“Matt and Justin recorded Alkaline Trio, and we were excited to go in there and record with some of the same equipment and with the same guy,” says singer Tom May via phone from an Amarillo, TX tour stop. The Menzingers perform on Wednesday, Jan. 4, at House of Blues. “Chicago at that point was one of the best places for us to play. It was a city where we drew a lot of people. We were welcomed with open arms there and had lots of friends there. They knew us when we walking into the bar. Even though it was winter, it was a wonderful experience.”
Songs such as “Gates,” a track that opens with nothing more than a brittle guitar riff as it builds slowly, and the droning title track feature poetic lyrics that show off the band’s sensitive side.
“On the record, whoever wrote the song also wrote the lyrics for it,” says May. “We were really into the Clash, and [guitarist] Greg [Barnett] was into Russian writers. I was getting into [singer-songwriter] Regina Spektor. I didn’t listen to Bruce Springsteen while growing up, but that music was becoming something in my life, and I was going through his back catalog. The biggest inspiration was just people in our lives. A lot of the lines are pulled from conversations with people we were entangled with at the time.”
The chorus of “Casey,” for example, was written by a friend of the band’s, and the group reworked it into a different story.
For the current tour, the band will celebrate the album’s tenth anniversary and play On the Impossible Past from start to finish. After playing the album in its entirety, it will then play a mix of other tunes, old and new.
“Well, at first we were leery [of revisiting On the Impossible Past] because we didn’t want to relive our past or come off as the band that has a record that everyone loves from ten years ago but hasn’t done anything else good since then,” says May. “But people do like our newer records, and our new record is more popular than this album. Looking back at what parts of songs worked and didn’t work has been fun. One of the interesting parts is that we had the shittiest gear back then and no money to buy any gear. Now that we’ve collected ten years’ worth of gear, the songs actually sound pretty good when we play them live.” 
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This article appears in Nov 30 – Dec 13, 2022.
