The Front Bottoms Reflect on How Far They’ve Come for a Band Whose Name Means “Vaginas”

Photo by Mark Jaworski

Considering their name is a not-so-subtle euphemism for vagina, the Front Bottoms are becoming a big thing. This is clearly evident from the way, just before this interview, four fans—three girls and one guy—squeal with near orgasmic delight after front-Front Bottom Brian Sella gives them autographs and poses for pictures. Later, it’s even more evident—the crowd’s hysteria at New York’s Best Buy Theater is more akin to a One Direction show. Or, for a more favorable musical comparison, the Beatles’ famous 1965 gig at Shea Stadium. Because, despite what the name suggests, the Front Bottoms—completed by drummer/founding member Mathew Uychich, plus Tom Warren on bass and Ciaran O’Donnell on keyboard, trumpet and guitar—are actually very good. But they weren’t always. Before 2011’s self-titled LP and last year’s kind-of breakthrough effort Talon Of The Hawk, they self-released two other albums, I Hate Your Friends and My Grandma Vs. Pneumonia, and an EP, Brothers Can’t Be Friends. The EP’s not bad, but—how to put this nicely?—the albums are hardly masterpieces. But that’s OK, because the New Jersey four-piece has just released Rose, an EP named after Uychich’s grandmother which contains re-recordings of six early songs. They sound phenomenally better, too. Luckily, that’s something Sella doesn’t seem to mind being told.

Noisey: Not to offend you, but your first two records are nowhere near as good as self-titled and Talon Of The Hawk. There’s a huge leap in who you’ve become as musicians and when you listen to these reworked versions on Rose, you can really hear it.
Brian Sella: Absolutely. Those first two albums, me and Mat would record them live in one take and we wouldn’t mix them or master them and we put them on the internet that night. That was our mindset. We wanted to play live—here’s some music, check it out! Really, at that point, I wanted my friends to hear it. I didn’t think anybody was going to listen to it. And then when we started playing these shows people were like, “Oh, what about ‘Flying Model Rockets?’ What about ’12 Feet Deep?’’ And it was like, “What?! What do you mean?” That was, like, at this point, five or six years ago. But those original recordings have such a personality to them. But I agree. The recording is… I’d personally rather listen to a better recording.

Which is what you’ve done now.
Exactly. And it was a way to kill two birds with one stone. People would ask, “What’s the deal with those songs?” and there was never any deal with them. That was it. We recorded them and put them on the internet. Never thought that anybody would listen to them. Done. And then all of a sudden it was like, “Can you play that?” and it was like, “Shit, I don’t even know if I remember how…” So it was a nice way to go back and re-learn them. And I do really enjoy those songs.

Absolutely. “12 Feet Deep” is one of my favorites. That’s how I discovered those two records, because I saw you play that song somewhere and was like, “How do I find this?” There was some random site that had those albums, probably illegally, and so I downloaded them.
Good. That was sort of the thing, too. There was nowhere to get, like, a bank of probably 40 songs unless you went on the internet and dug around and did research. And if you really wanted the songs then you could find them. Which I think added a lot to the songs. If people wanted them, they had to find them and then they could download them. There was nowhere to buy them. So I think that that had a lot to do with why people liked the songs. It was a quest.

You just said you didn’t expect anyone to hear these songs. And not to go on about your name, because I’m sure you get enough of it, but does that explain it? I don’t believe that you didn’t know what it meant when you named the band.
Well, I knew it was something funny. I thought it was calling it like a wiener or something like that. Which I think it is. But over in the UK, that means something more specific. So everybody sort of has a different idea of what it means. Like, my mom, I don’t think she really realized until a little while in, like, “Oh, wait—the front bottom.” But even that—with the old songs, I didn’t think anybody would listen to them. With the name, I didn’t think anybody would ever ask me about the name of the band. Honestly. Then to have someone ask, “What’s the deal with the name?” It’s like, I wish I could tell you!

It’s like ‘fanny’ in the US and the UK, where it means “ass” over here and “vagina” over there. So when Americans talk about fanny packs, it sounds pretty odd. But it’s just a cultural difference.
Exactly. But I think that’s cool.

Photo by Jade Esson

So you don’t regret the name of the band now that you’ve got to this stage?
No. Especially at this point. If I regret it, it’s too late. And always when it came up about whether we should change the name, me and Mat were always just like, “No, fuck that. Whatever. This is our name. If you don’t like it then you don’t like it.” I do know that there’s probably a lot of people who are just going to look at the name and be like, “That’s stupid as hell. I’m never going to listen to the music.” Which is another reason why I feel like the people who like the music really like the music, because they’ve got to get past that stupidness.

Yet your lyrics are anything but stupid, which is what really drew me in in the first place. Where does that love of language and these ideas come from? And do you have a favorite metaphor that you’ve used?
I’m dyslexic, and reading has always been very difficult for me. Writing as a kid in school, I was horrible at it. Everybody said: “You are not good at this. You don’t know how to spell, you don’t know how to do these things.” But when I was home, I could write in notebooks and nobody was grading them. Nobody looked at them. So I could fill these notebooks and get this emotion out of me through writing, and I think it had a lot to do with the fact that they told me I was bad at this—so I was just, “I’m just going to keep doing this. Who cares? They’re never going to see this.” It was this secret little thing that I could do and really blow off steam and stress. So I think that… wait. What was your question?

I don’t remember. Oh—lyrics. Where these ideas come from. Because they’re really involved metaphors.
I don’t know. I don’t know where it comes from, but I’m happy. I don’t really have a favorite. I like the lyrics of “Maps” because that was one of the first songs where I felt I was in a band. Mat’s brother [Bryan] was standing over here writing a keyboard part and we were all talking and discussing and we figured it out. It was rewarding on a very selfish level, like “I did this!” I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about…

No, it’s interesting. But now you’re a long way from there. For a start, you’re a proper four-piece.
Yeah, we have Ciaran and Tom now. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, obviously, but these guys wrote Talon Of The Hawk with us, they’ve been on the road with us for a year-and-a-half/two years and they are the reason why the Front Bottoms are what they are right now. It’s because of those two, without a doubt, and I love them so much. And before, when we had Drew [Villafuerte, former touring keyboard player and bassist] in the band—same thing. I love him. We toured with him for a year and made the self-titled with him, but he needed to be at home so he was at home. But those dudes are definitely part of it at this point. But Tom is classically trained and Ciaran is just fantastic, so they can definitely make up for the lack of… in terms of guitar, I can play power chords and that’s all I ever really needed personally for myself, because I was like, “I want to write poems! I want to write weird stuff! And all I need is three chords, or two even, sometimes.” So they definitely help fill it in and make it more like music!

So how did you get better? Let’s go back to those original albums. I’m intrigued about the process that changed the Front Bottoms of those first two albums into the band you are now.
I think it had a lot to do with the fact that we’ve been on tour for like four years. Like, every day for four years I’ve played music and I’ve been with Mat. For 24 hours a day, on tour, never really asleep and never really having time alone, always being with Ciaran and Tom—that constant playing every night. You get your chops. And I started thinking about how the songs were written, about how songs are written, whereas before I was like, “I don’t care—nobody’s going to listen to this shit, so let’s just do what we want to do.” But really, I think it had a lot to do with the fact that we’ve been playing together for years at this point. It’s basically all we have.

It comes across like you guys are all best friends who are out there having the times of your lives. Maybe that’s because of your videos, too, because it’s as if they’re these adventures of a gang of two or three or however many are in the band at the time. And it’s silly and fun, but at the same time there’s also a real sadness to your music.
Absolutely. We have a very, very dear friend, Mark Jaworski, who takes most of our photos and makes most of our videos and stuff, and when the label says something like, “How about you take some silly photos?” his response is always “I want you to listen to ‘Twin Size Mattress’ and tell me that that’s a silly song.” So some people are going to get it. Back in the day, kids would always come up and be like, “Dude, your songs are funny as hell.” And then the next person would come up almost in tears and be like, “I listen to you when I’m the saddest I’ve ever felt.” And it’s like “OK, cool—so that’s able to relate to all sides.” It’s a cool feeling.

So who do you think your audience is? Because you have a lot of younger fans, but I don’t think that it’s necessarily music for a young audience. I can relate to these songs at the age I am now, and also as the 18-year-old I once was, and everything in between.
That’s awesome. And I think that a younger audience is able to be a little more open-minded and say, “Oh, this is sad, but it’s also funny as hell.” A kid would be like: “The Front Bottoms. That’s funny. But also stupid. But I like it because of that.” But a lot of older people come to the shows, too, which was surprising to me, but we got a push from NPR which I think had a lot to do with it. And I think that the music is good enough that even if you don’t love it, it’s like, “Well, this isn’t horrible…”

Is there pressure on you now that there is an audience?
I think that if you start writing songs for any other reason than to just write, it’s not going to be good. I personally feel that you have to… like, those old recording—they suck. But the emotion and the personality is there. And me and Mat always used to say—because we’d record in a friend’s basement—and we’d always say to justify the quality of the sound was that if you like the songs, you’re not going to care about how bad the recording is. And that was always our mindset. And I think we’re going to continue that mindset. Obviously, we’re going to try to polish up the recording quality of it, but what it comes down to is that the songs are the songs. You’ve got to write them the way that you want to write them and that’s it.

Mischa Pearlman is a British writer living in the US and totally giggles when he hears “front bottom.”

Rose is out from Bar/None Records.

The Front Bottoms are on tour with Say Anything, the So So Glos, and You Blew It!:

Jul 01 Toad’s Place New Haven, CT

Jul 02 Upstate Concert Hall Clifton Park, NY

Jul 03 Lost Horizon Syracuse, NY

Jul 05 Opera House Toronto, ON

Jul 06 Mr. Small’s Theatre Pittsburgh, PA

Jul 08 Common Ground Fest Lansing, MI

Jul 09 Newport Music Hall Columbus, OH

Jul 10 The Blue Note Columbia, MO

Jul 11 Concord Music Hall Chicago, IL

Jul 12 The Rave Milwaukee, WI

Jul 13 Varsity Theater Minneapolis, MN

Jul 15 Bourbon Theatre Lincoln, NE

Jul 16 Summit Music Hall Denver, CO

Jul 17 Club Sound Salt Lake City, UT

Jul 19 Showbox at The Market Seattle, WA

Jul 20 Crystal Ballroom Portland, OR

Jul 22 The Regency Ballroom San Francisco, CA

Jul 24 The Fonda Theatre Los Angeles, CA

Jul 25 The Glass House Pomona, CA

Jul 26 House of Blues San Diego, CA

Jul 27 The Marquee Tempe, AZ