Trees... and Shopkeepers that Won’t Sell Pink? An Interview with Goodbye Honolulu

Cover photo from Vinyl Chapters

Interviewed by Mischa White and Camilla Johnson. Transcribed by Grace Ellsworth.

Name Pronouns Age Zodiac

Fox He/him 24 Leo

Max He/him 25 Capricorn

Emmett He/him 24 Virgo

Jacob He/him 24 Capricorn

OFF THE RECORD - CAMILLA JOHNSON: So the first question we have for y’all is what are y’all up to during self-isolation? Have you discovered any talents, or are you absolutely losing it?

GOODBYE HONOLULU - JACOB SWITZER: We’re losing our talents.

GOODBYE HONOLULU - EMMETT WEBB: Um… I dunno, <inaudible> we’re mixing it up a bunch, I dunno...

GOODBYE HONOLULU - FOX MARTINDALE: Recording our new album.

JACOB: Yeah, um, I’m with my brother-in-law Braden Sauder at his studio Marquee Sound and we’re making a little album, um, but yeah, I dunno if I’ve learned any new new talents, as much as sort of like, exercising old ones, but—

FOX: I learned poker, I know how to play poker now. Pretty psyched about that. I like it.

JACOB: We’re all gonna start losing money to Fox on tour.

EMMETT: Um, I dunno, I was playing a lot of basketball with my little brother in the back alley. Yeah. trying to cook when I can. I’m here with my family and there’s a lot of us so… it’s kinda—it gets a little crazy sometimes. Younger siblings are fun. So.

GOODBYE HONOLULU - MAX BORNSTEIN: I’m building a birdhouse, a birdfeeder, and uh, I’m still waiting for some glue to dry. So I—I’m—I don’t think I’ve gained any talent, but uh—maybe—maybe I’ll get into constructing small… small structures.

CAMILLA: Have you seen any, like, cool birds? Or are they just, like, random birds that are out there outside? Like cardinals, blue jays, like?...

MAXIE: If anything, yeah, like sparrows, robins will be around, I dunno if we’re gonna get any crazy critters.

FOX: I’ve got cardinals all the time in my backyard.

EMMETT: I’ve got cardinals in the front. It’s great.

(UNCLEAR): I’ve got cardinals to the side—

FOX: I’ve got cardinals up top!

EMMETT: Got cardinals… flying round my head… got birds flying around my head every time I wake up… um, no—and then I mean—the band—we were also—maybe a week or two ago now, months, I don’t even know, days, we were collaborating on a new wave, just kind of collaborating via laptop which was kind of new for us, and interesting, and… coming up with some new results, and trying new stuff, so that was—that’s been fun.

CAMILLA: So what is the hardest song y’all have ever had to write, and what is the easiest, would you say? The quickest, I guess. If that makes sense.

JACOB: I think the easiest might have been “Bum Me Out”, like Emmett said. Like literally—we were literally jamming out, and someone came up with that original riff, and then we kinda just started singing over it, and it came so easily. And then we never really changed it.

EMMETT: That’s how lazy it was. We were like, “That’s cool! Let’s do that!”

JACOB: It went pretty fast.

FOX: I think it only took an hour or something to write, maybe less?

EMMETT: That was Fox that wrote that, brought it in to us… Max, do you know the most difficult song? I can’t really…

MAXIE: I don’t know if we have too much trouble, like, writing together, coming up with, like, a final—final product, I guess? But I, uh, think of us recording “Slip Inside Your Mind” for Heavy Gold, like, the original version in 2015. It took a lot of takes to record because it’s kind of long, kind of complex, but I don’t think… writing, we’re usually pretty quick. The new song “Cut Off” took a little while, cuz’ I found an old voice sample… where like, we were playing this for like two or three years ago, the guitar ideas, the drum ideas...

EMMETT: The chorus… but the way a lot of the new stuff—we kind of made a time frame in the studio when we recorded all this unreleased music that’s yet to be released. But yeah, we made it very short… We were like, gotta get through it in a day or two, cuz we did the whole record in like ten days.

FOX: A lot of songs are just brought in as like, a guitar riff, or even just like a small idea, and “Cut Off” was just a small little guitar riff. And we liked it enough to make it an entire song.

CAMILLA: Like, uh—I read in an interview that y’all did about a year ago—I don’t remember the specific, like, theme, or who was doing the interview—but you said that one of your biggest roadblocks as artists, like as a band, was getting into the States? So one year and a couple of months later, is that still true, or do you feel like there’s been some progression of your audience breaking into the scene here?

JACOB: I think our, like, our barrier to getting into the States was more the actual order, and the actual like, getting the papers and the Visa and stuff together and pay—getting the money. That was, like, our initial roadblock to getting into the States. The actual—the actual audiences and stuff, not that like, we’re super big in the States or anything, haven’t always been a huge issue because we went there initially with bands that were bigger than us that were our friends, like Hinds and Swimmers, um—

EMMETT: We’re lucky.

JACOB: We’re lucky, and a lot of bands—and the bands that we went with were—already had a fanbase there, so we were able to sort of like, y’know, steal some of those fans, which was awesome. So I think that the roadblock for us was more like the actual legal roadblocks.

EMMETT: And yeah, for Canadian artists, it’s a lot harder to, uh, if you want to do it legally and if you wanna make—be paid at shows, you have to get Visas, so we had to uh—yeah, we had to get Visas, and for the first Hinds tour that we were offered, we didn’t have any, so we had to get them expedited. And there’s a lot of money involved that we were pulling, just trying to get money to get these Visas, which were—it’s a big deal for Canadian artists because we wanna be able to get paid and be able to tour properly, cuz’ if you don’t, you run the risk of getting kicked out of the country and all these sketchy things, so…

CAMILLA: That’s so odd… cuz’ I never think about that, like, part of it. I always think about, like, I guess… cuz’ artists I usually listen to are either from the States or, if not, then they migrate to the States all the way. So I never really think about all the paperwork…

FOX: There’s a lot of work that goes into the process to come from Canada to the States for sure.

MAXIE: It’s crazy. Like, we always hear from our American friends, they just need, like, a letter that says ‘we’re playing this club at this time, here you go…’

EMMETT: Like five dollars… it’s a five dollar fee for Americans to come into Canada to play stuff, but for us, it’s like thousands of dollars. Per person.

CAMILLA: Well… I mean, that does kind of sound like America… I hate this.

EMMETT: Yeah. But no, I mean, we understand the… That’s how it is, and yeah, we were super lucky to get early tours where we were able… But I mean, the first opportunity we ever played in the States was with the band Swimmers, and they were—they were kinda transitioning from their old band Emily’s Army, and they actua—they found Joey, I think Joey or Cole… Joey or Cole reached out to Fox through BandCamp

FOX: Joey reached out.

EMMETT: Yeah, through BandCamp, he heard his songs and then they invited us to come to New York and play and we were playing as Jacob’s solo project, uh, Headspace, at the time. All four of us, but it was the same band that—we had three different band names, it was ridiculous. But we uh, did that just under the radar and flew there as a “trip” and uh, and we just took like a, yeah, we did that and it was just very under the radar.

FOX: <laughs>

EMMETT: They’re coming after us! Um, but yeah, so that was our first introduction to the States and they gave us our first like, ever, opportunity. And Hinds, as well, gave us our major, major touring opportunity and we’re like, forever thankful for those guys. They’re the best.

CAMILLA: So, on the topic of songwriting, there are four people in the band. What is the process of songwriting like? Like, is it really hectic, or do y’all each write your own songs, or do you bring them to the band? Cuz’ I know y’all all have solo projects as well, so how does the songwriting process work?

EMMETT: It’s an ego battle. We just—wrestle our egos.

FOX: We wrestle until someone wins.

EMMETT: The strongest ego wins the song. No, yeah, it started differently, but it’s evolving—it evolves all the time. Yeah, it started where we all had solo projects, so uh, the first while it was definitely pulling our favorite songs from each member’s solo project or band before Goodbye Honolulu started, cuz’ that’s how we started, amalgamated all our solo projects just to do this. Um, but I mean, as we’ve been—last year we recorded our debut record that we’re still waiting to release and stuff, and that was a whole new process, we had like, some good buddies who produced it with us, and we all kinda wrote that stuff together more as a band, and we collaborated in studio, which was a whole new thing for us. Doing instrumentations, and letting everyone do different parts, different instruments, and kind of—

JACOB: Basically—basically it always starts with like one person bringing a song that they wrote and at some point and then we all touch on it and add stuff to it...

FOX: Still kind of works like that, unless we’re all together and we come up with something, but… most songs, that’s how it happens, how we’re writing them.

EMMETT: I think the only song we’ve ever come up with in the same room together was “Bum Me Out”, and that was just a—we just re-released it on our album.

FOX: We also wrote a lot together on our new album that’s coming out.

CAMILLA: So, um, imagine we live in a universe where all Goodbye Honolulu, like, projects are deleted off the face of the universe, but then y’all get like this super gov—like, super secret government agency and they’re like, ‘You can only let one project out.’ Only one project can be produced by Goodbye Honolulu, be out in stores, streamed on all platforms. Everything else is deleted forever. Which project would you pick to put out?

EMMETT: Of ours?

JACOB: It’d be our new album.

FOX: Yeah, the album that we’re working on.

JACOB: Yeah, it’d be our new one that’s coming.

EMMETT: Yes. Guarantee. We’re very very very proud of it, and it’s—it’s a bit of a different direction, but not that much. It’s just like—it’s just we definitely tuned into everything that we loved and was, like, true to us and authentic and stuff, so. We’re very stoked for that and it’s definitely in the stages of… We’re, yeah. We have stuff to announce coming soon, and we’re excited about the stuff.

CAMILLA: That’s good! I’m excited to hear it!

EMMETT: It’s good, I promise.

CAMILLA: Um, okay. So there are two songs I’m super obsessed with. One of them is “Mother to a Brother”, and then the other is “Where You Wanna Go”, and I often think about those songs. For a couple—I dunno, this is gonna sound weird—for a whole straight up week, those two songs… it was just those… were the playlist of my mind. Like those two, just back and forth. So could you talk about the production of those songs? I think it’ll help me rest and I won’t think about them as much.

EMMETT: Are there any questions you have specifically about the production?

CAMILLA: Um… No, I guess I just wanna know how it all came together? Production, recording… the process of those two songs specifically? I guess it doesn’t matter which one you start with first.

EMMETT: Yeah—I mean—“Mother to a Brother” was definitely our first song. It was our first song we put out as Goodbye Honolulu. It was recorded as our old band, the demo was around on the internet for a while, but Fox played on it. It was this weird thing, this hybrid thing we had. And then, uh, that song was like Jacob and I… we had the chorus idea for it. And then I remember sitting in the backhouse at his parents’ house, and then we had this rap kind of verse type thing, and then we never—I just remember we had—goofy ass lyrics about being mother to a brother and then we never re—we never looked at the lyrics again. We were like, ‘Jacob came up with it, had this little voice note,’ and we were like, ‘Sick.’

JACOB: I remember just having the voice note and like listening back when we were like—trying to remember it—being like, ‘What are the lyrics? From a brother to a sister? Just random?’ And then we kind of just—embraced the nonsensical aspect of it.

EMMETT: We created meaning about it. And then, uh, yeah I think that was the first song we also played live, and then we had everyone involved in the recording where we were like—this is the Goodbye Honolulu vibe, it was just kind of a mix. It had all the elements we had been wanting to do for a while, and like, we had a demo online for about a year and a half, for two years on our BandCamp that was like, done in Max’s basement and it was like—it was us getting our footing together, and yeah—still—that still feels like one of the most authentic songs. That was definitely the beginning of the vibe for the band. And the video too, we were really proud of that. That stupid fucking party video… The hotel… Which we did, we went to a hotel and threw a party… 

MAXIE: Yeah, and like the demo kind of developed—I think the demo was really more barebones and more like… we had acoustic guitar, and then the one… that song “No Honey”, we kind of rocked it out, it was more electric, loud, more garage-y I guess? 

EMMETT: And then, “Where You Wanna Go” was… uh… I dunno dude, I don’t remember how…

JACOB: That was one of the songs I remember Emmett brought in, and you’d written the lyrics for it, and you had a general vibe and idea behind the song, and then it was one of the songs you’d brought in and kind of had ideas for, kind of like…

EMMETT: Oh, yeah! Cuz’ the chorus was initially the guitar riff

SEVERAL OF THEM: <imitating the guitar riff at the same time>

EMMETT: So everyone had a touch of it, and we kind of… I remember Max saying we should have a different chorus, why don’t we try this or something. And then the production of that, yeah, a friend of ours, Mike Turner, he would play in the band Our Lady Peace back in the 90s and 2000s as the guitarist of that, and he produced those two EPs with us because initially we recorded those all together. And, uh, yeah, that was kind of—when we were doing that it was very electric. We wanted energy, we wanted a live feel. We were going for super easy listening, tried to make it hyper. Lots of energy. 

CAMILLA: So if you could tour with any band or I guess, artist, currently performing, together or not, who would you tour with? Or support, or like…

EMMETT: Damn… Maxie, anyone right off the top of your head?

MAXIE: Uh, I was just gonna say like… I gotta keep my feet in reality here… We’re—we’re supposed to do a tour in April with Hockey Dad and Gym Shorts and I just wish we could be on that tour right now… We could’ve done it last month, so… hopefully that does actually become—postpone, and we do actually get to do it at some point, but…

JACOB: That’s a good answer because there’s literally like a million bands that we would want to tour with, so it’s like so hard to choose. But I think that’s a good answer. We’d like to be on the tour we were supposed to be on originally.

CAMILLA: What about out-of-boxing? Out-of-box? I don’t know, a far-fetched answer?

EMMETT: I dunno, who’d be fun?..

JACOB: Like Dream Fuhrer?

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Might not have been what Jacob said. I couldn’t make it out.)

EMMETT: Jeez… there’s cool artists, man…

JACOB: There’s so many bands that I think would be awesome to tour with, but I dunno if we as a band would like, mesh with them, necessarily?

EMMETT: My head went right to slowthai, I feel like he would be like, fun to hang out with, and like...

CAMILLA: He’d be so cool to tour with.

EMMETT: Yeah, he’d be fun. And Brockhampton, maybe. But, I dunno, I was just thinking… Hinds was like, literally the dream tour, like, they were… people were like, “I bet those people are fun to tour with,” and we were like, “They are!” We just had to keep up and it was like, that was one of my biggest dream tours.

JACOB: Totally. Yeah, like I feel like Brockhampton or someone like that, like, that’d be cool, but at the same time, I don’t know if their audience would like, like us, necessarily?...

CAMILLA: I feel like they would? But that’s me, because I’m a big, like… I’m not gonna say I’m the biggest Brockhampton fan, however, I’m a really huge fan? So I feel like y’all would mesh with their audience, I mean… They’re kind of crowd energy and y’alls’ energy all match.

EMMETT: Let’s say… Wu-tang… Let’s say that. That would be intriguing. Us and Wu-tang, the original lineup, thirty six chambers…

JACOB: That’d be fucking gnarly.

EMMETT: They’d push us off the tour early.

CAMILLA: Um, onto more non-related music questions… if you were stranded on an island, and you could choose only one bandmate to have with you on the island, what bandmate would you choose?

EMMETT: Aw, fuck.

CAMILLA: Hate to break up the band, but...

FOX: Oh my god, what an awful question!

EMMETT: It’s gonna break up the band.

FOX: But obviously Jacob.

EMMETT: Everyone’s answer is going to be Jacob, I think.

FOX: He’s just the easiest to live with.

EMMETT: Max is easy to live with…

MAXIE: I’ll say—I’ll say Emmett, and I’ll just say right, I’ll be the sacrifice. You can eat me. Like, we’re good.

EMMETT: Yeah, I’ll choose Max cuz’ I can eat him.

JACOB: Fox and Jacob... <inaudible>

FOX: Cuz’ I chose you?

JACOB: Cuz’ yeah, I mean—there you go.

EMMETT: You can tell how awkward this is because we’re pretty democratic with everybody.

FOX: Although I’m really starting to think about Max… very useful… guy...

EMMETT: This is very easy...

JACOB: Not on an island, though… an ISLAND?

EMMETT: It would be Fox and Max on a nice, chill island, then it would be Jacob and I on a nutjob island. We’d lose our mind in a fucking week drinking the fuckin’ coconut booze or something.

FOX: Me and Max would be, like, getting the economy back. We’d start building…

EMMETT: We’d be like swimming with bottles of whiskey to get over to your island.

FOX: Bottles—

JACOB: Tired of water—

FOX: That went Jack Sparrow pretty quick.

EMMETT: I’d be screaming “Wilson” in like, two days.

JACOB: Anyways, let’s just hope that never happens, cuz’ it’s gonna be—that’d be really bad.

FOX: Unless we had the entire band on the island.

JACOB: That’d be even worse!

FOX: That’s—extra sketchy.

CAMILLA: Okay, so your Instagram logo is a scorpion. What? Would you say the scorpion is your band’s spirit animal? If it is a scorpion, then why is it a scorpion? If not, what is your band’s spirit animal?

EMMETT: Uh, Drake is our god, we take the scorpion logo wherever we go, from the six…

MAXIE: I actually think our band’s spirit animal should be, like, a turkey. No, I think we’re all just really cowardly and silly. That’s what I associate turkeys with.

JACOB: <frowning> Max, don’t release that information.

FOX: Off the record, off the record—

EMMETT: We’re not cowardly… We sting like fuckin—uh, I dunno, we just thought scorpion—it—it looked cool. It’s a cool looking animal, I dunno. Our buddy made that for us for so long ago, and we—it just kind of stuck, and we love the look of it.

CAMILLA: So scorpion, yes, or turkey, yes?

MAXIE: Turkey.

FOX: I think scorpion.

JACOB: I think turkey’s the real inner animal of the band, but—our outside is—

EMMETT: With those gross necks that hang down and shit.

FOX: It’s like a scorpion’s exoskeleton, that’s our spirit animal. The scorpion. But on the inside, we’re just a bunch of turkeys.

EMMETT: We have a huge turkey complex.

FOX: …Turkey complex?!

CAMILLA: Okay, so the spooky stories with Goodbye Honolulu... those kinda haunt my mind, mostly cuz’ I want to know where you get the stories from? A lot of the time they sound like Reddit stories? Or sometimes they sound like stories off the dome? So, can you say?

JACOB: We’ve got a bit of everything, but the ones we released were mostly off Reddit, mostly off this Reddit that we read called Nosleep, and then we also… because those were getting too long and too, like, long-winded, we just went over to another website that was like ‘30 Really Short Spooky Stories’ and those were just like, just so bad and so funny. That became our kinda go-to, cuz’ it was just, like, so short and silly, that kind of made it ridiculous.

CAMILLA: What do you think the next spooky story is gonna be about? Can you release that information?

EMMETT: Top secret. I dunno… you’re gonna have to dig, ask the government…

JACOB: We’re thinking of like some—

EMMETT: We’re gonna change the format up a little bit. We’re gonna get some friends… we’re gonna try to do, maybe a—see if people in other bands have some—some stories to tell. I dunno. We haven’t figured it out yet.

JACOB: It’s a secret, but here it is.

EMMETT: I don’t care, we’re probably not gonna do it anymore—

CAMILLA: Keep going! You’re fueling my quarantine life right now!

JACOB: We’ll do something. Something will come.

MAXIE: We’re gonna write our own fanfiction about what if two band members wound up on an island together?

EMMETT: A horror story. Max is eaten by his three best friends.

JACOB: It’ll be a horror-romance—a horror-romance style story.

CAMILLA: Who ends up together in the end?

JACOB, EMMET, & FOX: Yeah.

JACOB: Wait, what?

CAMILLA: You said it was a horror-style romance style sorry, so who gets together in the end?

JACOB: Oh, well I think… in the end all our islands converge… One big band...

EMMETT: I’ve definitely—I’ve definitely kissed Jacob the most out of any of these band members, so I think me and Jacob would get together at the end…

JACOB: Yeah, maybe. It might end up like that, who knows… That depends on where the beds might lie, you know what I mean?

EMMETT: We’re the worst band ever.

JACOB: Anyway—

CAMILLA: Alright, um. This is just a simple question: what are your favorite colors? But, also, if you wanna think about it in the way that, like, if you were walking on a street, and someone saw you, and they only saw your color—like a color block above your head, what would it be?

JACOB: I mean, like, light blue has always been my favorite color since I was like, really young. But then when I grew older, I wanted to have, like, a cooler color? Like, I wanted to have a cooler color, so I was like, whatever else, ‘Gold is sick’. But I feel like, above my head, it wouldn’t be gold, it would be like… blue.

EMMETT: I’d say pink, cuz’ when I was a kid I loved pink. It was my favorite color. I had pink skate shoes and stuff. My mom had to buy me pink shoes cuz’ the lady wouldn’t sell them to me.

JACOB: Whet?

OFF THE RECORD - MISCHA WHITE: <in shock>

EMMETT: Yeah, it’s some crazy story? I was at a skate shop and she was just like, ‘These are girl shoes,’ and I was like, ‘I like them, can I buy them?’ and she was like, ‘I can’t sell them to you,’ and I was like, ‘What?’ And my mom was like, ‘Can I buy them?’ and she was like, ‘You can buy them,’ so she bought me pink shoes. But yeah, pink was my favorite forever. I’d say maybe black? I like black a lot.

JACOB: Blackpink dude.

EMMETT: Blackpink.

JACOB: Kpop.

EMMETT: Yeah, pink. Pink’s mine. I’ll go pink.

FOX: I’ll go green. Nature. Yeah.

MAXIE: I’d also be blue, if I was like a little Sim character walking around, my little icon above me… Nice deep blue.

JACOB: Also I really like a nice emerald green?

EMMETT: Ooh... you dirty…

JACOB: Aw, yeah, bit of a freak.

FOX: Also, where ARE you? Those trees are ginormous.

EMMETT: Yeah, that’s a real background, right? Not like mine?

FOX: That’s like—those are the woods.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: During the Zoom interview, some of the band members, like Emmett, had fake backgrounds up. Camilla was sitting in front of a window; you could see her background. It has a shit-ton of these magnificent trees.)

CAMILLA: Yeah, I’m in Memphis, Tennessee, currently. That’s where I live, and that’s my backyard.

EMMETT: That’s dope as fuck.

FOX: That’s… quite the backyard. I wish I had that many trees.

EMMETT: What are those trees? Like two-hundred? They look about two-hundred.

FOX: They look ginormous.

CAMILLA: I’d say about five hundred?

EMMETT: Five—yeah, that was my second guess. That’s crazy. Forest.

CAMILLA: Um, so probably like the most important interview question we have: what are your feelings and thoughts on Friends, the TV show?

JACOB: Friends? I think Friends is a good show to put on, like, to just have in the background. One of those shows that you can just, like, if you’re sitting with people, and you wanna put something on, it’s a good background show? I don’t think I’d ever like, dedicate my time to like, sitting—

(EDITOR’S NOTE: One pitfall to having online interviews is that the internet connection isn’t always reliable. The interview ended here, lads. Also, Friends sucks! Like, why does a show even need that many laugh tracks? Grace, out. Peace.)

Thanks again, Goodbye Honolulu, for chatting with us! Make sure to check out their Spotify below!