Sean Bonnette Of AJJ On Finding Confidence & Clarity In 'Disposable Everything'

AJJ. Image: Kyle Dehn

For fans of Arizona genre-defying rockers AJJ, it’s been a few years between drinks when it comes to albums. Last releasing their seventh album, Good Luck Everybody, just two months before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold on a global scale, the band have spent much of the last few years in a somewhat tentative state, unwilling to return to normal programming until it was safe to do so.

In the immediate aftermath of COVID’s takeover, frontman Sean Bonnette kept busy by way of his near-daily Live From Quarantine sessions, which saw him perform songs solo via social media in a way to maintain a sense of sanity and to continue interactions with fans.

It was in these performances that fans began to hear new material, including ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog 2’, ‘Schadenfreude’, and ‘Horsehair Vase’, with the latter being released as a non-album single in 2020.

However, it was just last year that the band began sharing tastes from their forthcoming eighth album. Dubbed Disposable Everything, the record was borne out of a return to songwriting, touring, and darker personal experiences, including the current state of the world, and the passing of Bonnette’s own mother.

However, working with producer David Jerkovich (Novi Split), and bolstered by the addition of drummer Kevin Higuchi, AJJ created a record which is among their most confident and powerful, with Bonnette himself labelling it their “happiest record”.

With the new record out in the world, I spoke to Bonnette to discuss the new record, the past few years, their growing levels of confidence, and of course, Australian tour plans.

Tyler Jenke: Hey there Sean, how have things been going?

Sean Bonnette: It's going great. I'm calling you from the stairwell of a club in Providence, Rhode Island.

TJ: I’d figured you must have been in the northeast with the current tour right now. How has the tour been going for you all?

SB: It's been awesome so far. The shows have been sounding really good, we've been playing nice, and the reaction to the new songs has been kind of the best reaction of our career.

TJ: That’s awesome to hear, because this is also sort of the first ‘full-length’ tour you’ve had the chance to go on in recent years, isn’t it? Or am I remembering incorrectly?

SB: Uh, no, that's probably pretty accurate. It's the most dates we've had booked at one single time since pre-pandemic. Fingers crossed [laughs].

TJ: Here’s hoping we don’t get a return of anything soon, because the last time you guys released an album, a pandemic followed closely behind. So, y’know, thanks for that [laughs].

SB: You’re welcome [laughs].

TJ: But on the topic of that new album, it’s been out for a little bit now, it’s gotten some great reviews, and people seem to really be enjoying it – both in the crowd and out of it. So how does it feel to release a new record after so many years between them? 

SB: It feels great, man. The fact that I think it's such a good album… Like, we’re really, really, really proud of it; not to appear humble or anything. But it was a fantastic group effort from the top-down. Just like a very well-polished gem. 

We recorded basic tracks…. Well, shit, I mean, when we started off, I sent the songs around to the band and we're all kind of working remotely at the time, but we would have weekly Zoom meetings where we would talk about the songs and what approaches we wanted to try. And then we recorded all the basic tracks in about seven days and then spent a year doing everything else to the songs.

So by that point, by the end of it, the fact that like none of us seemed sick of it says a lot, I think.

TJ: Of course, because when you’re living with these songs for so long, they can become pretty tiresome by the time they’re out in the world. Then you need to actually keep performing them live as well.

SB: Yeah, and so far only a couple of the songs are like that to play at this point [laughs]. But yeah, they’ve been so much fun

TJ: Now, before I touch on the new album too much, I want to briefly go back a little bit. Good Luck Everybody was the last album AJJ released, and I think I’m like a few people in that I’ve found it difficult to listen to because it brings back that COVID period so strongly. But at the same time, it was a source of comfort to a lot of people. Is that something you’ve noticed from your end, or have you had people expressing gratitude for a record such as that?

SB: Not exactly, but I do know that there are some songs on that album that are very comforting for people: ‘Maggie’, ‘Your Voice As I Remember It’, ‘Body Terror Song’ definitely. But more than that, I've kind of sensed the ambivalence of that album. It brings back hard memories for people. Which is so weird, because it was recorded and came out before all that was even on the forecast. It was just a weird, strange coincidence. 

TJ: It felt fitting for the time though. The title was incredibly prescient, the style felt quite reflective, and even the content was a bit reactionary to the previous years at that point. Obviously, that’s how songwriters write, but moving onto this album, it feels a bit more confident and bright, and in a way, it reminds me of the shift between Knife Man and Christmas Island. That might just be me, so I'd love to know your thoughts – how do you view the album in terms of its sound and content?

SB: I think you're probably on the money with comparing this one to the Knife Man and Christmas Island shift. Because, yeah,  Good Luck Everybody in itself was a reaction to The Bible 2, which I thought was our best foot forward with making a rock record. So for the next record, we couldn't have possibly made a rock record.

We opted instead to do a self-recorded folk album. With, of course, a couple little rock bone throws. Like, with that song ‘Loudmouth’ for example. Or ‘Normalization Blues’, that actually is a pretty fucking traditional folk song. I was gonna say it was a folk-punk song, but not really. It's just a protest song. 

And that whole album kind of had to hit really hard on the nose because politically at the time in the US, not enough singers, I don't think, were singing about politics. So in an – admittedly – kind of a heavy-handed way, we sort of had to get on record.

Whereas this one, Disposable Everything, we decided to – since the politics had been exercised – move on to something a little bit more poetic, a little bit murkier, and a little bit harder to read. 

And to approach it with ambition. Not to say that the last record wasn't ambitious, but with this one it was like, “Alright, we're gonna try to get a label to put this one out. We're gonna spend a lot of time on it. We're gonna record it in a very nice studio. We're gonna get a great producer to come in with ideas and join us as a sixth member, sort of. And we're gonna approach it with a lot more collaboration than we did in the last one.”

Good Luck Everybody was a Sean and Ben-produced album where we had other guys beam in their parts. But this one was produced more by the whole band and by David Jerkovich.

TJ: Having a label, having it be more expansive and collaborative, did that change the process at all? I mean, it sounds different to the last record, but it still sounds like an AJJ record, so was the creative process different at all?

SB: Oh, that's good it does [sound like an AJJ record]. I don't know if we could make an album that doesn't sound like us in some way, but the process was totally different this time around [laughs]. That's something we aspire from album to album is to change.

TJ: Even recording as a five-piece (or six-piece with David J.), I’d assume the feeling of recording would be different. Because something I noticed from a sonic point of view is that everything feels more confident, but I don’t know if that’s something you guys noticed or felt as well?

SB: Definitely. Yeah, we definitely felt that. By the time we got into the studio to record, we had enough energy – a lot of nervous energy [laughs] – and a real hunger to get in and make some decisions. We were kind of in cahoots with one another in a good way. 

With Good Luck Everybody, it was Ben and I alone in a studio for a lot of the time without anyone kind of gassing us up and being like, “That was the take! That was a good take!” So all of the kind of fun little things that a producer would hear, that on the face would make a performer kind of squirm – all those little vocal cracks or imperfections – we did our best, just out of never having recorded an album by ourselves, we kind of ended up polishing a lot of those out, which I think reads as not as confident. 

TJ: You also mentioned folk and folk-punk in general before, and I notice that AJJ are still frequently categorised as folk-punk. Now, the roots are there and the vibe is still there, but everything feels like the sound has been expanded quite a lot. Songs like ‘I Thought Of You’ are a great example of that because it’s very different to what the typical folk-punk sound is. So do you still view the band as being a folk-punk band, or rather one rooted in that scene who now just does whatever the hell they want to these days?

SB: The latter, for sure. I haven't considered AJJ a folk-punk band for a very, very long time. Although, I've become a lot more comfortable embracing it and kind of talking about folk punk in more recent years. I think the prime folk-punk era was after Candy Cigarettes [And Cap Guns, 2004] and up to a little bit after People Who Can Eat People [Are The Luckiest People In The World, 2007].

TJ: You can definitely see the evolution from there on, even just in terms of songwriting, which becomes more expansive. I also noted in a press release, you said this was “in some weird way, our happiest record”, and I can see that in thematic terms of being beaten down and realising there’s hope in moving forward. With this in mind, how do you sort of feel that your songwriting has changed in the last couple of years? Is there a noted difference for you?

SB: I'd say with this album, I left myself a lot more open to ideas in the studio about how to finish songs, and became a little bit more easygoing. ‘Dissonance’ wrote itself in about an afternoon, which doesn't happen very much. 

‘Strawberry (Probably)’ was the same thing. I went in, and I wanted to have something to take home to listen to that day. So I set up a drum loop and just kind of fucked around for the afternoon and came out with a very truncated version of what you hear on the record. 

But I'd say that's a big change, or a positive development in the songwriting for this record, is that I was open to things moving faster. Not as deep in the weeds trying to perfect a masterpiece or overwork any material. I think a lot of the songs on this record are not overworked and I'm glad for that. 

TJ: On that topic as well, there’s a few songs on the record which we first heard on your Live From Quarantine performances, such as ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog 2’ or ‘Schadenfreude. Did they evolve much from the time you first wrote them? I’d assume that with more time spent playing them, you’d start to think about their construction and delivery a lot more?

SB: We did not have that problem with ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog 2’. That song, from the demo that we released during quarantine to this finished official version, structurally and even tempo-wise, it’s the same song just with cooler harmonies and better sounds.

‘Schadenfreude’, on the other hand, was ‘Schaden-fraught’ with indecisions [laughs]. Just kidding.

TJ: That’s those songwriters for you, always with the wordplay [laughs].

SB: That one took a while in the studio to kind of massage and figure out how to finish it. And come to think of it, same thing with ‘Death Machine’. ‘Death Machine’ is funny because, lyrically, it was kind of finished like in the studio. Particularly that bridge, “This ain’t no call to action. Can’t get no satisfaction. Not evеn sure what I was trying to sing”. 

‘Not evеn sure what I was trying to sing’, I'm kind of glad for that line ultimately, because it asks the question and doesn't act like it has the answers. Which is kind of a 180 from Good Luck Everybody which really wanted to have the answers.

TJ: And hey, let’s hope The Rolling Stones don’t come asking for royalties for the line “can’t get no satisfaction”, eh?

SB: [Laughs] Oh yeah, I have a long list of artists I'm afraid of if they hear my band and hear me reference their songs.

TJ: Even in the likes of ‘Strawberry (Probably)’ there’s a quick reference to They Might Be Giants’ ‘Don’t Let’s Start’, isn’t there?

SB: Oh yeah, well, that's sort of a common colloquialism that other people use too, but the first time I ever heard it was They Might Be Giants for sure. God, that's a good band. 

TJ: Also touching on the topic of evolution in both confidence and sound, we’ve also got Ben singing lead briefly on ‘In The Valley’. Now, is this the first time he’s sung lead on an AJJ song, or am I forgetting another?

SB: That's a good question, I don't know… When we play ‘Coffin Dance’ live he takes Jamie Stewart's part, and he sings lots of backup.

Since we've been playing for so long, we can sing unison really, really well. We have kind of a similar singing voice in, in some ways, but shit, I think that might have been the first time he sang lead, yeah. He sounds so sheepish when he sings “cum”, it's great. [Laughs]. He sounds straight-up embarrassed; it's beautiful. 

TJ: Obviously Ben has recorded his own stuff, both solo and as Wiccan Babysitter, but just hearing him on lead here is an example of how the band  feels like it's getting bigger and better with every opportunity. And I feel that must be something you guys would be feeling as well? 

SB: Yeah. Ideally that's what happens. I would love for us to keep getting better, at being a band, at playing together. Hopefully the songs get better too, but just being a good band is enough. 

TJ: It’s rare for bands to be around for almost two decades – and it must feel weird to think of AJJ being around for almost 20 years – and to still feel like they’re on that continual evolution as opposed to being set in their ways, accustomed to a sound.

SB: Yeah, I hate bands that stick to one sound. Well, I don't hate them, but I don't understand them at all. I just straight-up don't get why a band would go in and make the same record over and over and over and over again. It seems like a choice motivated by fear.

TJ: Before we wrap up, I do want to ask as well, it’s been a few years since y’all were here in Australia. Are there any plans for a return visit, or will we be waiting a bit longer?

SB: There's no current plans booked, but we do plan on coming to Australia in 2024 at some point. I suppose we should start planning that now. [Laughs] Australia's one of the few places that like us. [Laughs]

AJJ’s Disposable Everything is out now via Hopeless Records.