The Treasure Fleet is a new Chicago band that consists of Isaac Thotz and Dave Merriman of The Arrivals, Neil Hennessy of The Lawrence Arms and Smoking Popes, Eli Caterer of Smoking Popes and Mike Oberlin of Sass Dragons. We spoke with Isaac and Neil and talked in detail about how the band formed, their unique sound, their upcoming album for Recess Records and more.

Bill – When did The Treasure Fleet form?

Isaac – Well, I guess in ‘09 Neil and I started getting together and playing this batch of songs that I had. That’s really when Treasure Fleet started, but before that there was another band. Or, here’s how it happened. There was a punk festival in Chicago in the summer of ‘07, called Mauled By Tigers. The guys from Toys That Kill/Underground Railroad to Candyland were coming into town and they were supposed to stay with me for the weekend. They were all flying in, so I was also acting as their chauffeur while they were here. The fest itself was a really, really awesome lineup, a lot of bands I’d been hearing about but never seen, like Screaming Females, Shellshag and Future Virgins. That was the first time I’d seen URTC. And I was already excited about the scene here in Chicago just then because of Sass Dragons, The Brokedowns, Bust and this whole new batch of punk bands that were coming up and making us feel like what we were doing with The Arrivals wasn’t just a waste of time. So it was a really exciting and awesome weekend for those reasons, and the people and the scene were super positive in general at Mauled By Tigers. Both nights of the fest there ended up being parties at my place and I was living in Pilsen at the time. They weren’t crazy, raging parties, but we partied pretty good, like when I’d wake up in the morning there’d be four other people in my bed and seven others sleeping on the floor, and lots of people who I didn’t know hanging out all night. In between all that, we were driving around Chicago to places those guys wanted to go, like we went to Hot Doug’s for example. Todd C., (from Recess Records, Toys That Kill, URTC) was on a big Syd Barrett and T. Rex kick at that time, so whenever we’d get in the van that’s what he’d put on. By that Sunday, I was just out of my mind from partying and not sleeping, and then the last thing I saw that weekend was a daytime show at Ronny’s. I saw Shellshag and URTC. After that I had to go home, because my wife, who’d gone out of town with our two young kids for the weekend, had come back to town and I had to do my part of watching the kids and making up for the lost weekend. At that time, Ronnie, the drummer from The Arrivals, was living downstairs from us. I remember as soon as I got home from the Candyland show, I sat downstairs and I went on and on to Ronnie about how we were going to start this new band. I had an idea for it and it was going to be kind of psychedelic, ‘60s, mod pop stuff. My mind was just blazing then. I was on fire. Then after a bit of that, I went upstairs and told my wife that I’d take the kids to the park. On the way to the park, I started humming this tune and that would become, essentially, the first Treasure Fleet song. Anyway, so while we were at the park, I was thinking of this song and I was just kind of half watching the kids play. My daughter was three and a half at the time and my son was almost one. My son wasn’t even really walking yet, but he was starting to hold onto things to help himself stand up by that point. And my son, Cyric is his name, he was at the base of a slide and he was leaning on the slide and trying to stand up. He was just toddling around there and I was just hanging out, watching him and my daughter. Then the next thing I know, all of a sudden Cyric is balling his head off. I run over there and I didn’t see it happen, but apparently Cyric had lost his grip on the slide and fallen forward and done a face-plant. So I went over and picked him up, and when I did there was blood everywhere, just streaming out of his mouth, all over him, all over the slide. I was totally freaked out, in shock. These two mothers were there, they saw me and they were terrified. They ran over to help. I remember, one of the mothers had this chubby twelve-year-old boy at the park and she grabbed him and ripped his shirt off and ran over to me. She grabbed Cyric from me because I was just sort of standing there dumbfounded and she started mopping up the blood with this other kid’s shirt. I’m just covered in blood at this point and so is Cyric. My daughter is freaking out and this lady, she doesn’t even speak any English. She’s holding Cyric and I don’t know what to do, but I figure she knows better than me at this point, so I just let her hold him and I phone my wife. I tell her to hurry over, that Cyric was hurt and we might have to go to the hospital. We lived about four blocks away from the park and my wife just ran over on foot. That took, I don’t know, five minutes. She was fast. By the time she got there it was crazy, Cyric went from screaming bloody murder to where he had totally calmed down. And it looked like the bleeding had stopped. I don’t remember if he had any teeth, but anyway, we looked in his mouth and his tongue was there and everything looked okay. I just felt like absolute shit though, like the worst parent in the world. I was kind of walking home with my tail between my legs, feeling guilty because I’d been partying all weekend while my wife was away, and now I’d been watching my children by myself for no more than a half hour and this shit happened. So we went home and it was sort of all’s well that ends well. We didn’t end up going to the doctor’s. My wife called and they were just like, “Yeah, mouth injuries bleed a lot, but if it’s stopped bleeding and he’s not complaining, don’t worry about it.” So we ate dinner and had a bath. That night we were hanging out in the bedroom and my son was acting really squirrely, and we couldn’t figure out what was wrong. We started worrying that maybe it had something to do with his fall, that it was maybe worse than we had first thought, but he was just acting super squirrely. Then my wife saw he was chewing on something, like he was gumming something. He was at an age where everything went straight into his mouth. She just sort of swept her finger through his gums and pulled out this little piece of like rubber plastic something. She looks at it and it has something printed on it. She reads it and looks at me and she’s like, “Adderall.” It was like that plastic coating of a gelcap or whatever, and it must have fallen out of somebody’s pocket when they were sleeping on the bedroom floor. We didn’t know if it was actually the whole gelcap or just the coating, but in any case, we were back on the phone, calling the doctor, calling poison control. It turns out, this wasn’t such a big deal either. Poison control was like, “Well, Adderall is something designed to be put in humans’ bodies. I wouldn’t recommend giving it to a one-year-old, but it’s not like it’s going to kill him. He’s just going to be high for a couple hours.” So basically, I’m the worst dad in the world, again. Everybody goes to bed. I’d been sleeping on the floor and sleeping in my daughter’s bedroom at that point, and always staying up later than everybody else. So I went downstairs and borrowed Ronnie’s 8-track. I had recorded albums in the studio before, but I never had recorded myself on anything before. That night I recorded the tune I’d been humming and I wrote another one right there on the spot and recorded that one too. And with both of them, I wrote harmonies and multiple guitar parts and everything right there in one sitting. Those were “The Girls Who Run Together” and “I’ve Lost My Everything”. Then the next morning I was taking care of my daughter and I wrote another one, lyrics, tune and harmonies, everything, there on the spot. That one was “Nitsa”. Then I showed these first three songs to a few people, just to see whether it was good or whether I just thought it was good because I’d never done anything like this before. And I remember, Todd C. was one of the few people I showed the songs to and he thought I was pulling his leg at first. With the first song I sent him, he thought I’d dug up some obscure Syd Barrett outtake and only after I sent him a couple more tunes he was like, “Oh shit, that really was you!” And the few other people that I showed those songs, they were all very positive about them as well. Then I decided I was going to try and make a whole album’s worth of songs within the next month and I’d show it to Todd by the time I saw him, because The Arrivals and URTC were set to do a tour together that next month. So I recorded twelve songs that month and showed Todd after the show we played with URTC in Minneapolis. Then, a few nights later, we played a show at this tenement in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. I remember it was this building in a pretty shady neighborhood and punks had taken over the entire thing. The stairway was just lined with bicycles and there was a party in every apartment all the way up, and the show was on the top floor and there was a party on the roof as well. We played and then we were drinking and partying and I asked Todd if he wanted to do a band with these songs that I’d written. We’d do some of my songs and some of his I said. He was into it. That was fall of ‘07. In spring of ‘08, Todd came up with the idea to have me join a project he was doing out in L.A. with members of the band Dios Malos. That band was called Bible Children. I went out to stay with Todd in San Pedro that year and Bible Children recorded a demo with four of his songs and four of mine. We played one show. Then a whole year passed and we tried to do it again. I went out there and we played a couple of shows around L.A. and went up to play a show in Santa Barbara. We meant to record, but the tape machine broke right before I got there. So we spent the time building a studio in Todd’s garage and watching the NBA playoffs instead. Then the other Bible Children guys came here to Chicago for Windy City Sound Clash that year, summer of ‘09, and Bible Children played a house show and a show at Beat Kitchen on the Sunday of that weekend. After that, over the next few months, it pretty much became clear that it wasn’t working out to do a long-distance band. Todd’s songs went to his solo stuff and Stoned at Heart, and I asked Neil if he wanted to start Treasure Fleet.

Bill – How did the rest of The Treasure Fleet’s members come together?

Neil – In ‘08-‘09 I had been filling in on bass for The Arrivals when Paddy couldn’t make it. In mid ‘09, Isaac handed me a demo that had some really cool, really different sounding stuff on it. When we got together to start playing the songs, I found out that Isaac had a bunch more songs that weren’t going to be used for The Arrivals, almost two albums worth. I’ve known Isaac and Dave for a long time actually. I was in a band during high school that played The Arrivals first show ever back in ‘96, but it wasn’t until ‘02 when The Arrivals and The Lawrence Arms toured with D4 that I met them.

Isaac – Lil’ Dave, (from The Arrivals) had played keys with Bible Children at the last show we did at Beat Kitchen in Chicago, and he just continued on with that when we started Treasure Fleet. Originally a friend of Dave’s said he’d play drums for us. He was a regular at the bar that Dave was bartending at and he was heavy into ‘60s mod and soul. He was always turning Dave on to this or that mod record, and he had heard the Bible Children recordings and said he was into doing it. I had been getting together with Neil to learn songs, and then the two of us got together with Dave to practice, and this friend couldn’t make it and couldn’t make it again and again. Then in the meantime, I had booked a show at Beat Kitchen. It was going to be Treasure Fleet’s first show, with Andrew Jackson Jihad and The Gunshy. It was getting close to the date of the show and we’d still never practiced as a full band with a drummer. So finally, just a couple of weeks out from that show, Dave’s friend admitted that he really wasn’t into doing a band. So we were in a pinch. I had known Mike from Sass Dragons and hanging out at shows and stuff, but I’d never actually seen or heard him play drums, (Mike played bass with Sass Dragons). I knew I liked him as a person and always had fun hanging out with him, so I got online to see if I could find any YouTube footage of him playing drums with other bands I knew he’d played for. I never did find anything, but people had told me that he was a great drummer, so I called him anyway. I was just like, “Mike, I have a weird proposition for you” and I told him about the band and the show and how we needed a drummer. He said he would give it a shot. And everyone was right, he’s great!

Neil – Treasure Fleet ended up playing a few shows as a four piece and we realized we needed a lead guitar player. I had shown Eli the demos and he’d seen us play, so I asked him if he’d want to join. He was just as into it as we were, and he has such a great tone and a bunch of pedals he doesn’t get to play with in the Popes.

Bill – Given that the members of The Treasure Fleet also play in some rather established bands, how would you describe your sound compared to some of the other projects you guys are involved with?

Neil – The Treasure Fleet is more about layers and reverb, less about distortion and aggression. Also, the band features Dave Merriman on keyboards, so that’s different.

Isaac – I know with The Arrivals we had this thing for a long time where we wanted to be able to replicate in a live performance whatever we did on the recordings. And similarly, when we’ve recorded with The Arrivals, in terms of the arrangement of songs, it was most often just four guys each playing their instrument at every moment of every song. With Treasure Fleet, really anything goes. On Cocamotion, there are female vocals, handclaps, bongos, acoustic guitar, seven vocal parts going all at once; all kinds of shit we would never hope to replicate live, but that we just decided to do on the recording because we thought it was cool at the time and we thought that’s what the song called for. So that’s a different approach that influences the sound, I think.

Bill – Since none of your other bands have a full-time keyboardist, how does having Dave on keyboards impact the way that you guys write songs?

Isaac – It doesn’t really influence the writing of the songs. Dave writes most of the parts after hearing a demo. Some of the demos have key parts, but most don’t. Usually I’ll come up with the tune and the lyrics and maybe a couple guitar parts, and then everybody writes their own parts.

Bill – Where does the band’s name come from?

Isaac – It came out of my shitty head. It’s nothing. I’m no good at naming bands.

Bill – Where did you record your debut album, Cocamotion, and what was the recording process like?

Neil – Cocamotion wasn’t recorded in a traditional way. Five of the songs are full band. The guitar, bass and drums for those were tracked live to an 8-track Tascam 238 at the Lucky Gator Loft in December of ‘11 by Bob Katovich. We took those tracks to Isaac’s attic where he built a control room, the Blue Room. Throughout the month of January we finished tracking guitars, vocals, keys, percussion, etc.

Isaac – That Tascam, it’s a cassette 8-track. Bob had two of those machines and our original plan was to record to 16 tracks and just mix the record over at Lucky Gator. There’s a separate sync machine that lets the two 8-track machines talk to each other, because otherwise they don’t play at exactly the same rate and some weird shit happens. We recorded onto seven tracks on the one machine and got awesome feels and sounds, and only then did Bob realize that he didn’t have the right cables for the sync machine to work. So we had no vocals or keys and only one guitar, and we had one more track to work with. For about a month there we were just fucked. We had about fifteen different plans for how we were actually going to finish the record. We were going to dump the tracks one by one to digital and line them up, we were going to mix down the tracks and record to that, we were going to say ‘fuck it’ and start over. Somewhere in that month though, I realized we almost certainly weren’t going to finish the record at Lucky Gator and we were going to have to get the tracks onto something else and record somewhere else. So, in case we were going to need another place to record, I started building this room in my attic. After a couple failed attempts, we did end up getting those original seven tracks onto a computer. By that time, the room in the attic was done. Neil came in and had a bunch of suggestions for how to make the room suitable for tracking and mixing, and so the two of us made it sound good up there and then we finished the record in my attic.

Neil – Isaac also had songs that he had tracked on GarageBand back in ‘09 that fit really well. We mixed the record in a couple of days and then took it to Andy Gallas to get mastered.

Isaac – Well, mostly Neil mixed it. I mostly drank beer and kept telling Neil he was doing a good job.

Bill – Tell me about your video for the song “Vice”.

Isaac – My five-year-old son recorded all but about ten seconds of the video, which is why it looks the way it does. When I went to edit it all together, I thought the footage looked sort of like what MTV must have looked to my nine-year-old brain. I remember that stuff as all just half-baked, non sequiturs like, “Oh somebody’s in a devil’s costume/look at that fucking Ferrari/going to prom/Jane Fonda workout time/now there’s a guy playing guitar in a dingy warehouse with a snake around his neck. The song is sort of new-wavey, so I thought it’d be fun to do that sort of ‘80s theme and use some ‘80s footage. And I like that old MTV vibe anyway, because it feels psychedelic, where everything is stimulating, nothing is connected. I guess, if there is any central concept of the “Vice” video, it’s something like that.

Bill – What inspired the lyrics for your song “High on a Bicycle”?

Isaac – A couple of years ago, I was hanging out with The Copyrights guys at Insubordination Fest in Baltimore and I was kind of out of my mind. I went on this rant about space punk and how it was going to be the next movement in punk. We were going to start it and it would be for all of the stoner, weirdo punks who were into freaking themselves out, but not into the folksy, crusty type. And not like hippies. Like a sillier, more colorful, urban, mod, psychedelic alternative to that stuff. I don’t know. It didn’t make any sense then and it still doesn’t make any sense. But after that I knew I had to at least write a song for the space punks, for the new-psych movement. Then, not long after that I went to this promotional thing that the New Belgium Brewery puts on, the people who make Fat Tire beer. It’s like an old time, traveling carnival-type thing. They threw the one in Chicago just a couple blocks from where I live. I went to that and they had all kinds of freak bikes, DIY arts and crafts tents and all kinds of cool stuff. The music wasn’t good, I don’t remember what it was, it was like some hippy stuff, but the scene was really fucking cool. And everybody was just getting drunk and riding bicycles, all kinds of people from all kinds of scenes just hanging out and having fun. I was like, “This is great, this is what space punk should look like.” And then I wrote the song.

Bill – A lot of The Treasure Fleet’s songs don’t follow typical structures and instead focus on establishing different moods and vibes. In short, it’s pretty psychedelic. What brought about this influence?

Isaac – Well, I mean psych has come to be so many things and has gone so many places. Bands that I think of as psych bands these days, I think of droney and jammy stuff, a band like Cave maybe. They really have moved from conventional song structures, and compared to any of that stuff, Treasure Fleet really uses a bunch of conventions. But I’m just meaning to say, “psychedelic” is a label that the genre has sort of claimed as their own, and I don’t want to give anyone the idea that we sound anything like that. But I know what you’re saying. I mean, well, I don’t mean to imply that you are wrong to say that Treasure Fleet is psych, and in fact I’m very happy that you think so and take that as a great complement. So, I think there are two things. One thing that makes the music feels psych is just about tones and scales and stuff like that. Those are just elements that we lifted from classic psych, because we’re fans of that stuff. There was a time in the history of pop and rock in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s where loads of pop songs would get the “psych” treatment as a matter of production, just because that was the mode of the day. Like you could have the cheesiest pop love ballad and some producer would want to put a sitar and tablas on it just because that was the fad. And that trend set a certain palate, where whenever you hear some of those elements you think of classic psych. Early on in that era, probably what helped launch the fad, before psych went mainstream, was all the great classic mod bands that weren’t actually psych bands took a stab at making a psych record. Obviously The Beatles, but the Zombies too with Odessey and Oracle, The Who with Sell Out, The Rolling Stones with Their Satanic Majesties Request, The Kinks, maybe, with Face to Face. I don’t know, that one’s probably a stretch, but Pink Floyd too, obviously. I think with Treasure Fleet, that particular era of music just weighs heavy as an influence. Actually I should say, I love that shit. A lot of those psych conventions that were used in making those records have made their way into Treasure Fleet’s music, just because that’s what we’re into. For me, I know, I didn’t really start getting into contemporary music until like ‘91. Before that, I had a Poison tape, a Huey Lewis and the News tape, a Van Halen tape and that was about it. Before ‘91, if I wanted to listen to music, I listened to my dad’s records. My dad was huge into music when he was a teenager and he had a pretty great record collection. He was born in ‘52, so his teenage stuff was all stuff from ‘64 to ‘69 mostly. When he went to college, he got into the ‘60s folk revival like Dylan and Joan Baez and Phil Ochs, and then folk revival stuff from earlier, like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and the Weavers, so that was another big chunk of his collection. I was into that too, but the bulk of his other stuff is all just classic British invasion stuff. So those were the bands and the records that I grew up on, The Beatles, The Who and The Kinks. I think when I sat down to write these songs off the top of my head, that’s what popped out, that influence. And it was me alone recording, late at night, and I’m singing and doing harmonies all quiet so as not to wake anyone and it turned out real moody. And like I told in the story earlier of how I started writing these songs, that Todd had been playing a bunch of Syd Barrett and T. Rex, so that was just fresh in my psyche right off the bat. Then when we started playing these songs as a band, both with Bible Children and Treasure Fleet, everybody just picked up on that and went with it. Since then, we’ve started making more of a conscious effort to have this classic psych sound consistently in there. We’re doing it more intentionally now I suppose. Then the other thing I think that kind of makes it feel psychedelic is the way the songs come about. It’s something like this, if you ask a thirteen-year-old kid to write you a song, they’re just going to use all the structures that are familiar to them. They’ll probably use a simple or familiar tune and melody and start singing about things in their life and things they’ve probably heard other people sing about before. If you ask a seven-year-old to write a song, it’s probably going to be like some monotone thing about the things they’re experiencing right then, like “There’s a lamp, it’s on, and I hear the cars that are driving by outside.” If you ask a four-year-old to write a song, there’s a good chance they’re just grasping from the edges of the cosmos, anything they’ve ever experienced and couldn’t make sense of can be fit together to make something new. In that case, it’s going to turn out pretty fucking cool by my reckoning. When I started making those first demos, I was just forcing myself to sit down with an eight-track machine and spit a song out. I had gotten really burned out writing for The Arrivals, where I could come up with a concept for a song and take a year to figure out where the tune and the lyrics and everything could work. So, I just wanted to try something new by trying to be more spontaneous and using, whatever, the first thing that popped into my head. That’s the way I did it for the first twelve songs I wrote, before Bible Children was a band, before Treasure Fleet. Then later it got harder to do it that way, because I knew there was this band I was writing for, and I’d just have this tendency to want to write lyrics in a certain way, but I still tried to force myself to keep it more spontaneous. And that’s the process, don’t think about it. Don’t think about anything. Or at least don’t over-think it. Just go with the first thing that comes to you. You need to get back to your four-year-old brain. Like I think that’s where we’re all trying to get to when we’re doing drugs, we want to get to a place where the world is new and it’s more about sensation and stimulation than ideas. The universe is all right there in front of you, but nothing is connected in any pre-constructed way. It can be connected any way you like, any way you want to connect it. And that’s good for music, because so much in music is just purely physical, just sound waves hitting your eardrums, hitting your body. You don’t really need the ideas, you can put them in there later so that it’s intellectually entertaining, but it’s not what’s essential. And that’s good for art, because a lot of art is just putting things together that haven’t been put together before. I think that’s how the way I’ve been talking about, that’s how Treasure Fleet is kind of psych too, like you said, the mood, the vibes, that’s what’s turning you on, more than a story or more than ideas. And then there’s the fact that we have a lot of drug-themed songs, and in fact, with Cocamotion, it’s a whole drug-themed record. That probably makes it feel psych too.

Bill – Why did you choose to team with Recess Records for the release of this album?

Isaac – Well, there was never any question with this release. Todd said he wanted to put the record out before we even had a record. The one we did at Atlas, which we actually recorded before we recorded Cocamotion, won’t come out until later. We did honestly consider for a minute having someone besides Todd put the record out, I think in part because, well, I guess it’s kind of embarrassing to admit this out loud, but we were just worried that people who are into punk and only punk wouldn’t like Treasure Fleet. But we got over that, and anyway, Todd puts out stuff that’s all over the map and what we’re doing actually fits really well with URTC and Lenguas Largas, and even other stuff that Todd’s put out recently like Landlord and Big Kitty. The new ‘69 is going to be way better than the last one.

Bill – What are you most looking forward to regarding your upcoming tour with Andrew Jackson Jihad and Joyce Manor?

Neil – Playing for the kids. AJJ and Joyce Manor have a great younger fan base and we’re excited to play for them. The teenage years are the best when it comes to experiencing underground shows. You’re at an age when the world starts to open up and finding a community at a punk show is something that can change your life.

Isaac – Yeah, that goes double for me. I just hope they’re not all rolling their eyes at us every night.

Bill – Do you guys have anything planned in terms of a record release show?

Isaac – Yes, we’re definitely going to do one. Likely in May, when we get home from this tour.

Bill – What else does the band have going on this year?

Isaac – After this spring tour, we’re going to do a short stint out west, maybe just in California, sometime this summer, probably June. We’re going to record a seven-inch at Todd’s while we’re out there. Then hopefully put that record we recorded at Atlas out this fall. I expect we’ll tour once that’s out. Lots of stuff to do, we just don’t know when yet.

Bill – How do you view The Treasure Fleet? Is it more of a side project or is it fair to say that this band is currently everyone’s primary focus?

Neil – Treasure Fleet is not a side project. We’re busy people, but Treasure Fleet is something we all believe in and want to take around the world.

Isaac – I’m with that.