INTERVIEW: Josh Davis of SEACATS

SEACATS’ Josh Davis talks about the history of his Kelso-based band and the catharsis buried in their new epic-length single.

Anybody can start a band, but it takes a commitment to keep that band going through thick and thin. Though SEACATS started outside of Seattle’s city limits, they’ve become a local staple over the last decade-plus through their potent mixture of humor and punk bite. Their line-up has grown and shrunk drastically over those years, but at the heart of the band sits Josh Davis, who along with his brother Mike have steered the act through myriad shows, singles, albums, comedic endeavors and one (perhaps facetious) incidence of tax fraud.

The band’s history is long and storied, so I took the opportunity to sit down with Davis and chat about SEACATS old and new. They’ve got a new 10-minute single called “Battlefield 1942” that’s not quite like anything they’ve done before, so I got the scoop on where it sits in that history and whether it represents what’s next for the band.

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When did the band officially start?

2009, basically, yeah.

Was it just you?

Me and my brother. Those are the only people that are still around.

I have noticed that over the years there have been different lineups, a collective of people.

So we’re from Kelso, which is two hours south of here. Basically we have a lineup where four of us are Kelso people. There’s been like a couple phases of the band, but Keenan has been with us for maybe seven or eight years now. David, who’s from Bellevue, has been with us for maybe five or six years now. My friend Jordan’s been playing on and off with us basically since 2009. So it’s definitely been a mix of people.

How many people at most have been in the band?

We’ve done shows with eight people. It’s very fun. During the moments when you’re playing on stage together, it’s very fun. The rest of the time, it’s really difficult. So we definitely have like an expanding and contracting group right now.

SEACATS (and company) in 2018.

What were your ideas when you started? What did you wanna try and do?

It was way less thought out than it was…just wanting to start a band essentially. My brother and I – and our friend Jordan, who is still around with us – did a web show in Kelso for a year before the band. It was like a comedy thing. It felt exciting and punk to do creative stuff in Kelso, because Kelso is super conservative. It’s a logging town. I think it was maybe the main Trump county.

It was not excited about making things, other than producing lumber. So I would say we started with a chip on our shoulder. Part of what we were working through for a period of time was using comedy as armor for the first chunk of the band. That was definitely a big part of the identity of the band for the first long part of it. I mean, still to a certain extent now, but that was kind of my whole thought for a while.

I remember stumbling upon the the five year anniversary video that you did, where you look back at 2013 culture. That really got a real chuckle outta me, that was legitimately funny. So over the course of the band that humor has been intact. Do you think that’s changed at all now?

I think that the spirit it came from is pretty much still there. I think that…I guess being kind of aggressively anti- status quo, that like felt safe when we were in Kelso because it was so harsh there. There was times where we were doing a lot of performance-art things on stage and being kind of aggressive to the audience, and I have mixed feelings about it. I love doing that kind of stuff, but I also think we were maybe against the audience as opposed to bringing people in. And so that same energy of like making people feel uncomfortable is definitely there, but I feel like I put a little bit more thought now into why we’re doing it and where we’re trying to leave people with the discomfort.

It’s more purposeful?

Yeah.

Still confrontational?

Hopefully. [Laughs.] We were just working through our own personal, psychological things, and then also working through what we felt was going on around us socially.

You describe your music, currently at least, as “therapy rock.” Has that always been the case, or is that what it feels like more now?

Yeah. We’re definitely just experimenting with what can, in the quickest fashion, tell people what we’re doing right now. So that seems like a catchy thing to say. That’s going to continue to change because right now we’ve kind of been focused on a record of my songs. My brother and I both write songs in the band, and the last two singles we put out were both Mike’s music.

Did that include the new one?

No. “Same Team” and “My Shoes” were Mike’s songs. This new one is one of mine and everything is also collaborative, but the chords and lyrics are coming from one person generally and then everybody throws stuff on it. So I’m branding this moment where we’re putting out a lot of my songs that are that way as “therapy rock,” but I think that will probably change into something else when Mike starts putting out a lot of his songs.

This new song is so intensely personal, and it’s a long song. It’s kind of an epic in that it’s so historical and, again, so intensely tied up in the personal. When did you write this song?

It was actually a bit ago, it was probably four or five years ago. Part of the reason it’s taken so long to put out is just because, you know…we exist as a side project to our jobs in capitalism, and there’s just limited time to work on things. It just took a lot of man hours to put it together in the way we wanted to, production-wise. It was very important to treat every minute as if it were part of a three-minute song, to have it take different phases as it went through different parts of the song and put all our effort into all of the time that passes by. It just took a long time.

How did the song come about? Did you just come up with all those chords together or were there people that helped?

A chunk of the tunes that are gonna be on the new album were definitely conceived in a stream-of-consciousness fashion and then just iterated on. So a lot of that was written in one sitting, just stream-of-consciousness.

I was spending a lot of time practicing improvisational songwriting. There are a hundred other stream-of-consciousness songs that I did during that period that we’ll never release. That one just kind of came together with a melody that felt strong, and it made enough sense. It made pretty good sense, and then there are parts that I feel are slightly more poetic as opposed to being direct.

The way the chords change and a lot of the musical ideas are definitely more collaborative. When I wrote the song it was mostly one chord progression, and then those weird things that happened in it where I play one of my other songs, that was in there. But Keenan wrote the sections of the guitar solo and David wrote some new chords to throw under the third verse. We were honestly brainstorming, figuring out what we could do to make each verse change.

SEACATS on KEXP in 2013.

This stream-of-consciousness tactic in writing songs, is that something that’s new to you?

It was definitely new with the writing of this. It’s probably the most satisfying way to write, in that in the moment it feels the best. It’s really, really satisfying to just start and then end with something. But it’s not super sustainable. I’ll always just have that in the tool box now, and I’ll use it when I can, but it doesn’t always work. Like I said, there are many, many songs that are not as interesting as this one.

The idea of writing something in a stream of consciousness is appealing because I think for a lot of us, especially those who are prone to feeling like we need to be perfect – such a toxic mentality when songwriting – if you lean into practicing a stream-of-consciousness tact where you’re just putting chords together and putting words together and you’re not thinking about about how they sound in the moment, it just comes out. It’s almost like purifying the process, compartmentalizing things, and then editing afterwards.

I think at the time I was definitely not sure if I would ever release those songs, to try and keep at least that illusion with myself moving forward so that I’m not doing the editing you’re talking about. It’s definitely way harder to say real shit when you are thinking about showing people it.

A stream-of-consciousness about anything is already kind of difficult, but when it’s coming straight off of whatever traumas you’ve endured in the past, there’s a vulnerability there that I can imagine being tough to put out there. Was the idea of putting out a song like that scary to you?

For sure. I think that’s definitely part of why it’s taken so long to put out the song. It’s not super normal when you are a DIY small band to talk in lyrics in a way where you can tell what you’re singing about. There’s a really, really strong expectation for poetry and metaphor, which I love as well, but in the process of putting this one out we’ve asked “Can this option not even be on the table?”

Which option would that be?

The option to just say what is actually happening. And it’s not like we’re the only people that are doing that at all, but it’s scary because it feels like it’s pushing a little bit against what’s expected.

It’s also scary because I feel, very strongly, that the point of what we’re doing is trying to say things that people are scared to say about their family. I’m fairly anti-capitalist, and I think that the family is a really important arm of setting social norms and reinforcing them constantly, whether it’s sexism, racism, whatever. A lot of the time people are scared to say those things about their family.

I also think it’s important to say that I don’t think my parents – and my mom is more talked about in other songs we will be releasing – but my parents aren’t something special. The things I’m talking about are super normal and more covert forms of abuse are literally just the norm in parenting.

I used to go back and forth wondering if it was impossible not to traumatize your children. I think the stuff that you were describing in that song, just by virtue of it being in a song – a ten-minute song, no less – makes it feel more of like a “special” thing, but you’re right. Your childhood is just like everyone else’s childhood. It’s relatable. The specific details might be not because they’re yours, but almost everyone’s experienced that “covert” form of abuse, so it’s important to talk about.

I think that it is advantageous to the current setup of society to make us feel like it’s impossible to improve, that it’s impossible to parent kids better than your parents parented you. Whether you wanna refer to it as neoliberalism or capitalism, it’s this tone, that like, “This is the way things are, do not try to improve them. It’s impossible. This is just human nature.” It’s really beneficial to keep us feeling that way.

I agree that it may be impossible to remove harm from a parent-child relationship, but you can read and you can learn about what things are better as opposed to just throwing up your hands and believing that’s all there is.

That’s true. Some people have children and they either think they’re prepared but aren’t, or just don’t really care. We get into vanity projects and the like. And then some parents really do try their hardest but still don’t know. There’s no qualifier to be a parent at all. You don’t have to have a certain level of empathy or a certain level of worldliness or intelligence or anything, you know?

My parents were super young. My dad literally said what you said when I spoke to him more recently. He said, “I think parents should not be allowed to have children until they’re thirty.”

In this world, yeah, for sure.

What you said is completely true. They were trying their best, but there were societal factors making my parents turn out the way they did. The stigma around speaking about emotion or speaking about abuse, and the way their parents were…none of that can even start to be undone unless we are able to look at it with more scrutiny.

I think it’s just really easy to look at the present tense in a more negative context because there are so much negative stuff happening right now. But one of the positive aspects of the current era is that it is easier to gain perspective, because it’s easier to hear other people’s voices. Through stuff like your songs and other people’s songs, I feel like that that’s a step in the right direction, at least.

It provides an option, for sure. Us being in a rural community when we were is the only reason we were able to do what we did from our rural community. We wouldn’t be doing what we did if we weren’t able to put our dumb comedy show on the internet because there would’ve been no outlet for that in that town at all.

I feel really strongly for the people and the children in rural communities because of how isolated you are and how impossible it is to escape that echo chamber. But that is, like you said, why it’s really important to use the internet for as long as we can get real messages out through it, because the algorithm certainly is challenging that seriously.

SEACATS from 2009.