Punk icon Jeff Rosenstock talks about writing his new album 𝘕𝘖 𝘋𝘙𝘌𝘈𝘔, coping with the chaos of daily life, and composing a cartoon musical.

The new record is available here, and you can check out the uncut video interview on YouTube!

Transcript below:

Matt Burdick: Hey, it’s Matt Burdick with WDBM and I’m here with legendary punk musician Jeff Rosenstock. 

Jeff Rosenstock: Legendary, uh oh. Hi, hello!

Matt Burdick: Do you have any introductory things you want to say?

Jeff Rosenstock: Uh, greetings. Hello everybody. I don’t know, that’s what I got. How’s that? 

Matt Burdick: That’s perfect. 

Jeff Rosenstock: I like your shirt.

Matt Burdick: Oh, thank you! So you just came out with your new record NO DREAM. It was surprise-released with like no announcement or anything, and I know this isn’t the first time you’ve surprise-released a record either.  What are some of the advantages and disadvantages do you think of dropping albums out of the blue like that?

Jeff Rosenstock: Well, one of the big advantages for someone like me is that I don’t have to think about the record doing badly for four months or five months or six months, or however long it will take between finishing the record and putting it out.  You could just know right away whether or not people will like it, so I don’t just get anxious about it a bunch. That’s a big one for me. 

I don’t know, I just like the feeling of immediacy that comes with just putting out a record when it’s done and kind of moving on. Or not moving on, but just like getting it out, you know? I tend to write at a pretty steady pace, or I try to write at a pretty steady pace, so I think time that I’m spending thinking about what… Just spending all this time before  putting out the record kind of takes up a lot of mental space for me that I feel like I just would rather be thinking about anything else. I don’t feel like it’s a particularly professional attitude to have, but I’ve been lucky that it’s worked out and that Polyvinyl are cool with it going down like that.

Matt Burdick: And I’ve heard it mentioned that you originally planned to have NO DREAM come out in like July, but decided to drop it early in May. So is that the same type of thought process behind that, getting it out immediately?

Jeff Rosenstock: Kinda, yeah. I mean, we had like a whole bunch of things planned for July and for tours. We were going to announce everything in a very smart and cool way, and I had this planner here and I wrote all these dates for the cartoon and all these dates for tour and where I’m going to be doing stuff… Then when COVID hit, and when it continued to keep getting worse and worse and we canceled like everything for the year, it just seemed like “Let’s put this record out. What are we doing?” It seemed like it would just feel like the right thing to do. 

When we put POST- out as a surprise-release, I know that fans were real stoked about it and were stoked about the surprise, and I really liked the surprise too. And so I was just like, “Let’s just do it, I think people will be stoked for the surprise.” It seems like people were for the most part, so that’s good. It was nice to do something that felt like it was not an extra thing bringing doom and dread into the world in particular, you know what I mean?

Matt Burdick: And I think there’s something really special about doing the surprise-drops too, in that it makes it seem like maybe a little more of a magical experience. Like, I remember when POST- dropped and when NO DREAM dropped, at first I was like “Wait, is this for real? Is this like a prank or something?” 

Jeff Rosenstock: Thanks, man. Yeah I feel like, I don’t know, maybe the next one we’ll drop on April Fools’ Day and it’s just bad. Very, very bad. And then we’ll just be like “psych!” and then I don’t know, spend six months or whatever on a new one. No, that’s nice to hear! I can think about like standing in line to get the Jimmy Eat World record Bleed American and being really excited when that came out. And I think that something that comes with streaming culture is that things just feel a little bit more disposable in certain ways, at least versus like, you know, when people would get stoked for things to drop and like line up and talk to each other. 

So I don’t know, it kind of felt like when we did POST- we didn’t really see how that was going to work out. But like throughout the day, seeing everybody talking to each other, it kind of just brought those nice feelings back for me of just like… I remember getting stoked for something to come out and showing up at the thing at midnight and being like “Yeah, I got a copy!” 

Matt Burdick: Yeah, and I mean that’s kind of the vibe of the year so far too, just things being really unpredictable. “What’s going to happen next?” 

Jeff Rosenstock: It seems like everybody’s just putting out their record – I know you’re not talking about only music being unpredictable of course – but it seems like people are either like “Screw it, I’m putting out my record now” or like “We’re putting off this record eight months until all this blows over.” Nobody’s sticking to anything. It’s chaos. 

Matt Burdick: So what song on the record for you was the hardest to put together? The hardest to record or write?

Jeff Rosenstock:  I don’t know, probably …. the hardest to put together… “f a m e” was a weird one cause I demo all of these songs pretty extensively, like full arrangements and stuff. I want to hear what it would sound like, you know? And that was one where in the demo stages of it, like by the time it got to kind of the droney repetitive part at the end, it just didn’t feel like… The momentum just felt wrong. 

And we worked that out like as we were practicing the record. We just kind of went through a bunch of different permutations of like, “Well what feels right? When does it feel right for it to kick in? When does it feel right for the metal part to happen?” Just kind of tried to figure out how long it is, cause also it’s an unusual thing for our band to do, which is kind of just jam on one riff for like two minutes. But I don’t know, I listen to some music that does that, like I listen to dub music and I listen to a little bit of kraut stuff and ambient stuff, and I kind of wanted to put that vibe in there. 

So yeah, that was just something that we had to just keep trying and keep seeing like, “Well what feels right? When does it feel right for this to come in? How does it feel right to escalate and like how could it make the refrain-” I can’t swear on this radio station, right? –  Well, the refrain where it finally comes in with the “leave me the ‘F’ alone” and it gets crazy, you know? Like how to make that really feel satisfying when that part came in and not just make it feel like “Alright, well we do this part, then we do this part, and then we do this thing and then we do this thing and then the song’s done, I don’t know.” So that was one, but it was cool. I’m lucky that everyone in my band kicks ass and is good at it, so it was just fun to work on that together. 

Matt Burdick: Well from an outside perspective, that ending of “f a m e” is one of my personal favorite moments on the record, I would say.

Jeff Rosenstock: We did it!

Matt Burdick: The impact of the ending hits really hard.

Jeff Rosenstock: Cool, thanks! 

Matt Burdick: But you mentioned the ambient and krautrock influences a bit. Were there any non-musical things that really inspired the album? 

Jeff Rosenstock: Aside from just like obvious things that inspired the lyrics, whether it’s the things happening in the world around us, or just kind of having personally felt like I went through a bit of a mental spiral for like a year there and then needed to take a year to just kind of get my head together, that’s all in there in ways or whatever. I think, I’ve been running a lot and I was driving a lot on tour, and I think just the feeling of being in motion and the feeling of continuing to go was a pretty big influence on a lot of the stuff. 

And like I haven’t really thought about this until I started talking about it in interviews and stuff, but yeah I think that the faster pace of the record and the momentum of this record kind of lends itself to like trying to stay awake on a long drive or trying to run five miles after you’ve been working for ten hours in a day. So I think that there are things in my life of just trying to keep the energy going and listening to music that to me felt like a companion to not burning out. I think that those kinds of actions, just like running, driving, biking, moving forward were big ones for this record. Does that answer your question? Non-musical influences… Pizza? 

Matt Burdick: For sure. So I’m glad you brought up the faster pace of this album and the heavier, more breakneck punk stuff that hasn’t really been as present since maybe like the Bomb the Music Industry! days. Is that something that you consciously thought about while you were recording or did you just kind of look back on it and you’re like “Ooh, we went fast this time.” 

Jeff Rosenstock: I think a lot of these songs were written while we were on tour for a really long time, so at that point our band was just playing fast. Like when we play live, I feel like we’re playing all of our songs like 20% faster than they are on the record, so I think when I was writing I had that pace in mind. It’s interesting, I have seen a lot about it feeling like a throwback to “Bomb” stuff as far as like the faster breakneck punk things go, but to me it was just more that it’s kind of more unrelenting on this record, like there aren’t too many quiet moments. 

Cause there were all those, like there were a lot of fast things… WORRY. has “Planet Luxury” on it and that song is like fast, and there’s a ska song on it. There’s a part on We Cool? that everybody in the band refers to as our “Pennywise part” of our song. So we’ve always kind of been trying to push to see how fast –  Like for every moment that we’re trying to not be afraid to get slower or trying to not be afraid to get quieter, I’ve tried to be aware of like, if you’re doing that then you should pull it in the other direction. Also do something that’s faster and louder.

I think this is just the first record in a while where all of the songs that kind of hung together were all like rockers and were all just kinda bangers. The slow ones that I was writing as I was working on this record just felt, I don’t know, “whiny” is the wrong way to put it, but just felt like a little too much of a downer or too depressing. And it just didn’t sit well with what was on this, you know? 

Matt Burdick: Yeah. And it’s like, with some of your work the tension and release will come from having like a slow, soft part into a fast, big part. But what I thought was really impressive about this record is instead of having that impact come from going from soft to loud, you go from like huge to even huger. 

Jeff Rosenstock: Thank you, that’s that’s what we wanted to do. Like any of the metal parts of this record were just like all of us just grinning from ear to ear like “Oh yeah! We have this metalcore mosh breakdown, siiiick.” 

Matt Burdick: So what other things do you think set this album apart from the rest of your albums? 

Jeff Rosenstock: Oh, I’m not sure. I mean, it’s different with the songs. It’s different songs on it. The artwork’s totally different than the other records. Uh, new words. I’m not sure. 

There’s a bit of writing about traveling on this record.  I haven’t really written too much about like, “Hey I’m a guy in a band on tour,” cause I feel like those songs can just be bad a lot of the time, and so I was afraid to kind of write from that perspective for a while. But I do always just try to challenge myself to do something that I think might turn out bad on every record, and so I was just trying to write some songs that reflected what my experience- What my friends’ experiences have been just kind of being in a van or on a plane so much for like the last three and a half years, you know? Because that has been my reality and it would be dishonest to not talk about that at all. So I think that’s a pretty big difference on this one.

Matt Burdick: And then I bet it stings extra hard that you finally put out these songs about like the difficulties of tour life and stuff, and then suddenly COVID hits. No one can tour. It’s like “Wait, this isn’t what I wanted.”

Jeff Rosenstock: Yeah, also I took a year off there and I’m just kind of like “Could I have just hung in there for one more year?” Then I could have had my nervous breakdown like a year later and chilled out. Yeah it stings, but what can you do? You know, everybody’s going through it. It stings a little bit but then I just think about how everyone is dealing with this, and I’m not special in the way that I’m dealing with it. I’m pretty lucky in the way that I’m dealing with it. I’m healthy, I have a good situation, I just moved like right before this happened. We were not on tour when it did happen. Like, we’ll be fine, you know? 

Matt Burdick: Yeah. And then you brought up the artwork for NO DREAM, which is a lot different than the previous projects under your solo name. What’s the significance of that melty painted cover to you?

Jeff Rosenstock:  For me it was kind of reflecting everything, kind of like the mishmash that life felt like for a while for me there. But also I don’t know, like I think about the world getting hotter all the time, and I thought that the image of like a nice house just melting in the sun… Though I didn’t want it to feel really explicit in that way. I think this is the first time I’ve ever told anybody that that was even a thought in my head aside from the artist who drew it. 

But I just wanted it to encapsulate the feeling that there’s like a slow drip-down of life happening right now, and having also just super bright colors that make it feel super bright. Trying to both capture the overwhelming nature of everything being in our brains all the time at like max levels all the time, while also thinking about like old reggae album covers and stuff and how they’re all very bright colors, and trying to find like a middle ground between those things.

Matt Burdick: Yeah I would say that’s a perfect description for how it sounds, with it being a real fun summer album but with this underlying sense of like, “Everything is falling apart or could fall apart at any moment.”

Jeff Rosenstock:  Yeah, I mean that’s life. It’s intense. 

Matt Burdick: And for the full album stream on YouTube, there’s this hilarious Bob Ross parody of just like a painting tutorial for the album cover. Was that something you came up with or was that the label’s idea? 

Jeff Rosenstock: That was Christine’s idea, my wife and our tour manager Christine thought of that. They wanted to do a live full album stream something, we were trying to figure out something to do for a full album stream video. Since we can’t tour, we were just trying to be like “Well what’s something cool we could put out there?” And we just watch a lot of Bob Ross. It’s a very chill thing to watch. Very low-stakes TV, and I’m working on the cartoon so much that I can only deal with so much hyperactive TV when I’m not working on the hyperactive TV I’m working on all the time. So we just end up watching a lot of Bob Ross and thought it’d be cool. 

Our friend Bob and his partner Megan are awesome and we like them a lot, and I know Megan’s a sick painter, so I just asked them “Bob would you film this and Megan would you paint this?” Bob works at a warehouse for the streetwear brand Undefeated and he was like “Oh yeah, and we have a nice space where we could do it. We could keep it safe and my buddy Mikey who works here can also like help out with the cameras.” So it worked out good, I was stoked. I was really happy when I saw it. I was also just like “Oh my God, is she gonna finish this painting?”  I was like “Is she gonna make it?” the first time I watched it. She makes it. 

Matt Burdick: Let’s focus in on, you said, “hyperactive TV?” So you do the music for Cartoon Network’s Craig of the Creek, and if I’m not mistaken you just came out with the first full-musical episode basically. What were some of the challenges of trying to pen a children’s TV musical? 

Jeff Rosenstock: The challenges were not in writing it, and I hope that doesn’t sound like an obnoxious thing to say, but writing it was so much fun. I’ve been working on this show for so long and it was really cool to just be in this office that I would visit whenever we came out to LA and like sit in on a pitch every now and then. To like be in the room, talk about the episode and like try to work on stuff together, it was really really cool. 

And then I would go back to the Airbnb that had my laptop and my keyboard and my two little modular synths, and a couple of guitars and some stuff I borrowed from Chris Farren. It’s just like “Okay, I gotta write a song about this.” I don’t have to think about “Why am I sad?” I don’t have to think about like “What could I say that I haven’t said before?” or like “What can I say that’s even worthwhile for another person to hear?” which is all stupid hurdles that I feel like I have to get past when I’m writing lyrics. I was just like “Oh, I gotta say that Craig doesn’t know what this key goes to! Let’s go!” That was really fun, it was really fun to just have a framework for the lyrics already and to write stuff for these characters that I feel like I’ve spent so much time with, and everybody was super supportive. 

And then like putting it all together, the records were wild, cause you know we had like two days, two hours each to record. Everybody’s singing everything, and I arranged it like I would arrange one of my records. So like poor –  not poor cause she kicked ass – but Noël Wells who plays Kelsey. I was just like, “Yo I know you just put out a record. I’m going to lean on you super hard and you’re going to have to do a lot of harmonies.” And she was like “Okay, cool” and just  banged out harmonies. Philip, the kid who plays Craig, was just like goin’ in, they’re super psyched just knocking stuff out. 

But like going in there, especially that first day – cause they were filming behind-the-scenes stuff too so there was like a whole extra level of insanity to it – but going in there that first day it was just like, “Okay I really hope I get this done, cause I don’t live here and I told everybody I could do this, and if I can’t do it I’m going to be in trouble here.” And everybody just kind of banged it out. It was sick. 

Matt Burdick: Do you think that the new experience of trying to use your music to tell a story like that, do you think that kind of influences your solo music as well? Like I noticed in “***BNB”a lot of that song is kind of telling some stories from outside perspectives too. Is that something that might’ve come from the show? 

Jeff Rosenstock: I don’t think that… not really. That one came from, I was in that Airbnb in that first verse on my birthday. After having a bunch of beers and doing whatever outside like some person’s house, and then waking up in the morning and using all their stuff in the shower, looking at their family photos, and just being like “This is weird.” I don’t know, I just kind of was like, “I want to write a song that feels different.” I’m always trying to just write in different ways. I don’t know if it ever comes out like that, but I’m always trying to push myself to write different kinds of things.

But I think Craig of the Creek in general kind of pushed this record in that more “Go Hard or Go Harder” kind of direction. Cause that’s just kinda how that show is, which I think is sick, which is something I love about working on that show. It also just kind of gave me confidence to write. To finish songs that I had had like 75% written in my head and was just getting in my own head like “Oh God, am I really making another record? Will anybody care?” I don’t know, I get down on myself, and once I was out there working on that musical and everybody was encouraging, and it turned out good and everybody was really stoked on it… I dunno. 

While I was working on it, I also ended up demoing “Nikes (Alt)” and demoing “f a m e,” and it kind of gave me a little bit of a push to be like, “Okay I can do this, alright. I’m not like a fraud,” like I’m always telling myself that I am, you know? 

Matt Burdick: So hypothetically, if anything were possible, is there any show where like it would be your dream to do the music for that TV show?

Jeff Rosenstock: Any show? Craig of the Creek. I feel like I am in my dream-zone, man. It would be really fun to like make a movie, to work on a blockbuster or something like that. That would just be super cool to do. Also I feel like they’d give me a ton of money and that’d be sick cause then I could spend that money on things. 

But yeah, like I’ve thought about that a lot cause I’ve thought about how I definitely got into this business now, this like composer business, because the creator of this show who slowly rose up the ranks at Cartoon Network saw Bomb the Music Industry! play in a backyard. And that’s like not a traditional way to get into anything, so I’ve definitely felt like “Alright, my foot’s in the door, what’s my next step?” And then I feel like the more that I think about it, I’m just like, “I don’t even care, man.” I’m so stoked to be on Craig of the Creek. I feel like I’m on the best show. I feel so stoked about it. 

Maybe an episode of Metalocalypse though, now that I’m thinking about it. I don’t know if that’s still on, but that’d just be fun. 

Matt Burdick:  So if you were to compare NO DREAM – like the album itself – to a movie or TV show, what do you think it would be? 

Jeff Rosenstock: Oh hmm, I don’t know. I want to say… This is a big question cause I think about these things seriously. I would want to say Sorry to Bother You, probably. I was going to say Crank 2: High Voltage, or maybe one of the more recent Fast & Furious movies, like Fast Five or something.

Matt Burdick: I think you need a Wiz Khalifa feature for that. 

Jeff Rosenstock: Yeah, I can’t mention it without getting a Wiz Khalifa’s feature on the record. But yeah maybe Sorry to Bother You, cause it’s anti-capitalist at its core, but that’s not the only thing that’s happening. And also it’s just like, I wanted to make something that like once you hit play you’re in and you’re not going anywhere. You’re locked in. That’s how I felt when I saw that movie. I was very much just like, “Oh man, it’s happening,” just grinning ear to ear the whole time. Just like, “I’m seeing this movie in a theater, and they like let this movie get made and put into theaters, this is sick!” You know? 

Matt Burdick: Yeah, I have a lot of friends who I’ve forced to watch that movie, and at the end they’re like “Yeah I love that, but I’m so mad that you made me watch that movie.”

Jeff Rosenstock: Oh man, the part… I don’t want to say anything, but yeah it’s an insane movie. 

Matt Burdick: Yeah, but you know that I know what part we’re thinking of. 

Jeff Rosenstock: Yeah, he was like, what?! And the next one’s going to be like Midsommar and you’ll just be like “Ughhhh…”

Matt Burdick: Yeah, for sure. So another thing about NO DREAM that I think is really cool is your music has always been both really personal and really political, but on this album –  maybe more so than some of the past even –  like the lines have become blurred so much that a lot of the songs can be taken as both personal and political at the same time. And I think it kind of mirrors how a lot of people’s lives are becoming nowadays too, where the personal and the political can essentially be the same thing. Is that something that you were really pushing for or do you think that’s just naturally how your life and people’s lives have progressed? 

Jeff Rosenstock: Yeah, I think something that I’m always just kind of striving for in writing is to just be honest to the moment in which I’m writing it, or just be honest about what I’m writing about or what I’m feeling. And I guess something that I’ve just grown closer to doing, grown closer toward – especially on this record, because the last one was pretty overtly political at times and WORRY. had a lot of that to it too –   I think I was trying to pull back from something that felt like it was a current events lesson or something that felt like I was lecturing about something. Or something that was finger-pointy, cause I don’t like fingers getting pointed at me either. I don’t think anybody likes that. 

Which whatever, I didn’t feel like those records were like that, but I just kind of felt like if I kept going that way, that was something that I feared I might end up in. So I think that just the way I approached these songs was just like, trying to approach just the emotional weight of processing all of these things. So the political feels tied into it and it feels like it could be both of those things, but I guess I was just really trying to be truthful to the era that these songs are being written in. And it’s a really messed up and violent era, you know?  

Matt Burdick: So this one’s kind of a big question that you can feel free to answer however you think is best, but what do you think is the place of musicians in affecting social change and inspiring that sort of thing?

Jeff Rosenstock: I think it just serves a lot of purposes. I think there are musicians out there that are making overtly political music that is just straight up informative, you know? Like I often think about the song on The Chronic by Dr. Dre about the LA riots and how hearing that when I was a kid gave me a completely different perspective on what was happening in the LA riots versus what I was seeing on TV. I think similarly about listening to Public Enemy growing up. And there is obviously music out there that’s like that right now that is popular, like Run The Jewels and Noname. The band Bad Moves who are about to put out a record are making like super political stuff. Downtown Boys… And I think that’s a good purpose for it. 

I also just think that music is, for me at least, an emotional balm, you know? Like it’s something that could be there to comfort you when you’re going through this stuff and you’re trying to just make it through a day. Or it could be something to energize you so that you feel like you could wake up and you could go out, and you could go protest, and you could go try and change stuff. And I don’t think it has to be political in order to achieve those. I think that it’s just this weird cosmic emotional resonance that music has in a lot of ways, that good music has that just kind of makes you be like “Alright, I could go do this, let’s go.” And then I think that to that end, no matter what the song’s about it can help bring forward social change. 

And it’s great when the music, it’s great when the lyrics are about it, and it’s great when the whole thing, the whole package and the whole way it’s presented is about it.  So that’s kind of the side of the fence I’ve landed on or have tried to land on with my own music. But at the same time, I don’t think it necessarily needs to be there. I think it could be emotionally centering without that, which I think is an important thing if you want to kind of try and keep your head straight and keep focused and keep your own personal momentum going as we continue to fight an unjust system.

 Matt Burdick: And I feel like your social media presence is also very concurrent with what you said about music being informative. I know I’ve definitely learned a lot about current events just from you and other musicians retweeting things, like as simple as clicking one button.  Did you feel kind of validated then when social media just completely turned to Black Lives Matter basically for the last couple of weeks? Like “yes! I’ve been doing this stuff on Twitter for weeks and people are catching on.”

Jeff Rosenstock: I mean, I didn’t feel validated. Like, it’s gross to see anything that feels like it’s performative, and I’ll just leave that at that. That said, it’s good to see everybody talking about it, and it’s nice to hear you say that from seeing that, you’ve learned things. I think from seeing it myself, I’ve learned things too. I think it’s important to keep that conversation going. 

I think it’s really hard sometimes because, you know, people don’t want to just be a bad news machine all the time, because if you’re a bad news machine all the time you fear that people aren’t going to listen to you anymore. They’re just going to mute you and turn you off, and then they’re not going to find out about anything. So I think there’s maybe a balance there, but also it’s a very privileged point of view to be like, “You know what, I’m exhausted, I can’t hear about this anymore” because that means that you are not getting murdered, you know? 

So I think that the movements in social media have been good, but also like I haven’t seen them bring forth enough change. The cops who killed Breonna Taylor are still walking around free men and that is completely wrong, and people have been kicking and screaming about it nonstop and they’ve been like, “Okay, wait, we fired one of them. Is that enough?” And everyone’s like, “NO! Arrest them all, what are you doing?!” Or like specifically in LA with the police budget, about trying to defund the police because they are a militarized gang and we are now seeing that clearly. But they still have so many ties to the government. And our police budget getting reduced, or our police budget increased, after like a week of protest, getting reduced by like 3% and everybody being like “No, that’s not enough! You’re not listening to us!” 

So I don’t know.  I want to think that social media can be an avenue for real change. And we’ve seen real change and at the very least people are talking about it, which is great. But I don’t think it’s the be-all and end-all of everything, and I don’t really know what the be-all and end-all of it is going to be, to try and undo these inequalities that have been built into our system since America was founded.

Matt Burdick: Right. So you’d say then like social media helps, but only up to a certain point before direct action in the real world is necessary?

Jeff Rosenstock: Yeah that’s a better way of saying that i think. 

Matt Burdick: Nah your way was perfect. 

Jeff Rosenstock: Well it’s a concise good way of saying that, I can say at least.

Matt Burdick: Well alright, I’ve got just a couple more questions and then I’ll let you go.  This one is a bit of a twist on the classic “desert Island album” question. If you only had one album you could listen to throughout the whole quarantine of the last few months, what would you pick? 

Jeff Rosenstock: Oh okay, it’s one of two things. My brain would say Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys because it’s been a record that’s been there for me through tough times, and that would be a good choice. But I think maybe Jay Som’s record Anak Ko, because like straight up, the first month and a half quarantine that was basically all I was listening to. I’d got it from our record label when I visited them on our drive from New York to LA when we were moving, and it was kinda like a CD I just had in my car for a while and I got really used to it. And then once we were locked in our house, and it was also raining in LA which is not a usual thing, I felt like I was just listening to that record 100% of the time. So maybe that. Or maybe Laura Stevenson’s record The Big Freeze. That might be one too, because it would just be nice to think of my buddy, and it’s a really great record. 

Matt Burdick: Alright so that’s three albums instead of one, but I think I’ll allow it.

Jeff Rosenstock: Okay, okay. Laura Stevenson – The Big Freeze.

Matt Burdick: Okay. Final question. So it’s years and years in the future. Everything has been erased except just one song. Years in the future, what is the one song from you that you want people to remember you by? Throughout your whole career?

Jeff Rosenstock: I don’t know. “Ohio Tpke” maybe. It’s long, at least. It’s a lot of song. 

Matt Burdick: Yeah that’s a good one. 

Jeff Rosenstock: Yeah, “Ohio Tpke.” I was going to say “USA” cause it’s also long. In my mind I’m like “the longest one would make the most sense,” cause it’s the most one. I don’t know. I have no idea. It’s like, how do you know if anything that you do is any better than anything else that you do? There’s no way to tell.

Matt Burdick: That’s a good way to look at it. Well, thank you so much for joining us! This has been really cool. 

Jeff Rosenstock: Yeah thanks a lot for talking to me!

Matt Burdick: Yeah! And NO DREAM is out now, go and listen to that if you like punk music, or if you don’t like punk music, because it’s still really good.

Jeff Rosenstock: Thank you!

Matt Burdick: Have a great day! 

Jeff Rosenstock: You too. Bye, nice talking to you Matt!