When NOBRO hits the road this week with the Descendents and Frank Turner & the Sleeping Souls, it will be the Canadian all-female punk band’s longest tour ever.
But the trek, which stretches from Feb. 13 to March 15, didn’t come without some casualties.
“Well, two of our members got fired for this tour,” singer/bassist Kathryn McCaughey said with a laugh. “I mean, yeah, they got fired-ish, I guess. They’re all on good terms, but they couldn’t take the amount of time off.”
The tour hits the Roxian Theatre in McKees Rocks on Feb. 17. It will be NOBRO’s first time in Pittsburgh, but McCaughey is familiar with the city’s NFL team.
“I found a Pittsburgh Steelers jacket in the garbage,” she said with a laugh. “But I washed it, and now I wear it.”
It’s been a tumultuous period for NOBRO, which saw the departure of half the band last year, right before winning a Juno (the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys) for rock album of the year for their debut.
“I just think that we got hit in the face last year… And we’re like, OK, so maybe it’s not the end of this. Maybe it’s just the phoenix rebirth,” guitarist Karolane Carbonneau said with a laugh.
In a Zoom call last week from Montreal, McCaughey and Carbonneau spoke with TribLive about the tour, their new single “Doomtown” and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.
You’ll be touring with the Descendents and Frank Turner, so what stands out to you about those two bands?
Carbonneau: Frank Turner, we’ve known him for a couple years now. He’s a really nice guy. We’ve played some shows with him in Montreal and in Las Vegas. The Descendents, it’s so cool. It’s a classic punk band, can’t wait to meet them. I wonder if they still party. (laughs)
McCaughey: I hear that Bill Stevenson is, he’s on fire. Did you watch that documentary (“Filmage”) about him, Karo?
Carbonneau: No, I didn’t.
McCaughey: It’s pretty crazy. It goes through the whole career of the Descendents and then Bill Stevenson when Milo went to college and then Bill Stevenson continued on and his trajectory in music, and then he ended up getting a brain tumor at one point. And the doctor who was his brain surgeon was like, holy (expletive), are you in Descendents? And he’s like, yeah. And he performed brain surgery on him. And then they cut to the crowd, and the doctor is in the crowd with his shirt off like, yeah. Anyways, it was so crazy.
Have you had any crazy experiences like that? You haven’t seen any of your doctors out in the crowd or anything like that?
Carbonneau: Not yet. (laughs)
McCaughey: Wait till we get older, then we’ll get back to you. (laughs)
You’ve toured with some big bands before, opening for Blink-182 and Rise Against. Does it get any easier seeing these big names and being on the same stage as them?
Carbonneau: We’re really excited, but for sure now we know how to tour with big bands like that. We are better with organizing ourselves and everything, but it’s a pretty big tour. It’s the biggest we’re going to do. It’s a little bit more than a month, so that’s going to be an adventure.
The band’s latest single is “Doomtown,” so what was the genesis of that song?
McCaughey: We had a pretty big situation, life-altering moments last year, in the last couple years. Half our band quit last year, and Karo and I decided to keep going forward, and we had a lot of things in our personal lives that weren’t super fun to deal with, so we just took the opportunity to write about lament, I guess.
Carbonneau: I think it’s the first sad song that we have that we released.
I know that it’s a serious song, so was that a harder subject to tackle compared to, say, “Let’s Do Drugs”?
McCaughey: Both have their challenges, for sure. (laughs) Because you have to be honest, right? You got to be honest when you write songs, and, yeah, we really rely on humor, especially like tongue-in-cheek humor. We like to insert a lot of jokes into our music. And this one, it wasn’t so “ha ha” funny, but we’re still laughing.
Carbonneau: Yeah and I think that we wanted to try something new, and the next album is gonna be a little bit sad but a little bit funny too. It’s gonna be a cool mix in between so just putting out this song was a statement. We worked with John Agnello. He’s a producer and he worked with one of my favorite bands, Sonic Youth, and we just wanted to try different producing techniques and recording, and it became a song.
Did you feel comfortable getting into those more personal issues with the song? Or was that something that you were worried about because you mentioned about being tongue-in-cheek with a lot of the other songs?
McCaughey: I think it’s really hard to be vulnerable in general. I think that, because of the internet and the way that we use social media, I think we see it a lot, people just oversharing. It’s just a lot of information. You know when you’re on Instagram, all of a sudden, you know so much of a person’s life. And you’re like, how do I know all that? It’s so weird. And you kind of recoil. You’re like, I don’t want to participate in that. It’s such a fine line with art or whatever, because you want to insert yourself and you want to be authentic to yourself and what you’re doing, but you also don’t want to overshare. You don’t want to come off as performative. Anyways, it’s just weird. And getting to know your feelings is very awkward. You have to examine yourself. Sometimes you see things that you don’t like, sometimes you feel things that are uncomfortable. Anyways, it’s part of growing up or whatever. I don’t know. It’s hard.
If you’re coming from a singer-songwriter background, it would be no big deal sharing personal stuff, but punk, it’s maybe not as prevalent.
McCaughey: Yeah, it’s also just kind of like, the place where we’re at — and maybe you feel like this too, Karo — it’s all fun and games until there are real consequences, you see your loved ones get older and go through things. And you see you can’t just keep a band together with a couple hopeful dreams.
Carbonneau: It’s a lot harder than we think in general. Life is hard.
McCaughey: Life is really hard.
When the people quit the band, were there questions about whether you wanted to keep the band going?
McCaughey: It was like suspended in the air. For me, I was like, OK, well, it’s a very uncertain time, but you have to be very brave. You have to find it within you to believe in yourself, more than you’ve ever believed in anything in your life. And I think that any musician or artist can relate to this, but when you’re doing this, you have to just commit to it being really amazing, and it being really (bad). And no matter what your project is, you have to commit to it 100%. And we just at that moment, we threw ourselves back into it. And it was one of the best decisions, I think, personally, that I made.
Carbonneau: Yeah, I guess it puts things in perspective, and we had to think about our future and what we really want to do in life with this band, because it’s a life project. It’s not just a little band that I play with on the weekend and I jam with some friends. It’s a family, it’s a commitment and yeah, I think, even if it was hard, I think it’s a good thing that this happened because now we’re just stronger.
Has it been a smooth transition with the new band members?
McCaughey: Yeah, it’s surprisingly super easy. (laughs)
Carbonneau: Yeah, they’re so stoked. We’re just having fun, like we just discovered new friends now. And, yeah, I can’t wait to be with them in the van for more than 30 days. (laughs)
This will be the longest tour of your career. So what are the best things about touring? What are the worst things about touring?
Carbonneau: The best thing is that Kathryn is really organized. She’s really good at finding good restaurants, and so this is going to be a good thing. I think we’re going to eat so well. I’m so happy about that. And bad things, we might get sick at some point. When somebody gets sick, everybody gets sick. But it’s kind of like a bubble when you’re on tour, and when you go out of it, when you return home, something is missing, and you go through a small depression for a couple days, just to be in your normal life again. I think it’s just going to be another life experience.
You mentioned new music so is “Doomtown” part of the new album or a standalone? Do you have a plan?
McCaughey: We’ve got music in the bank. We’re not sure if it’s going to be part of an album yet, because we actually have more songs for an album. But it shall be revealed in time.
Carbonneau: The truth is that we don’t know yet because we are looking for a U.S. label right now, so it all depends on what’s our deal with them and what we’re gonna look for. But for sure, there’s music that’s gonna be released in the next year, and we just don’t know when exactly for now.