Interview: Modern Baseball Talks Tour, Twitter and Stardom

The Philadelphia natives that make up Modern Baseball have had a wild year. After releasing their first album Sports with LameO Records in late 2012, getting picked up by Run For Cover records early in 2013, doing summer tours with You Blew It! and managing to keep on track with the rigors of college, the gang is now poised to release their second album You're Gonna Miss It All on February 11, but the album is already catching major accolades after going up for stream

over at Pitchfork.

Demonstrating a dynamic that feels wholly emotive, the band is touted for straightforward, contagious tracks that can be at the same time unsettlingly relatable and grin inducing, as Modern Baseball tackles everything from social networking to self loathing.

Bassist Ian Farmer spent some of his scant downtime to chat with ACRN before the band skips out on spring semester to tour 'til they drop.

You guys are still in Philly right? You haven’t started off on the crazy tour yet?

Ian Farmer: Yeah. We have a couple months well, I guess only about a month now before that all starts. It’s coming up!

So I’m sure you’re all pretty excited for it then?

IF: Oh yeah! We don’t get the opportunity to tour very often because of school so we figured out a way to take off and still graduate on time because we had AP credits coming in. So we were actually on schedule to graduate early.

Those AP credits are a lifesaver.

IF: Yeah, you know it sucks in high school, but they’re paying off now.

How’d you guys get hooked up on The Wonder Years tour?

IF: To be honest, I don’t know how Sports got into Soupy’s [a.k.a. Dan Campbell of The Wonder Years] hands but somehow it fell into his hands and we ended up playing The Greatest Generation record release show in Philly. They asked us to play that and we were just like, “Uh, okay!” And so we got to play the First Unitarian Church, I know at least for me and I think for the other dudes, one of my absolute favorite venues. It’s essentially a huge DIY space plus it’s a church [laughs]. Just a combination of those two things: playing The Wonder Years sold out record release and being at the church you know, it was just an awesome thing.

Then, in September, The Wonder Years hit us up and they were like, “Hey, we’re going on tour this spring. Do you want to come?” And at first we were like, “Oh man, we have school,” and we actually turned it down at first because we thought, “We can’t with school.” Then they were like, “Alright…well, are you sure?” and then we were like, “What the hell were we thinking!?” [laughs] So we figured out some sort of way to do it, and decided, “Okay, we’re gonna do this.” And then we found out Citizen, Defeater* and Real Friends were on it and it was like, “Well, this is awesome!” [laughs] So we couldn’t pass that up for anything and it was like [before we changed our minds] everyone we were talking to said, “You guys know you screwed up, right?” So yeah, that’s how that one happened [laughs].

[Editor's Note: Since this interview, Defeater has dropped off The Greatest Generation Tour due to medical issues. They have since been replaced by Fireworks.]

So after The Wonder Years tour you’re going to Europe. Have you been over there before?

IF: No, we haven’t really done much touring as a band because we haven’t actually been a band that long, but we’re all super excited. When we found out we were able to go with Real Friends and You Blew It!, who have been some of our best friends since the summer when we did our U.S. tour with them, we’re just…I don’t even know how to explain it--how excited we actually are because we’re gonna get to see a new part of the world we’ve never seen before with some of our best friends--and we feel so lucky.

How long do you have left in school? That tour will take you through May.

IF: Jake and I have about a year left because we’re juniors right now. So we have to go back in the summer, but we’ll be able to graduate hopefully in the spring, if all goes according to plan. Then we won’t have school holding us back [laughs].

Up until this point, what do you think the catalyst has been to Modern Baseball gaining so much momentum? Receiving a lot of coverage from Property of Zack and getting picked up to Run For

Cover and now running the tour circuit, it’s been a bit of a whirlwind.

IF: Honestly, I think it was a chain of very lucky events. We actually have known Zack since we came to [Drexel University] because he’s in our major and our grade. So at first he was just like, “Oh, haha, this is my dumb friends’ band,” and he finally heard a song and he was like, “Oh, okay,” and he decided to give us a shot which turned out to help a whole lot because he runs Property of Zack and out of nowhere, Run For Cover hit us up. We weren’t expecting that for a couple years if even that. That was bestcase scenario for us. They hit us up on January 1, [2013], and we were like, “What?” Those two things brought us a whole bunch of fans that wouldn’t have heard the music because otherwise, we’d still be a basement Philly band. They kind of brought us out of that whole scene. I’m not exactly sure how it all happened but it did, and I’m very thankful for it.

Property of Zack seems to cull some really good information for being so DIY.

IF: Yeah, he does. That kid is in front of a computer 24 hours a day [laughs].

So you must have been pretty far into recording the new album when Run For Cover approached you?

IF: No, actually. You’re Gonna Miss It All wasn’t even written by that point. Well, some of the songs were, but Sports had come out maybe a little over a month before that when [Run For Cover] hit us up. They ended up repressing Sports a couple times, and we agreed to do a couple records with them. We were just floored by that.

In terms of lyrics, Modern Baseball seems to incorporate a lot of modern themes in its music. Is that an active attempt to appeal to a younger generation or more of a byproduct of the stream-of-consciousness style?

IF: I think it’s really just that. That’s just our lives. We’re pretty much addicted to Twitter [laughs]. I think that’s why it ends up coming out so much. Also because, with social media in general, it’s a big part of life as a college student or anybody in that age group. So it really is part of what’s happening in our lives and that’s why it gets written about [laughs].

What are some of the band’s favorite Twitter accounts then?

IF: Let’s see, my favorite Twitter accounts are probably...when Jaded Punk Hulk was really going full force, like every single tweet, I was on my ass laughing. He still does every once in awhile. There was a good Ian Mackaye parody account too. Also, more recently, there’s this restaurant in Philly called Pizza Brain that’s like a pizza museum, and they have an excellent

Twitter. They basically just take really prophetic sayings and put pizza in it. Another one of our favorites, Sean hates it though, is this account called “Big Ben,” and it just tweets the time like, “BONG BONG BONG.” We find it hilarious, but Sean [Huber, the band's drummer] doesn’t.

On Facebook, you’re listed as “Ian ‘Slugworth’ Farmer.” What’s with the nickname?

IF: One day, we were in the van going somewhere, and we were talking and I started saying how I think bowler hats are cool. Then somebody mentioned how bowler hats remind them of Slugworth, and from then on I just have the name Slugworth! They also call me bones, mostly because that’s all that’s in my body [laughs].