John Lucas

Exactly 13 years ago to this day, Pennsylvania punks Pissed Jeans released their fourth album, Honeys, on the Sub Pop label. I interviewed frontman Matt Korvette about the album for Concrete Skateboarding magazine. The original article only appeared in print, so this is the first time it has ever been posted online.

Sound Check: Pissed Jeans

(This article originally appeared in Concrete Skateboarding Issue 124.)

Matt Korvette’s musical identity was shaped by the steady diet of punk and hardcore he grew up on, but don’t hold your breath waiting for him to write the definitive smash-the-state anthem for his band, Pissed Jeans. Over a caustic but weirdly approachable wall of punk noise constructed by his bandmates (guitarist Bradley Fry, bassist Randy Huth, and drummer Sean McGuinness), Korvette can work himself up into a righteous fury, as a listen to Pissed Jeans’ fourth album, Honeys, reveals. 

On tracks like the Black Flag-indebted slow grinder “Male Gaze” and the adrenaline-charged thrasher “Health Plan” you might pick up on the fact that the former song is Korvette’s public apology for being a drooling lecher, and the latter is about his aversion to doctors’ offices. If these seem like mundane concerns compared to, say, the political sloganeering found on the latest Rise Against record, Korvette makes no apologies for that. 

“I feel like being the singer in a band that some people have heard of is kind of like a real lucky break,” he says over the phone from his home in Philadelphia. “I don’t want to just waste it by going back to seeing what everyone else has written about for the past 30 years, and just kind of altering those slightly so we have lyrics that exist and are completely unimportant, but no one’s going to get angry at them or notice them. That just bores me, because there’s nothing being said, actually. I have an opportunity to give you my spin on things that are annoying, so I feel like I want to do that and be true to things that I actually think about every day.”

Most of what Korvette ponders on a daily basis is relatable to the average listener because, although the band is signed to Sub Pop, Pissed Jeans isn’t keeping a roof over anyone’s head. The group’s members all have day jobs, including Korvette’s 9-to-5 gig as an insurance claims adjuster. Office politics don’t usually make for compelling song fodder, but “Cafeteria Food” is an exception to the rule. In that one, a cubicle dweller fantasizes about the death of a hated project manager.

“I was actually a bit nervous about that one,” the singer admits. “You know, I felt really good writing it, but after it was written I was like, ‘Oh, man. Did I go a bit too far?’ Having a little pang of ‘I hope my boss doesn’t hear this song,’ but I don’t think he did.” 

The brilliant thing about “Cafeteria Food” is that its protagonist doesn’t dream up some elaborate plot to assassinate his nemesis; he simply imagines how satisfied he would feel upon hearing of the man’s demise: “Inside I’ll be laughing because you’re dead/You died/And I’m wishing I had my tap shoes on.”

“I feel like I’m not a unique fiower,” Korvette offers. “Probably a lot of the things that I’m dealing with, other people have thought about or just have not even realized that they deal with all the time, and they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, that happens to me, too.’ Which might be more potent than ‘I hate cops.’”

Of course, songs about hating cops can be perfectly relevant. If you’re a young Black man in Compton, and it happens to be 1988, then “Fuck tha Police” is a powerful call to arms. That, however, is not where Korvette is coming from, and he has no interest in making believe he’s something that he’s not.

“I’m coming from a very specific place of middle-class, white male privilege,” he acknowledges. “I haven’t had much serious struggle in my life, so I think that probably shines through. l’m not a guy that was homeless at some point and had to really struggle or sleep in a car for weeks. And l’m not trying to pretend that I am, either. I don’t think that I’m better because I had all these privileges, and I don’t think l’m worse. l’m just trying to say: ‘Here’s what I am.’”