Culture
Ed Barakauskas of Teen Mortgage talks about playing stadiums, quitting his day job, and the band’s evolving writing process
By: Nicholas Kobe
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LOUISVILLE, Kentucky (WOUB) – Washington D.C. is best known for being the political epicenter of the United States. So, maybe it’s not so surprising that it’s also the birthplace of one of music’s most political genres: hardcore punk.
Often credited as the “founding fathers” of the genre is Washington D.C.’s Bad Brains. A band who’s self-titled LP combines blistering speed and harsh vocals with funk and reggae influences. Bands such as Minor Threat and Teen Idles would carry and iterate on the ferocity of Bad Brains to make hardcore punk the alternative juggernaut it is today.
However, as punk has spread and evolved, Washington D.C. hasn’t stopped producing great bands.
Case in point: Teen Mortgage.
The garage-punk duo may not be as thrashy as some of their predecessors, but the spirit of DC punk is clearly visible in this band. Through their relatively small discography, the band is bursting with energy, wit, and simple-but-effective songwriting that demands your attention. Their thick low-fi production helps them stand out against the sleek polish that dominates rock radio and festival lineups, making them a breath of fresh air for fans looking for something scrappy and raw.
Evidently, one of the people that Teen Mortage has managed to impress is Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, who invited the group to join The Smashing Pumpkins and Weezer on their UK and Ireland tour earlier this summer.
Now, back in the US, Teen Mortgage drummer Ed Barakauskas spoke with WOUB’s Nicholas Kobe about the large steps made by the band as of late, as well as their bright future ahead of their performance at Louder Than Life September 26.
Find an edited transcript of their conversation, below.
Nicholas Kobe: If you had to describe Teen Mortgage in one sentence, what would you say?
Ed Barakauskas:
I have my elevator pitch for the genre, but to describe the band? “Heavy
garage punk” is kind of how we refer to it. You always cater the term to whoever you’re talking to.
Yeah, exactly. So recently Teen Mortgage has been making some pretty big moves. You guys just toured in the UK and Ireland with Weezer and Smashing Pumpkins. What was it like touring with those kinds of bands, on that kind of a stage?
Barakauskas: Oh, it’s a pretty big learning experience for a band that’s been doing clubs. We’re used to being in this really intimate environment where you can really feel the audience. When you get onto an arena stage, especially when you’re opening for bands that already sold out the stage before you were added to the bill, it’s just such a different environment as far as intimacy goes. It’s like you have to have almost a little bit more confidence to know that people are still getting into it because you can’t see them directly.
After being on that tour, do you prefer the smaller setting versus an arena venue, or has that changed now that you’ve had that experience?
Barakauskas: I think the most even way I can reply to that is we’ve only done a handful of these arena shows. So it’s like you take our entire career up until that point, doing clubs and venues, even up to festival stages. It’s just kind of a little different when you’re playing an arena. So it’s hard to really draw a comparison between over a decade or so of that to six days. I will say it gave us confidence that we can really rise to the occasion because we were lined up to go on right before two legendary groups with the knowledge that any of our fans that got in there were most likely coincidental.
Then when you’re playing on such a big stage before those bands, you are often kind of the last person to get in and get your sound stuff done and everything. So it’s not always going on in an ideal situation. So with all that pressure, we were able to still go out and do our thing and I would say by the third show I eased in and was just enjoying myself again.
So now that you are back in the U.S., I’m talking to you guys ahead of your performance at Louder Than Life. What’s something that you are particularly excited about, or find unique about the whole festival experience?
Barakauskas: I mean, it’s awesome to kind of be thrown into these situations where you are just in the company of so many legendary bands and upcoming bands all in the same spot, and then the people that show up and invest to go to a festival show. It’s like they’ve already bought the ticket for the whole experience, so they’re very eager crowds to kind of get into music. So generally I would say as a fan and when we played festivals, it’s just this really cool vibe where people have set aside days at a time to go soak up music versus when you play a club show, it’s like people set aside the nighttime. It’s also really awesome, but it’s just a different vibe. They’re both really cool but different.
I think we’re tapping into this thing now where it’s become a little community for us too, where some of these shows when we went and played Punk Rock Bowling, it’s become a place where we see our friends now. It’s like we had toured with Off! and a bunch of the guys from Off!, were at that show and we get to meet bands through their circuit. We get to hang with the Descendants and Devo and that’s just not something that happens on an average club show where they run into all these people at a two-day time. Some of my new favorite bands are just because we were on the bill together at a stage or something.
Any particular examples of that?
Barakauskas: I think one really random one is I met Iron Roses and they’re kind of like a band that’s coming up and they went on the stage a little bit before us and they just ripped it up and I was like, “Oh yeah, I got to spend more time with this band.” It’s like I saw them after I had a conversation with one of the singers and I was like, “Oh yeah, I’m definitely going to check you out. You are a really solid person.”
So for fans that are just hearing about you guys for the first time or getting into your music is there any particular song or place in your guys’ discography that you think is a good place for people to start?
Barakauskas: I mean, I think our flagship song, at least from my perspective is S.W.A.S. That’s kind of been our song leading the way for the longest time. If you just go on our Spotify, it’s like those top songs are pretty good intro into what people are getting into. My personal favorite, at least as far as throughout the history of the band is the song Doctor. It’s been our opener for the longest time just because of the song that always feels right to do that with. I think now that we’re entering into this new phase and we’re really working on so much stuff, we have such an incredible body of work that’s coming out that will probably change, but you never know.
Absolutely. Now that you referenced kind of this new body of work, what’s your guys’ songwriting process going forward, and how has that kind of changed from some of the stuff you guys put out earlier as a band?
Barakauskas: I feel like we are getting a lot more confidence in just building songs out and then knowing that we don’t have to tinker with them forever. In the past, we would make a song and then we would rewrite it a bunch of times, and some of the songs took over a year or more to come into place. It wasn’t that they weren’t good before, we just kept going through different formations and then now it’s like we have more time to dedicate to writing. So I think at this point when James (Guile) will demo something out or bring something to practice they’ve been working on usually if it’s going to work, we kind of know to a degree from the time we start playing it, whether it’s gelling or not.
Fair enough. And you guys are doing this full-time, correct?
Barakauskas: As of now, we’re in that gear-changing phase where I had to leave my occupation to go do that last tour. As I’ve mentioned before, I am licensed as a nurse, so I’ve been looking for an “as-needed” position, but my company wasn’t going to provide one, so they kind of forced my hand to a degree and then some other things came into place at the same time and I was like, all right, “I think I could do this.”
As a band, what kind of made you guys realize, “okay, we’re ready to take this leap?”
Barakauskas: I mean it’s no one thing, but doing that arena tour was a pretty big endorsement. We were signed off on by Billy Corgan to come on the show, so I was like, “If he’s at least willing to let us open up his shows for him, that’s a sign we might be doing something right.” Just to highlight that we weren’t a signed band doing that. We’re like, we were a DIY band that got on these arena shows. That’s no financial backing, none of that stuff. Just the crew that we’ve kind of built through shaking hands and going to shows and meeting people.
Absolutely. What would you say to other bands that are in a kind of similar position who want to make that leap?
Barakauskas: I mean, I don’t think there’s ever going to be a comfortable time to do it. At a certain point, it’s just like you’re looking out of an airplane or you’re about to go skydiving. You got to make a leap at some point, and most likely there’s going to be an uncomfortable point and you just kind of have to build up the mental fortitude to do it, and then also just take inventory of what it means to you and what you have to fall back on. I don’t think from a life planning perspective, anyone would be like, “yeah, you should quit your job and go play music,” but you also only get one life. So it looks like things are trending in a certain way and you have the fluidity in your life to do it. You’re most likely only going to get one shot where it makes sense.
I’ll also say that you don’t necessarily have to either. There’s a lot of people that work hybrid kind of lifestyles. I got a chance to talk with Mario Rubalcaba from Off!, Hot Stakes, and Rocket for the Crypt, and he’s told me he’s been doing this for decades and he is like, “yeah, it’s like I have times where it’s a little bit more in the music world and then sometimes it’s a little bit more in the work world, the normal job world.” He says that’s been going on for decades. It’s like the ratio just kind of changes depending on where you’re at in your life and what you’re doing. You can live a good life doing that. I mean, I think one of my favorite bands, Pissed Jeans, I think those dudes have office jobs and stuff.
Yeah, there’s a lot of great artists who do. The last question I really have for you, and going off of that, where are you guys planning to take this in the future? What’s your goal at the end of the day for this band?
Barakauskas: For me, I don’t really set an end goal for things, I just kind of set trajectories. There’s that reward system and once you reach a goal, what you end up doing is just kind of going, “okay, what do I do next?” So you kind of got to just enjoy the process. So for me it’s like I love doing this, I’m going to push it as far as I can push it, and so far it’s like I’ve already pushed this further than I ever would’ve thought it was going to go rationally. So it’s all bonus rounds. I’m just kind of enjoying it, but we have a lot of momentum going right now and there’s a lot of stuff that we’re doing that I’m not going to quite talk about yet, but just say 2025 is going to probably be way bigger than 2024 was.