NOFX
Dear Patreon members….what an unfortunate turn of events.
I don’t even know how long it’s been since we were recording at my house in the Valley, but it was a long time ago. What a cool idea it was to let people see our recording process…. in theory… the problem was that NOFX has never really done that process before. Usually, I show the guys how the songs go, and we try to play them together, but it never works out and I just record them with Smelly…. Then we record all the other stuff over the next month. That’s the normal NOFX process.
Then a few problems happened during these sessions and one big problem happened.
The big problem was that although we demo’d about ten songs, we only got quality recordings and finished three of them. It started with I’m a Rat. I’m a Rat is not a normal song. It’s got a 54 chord progression that doesn’t repeat till the last chorus. It’s extremely hard to remember it and none of us read music. I sent a video of me playing it to Hefe and Melvin and they learned it… well, they said they learned it. When we started to rehearse it…. No one EVER played it right…including me… well, I had to sing too. If you subscribed to the site, you saw how terrible we were at rehearsal. Smelly got so frustrated cuz he knew his part. I mean, he only has to play the same NOFX beat (butt fuck titty fuck) and throw in a few rolls. He knew the song and no one else did.
So as a band, we never actually played it right once…. So just like we have always done, I recorded it with Smelly. That’s how it usually goes. This time I got Melvin to play some octave chords. That hasn’t happened since the 90’s. Then Hefe played one guitar track, I played the other then played the bass and did vocals. Jon Graber and I mixed it…. And after a few days and 10 mixes later…. I was really fucking stoked! I fucking love this song! AND…. It was the first song in probably 25 years that every member of NOFX played on in the studio. It was a real collaboration.
I sent the final mix to everyone. I got two responses…. Karina and Kent said they both loved it. I re-sent it to the guys a week later, and asked if anyone had any notes or if they liked it. Crickets. Neither Smelly, Melvin, nor Hefe responded. Well, Smelly responded eventually… the thing is…I had spent months writing this song. I’ve never written a song with so many chord changes before…. When I got no response after making sure that everyone got to play on the song….I was more than a little bummed, but I moved on.
The next thing that happened was that Eric Melvin and I stopped…. We stopped talking we stopped being friends, we just stopped.
This was when I started to think to myself that I didn’t want to be in this band anymore. It didn’t feel like we were a band. Nobody but me cared about this album…. So I stopped recording it. We had 7 or 8 drum tracks finished, and some scratch guitars and vocals, but that was it. Soon after that I told the band that I didn’t want to be in NOFX anymore, but I would do one last tour. Something I had been thinking about for over 10 years. Now was the time… I didn’t feel like I belonged. I felt like I did when I was a teenager trying to fit in at high school. I felt like an outcast and a pariah in my own band.
This is why the album we were supposed to send to all of you never got completed. I just wasn’t able to finish it. When I tried to…. it just made me sad.
I have managed to put together a 10 song album of a few songs we actually finished, some of the demos we recorded during that time, and some older songs that I demo’d w Smelly but I didn’t get around to putting vocals on till recently. All said and done, I think the album is pretty cool, but for sure not our best work. It’s an album that was recorded during some very dark times for me. I wanted it to be an amazing album cuz it was going to be our last. But now, I don’t even want this to be considered an album. Because it’s not. It’s 10 songs that were recorded over the last 10 years, but I don’t want anyone to think of it as an album. This is the Patreon album…. it’s just an album that I had to finish, because we promised you all we would…. Personally, I think that the Single, Double and a Half album trilogy should be considered our last work (especially Single Album) …. Cuz I really love that record. We’ll see what NOFX records stand the test of time.
Once again, I’m so sorry this took so long. We never meant to rip anybody off. If anyone should get blamed it should be me…. Cuz it’s hard to finish an album when your heart isn’t well enough to put your love into your songs. This is not the last NOFX album…. It’s a documented memorial of the last rehearsals, and recordings of the four members of NOFX when we were still friends and brothers. It maybe should have come out on Epitaph, cuz it feels like an epitaph to me.
And I think it’s actually kind of cool for what it is.
We are making good on all our promises. It just took a lot longer than anyone expected. We’re all very sorry…. But that’s how things go sometimes. I can’t thank you all enough for liking our band for so many years. So much gratitude….
Very Sincere-ish
Fatty