Jolly Rancher

A Monastic Quest for Meaning in Music

Emo has had an interesting progression as far as musical genres go. It’s always teetered on a unique line between being undeniably popular and completely insular. Fans of the genre, and its many splintering scenes, are all very familiar with one another in a place like Austin. But to the outsider, many local bands fly totally under the radar. Maybe it’s the nature of the music, which taps into the growing-pains and discomfort of early adulthood in a raw and real way that many other musicians just aren’t willing to touch. 

Ever since I was first made aware of Emo music, in middle school when my friend, Sam, took me to the Warp Tour and I saw a man squirt lemons into his open eyeballs, I knew that it wasn’t the thing for everyone. But I, like many, was charmed by the brutal honesty in those self-flagellating lyrics, screamed through a microphone. I have come to think that Emo is one of those things everyone relates to, on some level, and how much of the appeal you’re willing to admit you understand (even if you don’t like the sound), is somewhere close to how honest you are with yourself.

It feels weird to call Jolly Rancher an Emo band, but they feel as comfortable with that label as any other. The group is certainly unique, drawing influence from jazz and math-rock: rhythm-centric changes that you can feel in your feet, jangling guitar riffs that float around almost softly, at times, like a wind-chime, and high screams with emotional and painful lyrics that echo afterwards in your head. The band is made up of guitarist, Kyle Berryman, drummer Cameron Hudgens, guitarist, Josh Gibbs, and bassist, Drew Thornton, who liked to talk as much about the sound, as their process of pushing themselves as musicians. And maybe it’s that self-flagellating, almost monastic drive to always be better, to always be striving to do the next difficult thing, that puts them in that aforementioned category as much as the sound, itself. 

On top of being a good band, Jolly Rancher is also a great case-study for how the Emo scene has developed in Austin. I wasn’t at all surprised when our conversation inevitably turned outward toward that larger group, the friendship and camaraderie they’ve found there, and the hopeful future the band sees in it as a tinderbox for grass-roots action.

Jake: So you guys have all floated around different bands in the scene for years now. Where were you all at when you came together here as Jolly Rancher?

Cam: I guess we had our first show at SXSW last year, but we had jammed together before, so the official date is a little blurry even.

Josh: We all had some half-baked ideas together coming in; riffs and things that ended up melting into what we have now. We’re naturally collaborative. We all come in with something individually, and as a band, it becomes something more. We each have our individual ideas that become aspects of our sound. No song sounds like just one of us.

Kyle: There were definitely ideas and riffs that we had before the band started. But we brought those pieces together and that initial building process was how we found this collaborative stride. Now, collaboration is how we make everything. It’s the first band I’ve ever played in that worked that way and I really love it. Nobody has an ego.

Cam: We’re basically a jam band, believe it or not. Our process is: we make a riff, or someone comes in with a riff, and we jam it out until we have a song. Sometimes we'll spend a couple  of hours figuring out how two minutes of a song are gonna sound, just trying everything out until it clicks. It’s about throwing things against a wall, drilling things into our heads, and then finding a nice groove with it and staying there.

Drew: A lot of the inspiration comes from musically challenging ourselves, too. Trying things in practice we’re not sure we can do, and in the process of hammering that out, we find a song. There’s a lot of experimentation going on, with techniques and rhythms, but also a lot of refining that goes on in practice and really shows on the EP (“Good Neighbor”).

Jake: Do you think that that’s an aspect of math-rock music? Like not making something because it’s catchy but because you had to push yourself to make it?

Cam: I think it’s the primary motivation for us. I can’t speak to anyone else. But for us, it’s all about: how can we push ourselves as musicians? So trying out overlapping time-signatures or syncopated rhythms, or anything we haven’t done before is what we’re trying to do next. From conception, this has been a project where we can all just get together, have fun and push ourselves.

Kyle: And of course being challenged isn’t all about not playing in 4-4 or the usual stuff people gravitate towards when they think of our kind of music. There’s some debates I’ve seen about 4-4 not being challenging music and that’s silly, obviously, because people do all sorts of stuff musically with simple rhythms that’s still crazy and out-there. Challenging yourself is about new sounds as much as it is about new technique, we’re just more of a technique band.  

Cam: I think we’re at the crossroads of challenging and palatable. I want to write ear-worms, too. And being able to groove with four on the floor— just to make something you can get down and dance to, is super important no matter what genre you’re in. I think we found a good middle-ground, at least with our first EP, that challenged us without being alienating to outsiders.

Josh: We did a whole cover-set this Halloween of My Chemical Romance songs, and that actually had an effect on how we all approached our own music and just bringing it all back down to that level, because MCR is definitely an ear-worm band. That’s when we realized we could rock. 

Jake: What are your thoughts on the... would you call it an Emo scene? That’s what I’ve heard people refer to it as.

Josh: There’s definitely a scene, with a lot of the same people showing up on bills. We’ve played with our friends in Minuano on most of our bills, for instance.

Cam: Emo, DIY, whatever you want to call it, there’s a burgeoning scene for sure. Face Turn, Minuano, Grit is another one to check out; Drunk Uncle, too. It’s nice that there’s never a shortage of good shows because all of these bands are good friends with each other, and they’re friends with the people booking and so there’s a symbiotic community of people who want to get together and listen to this music. Before we all holed up for the “big sick” it was super easy to set up a bill whenever you wanted to. Much more collaborative than competitive.

Drew: Coming together for gigs on the weekend, before the quarantine, became kind of a ritual for us, it was so regular it was just a given.

Cam: Yeah, because there aren’t really any big shows for us to play. This kind of music is really on the back-burner in Austin, so playing was, and is, more about the community and enjoying ourselves than it is about self-promotion or who we can get on a bill with and where. I think we mostly like it like that, too.

Jake: You guys helped put on a fundraiser for Bernie a few months ago that included a lot of bands from that scene. Do you feel like having that tight-knit community, and that ability to get a show together on such short notice, helps give you a platform to fundraise and support causes you care about?

Cam: That’s the idea. The Bernie thing (Bernie Man 2020) was my first experience doing something like that, but I felt inspired by how many people turned out. I definitely want to do more of that work in the future, especially for causes that we all already support in other ways like Black Lives Matter or the Austin Tenants’ Council. I think it’s our plan to try and pick things back up as a band as soon as it’s safer, and then to look for more opportunities to mobilize this community and replicate that success wherever we can,  moving forward.

Josh: We’re trying to work on a blueprint for how to do that and just for what’s going on, in general. It’s all still sort of up-in-the-air with Covid, but we’re all starting to realize that this whole thing is going to go on for a lot longer than any of us expected. So we’re adapting, now. We haven’t even been practicing, recently, so yeah, it’s up-in-the-air.

Cam: I think there’s a certain responsibility we have, now that we know we can do it, to do more of it and to do it better. We have this opportunity with this community and I think we’re all excited to see where we can take it.

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Once again, you can check out Jolly Rancher’s EP, “Good Neighbor” on Bandcamp

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Written by Jake Webber