The End of Reality as We Know It

A Discussion with Rob Taxpayer

Rob Morton, best known as Rob Taxpayer, has led an interesting life in DIY. He spent nearly a decade at the helm of the goof-punx collective The Taxpayers, with which he released multiple albums that are now firmly considered classics in the independent punk canon. In recent years, however, we haven’t heard too much from him.

During this time, the music world’s one ongoing connection with him was his Song of the Week Club, through which he would, as the title suggests, publish at least one new song every week.

Back with a brand new project, Rob was kind enough to sit down with me for a lengthy phone conversation to discuss Anxiety Cat, experimenting with different genres, the importance of balloons & roosters, and everything in between.

Keeping with the theme touched upon in this interview about the benefits of presenting things through multiple formats, you can also access the audio of our phone interview, complete with all of the tangents and other bits that were omitted from the written interview for sake of space and flow. This is available through Rob’s Youtube page, which is linked at the bottom of this interview.

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Folk Punk Archivist: Fair warning, some of my questions can tend to get a bit wordy.

Rob Taxpayer: I’m down. I’m a words guy, so let’s do it!

FPA: You’re roughly one year removed from the release of your new country project, Trusty Snakes, and about four years removed from the latest Taxpayers record [Big Delusion Factory]-

Rob: is it that long? Wow, I guess it has been…

FPA: 2016, I believe, right?

Rob: Dear God, you’re right!

FPA: It could be worse; I could have called it “almost half a decade”.

Rob: Ah, that’s true!

FPA: -so what inspired you to create this as a separate project when you currently have Trusty Snakes as well as your ongoing Song of the Week Club?

Rob: The reason to create a new project was largely to be able to funnel specific ideas into a larger story. That’s how I like to make records and tell stories; I like to have an overarching idea/theme for something. With The Taxpayers, all of those records had some kind of central theme/character behind them, and the same was the case with the Trusty Snakes record. Pretty much anything I’ve ever done has been that way.

The difference with The Song of the Week Club is that it didn’t have that continuity of a larger theme, or even genre. I started working on those kinds of songs after the 2016 elections. I was kind of yearning for an outlet to start trying to make sense of the world after that. Some people I talk to about that election say, “eh, I saw that coming”, but I did not. There’s no fucking way you could have predicted that, in my opinion. I did not understand how it was that reality shifted so quickly, or I guess I didn’t understand how I did not understand the rest of America like I thought I did. I was under no illusions that there was a large portion of the country that had different political beliefs than me, but I did not know that we were so out of touch that, ya know, 40% of the country would end up supporting a person who is so clearly a con man.

A few years (four years, I guess), went by and I realized that I had just a ton of songs that fell into this one idea: international topics related to reality shifting events, or events that changed reality for either one region of the world, or the world at large. So I tried to weed through all the songs and create an umbrella project for it, which became Anxiety Cat.

I’ve never had any project that was for overtly political material. I’ve also never done anything that was digital, and this project allowed me to explore digital electronic music a bit more because I think it gets a bad rap, especially in the DIY community. There’s plenty of garbage out there (as there is with any genre), but I’d come across a few things that made me think all the assumptions I’d made about electronic music growing up were wrong and so I wanted to make something that utilized that genre of music while incorporating acoustic elements. I was also interested in audio excerpts, which I had mostly only heard in the context of noise music or art pieces, and I wanted to explore working them into more conventional pop songs. Like anything, it’s an experiment!

FPA: A number of the projects you’ve been involved with have been multi-media, whether it be the novella that accompanies ‘God Forgive these Bastards’, the zine that goes along with ‘To Risk so Much for One Damn Meal’, or even the (albeit unreleased) comic that was planned to accompany ‘Cold Hearted Town’. Taking into account the planned visual component of Anxiety Cat, do you find an inherent value in presenting art through a multitude of mediums? Do you think there’s something specific that is added/to be gained through that process?

Rob: I do. I should first say that there is no right way to make art of any kind. For me, I think the multi-media thing comes from—so, I’m a teacher and one of the things you learn (which has been partially debunked) is that in the 1970’s there was all this research going on about learning styles. The primary learning styles were visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and so on. The idea being that if you can take into account these different learning styles, you can reach everyone, but the problem with education is that often we only teach with one method (i.e. a the college professor only giving lectures, thus only appealing to the auditory learners). Basically, you’re taught that every lesson you create should incorporate facets from all the learning styles.

Connecting to that, it follows that the best way to teach/learn something is to present it/take it in, through multiple methods because then you’re engaging different parts of your brain and you’re going to reach more people than maybe you would have otherwise. So I don’t always think of this when I’m creating a project, but I tend to think that you can create a richer story by presenting it through a variety of sources. Like for me, I’m very much a lyrics guy, but I’ve come to the unfortunate conclusion that lots of people don’t listen to music that way, which is fine. Plenty of people don’t have a lyric sheet in front of them or think about what different couplets mean and how this word rhymes with a word in the pervious paragraph, and so on. Most people are listening to the music for the pleasure center of their brain, which is totally fine! But if you’re trying to present a story that is lyric-based and for listeners who are not lyric people then sometimes you have to try different methods (not to mention it’s just fun to try and tell stories in different ways). For instance, I wondered if I could write a comic book, and it turned out I couldn’t, but I tried!

FPA: Would you consider a project like Anxiety Cat or one of your prior projects that have been multi-media to work as stand-alone audio pieces, or do you feel that there is something inherently missing by only taking in that single aspect of it?

Rob: It depends on the project and the song. With the Henry Turner record and book [God Forgive These Bastards: Stories from the Forgotten Life of Georgia Tech Pitcher Henry Turner], I feel like you’re missing out on a lot if you don’t have the book. There’s just so much that isn’t in the songs, or maybe there’s just a little reference in the songs that you can only really understand by reading that chapter in the book. And of course the most popular song on the record [I Love You like an Alcoholic], I feel like 99% of the people listening to it on Youtube or wherever hear it as a French-sounding folk band singing a love song, and it largely is not. It’s part of a much larger story about a broken man.

In other cases, it’s not so important. I feel like on ‘Cold Hearted Town’, there were some things that were explored in those songs that were intended to be a part of that comic book that now just live in the ether so now the only person who knows what some of those things really mean is my own dumb brain that didn’t really figure out a way to make it work.

As far as Anxiety Cat goes, yes! For example, the second song on the record is called “The End of Growth” and it uses an excerpt from one of the last speeches of Muammar Gaddafi, which is in Arabic and if you just hear the song on its own, you’re just like, “what is this about?” and even if you do happen to speak Arabic, you would still probably wonder what the reason was to have these words included in this song. So there’s a lot of context that is missing without the video. Most of the videos I’ve put together for this project have been collage pieces, which kind of mirrors the structure of the project itself. So I think not just from the subtitles, but also from the collaged visuals, it makes the inclusions of his speech make a lot more sense not only in the context of this song, but the theme of the album as well. In fact, I probably spent the more time researching that topic for this track than anything else on the album because I feel that what happened with him is a perfect encapsulation of everything that is happening in the world right now; him as a leader is an encapsulation of all the authoritarian leaders right now. He was overthrown in 2011 and it was almost like it marked the beginning of a new era of instability. This instability definitely began way before that and will continue long after, but it was a way for me to think about the structural instability of some countries and why it is that certain leaders are able to exert influence.

FPA: I wanted to know about your specific intentions with the track “Balloons”, and particularly the titular symbol of the balloon, which seems to be recurring from “The End of Growth”.

Rob: So, each song on this album kind of has its own balloons, although they’re not always called balloons. For me, it’s the peanuts that you give a population that work as placation. It’s the stimulus check that everyone is getting in the mail; those are balloons. The question of every government, person, or group that is trying to exert influence over a large group of people is: “how do you garner trust? How do you garner support?” and the way you do that is with these balloons. You say, “Hey, before me you didn’t have this oil money or the opportunity for higher education in Libya, right?”. Every country has some version of that. It’s just a way to keep the populace content and unquestioning.

FPA: It felt “Balloons” was being sung from the perspective of ‘the truly converted’, which I thought was introduced very well with the opening audio clip of the toddler singing what would become the song’s hook: “we thank you, God…”, which seemed like a perfect portrayal of the childlike wholeness and conviction of belief present in this song.

Rob: I think that’s a good way to put it. The ability to convince yourself that despite the shit storm that is around you and maybe how horrible things are around you, you’re like, “hey, I’ve got this, and other places don’t have this”. And we do a damn good job of convincing ourselves of that in America, don’t we? Plenty of people you hear right now when asked why they came to the store without their mask, they tell you “It’s a free country”, “This is America”, and that “This is an individualist country and if you take away that, what do we have left?”. Individualism is a dream that has been sold to the American people: sure, you need three jobs to pay your rent, you can’t afford to buy a house, you’re impoverished, you’re I massive debt, BUT…you’re free! We’ve all got those balloons in some way, I think. But yeah, I liked this one too; it was a lot of fun to make.

FPA: It’s also just really catchy.

Rob: Yeah! It was also one of the first tracks where I really started fuckin’ around with the electronics.

FPA: I really liked the devolution of the group vocal hook at the end, which sort of gives you that hive sound to it.

Rob: You’re an astute listener! I don’t expect everyone to pick up on that type of stuff, but yeah that was the idea of this crescendo of belief, this conviction that eventually just falls apart… and then it starts up again. The metronome starts up again and it never ends!

FPA: There seems to be a noticeable dichotomy in your vocal delivery on this album. On songs like “Balloons”, it is very melodic, but then there are tracks such as “Dolls Inside Dolls” which devolve so quickly, or “The Frenzy” where essentially all of the vocals are just very manic and often times go beyond comprehension without a lyric sheet to guide you. Is there a particular correspondence between your varied vocal deliveries and the topic matter/perspectives you were trying to address/portray on these tracks?

Rob: Oh, definitely. That was for sure the case with “The Frenzy”. When you’re trying to inhabit the mind of a rabid believer in a cause, how do you inhabit that without being a bit frantic?

When I was fuckin’ around with the vocal delivery method, the first idea I had for how to convey that with “Dolls inside Dolls”, was “I wonder how it would sound to whisper, talk, and scream the same line overtop each other at the same time, and would that adequately convey this kind of fervor?” and I think it did. Whispering coupled with screaming-whispering coupled with anything, is really scary. I heard Ian Mackaye of Minor Threat and The Evens, was asked “why aren’t you screaming [on the vocals] in The Evens?” and he said: “Well, if you want people to really listen, you can convey so much more anger with a whisper than with screaming”. If you’re screaming in peoples’ faces, they step back and stop listening to you, but if you whisper something, they lean in; they want to hear you. I made a mental note of that when I heard that interview.

I’m kind of new to manipulating all of this in a DAW, which is what they call the programs you use to mix and master and record things. I use Logic, and the reason I use Logic is because I bought an old Macbook pro on Craigslist about six years ago and it already had it installed. It’s kind of a more sophisticated version of Garage Band, although not a ton more complex. I never knew how to do any of this most of the time with The Taxpayers, but then for the last record of the Taxpayers [Big Delusion Factory], Trevor [Oattes], who recorded a lot of our albums, kind of showed me how to use Logic. I started really messing around with that a few years ago and tried to figure out how to take some of these vocals and present them in a different way because the only way I knew to write songs before was, ya know: you get a guitar, you get a piano, you get who you want to play with and you sing or you shout, but there’s so much more you can do when you are able to harness the recording software! It’s been years trying to figure this all out. It’s like learning a language, but once you’re fluent, you have so much more power in what you can do.

FPA: I have to mention this; I think you are the first person I’ve ever heard refer to Ian MacKaye as the singer for Minor Threat and the Evens!

Rob: Ha! I think The Evens are a superior band to Minor Threat. Now, Fugazi of course is iconic. When we started The Taxpayers, Noah was one of the first people that I reached out to about starting the band, Fugazi was definitely one of the groups that we were aiming for: we liked Fugazi, we liked The Minutemen. But The Evens are in some ways even more interesting because of how different it is from his prior work.

FPA: This is my most straightforward question: who are the roosters, as referenced in the title and lyrics of track 7?

Rob: For me, and I should preface this by saying that I don’t think that there’s a wrong way to take anything [in an artistic work], the roosters are anything that is immobile; the type of person or thing in the world that is so confidant and averse to change that eventually the world has to force it to change. I thought that roosters were a good symbol for this because they’re so cocksure, confidant, they’re kind of dicks, but they serve a purpose in some ways. For instance, I have chickens and I don’t have a rooster, so sometimes hawks will pick one of them off, or the raccoons will get them. The reason for them in the context of the story of the album (and at one point I was going to call this album ‘Roosters’) is because I think that they are also a good representation of some of these dictators. For example, Trump is very much a rooster, as are Gaddafi and Putin. They present themselves as manly and take-charge, despite all evidence to the contrary. They have to be in charge, but they also are not capable of changing themselves. A rooster is going to be a rooster. This idea also extends to issues not explicitly addressed on the album. An example of this would be the men that have not seemed to take the lessons of the #metoo movement to heart; the people who just doubled down on their behavior, or basically anyone who refuses to hear evidence contrary to their belief systems.

Further in the context of this album, if the world demands change enough, then eventually it will force you [the rooster] to change. That’s what the words at the beginning of the song are explaining: “the roosters had begun to piss the world off, so everything they knew began to change” and so they not longer exist as roosters and are manipulated into something else. Now, I don’t know that this is what will happen to Trump or Putin. I hope it is. I hope they change. I hope that the world forces them to change.

FPA: So, is this particular song from the roosters’ perspective?

Rob: It is, and this is one of the few cases where, and I try not to do this too often, once it becomes from the narrator’s perspective some of that is me, and some of that is feeling like I myself was a rooster. The first verse is not from the rooster’s perspective. By the time you get to “in a parking lot I drank old bitter coffee…”, there was this moment that I was sitting in my car, and that’s where my perspective comes in. I had stayed up all night so I just went for a drive. I was watching the sun come up in some parking lot and I was just thinking about all the bad decisions that I’ve made, all the regrets that I have, and I was listening to this onslaught of bad news and I’m just really beating myself up. I was starting to see myself in some of the characters in the news. That really culminates in those lines, “Who am I to build a new life? Who am I to build a home?”. When you start adding up all the mistakes that you’ve made (and maybe you’re trying to grow), and you weigh it against the good things you have in your life, you start wondering who am I to have these things, when my neighbor is working her ass off working three jobs trying to support her four kids…who am I to deserve this over her? It’s hard to try and see all of these international and political events through a personal lens but yeah, that was why I considered calling this album ‘Roosters’.

FPA: Being the fan (some might say obsessor) of physical media that I am, and with your own interesting history with physical media through Useless State Records, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask about this phrase you put in the pre-order description for this album on Bandcamp: “…with special album cover”. Do you have some sort of alternate cover art in the works?

Rob: Yes! There’s at least going to be two different covers for it, as well as some slight differences between the albums themselves. Keith Rosson made the art that you’re referring to. He’s an author and an artist. He’s been in the punk world for quite a while, and done a lot of punk art over the years. He’s actually helped us before with some Taxpayers releases and I consider him a friend. Him and I actually met through teaching when I was living in Portland. I taught in an after school arts program where he was also working, probably in 2008-ish. He was an entity I knew of already because I was reading his zine, ‘Avow’. Between that and some of the book he’s had published lately, he’s really just one of my favorite writers.

I commissioned him to make some artwork for the project after sending him the tracks to listen to. I was originally going to use that as the only cover art but then I decided to start playing with a few different pieces of art to fit different songs. I thought it might be neat to create some symmetry between the songs and the videos, forming a sort of visual puzzle to go along with the record.

FPA: To wrap things up, is there anything that you want listeners to know going into their first listen through ‘The End of Reality as We Know It”?

Rob: The one thing I would say in terms of the habits of listenership in 2020 is that not a lot of people always listen to records from front to back, and I think that this is an important record to listen to in that way. The record was created with the order being an important aspect of it, so while you can certainly listen to individual songs out of context and that’s totally fine, the larger story can only be told in that certain way.

Another thing is that the videos are an important component of the project. They provide a lot of context that is needed to give a deeper meaning to these songs.

Most importantly, thank you to anyone that spends a half hour to listen to it! I just appreciate any time people can spend on it because I know time is at a premium for most people and I understand that it can be hard to carve out time to listen to something that is as abrasive as this record can be at moments.

Keep an open mind. Challenge yourself. Challenge your beliefs because that’s what this whole project has been for me: a method for challenging my own beliefs and understanding of the world.

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The audio component of this interview is available via Rob’s Youtube page

“The End of Reality as We Know It” is available for purchase on cd/tape/digital, through his Bandcamp

You can keep up with all things Rob Taxpayer on his brand new website

The Folkpunk Archivist is an independently run preservation and research project by Luke Pizzola, taken public in January 2019 via their page on Instagram @folkpunkarchivist