Words by David C. Obenour
Get Me the Good Stuff is a fitting title for the second release from Jonah Falco and Mike Haliechuk. While 2020’s Harmony Avenue marked the pandemic-era debut by the duo from hardcore fusion legends Fucked Up, the new album takes the myriad of inspirations and has melded them seamlessly together. Glam rock, english punk, Madchester, psychedelia, guitar pop earworms, nonstop funk, art pop… what do you have in that bin over there? Yeah, pop it in. If Harmony Avenue was a DJ’s crate of records, Get Me the Good Stuff is the curated set.
Off Shelf: Harmony Avenue and Get Me the Good Stuff feel like very different albums to me. Without putting my words in your mouth – how would you see the difference between the two?
Jonah Falco: Get Me The Good Stuff is less impulse and more of a considerate stride towards making a record full of personality. Harmony Ave was about inhabiting different spaces to find out who we are… this record has all the eccentricity on display like a grubby antique store with really high price tags.
OS: Do you feel like Get Me the Good Stuff is a more fully formed album – asserting more of what you want to sound like as Jade Hairpins? If so, how did you arrive there?
JF: We arrived here by getting the band out in the world for a few years and brought our heads back into the studio knowing what the outline of Jade Hairpins really feels like. Everything we said we sounded like – but didn’t actually sound like – in the past felt like some kind of positive projection, and that energy went back into making this record. It’s still diverse stylistically but that’s the point. Our unifying effort is this kaleidoscopic, high-spec-amateur take on pop.
OS: How do you think playing live has influenced the new songs?
JF: If anything, playing live has pulled our sounds closer together. There’s a lot of Buzzcocks-esque punky guitar on this record, and the danceable baggy tracks are tighter to what a live band of four people can readily perform. The record turned out to be versatile in terms of performing live, and we’ve been playing most of the new record in the set for the past year.
OS: With Tamsin M. Leach and Jack Goldstein, how has writing and performing evolved for Jade Hairpins? Can you talk about their influence on the new album?
JF: Tamsin and Jack do both sing on the new record, and Jack plays a bit of keys on and helped with “Lost in Song,” but Mike and I do all the writing and performing and recording in studio. Knowing that we have their strengths to play to means that we can write with confidence when we throw parts at them, but ultimately the idea of the live band and the studio band are really two different parts of the brain. It’s been great having them as ears and eyes with this record since they can look at what we do really objectively, and add things that really punch it up.
OS: How do you separate the creative influences on Jade Hairpins and Fucked Up? What is the distinction and how to they bleed into one another still?
JF: There’s a really firm filter between the two bands, creatively. Mike does all the writing in FU and I am like an auxiliary instrument/wing of the songwriting apparatus. In Pins the decision making is more collaborative and ultimately with my voice/melodies etc going on top the creativity gets taken in my direction and away from the intellectual centre of FU. There are songs that we made during the creation of Good Stuff that didn’t turn out to be Hairpins songs, but rarely does that crossover to FU.
OS: It may seem ridiculous to say – acknowledging that pop stems from popular – but whether it’s a band’s unexpected influences or crate-digging reissues and compilations, it feels like pop music is having a moment. Have you noticed this? What do you think is driving this re-evaluation?
JF: Pop music is having a moment because it’s been moved into a different consciousness of individual culture. People have started to stop treating pop as an unreachable emerald castle on a hillside – it more or less still is this – and maybe consider more as a part of a toolkit which can create a broader pastiche. The ground level pop that people are making, or bedroom pop, have not much to do with the faceless gnashing music machine that is so poisonous, but more about the aesthetics and mechanics of mass appeal as a tool for everyone. The nice thing is that the more pervasive pop becomes as a musical aesthetic, the less it needs to be popular and the more room there is to shim qualifiers infront of it – “experimental” pop, “angular” pop, “lo fi” pop, “hyper” pop, “diy” pop, etc.
OS: Do you feel swept up in this too? There’s definitely a myriad of influences peppered in your press release. Is there any crate-digging of your own – or compilation reissues – that have helped shape the music of Get Me the Good Stuff?
JF: Yes, definitely! We’re not pop musicians, but we consume this music and bring whatever elemental, cobbled together, understanding we have of it into the songs we write. I like pop of past generations because it’s a lot more accessible as a learning tool. Since I don’t have the cynicism of experiencing it as contemporary music, it feels way less banal to listen to a record from the 60s that sold 3 million copies than it does to listen to something similar today. Some people are incredibly literate in contemporary pop music and can see all the brilliant elements of its deeper construction – there’s still and will continue to be huge intelligence in “big” music – but yeah just not as fun for me. [laughs]
The crate digging is just our usual life long journey with discovering lots of music and trying out our take on it. Sparks seems to be a centralizing figure in the musical compass of this record, and I think Pulp, too. Both achieve brilliant histrionic takes on pop music whilst not really sounding anything like it. Feels like the kind of honesty I can get behind.
OS: For as much as those earlier questions are relevant, Get Me the Good Stuff is an undeniably modern feeling record still. Do you think that comes from a pluralism of influences or is there something else that brings them into the 21st century?
JF: I’m happy to hear that. I don’t know what our music actually sounds like, it just sounds good in my head. Like my pal Charlie says, music is just “wobbly air.” It’s modern cause it’s now and we’ve already seen too much of the past to stay stuck there.
OS: Why am I totally convinced that Drifting Superstition is going to be my favorite song of 2024? As one of the first singles, what resonates with you about?
JF: I wanted that song to sound like baroque psych and Funkadelic, Abba, and T Rex. It’s a good first single cause it’s got a groove, a solid tempo, and a lot to look at. It’s a song about putting your trust somewhere higher, but pretending not to know you’re really in charge. It’s the song of the listener, the watcher, and the person at the beginning of their own journey.
OS: Can you talk about the cover image for the album? What you were trying to get with that photograph and how you like how it serves as the visual introduction and accompaniant to the music?
JF: Just wanted a cover that was bright and playful and spoke to the ideas on the record. Excess, pleasure, foolishness. Again, comes back to Sparks – especially the cover of Propaganda – and maybe like Sly Stone or something like that. Musicians in ludicrous portraiture. The record is a journey from being behind your fears, pains, troubles, to sprinting into a sunset with confidence so a feast seemed like a good representation.