INTERVIEW: GRAHAM HUNT

THE WISCONSIN SONG MASTER HAD MY DAD AS HIS HIGH SCHOOL PHOTOGRAPHY TEACHER

Graham Hunt made my favorite indie rock record of 2022. It’s called If You Knew Would You Believe It and it sounds like a lost collaboration between Paul Westerberg and the Dust Brothers. It’s full of hooks and breakbeats and Heartland Soul. He also had my father as his high school photo teacher, for whatever that’s worth.

Back to the record: on it, Hunt gets into themes very close to my heart. I can picture a Milwaukee punk house or dive bar while each chorus rings out. This sets the music apart from whatever 23-year-old is currently filling a spot on one of those “genreless” Spotify playlists and cites Mac DeMarco as a major influence. 

If You Knew Would You Believe It is an outgrowth of Hunt’s band Midnight Reruns, who wrote some of the best Midwestern power pop songs of the 2010s. Before that, he played in a variety of street punk bands, a fact that I did not know until recently but makes a lot of sense given some of his most recent album’s lyrical content. Related: Before I conducted this interview, I did not know that at one point Hunt had a mohawk. I learned a lot. 

So, you had my dad as your high school photography teacher?

Yes. That’s true. I didn’t even know he was your dad, actually, until later. Until after high school. But that was sophomore, junior and senior year of high school. 

You took it for three years.

I took all three levels of photography.

I heard he was a fairly mellow teacher.

Super mellow. Yeah. He had a little bit of a beaten-down quality to him, where he was kind of like, “You know, here’s what I think is good, but you guys can really do whatever.” He would always have Pandora on, and it was always like CCR Pandora. I remember that. So, that was cool. There was always good music in there. But, yeah, he was extremely chill. That’s for sure.

It’s funny. I’m a talker and he’s a talker, and I think the older I get the more I realize that teaching was an outlet for his performative side.

Interesting. Like, talking to the kids?

Yeah, but maybe by the time you had him he was less like that. It was pretty late in his career, you know? 

Is he still doing it?

No, he’s retired now, and he’s been retired for a long time. You probably had him towards the end of his run. You were playing in bands around that time, right? You told me you were in a street punk band.

Yeah, I was in a bunch of different street punk bands.

Tell me about that scene, because I was still living in Milwaukee around then, but I was not plugged into the street punk game.

It was this basement in Riverwest called The Outhouse, which is where all the shows were. Did you ever go there?

No. Don’t even know about it. This is like a parallel universe.

Yeah, I remember thinking it was kind of weird that these different punk scenes existed side by side. I didn’t know anything about The Vault or whatever, I didn’t know about that until right before I graduated high school, or maybe right after. That shit was going on a couple blocks away, and I had no idea that it even existed.

The Outhouse was booking touring bands?

Yeah, definitely. There was this band Larry and His Flask that I remember played down there. They were kind of a street punk thing, then I think they got famous later playing bluegrass music or something.

Yeah, that’s a weird pipeline. The street punk-to-bluegrass pipeline. 

For sure. It was a lot of teeangers and people in their early-20s and some weird older punk dudes. They’d be selling dollar things of Red Dog. There’s that liquor store on Pierce that’s right next to Mad Planet, you know what I’m talking about?

Yup.

I remember that one was, like–I had a fake ID that said I was 6-foot-6 and had blue eyes and red hair and was, like, 250 pounds. Totally not anything that I look like at all. But I used that there all the time when I was 16, 17. They never asked me about it.

Did you have the full gear? Any mohawks?

I think at 15 I had a mohawk. I had a red one, then I think I dyed it black. I remember shaving the sides at one point and realizing I had a lumpy head, I have moles and shit on my head. I was like, Ah, damn, I don’t know if this is the look for me. But, yeah, I had all sorts of, you know, the two belts bullshit, and I had the half-black, half-green, spiky hair, studded denim leather. The whole shebang. 

At what point did you sort of ditch that? And was that around the time you started Midnight Reruns?

There was this transition area. I feel like with that street punk shit, The Exploding Hearts were a band that was on the list of things that you were allowed to like.

They were the power pop band that both garage rockers and street punk people could like.

Totally. Yeah, and so I really connected with that a lot, so that got me into Nick Lowe and shit like that, my dad had a Nick Lowe CD that I stole from him and listened to a lot. It got me into other things that weren’t punk. I was like, Oh maybe my identity isn’t being punk or whatever, maybe it’s just that I like music. And The Replacements were also huge for that, because I really liked them–then I started reading about bands they liked and got into Big Star and The Rolling Stones. It’s like, OK, I like other things besides punk. 

So that’s around Midnight Returns time?

There was a transition band between the street punk band when I was high school and Midnight Reruns. It was all street punk kids, but we were all trying to be power pop or whatever, and we’d wear polka dots and straighten our hair and stuff.

When you were doing that band, is that when you met all the Milwaukee garage rock people?

Yeah, that’s when I became aware of those people. And that’s when I was like 18. I was writing songs that I wanted to sing, and we all wanted to kick our singer out and have me be the singer, but we did the cowardly move: everyone quit the band and we just started the band again without that guy.

And that was Midnight Reruns?

Yeah, and by then I was fully, like, there was no commitment left to the street punk identity or lifestyle. 

I’ll probably write this in the beginning of the article, but when I tell people about your record I tell people it sounds like Paul Westerberg did a record with the Dust Brothers.

That’s a very nice thing to say.

How much of that punk era of your songwriting are you still bringing into these new records?

The thing about punk, when I was a kid, that really drew me to it: everything was very song-based, you know? People liked things like Cock Sparrer or whatever, where there’s a chorus, everyone can sing along to it, it’s very catchy. A lot of that stuff, for all the trying to be transgressive or whatever, it’s all based on a traditional kind of songwriting. That’s maybe why I gravitated towards it. I’ve always liked the same kind of thing–as I learned more about it, I started to get interested in it in more and more complex ways.

It’s funny, your record: There’s definitely this thing happening where maybe more Zoomers are getting into breakbeats and a certain era of music, but your songwriting is a lot more focused than some of that, which can be like, for better or worse, more based on vibes than choruses.

Yeah, totally, I agree, and that’s maybe one of the reasons why I gravitated towards punk in high school. I was aware of indie rock, but indie rock in 2006 or whatever was Arcade Fire and stuff like that. I wanted nothing to do with that. It was for the soccer jocks–they played soccer instead of football and had liberal parents and maybe wore skinny jeans or whatever. They really liked TV On The Radio and Arcade Fire. I was like, I want to not be this at all. Because I thought that all indie rock was that. Actually, I haven’t given TV On The Radio a chance since then, maybe I’d like them now, I have no idea. Definitely don’t like Arcade Fire still. I just thought that term meant that everything was that sort of thing. It wasn’t until I was 19 or 20 or something that I had people show me Pavement or Guided By Voices. It was like, I thought I hated all indie rock, but I guess I like this. 

Did you listen to Beck growing up?

No, you know, I’ve had a lot of people tell me that this record reminds them of Beck. And I like Beck. When I was growing up, I would leave “Loser” on the radio if it came on, and all the songs I’ve heard by him, all the hits, I’m always into, but I never had a Beck phase. It’s kind of interesting how that happened.

I guess when you’re fucking with breakbeats, when you’re doing indie rock-ish songwriting over breakbeats, inevitably some people are going to say Beck. What was crazy to me about this record was you telling me that there were not many samples on it. 

So you know Sahan [Jayasuriya], we play in a hardcore band together, we’ve known each other for a long time. I was always talking back in the day about how I wanted to do a baggy kind of record, because I was really into Creation Records kind of stuff and Happy Mondays and Primal Scream and all that shit. We also just thought it was funny: that type of shit, it’s such a time and place, the idea of an American guy trying to make Madchester–it's literally got the city in the name–currently in a different place is just so stupid. We thought I should do it one day, it would just be funny. Years went by and he recorded a baggy-ish beat with tambourine stuff, he made a loop and told me I should do something with it. I sped it up a little bit, but then I wrote “Atwood” over that and that was the first song I wrote for the record. I wasn’t even planning on making another record, at least not right away, but that was the catalyst for it. 

After I found that out I had to hit up Sahan for some breakbeats. It made me want to start rhyming again.

He told me, yeah.

I haven’t done anything yet but I can’t wait to rap again. It’s going to be a funny thing to sit down and try to do that.

Yeah, he’s really good at playing drums that way. He does a super minimal drum technique where it’s just two mics. Like you said, it sounds like a sample of an old record or something, but it’s just him playing the drums.

And next you’re going on tour with Narrow Head.

Yeah.

They’re sort of a hardcore-adjacent band, right?

Yeah, I think they come from that scene, so it’s a lot of people that are into hardcore music that like them. They sound kind of nü metal to me, a little bit. 

I gotta check it. I feel like there’s this whole sub-subgenre of hardcore where it’s like hardcore kids playing shoegaze or Britpop or nü metal.

That’s kind of the vibe. They’re kind of doing all three of those a little bit.

It’s all good, though: you can go on stage and tell the crowd that you used to have a mohawk. But it’s the wrong hardcore crowd, so they’ll hate that.

That’s true, yeah. That is another thing–a lot of hardcore bands, the music is so similar to street punk, to me, but the culture is completely different. Very weird.

With all of this stuff, you play an outsider these genres next to each other and they’re not going to be able to tell any difference, but if you show them pictures of the fans, they’re going to see a difference there.

I feel like street punk, on any sort of large scale, has no cultural relevance. People always say that Gen Z people, they just like whatever: they aren’t forming a sort of all-encompassing identity or aesthetic. So I don’t know, maybe more hardcore kids will get into street punk shit. One thing I will say is that a lot of street punk sucks. It does not hold up. Some of it does, but a lot of it is really bad music.

If You Knew Would You Believe It is out now on Smoking Room. Graham Hunt on Instagram