"We're Human, And There Needs To Be A Margin-For-Error For Human Flaw"

"Rock'n'roll saved my life," says James Alex Snyder, frontman of Philadelphia's Beach Slang. Anyone who's heard his band's thundering, superfuzz'd debut LP, 2015's The Things We Do To Find People Who Feel Like Us, knows that Snyder is sincere about such a sentiment, the record an earnest, joyous shrine to the positive powers of rock.

"Discovering the punk rock community gave me a place to go when I felt pretty hopeless, and had no one," says Snyder. "I could throw all this angst into that thing, that energetic outlet. It's always been bigger than just music for me. The music's a really cool part of it, but it was that sense of community: finding where I fit in, not feeling alone. That was the bigger part of it. And you see that pretty directly reflected in the stuff I write. It's me remembering this thing that was so good to me at a time in my life when not many things were."

"Discovering the punk rock community gave me a place to go when I felt pretty hopeless, and had no one."

Snyder isn't your standard buzz band figure. In an era in which beat-makers are fetishised for their proximity to puberty, Snyder released his breakout album at 41. He grew up in the '80s, in a Navy family, bouncing around New England and Pennsylvania. He didn't have a relationship with his birth father, and calls his childhood 'difficult'. "I've never really super opened up about it," Snyder offers. "I just don't wanna look like a charity case. Let's just keep it broad and say: I had a lot of rough-and-tumble stuff. It wasn't a very nice way to grow up. I had such a crummy childhood that, once I became my own person, once I became able to reclaim my life as my own, I just said: from hereon out, I'm going to make it amazing. You can be a victim or an overcomer, and I just didn't want to get bogged down in the muck. Just because things start off wobbly, they don't have to stick and be that way for good. If the first decade or two were a little bouncy, I wanna make sure the last six are amazing. This is the one life I get, I want it to mean something."

And the guiding light, for Snyder, was always rock'n'roll. His mother religiously played The Beatles and The Beach Boys when he was a kid, but the switch was really flicked when she took him to see a local high school production of Tommy. "You see The Who do it, and you think 'These guys are like these mythical creatures, I can't do that,'" Snyder recounts, "[but] then you see kids that aren't a whole lot older than you doing it, it really knocks what you think's possible for you to do with your life."

Once Snyder went to see The Ramones as a 12-year-old, he was hooked, his entire adolescence spent strumming a guitar. In 1992, as an 18-year-old, he joined his first band, the cult pop-punk act Weston. "I started off being a fan of theirs, then their guitarist split, and they were just like: 'Look man, you're at all these shows anyway, you wanna just start playing?' It was that small and dumb — just because I dug going to shows, and seeing this one particular band — but it lead to this whole life."

Snyder spent the next two decades playing guitar in Weston, and almost the entirety of the '90s on tour. The band slowed down in the new century, going on hiatus in the early '00s, then reuniting to play sporadically. In 2011, when his old pal JP Flexner filled in on drums for a Weston show, Snyder played him the songs he'd spent years writing on the side. Flexner heard their big riffs and big heart, and convinced Snyder to preserve them. So, Beach Slang was conceived as a recording project, and only once they'd recorded their debut EP, 2014's Who Would Ever Want Anything So Broken?, did they became a band proper. Another EP, Cheap Thrills On A Dead End Street, soon followed, after which Beach Slang signed with Polyvinyl (home to spiritual peers Japandroids), recorded their debut LP, and hit the road. After years of toiling away, Snyder was suddenly living the rock'n'roll dream.

"Unfortunately it came out in a public place. Our regret is that we should've made the time to talk about it in a place that made more sense, not on stage at a rock'n'roll show."

Which made it strange that, in late April, Beach Slang broke up on stage in Salt Lake City, in the middle of — with comic coincidence — a cover of Can't Hardly Wait, by the famously tempestuous Replacements. Snyder, however, turns to a different iconic rock band to talk about what happened. "We thought we were The Kinks," Snyder says. "Just another band fighting amongst themselves, succumbing to the pressures. We've been on tour for a year, with very little breaks, and we just had a moment of dumb, little infighting. Stuff that we know was bubbling under the surface, but [because] this thing has taken off so quickly, we never had the time to properly suss it out. We're a rock'n'roll band, one who wears their hearts on their sleeves, and we had a little disagreement on stage that bubbled over into something.

"I walk away from that, and the thing I'm most disappointed about is that's the most cliche thing we've ever done. To be just another band who fights on stage. It wasn't like this catastrophic event, which is obviously how it appeared when press picked up on it. There isn't any real juice or bite to it. We knew those tensions were there. Unfortunately it came out in a public place. Our regret is that we should've made the time to talk about it in a place that made more sense, not on stage at a rock'n'roll show."

The next day, Snyder publicly stated that the blow-up had blown over, and that Beach Slang would continue on, even citing a passage from the Replacements biography Trouble Boys, where Paul Westerberg claims he destroys the things that he loves. "I think there's a part of me that has a real fear, now, of this thing that I have," Snyder admits. "It's like if I destroy it before I lose it, then I never failed. I just gave up. And that's a horrible, horrible way to approach things. But, in a moment where there's outlier tensions and other things happening, that kind of thinking sort of starts confusing your head a little bit… I just wanted to put it out there: we're human, and there needs to be a margin-for-error for human flaw. Here's an honest representation of that night. I look at it that I'm really lucky, living this dream life; I get to make a living at the thing I love more than anything. But, even in that, you can lose sight of it momentarily.

"You can lose sight of life. We're humans: we go up, we go down, we have the whole deal. But, at the end of the day, there's something really beautiful about remembering that we have this fleeting amount of time, and making the time count. So, I suppose these [songs] are like these little two-minute reminders: 'You're here, you're alive, bite into that.' Now, it's sort of become this battle-cry. So, I get to shout that out to people, and it really connects with people that really do chomp into life."