Greg Barnett, The Menzingers’ co-vocalist and guitarist, is committed to the habit of writing songs. On precious rare days off from life in a band that has been in the game since forming in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 2006, the 31-year-old fills part of his time enjoying home comforts with his girlfriend. He catches up on what’s going on in the world through the pages of The New Yorker magazine. He oohs and aahs in the direction of his niece. Improbably, he even plays a round or two of golf. But at least part of each day he makes sure to spend alone, with only an acoustic guitar for company, as he attempts to conjure songs out of city air.
“It’s what I’ve always known,” he says of his dedication to his craft. “I fell in love with songwriting at a young age. I got [Billy Bragg’s 1986 album] Talking With The Taxman About Poetry when I was 15, and I devoured it. I devoured records by Bob Dylan, The Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones; I loved that style. I love political music, I love protest music, and I adore love songs. I love the human expression that comes with songwriting.”
He has become rather good at it, too. The Menzingers’ 4K-rated sixth album, Hello Exile – on which writing credits are shared with fellow members Tom May (guitars and vocals), Eric Keen (bass) and Joe Godino (drums) – glows resplendent with first person vignettes, across a 12-song set ablaze with vivid images of the American landscape. Lost evenings abound. As do reflections on the passing of youth, and portraits of lives in which even the personal becomes quietly political.
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But this is an age, and America is a country, where even those with introverted instincts feel the need to become loudly political. This The Menzingers do on Hello Exile’s opening track, the fabulously titled America (You’re Freaking Me Out). It’s a biting song that takes place at the ‘end of history’, where people are ‘swinging and swaying to the murder mystery’ from which ‘rhyme and reason fled the crime scene’ that has occurred in a nation where some at least are unable to ‘recognise truth from clever lies’. In its original form, the song ran to a sprawling “10,
15, 20 verses” as Greg wrestled to get the enormous weight of disillusion at events in his homeland off his chest. With help from the band, he eventually tightened it up and honed it down. To hear him speak of the process now, it sounds as if it cost him something.
“Not to write that song would have felt like I’d failed to address the elephant in the room,” he concedes. “It affects me mentally on a daily basis, having to read the news every day and being so upset, that if I didn’t write something like that it would feel as if I was cheating myself. It would feel as if I was cheating the band, our ideas and what it is we stand for.”