Deer Tick is one of the bands most synonymous with Rhode Island. Not just because they’re based here – where most of the band members are from – or because they’ve been making music since the late 2000s. It’s also because Rhode Island and particularly Providence show up in the band’s work. And that’s never been more true than with their newest album, “Coin-O-Matic.”
Deer Tick came by Ocean State Media recently for the second edition of Biggest Little Desk: our series of intimate, live mini-concerts in the style of NPR’s Tiny Desk.
After the set, afternoon host Mareva Lindo spoke with band members John McCauley and Ian O’Neil about “Coin-O-Matic,” Providence, and what it’s like to be in a band with the same four people for 16 years.
Click the “listen” button above to hear a longer, web-exclusive version of the interview.
Interview highlights
On what it takes to stick together for so long
John McCauley: We’re buddies, so it’s not too difficult. I think it would be a lot more difficult, at least for me, to start over with a new group of musicians, you know? That sounds terrible. That sounds absolutely awful. Way too much work. It’s almost less work to maintain our relationship as friends and as bandmates than it would be to put together a new group.
Ian O’Neil: We have to be adaptable, and the older you get, the more difficult it seems to be adaptable. But we’re quick on our feet, and we lean on one another for a lot of different things in our personal lives. … These are my closest relationships outside of my wife that I have in my life.
McCauley: Like, you know, if the whole music thing doesn’t work out, we’ll probably still stick together and open a lemonade stand or something.
On what keeps them in (or coming back to) Providence
McCauley: It’s kind of our gravitational center, because we’ve all moved around. We lived in different cities. I lived in Nashville for over 10 years, and I just moved back five years ago. So yeah, I’m sure just being from here has something to do with it. It drew all of us back here. … Maybe one of the things that really inspired us to make this record at this point in our career was because we’re all back together in our hometown, and it felt like a good time to, I guess, just take stock of things, and look back on the place we grew up. It’s so different now. Even, I mean, when I grew up is a lot more than 10 years ago, but in the 10 years that I was gone from Rhode Island, so much had changed about Providence, and my old neighborhood, Smith Hill.
O’Neil: Because we’re not such a major metropolitan music city, or business side of the music industry, it feels like we’re a little protected, and we’re a little kind of cordoned off in a weird way that makes it really easy, I think, to feel flexible, and to maneuver, and to do what we want to do and make our decisions. Whereas when I was living in New York, I feel like I was getting a lot of advice from a lot of people all the time.
On the concept behind their newest album: ‘Coin-O-Matic’
McCauley: The boss of the New England Mafia, Raymond Patriarca, [Coin-o-Matic] was his vending machine company in a storefront on Federal Hill, Atwells Avenue – kind of like Providence’s Little Italy, you know. … The record, to me, it’s not so much about the mafia or something, but it’s just a nostalgic record. And it’s about, you know … people that have passed on, places that no longer exist anymore, and it’s informed by all my experiences growing up here, I guess, as a little Irish Catholic altar boy. … There’s a lot of characters on the album that are amalgamations of folks that I knew, whether they’re family members or just people from the neighborhood, or people who were on the 6 o’clock news.
On ‘Mary Singletary’: Adolescence meets Catholic guilt
McCauley: Growing up I felt like I was a very devout Catholic as a boy, and I guess around puberty I was not emotionally intelligent enough to figure out what the hell was going on with me. So I took a little bit of my own confusion from that time, and I just kind of wrote this teenage love story with a little bit of Looney Tunes-style violence in it, just imagining a very vengeful god cutting you down for having premarital sex and having an interfaith relationship.
How fatherhood and the COVID-19 pandemic inspired ‘Everything Born’
O’Neil: The germ from that song came to me during the most desperate points of the pandemic, I guess. So it’s like a vignette of a family, and a growing family, set in Mount Pleasant, and just kind of being fearful of your neighbors – I just feel like 2020 specifically had everybody fearful of other people. And just what it was like for me to be going through that at the time, and specifically in Providence, and the sense of paranoia and the sense of doomerism that was happening. And that’s how it started. And then, I don’t know, I just wrote from the perspective of a man living in Rhode Island who is kind of in a downward spiral, and maybe at the bottom of his barrel, but finding salvation in the idea that when you do become a father, that you come to accept that everything born is going to go away, and that makes it really special to be alive.
