We Used to Cut the Grass, a jazz-fusion ensemble lead by Cody McCorry (of Thank You Scientist, Glass Garden, Slaughtersun, and many others), recently released their second full-length record, We Used to Cut the Grass #2. I had a chat with Cody where we discussed the new LP, how he manages to balance his many projects, touring with trash instruments, and his favorite fruit.

---

---

You’re wrapping up a tour with Thank You Scientist now aren’t you?

Yeah, Thursday, September 4th in Stroudsburg, PA, is our next show. We’re opening for Symphony X, which is going to be cool. It’s the first time we’re doing that. The drummer from Symphony X [Jason Rullo] was actually Kevin Grossman’s drum teacher growing up.

So between now and then, what are you busy with? Working on the new Thank You Scientist album? Or are you focused on your other bands?

Tom and I both have a ton going on right now. We’re doing a lot of jazz gigs together with our friend, Audra Mariel, who’s a vocalist. We’re both just gigging a lot, working around town, doing all kinds of things to keep the lights on. But yeah, Tom is working on the new Thank You Scientist album and we’re getting together intermittently. I’m working on the next We Used to Cut the Grass album which is already pretty much written—we’ve been performing some of it. But other than that, just kind of writing and recording and a lot of gigs: jazz gigs, cover gigs, whatever pays the bills you know?

You’re a busy guy. You’ve been with Thank You Scientist for a decade now and started touring with them again this summer, you joined and toured with The Number Twelve Looks Like You last year, and your bands Glass Garden and We Used to Cut the Grass both just released their second LPs. How do I stop doomscrolling and become a motivated, productive person like you? Is there a secret?

I mean, there’s always time for doomscrolling. I still get lost doing that stuff, too. But I think one of the things that helped me get organized in terms of composing a lot and managing different projects and balancing everything was this book called The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron. It’s a twelve week series of exercises that you do to organize your creative life. During the pandemic, I worked through them with some friends. You write a lot and organize your thoughts and see what really matters to you and how to focus on it, while also balancing the things that pay your bills and all that.

It’s something that a lot of writers do, but it’s good for really any creative medium. I would say that before the pandemic, and before I went through that course, I was really disorganized and things were happening in a very oblong way. I would mostly work on Thank You Scientist and then maybe Karmic Juggernaut would put something out and I would devote all my time to that, and so on.

For example, We Used to Cut the Grass has been around for over a decade. We’ve actually been together for like thirteen or fourteen years. So the fact that we’re just putting out our second album now goes to show how unbalanced my life has been for a long time. Because this is the thing that I really love, and I love to write for it; it’s a house for all my compositions. But it really wasn’t until after 2020 that I got organized and was like “right, we’re doing this. We’re putting out records now.”

Do you ever feel burned out with all these different projects you have going on?

Yeah. It’s a constant struggle and a balancing act. And that’s why I had to do a twelve week course to help organize it all. There are definitely months where I feel like I have to devote a lot of time to other things. It’s really only the past few years that I was like “you know what, I’m going to start putting We Used to Cut the Grass toward the forefront”. Because writing music is the thing that I love the most. I love playing bass, I love playing really complicated music, and being in bands, but that is secondary to just creating new music. Especially hearing that new music for the first time with a large ensemble, or any ensemble really, that’s what excites me.

So I’m trying to put that first and put all the bass playing and being a side man in other people’s bands second. Even in roles where I’m co-composing. I’m trying to rebalance so that creating new music comes first and being a bass player for a whole host of different projects comes second. 

You play, you compose, you gig… you do all sorts of stuff related to music. Have you always been “all in”? Or was it a side gig for a little while where you had a day job that paid the bills?

Yeah, I worked in food service for close to ten years, and then I had an office job for two or three years. But around the time I joined Thank You Scientist in 2015, when I went on my first big tour with them, it became untenable to hold down a job and then also leave for three months at a time. So that’s when I took the leap and thought “alright, I’ve got to figure out how to make this music thing work”. So that’s when I started taking any gig I possibly could, whether it was covers or jazz gigs… I played a lot of jazz gigs. And a lot of gigs I really didn’t like. I had to play in a Top 40 country cover band for a little while, and, like, no shade to them, but I hated that. 

Do you do a lot of session work?

Totally. I actually love doing session work even more than just gigging. Because it’s more relaxed and you can try different things and you get a bigger variety of music. And frequently it’s original music. So I vastly prefer working on other people’s original music versus showing up and playing a cover gig. Because I like to help people make new stuff.

Do you have any advice for new musicians who are trying to decide whether to go all in or keep it as a side gig?

The only piece of advice I have is to stay on the bus and you’ll get where you’re going. It gets bleak sometimes, and the balance can be hard to maintain, and it can feel like you’re gonna be trapped in a certain type of musical life forever. But the longer you stick with it, things do get better, and your network expands, and opportunities you would never expect in a million years will appear. And maybe it’s not something you wanted or expected but you’ve got to roll with it. You just have to be open to the possibilities; and don’t give up.

Balance is another big idea from The Artist’s Way. You do have to pay your bills and the thing you love the most may not do that. So you have to strike a balance somehow.

Coming to your creative process, when you’re in a creative headspace, do you start more generally and then think specifically? Do you come up with a melody or a riff and think “that’s a Thank You Scientist riff” or “that’s more Homeless Apians”? Or do you work in reverse and get into the headspace of a particular project first, and then start composing?

I would say it’s probably the notes that come first. When I compose, I don’t frequently sit down and think “I’m going to write a song today”. I’ll sit down at the piano—as often as I can—and just improvise. And once I find something in that improvisation that’s a bit of an earworm or something that’s resonating with me, I’ll loop it a few times and it will gradually start to take shape out of this, like, improvisational mud.

And once there’s an idea that’s a little more clear, then I figure out what box to put it in. And lately that box is We Used to Cut the Grass, for the most part. But before, like for Terraformer and Stranger Heads and the Karmic Juggernaut stuff, if I was working on something proggy and complicated I’d be like “alright, this is Thank You Scientist”. If it was something more ethereal and moody, or something that I just knew would not work with vocals, I’d think “this is probably We Used to Cut the Grass”.

I’m sure it’s stressful, and busy, to have all those different projects going on at the same time. There are lots of artists who have their main gig and spin off side gigs in order to express themselves in different creative ways. But you already have those ready to go, you can just plug them in.

Yeah it’s a lot of different boxes. And they all take a lot of upkeep. It’s not easy to maintain the Thank You Scientist catalog; it’s a lot of material. And Glass Garden, too, that music isn’t super easy, either. But some months are busier for one band, another month will be busy for the other band, so it kind of balances out.

About Homeless Apians: you put out an EP with that group in 2018, Humour as a Defense Mechanism, and a few singles since then. That project seems to have been on the back burner for a while, but you did recently re-record “Shep’s Encounter” for We Used to Cut the Grass #2. I know the first We Used to Cut the Grass EP came out first, but do you see Homeless Apians as a sort of stepping stone to a more fully-realized We Used to Cut the Grass? Do you think you would work with a smaller, more experimental group again?

Homeless Apians was a super fun project, but it’s definitely on hiatus right now. Not for any specific reason other than that we’re all doing different things. I would say that the leader of Homeless Apians was really Matt Brown, and he has a new project called Heavy Mouth. I also play bass on that project; the rhythm section is kind of rotating. That band is really led by Matt Brown and Mike Rainone. And they’re repurposing some stuff that never got put out for Homeless Apians. So I would say that’s probably the next incarnation of that band.

Homeless Apians started out as a whole ethos that Matt Brown had where we, like, built all our instruments out of trash and recorded using only solar power. And we did all of that; it was really fun. We worked really hard on it for like three years. But that was right around the time that I was joining Thank You Scientist. So things really picked up with Thank You Scientist and it became difficult to put adequate energy into Homeless Apians.

So we did those two records, and it was really fun. But I think we got tired of the limitation of the trash instruments. Also, Matt wanted the band to be busier because he’s an amazing composer and writes a lot of cool music. But me and Kevin having scheduling discrepancies with touring and everything else was difficult.

So, yeah, Homeless Apians has sort of hung up the spurs for now. I don’t know, I mean, I still have the trash washtub in my basement. So maybe one day we’ll pick it back up. But Matt’s doing Heavy Mouth now.

And yeah, I’m glad that you noticed that “Shep’s Encounter” existed before this record.

Yeah, I was going through your back catalog and I was like “oh, this one’s familiar”.

That’s one of the oldest We Used to Cut the Grass songs. That was written when we started the band. It was just me and Seamus Leonhardt on drums, and that was We Used to Cut the Grass. We had some songs where it was just bass and drums, and we had some songs where it was just guitar and drums.

And we loved the band Hella. We were like, obsessed with Hella. So we wanted to do stuff that sounded like that. So I would just grab my guitar and put a bunch of distortion on it and we would try to write cool, complicated, guitar-and-drums music. But yeah, “Shep’s Encounter” was one of our first songs. And We Used to Cut the Grass never recorded it because we just never really got our shit together. So when Homeless Apians was recording, I was like, this is a chance to just get one of my compositions down on tape. So I did it with that band.

Kevin already knew the material because he had joined We Used to Cut the Grass at that point, and Matt and I were composing together a lot, so it made sense to do it then. And that recording was cool, with the trash instruments and everything, but years later, I was like, I really want to give this the full glow-up of, like, real instruments, and, you know, not recording in a field with solar panels. As fun as that was, it didn’t produce the highest fidelity recording, necessarily. So we decided to do it again.

Plus, I feel like Faye’s drumming, her whole ethos, really works well with the track because it’s also inspired by electronic music. It’s very rigid and almost feels programmed in a way.

Yeah, I saw the music video for Shep’s Encounter, her drumming is intense. Almost drum and bass style.

Yeah, she’s out of control. I feel like her drumming really brought it to life in a different way. It was super fun to revisit that.

Did you ever gig with the trash instruments? Were you worried, leaving them outside the stage door, that some garbage men would come and pick them up?

We gigged with that band a lot. We toured with Homeless Apians a few times, actually. They weren’t big tours; it would be us going to play in someone’s basement in North Carolina, or whatever, but yeah, we gigged with the trash instruments all the time and they would break all the time, and it was super annoying. That band was so much work, and we loved it, we really did. We believed in it. But it had a time and a place and we’re all working on different things now.

Coming back to Karmic Juggernaut, with Daimon taking over Sal’s role in Thank You Scientist, do you think that Karmic Juggernaut is also going to take a backseat for a while?

Karmic Juggernaut has always had this kind of on-and-off nature to it. In the list of bands we’ve been talking about – Thank You Scientist, Grass, Karmic, Homeless Apians… I’m pretty sure Karmic is the oldest. Karmic started when Kevin Grossman and James McCaffrey were in high school, and it was just the two of them and Randy Preston and they had a string of bass players until I joined. But that goes back to—I want to say, like—2010 or something.

They were gigging as Karmic Juggernaut and they would work really hard on it, put out an album, play a bunch of gigs, and then take a few years off. They also do other projects and have a lot of life stuff going on and so that project has always had this ebb and flow. But it’s been really constant since, like, 2010. So I’m sure Karmic Juggernaut’s going to do something because we’re all friends and we like hanging out together. And that’s more the vibe of that band. It’s run less like a business, in any kind of organized sense. Thank You Scientist is a well-oiled machine. Karmic Juggernaut is the opposite of whatever that is.

A poorly-oiled machine?

It’s just a bunch of friends getting together in a garage, having a good time, and then very slowly making a prog album. It’s very much like we’ll work on one song for three months and then just pivot and forget about that song. It happens very slowly because we just have fun together and it’s not super organized.

I have a few questions about specific songs on the new We Used to Cut the Grass record. Can we start with “who are Shep and Scully”? Because they’re mentioned in like half of the song titles, but not in any lyrics.

On We Used to Cut the Grass #1, we had a song called “Lay Down, Scully”. That song was originally about Agent Dana Scully on The X-Files, but then I adopted my dog and named her Scully, and so then it was obviously about Scully the dog. But before that, it was really about The X-Files. But now, obviously, all the future Scully songs that we do are going to be ballads about my dog and how much I love her.

Shep goes back to the beginning of the band, where we had these weird drum-and-bass, guitar-and-bass songs, with no idea what to call them because they’re just ethereal, instrumental music. It always feels kind of silly to slap a name on an instrumental song. So we decided to do it as a series of, like, “Shep’s this”, “Shep’s that”, just as a bit, to say “we don’t know what to call these”. So they’re all Shep’s. They’re just, like, Shep’s songs.

Rather than calling it “Composition in B minor” or something like that.

Yeah, or, you know, putting some long title on it. Which we now do, anyway.

But similar to how “Lay Down Scully” was about Agent Dana Scully and then later became about my dog, we had these Shep songs. My girlfriend at the time worked at a coffee shop in Convention Hall in Asbury Park and we found an injured mouse on the ground and got it into a shoebox and took it home for a couple weeks. We named that mouse Shep. It was present at a lot of the rehearsals when we were putting together some of these early Shep tunes, and that’s how those songs got their names.

All the Shep songs are old, too, I guess I should clarify that. Anything that’s a “Shep’s something” was probably written around 2013, 2014.

But they’ve just been recorded now for the first time?

Yeah, we’ve been a band for (getting close to) fifteen years, but we’re only just starting to put out records. So we have this back catalog of stuff that we’ve been playing live for a few years, shelved, worked on, replaced…

I think almost all of the Grass albums, even going forward, are going to have some stuff that was written like ten years ago that’s only just seeing the light of day now.

So you have enough material to release another album? Are you planning on releasing them in a quick cadence or are you going to drip feed it to people?

The idea is to do it quickly. The first album took five years and that was way too long, but we weren’t super organized about it. This latest album took three years, which is better, but we’re definitely going to do the next one faster than that. Especially since it’s all written, too. And there’s going to be a lot of new compositions on it, as well.

But I think I’ve gotten a lot more organized. Like, once we’re in the mixing process of one record, I can get started on writing the next one. For the first album, I was just working on the album and when the album came out, I really had nothing new for the second one. Whereas we continued to perform while we were mixing and mastering this one.

So we got together and it gave me the chance to workshop the new ideas, so that by the time this one actually came out, the new one’s already written. So I’m trying to have them kind of roll over each other like that going forward.

Another question about another track on the new album, “The Play Shep Wrote in ’92”, I heard that was partially recorded over Zoom? Can you tell us more about how that was coordinated?

Yeah it was almost 100% recorded over Zoom. When I was doing The Artist’s Way during Covid, one of the things that I discovered while I was going through these exercises was that I really wanted to write orchestral music. And that was something that I’d never gotten to do. I had mixed it into We Used to Cut the Grass a little bit by having brass and strings and orchestral elements, but I really wanted to take the plunge and just write a full orchestra piece.

So I applied to take a course at Juilliard’s night school and I studied orchestration there, and the culmination of that studying was writing the score for “The Play Shep Wrote in ’92”. I had two professors there who helped me review it and prepare the score. And another composer friend of mine helped me find this organization in Bulgaria that does remote orchestra recordings. Mostly for films and stuff like that. Projects where you gotta get it done really fast, and you have a limited budget.

So he gave me this organization’s info and I hit them up and they were super cool, super professional, and the whole thing was, like, how clean can we make this score so that we can get this recorded in an hour. Because they don’t look at it, they don’t practice. The way that that orchestra’s day works is that they get in the studio and nine to five, every hour they’re looking at someone else’s composition and just reading it and recording it. They haven’t seen the music before. So whether or not your thing is going to sound good after that hour is really dependent on how clean your chart is. You know, how clean the score is and how well the conductor can communicate it to them and… it was a lot, man. It was very stressful.

It was just like a one-hour-long Zoom call with the orchestra, and you’re just communicating with them through the chat box.

I was going to ask how you ended up working specifically with the Sofia Session Orchestra and not an orchestra in New Jersey or something like that.

I definitely had considered maybe trying a local orchestra or something like that. But my friend, Brian Lawlor—he’s a composer who lives out in Vienna now—he was like “I’ve done stuff with this orchestra, they’re super fast, they’re super professional, the recording quality is amazing”. They’re just set up to make tracks really fast and really efficiently. And honestly, the price… it was expensive, but it wasn’t insane, you know?

So you’d recommend them for anyone else looking for an orchestral recording?

Oh definitely, yeah. I think, more than likely, unless I get some kind of commission to do something with another orchestra, I’ll probably work with them again on whatever next orchestra thing I have to work on. I’d probably use them again, because they were great.

My next question is about “Hot Vegan Summer”. This track is co-credited to Trust Fund Ozu. I know that you’ve collaborated with lots of other artists—one that comes to mind is Ben Levin—in an unofficial capacity, but this is the first track of yours which was co-credited to a different artist. So is this a trend? Are you going to move towards more official collaborations with other bands?

Yeah, I think so. Faye and I co-wrote that song and we had a lot of fun. Obviously it’s a total, like, silly goof song, but we just wrote it together and had a lot of fun. But yeah, we’ll definitely do more collaborations in the future.

And actually, there’s a track on the new Glass Garden record that is a collaboration between We Used to Cut the Grass and Glass Garden. And we performed that song at a release show with Idris, the vocalist from Glass Garden, and it was super fun. That one’s called “Mapping the Cage”, and that one was a good time to put together. But yeah, we are trying to do more collaborations going forward.

I know you toured alongside Bent Knee, and I don’t know how much you have your finger on the pulse of r/progmetal, but there’s a jazz fusion contingent there that are huge Bent Knee and Thank You Scientist fans. I feel like they would have a meltdown if there were ever an official collaboration between Thank You Scientist and Bent Knee, even if it was just a one-off track.

Touring with them, to me, was probably the most fun Thank You Scientist ever had on the road. Because Ben Levin and Courtney and Jess and all those guys are just so much fun to be around. When Thank You Scientist was touring with Bent Knee it literally felt like summer camp for adults. We were just having a great time.

And both bands were in their prime at that point. We had just put out Terraformer and Bent Knee was putting out amazing stuff at that time. And they still are. I’m not sure what’s going on with Bent Knee. I know they’re still touring and they put out a record since Ben and Jess left the band, and that record was really cool that they did just as a quartet.

I think because Bent Knee is going through changes and Thank You Scientist is going through changes… I feel like if there was going to be a collab between those bands, it would have happened back then. I feel like the window for that has probably passed. But there will absolutely be more collaborative stuff, you know, with Ben Levin and Justice Cow and other people from Bent Knee, for sure, because we’re still tight with them. We still hang out with them and do gigs together.

Like, Justice Cow was at our release show [for #2], so Jess was there and performing. And Jess is coming down with her friend Kate’s band, Kit Orion, and they’re playing on Tuesday, with Faye [Trust Fund Ozu]. So we’re still doing gigs together all the time. It’s just that Bent Knee is going through some transformations and Ben and Jess aren’t in it anymore, and you know, Thank You Scientist has a new vocalist and is slowly putting together this new record, so I think both of those bands are figuring out what’s happening with themselves individually.

Are there any other artists in the Cody McCorry universe that we haven’t mentioned yet that you think our readers should check out?

[Ed. Note: Cody also sent us a list of recommended bands, which we’ve put at the end of this interview.]

Oh man, there’s a lot. Justice Cow is Jess’s band, Ben Levin’s putting out cool stuff all the time. The Ben Levin expanded universe is insane. I love the arc of how Ben Levin went from a music YouTuber to making these videos about the existential void with like, adorable 3D creatures. It’s really cool. He’s just one of a kind, man.

Yeah, his work with Adam Neely, too. I love those albums they put out together, where they wrote and recorded them in twenty-four hours.

Yeah, and Adam was just on his last record, which was really cool. Courtney Swain‘s doing amazing stuff, too. She did a collaboration with the Bluecoats, the marching band that Thank You Scientist collaborated with a while ago, which was incredible. They did some of her original stuff; they also did “Creep” by Radiohead, in a beautiful arrangement.

Your bands We Used to Cut the Grass and Thank You Scientist share many of the same members. In fact, I think We Used to Cut the Grass is a superset of Thank You Scientist. But are the group dynamics quite different between the two? Thank You Scientist feels like Tom’s band and the Grass like your band?

Yeah, I would say that’s accurate. Tom is in charge of Thank You Scientist, and that’s always gonna be a set, seven-piece band: trumpet, tenor sax, violin, guitar, drums, bass, vocals. Whereas We Used to Cut the Grass is a shape-shifting-type ensemble. It’s basically just, whoever is available to come do the gigs and whoever is available to come record. People have a lot of life stuff going on and people have different projects happening…

We used to record with Sam Greenfield, who was the former tenor player from Thank You Scientist, but he is super busy touring Europe and the world with his own solo project now. So he hasn’t played with We Used to Cut the Grass in quite a while. But he’s an example of how people come in and out of We Used to Cut the Grass very casually. We rarely have the same lineup from one gig to another. Even the shows we’re playing later this month are going to have a different set of people than the release show we just did.

I feel like a lot of people don’t realize how much Thank You Scientist’s lineup has shifted since it started.

Yeah, there’s been a lot of turnover. It’s a bigger deal for Thank You Scientist because that’s more of a “band”. There are seven people who are touring and making the record. Whereas with We Used to Cut the Grass, it’s an informal roster of musicians who come together to make music. And even on the record, Faye plays drums on some tracks, Kevin’s on other tracks, they’re both on a few tracks together. I play guitar on a few songs, Tom plays guitar on a few songs. It’s much more casual.

I actually didn’t realize until the music video was released that you were playing guitar on “Shep’s Encounter”. The guitar there sounds very Jonny Greenwood [of Radiohead].

In terms of inspirations, I’d probably put Jonny Greenwood at the top. Maybe Frank Zappa. But they’re real close, maybe neck and neck. They’re probably my two biggest musical inspirations.

Well you did a great job of channeling his spirit into that song, because that’s the first thing I thought of.

When we started We Used to Cut the Grass, there was a while where I was just ripping off Radiohead as much as I possibly could. I got so much of my tonal vocabulary from that band. I love Jonny’s compositions and everything, he’s just such a cool composer.

“Shep’s Encounter” is probably the most Radiohead-like We Used to Cut the Grass song. It makes sense because it’s from the beginning of the band, which was me getting out of high school and into college when I was listening to nothing but Radiohead.

Coming back to your creative process, do you feel like you have more creative freedom in the Grass than in Thank You Scientist?

We Used to Cut the Grass is a house for my compositions and Thank You Scientist has always been a collaborative compositional band. Which is not to downplay Tom’s role in it, because I would say he’s the primary composer. He brings in most of the ideas. But it’s a case-by-case thing, too. There would be whole songs that Sam Greenfield would bring in or I would bring in… so it’s very much a collaboration.

Another question about Thank You Scientist: I saw footage of you guys at Cruise to the Edge. It looks like you were having a blast. How’s Daimon settling in? Do you feel like he’s fully gelled with the band now?

Yeah, Daimon’s doing a great job. I have a lot of experience working with Daimon from Karmic Juggernaut and also from his previous projects, like Bone and Marrow. That’s his project with his wife, Jen. They toured with Homeless Apians and we used to travel together a lot. So I’ve been working with Daimon in some capacity or another for over a decade. And yeah, he’s doing a great job. He’s a great vocalist.

I mean, there’s no replacing Sal, you know? Like, that’s just not happening. So I think that idea, that we wouldn’t even want to “replace” Sal, means that the band has to go in a new direction now. Daimon’s going to do Daimon, and he’s not going to try to replace Sal.

A new direction vocally? Or a new direction instrumentally, as well?

That’s hard to say. So far, the new material for Thank You Scientist has largely been composed by Tom with Daimon and Tom writing the vocal parts together. And I think that’s probably going to be the pattern for most of the record. I mean, every Thank You Scientist record is different, so I imagine this one will be different, too.

Obviously, without Sal, it’s going to be super different. You can’t really downplay what a huge role Sal played in the band. He has such an iconic presence and voice that I really think is irreplaceable. So the band has no choice but to develop in a different direction.

Yeah, one of the two guys who had been there from the very beginning is gone.

Straight up the only two original members. And now Tom is the last remaining one. It was always his project. If there was no Tom, there would be no Thank You Scientist.

A previous coworker of mine said “teams are immutable”. You can add or lose team members, but then it’s a different team, with different dynamics. Do you feel like that’s the case for Thank You Scientist?

Oh, yeah. I’ve been through a lot of different changes with that band. I performed with one of the original lineups with Odin, Andrew, and Ellis on Stranger Heads. That was a set band with its own dynamics. And then the turnover for the Terraformer lineup, that band had its own dynamics. And then after Faye left, this version has its own. It’s a huge change when someone comes or goes from the band, but as long as Tom wants to keep doing it, it will keep going.

He’s the core thread throughout all the different iterations.

Yeah, similar to the way that We Used to Cut the Grass started. Tom could probably verify this, but I believe Thank You Scientist was originally an instrumental project. And I think Tom sang in a very early incarnation of the band. Similar to my band, it was just a place for him to work on his compositions. I don’t think it was really until they started touring and they put out Maps of Non-Existent Places that it was, like, “we are a seven-piece prog band”.

But yeah, I would say the future of Thank You Scientist is still somewhat nebulous, but we’re working on the album for sure.

Plague Accommodations feels like it was released yesterday, but it somehow came out four years ago already.

Yeah, time flies.

I know that you have one more tour date in September, but then you’re back to working on the new LP, right? Or you’re working on it right now?

We were working on it even before Sal left the band. Since Plague Accommodations, we’ve been working on new material. Some stuff is sticking, some isn’t. We’ve been performing one of the songs live a lot. So for sure that song will be on the record, no doubt.

The rest of it remains to be seen. We’ve been working on it, but Tom has a lot more stuff that he’s been working on with Daimon. And I think Tom has a bunch of compositions that he’s about to roll out, so it’s been less collaborative than it was on Terraformer.

Do you know when we can expect a new single or a new EP?

Oh man, I wish I did. Thank You Scientist is a very slow-moving machine. But I’m trying to focus on my work with We Used to Cut the Grass. Tom has also started a new fusion project with a rhythm section from the west coast: Zach Westfall and Ray Belli, a trio fusion band called Now This. And he’s been flying out there to work on that with them. So Tom’s got a lot of irons in the fire, too, but I think he’s super motivated to be doing the new Thank You Scientist record.

Daimon’s really excited about it, too. I think it’s gonna come together. But yeah, Thank You Scientist has always been a slow-moving machine.

So no Progressive Subway exclusive single announcement date?

I wish, but no. It’s hard to give any kind of estimate. I would say safely that there’s still a lot of work to do on that record. But Tom has written a lot of stuff for it already.

It felt like we were so close to a new LP when Plague Accommodations came out in 2021 and then, of course, Sal left and things went off the rails a bit.

Yeah, I think Plague Accommodations would have been an LP if it wasn’t for Covid and the world going to shit… and also so much life stuff happened, and people joining and leaving the band… I think Plague Accommodations would have been a full record.

This isn’t really a question, but please, please, please tour in Canada again. Have you ever been to Halifax? It’s a nice place.

Haven’t been to Halifax, but we have toured Canada quite a bit. We’ve done Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, and some other places.

I saw you guys perform in Montreal, opening for Between the Buried and Me on their Parallax II Tour.

Yeah, that was a fun tour. Dan Briggs is the man. Dan and I still talk every once in a while.

It would be awesome if we could get a Tommy guest vocalist feature on the next record.

Yeah, Tommy’s awesome. And Dan has been doing some really cool stuff. He just did that record, Obverse, with Emily Hopkins, the harp player, and Chris Allison, the drummer for Plini. Dan always has some cool stuff cooking with somebody. He does a lot of collaborative stuff.

Anything that came out recently that you’re jamming to? Anything you think our readers should check out?

I really like the new Cocojoey record. Cocojoey’s an electronic, hyperpop producer and artist. They rip on the keyboard. They’re a classically trained keyboardist. And they make really cool hyperpop / electronic music and their live shows are insane. And Faye has been playing drums for them recently, on their most recent tours. Faye also opened the show as Trust Fund Ozu, and they have some shows this weekend. But yeah the new Cocojoey record is sick.

Obviously, I have to plug my partner Faye’s (Trust Fund Ozu’s) new record, Ozumaki. She always has like three albums ready to go at any given moment. She makes music so fast.

You guys are all so prolific, I don’t know how you do it.

Yeah, Faye especially, though. She’s constantly on her laptop making a new record. I think she has one that’s being mixed right now. Yeah, so Cocojoey, Trust Fund Ozu, for sure.

The new Cocojoey has gone over really well at The Progressive Subway. A lot of us are really digging it. We reviewed it when it came out. It’s probably one of my favorite releases of the past year or so.

It’s intense. It’s wild. Cocojoey, they went to college for composition, and it really shows because the themes of that record are very much intertwined and it’s a very symphonic-type album, even though it’s presented on all electronic instruments. Like, a theme from the first song comes back in the last song and it’s organized in a very classical kind of way. And yeah, I love it.

Anything else we should keep an eye out for?

Be on the lookout for more We Used to Cut the Grass stuff. We have two more live videos we’re going to be putting out. We’re doing shows in various configurations over the next few months. It’s a difficult thing to tour with this band and we’re figuring that out. Because, like, we’re not going to tour as a nine-piece band. That’s not happening. Even at the Thank You Scientist level, it’s hard to tour as a seven-piece band. So we’re going to be doing some tour dates as a trio.

It’s funny, because we’re taking this band that started as a duo, eventually grew to be a nine-piece monstrosity, and now, in order to travel, we have to shrink it back to what we started with, basically, and rearrange the music. Also, we’ll be playing a ton of new music. But we’re gonna be touring as a trio. We will be doing some tour dates as a large band, but only where that logistically makes sense, like in cities we’ve been to a bunch of times, and at clubs that know us, and stuff like that.

Sound guys are typically not very happy when you show up with two drum sets. So we’re going to stop doing that so much. I mean, we’re not going to stop doing that, but we’re going to stop doing it all the time.

Better than showing up with trash instruments, I guess?

Honestly, I think it’s worse. I think a sound guy would rather mic up a wash tub bass than to have to do changeover for two drum kits. Especially if you’re not even the headlining band, you know? But yeah, it’s logistically tough, so We Used to Cut the Grass will be touring as a trio. And just doing weekends and regional stuff.

Are the tour dates on the website now, or will they be posted shortly?

Well, not all of it’s been announced yet. Most of our promotion is through Instagram. But I would encourage people to join the mailing list. That’s the best place to keep up with the band. Because these days, you know, every post gets suppressed no matter what it is. The mailing list is the only way to avoid the algorithm completely.

[Ed. Note: you can sign up to the We Used to Cut the Grass mailing list at codymccorry.com]

Which is what we all want to do, really, isn’t it?

Yeah, ideally.

Very last question: what’s your favorite fruit?

I think it changes from year to year. Right now, I think it’s bananas.

That’s a good one. A classic.

In my house, it’s like a bit that we buy too many bananas. Like, we always have a mountain of bananas in the kitchen. And then it’s kind of a race to eat them before they all go rotten. Which is good, because it puts pressure on you to eat bananas. It’s a healthy cycle.

A similar theme to your musical endeavors, where you have so many things going on that you have to do all of them at all times.

Sort of, yeah. You find ways to put pressure on yourself to stay organized and get shit done.

And eat bananas.

And eat bananas.

—

Cody also sent The Progressive Subway his list of recommendations, repeated verbatim below

• Trust Fund Ozu (Hyperpop by Faye Fadem; I’m on bass)
• Slaughtersun (Progressive death composed by Ben Karas; I’m on bass)
• Civilians (FFO Joe Gullace)
• Flowmingos (FFO Alex Silver)
• Now This (Tom’s new fusion trio, they have an instagram but no recordings out yet)
• Justice Cow (Super raw heartwrenching alt rock by Jess formerly of Bent Knee! Ben Levin on the record as well)
• Fire-Toolz (Angel Marcloid, our mastering engineer, is an all-time musical genius)

New records I’ve been diggin’:

• STARS by Cocojoey
• Ozumaki by Trust Fund Ozu
• my dad died by Justice Cow
• Havdalah to the Blank Without by Ben Levin
• Bottle Grin by Kit Orion (Ben Levin and Jess Kion are on this record)
• The Common Task by Horse Lords
• About Ghosts by Mary Halvorson
• MOHINI DEY by Mohini Dey

---

Thank you again to Cody McCorry for the interview and make sure to check out the new LP We Used to Cut the Grass #2 on Bandcamp and wherever else good music is streamable!

Links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Album review