The Return of Bad Mary (From Japan!)

Written by: Ryan Dobby - November 2019
Edited by: Travis Ryan

I caught my first glimpse of Bad Mary while running the merch table for Samurai Pizza Cats at their Anxiety EP-release show back in March of 2018. Despite being caught up in the nervous excitement of my first night as a merch guy and anticipation of the incredible music to come, I recall being blown away by the first band, whose energy and straight up punk rock ethos permeated through the walls of the Great South Bay Brewery. That first band happened to be Bad Mary.

The band, which formed back in 2010 and has put out four prior releases—Better Days (2013), Killing Dinosaurs (2015), We Could Have Saved the World (2016), and Glitter Bomb (2017)—just dropped their brand new LP The Return of Space Girl and will hit the stage for two release shows at Mr. Beery’s in Bethpage 11/8 and Arlene’s Grocery in NYC 11/18. They dropped a video for their social-media-satirizing single “The Itch” in October, so be sure to check that out during one of the thousand times you’re on your phone today.

In late August, prior to the release of the new full-length, Bad Mary headed out on tour to play a string of shows IN JAPAN! I recently had the privilege to chat with lead vocalist Amanda Mac about the tour, the new album, and what’s ahead for the band:

RD - What made you decide to head to Japan on your most recent tour? Did you have any specific venues in mind to play?

AM - We didn’t have any specific venues in mind when we first started booking, but honestly it’s something that we had always wanted to do if the opportunity ever came around. Japan is a country where we’ve been there before just to travel and we loved it just as a place, but to play was something that we’d always joked around about. Like, ‘One day when we tour Japan…’ There’s a song off of We Could Have Saved the World—though I could be wrong on quoting our own recordings—called “Japan” that was released in 2015 I believe, where in the really fast part of the lyrics it’s, “Do what you can, make a plan, stick it to the man, form a band, tour Japan”. And “Japan” was like the working title of the song where we just kept calling it that so we never changed it, so it’s always definitely been like a pipe dream or just a dream of ours. 

Then we found out that we had started to get played on FM radio on a major show in Tokyo, so that’s when we were like, ‘Oh, okay so if we were to ever do something there - now would probably be the time since we’re starting to get some kind of traction.’ So we reached out to Mike Rogers, who was the host of that show, to see what the feasibility of doing something like that would be, and he put us in touch with some of the right people. We have another person that we worked with, April, who was so helpful with booking venues and helping us figure out where we should stay and everything like that. So it all kind of came together and we just decided to go for it.

RD - What were some of your favorite cities and venues to play? Did you have any in mind that you’d specifically set out to?

AM - In talking with Mike [Staub] (bass/vox/husband) and with April, we had mostly decided—and transportation is a definite factor in this too because it’s not close, it’s very far away (laughs). There’s some planes and some trains and things to take—to keep it central to mostly Tokyo. We were in the Kanto region, and at first we were calling it the Tokyo Tour, and then we booked two venues that were like slightly outside of Tokyo so it just became the Japan Tour. But it was mostly Tokyo. And just because the trains are so easy, and everywhere we booked was pretty much within an hour of where we stayed, it was really easy to get around. Basically once we figured out it was going to be in Tokyo, the transportation was the next thing to figure out, so like where we could feasibly get to, et cetera, and then we began to just organize everything from there. We knew if we’d booked a venue that was, like, three hours away and then we had to come home in the same day…

RD - (Laughs) It would be tough…

AM - Yea like would we do it? Maybe, but it would be a lot.

RD - Was there any immediate culture shock in arriving and playing those first few shows? I know you’d mentioned that you had been there before.

AM - Yes. So Mike has been there; this was his fourth time now. He studied abroad when he was at Hofstra (University) and he took Japanese as his language while he was there. So he actually had a pretty decent base to help figure out where we were going and how to read signs and talk to people, too. It helped a lot having somebody who knew what they were looking at a bit more. He was there for about six weeks in college, and we had gone back for our honeymoon. We went there for two weeks and that was my first time there so I didn’t know how to really speak the language. I did know how to say “Sumimasen,” which is like the most useful phrase, which means like, “Excuse me,” which is a basic nicety. That, for the first time I went, got me around as much as possible. We went again in November of 2018 for an anniversary trip because there was so much that we hadn’t gotten to see and we were like, ‘Okay, let’s make a list and go back to do all these other things,’ and we had no idea that within the year of that trip, that we’d be back so soon for such a different purpose. David [Henderson] (guitar) had also gone in January of 2019 because his brother lives in Vietnam. So he was going to visit his brother, but en route to Vietnam, he and his wife decided to take a side-trip, and they spent some time in Japan as well. 

RD - That’s cool, so it wasn’t like all of you all at once experiencing it for the first time, like enough of you had gone there before...

AM - Yea I mean we definitely mostly followed Mike because he was the one that mostly dealt with April and Mike Rogers for booking and stuff, and talked with people over there because he knows the most Japanese, so anything that had to be translated or whatnot we just went through him. We’d be like, “Mike, what does this say? Mike, what are we doing, where are we going?” So having him, even though I had been there, it was really useful to have him around. 

My dad [Bill Mac] (drums) had never been there before. He’d been to Italy when he was a teenager, and I always heard about that trip and haven’t been there before and really want to go. He’d heard about the experience from our trip (to Japan), so he was so excited and had no idea what to expect, so it was very cool watching him see things for the first time—Like, taking him to different places or trying foods that we had tried and being like, “What do you think, isn’t it great?!” So it was so cool to experience that with my dad. 

I said this to David at one of the clubs (David being my professor from college also): “If you had asked me 12 years ago (when I was probably in one of his classes) if I would be in a band with you along with the person who is now my husband AND with my father and we’d all travel to Japan, I would have laughed in your face, just absolutely laughed in your face.” Just looking around at where we were I was just like ‘I can’t believe it, this is wild. It’s absolutely nuts.’

RD - How responsive were the crowds to your music?

AM - We had no idea what to expect. And when I say we went with absolutely no expectations we were like—there were six shows—we were [thinking], we could walk into every single club and there could be, like, the four people that are always there every night and then no one else. It could just be empty or it could be amazing. We were just happy to be there and excited to see what happened. The first night we played at this venue called “Denatsu” which translates, I think, to “20,000 Volts”. And when you were asking about venues earlier—we didn’t really set out to play any specific venues, but April (who helped with our booking) picked some really cool spots for us, so I would like to check those out again if we were to go back. I would love to check those places out again, but Denatsu was like this punk rock basement club that had been there forever basically. You’d walk in and it’s this big square cement room behind a soundproof door; full of smoke, people are decked out in punk clothes, you see mohawks, you see patches all over things. Our soundcheck was also six hours before we played, so we had to haul our stuff an hour out to this club six hours before we played. This was the first day, so we had no idea what to expect yet, and we were getting an idea of like, ‘Here’s how the schedule might run’ because all the other clubs kind of had a similar itinerary and everything, so this was our first rodeo. 

So we got there and the first band sound checking was awesome, and we got to talk with them a little bit. And then the second band at soundcheck was also awesome! Their name is Riot Missile and we’re still friends with them, we talk with them all the time. They were incredible. I could talk about them a bunch because we always do. But that first night was like lightning in a bottle. Every single band that played was so kickass, and when we got up to play there were people who knew us from the Mike Rogers (Radio) Show and there were people that found us on Twitter. And there were people [who], when I checked our social media after that, were like, “I was really hoping they were going to play ‘Ninja’ and then they did!” and that was crazy. Just talking about it I feel like I’m out of my body, it just doesn’t…

RD - Yea I can only imagine, just being in another country, different culture entirely, and then there are people that are just like, “Oh yeah I know you guys!”

AM - Yeah just reacting to it, I mean, I took a selfie with every crowd at the end of every night just so I would remember that: where the crowd would rush to the stage, just a whole different group of people, with their fists in the air. The crowds there are, from my experience, looking to find new original music. Like they’re not just out going, ‘Oh yeah, there’s live music.’ They are looking to hear new stuff and they are excited when they find it, and it’s a very cool energy.

RD - Having been back from the tour for a while now and dropping two brand new singles already, can you tell me a little about the new album The Return of Space Girl?

AM - So the new album we’ve been working on for a long time. There’s one song on it—I think this is like the seventh version of it, where it’s now in its final form. We’ve been working on it since before we released two of the EPs that came out between then and now. It’s been in the works since “Space Girl” was originally written, which came out on our first album, so that’s 2013 I guess. It’s our first return to recording in our home studio, so we did everything at home. We could really take our time with it, which was nice. It’s a 33-minute punk rock concept album about a robot in space, social media addiction, and the end of the world as we know it. When I recorded all the vocal stuff, there are so many different points of view that the album is coming from that it definitely has a story and a journey it takes you on, but it’s not necessarily linear. There’s definitely a cohesive feel to it and you can kind of feel the journey of the world that the album is taking place in. 

So on “Space Girl”, the opening track, you hear—it’s so strange to explain—but you hear the people that sent her on this mission tell her that she’s not allowed back. That the things that she’s found are too dangerous, so they are just going to hide them from humanity and she is not allowed back. The song immediately after that (“Try Your Best) is then told from Space Girl’s perspective and it’s pretty much ‘You can try your best to hide my passion or hide my mission but you’re not going to get away with it.’ Then it kind of takes a turn to society and this world that we now live in, and this is when the two songs that we just released as singles are back to back on the album. I believe “Addicted” is first, which is the second single that we released, and that is the song from the point of view of the internet, of social media and it’s about how we’ve all kind of become addicted and intertwined with this web of everything online. You look at pictures of people nowadays and everyone’s looking at their screens, so it’s kind of pretty much told from the screen’s perspective and how...I can’t speak for everybody, but I feel like the majority have fallen victim. I look at the hourly time I spend on my phone every week and it’s like a stupid number that I don’t even want to say out loud.

RD - (Laughs) Especially considering that this right now is being recorded on an iPhone.

AM - Right! So yeah, it’s basically the Space Girl character’s journey and it’s the current state of the world that we’re in and how communication has changed so much because of social media, and dealing with social media addiction in the modern world. The narrative of the whole album goes that the people of Earth are told that Space Girl is going to destroy the planet, so they prepare for the end and throw a “Disaster Party” where they throw caution to the wind and don’t worry about any consequences to their actions. In “Ordinary Day” everyone wakes up to the planet still being here but social media destroyed, so we have to learn how to talk and interact with each other again. 

It’s all about personal contact and connection. We sometimes lose some of our humanity on the Internet because we forget there are real people on the other side of the screens. We understand the importance of the Internet, but we’re wary of the divide caused due to the emergence of social media.

RD - I know you mentioned earlier that this was basically home-recorded but also self-produced as well?

AM - Yes it was all self-produced. We have worked with producers that did some great work with us in the past that we have nothing but good things to say about, but we just really wanted to bring this one back to the beginning and back to kind of how we started. We took a lot of what we learned from trial and error of recording our own album the first time and then kind of having the experience in studio and seeing what worked and what didn’t. We definitely learned and have grown since our first trial with Better Days (2014), and I would actually love to re-record some stuff from Better Days and put it out possibly in the future. I’ve been trying to get that to happen for a long time, so maybe I can will it into existence.

RD - Are there any specific songs off the new album you as a singer gravitate more towards either personally or because they’re just a lot of fun to play live?

AM - I really like singing the song “Disaster Party”. I just like the title also but Mike—every time I describe the song like this he kind of looks at me like ‘Ugh’ (rolls eyes) but I always call it a bop. That song’s a bop. I love doing it. It’s just fun, but it’s a song about the party that you throw the night that you know that the world is going to end, so that’s what a “Disaster Party” is. It sounds cheerful and again it’s a bop, but the subject matter is so heavy that that’s also kind of what I like about it: It’s a little macabre. It’s not like “spooky” macabre but it’s apocalyptic, it’s like ‘Well we’re all going out, we’re all gonna die, so let’s get drunk and party and make the best of this last night that we get.’ I really like that one. 

There’s a couple of songs that are very different for me. There’s one song “Venetia Phair” that’s actually named after and written about the girl who named Pluto. The lyrics to the bridge are an actual quote from her when asked what she felt about Pluto not being a planet anymore. I like it because I kind of get to live in my head voice a little bit, which I don’t do often, so that’s a nice change of pace. “Disaster Party” and “Try Your Best” as far as songs that have the most lyrics packed into a very small amount of space; those two I literally had to change some lyrics to make them the same amount of syllables but just easier to shape my mouth in the form of words, to make it easy to say the next one and also breathe. I’ve never had to be that specific with the phonetics of the lyric to make it possible to say, but that was a challenge that was fun because I was like, ‘I have a very short amount of time to have to say this many things and it’s not working, so what can I change?’

RD - So like a musical puzzle in a sense but having to fit everything lyrically.

AM - Yup, exactly. So that was fun, and I’m still finding different ways to sing it live versus the recording. I’ve been trying to sing it through because we’re doing the two album release shows playing the album in its entirety. So I’ve been trying to treat it like one big song, so in my brain they’re all melding together. The opening is sick. I don't even sing on the opening but I can just kind of sit back and listen which is nice.

RD - Do you have any new merch available for fans?

AM - Yes we have a bunch on our website right now that—they’re not the album cover shirt, but it’s the “Space Girl” face shirt. There’s tanks and tees and we have new hoodies. We have not had hoodies in a long time so I’m very excited to have those back. And we’ve figured out a way to kind of print some things on demand, so we’ve opened up to our Patreon subscribers some Patreon-only merch so they can get a little bit more specific with the design of certain things. Because of Patreon we were able to record an album by ourselves and we were able to organize and plan and book an international tour to Japan pretty much on our own. We don’t have management or a label or a distributor, so Patreon has been instrumental in allowing us to do all that and pushing us to create more content and to write more music. We just shipped out brand new keychains that came out cooler than we expected them to, and the “Bad Mary Maniacs” who were our fanpage on Facebook, we’re basically trying to funnel over to Patreon. So if you’re a Maniac and you sign up there we’ll send you a keychain as a welcome gift.  

RD - Anything more you like to add about the new album coming out or show dates for fans?

AM - We have the two album release shows: November 8th at Mr. Beery’s [costs] $10 at the door and anybody who pays to get in also gets a hard copy of the album. That should be a fun show; we always love the nights at Mr. Beery’s, the crowds are great there. And then November 18th at Arlene’s Grocery. 

Also, David has animated a full-length short film to go along with our album. [It’s] doing the festival circuit right now, and it’s won some awards. He fully animated an entire cartoon that goes along with and kind of visually tells a slightly different story than the album itself, but pretty similar. There’s just some other characters that he made up and created for it, but he showed us that after we’d recorded a rough demo version of the whole album. He pulled us into the studio one night and had the first song and a half fully animated, and he hadn’t told us he was doing it. So once it got past a certain point we were like ‘Oh shit, this is a real movie!’ I think at Mr. Beery’s we’re going to screen it behind us while we play through it. 

Then Arlene’s Grocery on November 18th, it’s the first time that we are playing with both bands that we have on that bill. So there’s Glittervvitch, who we’ve played with their sister-band Zombie Sunday, and some of the members of that band we’d asked first but they couldn’t do that show. So they suggested Glittervvitch and I was like, ‘Actually yeah they are awesome!’ So it will be cool to play with them. And it’s our first show with this other band called Violent In Black that we met at Arlene’s Grocery over a year ago now, after they were playing a show at Piano’s around the block and wandered in off the block just to see who was playing. [They] wandered into our set and were like, “We have to play with you guys,” and we’ve been trying to play with them ever since. 

Then we’re having our fifth annual Holiday Disaster again at Mr. Beery’s on December 13th. We throw this party every year; we’re still finalizing the bands but there’s four bands on, a grab-bag of the worst Christmas Presents you’ve ever seen in your life, I think there’s going to be a Santa this year. I think Flack Jacket is playing, so they usually have one in tow. It’s a fun night, so that’s coming up. After that we don’t have anything announced yet for the New Year.