Discovering a new genre of music is one of life’s little joys. To navigate a web of unfamiliar bands, so giddy to learn more that you hardly make it to the end of a single song, is a special thing.

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Did skateboarding play a role in getting you into music?
It all happened pretty organically. I was a big magazine kid, and I had subscriptions to Skateboarder, Transworld, and then of course Thrasher which had the section at the end with band interviews. I ended up getting turned on to Modest Mouse and Fugazi and other stuff pretty young. So yeah, it all kind of went hand in hand.

I remember I wasn’t allowed to listen to music with swears and stuff as a little kid, so I would sneak stuff home and I snuck home a copy of Flip’s Sorry, which is such a gnarly video, but my dad was more chill about it and he was like, “This guy hosting this video is the singer of the Sex Pistols. Do you know what the Sex Pistols are, son?” So I found out about early punk via Sorry. That video blew my whole world open. I wanted to be a punk so bad after that.

How was the skate scene at that time? I’m guessing you were living in the suburbs outside Chicago or something?
Yep, born and raised in this town called Mundelein, which is up north. Maybe the old heads in the chat will remember Triple R Skatepark, which was this local indoor skatepark that happened to randomly be one of the best in the country. So we would get demos all the time. I got to see [Eric] Koston and [Andrew] Reynolds at demos.

Of all the instruments, how’d you land on drumming?
My dad is a musician. He plays guitar and his favorite band when I was a kid was Rush. So he would show me old Rush concert footage. I thought Neil Peart the drummer was like, I don’t know, a God [laughs]. He’s got 400 drums and he’s going crazy.

Then I heard Nirvana and my brain was like, “I can kind of understand the drum parts.” So I started to try to follow along. My dad got me an old crusty drum set and I spent days listening to music and trying to copy it. That was probably in sixth grade, and I was definitely skating at that time as well.

And then when did you start taking music seriously and join a band?
I joined my first real band when I was a sophomore in high school. I befriended this dude who was in college in Chicago and he was writing these punk songs and we just started to book shows in the city. It snowballed from there. When I got out of high school we started to go on little regional tours and then touring across the country, and then I started meeting everybody that I still know now. His name is Jeff, and that band was called The Please and Thank Yous.

I noticed you’ve been in what I would call a shit ton of bands over the years.
[laughs] Yeah, that’s part of being a drummer. Everybody needs one. I spent a couple years through the 2010s being in six bands at once. I would have band practice and shows every single day. I’m so thankful that it has solidified into just a couple focused projects, but god, I cut my teeth back then. I learned so much playing with so many different people, so many different styles, and different kinds of shows. It’s beneficial to me now.

How do you keep songs memorized and separate when you’re playing in six bands?
I don’t know, man. I think as a drummer you have to have a certain music IQ. I think very melodically, and I have a knack for remembering melodies and the way that rhythm fits into them. I spend a lot of time listening to music though, so sometimes my brain’s CPU gets full, and I’ll be like, “How the fuck does that song go?”

Is there a margin of error that you’re allowed while playing a show? Like do you ever improvise?
Dude, a hundred percent margin of error [laughs]. And so much of it is intuition. As long as you’re listening and making eye contact with your band members, you’ll be ok. It might not be the exact notes that you recorded on the record, but you just hope that the crowd isn’t scrutinizing your every move. Some freaks are out there like that, and they’re like, “I noticed you played that fill a little different,” and I’m like, “Hey, it’s all jazz baby.”

Rat Boys is completely different from previous projects you’ve been a part of, which I would describe as more Midwest Emo. Do you change your approach to drumming in this folk-y, indie-y, band?
It’s been super interesting and educational to play drums with Rat Boys after playing in a lot of louder emo punk bands. I’m conscious about like, am I serving the song correctly? Am I playing over Julia [Steiner]’s lyrics? And it leads to this really interesting strain of folk indie rock that Julia and Dave [Sagan] have been making for a long time. I definitely hear my emo power pop influences shining through still, but I’m conscious of not just bashing over everything. It’s a delicate balance.

And I kind of want to ask the same question but about the live shows. I’m sure the room for Rat Boys is very different from the room with other projects?
A big thing is tempo. For a lot of Rat Boys music, the tempo needs to be reigned in a little bit to allow Julia to be able to sing her lyrics fully and to allow some of Dave’s guitar parts to fully bloom on stage. With Pet Symmetry [another band that Marcus is in] it’s only three of us, and our singer Evan [Weiss] has a louder voice and his words come out faster. So tempo is out the window when I’m playing Pet Sym shows. We can just freight train forward. Also, with Rat Boys the rooms tend to feel more cavernous, so there’s literally more reverb when you hit the snare. So I have to make sure I’m not just filling the room with loud noise. With Pet Sym, we usually play smaller clubs, so it’s a lot tighter of a sound. You can kind of just bludgeon hits.

[laughs] Does playing drums with Rat Boys stifle your ability to fully express yourself, or is there a benefit to holding back?
It’s a totally different kind of expression, and it’s really gratifying to have discipline. I’m really cognizant of smaller drum hits, and I’m really using my ears and listening to my band mates. An awesome piece of advice I got really young was: The last thing you should be listening to is yourself. You should be listening to your band mates first to a point where you almost don’t even hear yourself anymore. So I try to get into that mindset on stage with Rat Boys, and it feels awesome. It’s just as gratifying crushing a slower, softer song as it is crushing a super loud fast one. It’s just different.

I often laugh at emo bands because it can feel like they’re making music for angsty 16-year-olds when they’re 35. So I was wondering, how much of this genre switch can be attributed to you simply getting older?
Pet Sym toured a lot this year. We put out a record and played a good amount of DIY festivals, but we were absolutely the oldest dudes there [laughs]. These young kids are doing backflips on stage and you’re like, “Okay, it’s a bit different now.” I’m just lucky to be in bands where the music held up. Pet Sym’s lyrics aren’t super juvenile or caught in these childish themes, so we can still sing our songs and not feel embarrassed.

Closing up, can you give me your Chicago music Mt. Rushmore?
Absolutely, dude. The first band that came to mind is Joan of Arc, which is Mike and Tim Kinsella. Those two are responsible for many, many bands in the Midwest emo genre, but to me, Joan of Arc is the pinnacle. It’s also kind of the least listenable [laughs], but I love it so dearly. Then the band Tortoise, who are this post-rock, absolute inventors of the genre in Chicago. To me, Tortoise sounds like Chicago. The buildings, the trains, the streets. The third, lesser-known band I’ll say is Castevet. They took a lot of what Tortoise and Joan of Arc were doing and made it into this kind of late 2000s sound, similar to Algernon Cadwallader and Snowing. Fourth, I mean, Wilco. Dude, absolute champions of indie rock. They now run their own label and they record their own music in Chicago. Complete legends.

Words by: Ben Komins
Header photo courtesy of: Miles Kalchik
Mixed by: Adrian Michna
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