Stonerider’s Jason Krutzky talks new album with Brother Hawk’s J.B. Brisendine

Brother Hawk’s J.B Brisendine and Stonerider’s Jason Krutzky talk about their new albums.

MUSICIAN ON MUSICIAN: Jason Krutzky (second from right) laughs it up with his Stonerider bandmates.
Photo credit: Photo by Kate Lamb

“I run hot,” proclaims J.B. Brisendine, singer-songwriter and guitarist of Brother Hawk. He’s explaining why he prefers cold pressed iced coffee, but he may as well be referencing his own Modus Operandi. The man leaves enough blood, sweat, and tears on stage to verify his statement. Across from him on the patio of Dancing Goats, Stonerider drummer Jason Krutzky laughs and professes to be the complete opposite. Perhaps his naturally cool disposition requires hot coffee for equilibrium even though he works outside. Both bands are on the verge of releasing their first albums in four years — Brother Hawk’s Big Medicine and Stonerider’s Hologram. A mutual respect between Brother Hawk and Stonerider has been in place since the inception of the two bands, and since their paths cross at this important milestone, the bands will coalesce for a co-headline co-album release show at The Earl on May 28.

How many years has it been since the last Brother Hawk album?

JB:  Everything we’ve done has been little EP’s and stuff. We did the live session Half Life in 2014, and we did physically release that. The last album was Affairs Of Plain Living, 2012. There’s material from both of those on this full-length, which is kind of like stopping and treating the things that we’ve done like demos. This is like best foot forward, real studio, real engineer, real mastering dude, real time shit, real money, a real full-length that we are 100% proud of from top to bottom for the first time ever. From my perspective, and I’m sure everybody else in the band agrees with me, it sounds like our band. This is a new starting point. We’re still at that point where most of what we’re doing is acquiring fans. When someone hears about our band, I don’t want them to hear the thing we did in our buddy’s basement four years ago when they go Google our fucking name. I want them to hear what we are and what we do. That’s the whole point of this, it’s a mission statement almost: This is what our shit’s about.

BAND OF BROTHERS: J.B. Brisendine (second from left) in Brother Hawk's Big Medicine" video."
Photo credit: Photo by Bear Allison

The last Stonerider album was also 2012. There has been a significant change in your sound since then.

JK: I imagine that come next record we might sound different again, at least to a degree.

Listening to your records it might seem like a huge jump, but Atlantan’s who have seen you during the time between would probably realize ...

JK: ... It’s all been coming. We just haven’t been playing a ton live. We went through lulls between 2012 and now where we weren’t playing for months. We get so caught up in writing, it becomes the only thing we want to do (laughs).

It seems like you guys write a lot of music. How did you decide which songs you wanted to use for this album?

JK: Those are the songs that everybody said “yeah, that’s the shit.” There’s so many ideas that don’t make it past rehearsal because someone in the band wasn’t feeling it. So that’s what Hologram is, it’s just the songs that represent the ideas that we had.

JB: I think that shows like crazy in your record too. I don’t think anyone would ever hear your record and think one person sat down and wrote it. You’d never get that vibe, everything is so orchestrated, it’s an obvious team effort.

JK: It was our first foray and maybe our last into a conceptual album. When it first started, that wasn’t the idea. But after a couple of songs, it started feeling like, “well, there’s a running theme in these songs, let’s see if we can continue it.” There’s parts of the record that only exist to facilitate the story. It almost became easier to write once we knew what the story was going to be. If you have a story to tell in a song, it almost inspires how you write your music for it.

JB: I can’t fathom writing in that process.

What is the Brother Hawk process like?

JB: Our process is the path of least resistance. We strive for everything to be as natural as possible. What are we feeling? What’s right? It always comes somehow. Or it will come when I wake up in the middle of the fucking night and figure it out and bring it to practice. We’ll jam on something, and if it goes somewhere, cool. I will spend time on something, but I don’t force anything.

JK: The path of least resistance is absolutely the way to go.

JB: Yeah, because you want it to feel good at all times. And sometimes, it’s not the path of least resistance, but it works somehow. Sometimes you just drill something and all the sudden it clicks, and you’re like “Holy shit!,” and it’s just figuring out where to draw that line.

It seems like with Stonerider there is a collaborative effort on lyrics as well as music. Do you pass ideas back and forth?

JK: We do pass ideas back and forth. We actually sat down and had a writing session once, and it was probably the one time we did it, and we wrote “Hologram.” Adam McIntyre, former bassist has a wall in his house that you can write on, and he just scribbled some lyric, I don’t remember what. And then I wrote one, and Matt Tanner guitar, vocals wrote one, and by the end of it we had “Hologram” the album’s title track. And that became kind of a beacon point for the rest of the album. We didn’t do the rest of lyrics necessarily that way. It was an experiment to see what would happen because we needed lyrics for the tune. I think we came out with the best lyrics of the record, maybe, that way.

JB: That’s awesome. The only time I’ve ever done any type of lyrical collaboration is the song “Big Medicine.” My brother and I wrote that song together before Brother Hawk was even a band. I guess with our thing, there’s a little bit more of a songwriter vibe to it. It’s all personal, I’m not a good storyteller about something that happened to somebody else. Everything I sing about is something I’m thinking or feeling, in some way. The exception being “Midnight In Tifton,” I wrote that song about my parents, but I can sit there and see that and feel it. I wrote that song from my Dad’s perspective. But “Big Medicine,, my brother and I wrote it about my family. It’s one of those things where it’s the only time that I’ve ever been able to do that because that person shared that experience so we could write about it together. I almost cry every time we play “Midnight In Tifton,” it always has an impact on me one way or another. Highly emotional.

JK: Emo blues.

JB: It is emotionally charged music to the highest degree. Especially when I write lyrics, I can’t write lyrics unless I’m having an emotional time.

How many times have you guys played together?

JK: Oh man, a lot.

JB: Maybe 30? Not enough. We want to be on a co-headlining tour 200 days out of the year. It’s tough for us to get out of town because of the level that we are both at, but we try to do as much as we can. When we started Brother Hawk, Stonerider was the first band where we were like, “oh we can play with them.”

JK: What’s cool too, is that I remember seeing your early bands in high school.

JB: Yeah, same.

JK: When we were 18 years old — years before I knew J.B. — I saw J.B.’s bands. We came from the same musical world. I started playing with Matt when I was 17, around the same time you started playing with James. Conyers bred so many musicians.

JB: I guess you could just say the suburbs of Atlanta bred so many musicians. They’re all connected, there’s just bands going all the fucking time. When you’re kids and you’re not old enough to be a part of anything in Atlanta yet, but you’re old enough to play, and know that you want to play, that’s how things start.

Brother Hawk, Stonerider, and Tedo Stone play the Earl on Sat., May 28. $10-$12. 8:30 p.m. 529 Flat Shoals Ave. 404-228-6769. www.529atlanta.com.