Hello, and welcome to the first edition of “A Guide To”, a series of introductions to the many different subgenres of punk.

Given punk’s usually urban aesthetic, the phrase “folk punk” probably elicits either confusion, skepticism, or both. But I assure you, this unlikely combination is a match made in heaven. The rawness and intense emotion that inherently comes with punk rock, combined with the natural sound of folk instruments, makes for some of the most fun, beautiful, and achingly sad music out there.

The Basics

Folk punk is essentially this: punk-informed folk (and vice versa) played on traditional instrument such as acoustic guitars, trumpets, banjos, violins, etc. Most people are familiar with foundational bands such as Flogging Molly and the Pogues, but the folk punk I’m talking about here has a sound much more informed by the protest songs of American folk musicians such as Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, plus folk subgenres like bluegrass.

Essential Artists

Three main artists make up my experience of listening to folk punk: Pat the Bunny, Days ‘n Daze and Asking for It.

Pat the Bunny

I could write a whole post on how much I love Pat the Bunny and why he’s so great, but at this point it’s cliché in folk punk community. Everybody knows him, everybody loves him, and if you don’t you’re really missing out.

Pat the Bunny, now retired, is the stage name of Pat Schneeweis, a singer-songwriter from Vermont who I will just call Pat from now on for brevity’s sake. He has a career stretching way back into his teenage years, but his most well-known work is the album Live the Dream, performed with his band Ramshackle Glory. Although it’s brilliant and a modern classic, in my opinion it doesn’t hold a candle to his first few albums. His best in my opinion is a split with the band Mantits called Love Songs for the Apocalypse. Under the name Johnny Hobo and the Freight Trains, Pat sings mainly autobiographical songs about drug addiction, God, anarchism, and more. He grew to be an incredible musician later in life, but I think it’s undeniable that at this stage he wrote his best work. Absolutely nowhere else will you hear such raw anger and sadness come out of one man. If you want to understand Pat the Bunny, start with this record; the opening lines in New Mexico Song neatly sum up the rest of his music: “As he lights an American Spirit, he asks how I can smoke such shit/I say there’s nothing like chain-smoking GPC cigarettes, ‘cause any smokes will kill ya/but these will make you feel like it.”

Days ‘n Daze

Would you believe me if I told you that a Houston band featuring an acoustic guitar, a trumpet, a washboard and a tub bass put out one of the best punk albums of the 2010’s? You should, because it is so, so true.

Days ‘n Daze has more energy than some bands that dare to call themselves hardcore punk. This is thanks to their amalgam of bluegrass and crust punk they call H-town thrashgrass, exemplified by 2013’s Rouge Taxidermy. If that album’s manic energy does not get you addicted to this band than nothing will. They somehow manage to effortlessly blend bluegrass, punk, metal, ska and more, covering everything from dainty love songs to spitfire anti-consumerist rants. They’re awesome, they’re insane, and they would define folk punk for me if they weren’t so unique. And while the later albums don’t quite reach their original levels of creativity, they’re brilliant in their own right.

Asking For It

“Oh how I wanna be an alcoholic/Drinking ‘til the day I die, passing out every night/For falling over is how I want to be remembered”

So goes a tune off Asking For Its album Happy Birthday Hitler!, recorded in a living room somewhere in suburban Tasmania. If an album about drinking, getting high and hating cops recorded in a living room doesn’t sum up folk punk, I don’t know what does. While it’s not as emotionally deep as the last two albums I mentioned, it’s my number one go-to for albums that are just fun. The whole album is sung by a group of people, most of whom are just the lead singers’ friends, drunkenly screaming things like “Do you wanna get a shitty job, or do you wanna live your fuckin’ dreams?!” in between every song. It’s not professionally recorded or performed, and it’s still one of the best folk punk albums ever.

Folk punk is huge and diverse, and there’s many sides to it. All of my favorite albums are often completely different, and I hope it never stops being that way. I hope that as long as I live I’ll never run out of badly recorded basement tapes to listen to, and I’ll never cease to tell my friends that I thought their objectively awful cover of Pat the Bunny was perfect just the way it was. Folk punk, like all music, is personal. It sets itself apart by not trying to be anything more.