Dropkick Murphys playing Outer Harbor with Bad Religion next week: Tim Brennan interview
BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) -- The Dropkick Murphys will be performing at Buffalo's Outer Harbor on Aug. 6 with Bad Religion, featuring openers The Mainliners, as part of the Summer of Discontent tour. Multi-instrumentalist Tim Brennan gave WIVB a preview of the show, discussed the band's new album, "For the People," and spoke on the tour, which began last week.
Now a few shows in, Brennan is telling fans who come to the Buffalo show to expect a "raucously good time from both bands."
"We're so psyched to be out with Bad Religion, obviously," he said. "They're a friggin' institution in punk rock."
Dropkick Murphys will be bringing along a few songs from "For the People," which released on July 4. Brennan said, as far as subject matter goes, it would have been tough for the band to not write about the current political landscape in America. He also said, having released two acoustic albums recently, the band wanted to make an album that was "louder and harder."
"Musically speaking, things were coming out fairly aggressive when we were just sort of writing the music -- and that was before the lyrics ever really came into play," Brennan said. "So that, in tandem with the fact that [Dropkick Murphy's frontman Ken Casey] was writing a lot about the sort of the state of things currently, those things just kind of came together to make a handful of pretty aggressive songs talking about the current B.S. state of the world."
The physical copy of the record will be released Oct. 10 and includes five additional songs. Brennan attributed the bonus songs to the band going into the studio with more songs than they needed, and to incentivizing listeners to buy the physical copy.
"Ultimately, we knew that we were going to have a couple of things on the cutting room floor, based on the fact that we wanted a 10- or 12-song record," he said. "So those are purely -- I mean, I guess they would be considered B-sides -- but those are purely just other songs that we recorded for the album that ended up getting left off the final track list."
He said the band was psyched about the songs and wanted to release them anyways, as they came up with the idea early in the release process.
As far as his portion of each album goes, Brennan said he decides on what instrument or instruments a song needs based on what he hears.
"We've been doing it long enough at this point that you can sort of hear what a song is looking for as far as those weird instruments," he said. "That being said, it's a lot of trial and error. We're literally surrounded with all these wacky instruments all the time, and so it's easy in the studio to -- when you're listening back to songs, you can kind of tell if it needs another part or if it's missing a specific sort of frequency from an instrument or whatever -- and so that all sort of plays into it, but a lot of times it's just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks."
Recently, the band went viral on social media, as Casey responded to two men in a Florida crowd who showed up in MAGA gear. Casey offered the men a wager: if their shirts were made in America, he'd give them each $100 and a free American union-made Dropkick Murphys shirt, but if they weren't made in America, they would give him their shirts. Ultimately, the shirts were made in Nicaragua, and Casey traded them two Dropkick Murphys shirts in exchange for the MAGA shirts.
"I thought Ken handled that perfectly," Brennan said. "I don't think that could have been handled any better. It's tough, as we talked about earlier. Like, the landscape of things is very crazy right now. Personally, I'm not a hugely political person, my views are more in line with humanity and everybody being cool to one another and just sort of live and let live, right? That being said, it's unavoidable, some of the confrontational aspects of of things. So that particular incident, like I said, I thought he handled that perfectly."
Brennan said it's too bad that "people are coming to shows deliberately to sort of troll a band or get a reaction," but said he is a fan of handling things diplomatically the way Casey did that night.
"Hopefully nobody else wastes their time by paying for a ticket to come to a show of a band that they don't even want to see," he said.
Brennan said that the Dropkick Murphys show at Outer Harbor will be the most fun those in attendance will have all summer.
"Come on out. We're going to have a great time, we can all eat some Dinosaur Barbecue together if we'd like," he said. "We won't talk about politics, and we'll just have a good time."
Tickets to the show can be found at this link. The full interview can be heard on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, or in the podcast player at the top of this page.