interview: The Homeless Gospel Choir
words: aaron eisenreich
Martyna Wisniewska
Derek Zanetti of The Homeless Gospel Choir isn’t letting a pandemic slow him down. Since the start of the year, he’s been releasing tracks for his upcoming record, This Land Is Your Landfill, the first with a full band backing his punk rock troubadour act. Most recently, the band put out a video for “Art Punk,” a great song with a chorus eerily appropriate for these times. I emailed Derek some questions while cooped up in quarantine about his fantastic new record and what “punk” looks like in 2020. Check out the answers below and, if you are so inclined, head on over to A-F Records to preorder This Land is Your Landfill (out on April 24).
To start, how are you holding up under the current quarantine conditions? Any tips for our readers on how to stay sane?
It's strange for sure. This is the first time anything like this has ever happened before. I think people are trying their best, and I think in times of crisis people choose to be kind, so that’s wonderful to witness and to participate in. Me? I never stop going. I’m just as busy now under quarantine then I would be without. My resources are just much more limited being that everything is closed. But my creative juices are flowing and I’m thinking of fun and exciting ways to beat the boredom. I think that everybody should play in a punk band, if you ever wanted to start writing music for your next punk band now is a great time.
Could you describe your music for those who may be unfamiliar? And talk a bit about what it means to be a quote unquote punk musician in 2020?
I wanted to try and write a soundtrack to how it would feel if you were in a doctor's office waiting room on the 4th of July in Dallas, Texas with no AC and no wifi service. It’s a loud punk rock record about how every day feels like the end of the world and you’re more unsure today than you were yesterday. And also how the internet warps our perceptions of ourselves through comparison culture.
Punk is whatever you want it to be. Any type of music that speaks out against power. A tambourine and a penny whistle could be more punk than anything with a spiked jacket and hairdo, if ya know what I mean. Punk raises awareness towards issues that are important to the artist and the world they live in. To choose to have empathy and choose to engage with the community of people interested in leaving this world better than how they found it—that’s punk, that's the goods.
I’ve been loving your new album, This Land Is Your Landfill. Were there any particular ideas or themes that inspired you while writing the album?
So many different things. Most of the time in my mind I feel like I’m surfing through an ocean of rubbish, narrowly escaping one giant disaster after another. I have become increasingly worried about the amount of single use plastic that I was touching, that worry turned into paranoia which manifested into anxiety that I felt powerless to overcome. So I wrote songs about it and that kinda helped. I was also listening to so many of my friends speak about loneliness and isolation in a new way that I had never heard before. Everyone is working overtime to look calm, cool, and collected on the Internet but in real life they're starving for human connection and acceptance. More and more I felt like life was reverting to high school lunch table cool guy hour and I wanted to sing about that too.
All that and we listened to The Pixies a lot.
You recently released a video for the song “Art Punk,” how did the concept and video come together?
I went to Harrisburg to work with Zach Moser, Clark Stefanic, and Matt Miller who plays guitar in THGC. We wanted to make a music video using limited resources and shoot it in an afternoon. I really have to give all of the credit to the film makers. It was their idea and their concepts and their art direction.
“Blind Faith” deals with religion, which you’ve addressed before in your music. Could you talk a bit about your relationship with religion over the years and how you view it now?
Sure, I was raised in a very conservative evangelical right wing church as a child. That type of upbringing and that type of education changes the way your mind works. When you introduce routine fear into the mind of a child it's very easy to control the way that that child makes decisions. All my life I was deathly afraid of sin, and hell, and the devil. It was a reoccurring tool that was used as a fear technique to manipulate my decision making process. And even now as a 36-year-old grown-up adult who doesn’t believe in God or the devil or heaven or hell, I still have this nagging little voice in the back of my head that has teeth and claws. It's always reminding me to be afraid. Things like that are hard to shake, it changes the way that you make a decision when fear is at the forefront of your mind. So naturally these themes and topics are present in a lot of my songwriting.
Now in my life I’m just at peace with doing my best, trying hard to be kind and being good to my neighbor—and forgiving myself and forgiving my parents. I think religion is roundly a bad thing, but that's only because I had a bad experience. No Judgement either way, just be cool about it.
This is your first record with a full band behind you and you explore a lot of different sounds on it. Was there anything you were especially excited to try with a full band?
I've never really played with effects pedals or noise and feedback. I just wanted to be loud and fast and good! I'm lucky to have such amazing players in my band (Maura Weaver, Megan Schroer, Craig Luckman, Matt Miller). They make it so easy for me.
What newer bands are you digging right now?
Gouge Away, Grumpster, Dream Nails, Drew Thompson Foundation, Medium Ugly, Taking Meds, Ramona, Teenage Halloween, Control Top.
Finally, how do you want people to feel when they hear This Land is Your Landfill?
Like you’re at a party with all of your friends, and you feel safe and secure, and then you get a text message that says “the world is going to end." And then you return to the party with all of your friends still feeling safe and secure.