Pennywise Get Back To Their Roots On New Record

Californian skatepunks Pennywise were at the vanguard of the '90s post-hardcore punk revival, forging a strong career on the back of propulsive and catchy music, a tireless work ethic and their ubiquitous presence in the surf, skate and snowboard videos which were so popular at the time.

Yet despite building up a sizable following all over the globe they never quite followed their peers such as Green Day, Bad Religion and The Offspring into the mainstream, held back in part by an idealistic bent which manifested in internal band conflict, and also by the alcohol-related suicide in 1996 of founding bassist and songwriter Jason Thirsk. Nonetheless Pennywise persevered and retained their cult status in the punk community, until in 2010 frontman Jim Lindberg left the group citing fatigue and was unceremoniously replaced by Zoli Teglas of Ignite. This union culminated in 2010 album All Or Nothing but was split asunder when Teglas suffered a serious back injury, leaving the door ajar for Lindberg to rejoin the band he'd started more than 25 years earlier.

Their first release since the reconciliation is a compilation entitled Yesterdays, which includes some early Thirsk compositions (dating back to before their eponymous 1991 debut) as well as some offcuts from around the time of 1997's Full Circle – it's a batch of songs chosen by design to remind both the band and their fans of what Pennywise stood for as a fledgling outfit back before their troubles balancing art and commerce began.

“It's a fun record, and that's really important,” Lindberg reflects. “It's got some of that youthful spirit – these are songs that we wrote a long time ago, and which kinda represent our band when it first started out, so I think that vibe is throughout the record and people are going to be stoked on it.

“I think with me coming back to the band after some time out it was important for us to reconnect with why we started and the roots of the band. It seemed to have kind of gone astray towards the end there, which is a common thing to happen to bands when they've been doing it for as long as we had – around 20 years – and it's hard not to get in a rut where you're just doing album and then tour, album and then tour and not repeating yourselves. I definitely think that if we were to just jump back into trying to write new songs it would have been confusing for Pennywise fans in 2014, so it was really a way for us to reconnect with these old songs and the original spirit of the band. We always had this batch of songs that I knew were really fun and a little bit more carefree than some of our later stuff – I always wanted to put it out so I'm glad that we got to do it.”

Lindberg explains that these songs weren't released back in the day not because of quality issues, but because the band's aesthetics had evolved so quickly.

"It seemed to have kind of gone astray towards the end there."

“I think to be totally honest we started out playing backyard parties and just doing it for fun, and the songs came out really quickly. So we had this batch of songs, then we wrote some of the songs which became the first record and that's when Epitaph took notice of the band and we signed a record deal – that's when it became a little more serious. We were trying to write bigger songs, but I think these represent a simpler side to the band when we weren't doing it 'for real',” he chuckles. “There's no better way of putting it. I think that was the main motivation of putting this stuff out, reminding ourselves what was important about the band, and especially that the original vibe that Jason started with the band was all about PMA [positive mental attitude].

“The first wave of punk rock was very nihilistic and all about anarchy and smash the state type of stuff and very sarcastic, and then in the late '80s the bands that survived that first wave like Minor Threat and Dag Nasty were trying to write more positive songs and that's what Jason our original songwriter – who wrote most of the lyrics – was about. That's what I loved about the band; I'd just finished college and had read a lot of philosophers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau – very positive thinkers about making the most of your life and enjoying what you have – and there's a song on this record called Thanksgiving which was one of my favourite songs when we first started out. The chorus is, 'Think about all that you have, not about what you can't get,' and it was that vibe of the music that really drew me to the band.

“I think with age and experience you tend to lose that somewhat, when you start having to pay taxes and the politics of the world start invading your life outlook and various things happen, it's hard not to become jaded with the world and the way it is, but I think this record represents where we started which was trying to be positive about things.”

Is Lindberg confident that this will resonate in the music that Pennywise write next?

“I know it will,” he states emphatically, “because I think we're unwilling to go back to any song or music or situation where we're not all totally feeling it and totally stoked on it because that's not a fun place to be and we've all said that we only want to do this when it's fun. Right now it's fun again, so that's what works.”