This past week, I had the pleasure of sitting down virtually with Graham Huff, frontman and songwriter for the Atlanta-based emo band Rocket Surgeon. I’ve known Graham for a long time, but as we’ve both recently launched our respective music endeavors (Rocket Surgeon’s debut album just dropped YESTERDAY), it seems like the right time to talk shop with the cameras rolling. Check out Graham’s thoughts on everything from ProTools to pant design below. (Interview has been edited for length.)
LB: Welcome to Off Pitch! Give us some background on yourself and how Rocket Surgeon came to be.
GH: My name’s Graham, I am 23 years of age and for much of that I have been playing music of various types. I think my main intro to music music was Guitar Hero 3. Which is the same for a lot of people, interestingly. So that kind of set the framework for the kind of stuff that I listen to. And right now, that’s really loud emo. That’s what Rocket Surgeon is.
Rocket Surgeon is all my songs and arrangements, and I’ve been looking for an outlet for that for a long time. As you, Lyle, probably know, my first official album came out like six years ago when I had no idea how to produce music or anything. It was pretty much the same deal as Flash Fiction but it… sucks in retrospect. The writing is pretty good, but when I go back and look at it, all the production… I didn’t even have ProTools. It was terrible. But through the years I’ve practiced and worked a lot at my craft, met a lot of cool people.
A little over two years ago I started rehearsing with Arthur, our drummer. And we just sort of became friends and started playing together. I was bringing these songs to him that I’d written and he really liked them, so we decided to try to get some people together. We’ve been through several different lineup changes, and none of them really stuck until a year ago when Arthur moved to Nashville and by coincidence moved in with one of my other friends from college, Christi, who’s an amazing guitarist. He also moved in with one of my old college friends who was normally a guitarist, and that’s Campbell who plays bass for us. So it was obvious, since the three of them were living in the same house, for us to be a band. And that was initially a weird thing that I had to get over - I didn’t have to get over, but like it seems weird now looking back that everybody who was perfect for this band just happened to live in the same house.
So we started rehearsing. Last year we’d done some work on a couple songs in Boston before we moved. And so we were working on those songs as well as some that I was writing last summer. And we geared up, practiced a bunch, and started playing some shows in Nashville. Then we kinda holed up over the winter and just chilled in my home studio, tried to make this album happen, and I spent a good two, three months just tracking it by myself at home.
LB: And so you played most of the instruments, if not all of them? There were a couple drum tracks that you didn’t?
GH: So I don’t play drums. Well I can, but Arthur is way, way better at them than me. Arthur played the drums and I recorded everything else except for one guitar line on “Buckhead Dads” that Christi did, and Christi also has background vocals on “Clarence, the Lake Monster.” But it’s kind of just circumstance that it ended up like that, just me being in Atlanta and everybody else being in Nashville. I think if I had been in Nashville, we would’ve done this with the entire band. Cuz they are much better at their instruments than me.
LB: Where did the name Rocket Surgeon come from?
GH: I think someone was flaming me on the internet and they were like “it’s not rocket surgery idiot!” and I was like, oh, that’s kinda cool.
LB: That’s funny. So I don’t know much about the Atlanta emo scene, but I wasn’t aware there was a big Atlanta emo scene. Can you speak to that or any venues or labels down there?
GH: So it’s mostly DIY. I don’t know how much of a label presence there is down here. My general rule of thumb is: the shittier a city is, the better its hardcore scene. So like, Boston, Philadelphia, all of Norway, have amazing hardcore scenes. Atlanta is like, up there. Atlanta is a pretty cool city, and so the hardcore scene is cool but it’s also like vibrant and creative, and so that allows a lot of room for your Midwest/Illinois stuff to blend with the East coast hardcore. And so it’s this really interesting middle ground. There are some crazy hardcore bands and there are some kind of soft emo bands, and they totally coexist. They play shows together and everybody’s friends.
The bands I know the best are somehow affiliated with my boy Cory Bautista. He’s an engineer who recorded the drums for two of the tracks, “Buckhead Dads'' and “Crocodiles.” I’ve become friends with him because I’m doing the engineer thing too. And so I’ve just been talking to him and listening to his bands. He does everything from crazy hardcore like Callas Daoboys, an Atlanta hardcore band that’s like hilarious but also super sick, to this band called Stay Here, which is a lot closer to Rocket Surgeon. That kind of emo stuff.
LB: What about when you go up to Nashville?
GH: Nashville is a little different cuz the population is obviously way smaller so there isn’t as much of that kind of emo scene. And the other thing is it’s a musician city, it’s an artist city, and you have to do a lot to stand out. If you’re in a city where everyone’s playing a gig two, three times a week, you gotta do something to be really different. But I think Rocket Surgeon IS really different from a lot of Nashville bands because there aren’t a lot of people in Nashville doing our kind of loud emo. So yeah, it’s interesting. When we play shows in Nashville, it’s a lot of the time with bands that are further toward the country/rock side of things.
LB: One of the songs on your record, “Crocodiles,” is about your experience choosing the independent career path as a musician. What made you want to go that route?
GH: My number one reason is just that I’ve never felt comfortable in an environment with a lot of the same people. I went to music college, and so everyone that I was friends with was a musician. Everyone was doing the same thing, trying to make a name for themselves in the same way. And even if you’re in a band… you’re in a band with four people and they all have their own solo projects and they all have different stuff that they’re committed to, but they’re all looking towards the same goal. But if you get outside of that kind of bubble, you’re interacting with people who are trying to make it in different ways. So you’re not just playing to musicians, you’re not just playing with musicians, you’re playing with artists in a different vein.
My main motivator is that I didn’t want to have to compete with everyone who’s like… trying way harder than me. Cuz I wanted to be able to do the stuff that I wanted to do, which is, y’know, build pedals sometimes, and make music in my basement, and not be on social media all the time, and hang out with my girlfriend. So yeah.
LB: So be honest, have you written any coronavirus-themed songs?
GH: I have to keep myself from writing coronavirus-themed songs. I am spending a lot of time writing music, or at least thinking about it, but nothing has been good so far. I want to write about it, but it’s already become a cliche topic. It’s already something that’s affected literally everyone in a huge way. But I do think it’s a really rich subject. Something to explore, even if not in a direct way. More of a tangential way. There’s a lot of stuff to write about that’s not necessarily, like, “I’m sick, da-na-na-na-na” or “I can’t go outside, da-na-na-na-na.”
LB: Both solid hooks right there.
GH: Thank you. Can we get the rights to that?
LB: Sure, man.
GH: Thank you. But no, there’s a lot of in-depth things you can write about that we’re all going through right now, and so I think when I do eventually start processing this in a songwriting form, I’ll be looking for ways to hone in on little things that I’ve been thinking about.
LB: You mentioned that your first album six years ago compared to your current album, you’re more well-equipped, more knowledgeable now. You have ProTools now, which I’m sure is great. So what’s that been like, learning to record your own music?
GH: Well, it’s more experience than anything. I think going to music school was definitely a way of accelerating… fitting multiple years of recording experience into my college years. But basically, it’s just little things like mic placement and just learning how to do stuff. It’s like any other skill, the more you practice it the better you get at it.
It’s always been really important to me to be able to record my own music. It’s not that I’m uncomfortable letting someone else work on it, it’s that I’m uncomfortable not knowing how to do it. If I know how to do something, and I trust someone else to do it for me, then that is super easy peasy. No problems with that. If it’s something that I have no idea how to do, then I start to get a little nervous cuz I don’t know if someone else is doing a good job or not. And so I have always felt way more comfortable learning how to do something and then just doing it myself. That comes down to like building guitar pedals, and buying vintage synthesizers and fixing them up.
Even, I am literally considering… I can’t find any shorts that are good for me that are durable but lightweight, waterproof, have draining pockets with velcro in the back for your wallet, short enough but tall for a guy like me. The right size. An elastic waistband. There are no shorts on the market that tick all those boxes. And if there are, they’re like 75 bucks. So I’m like, fuck that, I’m just gonna buy a sewing machine, and some fabric, and make ‘em for ten dollars. And so that is the exact thought process that translates to how I make music or how I make guitar pedals or anything.
LB: There you go. The shorts approach.
GH: I haven’t actually made any shorts yet. We’ll see how it goes.
LB: You have time. So this is kind of a stupid question now, because of coronavirus, but once things get back to normal, what’s the plan for touring the album, or taking it out?
GH: What we were thinking about earlier was: just play as many shows as possible around Atlanta and Nashville, and then once the summer starts coming around, doing short day trips to different towns. So we were thinking like, just wherever we can get gigs, like Jacksonville, Durham, DC, maybe Chicago if we can get all the way up there, Louisville, Memphis and stuff. We were never planning on touring, because we still have day jobs. But little weekend trips. And I think that’s still our plan.
The only thing that’s changed is how that centers around the album. So obviously the album is coming out on Friday (yesterday at the time of publishing), whether we like it or not. And we can’t just put everything on hold and be inactive for eight months. So what we’re going to try to do is just have as big of an online presence as we can, putting these songs out and getting them to people. And then once this starts to lighten up, and we can play shows again, we’re going to be one of the bajillion bands that’s gonna want to be doing that. So I don’t think it’ll be hard for us to find stuff.
Thanks again to Graham for sitting down with me! Hopefully we can get together face-to-face sometime soon. Check out Rocket Surgeon’s brand new album Flash Fiction below.