Interview by Marisa Whitaker
For the first time in New York City Theater District musical history, a very special once-in-a-lifetime concert called All My Friends Vol. 1 (the inevitable Vol. 2 will make it twice-in-a-lifetime!) is slated to take place at the renowned dance hall/nightclub/speakeasy/cabaret/concert venue Sony Hall on Tue. August 26th (TIX HERE!)…
…and truly not since Hedwig & The Angry Inch nor Human Centipede: The Musical has the world of musical theater been rocked to its core the way All My Friends will undoubtably rock its audience to their collective cores (esp. among those dazed and confused souls expecting a sneak preview of Bill & Ted‘s production of Waiting For Godot opening soon a mere couple blocks away) which coincidentally is said to be really good for developing core strength…
…with this brand new concert series—all but guaranteed to bring downtown kids and Brooklyn gutter punks and anarcho-crusties alike uptown to Times Square & Midtown with no little bit of chaos ensuing—kicking off its inaugural happening with live sets by some of “the scene’s” favorite bands and/or artists, namely: Thesaurus Rex, Sid Simons, Glom, and Meyru.
And it goes without saying but we’ll say it anyway that we’re beyond excited to act as a promotional partner shamelessly shilling for this soon-to-be-iconic concert series and doing one of the things we do best: providing words direct from the pie holes of the very musicians who’ll be gracing the Sony Hall stage for your mind and body’s pleasure and fueling your eager excitement for the big, big show…
…a show featuring a foursome of emerging artists, more accustomed to playing scrappy smaller-scale venues, making the leap to the big leagues performing in a thousand capacity house which’ll likewise give attendees bragging rights going forward for being the first to see these acts in such a grand if not grandiloquent setting should you be so wise to attend on 8/26…
So without further ado or adieu, below you’ll find the first of our four interviews (!) with the featured All My Friends artists, leading off with none other than the witty, wacky, wildly talented…Thesaurus Rex, a band made up of frontman Calvin Rezen, guitarist Varun Jhunjhunwalla, bassist Ethan Marsh, and drummer Dan MacDonald.
(Author’s note: this is one of my favorite interviews of all time! – Love, MW)
Marisa Whitaker (turns on Hello Kitty brand strawberry Kawaii portable cassette player and recorder): You’re on the record.
I’m so excited for Sony Hall. Why are y’all excited for Sony Hall?
Calvin Rezen: I’m excited for Sony Hall because it’s such a cool venue. I’ve gotten to go there a couple of times. It’s the biggest space we’ll have ever played at, by far. Glom and Sid I’ve been aware of in the scene for the last couple of years. We’ve tried to put together a bill before, and it hasn’t worked out until now. I think it’s going to be a really cool lineup at a beautiful venue.
Varun Jhunjhunwalla: I’m a big fan of Sony products, such as PlayStation.
CR: We’ve been informed that the Hall is really inspired by other incredible Sony properties, including the PlayStation and Microsoft headphones.
MW: I hope they have a PlayStation set up there that I can play while y’all are on stage performing.
CR: We’re going to do a Guitar Hero kind of thing. We’ve been working with the Neuralink people, so that you guys can control what we play onstage.
MW: Oh my god, I can’t wait. When is the Thesaurus Rex Guitar Hero game coming out?
CR: We’ll get a mock-up sent to you.
MW: I love that y’all just put out the Greatest Hits record. I mean, y’all are in the same ballpark as Bruce Springsteen, Rick Springfield, all those cats. Why make a greatest hits record?
Ethan Marsh: …The money.
CR: Yeah. A lot of it was to make a lot of money.
EM: We’ve kind of fallen off the past decade, and we were like, “Oh, we have no material, so we might as well take all the good songs and repackage it.”
CR: It’s also this thing about music, like when people ask me what my favorite Beatles record is, I say 1. When people ask me what my favorite Billy Joel record is, I say The Essential Billy Joel. It’s like, do you want to make a substandard record or do you want to make something that’s a classic? It’s no-skips on purpose.
MW: I love it. I’m y’all’s biggest fan. Back to Sony. Your friend Glom was very excited about playing in Times Square. He loves Times Square. What is the beauty, for you guys, to play so near such a mecca of not only this beautiful city, but this country?
CR: This actually is kind of a big deal for us because it’s our Midtown premiere. We’ve only played in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn at this point. I’ve been going to Times Square since I was just a wee lad, at the wee age of, maybe, three. I admire this incredible project as made famous by Rudy Giuliani and just being part of its legacy.
VJ: I think you’ve really made it when you’re surrounded by ads. I think of all the major venues, like YouTube, Citi Field, and whatnot. It’s really the ads that make it known that you’ve made it in the big leagues. That’s very special for us.
CR: Dan, you were saying something about maybe getting one of the Elmo guys or something to come to the show?
Dan MacDonald: I could definitely get an Elmo guy. I’m tight with that crew. I’m just a huge fan of TVs as well. There’s no shortage of those in Times Square. So I’m gonna just say it now, I’m gonna get my screen time at the show.
CR: It’s gonna be really good because people are gonna be wanting to use their phones to record the show, but we’ll be like, “Hey, don’t worry, we’ve got the screens covered.”
MW: What do you guys think of this bill? What’s the tea about who you’re playing with? What do you know about these bands? What do you like about them?
CR: Humbly, I’ll say I’ve yet to hear anything by Meyru. I don’t really know their work, but I’m excited to hear them. We’ve heard good things about them through the grapevine. Glom, obviously, we’ve known for a while. I feel like they’ve been around in the city for several years. And same deal with Sid Simons. I’ve seen him DJ places, and when he performed with us at The Bitter End with SPIN Magazine and Lipps Service Podcast. He came up on stage and did a little bit of jamming with us and Telescreens at the end, which was really fun. But I’ve yet to see his band project, so I’m excited to see them in a different light.
DM: Similar to what we’ve done at Our Wicked Lady’s Winter Madness, where there’s a bunch of bands we’ve heard of and haven’t had the privilege of sharing a bill with, it’s just cool to finally be on a bill with these people. Especially in a venue like this, where it’s not our usual New York City clubs that we’re playing. It’s a big, big venue.
CR: It’s kind of like a summit, a melding of minds, if you will. It would be the equivalent of going to, like, Comic Con.
VJ: Or the UN.
EM: Or a late 2000’s Apple Keynote.
CR: It’s a meeting of the minds. We’re kind of the Steve Jobs of the band. In some ways, I would say that Glom is like a Steve Wozniak situation. Sid is like Bill Gates. And Meryu is the collective powers of Microsoft and Apple.
MW: What are the stage fits gonna be? Are y’all gonna be matching?
CR: We actually have yet to figure out what we’re gonna wear. Because of the grandeur of Sony Hall, I do feel like this might be a formal occasion. I think this would be a situation where we might want to suit up and give the people our best James Bond. It’s at the end of the summer, and hopefully we’re ushering in some less disgusting, humid, golf-sweater type of weather. We’re going into fall, and so I feel like maybe we should all don some tails. In the tuxedo sense, I mean, not in the like we’re-wearing-tails kind of situation. I mean, maybe Dan.
MW: Are y’all going to do anything different to honor the big show?
CR: We have some slightly covert plans, but I think there will almost definitely be some poetry on the stage, which is something we like to pull out for the bigger shows. We were also talking about potentially having some special guests and friends. I think we’ve already said this in other interviews, but we’re gonna have our friend, Greg Carlton of Wilmah and Cab Ellis fame, who played saxophone on our Greatest Hits album. There’ll be some ajouter de l’éclat added to the bill through the magic of saxophone.
MW: Why do you enjoy playing in a different space that isn’t a typical rock venue?
CR: I think it’s got to be the biggest room we’ve played ever. Having the ability to pack everyone we know into the venue, instead of it being a bar situation, is really exciting. Whenever I’ve been to Sony Hall, it’s been a seated situation, and if there’s no seats, then that means there’s a huge dance floor. That means we will be pulling out some of our danciest, funkiest stuff for a show like this.
EM: I think the vibe of the whole show will center around the environment that we’re in, which is perfect for us. I feel like the atmosphere in Sony Hall will very much lend itself to our style of music and the type of shows that we put on.
CR: We’ve already talked about, obviously jokingly, about getting the Elmo guys to come in, but with it being New York Times Square, we’d like to run out in the street before the show and see if there’s any random passerbys who are just down to come and see a show. I feel like the Midtown crowd is filled with way more people who are like, “Let’s see what’s going on in New York.” This is the perfect opportunity to show people who are from out of town what the reality of the scene looks like.
VJ: I think Sony Hall has the crazy 360 audio system as well. I wonder if they’re gonna use that at the show, because that’ll be really different from the classic venue backline plus PA. It’s a really fancy system, and I think it’s a 1000-cap room, which I know you already said this, but that’s way bigger than we’ve played in the past.
CR: We’re going to be practicing our high kicks as much as possible so we can fill up the space.
MW: My final question for you lovely, wicked fellas: What is your all-time, number one, favorite Sony product?
CR: It’s got to be…what’s the Mariah Carey mic? It’s the Mariah Carey mic that I blew in grad school.
VJ: The C800?
CR: Yeah, the C800. This is paired with a story for me. It’s a short one. I did a recording class in grad school, where we lined up a bunch of microphones to hear the differences between them. The professor said that the C800 was the most expensive microphone on the market. Only Mariah Carey used it because she has a perfect high whistle tone voice. I sang into it, and it stopped working. That’s just a little bit of foreshadowing as to the kind of sonic quality our band is going to be bringing to Sony Hall.
MW: So you’re literally Mariah Carey?
CR: Mariah Carey fans are not going to love our band, but if you’re not a fan of Mariah Carey, you’re literally going to love our band.
EM: I’m personally a fan of the Sony Rolly. I don’t know if you guys have heard of this. It’s egg shaped, it’s motorized. It actually has flapping wings and has the ability to dance to music. I think that really represents the vibe of our band a lot.
MW: Whenever y’all make the money from the ticket sales, y’all gotta buy me a Sony Rolly.
EM: Yeah, we hope they have them at the show. Is there gonna be a Sony kiosk at the show?
CR: We’re talking with Sony right now about having a Sony kiosk. They’re also going to be playing a series of movies that are assets of the Sony company.
VJ: I’m gonna go with Sony Mylo, which stands for “my life online.” It’s a phone, but you can only message other Mylos. I think it was WiFi only. Given my phone addiction, I would love to have a Mylo in my life. The only problem is that I think it sold 1000 units around the world in total, and it works on the principle of everyone else having one. If that hurdle can be overcome, a Mylo would be good to have in life.
DM: Mine’s the Walkman. The Walkman changed my life. My mom had an awesome yellow Walkman that I would steal. Then my first digital music player was the digital Walkman, and I brought that everywhere. It changed me forever. I owe a lot to the Walkman.
CR: Marisa, do you mind if I have an honorable mention?
MW: Please.
CR: These are all tangible products that we love from Sony, but we forget that Sony, of course, being a huge conglomerate, owns a lot of property. So I’d like to also thank Sony Pictures, which has brought us such classics as Jumanji, Paddington, Spider Man, the original Spider Man trilogy, Spider Man Across The Spider Verse, Ghostbusters, and the new Smurfs movie. These are movies that we really love and have touched our band. We don’t really know what the fallout of the Sony Hall show will be, but we’ve heard some whispers that potentially in the next Smurfs movie, Smurfs 2, there is a chance for a Thesaurus Rex song to be featured. We’re just really hoping that that’s in our future because we love the Smurfs property. We also love Venom, the entire Venom 3-Movie Collection, Cedar Rapids, The Equalizer. These are some of the greatest films of all time, and we just want to be associated with them.
DM: That’s just the ones that we know off the top of our head.
VJ: And the video games. PlayStation, obviously, is a large part of Sony.
CR: We’ve obviously overstayed our welcome with Sony, but we just love their products. We love their assets.
VJ: They have really nice capital.
EM: Super respectable capital.
CR: If there’s any world in which we were featured in the next Paddington movie, that would be really powerful for us and would mean a lot.
[Editor’s note: Please don’t forget about your good friends at the Deli! We’d be more than happy to drop exclusive advance TikToks of T.Rex’s “Paddington Goes to Bushwick” cameo and musical number and even to release the soundtrack on our own soon to be launched boutique imprint, just say the word!]
EM: Like, Paddington Goes to Bushwick.
CR: We actually have a couple spec scripts if they want to hit us up. They’re mostly Paddington.
MW: I mean, if y’all don’t write the soundtrack for the next Paddington movie, I don’t know who will.
EM: When Paddington goes to Clockwork, it’s gonna be absolutely insane.
CR: At the Sony Hall Show, there’s probably going to be a poem read about the plot of Paddington’s travels to the Lower East Side.
MW: It has been the honor of my life to spend the last 18 minutes and 21 seconds of my life with you guys. Thank you for your time. I’ll see y’all at Sony Hall. I hope I’m on the list.
CR: If there’s any issues with the list, we’re probably gonna parachute you in.
MW: I was hoping you would offer.
All: Thanks so much Marisa. We love you. We love The Deli Mag.