Interviews: Ninja Gun

Georgia's Ninja Gun are still riding the crest of their latest album, Restless Rubes, released earlier this year on Suburban Home Records. What's more, the band will be playing The Fest this Halloween weekend in Gainesville, Florida. In our first in a series of interviews with bands playing The Fest, Michael Dauphin chatted with Ninja Gun's Jonathan Coody.
You can click Read More for the interview.

You fellas hail from
Valdosta, Georgia.a) Where the heck
is Valdosta? b) How has the rural
environment in which you reside shaped or impacted your songwriting?a) Well, if you’re
heading South down I-75 through Georgia, it’s the last town before
you hit Florida and start heading North again. ESPN just
named us Title Town USA because we kick so much fucking ass in high
school football. Lowndes High School is ranked number two in the
nation right now amongst AAAAA high school teams. Valdosta High
School, which is the cross-town rival, is the winningest high school
team ever. My buddy Will from The Grabass Charlestons
was pissed because Gainesville was also one of the towns in the running
for Title Town, but they ultimately came up a little short of my hometown. Also, Enos from TV’s "The Dukes of Hazzard" is from Valdosta.
The guy that wrote Jingle Bells is from here too. Doc Holiday
was from here, but he finally decided that it sucked and he moved out
west to dry out. The comedian Bill Hicks is from here also.
He made a career out of hating this place.b) I was thinking about
this the other day on the lawnmower. Everyone in this band is
a product of the South. Jeffrey and I were raised in a more rural
environment than Thad and Jake, but the basic mentality is the same
all over the South. If you hate the right people, work the right
jobs (insurance, air-conditioning repair), go to the right church, and
don’t ask any questions, you can do just fine around here. If
you just fall in line and drink the sweet tea you can become a part
of "The Good Old Boy Network" and life can be really easy.
The best part about it is you don’t have to think for yourself. You just adopt the belief system of the least educated / most mal-informed
person you know and you’re set till you die. We just couldn’t
buy into that I guess. Maybe we, as writers, want to know if there’s
anybody else in our situation that feels that way. I don’t know.
I think being discontent with our immediate environment has been the
catalyst for a lot of our songs here lately. There are redeeming
qualities though. The food’s real good. I think the best writers
write what they know. When Ray Davies of The Kinks wrote their
album "Village Green Preservation Society" he was attempting to
make sense of where he came from. At the same time he was rebuking
the things he didn’t like about it while highlighting the things that
were good and reputable. He could write those great songs because
he had a firm grasp of what he was talking about. That gives you
a lot of colors to paint with when you write. I think people will
ultimately connect with a song that’s honest and not pretentious.While your music is
primarily of the pop/rock/alt-country influence, you guys tend to appeal
to punk rock crowds as well. What’s your take on that?I don’t know what Alt-country
is. If wading through hog shit all my life isn’t country then
I must be living in a parallel universe or something. That noise
on the radio isn’t country and I refuse to take a back seat to it.
When an Australian pretty boy whose last name is fucking Urban is topping
the country charts people should check their bullshit detector.
All that stuff exists to give Hummer driving football moms a boner.
It’s not art. It’s commodity. Nashville sucks.
Always has. The best stuff comes from the dirt because it’s
real and it has to struggle to exist in a sea of practicality. I think musically we’re
a mixture of whatever we’ve listened to all of our lives. It’s
really important to listen to a lot of music so you can filter it through
yourself and use it to articulate whatever moves you to write a song.
If you limit yourself by only listening to one type of music your sound
is probably going to be some homogenized bullshit like a lot of the
haircut bands that are polluting ears these days. Limiting the
scope of what you write or how you write is never a good thing.
Being easily categorized may make it easier to sell records or get laid
or whatever, but it ultimately makes for bad art.As far as the punk thing
goes, yeah we’re that too.I understand that
you work on your father’s farm. What kind of work do you do
on the farm? Considering the polar opposites here, is it difficult
to balance farming with your job as a touring musician?We got home from a two-month
tour out West about a month or so ago and the day after I got home I
was out in the middle of this huge peanut field by myself pulling pigweeds.
They mess up the combine when you harvest if you don’t pull them up.
Anyway, I’m out in the hot ass middle of the day in this field and
I started thinking about how it seems like I lead a double life or something.
I’ve never had any aspirations about farming myself. Its shitty
work and you don’t get paid for it anymore since our government decided
to deregulate and let corporations decimate small family operations.
It’s the death of that way of life and it’s sad. Security is very important
to my folks because they know what it’s like to struggle. I’m
sure it’s hard for them to grasp the idea that I want travel around
in a van playing songs I wrote in my underwear for little to no money.
I went to college and got a degree because that’s what you’re supposed
to do and it helped me prolong my youth to some extent. I’ve
had several soul crushing jobs. For the last two years I worked
for a restoration company and had to go around and talk to South Georgia
insurance adjusters about fire, water, and mold damage. There’s
only so much you can say about mold. The acquisition and preservation
of security can prevent you from doing what you know you’re supposed
to do if you’re not careful. Ultimately I decided that trading
my happiness for a 401k was not an option. Helping my dad on the
farm is good for me when I’m home. It keeps me from sitting
around the Trailer of Tears (the double-wide that Jeffrey and I occupy)
hating life. I’m writing a song about the dog days of summer
down here. It’s going to be called "Tropical Depression."The production value
on your newest album, Restless Rubes, is near immaculate and
I’d imagine you weren’t recording with a major label budget.
How were you able to achieve such a sound?There are two main reasons.
Firstly, Jeffrey’s dad owns J&J’s fried chicken in Quitman,
GA and he believed in us enough to loan us the money to make the album
we wanted to make and we’ll be forever grateful. If you’re
into fried chicken and seafood and you’re passing through Quitman,
give it a try. You won’t regret it. Secondly, we recorded
at Earthsound Recordings here in Valdosta with our buddy Lee Dyess.
He’s an old friend of ours who runs a pro-style operation. He
knows what he’s doing and we’re lucky to have him here. I think we knew what
we wanted out of these songs and we were determined not to compromise
for the sake of time. We didn’t care if it took us years. We wanted to be able to listen to those songs without cringing in 10
years. We like bedroom style recordings too, but we wanted this
album to be really textured because that’s the type of production
we thought these particular songs needed.The lyrical content
on Restless Rubes tends to focus on dealing with socio-political
ideals of The South. Was there a conscious effort to stick to
this theme?I don’t think there
was a conscious effort, but now looking at the album as a whole I can
see that theme in most of the songs. I guess that was just what
was driving me to write at the time. The South is a mixture of
the extremely beautiful and the staggeringly profane. I feel like
we have a unique perspective because of where we’re from. Maybe
we just wanted people from different walks of life to understand us
a little more and not buy into southern clichés. Things aren’t
as cut and dry around here as people would have you believe. There’s
so much more to write about than whiskey. Writing a song about
a specific idea is like taking a highlighting pen and marking that something
that exists in your environment because you feel it’s worthy of note.
Hopefully the listener can make some sense of it and find some value
in it.You guys tour in a
"First United Methodist Church" van. Can you explain the story
behind acquiring said van?Well, one of the perks
of being from here is the multitude of church vans available for purchase.
Church vans make really good tour vans for two reasons:1) They generally
aren’t used that much and they’re well taken care of. They’re
kind of like fleet vehicles in that churches get rid of them periodically
to buy newer ones and if you look you can probably get a good deal. 2) They are the best
camouflage ever for a bunch of dirt bag rockers riding around pillaging
town after town. Never been pulled over. We came into possession
of ours about two years ago. I went through the phone book and
left messages on tons of church answering machines asking about vans.
One called me back and we ended up getting a good deal. I might
have told the guy I was a youth group leader, which isn’t entirely
untrue -- I am the oldest guy in the band. One time we played at
a punk bar in Athens, GA called Repent and we got some funny looks when
we rolled up in there like a bunch of Methodists.Restless Rubes
is your first album with Virgil and Suburban Home. How did that
relationship come about and how has the response of the album been thus
far?We were about halfway
through the recording process and I sent Virgil some roughs. He
wrote me back and told me he liked the songs a lot and asked what we
were looking for in a label. I told him that we just wanted someone
reputable that genuinely liked our songs to put it out. Virgil and everyone involved
with Suburban Home have been so good to us. When we were out in
Denver a couple of months ago on tour we got to meet everyone at the
label and we got to play with a lot of the bands on the label.
They’re the nicest bunch of people you’ll ever meet and we had a
really fun time with them. We’re about to fly out there for
Suburban Home’s 13th anniversary shows/parties. We’re really
looking forward to that.