a person named Rose is using your old toy drumkit to make music about PEZ candy and Super Mario '64 stars

The boundless creativity of DIY musicians is what inspired me to start this interview project in the first place. I love discovering music from under-the-radar, primarily self-released artists, and I love learning about how their album was made with little more than a broken laptop, a free DAW, a Rock Band mic, and a dream. I always leave these interviews feeling like I can and should create anything.

Rose (aka a person named Rose) exemplifies everything that this interview series is all about. A few months ago, she put out an EP of songs called August Demo via the Alabama-based indie label (^_^) Records (with another EP coming out next month!), and they also make music with The Everfree Forest and Peanut, Tree Nut, & Gluten Free. Rose thrives by challenging the “limitations” of cheap analog equipment - whether it be by stitching together drum kits made of children’s toys, recording songs on a four-track, or making their music available via a Google Voice phone hotline.

Most importantly, she clearly loves making music and wants other people to release their inhibitions and start making it, too. Small budgets or lack of formal training be damned - hit the thrift store, salvage an instrument from a dumpster, mess around, and make whatever you want.

The two of us got pretty carried away talking about camcorders, the Rocky Horror sequel Shock Treatment, a hip hop sample CD that was used for the Sonic and Persona soundtracks, and Banjo Kazooie Easter eggs. Multiple times, she grabbed an instrument to show me - like for example, grabbing a Casio SA-35 to demonstrate that Death Grips used a similar sound effect to make the intro to “Hustle Bones.” When I hopped off the Discord call, I had about twenty tabs open with all the cool (and cheap!) instruments she recommended me. Then I went onto eBay and bought a $20 toy keyboard to mess around with. I hope reading this interview makes you want to buy a cheap instrument to mess around with, too.

I was looking through your band websites, and I love that these are all Neocities sites.

Yeah! When I was in eighth grade, my middle school was like, “hey, we have too many old books and we need to get rid of them.” And so I was looking through the big rack of them, and I see a book labeled Web Design in a Nutshell, Volume 3, and I'm like, “oh, I gotta get that.” So I've been learning HTML by way of a book that existed before I started existing. I don't like how soulless social media is, which is why I have so many web pages for my projects. It's just more fun to update those than it is to go on Twitter or Tumblr.

NeoCities websites are kind of peak DIY.

Yeah. No, I've been DIY for as long as I can remember. At my high school there's this big open field-ish thing, and that was where I could sit down and busk. And so a lot of people in my area became aware of me from doing that. And I would be like, “hey, I have a CD for $3, do you want it?” So I've just kind of had those circulating for forever. I think August Demo was the first thing I actually got another person to make for me, though.

Your other stuff was all self-released, right?

Yeah, I've been self-releasing things forever. So like, (^_^) Records is set up by my friend Alex, who is a music enthusiast from the Birmingham, Alabama scene. And so I sent the things I had compiled into the EP to them in and I was like, “hey, I have this thing. Do you want to put it out?” And they were like, “oh yeah, I love four track things.” I think the only thing that changed between the mp3s I sent and what's on Bandcamp now is just me exporting it in lossless and some volume normalization. Aside from that, it's just raw from my four track. Aside from “Rattlesnake” - part of that was done on my computer.

Oh, “Rattlesnake” was my favorite song - there's a sound effect on it that I really liked, it sounds like it's a little whip or something.

Oh yeah, during the…hang on. I’ll play it for you. ♫ Got bit by a rattlesnake, rattlesnake, got bit by a rattlesnake ♫  Okay so, around there - I recorded myself doing like, a gravelly whisper and going, “raaaattttttle.” And then I put a crazy flanger and delay on it so that it was vocal-ish, but not really. I decided using something like that would be really cool in the stereo field.

I love that so much. So, you’re pretty prolific. Are you always working on something? 

Yeah, I'm always creating something. There are a few ways a song will appear to me. The first one is the song appears fully fleshed out in my head, and I have to get it down before it disappears. This happened with one I did as Jordan Sunlight called “Angry Bees Are In Your Skull.” I had been working on a project where I wrote a song every week…which I didn't manage to finish because writing a song every week that I'm proud of and actually want to release is very difficult! And so I was just sitting in front of a microphone and mumbling to myself, playing a thing in G, and I just started singing, “I don't know what to say at all…let me tell you this…angry bees are in your skull.” and I was like, “Oh, oh, I have to make this a thing.”

Other times I try to write a song with the intent to make it about a thing. And sometimes that doesn't work even remotely, because as a creative, I found that forcing a song usually results in something I really, really, really, really, really, really do not like.

You mentioned to me earlier something about recording drums live at somebody else's house, what was that like?

Yeah. There's this hardcore band in my scene called Pipeline, and my friend Kole does drums for them. And so I posted a thing on my Instagram story that was like, “hey, I want to record drums at a place at some point soon. Do any of you have drums and wouldn't mind me bringing a portable recorder over?” And literally less than a minute later, he's like, “I've been your fan since day one, and I have drums.” And so one day I went over to his family's office complex type thing, and there was a room off to the side that had drums and microphones set up. And so over the course of about two or three hours, I recorded three drum tracks there.

When I read your I Enjoy Music interview, I saw you mentioned Frankenstein drum kits. I want to hear about the Frankenstein kit so bad.

So the Franken-kit…it’s a miracle of God that it still exists. When I was 12, my mom brought in this First Act discovery kick drum, which is this brand of tiny drum sets meant for tiny children. And so 12 year old me was like, “oh, I should do something with this.” The earliest recording I have of it is one of me and my close friend Nate banging on it and strumming nonsense out on an unplugged electric guitar and shouting. Then later my mom brought over more percussive stuff salvaged from a dumpster, which is how I got my accordion. And by then I was like, “oh, hey, I have two toms, one cymbal, another cymbal...wait, I can make something out of this!” And then a year later I saunter over to the Goodwill by Route 66 and I'm looking through the CDs, and out of the corner of my eye I spot this children's snare drum that’s a brilliant glittery purple. And I'm like, “hey, I could use that, too!” You can hear the Franken-kit on “Crow Song.”

I saw that Peanut, Tree Nut, & Gluten Free has a big giant concept album in the works about Super Mario ‘64 stars.

Yeah! The original intent was to write a song for every star name in the video game Super Mario '64. Now I don't know if we're doing all of it, but we're still going to do a good chunk.

What are there, like, hundreds of them?

Yeah, we calculated and there's 120 in the game. It's hard to write them because a lot of the time the lyrics I write are directly influenced by the stars, but [fellow band member of The Everfree Forest and P/TN/GF] Juno’s are usually fairly disconnected from the actual contents of the star from Mario. It's hard to explain, but it's like, in the same way John Linnell from They Might Be Giants talks about how their state songs aren't about the states necessarily. Cuz, you know, “past my bedtime miles ago, still haven't entered Idaho,” It's just a song about staying up too late and thinking you're driving your house.  I don't remember why we took up this…maybe it was because we did the PEZ album…

A PEZ album?

Yeah, like the candy.

Whoa, tell me about that. I didn’t know about that one.

Okay so, basically, it was a thing me and Juno made for April Fool’s. And I think it's another example of the dichotomy between us as songwriters, because her songs are the best ones on the album, and mine are… well, the first lyrics I sing on the album are, “you know the Nether Portals from Minecraft? Well, I made one made out of PEZ.” 

The PEZ album itself came into existence because I was looking at this wholesale candy shop website and they had a whole category dedicated to PEZ. And every time I looked at it, I just ended up entering, like, a weird state of PEZ euphoria. And so I was like, “Juno, Juno, we need to make the best album!” So we come up with a bunch of titles, some of which wound up on the album, like “PEZHEAD,” “Peanut, Tree Nut, and Gluten Free,” a cover of the song “I Like Pez” by Logan Whitehurst, who is this dude who really influenced the way I write songs. And so that's how the band wound up - Juno's "Peanut," I'm "Tree Nut," and Jay's "Gluten Free."

I also wanted to ask you about The Everfree Forest song hot line. How did you set that up?

I was inspired twofold by the Hall & Oates hotline or whatever it's called, where you call in and it's like, press one to hear “Maneater,” press two to hear “You Make My Dreams Come True.” They Might Be Giants also had an old “dial-a-song” service where they had a different song play every day for, I want to say like, 30 years. I wanted to do something like that, but I live with my parents and I don't know how to get an extra line on our phone and I don't want to go through that hassle. So instead, what I wound up doing was I hooked my cell phone up to Google Voice, and every Tuesday and Friday I put a different song through. It handles like, three minutes max, but usually the songs I write are two minutes or less anyways. It winds up sounding a little bad, but I want to say for the half a year it's been up, it does usually sound good enough at least. 

Here's a question for you - hypothetically, if you had a crazy big budget for an album, what do you think you would do?

I mean, the thing with that is, having infinite money means I can get all the weird drum machines and synths that I've wanted... But I think I'd still limit myself a bit. I feel like even if I had a crazy budget, I wouldn't spend a million dollars on Pro Tools - I would just upgrade the weird analog stuff I have.  It's hard to explain, but even when I was making music when I was 13, just using a Rock Band microphone, I've just…I don't know, I've always been more creative when I have limitations around me, I guess.

I’ve learned through this interview project that you can really make music with anything. I don't know anything about playing music, but I think I just need to buy some instruments and try.

Hmm, what are some inexpensive instruments that I like a lot…there are melodicas, which are some of my favorite things. You just gotta blow through a tube and it makes noise. And then tin whistle is another good one. I guess there’s ukulele too, but everyone plays ukulele…but baritone ukulele is kinda my thing. Tenor banjo is cool, but that's more into the triple digits money-wise. But it's basically just the top couple strings of a guitar.

I've actually wanted to get a theremin for so long and I think it's time to finally do it…

Yeah, I like those a lot. I've never managed to get one. Instead I do silly things like spend $75 on a tape machine. There's so many things I want, but I have so little money so I never get a lot of them. But I make it work. It will all come together with time. Music is awesome…

Check out those Neocities websites if you didn't already, follow Rose over on Bluesky, support August Demos on Bandcamp, and keep an eye out for March Demo's release on 3/14/2025.

Do you make music you think I'd like? Email it to me at jenn@discfive.com! And if you like what I’m trying to do around here, consider dropping me a tip on ko-fi :-)