Mike” on the table though.
BEN: I’ve outgrown my inside joke era for song names. I wrote songs in another emo band before Goalie where we had those long titles that were independent of the song in every single way, and I got it out of my system for the most part.
MIKE: Another thing we can all blame Pete Wentz for.
GSC: I love that both your wives have a song on the record, too.
BEN: Does Rhianna know that song is for her on the record Mike?
MIKE: I don’t know, I guess I could probably tell her. I could also just wait for her to read this.
BEN: I asked my wife to go to the store for us tonight because I was doing this interview and she asked which one and I said, “Oh, it’s this one that I did with Mike a few years ago” and she remembered the first one! She was like, “Oh, that’s a really fun one. It seems like you guys had a great time. I really like reading these.” and I was like, “What do you mean?” And she’s like “No, I just like hearing what you have to say about the songs.” And I’m like, “I’m right here!” And she’s like, “Well what you say about them to other people.”
GSC: I get it though, it’s like a different side of you or something.
MIKE: I have a similar thing with like, all the Poltergeist. songs. We played like a few shows now and Rhianna will be like “Oh this song is so good!” and I’m thinking about the subject matter and what we could do to make it better and I’m like “Nah that one sucks”.
BEN: Mike’s writing a new song called “I Fucking Love My Wife and Child”. **Sings I Fucking Love My Wife and Child to the tune of “Mercury” by Mike’s band Poltergeist.
GSC: You know your Poltergiest. I see!
BEN: I listen to everyone in the band’s other bands too, I love the extended Goalie cousin band universe.
GSC: Could you name all those bands off the dome?
BEN: Mike is in Poltergeist, Alyssa drums for Lizdelise which is Liz and Mark Watter our producer and Alyssa and also drums in a band called Another Michael. Which, too damn many of them Michaels but really, really fun band. I saw them when they hit Omaha last fall, they were on tour with Ratboys and their set was the best of the night in my opinion. I don’t think Sean’s playing in anything else at the moment and neither is Becky. I know that Anna did a violin feature on the most recent Parting or Mt Oriander record too.
GSC: So Goalie LP 3 is possible but a lot of life needs to happen, people need to get married, babies need to be born, this album needs to get toured. So it’s far away but have any inklings of songs for a future record started to populate your minds?
BEN: Becky last time we talked mentioned to me having a couple ideas that felt like Goalie ideas, but I haven’t written anything that would be Goalie stuff. It is a little bit harder when you have a real job to sit down and be like, I’m gonna write five songs this week. I’ve been using my weekends, and the time that I might otherwise use for that to try to book a tour, which also takes a lot of time. But maybe someday.
GSC: The last question I had for you at the end of this is, what is a piece of art that has brought you joy recently?
BEN: I mentioned it already, But The Last Samurai” by Helen DeWitt. It is a great read. Mike’s gonna say Final Fantasy Seven.
MIKE: Actually, that’s been giving me quite a headache to get through. I’ve been playing Final Fantasy Tactics while my wife watches TV. It’s pretty good. I have it on PSP, the version that came out in 2007 where they changed all the translations to sound all Shakespearean. It’s pretty charming, it may be the best tactics RPG ever made. I’ve been reading this Brandon Sanderson tome of shit, and I’ll be in bed going, Hmm, am I going to spend my evening with Brandon Sanderson or Final Fantasy Tactics. I hate to say it, but the PSP always wins.
1 Comment