Then the idea for Sooper came about because my friend Glenn (Curran)—he was in a band called Long Face and he wanted to start doing solo music, and he hit me up and was like, “I wanted some help with drumming and coming up with some vocal melodies.” He had all of these lyrics and I was like, “Yeah, I’ll help you!” Then he was like, “I’ll pay you!” and I was like, “Go ahead! Even better! Let’s go!” So he was paying me to do sessions with him and work on these songs. We kind of just hit it off and it was a lot of fun working together. The project was called Man Without a Head and it was his first solo album. But just one day while we were hanging and writing, we just talked about all of the musicians and cool people we know and how much we thought other people needed to hear their music. There are a lot of people who I think are super legendary and talented. He brought up this idea, and I was just like, “Bro, I’ve been there… I’ve been there twice! I can’t afford to have another failure.” Honestly, that was how I was feeling. How exactly did Swerp end? Swerp ended very poorly. It was a handful of things, that
were mostly my fault. Matt, who was the person who started it, rented a van for me for this tour with my band Nervous Passenger and this band from the UK called Johnny Foreigner. We were driving straight to New York and I crashed it immediately. I didn’t have any money, so he ended up paying for it. The people who we rented it from were super pissed. I was like, “I’ll pay you back!” and he was like, “How will you pay me back? You have no money.” I was like “Some day I’ll be able to!” and he was like, “No.” It was not a great situation. So that was the first big thing. Then the second thing was also a car problem. We had a tour coming up for this band Water House that I was playing in and this band My Dad that I was also playing in. We bought this shitty van that we thought would work, and it broke down like half way through the tour. We got stuck in New Jersey, but luckily our bass player’s mom lived in New Jersey so we ended up crashing at her house. We were just stuck there for days just trying to figure out how we were going to fix this car. It ended up being a few grand that our friend’s dad helped pay, But Matt, the label owner, was texting all of us being like, “So what’s the deal? What’s going on?” and we were all just like, “We should just all text him the same thing at
We ended up starting Sooper because Glenn was so sure that this was the right idea. It had been a couple years since Swerp had ended. He was so sure and he was like, “I feel like we could do this!”