The Home Team, a Seattle based quartet made up of Brian Butcher (vocals), John Baran (guitar), Ryne Olson (bass), and Daniel Matson (drums) is widely known in the scene for their genre bending and constantly catchy music – appropriately coined as “heavy pop”. After a hugely successful album cycle with Slow Bloom full of headlining tours and supporting legacy acts such as The Used and Senses Fail, The Home Team have released the first single, “Loud”, from their highly anticipated upcoming album. We had the opportunity to sit down with singer Brian Butcher and drummer Daniel Matson to discuss the release of “Loud” as well as what they have been up to recently!
Let’s start with “Loud”! Can you talk about the writing and recording process?
Brian Butcher: It’s one of my favorite stories because it was one of the songs we wrote with Skylar and Tyler Accord. If you don’t know who they are, Ty is an award-winning producer – he has worked with tons of amazing artists – and Sky is the bassist of a band that is soon to break up, Issues, and is also the bassist of Twenty One Pilots. So needless to say, they have a huge repertoire and they are also dear friends of ours and we love writing with them. This was one song though, that kind of came pretty late in the process. By the end of our trip down to LA to write a bunch of music, I was a little tired, burnt, and this song came at the very end. The chorus is not super changed- the verse ended up changing totally- but the chorus that they had whipped up, because I wasn’t there that day, they were all like, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think we really like this very much.” And I heard it and I was like, “you guys are insane.” I think that at the time they were just so exhausted that it was one of those things that they were like “I don’t have the energy to even know how to feel about this.” But it inspired me immediately and I was “we gotta use this. We gotta finish this song. We gotta figure out what we want to do with this.” Lo and behold, it is one of our favorite songs that we have. And it was the first single to be released.
Why’d you guys choose it as the first single?
Daniel Matson: So we had a big debate between the first and second songs that we were releasing. When we originally wrote the instrumentals, we were all pretty much in agreement that what is going to be the second single should be the first one. The second single is called “Brag” and when we wrote that song we all knew it was lightning in a bottle and everyone was just firing on all cylinders- how many more old people terms can I come up with to talk about this? We all knew that it was a banger for us and it felt like this is the single we needed to write. Then we kind of had some debates with the people over at Thriller as we were talking about which song to release. We all “Brag” is the first one for sure. That’s the heater. And then the label had heard “Loud” and they were like “Hold on a second. You guys have something here. This song could be it.” We still went back and forth for a while and got into some pretty heated debates.
Brian Butcher: Honestly, it literally came down to a conversation within our camp. We, towards the end, got the power to say which one we wanted to come out first. And I think literally all of us were like, “I don’t care. Let’s just drop one.” The two songs are both great. I love them both. They’re different though. So it is a different approach, but realistically we were like it doesn’t matter which way we go. They have their pros and they have their cons and it doesn’t really matter. Let’s just drop something.
Daniel Matson: Oh, and there was another important part to this that I just remembered. When we were planning our set for the Don Broco tour in October, the label had said “Loud” was the first single so we said “okay, let’s play it live.” And then, a little bit more behind the scenes info, for our UK tour that we just did with The Used, we went to the label and said, “Hey, can we have a little bit of money for tour support, because we are going to lose money on this tour because it’s expensive.” They said, “Well, you haven’t actually released any music with us. All you’ve done is spend money. So we needed to put something out first.” So we fast tracked the release of “Loud”.
Daniel Matson: It wasn’t just for money. It was also to have the leverage of going on tour with The Used and having a new song that we can push to excite people.
Daniel Matson: With the timing of the Don Broco tour, then the tour with The Used, and then the holidays right afterwards, we knew in early October that if we don’t schedule music video shoots like in between the two tours, it’s not going to happen until like February. We also knew Brian would have these shows coming up with Issues. So we were like “we have to do this right now” and then fast tracked everything. The guy we worked with to shoot the videos was super fast and got us everything within a couple days.
Things have been extremely fast paced for you all, especially this year. How did that busy schedule influence the songs for this album? How did you manage burn out when trying to write the record?
Brian Butcher: It made the process longer for sure. I tried to write as much as I could on tour. It was easier on the Senses Fail run because that was way less demanding of a tour. With our headliner, we were doing VIP and setting up lights for the first time in our career. That was a really demanding tour in general and we were all exhausted. And that was right after the trip we took down to LA. We did like five weeks in February and the beginning of March down there and that’s when we wrote the bulk of the instrumentals. But the way that I write- I tried writing with co-writers and people who specialize in vocals. I mean I wrote with a few people who are all really good at what they do so it definitely wasn’t any fault of theirs, but I just didn’t like it. I just didn’t like writing with other people from the get-go. I’m totally down to write with other people if I have a chance to put down my ideas first, but writing with somebody else kind of just started to feel like somebody else’s idea. If you want The Home Team, if you want Brian, I should probably put something down first. These guys are all insane at what they do so they’re always quicker to put down an idea. And I’m like, “that’s a good idea. We should try it” and then by the end of the song, I don’t feel like I have written a song. So long story short, I asked everybody involved, including the label, “Can I take this stuff home? Can I please just sit with it for a while? Once I have a chance to put some vocals down, let’s bring it back to these guys and then see what they think.” But then touring happened, two tours back to back. Then by the time we came home from those two tours, we were going to be recording all this stuff for real. By that point I only had half the album written. I just wasn’t ready. I basically just had to tell everybody like, “Listen, if I don’t give myself the space and time to do this right, it’s going to suck.” I sat down and I had a good month to like really spend some time on it and then lo and behold, it kicks ass.
Daniel Matson: A piece that’s important to the timeline is that when we signed to Thriller, we explained like this is our process and this is what we think we need to do in order to deliver the next album. But also because we’re stepping into a bigger label with a very successful track record we want to give their method a shot and do things the way that they’ve seen success. Ultimately the two methods just clashed and did not really work. The part of the timeline that’s important is that that writing trip in LA, they expected us to leave with most of the album finished and recorded because a lot of the bands that they work with and a lot of those producers that we went to, like you go there, you sit in a room, you write the song, and then you leave with it finished and recorded. That is just not how we operate at all. For some bands, that has produced great music. There’s some friends of ours from Seattle called Designer Disguise. They did three songs with one of the producers and I think it’s three of the best songs that they ever put out. It worked really well for them. But for us, it just did not work. So by the time we had come home from those tours and we’re planning to record for real, we were already like four months behind the timeline the label wanted. So it was a little bit of a learning curve for us trying to fit our method into the big label machine. And what we have realized at the end of this is was fuck everyone else. We need to just do it our way cause it works out real good.
Brian Butcher: Every time we ever went back and said, “Hey, can I just have some time to do this our way?” it always yields something that everyone involved agrees is way better. It’s just how we go. It’s just how it works.
“Loud” is the first thing you put out with Thriller, right? How’s that going so far? You did mention some clashing with them but they do seem to have a good rhythm going with their artists. Do you feel like it’s working with the reception of “Loud”?
Brian Butcher: Yes, absolutely. To speak on Thriller specifically, while the methods clashed, they’ve been very understanding and cool. There have been times where we’re frustrated at one another, but I can’t think of a business engagement that doesn’t happen. And overall though, our relationship with them is great. And we’re really excited to have the resources that they’ve allotted us. It has helped! Do not get me wrong, we are happy that this is the route that we’ve taken because now we also know the things that we don’t want to do and things like that work.
“Loud” has been really fantastic and I’m a little skeptical. I love that song. It’s like one of my favorite songs from the album. But, the thing is, my tastes don’t always align with our fans’ tastes, if that makes sense. I don’t listen to a lot of rock music anymore. It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s just that I’ve listened to it for so long and I’m so picky about it that there’s only so many rock bands now that excite me, but there’s so many other genres that do excite me now. “Loud” is not the rock song. Like it’s got guitars and it’s got heavy parts and things, but overall, it feels way more like a pop song in my opinion. So, releasing that first, I was kind of nervous, like really nervous because I really thought people were just going to be like, “Oh, they signed to a big label and now they’re selling out.” That has so not been the case. It is doing super freaking well and I’m really grateful because it does mean that along the process of our evolution and growth, it feels like people are sticking with us and we’re not alienating anybody yet.
Daniel Matson: Even with Slow Bloom, our last record, I feel like we didn’t get nearly as much “what happened to the pop punk band?” or “where did the rock sound go?” as I expected. There were a very small number of comments of people saying that. So far with “Loud”, there’s almost none. It’s kind of shocking. It almost feels like someone’s out there hiding negative comments from us or something, because we read through everything and aside from obvious boomers who think anything besides Guns & Roses sucks, everyone is digging it which is very sick.
One thing that it’s a little counterintuitive, but I’m very glad about, is that our first record did not do that well. I feel like a trap that a lot of bands who have taken a similar trajectory as us fall into is that their early material does really well and then they get kind of type-casted as a pop punk band or as a metalcore band. And then when they transition away, it’s really hard to make a stark genre change and have it work. I mean, the most obvious example is like Bring Me The Horizon- their most successful stuff is about as different from the early stuff as you can get. But there’s tons of bands that have transitioned away from screaming music into singing music and people just don’t seem to care. I feel like because our more pop punk album didn’t do that well, we didn’t have a huge fan base to disappoint when we changed genres. So, I’m kind of glad it didn’t work out.
Brian Butcher: We could do whatever we wanted because nobody cared!
Daniel Matson: Honestly, that was kind of our mindset when we did our second album (Slow Bloom). We were like “well, the first thing didn’t work so who gives a shit? Let’s do whatever we want!” We kind of wrote what we thought people would like and then Slow Bloom was more so music we wanted to make. And now we’re even more confident. We just trust our taste and our vision and we’ll find the people who dig it.
I think that people are going to be more willing to try new things if they already trust that you’re loving it and you enjoy what you’re making. It’s just more genuine that way.
Daniel Matson: I also feel like The Story So Far did the cool, nonchalant pop punk better than anyone did. State Champs has written more catchy pop punk hooks than we ever could so I just don’t want to compete with that. So we just need to do us.
I wanted to talk about Sky and Ty Accord. You mentioned they worked on “Loud”. Are there any other songs on this next album that Sky worked on?
Brian Butcher: Yes! As a matter of fact his DNA spreads throughout the whole album because we had him do additional production, like random little synth things, on every song- except for “Loud” because his brother, Ty, did it.- Other than that though, we had him do additional production across the whole album. He produced Slow Bloom, and when I say produced, I mean more of the traditional sense of producing. He didn’t mix it, he didn’t record, engineer it. He just was in the room, helping us along, figuring out how we wanted to translate our vision. To be honest, we had pretty much everything written for that album. He came in at the last like 10%, but that 10% was very eye opening for us. With any red flags or anything he noticed that needed to get switched around or moved, he was totally right. Everything. Every suggestion that he made was a great idea. The ending of “Watching All Your Friends Get Rich” would not exist without him. Beyond that though, it was just little stuff here and there. It was mostly a lot of mental and spiritual coaching through figuring out how we want to move forward as a band and it couldn’t have come at a better time to work with him on Slow Bloom because we were developing this whole new sound. He really, really helped us along. When we were going into this next album, obviously, as we mentioned earlier with the stuff with Thriller, we said, “yes, we will try the big label way but can we please schedule just a few days with Sky and Ty?” We busted out a couple songs with them, but for the most part, as far as the songwriting goes, we only did four with them. The rest we did outside of their camp with the exception of that adpro that I had Sky do over the whole thing. Sky has been great. He’s somebody that we can look to in times of peril and trust his wisdom. And what’s nice is that it has actually become very empowering for us because as we’ve gotten further and further along this process, he’s basically been like, “you guys are going to be fine.” We’ll come to him with an issue and he’s like, “dude, you guys already know the answer.” He’s a very, very valued person to us, which is one of the reasons why we really wanted him on that Don Broco tour so it was a lot of fun getting to play with him, um, on those shows.
Brian, of course I have to ask about you doing vocals for the upcoming Issues farewell shows. How did that come about?
Brian Butcher: He asked me on the Don Broco tour. I didn’t know that they were happening until he asked me. It was funny because when it happened I was like “oh yeah, totally. Sure. That sounds great.” It took weeks of people being like, “dude, that’s crazy. Whoa, I can’t believe that. Holy shit.” for me to be like this is kind of a big deal, isn’t it? Not that I didn’t originally think it was a big deal, but in the process of being friends with Sky and watching the whole thing unfold and watching where our band has gotten, it just felt right when he asked me. Then when we announced it, I was like “this is kind of crazy!” I’m really excited. I am pretty nervous, but every day that passes I get less and less nervous only because I’ve been practicing so hard that those songs are really ingrained in my head by now which is the goal. And so now it’s just a matter of rehearsing with them.
Are there some songs that you hope you get to sing?
Brian Butcher: There are a couple songs that I think I won’t get to sing, unfortunately, only because there’s so much material that we have to get through. There’s so many songs that we have to play and I have no bearing over the setlist. I don’t want any bearing because this is their band. I am simply a conduit for these six shows in particular. I’ll help them make suggestions because there have been a couple times where they’re wondering what we should play and I’ll put in my vote. The setlist is not set in stone yet, at least as far as I know. It’s going to be long. It’s going to be really long. It’s going to be a lot of songs.
Daniel Matson: You were saying a lot of those songs are actually lower than most Home Team songs, right? Tyler Carter had a high pitched voice, but because the tuning is so low, the notes are actually not that high.
Brian Butcher: Yeah, I don’t know that it has too much to do with the specific tuning of guitars or keys. I often do this when I’m writing music, I consider my range and consider where it’s going to be most comfortable and what’s going to sound good? Historically, I’ve changed my melody to match and nowadays I tell John to change the tuning. Anyway, yes it is way lower than Home Team stuff because Home Team stuff is dumb. This shit is stupid. I can’t believe I did that to myself and it sounds great on record because my voice sounds really good that high, but it’s stupid. So, this is not stupid. This makes a lot of sense. Also, I’m not really doing any screaming. I might do this or that to have fun with it, but I’m not in charge of any of Michael’s parts. The Beautiful Oblivion songs, obviously, are a lot more clean vocal heavy, because there was no screamer so those ones will be a little more challenging, but that’s my favorite album by them. I’m the most excited to sing those ones. It’s going to be a really long set, but I’m not too worried about my endurance just because again, The Home Team stuff I sing is so up in my range and this is so much lower and so much- I don’t want to say easier because agility wise it’s pretty technical- but it’s like easier on my voice for sure.
I wanted to go back to “Loud” for a second. Where did the idea for this silly, fun music video come from?
Brian Butcher: Yeah, it was a lot of back and forth between us and the director. John has historically been like the music video idea guy. Actually, he’s kind of the ideas guy for our whole band in general. Me and Daniel are more the execution guys. We had some ideas, but for “Loud” we didn’t really have very many set in stone ideas. The second video is going to come out, we had way more fleshed out ideas for. For “Loud” we were like “we think this could be cool”. I mentioned wanting to do some choreography. I already had a guy that I had been talking to for a little while.I went to go see Victoria Monet in concert and I put in my story after a bunch of videos of her, a funny thing that just said like “damn I gotta learn how to dance” and he hit me because he was a fan. HIs name is Caleb and dude, he crushed it. Anyway, at the very end of our call with the director, John goes “maybe it would be funny to do a boyband thing.” and Sam, the director immediately was like, “yeah, like VH1 pop ups and we can make it all like VHS” and he just started going. That one took a little bit of back and forth figuring it out, but I am happy with it.
You’d expect it to be done multiple times before, but the first time I watched it, I was pretty sure I hadn’t seen done before in a modern music video.
Daniel Matson: I have to say that is definitely something we take into account when we’re talking about the visual aspect of our band. It’s like have we seen this music video before? Have we heard this song before? Not to say everything we do is original, but we actively try to come up with ideas and do things that we haven’t seen so that when people see it, it’s the first time.
Brian, in the music video, there is a moment where you are wearing a beer sweatshirt. A friend of mine gave that to you all at a show and it was very exciting to see it in the video!
Brian Butcher: I was going to mention that! A fan, your friend, gave that to us at a show. I remember getting it and it was damp with sweat. To be fair, it must have been in Houston and that room was so humid it made it hard for me to sing. I do not think anybody in that room wasn’t covered in moisture whether it was their own sweat or not. John got it as a gift and he was like “I don’t care that it’s drenched in sweat because this thing is awesome.”
She was very excited to see it and I just wanted to pass along the message!
Brian Butcher: I’m so happy that’s the case because we had some ridiculous outfits that we curated for the video and that thing just made the cut.
Let’s talk about touring. You guys did just get home not that long ago from being in the UK with The Used and Honey Revenge. How was being in the UK?
Brian Butcher: It was awesome. Even though it was only a week long, that tour was very go, go, go. It was very fast only because we didn’t have a sleepable vehicle. It didn’t really make sense to rent a whole ass RV for five days especially considering the drives were not very long. It’s like two and a half, three hours max with the exception of Glasgow to London, but we had a day off to do that. We had a van that was not a sleeping van. It was just a sitting van and we just slept in hotels. But the problem with that was we would do the majority of the drive at night. We would get to our hotel at like 3 AM. And then we’d have to wake up at like 10:30 to make it to the show on time to load in. It was fast paced. It wasn’t a lot of good, restful sleep. We got it done and it was the biggest shows we’ve ever played in our lives which was really, really cool. I remember that first night I was really nervous because the way that the venue was laid out, it was like a warehouse style venue. Everyone was on the floor in front of us and it was 2,300 people just staring at me. It was a crazy experience for sure. And then we ended up spending a week afterwards, just vacationing with our partners.
Daniel Matson: I keep hearing that at a certain point, the size of the crowd getting bigger makes it easier because you can’t see people’s faces and I will say it is entirely different playing to a thousand people than it is playing to 15 people. With 15 people, if one person gets bored and walks away, you know that that person left, but at 2000 it still hasn’t gotten any easier. So I’m waiting for that point.
Playing these shows with a band like The Used had to be nerve wracking too!
Brian Butcher: They’re definitely very influential. For me, personally, I didn’t really listen to them growing up. I knew “The Bird and the Worm”. I didn’t even know that “ The Taste of Ink” was by them until like a year ago. That’s how disconnected I was. That said, I’ve always known them to be a great band. It just wasn’t a band that clicked for me as a kid. I wasn’t really starstruck. Our bassist on the other hand was very much so. He was very, very stoked to be there, but he’s very cool. He didn’t embarrass us. He just at the very, very end, when we were taking our tour picture, he just turns to Burt and goes “your band means a lot to me. Thanks for having us.” It didn’t phase me too much. I will say this, it was very inspiring watching them work. They’ve been doing it for so long that they have their shit super dialed and like so much gear, so much expensive stuff, and they know what they’re doing with it. They sounded incredible. They’re dialed. They’ve been clearly doing this for so long and we learned a lot and it was very inspiring to see places where we can improve and we can figure out what things that we can add to our live set that they did.
How was it getting to tour with Honey Revenge again?
Daniel Matson: One thing with how short the tour was, at the 5th to 6th show is when everyone is pretty comfortable like in their role within the tour and you’re not really stressed out about getting to everything on time. You’re in the flow of things. And that’s usually when people start to recognize other people on the tour and say hey and start talking more. So, at the end of five days, that was basically the end of the whole thing. And we didn’t really get to hang out with too many people in The Used camp because they were doing their thing and we were doing ours. But because we already know Honey Revenger, getting to tour with them was like a family reunion on day one. We had a couple of nights where our green rooms were shared. So we were just with them all the time and we were just picking up basically right where we left off. The crazy thing is after the tour that we did with them, we did like the three weeks of Senses Fail run and then the month with Don Broco. They did what felt like another 12 tours in between, and they played like double the shows that we played this year. They have another tour in January, whereas we’re taking like five months off to get the album going. They’re just like right back to it. Their growth has been just an insane trajectory over the last year, and it’s very well deserved because they’re great live, great people, great musicians, and honestly, just like a joy to be around all the time. Nothing, but positive things to say about the Bee Band.
What do you think the absolute main takeaway from that tour was?
Brian Butcher: Oh, I mean, we had air tags in our gear and we’re really happy we did, because it all got left in San Francisco. I think maybe the takeaway is that we did that right and to keep doing that.
Daniel Matson: I think we got three takeaways. One, air tags. Two, I don’t want to fly our shit anymore. Next time we have to do a European tour, we’re going to put that on pallets and send it over a month in advance and just rehearse wherever the first show is. Having to use some gear that we rent over there and then some of our gear and having to lug it all through the airport and have it get left in another country was a nightmare. That part sucked. Third takeaway, and I think the biggest one for me. Throughout 2023, we’ve had a handful of moments of like, “Oh, this is like happening. The thing I’ve been trying to do since I was 15, we’re on our way to doing it.” This was another one of those moments where like we finished, I think it was after we finished the show in London. We know how we perform. So when we have a bad night, we all know and hopefully we hide it well enough so that the crowd doesn’t tell we’re thinking we’re performing kind poorly. After the London show, we got off stage and we all looked at each other. We were like we can’t play much better than that. That was pretty much it. The crowd response was crazy. Our new European booking agent was in the crowd so the guy we had to impress was there and I think we impressed him. It was definitely a moment of “this music thing is actually happening for us.” It was a big personal moment.
Brian Butcher: I’m surprised that one of your takeaways isn’t “don’t plug things into random plugs.”
Daniel Matson: To be fair, I did ask permission and I was given a yes and then I plugged it. I made the rookie mistake of plugging one of our American plugs into not into the wall, because I know that, but we got our inverter boxes, and I assumed the big box at the end was the thing you plug into, not that there’s an additional thing that you plug into the box and then plug into that. I asked if I could plug something in and I was told yes if it fits. So I plugged it in. And sure enough, in like three seconds, someone was like. “What’s that smell?” so I ripped it out. Luckily, it seems like no gear was permanently damaged. Everything worked fine, but it was very scary for a while.
Do you guys have any more fun stories from the UK?
Brian Butcher: I got to try Vegan Kit Kats!
Daniel Matson: We did have a good story. We got to this hotel at like maybe 10 or so. And as we got there, the person at the front desk was just about to leave and they were clearly annoyed that we had got there that late, which 10 o’clock doesn’t seem like super late for checking into a hotel. She checked us in and then there was a piece of paper at the front desk that was like “call here, if you need anything” and she left. Then we get up to our rooms. Our room was fine, but apparently the second room that we had gotten had like 30 years of cigarette smoke in a non smoking hotel. I think the heat didn’t work but they had to have the window open to breathe the air. Everything smelled like mold and they didn’t have any sheets or blankets. I think Ryne and John covered themselves with like eight pillowcases.
Brian Butcher: That they found elsewhere in the ghost town of a hotel.
Daniel Matson: They were walking around like a labyrinth basically and there was no one else there. A bunch of rooms were just open so you could just walk into them and I am pretty sure we narrowly escaped a haunting. Yeah, my sleep was totally fine though, but don’t tell them that.
Since we are at the end of the year, I just want to ask one last thing. What is your musical New Year’s resolution?
Brian Butcher: To give this new music the treatment it deserves and not to half ass anything. I mean, there’s only so many things that you can control. I don’t really like giving metrics that are out of my control. Bands say they want to reach this many monthly listeners or followers and you can’t really control that. What you can control is whether or not you put your best foot forward. And for me, that’s my goal. My goal is to make sure that we are happy with everything we do and that if it doesn’t work like we want it to, there’s nothing else we could have done.
