Good Luck is back to push some sound around

In July of 2020, in the middle of a hellish pandemic summer, I wrote about the band Good Luck. Well, sort of. It was more about the late-2000s era of punk music that would later be reframed as the "emo revival." I'm not going to re-read what I wrote then (what am I, a sadist?), but, from what I recall, I was correcting the narrative that I'd seen pushed over time about this scene. Believe it or not, very few people at that time were deliberately trying to make emo music; they were just taking punk and throwing it in a blender with a few other things, and that understanding seemed to get lost as the years wore on.

In rather short order, that piece became the most popular thing I'd ever published here. I received more texts, emails, and DMs from people who were around back then who agreed with my general thesis but also wanted to talk about Good Luck. To my surprise, this included Matt Tobey, the guitarist-vocalist of Good Luck, who had previously released solo albums under the name Matty Pop Chart. We had a couple of good conversations, the kind that I think feel incredibly indicative of that moment in 2020 where everything felt so dire, and so unending, that you could lob an email at someone you didn't know and then end up fostering someone kind of online friendship because we were all so desperate for connection.

It's why, when I received an email from Matt saying that Good Luck had a new album and, hey, here's a link to listen to it, I wasn't surprised, but I was a little shocked this thing actually existed. Clicking play on Big Dreams, Mister, I wasn't sure what to expect. Within seconds, it became clear that Good Luck hadn't missed a step. The loose, energetic feel that typified their back catalog is here in spades, and the production from Joe Reinhart (Algernon Cadwallader, Hop Along) shows he innately understands what makes Good Luck special. This is a band that would lose its soul if its music were too slick, and this record sounds exactly like a Good Luck album should.

I was deeply flattered that Matt asked if I'd want to talk with him, bassist-vocalist Ginger Alford, and drummer Mike Harpring about the band's history and their new album. Hopping on the call with the three members of Good Luck was a genuine thrill. Each of them was kind, enthusiastic, and funny, the type of people you'd expect them to be if you've ever listened to a minute of their music. I'm so glad this band is back.

Big Dreams, Mister is out October 17 on Lauren Records and Specialist Subject. You can listen to "Into The Void" wherever you listen to music and watch the music video for the song below. You can pre-order the record here.

Going back to do research for this, there aren't many interviews with all of you. There are a lot of dead links and, aside from a zine or two, there's not much about the band's history that's readily available, so that's where I want to start. When you first got together, what were your initial intentions?

Mike Harpring: Matt moved back from Olympia and was like, "I wanna jam!" Ginger and I hung out all the time.

Ginger Alford: We were kind of neighbors. That's when you lived at that apartment that was two blocks from mine, right?

Mike: Yeah, it was that apartment.

Matt Tobey: I had moved to Olympia for less than a year; I liked it so little. I came back and was excited to be in the Midwest again, and I was like, "I want to play electric guitar in a band." I had never played guitar in a band, other than some Halloween cover bands and stuff. How did we…

Mike: Matt and I jammed once in 2005. Just like, "We love Ted Leo, let's play some jaunty stuff." Then, when he moved back, we were all hanging out a bunch and it was just good energy. Ginger and I had talked about playing music a handful of times, and I had known Matt for five years at that point.

Matt: Ginger, did you move to town while I was away?

Ginger: Yeah, I moved to Bloomington while you were in Olympia. So we had known each other, not like, close-close known each other, but we had known each other since you were in high school, and my band came and played your high school graduation party.

Hold on. What?

Ginger: Yeah, Matt threw a high school graduation party with a bunch of really good bands from the time, and my band, One Reason, came up and played in Lansing, Michigan.

Matt: It was in Dimondale.

Ginger: Okay, well, thank you. [Laughs] Dimondale. I should know, I have the poster still up in my living room. But anyway, I knew Matt from meeting him in the Plan-It-X circles and Mike from Bloomington, because we had been hanging out. But I guess my hopes for the band were… nothing. [Laughs] Maybe we'll play a show? There was no grand design. I was in a band at the time called One Reason, and I was still trying to do stuff with that band, I wouldn't say seriously, but a decent amount at the time that we started playing as Good Luck. It was just like, "Yeah, I'll do this. It sounds cool. Why not?"

Mike: I do remember that Matt was still doing Matty Pop Chart, his solo project, and was finishing up artwork for the Everyone Does Everything album before going on tour with Best Friends Forever in 2007, so I remember just saying, "Let's just write some songs and see if we have fun with this." Then he went on tour, and we started doing it again when he came back, and I think we were prepping to record a demo and do some weekends of shows.

Matt: I think I was looking at it as: This is more fun than playing solo, for me. I think we were all like, "Oh, we're all really good musicians." [Laughs]

Mike: I used to liken it to dating, when you'd meet someone you were totally enamored with. When you'd write a really good song, it was just like, "Oh my god, this is so great! And this is so fun!" Just bursting out laughing when someone writes some crazy, cool thing. Or hearing Ginger's vocals at the end of "Pajammin" and just being like, "Fuck, this is like The Thermals." Just smiling so big when I was hearing that stuff for the first time and feasting on that energy.

Ginger: There was not, especially at the beginning, a grand design. I think that's been our ethos with the new album, too. One step at a time. "Would recording a demo be fun? Are we ready to record an album?" Just doing whatever is the next thing to pop up, or if somebody asks you to do something, and it feels right, you just do it.

So there was no grand design, but when did it start to feel like this was a band people were connecting with and starting to care about in a serious way?

Ginger: For me, and this is a funny one, but Bloomington can be very jaded. I feel like we played a ton of shows in Bloomington when we first started, and we kept playing them in weird places. Like, we played a battle of the bands competition, and we'd play at the Starbucks coffee shop on campus. Whenever somebody asked us if we wanted to play a show, we'd just say, "Okay!" I do remember having a feeling of, "Oh, we're playing all these weird shows and people are enjoying it." I feel like sometimes when you're in a punk band and you go and play places, and you're kind of like, "Okay, here's my punk songs. I'm sorry." Maybe that's just my vibe.

I cannot express how much I relate to that.

Ginger: Normally, it's just people like, "No, I do not like this." Then we would play this show, and it would be like, "Oh, people like this. They're enjoying this." I didn't have as much that vibe of, "Sorry, you have to listen to my punk band." It was a different vibe.

Mike: I think it was also because the dynamic in Bloomington was such that there were all these punk friends that we were hanging out with, and we could just always play house shows with those friends' bands. But I was going to I.U. [Indiana University] at the time, and not that I had more resources, but we were all like, "Let's play whatever show people ask us to do."

I remember playing at the radio station on campus, and good friends of ours would definitely razz us for getting in with the college crew a little more than they would. It can be very insular there, so it felt cool that we were breaking out of that. We went on a full U.S. tour the year after we started the band, and I just remember people dancing and singing along in New York. I was like, "Where is this coming from?" I guess because MySpace was such a thing that people could stream our songs on there all the time, but it felt like there was this energy, and I didn't know how it was happening.

Matt: As cheesy as it sounds, the battle of the bands that Ginger was talking about, we didn't just play it. We won it. [Laughs]

Were you guys just out there dunking on high schoolers at that thing or what?

Ginger: No, no, let me clarify, it was all college bands and adult bands. And we didn't just play one night, it was a series of like five shows.

Matt: It was a tournament.

Ginger: Yeah, you had to win over and over to get to the end. But the thing that was very key about it was, when we won the battle of the bands, was it a gift certificate?

Matt: It was $1,500 and a free day of recording at Russian Recording. Which, we did not know Mike Bridavsky at the time, and that was why we recorded with him, and why we even had money to record.

I'm sorry, we need to take a pause here. The reason you recorded Into Lake Griffy, this beloved album, was because you won a battle of the bands?

Matt: That's how we were able to do it.

Ginger: Yeah, we got this chunk of money and a free day at the studio, and we were like, "I guess we can record an album now."

Matt: It was probably $2,000 to record, and we had $1,500 and a free day of recording, so that pretty much paid for it, which is pretty amazing to think back on.

Well, when you think about it, it's probably the best record ever to come out of winning a battle of the bands.

Matt: [Laughs] It was sort of surreal. We were at this local bar, and the band that got second place was a rockabilly band, and the band that got third place was an arty, indie-rock band.

Ginger: I liked some of the bands! Was it The Delicious that was…

Matt: The Alarmists.

Ginger: The Alarmists, that's right! They were actually pretty good. When we won that, I had this feeling that I'd always been in stupid punk bands I was kind of embarrassed of. Yes, some people in the scene liked them, but we went to a battle of the bands, which was not a punk thing, and it's all these college bands that are in the hip, college indie-rock scene, and we were like, "Oh, I guess we're as good as these bands?"

Matt: That was one of the first times where I felt like, "Well, I like our band, and I think we're cool and original and we're having fun with it, but other people actually like it, too? This is weird."

Mike: The fact we could have all these college kids who weren't coming from the same insular punk scene be really stoked about us, it felt like this was a band I could play for my mom or my dad, and they'd be excited about.

I feel like, at that time, punk was starting to become really elastic, though. You could see a person with an acoustic guitar and people would call it punk, or you could watch someone cover Negative Approach, and that was punk, too. I remember having friends who listened to mostly '80s hardcore and also liked Good Luck. It didn't feel so segmented, and punk felt a little more limitless.

Matt: I feel like we only played shows that we thought of as punk shows. I don't remember being involved with, or even associated with, any kind of emo bands or anything.

Ginger: Well, Algernon [Cadwallader], who we played a bunch of shows with, I would have considered a punk band at that time. Now they're maybe emo or whatever, but all the bands we played with then were punk bands. It was like, "They're punk, but they have crazy guitars." Or folk-punk or whatever. It was all under the same umbrella.

Matt: I feel like these different labels weren't placed onto these bands until after.

I used to call it mathy punk or noodly punk because there was no other frame or reference. I didn't call any of the bands at that time emo because that had become something else entirely.

Mike: I can relate to you in terms of the idea of punk. That goes back to when I read Come As You Are, the Nirvana book, when I was 13. It was like, punk is just this idea and this set of ethics, and it can be this overarching thing that includes all these different kinds of bands. We were just part of the punk scene, which could include acoustic guitar bands or noise bands; totally relate to you on all of that. But also, just thinking about the term "emo" and how people talk about us being emo, that is still throwing me off. When someone talks about us being a major band from the emo revival, I'm like, "What are you talking about? I don't get this at all."

Ginger: Mike, I hard disagree.

Mike: Really? I never thought we were a part of an emo thing.

Ginger: I loved '90s emo. There is a distinct, straight line from all the '90s Jade Tree and Polyvinyl emo that I listened to then to so many parts in Good Luck songs.

Mike: I was playing in hardcore bands, so I was like, "I don't know, man. I don't get it."

Ginger: Braid was my favorite band in high school. For years and years, my favorite band.

Mike: I saw them and was like, "It's cool." I just didn't relate as much.

Ginger: Too cool for Braid? Alright… [Laughs]

Matt: I really feel like there was no discussion of genre or what scene we fit into because we were just playing the DIY shows. Whoever was into this lifestyle were the bands playing these shows.

Ginger: I think the term almost was DIY more than punk sometimes. We were going on DIY tours and were playing with other DIY bands. That was the umbrella.

Matt: As far as genre backgrounds, I think that's why our band is unique. Mike's a hardcore drummer, then Ginger with her influences, and me with mine; we're all coming from different musical spaces but similar cultural spaces. I think that's why we fit together as a band so nicely.

Having been in different bands before, at the start of Good Luck, were you trying to approach songwriting from a different angle, or were you just finding that the same writing the same way yielded different results with this group of people?

Matt: Most of the early songs, we wrote them together. The first six songs it was all a result of jamming it out. It would all start with a riff and then evolve from there. Then it was figuring out singing and divvying up lyric and melody writing after the songs were mostly complete. That's mostly how we've always written.

Ginger: That's still the case now, too. Most of our music is written in practice. 80 percent of it, really.

How did you end up splitting the vocals and lyrics? Was it just whoever had an idea they wanted to tackle and then offering sections of a song to the other person?

Matt: At the beginning, it was, "You do these ones, I'll do these ones." [Laughs]

Ginger: Genuinely, that was it. Sometimes one of us would take a stab at one and then be like, "I've got nothing. Do you want to try this one?"

Matt: Even with the new record, we wrote the last two songs musically mostly collaboratively, then it was like, "I'll do the lyrics for this one, you do the lyrics for that one."

Ginger: It's who's feeling the vibe.

Mike: And Matt, you wrote lyrics for a song that Ginger sang.

Matt: I love doing that. A big part of the reason that I play in a band with you guys is that I loved One Reason, and I wanted to sing in a band with you.

Ginger: I would like to write more songs with lyrics for Matt to sing. One day I'll write a whole song for you to sing, Matt. But Matt's a much faster lyric writer than I am, so he usually laps me a little bit. Which is great, because I love your lyrics. So it works out great for me.

Matt: We kind of do whatever works, I think.

Ginger: Whenever our best stuff comes out, it's just whatever vibe feels good and whatever comes out in that moment. That's when our best stuff happens.

Matt: Except for the second record, where we were writing lyrics in the studio. That's a sign that we did this new record with more of a free spirit, because we did not have to do that again.

Talking about the second record, I know the title, Without Hesitation, was kind of an in-joke because it took so long to come out after Into Lake Griffy. When it was released, where were you all at mentally with the band?

Matt: I don't think we thought it was going to be the last thing we would do for a while. It was like, "We're going to do this!"

Ginger: We had been working on some of the songs for like three years, and some of them were newer, but we just wanted to get it out. I would say the process was a little bit fraught in certain ways. There was a sense of relief in finishing it, but there were never any discussions about us breaking up after it. We honestly never even had the discussion of, "We're not going to play anymore." We never said those words to each other. We kind of just didn't play together because everyone was busy, and then we just didn't do it. It's a very funny thing, but that's just what happened.

It just kind of floated away.

Ginger: Mike had moved to Philly, Matt was going to school, I was running a restaurant, then Matt opened a bakery, we all just got super busy. I think it was this vibe that we were all going to do other stuff for a little while because we were all a little burnt out, but it wasn't, "I'm never going to do this again."

Mike: And people stopped asking. Ginger, I remember at one point you mentioning that The Hotelier asked us to do something and I think I mentioned that to Matt, and he was like, "Oh yeah, I didn't know anything about that." We weren't really talking as a band. It was just ideas getting thrown out, then fizzling out. We had other stuff and other priorities, so it was never a clear finish.

What convinced you to play the Russian Recording anniversary show in 2018 after all that time off?

Ginger: Matt, I think you texted us all that Mike [Bridavsky] wanted us to do this.

Matt: Yeah, I was working as the studio manager at Russian Recording for a while after we sold the bakery, and it just felt meaningful. Mike meant a lot to us over the years, and he asked us to play, and it was like, "Well, there's no reason that we can't play." It was the same reason as, "We never said we're not going to play." So it was just like, "You guys want to do this?"

Ginger: So we played and then, immediately after, you had your first child, right?

Matt: Yeah, but I think at the time it was like, "Let's just play this one show."

Ginger: There were no discussions that we were going to play any more than that.

Matt: And again, we just didn't really talk about it.

Mike: Around that time, on the internet, we were like, "Maybe we'll do some more, and maybe we won't. We don't know." We let it be kind of nebulous because we had no idea.

What I'm getting from all of this is that, even from the early days, it sounds like you were never putting too much pressure on yourselves about trying to do this in a more professional, music industry kind of way?

Mike: There was a point there near the end when those were the next things to do, but I think we decided to all take a chill pill on it. There was pressure on us with Without Hesitation, where it was like, "Is this fun? Are we still enjoying this?" It seemed like we could have gotten to the point where we could have taken it to another level, but that didn't seem like anything we wanted to do. And even know, it's fucking hard to get a booking agent, so I guess we're still DIY! [Laughs]

Matt: It was like Mike said, it was either take this next logical step or stop, because I don't think any of us wanted to do that. We were in the DIY world, and we didn't want to step away from that. And it just didn't feel feasible anymore to do it without any momentum, which was all gone after Without Hesitation, for us.

Ginger: The personal momentum, I feel like that was gone.

Doing some research, I dug up an old Punknews interview where they asked if you were doing the band full-tim,e and Mike said, "My rent's $190 a month. I just paint houses for a couple of days and my rent's covered."

Mike: [Laughs] That's Bloomington.

Ginger: That's the old Bloomington. [Laughs]

Mike: Even in Philly, I was paying $190 a month when I moved there.

Ginger: When I moved to Bloomington, my rent was just under $200.

Mike: I still try my best to live that way, to keep expenses down and work as little as I have to. But it's different now, for sure.

But that's the thing, back then, that DIY ethos was more attainable. I remember paying $3 to see you guys play with Defiance, Ohio. Vinyl records cost $8 from No Idea. If a twenty-year-old heard me say this, they'd think I'm talking about 1973.

The economics and the terms of service of being a band have changed so dramatically from 2008 to 2025, so when you decide to do Good Luck again, with all of you living in different places, and with adult responsibilities, there's a higher cost associated with that choice. How has that changed what level you need to commit to doing Good Luck now?

Matt: I don't know. Does that factor in?

Ginger: Here's what I'll say: The sticker shock of being a band has hit me hard. It's like, every band sells their record for $20, and T-shirts are $25 or $30. It's just like, "Well, that is what it is, I guess." But us trying to price our stuff when we came back? And not just from the perspective of charging what other people charge, but just thinking about costs, travel costs, all that stuff, it's like, "I guess this is what we have to do now?" This isn't our income; it's just us trying to break even as a band to make travel possible and then to make recording an album possible. As far as shows, we've mostly been very lucky to have friends invite us, and they have a successful thing, so they can pay us to travel to New York. Or we're playing in Bloomington, where people can stay with friends. So that's been fine so far, but that is an ongoing thing.

Mike: Even recording now, we've spent so much more on that. We've been fortunate to never have to worry about money because we make it work enough to come back with something to at least pay our rent when we're gone. We always made it work. But we're just like, fingers crossed, let's see if we can break even on this. We're not going to be a band that goes on tour for six months out of the year, but we do want to play some shows on it and give it a solid approach with the help of the label to know that we're doing it in a prescriptive way.

Ginger: We're doing slightly more than "whatever happens, happens" but way less than what anybody else does.

Matt: We've all put personal money into it with the hope that we will get paid back from that, but we're all at points in our adult lives now where we're not expecting this to be our job, and we're willing to front some money in order to make it happen. I think everything's gonna pay for itself in time, but that's not really why we're doing it. The goal when we got back together was to do things that sound fun, within our means. If we stick to that, we're going to be happy doing it.

Ginger: If you try to make the math of being a band math, it doesn't compute, so we don't try to. We just try to not throw a bunch of money away.

There's the show in 2018, and there aren't really plans to do more. So which one of you was the first person to say, "Actually, do you guys want to do some more stuff?"

Mike: I think in 2023, there were some loose conversations about how it could be fun to do it again. I think we just opened up our old text thread and started shooting around some texts.

Ginger: Matt, you sent a picture of your guitar or something, right?

Matt: I sent a picture of my guitar after I cleaned it up, because it had been in my case since that show in 2018, probably. I had made a deliberate choice to stop playing music completely when our first kid was born in 2019. It was to be free from that burden and focus on parenthood, and I only wanted to start again when—or if—it felt right. That moment was when I cleaned up my guitar that had been in its case since then, and I sent that picture to Mike and Ginger to kick this all off. I don’t think this would have happened if I hadn’t allowed myself that time.

Toby [Reif] from The Sidekicks lives in Cleveland, and I became friends with him after being an acquaintance for many years, but he mentioned that he had a practice space with some other people. He suggested if we ever needed to use it for anything, we could. So I think I was like, maybe we should? That was what started it, having a space here, which I triangulated as being about half way for both Mike and Ginger. So I think it was, "We have this space available. Does anyone want to do something with it sometime this year?"

Ginger: We put together a handful of songs at the first practice. I had no idea what to expect or what would come of it, but it wasn't like we had booked a show or planned to record. We had zero plans. Literally zero.

Mike: I think our first practice was in December of 2023, and we were like, "We should just write some songs and record a little EP." But it was vacillating between that and, "We should put together an album." That weekend, we decided not to put any major plans around it, so when we decided to record the four songs we had in April of 2024, I was pushing for us to play a show but we didn't even figure that out until six weeks beforehand to play a show in Philly.

Oh, wait, I secured the Instagram and I put a photo of us up, and then it just literally blew up. And I was like, "Oh, goddamnit." And then the band was mad at me.

Ginger: It was totally fine, Mike did the right thing, but I was the one who was like, "Let's write a bunch of songs in secret and not tell anybody." Because I did not want to tease the band. I'm very allergic to, "We got our reunion band together to play the album everybody loves!" That's totally fine if that's what you do but, personally, I'm allergic to that vibe. For everybody else, it's great, and I want you to do it forever. But I was very much like, "If we're going to get back together and play together, then we're going to write new songs and we're going to do cool new stuff."

With that being the case, how did that Philly show feel? Was there anything surprising to you about how it felt to be back onstage together playing this new batch of songs?

Ginger: I can tell you one really funny story, then I'll let someone else go, but you know Adam Goren from Atom and His Package? Well, we played with his new band, and his new band is with his kids, and his kids are Good Luck fans from when they were children. We've always been weirdly popular with children. I get a lot of, "My kids love your band!" We get a lot of that, for some reason. But since they were kids, they've listened to Good Luck, and now they are teenagers and they played this show with us, and they were so stoked and so happy. It was this full circle thing, because we used to get sent videos of them singing along and dancing to our songs when they were little kids, and now their band is playing with us.

Mike: And not only that, Adam was someone I loved when I was 17. I went out of my way to get him to come to Louisville [as a kid]. It definitely felt full circle, even aside from that. Other people brought their kids, there were folks from Buffalo who drove down, and there were a handful of teenagers who were there with their parents, and that felt cool. Outside of that, it was just a lot of old friends from all over, a lot of people who came out and surprised us. It's not like we sold out the church. There were 250 people there who were excited and it felt great; it felt like that magic was there. We played all four new songs that we had written up to that point, because we wanted to play the songs live before we recorded them, and we got to do that. It felt like a really good show, and we played longer than we'd ever played before.

Ginger: That is true, we played a really long set. It was funny.

Mike: Get used to it, y'all. [All laugh]

Matt: I know we've used the word "shocking," but it is pretty amazing to me. I can't get over that surprise that people are still interested in our band to the amount that they are, because we're not some crazy-huge band or anything. Just to get a couple hundred people to a show, it's like, "This is music from a long time ago that's still important to you?" That's really amazing to me.

As you all said, you aren't a huge band, but have you found that the records have still found their way to a new generation of fans?

Matt: I feel like it's a pretty small sample size with just these few shows. I don't feel like I've talked to many people who are notably younger.

Ginger: I've definitely talked to quite a few people at shows, and I've definitely talked to people who are young, where it's like, "You were a child when we were last doing this." I do wonder what their context for it is, but I try not to worry about it. I'm just glad they're coming. I feel like you can't stare into the void too hard about some of that stuff. I can't sit here and be like, "How do we make the young people like us?" because it's like, "I don't know. We probably won't!" Will anybody like this record? I don't know! But if I worry about it, then the record will be worse, so I can't.

Matt: I think that's part of what I was saying about just being perpetually surprised when people like it. Coming from this egalitarian punk scene, I don't know if it's a self-deprecating thing, but I just don't expect people to like what I'm doing because I'm just a dude making some music. To have a lasting impression on someone with something that you create is such an absurd, magical thing. It's hard to wrap my mind around. If I think about it too much, it makes me crazy.

Ginger: I think you just have to put one foot in front of the other and be like, "Well, here's the next song."

Matt: And, at least the lyrics I write, they're personal in that they're about my own struggles and mental health. To have someone be really affected by that is like, whoa.

Getting back and playing those old songs again, were there any lyrics that you wrote, or the other person wrote, that you found resonated in a new, unexpected way?

Matt: One thing for me, singing loudly is a really unique, special, and emotional feeling. We write "emotional" lyrics. [Laughs] It's full-throated, and getting lost in the moment singing is something I just really missed.

Ginger: I agree with that. I don't know if I have any insights about these lyrics now that I didn't then, because there are some that are probably stupid and some that are probably like, "Hey, that's a pretty good line!" But I do feel like getting to play them again, and maybe if we play 700 shows or something, come back and ask me again, but it's just fun. I'm just enjoying it. Getting to play where we're dialed-in and actually playing well, which occasionally happens, it feels really good.

Matt: For me, it's the physical sensation. The songs are such muscle memory now, I'm not really re-analyzing them while we're playing them, it just feels good to do this thing that my fingers somehow still know how to do.

That's the amazing part of it to me. From the outside looking in, those songs don't seem that easy to play.

Matt: If you want to count how many times I mess up during a show, go right ahead. [Laughs]

Ginger: A thing we always say after our shows is, "Pretty good for a Good Luck show!" [Laughs] The way that we play, it's never going to be 100 [percent]. If we hit 85 or 90, then I'm like, "Hey, that's pretty good for us." That's not self-deprecating, that's more like living in your zen of being like, that's just how we play. It's a little shabby, it's got a lot of energy, and that's great.

Matt: It's got a lot of notes, and we hit a lot of them. Not all of them, though.

Ginger: We hit a very large percentage of the very large amount of notes that are in the song.

That's the cheat code: The more notes there are, the more you can say you hit. If you miss 30 of them, but there are 1,000, it's not so bad. If you miss 30 of them but you're The Misfits, it's a problem. Anyway, you mentioned the intention of maybe doing an EP and then maybe doing a full-length. When did it shift from having four songs recorded to going all-in on making a new album?

Matt: The original intent was to record the four songs, make an EP, and then see what happens from there. I think when we were first fleshing those four songs out, we all would rather be making an album, but it felt insurmountable, at least to me.

Ginger: It felt like that would take forever. It was that feeling of not wanting to lose our momentum, so we should just put out the four songs and put them out so we've at least done something.

Matt: It was after we recorded them that we were like, "Ehh, we should just do a whole album, there's no rush." I think we had to slow ourselves down a little bit to not fall into the trap of feeling pressure to do it. We sat on those four songs for… a year? Maybe just under a year?

Ginger: It was 10 months later when we came back to record to finish the rest of the songs. Whihc, that's fast for us. Other than the first album, which we wrote so fast, but everything after that took a while.

Matt: The first record, we wrote the first six songs super fast. Then for these first four songs, it was one song from my solo album, one song that Ginger had written already, one song that I had written but never did anything with that we totally reworked, and then one new song I had a riff for, basically. So it wasn't starting from scratch; we had these shells where we said, "Let's see if we can make these sound like Good Luck."

Ginger: Then we were like, "Maybe we can write some more songs," which was kind of a leap of faith. We were feeling pretty good and just thought we could do it.

Matt: But we didn't have any other material.

Were you each still writing solo? Were you trying to get together and write collaboratively in person?

Matt: How many practices was that first batch of songs? Two or three?

Ginger: Yeah, two or three.

Matt: After that, we got together two more times in Cleveland.

Ginger: We really didn't get together that much, huh? Matt and I sent stuff back and forth more for this album than we ever had before, mainly because we'd not been in different cities before. That worked pretty well, but we were still writing the full band instrumentation in practice. We were sending back lyrics and vocal ideas, and I sent a few bass parts, but there was more of that this time. But there had to be. We wouldn't have finished it if we hadn't done that.

Matt: I had "Timelapse" and you suggested maybe doing "Into the Void." We sort of came up with the other two in that other batch, just with a riff to start.

Ginger: It was mostly little bursts on weekends and then some concentrated back-and-forth in between to prepare for that time. I think that focus really helped us, because if we were getting together, we had to have some ideas.

Matt: I think we got together six times total? Maybe seven? And that's just on weekends, two days of practicing each.

Do you think those focused bursts, followed by some revisions after, made it feel like you were able to stress-test the material even if you weren't able to play it all live before recording?

Matt: I think we were forced to be less precious about it.

Mike: First thought, best thought.

Ginger: I mean, kinda! Not to say we didn't play through stuff a lot, or try to find ways to do something better with certain parts, there was some of that. But it forced us to be like, "Are we having fun playing this part? Yeah? Then that's probably good."

Mike: If we got stuck, we were good about experimenting. "Heed My Call," that was going to be a lot slower, but then I sped it up and blazed through it, and we thought that was way more fun and we decided to go with that.

Matt: It was a lot of us trying to be open to each other's ideas, changing things, and not being a stinker about it.

Mike: It's problem-solving. What I love about our music is how collaborative we are and how open we are to throwing out ideas and trying new things out to try.

Ginger: It's definitely like, "Oh, you have a dumb idea? Let's try the dumb idea." And if it's not cool, then that's okay, we'll do something else.

Mike: Ginger plays drums and guitar in other bands, and Matt plays drums in other bands, and whatever other instrument he randomly decides to learn, and I've also played guitar and bass, too. The fact that we know each other's instruments makes it a lot easier for us to suggest something else to the other person.

What did those studio sessions with Joe feel like? Was there any extra pressure going into them?

Mike: I know that Joe Reinhart was able to keep the vibes in check and keep it laid back if there was ever even a slightly tense moment. It was really fun.

Matt: It was 99 percent awesome. And Joe was so great to work with.

Ginger: You can count on him to tell you, "I think you could play that better." Which is great, I want him to say that to me, so then we'd just do it again. But he also keeps it super light and fun, so it was pretty low-stress, honestly. There was a bit of a time crunch because we had a very specific window we could record in, because Matt and I traveled to Philly, and it was like, I took this much time off of work, and Matt could be away from his family for this much time, so we gotta finish it. But it ended up working out. We got everything done that we wanted to get done and didn't end up feeling short-changed. It was focused energy and not overthinking things too much.

Matt: It was that same thing where we had this amount of time, and we'll do the things we can in that time, and when it's done, we'll be happy. That's just the way our band has to work, and I think that feels really good for us.

Mike: I think this time, it was more like the first album, in that we tapped into that energy. We're all old, boring adults now, but we're all hanging out and again and get to do this thing, that's amazing. Let's tap into that magic.

Ginger: On the second album, we were recording it at Russian. We were all in Bloomington, and we would do some recording, then we'd book a couple days a month later to do another bit, then we'd start to think the guitars weren't loud enough, so we'd go back and redo all the guitars. I can't remember the exact details, that's just me saying something, but there was too much time, so we kept overworking it. We kept adding things, and trying something else, and at a certain point, you just need to say, "That's the album." You could always find something to make better, but you just have to say, "That's us at this moment in time," and then go with it.

Matt: You were talking about the title Without Hesitation, and that's something we were clearly trying to overcome. At least Ginger and I, we have issues with deciding things.

Ginger: There's literally a song on that album called "Decider."

Matt: I think at that point, we were overwhelmed with possibilities of what our band could be, what that record could be, and so this is so much more defined. This is the time we have for our band, so let's have fun. That impending doom of limitless possibilities is not there.

With that in mind, from the lyrical standpoint, what themes or topics were you finding yourselves drawn toward and feeling a need to express this time around?

Matt: I can pretty much only write songs about my current mental state. That's been the curse of my life since I was 15, writing Matty Pop Chart songs. I used to be able to write silly songs about nothing, but now I just write songs about my neuroses, and I guess things that are bringing me joy at the moment. My current life is the only thing that I can conjure up any words about, most of the time.

Ginger: I can never choose what to write a song about. I would maybe start writing a song and then would be like, "Well, I guess that's what this song is about." Usually, I find out what the song is about three-quarters of the way through writing the lyrics to the song. It's like, "Oh, I guess it's about that then." Whenever I try to write a song about something specific, that just does not work. So any themes and, weirdly, we always end up having these between Matt and I, it always happens even when we don't correlate it or try to do it. We just end up coming to the same place.

Matt: I think we just feed off each other going through that process of writing.

Ginger: That's true. Matt will write something, and then I'll kind of get that in my head and then I will kind of build on that with the next song.

Matt: I like that about our records. There's a soup of vague themes that we draw from together somehow. I think that's one of the special things about it.

What are you hoping people find in this record when it comes out? I know that's kind of a big question, but I'm curious if those thoughts about the audience have factored in at all.

Matt: I'm deliberately trying not to think about that too much.

Ginger: I feel the same way. I'm excited for people to hear it, but yeah.

Matt: I don't really know how to put it into words. It's the same sort of thing where I don't want to break the spell or expect any certain reaction, because I just want to be satisfied with it for ourselves.

Mike: Coming from my perspective, I just want people to see that three people who made a record together 17 years ago can snap out of their daily routines, whatever their place in life is, and still be friends and have fun doing this. I want that vibe and that presentation to be there. You can still do this.

Matt: That's one of the things I'm most proud of, just that it exists. The state of mind that we were in while making it, it feels sort of against the odds.

Mike: It's not formulaic or us going through the motions. It's just us doing what we felt.

Ginger: We wrote the record we were going to write, which is how it always is when we get together to play music. This is what naturally came to us, and these are the lyrics that came to us just by what was naturally going on in our lives. None of it felt forced, and I hope that is what comes across. And I do hope people enjoy it but, if not, that's okay. It's fine if people are like, "Yeah, that's a record." It's just about not being precious about anything. At my age, I'm so much more aware of my position in the world and all the fun things that I got to do with the band, and all the fun things I get to do not with the band, too. But this is a cool part of my life that I get to enjoy again. I hope other people want to come to the shows and enjoy it, and I hope they get something out of it. But if they don't, that's okay.

Mike: There are a lot of bands out there, and I don't feel like we have a wide reach. I don't think it's about growing an audience, but I think it's about reaching out and sharing what we've done and hoping people want to hear it. We're in different parts of our lives, and we wanted to do it to see if we still can.

The thing I've really taken from this conversation is that this isn't coming in some pre-packaged, marketing-driven way. You did the band the first time because you were friends and liked doing it. Now, it's almost 20 years later, and you're still friends and you still like doing it. It really doesn't need to be much more than that. After all, it worked out pretty well the first time.

Ginger: We've said multiple times at this point that we're going to keep doing it as long as everybody's having fun. "Everybody having fun?" Okay, cool, then we're going to keep doing it. Of course, there's times where you're frustrated or don't feel like doing a certain thing today, but for the most part, those are fleeting moments. If at any point, somebody's not enjoying it, then let's not even bother. Because what's the point of putting out a record anyway? I have no idea, but I just wanted to do it again. [Laughs]

Mike: When it comes to the record, I'm with you all on that. In the past, if there was any desire to go a little further past that, we don't really know how. We're DIY kids.

Ginger: We still don't know how.

Mike: It would be cool to, and I think we were attempting to find a booking agent, but we're not really that band. Had we done an Into Lake Griffy 17-year reunion tour and hyped it up, there are certain prescriptive, formulaic things to do, but we're not doing any of them. But it is a little daunting to be like, "Fuck. Are we going to be able to book a tour?" So the anxiety that I have has to do with the stuff after the record. We're trying to make it happen, but maybe we'll learn we can't do it until someone steps up to help us.

Matt: We can. We're doing it.

Ginger: We're doing a DIY tour in the year of our lord, 2025. Late November. It's happening and it's gonna be great. [Laughs] It's so funny, because we have friends who are on the other side of that and are doing things in such a professional way that totally makes sense for them, and I am so glad they can do that, but I don't know if we'll ever be that band. We can maybe ride somebody's coattails for a minute and play the cool venue, but that's just an extension of the old days. Did we ever go on tour with Defiance, Ohio?

Mike: No, but we played a couple shows with them.

Ginger: But that's just the example, those are people I see every day, and it didn't make any sense [musically], but those are the people we knew, so that's who we played with.

Mike: I will say that the anxiety has lessened a little bit when friends of ours who play in bands that are bigger, who play booking agent tours, they're asking us to play all these shows with them. They'll ask us to come out for multiple weeks in August or December, but that's not where we're at. We just want to do things the way we want to do it right now.

Matt: But it is great to play a couple shows. We are going to play a couple shows with Algernon in December. That's just what we can do right now, and that'll be great.

Ginger: We'll just enjoy what we can actually do and have fun with it.

Matt: It sounds cheesy how much we're talking about having fun, but that's just one of the touchstones for us.

Mike: Playing shows is fucking fun! We just want to be out there goofing around together.

I take it that's part of the reason you went with Lauren Records, because it doesn't seem like they're going to put any undue pressure on you to work this record in a way that doesn't feel natural to you?

Ginger: We told him from the beginning, when he reached out to us, that it's cool he wanted to talk, but we were also not going to go on a six-week, full-U.S. tour, full stop.

Mike: He wrote Ginger a really long time ago…

Ginger: I'm just going to come out and say that's a really bad plan to write to me, because I am very bad at responding to people. I will look at something and go, "That's so nice!" and then never respond. I love getting the messages, but I'm not good at responding. I know that about myself now. But he wrote to me and was like, "Hey, if you ever want to do anything with the band or something, hit me up." I did eventually respond to him, but he was very persistent in writing to us. And I had met him once when I was out in California playing a couple of solo shows.

Matt: And we played with his band a long time ago.

Ginger: Oh yeah, that's right. But I can say that one thing that led me to feeling good about the decision of going with Lauren Records was coming out and going to the Growing Up Is Dumb fest. It was like, "Oh, this label has a community around it. All these bands knew each other." It felt like its own scene, and it was all very positive-feeling. That's what I want. I want to be involved in something that feels like a gathering of different kinds of bands and not just, "We randomly selected the bands that will sell the most records and do the best." I felt really good about that, and it was reaffirming that we made the right decision.

Matt: He had just been someone that had asked us about it, and there weren't that many people that had ever offered over the years to put something out for us.

Ginger: We had a few, but he definitely felt like he was the most normal person that we could just talk to normally about this.

Matt: And he's just communicative and responds to things, which is nice.

Mike: Plus, he has the experience of working for a bigger label and knowing how they do things, from the press stuff and PR and all that, to coming up with solid schedules and just helping us get our shit together, too. But it feels like it's coming from a DIY punk perspective.

Ginger: At the same time, he is professional. We've definitely had our share of working with labels where it's like, "It's all good, we're just friends." But then you realize, as it goes on, that having no conversations about any of this means you just did what you wanted to do, and if things go sideways, you're left not knowing what's going on there. We were not going to shop the record around to see who was interested.

Matt: We definitely did not do any shopping. [Laughs]

I feel like that has to be such a demoralizing process. It's like waking up and deciding to collect the most rejection letters possible.

Mike: For a band like Algernon, whose members have played in bigger bands on solid, indie-rock labels, and people know about your band, you probably know you have options, so it makes the most sense to talk to a bunch of people to see what's the best fit. But we don't have any of those ins, so we don't want to be demoralized. It's just like, "This person is cool, let's fucking do it." There could have maybe been other options, but it was just nice to go with the first bud that made sense.

Ginger: But I do want to say, and this is important, that we are more professional now because we have one tiny, shitty keyboard that is on the record.

Matt: And it gets played live, the tiny, shitty keyboard.

Mike: Hold on. I need to clarify that Matt plays the tiny, shitty keyboard while also playing guitar and also singing at the same time.

Matt: It's important to always try to improve in your life. Which makes me realize, I didn't talk at all about having kids, which has been a pretty big part of this, too.

Mike: I mean, some of the lyrics are very much about you having kids.

Matt: I mean, it's what's on my mind. But there's nothing really specific to say about it, but it is a large part of my life since I'm mostly a stay-at-home dad. So it's just funny to not really talk about it.

Ginger: Weirdly, you wouldn't think that has translated into punk songs or punk-emo or punk-noodle or whatever the fuck you call it, but it has kind of worked well lyrically with the songs. Which is weird. I would not have guessed.

Matt: I think it just ties into the way I write lyrics, which is that I can only tie into the things in the present. There are touches of them in all the newer songs, obviously not the ones written beforehand, but it definitely seeps in.

Do your kids like the band? Have they gotten to see the band live?

Ginger: They watched the video of our show when we played in Bloomington. Is that right?

Matt: That is right. Oh, and they love the music video. I spent three months animating the video, and they saw that happening a lot and they were really stoked to see it when it was done, because they were like, "What have you been spending all your time on?"

Ginger: That's another perfect example of us just getting back to where we were, because the guy who made the music video, Paul B. Cummings, had asked us to make a music video back in the original Good Luck days, but it never worked out, partly because we were just being really weird about it. We kept waiting for it to be the perfect idea, and we were worried it was going to be stupid and not come across well. He went on to direct a bunch of stuff, and we filmed it all in a single day in Los Angeles. We filmed it on a rig Matt made on his iPhone. We just had this "Let's just make something" vibe, and that's kind of what we're trying to bring forward in everything we're doing. But it was nice getting to revisit that with Paul and circle back to something that we'd left hanging from before.

Matt: It was really nice to close that loose end. A lot of this is about finishing unfinished business. We needed to make another record.

One of the first songs we worked on was from my solo album, "Pin Me Down." It felt significant to get to re-imagine it with Good Luck because we had initially jammed on it in a tiny bit right before we stopped playing. It was supposed to be a Good Luck song! I eventually finished it years later and recorded it for my album, but to get to realize it with Mike and Ginger was another one of those unfinished business moments. This version feels like how it was supposed to be. 

On top of that, the riffs for "Hold On We’re On The Way," "What Young Me Wanted," and "Make a Road" were all song fragments that I had floating around for years. Another example of satisfying unresolved burdens. After writing for Without Hesitation, songwriting felt like a mental burden for many years. Half-written song fragments were more oppressive than anything else and remained that way for a long time. So to get to finally turn those into something was very liberating and kind of cleared the bank, so to speak. 

Getting to make this music video was very oddly satisfying in that way. My kids are young, they're four and six, so they're not fully going to understand the significance of this for me now, but I hope that they will at some point. Just showing that example of finishing things, and coming back to things that were left undone.

Mike: And showing them that you can be an adult with hobbies and interests that have been with you your whole life. And you can have creative outlets that you do just for fun.

Matt: Yeah, exactly. And learning new things, like with that animation for the music video, it's about giving them this example of constantly learning things, and being curious about things, and doing things that you're passionate about, because that's one of the core beliefs of being a human and a satisfied person. Now that they're not babies, and I'm not just in baby mode, I want these little people to see that their parents can be passionate about things and be creative, and push the envelope to always be trying to find something new.

It's important to realize it doesn't need to be an either-or. I definitely hit points in my life where it felt like I had to stop making music due to some goofy theory I had in my head, and it's nice to know from an early age that you don't have to stop doing something just because you're older or have a day job or whatever.

Ginger: I think that's where we were at on the second album. We felt we had to make a decision if we were going to start going on tour all the time or whatever, feeling like we were on the cusp of several things, but then coming back now and realizing we didn't have to make a decision. We'll just be the band that we are.

Matt: There's always space for the things that you care about if you want to make space for them.

Big Dreams, Mister is out October 17. You can pre-order it here. Thank you for reading.