We spoke with AJJ's Sean Bonette before their November 7th show at Mohawk in Austin, TX.

I mean, how can you not? It's not a bad weight, but it is definitely something to take seriously. Like, I take our music a lot more seriously, I think as a result of that.

I just want to start by saying “Thank you”. I really appreciate you taking the time to sit down to talk to me for 10 minutes. I've been a fan since I was in high school. The music meant a lot to me then and still means a lot to me now.

Thanks, Spencer. Thanks for listening, and thank you also for taking the time. You've taken much more than 10 minutes just to reach out and get to us.

Does that have a weight? Do you feel a responsibility hearing that?

There's something about your band. I feel like people are very intense about it. Do you get a lot of people saying things like, “This music saved my life” or “It's got me through a hard time”? Is that a common sentiment?

I've heard that before. I wouldn't call it common, but it's definitely a thing that happens for sure. People connect with our music that way, and it means a lot.

Constantly. That's how I think I've changed. It's a constant state of regeneration. At this point, I feel like it's been so many different little mini revolutions that it's impossible to point to any kind of linear “I started out this way and now I'm this way.” Sometimes I feel like I'm getting closer to how I was when I was younger writing songs. There's evolutions and devolutions that I think are important.

Tell me about your process on writing a song from start to finish.

I would say that you never really get the same results the same way every time; it's always a little bit different. At the core of it, oftentimes for me it'll be one of obsession where I can be focusing on one task or one activity that I'm doing in my day-to-day life, but there's like a little part of my brain that's always kind of whirring around and thinking about the latest song. It kind of feels like being haunted or like having the hiccups or having a tune stuck in your head. But it's a tune that hasn’t, you know… when you get a song stuck in your head it's a popular song a lot of the time, or like something like happy birthday. Working on a song, oftentimes it'll be you have a song stuck in your head, but it's one that's struggling really hard to still be born. I try all sorts of ways to get that out. Lately, I've been keeping a journal. I feel like for the past couple records I've tried to adopt a more Lil Wayne approach - If I can't remember it then It's not worth it. And using like demoing improv and voice memos for the source, but lately I've been doing a lot more writing things down and giving myself a paper trail to follow back to if I get too lost.

In short: there's no wrong way to do it, and songs are really fickle. If I try the same results every time they won’t work. I have to try it differently.

How do you think you've changed as an artist over the course of this project?

Once you have it on paper what's the next step? figuring out the melody first or the lyrics?

Melody and lyrics oftentimes come together like a little jingle that you sing to yourself, but then after it gets to a point where it's written down and there's enough verses or choruses and etc then I'll bring it to my bandmates and we'll flesh it out and make it make it a real song. We'll make structural changes. We'll decide how many times to play something and identify stuff that we want to crank up. After a certain point it becomes collaborative. That's usually when I get some kind of recording, or I can play it just in the room for everybody on a guitar.

I have a rule that I'm trying to break myself out of, where it's not a worthwhile song if I can't just play it alone on a guitar for somebody and hold their attention. You know, that is a good way to write a pretty solid song, but also I feel like I might be depriving myself of the opportunity to make something more long-form or more based on like texture and sonics and melody than in lyrics. Usually, I can crank out a two and a half minute long song and hold some attention, but I also wonder if I'm sacrificing something by making it so accessible so quickly.

It's going full circle.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Full circle... That might be a nice way to put that.

It's been a little over two years since the last full-length record. Are you working on stuff now?

Yeah, we're working on stuff now. Tonight we'll play a new tune called “Beauty and Truth” that we've been playing a lot. It's a country song. We've got a bunch of other ones in the hopper that we're kind of trying to figure out how we're going to approach them. Whether it be a more home-recorded approach the way we did “Good Luck Everybody,” or if we want to make a more tight, kind of cohesive band record in a studio with someone. We're leaning more towards the home recording approach. We need to figure out what our constraints are going to be; otherwise it will take a long time.

Do you have a timeline? Like an album next year?

Nothing really set in stone, but we're hoping... Yeah, I think it'll be an album next year.

You're a very political band, not in a subtle way. You’re very outspoken and very heart on your sleeve. It feels kind of hacky and lame to be like “everything sucks right now, doesn't that inspire you?”, but how are you feeling about the state of the world in November 2025? How is that affecting how you think about art and make art?

There are very frustrating moments, but also a lot of very hopeful moments in the time right now. And that's because everything is so unstable that even though the bad guys are oftentimes winning, their victory feels so tenuous and so precarious. Things are so unstable that there are these little victories that are peeking through, and I think everyone is kind of gradually waking up to what is happening. I can only speak from my own weird little bubble in that matter, but it does seem like things are more doomed than they've ever been or that they've been in a long time, but also like a lot more possible than they were even two years ago.

There's enough people that are upset about what is going on, where there maybe weren't two years ago. That's a hopeful thing that I find. But at the same time, like the oligarchy along with their paid politician goons are actively trying to kill everyone now. They're going full-on war against the general population. All of that when trying to make art is kind of discouraging. I wonder sometimes what's the fucking point, but at the same time, after I am sad about that, then I myself will put on a record or read a book or look at a painting and those are the things that save my life so I can't really ask myself what's the point of me making art when all those generous artists are making my life so much better by their making art. Even though I'm sad that we live in the Fourth Reich.

I agree with all that (laughs). You're going on in like 30 minutes. Do you have any pre-show rituals that you do?

You know, we always do a warm-up, but nowadays we usually do that on the way to the club. There's this really good app called VocalEase that this guy named Arnold McCuller devised. He's James Taylor's vocal coach. He's friends with a big friend in the punk scene named Chris Candy, and Chris disseminated this beautiful vocal warm-up app to all the punk friends that he has, like Joyce Manor, Jeff Rosenstock, and us. It's reached so many bands at this point. So VocalEase is one of our pre-show rituals. Other than that, not really, no. Break a leg, have a good show. I've seen the Bouncing Souls have a really good one where they all put their hands in a circle and they make a spiral by doing that. That's like really sick. I've gotten to put my hand in that before.

Sad Park stand in a circle and jump up and down and chant “we're the best band. we're the best band. we're the best band”, but we've never had anything like that, unfortunately. Just the practical one of getting our voices ready.

This is the second night of you guys playing in Austin. You come here pretty frequently, right?

Yeah, we're neighbors. We start and end tours a lot in Austin.

You like playing here?

Fuck yeah, of course.

Do you have any places you like to go in Austin when you're here, or activities you do?

I like skating at the House Park. That's a really nice skate park here. The locals that skate it skate that place like nobody's business. It's really kind of amazing. Two days in a row, we've eaten at a restaurant called Koriente, which is delicious. Last night we drank at this new bar called the Skeleton Key. I think it's a little bit north of here, but that place is fucking awesome. I left them a five-star review because they're really new and they're super nice. I don't review businesses a lot. They told us that they had one Yelp review that was like “this bar sucks, it's an Antifa stronghold” or something like that, “Antifa Communist bar”. So I was like "Awesome", I gave them a great review.

I have a boring desk job, so I listen to music for eight hours every day. I'm always on the lookout for new music. What have you been listening to? Any album recommendations or artists you want to shout out?

One recommendation is this band called Sewer Bitch. I recorded the album because I wanted to hear those songs as quickly as possible again, and they didn't have a record that I could get. That record in particular, it's not some kind of nepotism plug or anything. It's just like I saw this band and I loved them. Their songs are incredible, they're so fun and funny and really beautiful and sad at times. Especially this one song they have called It's Raining Down. The band's called Sewer Bitch. They're a lot better than their band name suggests.

No, I'm sold. I like the name.

They're a lot more sophisticated than their name suggests. Take that what you will. You would expect like a snotty punk band, but what you end up getting is something that's a little bit like Angel Olsen. But played with purposeful minimalist productions like bass and drums, and two vocalists who are kind of trained in the country school of singing. They're so good.

A couple of other joints I've been enjoying. Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… Pt. II by Raekwon, I've returned to that recently.

Also, it hit me in the van. I had sunglasses on, but I was crying. Nobody could see, but I was driving the van and listening to the Portishead live in New York City recording.

The Roseland Observatory?

Yeah. And that, I don't think I can love a recorded piece of music any more than that. It's so fucking great. The orchestra, the scratching, the vocal performance that Beth gives. Yeah, I love that. I love that record so much.

I think a big part of my connection to it is that it imprinted itself on me when my grandparents took that away, along with - I bought at the Tower Records once, Tool Ænima, Iggy Pop's Rough Power (the ones that David Bowie mixed), Have I Offended Someone by Frank Zappa, and the Roseland NYC record. I bought those at the tower, and then my like, narc cousin, looked at my stack of CDs and told my grandparents, “You should check out what Sean bought. He looks like he bought some kind of Satanist stuff.” They took all of them away.

Then, when I looked through their stuff a couple of months later and stole them back, the only records that were really worth a damn... Well, no, I'll say they were all pretty good except for that Frank Zappa record. But that one is obviously the winner, and I loved it so much more because it was taken from me.

Yeah, that album’s an all-timer for me too. I did realize there's something I meant to ask earlier that I forgot when we were talking about songwriting. This week, leading up to the show, I re-listened to all of your music in order.

Oh damn, that’s a lot of songs.

There's something you do on some of the earlier records that you kind of stop doing, where you have a pseudo cover in the middle of the song. You dive into “When The Saints Go Marching in” or “Mrs. Robinson” or the Woody Guthrie song. Can you speak on that, cause I think it’s really interesting. It's not quite a cover, it's not a parody, it's like your own interpretation of it, but it's not even the full song. What inspires that? It's not really present on any of the later records, at least that I was like noticed.

In “Getting Naked and Playing with Guns”, we lift a little Cars riff. Don't tell The Cars.

I love making references to other music. That's something that I think I probably learned from listening to rap and hip-hop is that they'll oftentimes do that just since the medium is based on samples a lot of the time. It's always kind of fun when the rappers will send off whatever the source material is that they're sampling. I think Willie Nelson also kind of did that in Redheaded Stranger. On that record, there are always these little outerludes that happen in songs.

I think part of it is an economic choice where if there's an emotion you're trying to evoke and there's already a tune or a melody that's evoked that emotion, sometimes it's simpler than to try to replicate it, just to drop that in a little bit. I guess it's kind of like if you're painting a picture, and you want a very detailed picture of a bird, and you happen to have a bird stamp, then you can just stamp it on there a couple of times. That's one way to think about it. But thanks for asking that. I haven't actually like really considered why I do that up until now. Other than that, it is kind of like a shorthand that you can employ.