In 1976, Mort Garson released the album “Mother Earth’s Plantasia,” a ten-track, thirty-minute album full of relaxing ambient songs meant exclusively for plants to listen to.
Columbus and Chicago-based band A-Go-Go might not have intended originally to make an album of a similar sort – for ears other than humans – but they might have stumbled into it with the newest album, “Today, Today” released via Super Sport Records on February 7th.
When I asked the group about how they’d describe the album, they said, “We’re trying to make dogs rock,” and you could tell from the album cover alone that this fits. Designed by the partner of guitarist/vocalist Henry Schuellerman, it actually features the couple’s dog, Sergeant, who they adopted over the past summer.
Last week, I had the benefit of meeting “Sarge” and talking with the group (minus guitarist Case Koerner, who was unable to attend) over the phone, where we discussed touring alongside the record’s release, maturing in sound while maturing as young adults, and the making of “Today, Today.”
Both before the release and after, A-Go-Go hasn’t stopped, well, going. From November to late February, the group hit a roundabout Midwest tour with stops in Athens, Cincinnati, Detroit, Kalamazoo, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, all within a drive of Columbus and easy to hit for weekend shows. “It's pretty doable that way, still have a date, still able to work, and you have a whole week to rest up, so it's been solid,” Schuellerman says.
“Touring's been pretty good lately, the last handful of shows we've gotten have been pretty awesome. We've had some great bands that we've connected with, and we've kind of grown alongside them in parallel, so it's pretty cool to play with them more and kind of see them grow up, in a sense, with us,” A-Go-Go’s drummer and “noisemaker in the back” Jack Smithberger chimes in.
Bassist/vocalist Niko Francis remarks, “We were talking to our friend Connor Lynch in Detroit like a month ago, and we were kind of reflecting on how we were like, ‘Oh, we're a lot better this year than we were last year.’”
Though he was describing the touring, this observation fits just as well with the new sound – If you listen to “Today, Today,” you might be able to hear this change when comparing it to earlier works. Part of this maturity in sound is thanks to the group’s tagging of some heavy hitters for production.
Colin Croom, founding member of the Chicago indie rock group Twin Peaks and collaborator with Moose favorite Waxahatchee, helped out with the production of the record. So did Jesse Henry of the band CAAMP, but that’s no surprise – his bandmate Evan Westfall founded Super Sport Records along with Ali Bell. Another Colin assisted mightily: Colin Miller, member of MJ Lenderman’s touring group “And the Wind” and solo artist in his own right, mastered the record.
“I think working with those guys – people that we've heard their names a lot or looked up to a lot – working with them you realize they're also just people, and they're also just working musicians. It was cool, it was exciting to be able to be involved in the creative process with those people when you look up to the products that they've made in the past,” Schuellerman praises.
“It was very easy just to trust them, to guide you along…[Colin] Croom would tell me to throw away a cymbal and put a new one on, and I'm like, ‘Yes sir.’ He knew much better than us, and we knew that we could trust him with that too,” Smithberger adds.
That maturity of sound comes alongside the maturity that A-Go-Go is going through, as so many others in the college scene are. “I think with the world being so crazy as it is right now, and all of us kind of coming to age into our young adulthood, we're all just kind of grappling with very similar questions in our lives and leaning on each other a lot through all of those things. I feel like this record is kind of a product of that experience,” Francis says.
You can hear it in the record, too. Many tracks hit on folks going through it, grappling with changing times and growing through them. “Room Full of Strangers” hits on the constant “go” of youth through partying (So as you rise / Go dry your eyes / Because tonight, a room full of strangers); “Comedown” focuses on growing through the passage of time (A year has up and left now / Stronger yes you are); “Burnt Sky” hits on the same note (And you told me, you'd leave as fast as you came / Not to worry, some things they can't stay the same; If to move fast, is to move alone / I will stay here and move slow).
Immediately upon first listen, that last line stood out to me as the big theme of the record – I questioned Francis about where that line came from and the songwriting process that the group took working on the album.
“I wrote ‘Burnt Sky’ around the time of graduating college. But whenever sitting in my college graduation in 2023, I was listening to the speaker, and they said a quote along the lines of, ‘You can move fast if you go by yourself, but the real beauty in life is to move slow and really cherish the moments with the people around you.’ That was kind of something that really stuck with me because whenever you graduate college, there's so many people that move away and go on to other things. I knew in my heart that wasn't what I wanted to do at that time, and that line really was almost like a mantra throughout the rest of that year. That was a very special thing to hear for my little ears.”
Giving credit where credit’s due, he adds that the quote is “an African proverb, and the commencement speaker who shared that proverb was Bryan Stevenson, who is a very acclaimed and notable civil rights lawyer.”
On the group’s songwriting as a whole, Schuellerman notes, “We write basically the bones and the lyrics independently and then bring them to the band so we kind of have different voices going on. For me, I'll write about a character, maybe someone I know, [maybe] it's just like a person I make up that kind of represents a certain way I feel or something. Sometimes I'll write about a character, but then that person is also part of the creator in that fictional character you make up or interject my perspective into certain things.”
One of those “real” characters that I loved from the record is the titular Bobby from the second-to-last track “Bobby’s Song,” a grand rock-opera-esque track that has “probably 57 layers or something.” Schuellerman wrote that one himself, after befriending a neighbor in the dorms back at the Ohio State University.
“[Bobby] used to be my neighbor in the dorms, and he was just a riot. He laughs really loud, he sounds like Seth Rogen, he's like 7 feet tall, he has an old red truck, and he ended up being our neighbor when we moved out of the dorms too, which was a coincidence. It [started as] just this stupid song I made when we were in the dorms, but when we were working on the album, I was like, ‘We should actually make this a real song,’ which became instrumentally the most absurd thing. We had a bunch of our lady friends come sing backup vocals and a bunch of horns. I just thought it would be funny to make this song that's not super serious and just make it super grand.”
If you couldn’t tell, the band has a knack for writing about these characters and just kind of going from there. It’s one of the special things about this record that we at the station love so much – It’s some of the most fun and upbeat sounds, layered in with beautiful themes about silly folks. This style reminds us of indie rockstar MJ Lenderman, who’s been quoted talking about his similar approach with characters in his songwriting.
“I think one thing that's become kind of important to me in songwriting is humor and things that are funny and sarcasm. A lot of songwriters have a really good sense of sarcasm and saying stuff right on the nose, and I think that that kind of carries through in ‘Bobby’ and some of the other ones that I write about some sort of character – I don't know, things that are kind of funny,” Schuellerman continues.
This songwriting doesn’t just come from contemporaries, though. Schuellerman gave credit to shows like “The Sopranos” and “Bojack Horseman” as inspiration for some of his songwriting.
“I got really into Sopranos, which some people think that it's just a mob show, but it is damn artistic. It's a masterpiece. The way they interact with each other, I think, there's probably been a shi- I don't know if I'm supposed to swear,” he laughs.
“There's probably been a lot of songs kind of written about that sort of stuff, and I have my own theories about that. I also really love Bojack Horseman – I don't know if you've seen that show – the writing on that is just genius.”
As touched on throughout the record, there are a lot of unknowns that come with moving on in life. Francis, as mentioned, graduated last year, and the rest of the four piece will graduate at the end of the spring semester. Through this change, it’ll be interesting to see what the band moves towards in the future – I asked the group what success would look like for them in the near future, as they start towards this new era.
“I think if we could put on, like, an absolute killer hometown show and have a few records made, and enough people listen to it in, like, five years, I would be so content. That's all I really need” Smithberger replies.
Francis chimes in, “I spend every day thinking about music non-stop…I don't really care if we're famous or not, but being able to do music most of the time – if not all of the time – I think would be really cool. But the economics, that's the hard part.”
“I recently heard a funny joke from a band called ‘Doc Robinson’ out of Columbus, they're a bit older. One of the guys told me, it easily took him 10 or 15 years of playing music to realize that, all bands are just glorified t-shirt salesmen. That's how you make the rent,” Smithberger laughs.
“As they mentioned, the economics of it all – very difficult to make that work out. So, I think I'd just be happy having more time to stay home and write and work on music together, together and have a space to be able to do that. I'd be content with that,” Schuellerman concludes.
Listening back to the record almost a month after its release, I can’t help but think of the line from the 1986 John Hughes movie “Ferris Bueller,” where Ferris tells the audience that “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” “Today, Today” echoes that sentiment beautifully, and I think it makes it one of the most important records any high school, college, or post-grad student could listen to.
On Instagram, the band captioned their post-release post with the description of the album being “marked by friendship, collaboration, and, finding comfort in the love of our community living in the present.” This record serves as a perfect testament to that – take it as easy as a dog with its head sticking out of a car window.
Photo sourced from @a.go.go.band via Instagram, November 3rd, 2024.