PART TWO of an insanely long conversation with Patrick Kindlon of Deathwish artists SELF DEFENSE FAMILY. We pick up the interview during James’ withering examination of song lyrics, whether being ‘mysterious’ as a band works in the age of social networking, and generally whether or not Kindlon is an jackass who simply can’t help but crap on other people. As a refresher, the interview was originally conducted in late 2011. Since then, SELF DEFENSE FAMILY has recorded new music and Kindlon has expanded his musical repertoire by forming the 90s inspired post-hardcore outfit DRUG CHURCH, who have a new EP coming soon on No Sleep Records. Part One of the interview can be found here. - Jordan

Pastepunk: Okay. “Jeni Leigh”.

Patrick: Haha!

Pastepunk: Start talking.

Patrick: That is one of the songs on the record that is… as I said, all the songs are personal in a manner of speaking, however, that song… relates directly to a woman I was seeing at the time.

That one, I think is really straightforward, actually. When you’re no longer with somebody as a kid, you’re pretty resentful of any new sex that they’re having. You know, like, it’s a total 18 year old thing to do to sit in a dark room and think about your ex-girlfriend boning a new dude and just being an angry dude, being an angry 18 year old thinking about that thing you don’t have.

As an adult… after you’ve been with a few women, those feelings don’t really grip you any more. You could really just be chilling under the bed the whole time so long as she’s happy and not bothering you anymore, then everything’s cool. As much as you want people to be happy, sometimes, if you know somebody really well, you can see them dropping the ball from a long way off, you can see them making a poor decision fifty miles away, you can anticipate that you’ll be getting a phone call a month now, saying “I don’t know what I was thinking, that guy was crazy, he threw me down the stairs, he set my hair on fire, he kicked me off a bridge,” you can kind of know that… but that’s not your boyfriend or girlfriend anymore, you don’t have any right to tell them how to live, I think there’s a certain sadness in that, that you spend time with somebody, you build a connection to them, if you’re a sociopath that connection is totally severed when you break up, but if you’re just a normal person, you still have a connection to them and it can be rough watching people stumble around afterwards.

Pastepunk: You were getting on really heavy on “Jeni Leigh” then the call dropped…

Patrick: I was getting really heavy. We’re not gonna get that heavy. I’m gonna say everybody go watch the science fiction film Four Sided Triangle.

Pastepunk: Okay… thanks for at least getting that heavy at least once on a song, I can name off the top of my head, tons of  bands that will not go anywhere near “this is what I meant on that song.”

Patrick: That’s interesting actually, bands really, I don’t blame bands, sometimes… things are just personal and you’re expressing yourself at the time and nobody needs to relate to it and that’s fine, but if I’m willing to sing about it all the time, I think I’d be willing to talk about it.

I don’t think it does me any good to be mysterious, I don’t think it does anybody any good to be mysterious now, because everybody can just go look at your Facebook. Being mysterious or not being forthright or upfront about… at this point I don’t get who’s buying it, I get that there are people who still like that who like that… having to work for it or I get it, they exist, but I don’t understand how.

There’s no great mysteries anymore, I’ll go read dude’s Twitter or I’ll go find what that singer’s about, I’ll go to a website where [that singer] posts photos of his dick all day, you know? Those resources are out there.

Nobody’s mysterious and I think it’s so crazy that they’ve talked themselves into believing that somebody’s mysterious, that they could mean anything other than what they’re saying…

Pastepunk: That was the only thing that rubbed me the wrong way about that BLACKLISTED record. I think that as a piece of music and as a vehicle for Mr. Hirsch to express himself it was… vivid and well done and engaging but… I really disliked that he would not do any interviews for it.

Patrick: I’ve got feelings on that. I can’t speak for him. I agree with you, it was well done, lyrically he borders on really, he’s very candid at times and other times quite overblown and it’s exaggerated for effect and borders on hysteria almost. I typically find that so repellent, that’s like the opposite of what I want at all from music, but I feel that for the last few records he’s done that very, very well. I really enjoyed it as well.

Doing an interview, not doing an interview, I’ve only met him in passing, I can’t say with any confidence why he makes that decision. But, not doing interviews is often better for your career, that’s how a lot of dudes make names for themselves is picking and choosing. I don’t mean to cut you down in any sort of way, but I’ll do an interview with anybody, because I like to talk.

Talking is fun, and maybe somebody gets something out of an interview or whatever. Being a little aloof is seemingly what people really, really want from performers now. It goes in waves. Every once in a while people will want things that are terribly earnest, super earnest and everybody’s coming at you with the most serious heartfelt thing they’ve ever said out loud and you’ll see those interviews for a couple years… the flip side is you’ll see nothing but people being sort of blase about music press or whatever. I don’t know if dude from BLACKLISTED is really that methodical about it, from everybody that I’ve spoken to, he apparently just is that dude. He is what he conveys, which is kind of a dude maybe sometimes doesn’t want to talk to people. I think his band is probably served better by not doing interviews. People attach meaning to things he says in a way that may be detracted from if he was constantly explaining.

While I personally would like to read what he has to say on the topic, I think for his band, that’s probably the thing to do. I don’t think he’s doing it for that reason, I think he’s doing it probably because he’s a bit of an odd dude, but it might benefit the band.

Pastepunk: I don’t doubt his authenticity…

Patrick: Nah, he seems… George, if you’re reading this shit somewhere, I’m not shit-talking you right now, I got nothing bad to say, but he seems like a legit kind of odd dude.

Pastepunk: George, if you’re listening, I would like to do an interview with you. I would like to pick your brains about the sounds of the kitchen at the end of No One Deserves… and the particular station that you said you wanted to throw yourself off the side of or in front of the train….

My issue, which I will presume to you directly George, which I am not, is that…you’re willing to take the step of recording these things and saying them, then, then I feel like you ought to take the next one and be able to talk about it…but… then again, the interview Mr. Bannon did… and Pat, I call him Mr. Bannon, because I’m not on a first name basis with Jake.

Patrick: I think that’s… you know, that’s funny, I thought about that in the shower today, I thought about the fact that music a lot of times people take a weird familiarity with artists and start calling them things that… I thought about that today. It’s interesting that you should say that.

I think he prefers to be called Jake, I don’t think he gives a shit, but Mr. Bannon sounds highly professional.

Pastepunk: When I say I have bought art pieces of Mr. Bannon’s before…

Patrick: When you say you’ve bought pieces by Mr. Bannon it helps that argument, I like that. If you’re trying to get in on building the aftermarket value of those you don’t call the artist Jake, you know what I mean? You call the artist… you say you’ve got a piece by Mr. Bannon here.

Pastepunk: And I suspect at this point there’s going to be some incredibly selective editing on this interview because there is no way that I am ever going to get another Deathwish interview when this comes out…

Patrick: Nah, they’re cool about that shit. They don’t care. They actually… I don’t know their rep here, I don’t know what their rep really is, but they’re pretty reasonable dudes. Pretty much any reasonable dudes could hang in the room with those reasonable dudes. They’ve got sort of a mystique or an aura from the label side or Jake’s other ventures in music and visual art and shit, but at the end of the day, that’s what I’m talking about mysterious not mysterious. I’m sure Jake’s not doing a billion interviews and always talking about his work, I don’t see a ton of that, but certainly you can always approach the dude at a merch table or you can always approach the dude if you see him in line at Del Taco, you can approach him, he’s not going to throw a smoke bomb and disappear, he’s a pretty normal dude.

Real quick James, [It's] something that I don’t know how to express properly in music, so I keep saying it in interviews, if there’s anything I would like my band to mean on any level, to be frank, I’m well convinced that once the world’s over, all that posterity shit don’t matter anyway, if there’s anything I’d like it to mean it’s that normal people can make art. Normal people, if you like, just people, that do normal people things, they watch History Channel, maybe their friend drags them to a strip club, they go poo.

Normal people, people like anybody else are the ones making real art, real art resonates with people because it relates, “oh yeah, that’s something that I understand, that’s something I do.” Those are people making real art. I think that anybody that’s attracted to Jake’s work is probably, maybe they think that he’s got some sort of mystique because his work is dark and it’s thematic, maybe they put that on him. I think the reasons that it rings bells for them and it makes them feel a certain way, is because Jake’s probably not that different from them on a lot of levels.

He’s a dude. He drove a car to work today. [He] didn’t take Pegasus.

Pastepunk: So Jake Bannon is not the goddamned Batman?

Patrick: I really hope he takes that audio right there and…

Hell, he’s the boss, and I like him quite a bit, but I also don’t know what he does in his private life, maybe he is the fucking Batman.

The point is: Regular people make art. I really wish more regular people acknowledged, you don’t have to be this dude that sets himself apart from the world. I’m not gonna get all dry-snitchy and weird, but there’s dudes out there, dudes that people love their bands, these are guys that go to great lengths to not exist in the public eye, they want to exist, they want to be bigger than life. But they go to great lengths not to be accessible, I should say.

Pastepunk: So we are not talking about TRAGEDY, then?

Patrick: Well, TRAGEDY might be an example…

Pastepunk: So we are talking about TRAGEDY?

Patrick: I wasn’t talking about TRAGEDY, but this probably does apply to TRAGEDY for all I know. A lot of those dudes who do that, that’s their vibe, that’s what they’re doing, those dudes also have Facebook accounts that they use a different name for. It’s still a Facebook account, you know what I’m saying? It’s still a Facebook account. It’s still a thing they use to pick up 19 year old girls.

A lot of that is fraud. A lot of those people that seek to be mysterious to be put apart and set above, that’s all bullshit. They gotta use text messages to get vagina just like any other dude. It’s all the same shit.

What I’m trying to say is: Even the guys that do set themselves apart that are the mysterious guys, they aren’t very mysterious. they’ve all got an angle and their little scams too.

Pastepunk: When you say normal people can make art… What about that guy and his friends that have a blues band and they work in, let’s say a design firm?

Patrick: That’s a pretty normal dude there.

Pastepunk: Would you extend the umbrella of art to that guy?

Patrick: Uhhh… yeah, roughly. Roughly. I don’t wanna give that guy too much to be honest. He’s a normal dude and he is using music to express himself, and I wanna cut shit down a lot, because when I don’t like something, obviously the thing to do is lash out and shit on it. But the reality is, if he’s feeling personally fulfilled, he could be playing in a streetpunk band at age 46 as the CEO of an online retailer, if he’s getting something out of it, who the fuck am I to judge?

Pastepunk: Wait, wait, wait you spend a bunch of time trying to distinguish yourself and your band from a bunch of other bands

Patrick: Yeah yeah, that’s true… I do that all day!

Pastepunk: …so don’t back down from it now, man.

Patrick: Here’s the thing: I didn’t say that dude doing the blues shit was a good artist. I would never give him that much. I’m not saying he has even an ounce of taste. I’m not saying I wouldn’t cross the street, if I heard his music, I would, I’d go to the other side immediately.

At the same time, there’s people who live their whole life without any sort of outlet at all and somebody who has a really shitty outlet is probably fundamentally happier and more well balanced than someone that has zero outlet, so while I don’t quite condone the dude’s shitty blues act that he does with his friend after they drink a couple Keystones, everybody starts somewhere, hopefully by that time that guy’s 84, he’s in something valid and cool actually expressive and interesting.

But that’s the thing, everybody’s trying to paint me out as I’m the Grinch, I just go around shitting on dudes that I don’t like and who the fuck am I people always try to do that shit. The reality is: firstly) who the fuck am I, I personally don’t value anyone’s opinion, unless they’ve done something I’m blown away by or a multibillionaire on their own accord; secondly) It’s strange to me when I say something, when I shit on something, when I say something negative about whatever band, and people get defensive, especially if they’re not in a band, that to me is bananas bullshit, that is crazy, psychotic, not appropriate behavior for adults sort of shit… Because who the fuck am I that you are… to be insecure about my opinion is crazy. If I came up to myself, and said “hey man I don’t like your fucking haircut,” I wouldn’t think anything of it…

Pastepunk: I disagree with your reaction, but I see your point..

Patrick: And I value my opinion I guess, but… when I read negative shit about my band on the internet, nobody ever comes up to my face and says it, when I read shit like that, truly I don’t think a thing about it, it’s not a when you hear people say “I don’t even give a shit, I don’t care what people think about me” it’s hard to believe that…

Pastepunk: Yeah, that, of course, is a lie.

Patrick: That seems like a persona driven thing, you’re attempting to say something so that people believe it about you. Let other people say that about you, don’t self-define, it’s very strange to demonstrate in that way.

You’re right, you and I don’t believe it, so I would understand if someone wouldn’t believe it if I say it about my band, but really truly, when you do something for long enough, other people’s opinions, they truly mean nothing, it’s cool when you read positive things, but you can’t take it seriously, because if you’re going to ignore the negative, you gotta ignore the positive for the most part, too.

99 percent of people don’t have actual opinions, they have knee jerk responses based on who liked something or how many times they heard it this week.

For example: That band TOUCHE AMORE, just put out a record…

Pastepunk: Yeah, they were kind enough to send me over a download just before the interview, actually…

Patrick: You might like it. It’s short, which I think is the nicest compliment somebody can give and I know that sounds real backhanded, it sounds like “the part of the record I like the most is when it ends.” That’s not what I’m saying, what I’m saying is the songs are under two minutes, every single one of ‘em…

Pastepunk: No no no they’re not, they’re at least one that’s two and a half minutes, but keep going…

Patrick: Wait which one, what hold on, I thought I listened to that record today, maybe it’s that fucking piano shit they put on there…

The point is I love that and I think more bands should do that, we’re going the opposite way, we’re probably gonna have seven minute long songs… now I didn’t know TOUCHE AMORE terribly well (Oh you’re right they have a two minute twenty second song…) I’ve met Jeremy and I’ve seen the band play live once, I wasn’t terribly familiar with their prior LP, but an album like this is a great great fuckin’ way to get people into it, because even if I didn’t like something, it’s not abusive, it doesn’t stick around so long that I feel like it entered my life hit me and then stuck around to hit me again.

If I like it, I can hit the back button and listen to it again, if I don’t like it, it leaves me. I guess this sounds really backhanded compliment and shit, but it’s really not. I think it’s such good thing for a band to do, it makes it so fun for the listener, it’s nice. I listened to the record once, and at no point did I say oh God, I gotta hit the fuckin’ skip button on this… which Is rare for me, I got no patience.

Pastepunk: But you’re gonna record seven minute long songs…

Patrick: Here’s the thing though, I hope I don’t turn off anybody to this, I hope Deathwish doesn’t hear this and say “I don’t want to give these motherfuckers money,” I’m at the juncture where I’m doing shit exclusively to get off in weird ways. If our full length that we’re doing at the end of summer or early fall, rather, it’s going to be self-indulgent on a level normal people don’t understand. It’ll probably be alienating in four different ways, it’s not because we’re shooting to be the big agit-pop band that… I really feel that a lot of people are limiting themselves artistically because they’ve got to exist. They’ve got to continue to try to tour and sell records, I’m not saying sell records in a bad way, they’ve still got to be something to someone.

My band went through a weird revelation where we’re nothing to anybody, really. The only people that really get it, and James, this is no offense to you or anybody is the people that are playing it when the thing is recorded…