Goalie Fight is an uptempo emo band from New Jersey. According to their press materials, they sometimes sound like Titus Andronicus, other times like Modern Baseball, and still other times like Built to Spill. Their album Roy Orbison was “functionally a solo record” (again, per their press materials) featuring Mark Dempsey on guitar, bass, vocals, and glockenspiel, with a few other musicians filling in here and there, most notably Seth Huff and Greg Alsop on drums. Since then Goalie Fight has become a “well-oiled New Jersey four-piece.” Depending on when you read this blog post, they may or may not be on an eight-date tour of every city in the NHL Metropolitan division, but you can follow them on Twitter (or whatever Twitter is currently calling itself) at @goaliefight to find out what they’re currently up to. 

I feel like “well-oiled New Jersey four-piece” could be slang for something. 

Or a euphemism.

I suppose so! What does being from New Jersey mean to you?

New Jersey’s a funny place. I like it here, I’ve lived here my whole life, but New Jersey is all about comparison. The culture is fundamentally competitive. If you stop to think about it, it makes sense that people would be fighting harder for everything in the densest state in the nation. 

Part of that comparison is also comparison to our neighbors. New Jersey wouldn’t be what it is without Philadelphia and New York City, right across the border, looming over us. Call it an inferiority complex if you must, but being from New Jersey means fighting really hard to prove you’re more than second best. It means celebrating what you have that is unique, maybe even holding onto it a little tighter than you should. It also means having strong opinions about breakfast sandwiches, but we don’t have to get into that right now.

What part of New Jersey are you from? Does it influence your music in any way?

I’m from Morristown, which is very much a bedroom community for New York. If you were to hang New Jersey up on a corkboard, you’d push the pin into the middle of Morris County. The most successful band from around here was the Dillinger Escape Plan, which is one of the first mathcore bands. They are very abrasive and technical. Goalie Fight don’t incorporate any mathcore into our sound, and Dillinger Escape Plan never played any “hometown shows” that I’m aware of. The other major rock figure I can think of from Morristown is Tom Verlaine. Joe and I love Television, and we’ve been very slow to incorporate that band’s sound into our own. We’re far more melodic than that.

I still live in Morris County, our guitarist lives on the other side of Morris County, our drummer lives in Newark, and our bassist lives all the way up in Sussex County. That means no matter where we book a show, it’s at least an hour drive for at least one of us.  There really wasn’t much of an independent music scene near me growing up, or at least there wasn’t one that I was aware of. The three biggest hubs of the New Jersey rock-derived independent music scene right now are Asbury Park, New Brunswick, and Jersey City. We have yet to play a show in any of those places. I guess that insulation from the wider scene has influenced us and allowed us to develop our sound on a different path than the bands in those scenes. We have to cherish our live shows and our time together because it is more rare and precious.

We are inspired by New Jersey artists, directly and indirectly. We love Milkmen, the Moms, Front Bottoms, Jerry at the Beach, the aforementioned Titus Andronicus. Of course we love Bruce Springsteen. There are also bands that we appreciate, but don’t incorporate into our sound. We don’t really have anything that’s as heavy or as dramatic as a Thursday or a My Chemical Romance track yet. We get kind of close to Marietta on some tracks on On Ice! but we’re never as scrappy as they were.

The opening track from your album Roy Orbison references Asphodel. I had to look it up: the place in Greek mythology where ordinary souls go when they die. So, props to you for turning a minute-plus indie tune into an occasion for learning. How did that reference come about?

I knew about it because I had read a bunch of Greek mythology as a kid, but it resurfaced when I was writing the song because I was into a video game called Hades at the time. You play as the son of Hades and Persephone, and you fight your way out of the underworld and into Greece. It also fits in neatly as a rhyme for Hell in a song about death.

I love that the track is called “Roy Orbison Thesis” and not just because I teach college composition for a living. It does an excellent job of setting the tone and establishing the overarching theme of the album in the space of a minute and twenty-two seconds. Did you set out to write a concept album, or did it just happen?

I came up with the riff and the lyrics for Roy Orbison Thesis in late 2020 and couldn’t find anything else to stick onto them to make it a full song. Then, it struck me that I could pull an old musical theatre trick and just throw all of the major themes and motifs into a single overture, which became Roy Orbison Denouement. I tried to sequence the rest of the record as if it were the immediate aftermath of a breakup, with the brighter but still distressed songs first, and then the darker and more hopeless songs last.

And why Roy Orbison?

False history. I mis-remembered some documentary series that I had watched about various early rock & roll and country stars that had an episode about Orbison’s career. 

I already knew who he was because he was a Travelling Wilbury, and I had heard Only The Lonely and Pretty Woman and In Dreams in various movies and TV shows. He has a one of a kind voice, as a singer and as a songwriter. He wrote or co-wrote most of his best work, which was unusual in the 1950s and early 1960s, and a lot of it has grand arrangements, unusual song structures, and high drama. 

What I thought I saw was that he had a big career downturn after the British Invasion, but that people were starting to appreciate him and his work again in the 1980s due to his work with the Travelling Wilburys and some TV and movie syncs. He took a break from his tour to go back home with his family one day. He relaxed at home with his wife, he built some model airplanes with his kids, he had dinner with the neighbors, and he went to bed and never woke up. Died unexpectedly after a good day spent with the people he loved. That’s what I meant when I said I wanted to “die like Roy Orbison.”

Apparently, I had seriously romanticized it. He had been having chest pains for weeks, people had told him he should slow down but he largely refused. He didn’t build models with his sons, he flew RC planes with his tour bus driver. He had a major heart attack at his mother’s house and died in the hospital. But why would you let the truth get in the way of a good story?

Since Roy Orbison, Goalie Fight has evolved from a solo project into a full-fledged rock band. What has that evolution been like for you? 

It has been fun! It has also been challenging. I moved back to New Jersey after the album was tracked only to discover that all my friends had moved away. I found my guys off of Craigslist. Dan and Joe both have songwriting credits on the album. All three of us sing. In my previous band I was the only lyricist, so stepping back and supporting someone else’s message through the music has been a helpful exercise. A big part of my philosophy as bandleader in the leadup to this record was to build consensus as much as possible on the creative decisions in order to ensure everyone at least appreciated the final product, even if the production and administrative responsibilities went to me at the end of the day. I love to jam. I love to play with people in a room. there’s really nothing like playing loud rock and roll with your friends. Being in a band is a lot of fun, even if it also can be a lot of work.

Our tastes and backgrounds differ a lot. Dan grew up with 90s alternative and grunge, whereas I only recently discovered that stuff. He also had actual guitar lessons that stuck with him, whereas I’m mostly self-taught. Joe is nine years older than I am, he is that Brooklyn hipster that I didn’t know I was taking taste cues from when I was first discovering major label indie rock on Pandora Radio in middle school. We jam and sometimes the influences clash but most of the time we’ve been able to find something complimentary, which is what you hear on On Ice!

We usually started off with a riff, which Dan or I would expand upon at home. We’d come back to the band with a nearly finished song and jam on it to elaborate upon the structure and parts. We finalized the lyrics and structure together and recorded a demo on a digital portastudio.

How is the new album different from Roy Orbison? Specifically, how has recording with a band changed both the process and the end product? 

Well, it’s not just me anymore. The instrumental sounds on Roy Orbison were double tracked vocals with minimal reverb and minimal harmonies, thin guitars, and picked angular basses. For On Ice!, my co-songwriters are a harmony freak with a RAT pedal and a plucked melodic bassist. Like I said, I tried to strive for consensus and buy-in, so we made compromises song-by-song. Having other people you can talk to in the room about a part or a take certainly lightens some of the decision load that you have to carry when you’re making a record, but if you are the arbiter you can make something truly yours, for better or for worse. I tried very hard not to feel slighted when I was not in control of something. I think that’s something I’ll need to work on for the rest of my life. Listening to the finished product, they don’t sound like compromises any more. They sound like new ideas. They sound like growth.

We mostly recorded sequentially, part by part, just like the first record. We recorded Do What You Like, Whirlpool, and the outro to Corbeau live in the room because those songs don’t stick to a single tempo the whole time. We also recorded a lot more overdubs after the studio session was over because we had more time and we wanted a greater level of polish, so we recorded some aux percussion and some alternate vocal and guitar takes at home.

Last time, the recording engineer Matt Very mixed the record. This time, Dan mixed most of the record, Kevin Antreassean mixed one song, and the recording engineer Shane Furst mixed two songs, and we hired a separate mastering engineer Noah Sommers. I think that’s part of why this record sounds different.

Similarly, how do you see yourself growing as a songwriter from one project to the next? 

Roy Orbison had a different feeling to every song. On Ice! is more coherent, but it’s still kind of all over the place. I have more people I am accountable to as a songwriter this time. Consensus is important, and while I kept striving for specificity in my lyrics and idiosyncrasy in my riffs I slowly felt them be pulled towards more universal themes and more danceable parts. In the past, I was very comfortable being either a supporting guy, or the one and only lead guy. Now, I’m able to fit in between more comfortably, to switch positions as needed. I feel like the band has grown into something more indie rock than emo, or perhaps the contemporary emo scene has moved away from where I was expecting to meet it.

I think that my writing style has also changed because I listen to music differently. When I was in Pittsburgh recording the last album, I was listening to Spotify a lot because I was taking the bus everywhere. I try not to rely on algorithmic playlists as much anymore, but I was working through a bunch of emo and indie rock recommendations and the algorithmic playlists based off of that, and I was going to the Government Center and picking up used review and radio copies of new CDs from Matador or Saddle Creek or Polyvinyl. I was listening to a lot of contemporary underground music. Since then, I’ve been getting used CDs from the 90s and 00s for $1 or $2 a disc at Scotti’s Records, so I’ve been listening to a lot of older and more mainstream material. Factory Records has a lot of great new music on vinyl, but I don’t own a record player, so I dig through their used CD section as well. I put those CDs in my car and I drive and I really get to sit with these older CDs. I also buy CDs on Bandcamp, so it’s not all old stuff.

If I’m being completely honest with you, I feel like in some ways I have regressed as a songwriter. I’m writing fewer songs because I have less time to spend writing songs. My job has picked up steam, I’m spending more time with my family and friends and partner, so I’m trying to balance that with the band work, so writing songs doesn’t take priority over any of that at the moment. I do have a big backlog that I’m excited to explore with the band, I love a lot of the songs that have fallen through the floorboard for whatever reason, but I also am excited to see what we write together.

What’s on the horizon for you?

If I’m being completely honest, I don’t know. The far future is pretty murky. We switched drummers. Our guitarist switched jobs. Our bassist might switch jobs too. I was already doing almost all of the administrative work for the band before all that happened, but I feel like I do three or four times as much band-management as I do songwriting or practicing now. Goalie Fight will continue, but I think that the next record is going to be down a different path than we originally expected to go down.

In the near future, we are very pleased to announce that we will be playing a series of dates in every market in the NHL Metropolitan Division. We’ve been dreaming about this tour for a long time, and we’re super excited to finally bring our new album on the road. I love playing live, I loved the weekenders we’ve played so far, and I’m really looking forward to playing our album for people. We will be playing 9/15 in DC, 9/16 in Raleigh, 9/22 in Brooklyn, 9/28 in Pittsburgh, 9/29 in Columbus, 9/30 in Philadelphia, 11/03 in Newark, and 11/04 in Westchester County. Then we’re probably going to write and record something cool for next year.

Dan has a solo album called Danello the Sad Surfer, which should be out sometime in October, so be on the look out for that. Some very interesting people have hit us up about a split record, and some very interesting people have reached out to jam on other projects, but I don’t really want to talk about it any further than that right now

Thanks for taking the time to talk to me! 

You’re very welcome!