#SPIKE COHEN MIXTAPE MANUAL#

#SPIKE COHEN MIXTAPE MANUAL#

“While they were doing what bands are meant to do, which is to have fun and then every now and again do the tour twice a year, we just cranked them out because, really, there was nothing waiting for us at home,” Sanville explains he describes an existence like a Springsteen song without the quiet dignity, getting consistently fired from dockwork and other manual labor. Thanks to singles “Feal Like Crab” and “*Equip Sunglasses*” - a little bit of The Hotelier’s incendiary anthems, a little bit of the 1975’s frothier, funkier pop - the quartet were now considered to be the Most Likely to Blow Up amidst a burgeoning Michigan scene, alongside critical darlings like Greet Death and Dogleg, as well as local fixtures Parkway and Columbia, Forest Green, and Charmer. Raw and spirited, 2018’s Pilot was often compared to Boston Manor and Tiny Moving Parts, emo and pop-punk acts exceedingly more popular than any you’ll read about in indie-leaning publications.

Though “Betty” is very, very, very direct in addressing its subject matter, Sanville’s dearly departed could still be seen as a stand-in for all of the home lives that Hot Mulligan had already sacrificed just to get to you’ll be fine, itself a classic emo trope: the sophomore leveling-up after a popular and admittedly derivative debut made by teens. When I challenge Sanville to name the most upbeat song from Why Would I Watch, he immediately offers “Christ Alive My Toe Dammit Hurts,” because “it starts really happy, like a dance.” The starting lyric in question - “I feel kinda sick / like I don’t wanna smoke no more / cause I feel like dying.”īoth Freeman and Sanville attest to slightly healthier lifestyles since completing Why Would I Watch - being on social media less, eating better, less booze, and less vaping, “if only because it looks stupid.” But the album itself is littered with the spiritual and physical detritus - “For every crater on the moon / there’s an empty beer around the room,” Sanville sings on Why Would I Watch’s most melodically uplifting hook, and the remainder airs out every last bad vibe that followed you’ll be fine - a record that might’ve shot them into the upper echelons of pop-punk had it not been given the unfortunate release date of March 6, 2020. The songwriting core of Sanville and Chris Freeman didn’t have to search very far for inspiration – the seasonal depression and regular ol’ depression depression borne of living in rural Michigan, intractable familial strife, alcoholic despair, graduating college with seemingly fewer career options than when you started. Like the two Hot Mulligan albums before it, Why Would I Watch is some of the most anthemic, invigorating rock music you’ll hear about wishing you had the energy to die just a little bit faster than you currently are. The reflex is not…bet I could write something about it. “There’s the joke where if you date the pop-punk guy, once you break up, you know that there’s gonna be a full-length album about you,” he explains. “And while I’m out on tour, Betty gets a lung condition and she can’t breathe and she dies.” The bigger offense was asking whether Hot Mulligan, in some perverse way, relishes experiencing a new form of shitty stimuli to sublimate into singalongs.

“I’ll just sit there in their room with their cage open and just watch them and play with them for hours at a time every day because it makes me feel better,” Sanville reflects. “ You fool,” he fires back, in what only sorta sounds like mock outrage – for one thing, I misidentified its subject, a beloved rat that he got at the beginning of the pandemic. Several decades of experience with this exact type of song led me to believe that Nathan “Tades” Sanville was mourning his dog. And so the centerpiece of their third album Why Would I Watch should be just as familiar: the acoustic weeper that temporarily puts all of the aforementioned aside to mourn a dead pet. Hot Mulligan know their way around a throwback emo trope - the scorched sugar melodies and set-and-spike dual vocalists, the absurdly long, shitposty song titles and earnestly twinkling guitars.

Spike cohen mixtape